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The Mets, the Royals and Charlie Parker, Linked by Autumn in New York – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/sports/baseball/the-mets-the-royals-and-charlie-parker-linked-by-autumn-in-new-york.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151030
** The Mets, the Royals and Charlie Parker, Linked by Autumn in New York
————————————————————
By DAVID WALDSTEIN
Duke Ellington, with bat, and members of his band played baseball in front of their segregated motel while touring Florida in 1955. Charlotte Brooks/Library of Congress (LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After the Mets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/newyorkmets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the Royals (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/kansascityroyals/index.html?inline=nyt-org) had secured spots in the World Series (http://www.nytimes.com/news-event/mlb-world-series) last week, observers searched for connections between the teams. There seemed to be few.
But as the Series shifts from Kansas City to New York, it is following a well-trodden path, forged decades ago with the migration of some of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.
Just as Kansas City once effectively served as a feeder system of ballplayers to New York, Kansas City’s hopping nightclub scene was the fertile ground that produced some of New York’s top musical acts, and baseball was a cherished pastime for many of them.
Count Basie’s big band helped make Kansas City’s nightclub district, around 18th and Vine Streets, swing before the musicians moved on to New York. The band also fielded a competitive baseball team, which played against a team from Duke Ellington (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/duke_ellington/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s band.
The tenor saxophonist Lester Young built his chops in Kansas City’s nightclub district before migrating to New York, where he became a jazz giant. A New York Giants baseball fan, he played on the Count Basie Orchestra team as a pitcher with nimble fingers.
From left, the trumpeter Max Kaminsky, the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, the trumpeter Hot Lips Page, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianist Lennie Tristano at Birdland in Manhattan in 1949.Bettmann/Corbis
The saxophone legend Charlie Parker (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/charlie_parker/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a Kansas City native and a devoted fan of the Monarchs, a Negro leagues team there, left the musical mecca for New York, where in the 1940s he helped develop the jazz style bebop. It was after his nickname that the famed Manhattan jazz club Birdland took its name.
Today, few ballplayers listen to jazz. But the genre and the sport, like Kansas City and New York, are intertwined in American culture.
“There was a time when everybody went to Kansas City,” said Phil Schaap, a prominent jazz historian and archivist. “Many of them eventually moved on to New York and made it there. But Kansas City, along with New York, Chicago and New Orleans, is one of the citadels of jazz. And during the swing era, all the bands had teams.”
If one man could be credited with fostering the environment that produced the Kansas City sound, it is Tom Pendergast, a political boss and early backer of Harry S. Truman. Pendergast protected the area from the police during Prohibition, when the nightclubs on 18th and Vine flourished, and promoted vice industries to counter the economic depression in the 1930s.
“Some operated 24 hours a day,” Bill McKemy, the education manager at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, said of the clubs. “Naturally, musicians flocked there, and it was a golden age for music.”
By day, many of the musicians in Kansas City were on the sandlot. For them, “swing” had two meanings.
“Duke Ellington couldn’t hit or throw, but he loved the game,” said Schaap, who has collected scouting reports on musicians. “Barney Bigard was a clarinetist in Duke’s band. He couldn’t field, and he couldn’t run, but he could hit the ball 600 feet.
Count Basie, right, playing baseball in 1947. Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty Images
“Harry James was also a great baseball player,” Schaap continued, referring to the bandleader and trumpeter. “It was competitive, and it was a big deal for them.”
Schaap said that Benny Morton, a trombonist who played in Count Basie’s and Fletcher Henderson’s bands, was an excellent second baseman. Years ago, Morton, who died in 1985, detailed to Schaap how he had opportunities to play in the Negro leagues.
“He decided on music because he did not want to be restricted to a second tier,” Schaap said, referring to baseball’s color line. “In music, he could perform alongside the best in the business.”
Parker’s affinity for baseball was not so much as a player but as a fan — of the Monarchs and, later, the Brooklyn Dodgers and their star second baseman Jackie Robinson. Still, if Louis Armstrong (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/louis_armstrong/index.html?inline=nyt-per) was the Babe Ruth of jazz, then Parker was its Willie Mays.
Parker, perhaps the greatest improviser of any musical form, was born in 1920 in Kansas City, Kan., and as he grew up on the Missouri side of the border, he was captivated by the music scene there. He visited New York in 1939 and had an epiphany during a jam session in Harlem, Schaap said. That planted the seeds of bebop, a revolutionary musical form that led to modern jazz and is known for its improvisational fluidity.
Parker served as an influence on another iconic saxophonist, John Coltrane (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/john_coltrane/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , who himself has a prominent fan in the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Tony Clark. Before Game 2 of this World Series (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/sports/baseball/kansas-city-royals-beat-new-york-mets-world-series-game-2.html) , Clark spoke of the bond between music and baseball, saying, “It’s a very interesting connection.”
Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, also said he enjoyed jazz — although he does not consider himself an expert, he said — and like Clark, Alderson mentioned the ties between New York and Kansas City.
“The Yankees used to get players from Kansas City,” he said in reference to Roger Maris, Ralph Terry and others the Yankees acquired in a series of successful trades (http://www.baseball-almanac.com/corner/c042001b.shtml) with the Athletics in the 1950s and ’60s, before that team moved to Oakland.
Musicians began making the trek a bit earlier, with Count Basie taking his band to New York in 1937.
Young, a member of the orchestra who was born in Mississippi, was in New York on Oct. 3, 1951. As he shaved to prepare for a gig at Birdland, Schaap said, Young listened intently on the radio as the Giants faced the Dodgers in a playoff.
“When Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ’Round the World, Young was so excited, he cut himself pretty badly,” Schaap said. “It was a noticeable cut, and he had some difficulty playing that night.”
Eventually, all the best musicians moved to New York, and the Kansas City scene died out.
There were other factors in its demise, said McKemy, the museum employee. They included World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , the construction of an interstate highway that cut through the area, and the downfall of Pendergast, who was convicted of income tax evasion. Soon, the police were cracking down on the vice industries.
Still, the Kansas City scene’s decline allowed for the rise of bebop, which grew in New York with Parker as the ace of its rotation.
Parker died at 34 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F02E4DC133AE53BBC4D52DFB566838E649EDE) in 1955 and was buried in Blue Summit, Mo. The gravestone is just four miles from Kauffman Stadium, where the Mets and the Royals played the first two games of the World Series, improvising a new link between two cities that have history after all.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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The Mets, the Royals and Charlie Parker, Linked by Autumn in New York – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/sports/baseball/the-mets-the-royals-and-charlie-parker-linked-by-autumn-in-new-york.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151030
** The Mets, the Royals and Charlie Parker, Linked by Autumn in New York
————————————————————
By DAVID WALDSTEIN
Duke Ellington, with bat, and members of his band played baseball in front of their segregated motel while touring Florida in 1955. Charlotte Brooks/Library of Congress (LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection)
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — After the Mets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/newyorkmets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) and the Royals (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/kansascityroyals/index.html?inline=nyt-org) had secured spots in the World Series (http://www.nytimes.com/news-event/mlb-world-series) last week, observers searched for connections between the teams. There seemed to be few.
But as the Series shifts from Kansas City to New York, it is following a well-trodden path, forged decades ago with the migration of some of the most influential musicians of the 20th century.
Just as Kansas City once effectively served as a feeder system of ballplayers to New York, Kansas City’s hopping nightclub scene was the fertile ground that produced some of New York’s top musical acts, and baseball was a cherished pastime for many of them.
Count Basie’s big band helped make Kansas City’s nightclub district, around 18th and Vine Streets, swing before the musicians moved on to New York. The band also fielded a competitive baseball team, which played against a team from Duke Ellington (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/duke_ellington/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s band.
The tenor saxophonist Lester Young built his chops in Kansas City’s nightclub district before migrating to New York, where he became a jazz giant. A New York Giants baseball fan, he played on the Count Basie Orchestra team as a pitcher with nimble fingers.
From left, the trumpeter Max Kaminsky, the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, the trumpeter Hot Lips Page, the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the pianist Lennie Tristano at Birdland in Manhattan in 1949.Bettmann/Corbis
The saxophone legend Charlie Parker (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/charlie_parker/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a Kansas City native and a devoted fan of the Monarchs, a Negro leagues team there, left the musical mecca for New York, where in the 1940s he helped develop the jazz style bebop. It was after his nickname that the famed Manhattan jazz club Birdland took its name.
Today, few ballplayers listen to jazz. But the genre and the sport, like Kansas City and New York, are intertwined in American culture.
“There was a time when everybody went to Kansas City,” said Phil Schaap, a prominent jazz historian and archivist. “Many of them eventually moved on to New York and made it there. But Kansas City, along with New York, Chicago and New Orleans, is one of the citadels of jazz. And during the swing era, all the bands had teams.”
If one man could be credited with fostering the environment that produced the Kansas City sound, it is Tom Pendergast, a political boss and early backer of Harry S. Truman. Pendergast protected the area from the police during Prohibition, when the nightclubs on 18th and Vine flourished, and promoted vice industries to counter the economic depression in the 1930s.
“Some operated 24 hours a day,” Bill McKemy, the education manager at the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, said of the clubs. “Naturally, musicians flocked there, and it was a golden age for music.”
By day, many of the musicians in Kansas City were on the sandlot. For them, “swing” had two meanings.
“Duke Ellington couldn’t hit or throw, but he loved the game,” said Schaap, who has collected scouting reports on musicians. “Barney Bigard was a clarinetist in Duke’s band. He couldn’t field, and he couldn’t run, but he could hit the ball 600 feet.
Count Basie, right, playing baseball in 1947. Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty Images
“Harry James was also a great baseball player,” Schaap continued, referring to the bandleader and trumpeter. “It was competitive, and it was a big deal for them.”
Schaap said that Benny Morton, a trombonist who played in Count Basie’s and Fletcher Henderson’s bands, was an excellent second baseman. Years ago, Morton, who died in 1985, detailed to Schaap how he had opportunities to play in the Negro leagues.
“He decided on music because he did not want to be restricted to a second tier,” Schaap said, referring to baseball’s color line. “In music, he could perform alongside the best in the business.”
Parker’s affinity for baseball was not so much as a player but as a fan — of the Monarchs and, later, the Brooklyn Dodgers and their star second baseman Jackie Robinson. Still, if Louis Armstrong (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/louis_armstrong/index.html?inline=nyt-per) was the Babe Ruth of jazz, then Parker was its Willie Mays.
Parker, perhaps the greatest improviser of any musical form, was born in 1920 in Kansas City, Kan., and as he grew up on the Missouri side of the border, he was captivated by the music scene there. He visited New York in 1939 and had an epiphany during a jam session in Harlem, Schaap said. That planted the seeds of bebop, a revolutionary musical form that led to modern jazz and is known for its improvisational fluidity.
Parker served as an influence on another iconic saxophonist, John Coltrane (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/john_coltrane/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , who himself has a prominent fan in the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Tony Clark. Before Game 2 of this World Series (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/sports/baseball/kansas-city-royals-beat-new-york-mets-world-series-game-2.html) , Clark spoke of the bond between music and baseball, saying, “It’s a very interesting connection.”
Sandy Alderson, the Mets’ general manager, also said he enjoyed jazz — although he does not consider himself an expert, he said — and like Clark, Alderson mentioned the ties between New York and Kansas City.
“The Yankees used to get players from Kansas City,” he said in reference to Roger Maris, Ralph Terry and others the Yankees acquired in a series of successful trades (http://www.baseball-almanac.com/corner/c042001b.shtml) with the Athletics in the 1950s and ’60s, before that team moved to Oakland.
Musicians began making the trek a bit earlier, with Count Basie taking his band to New York in 1937.
Young, a member of the orchestra who was born in Mississippi, was in New York on Oct. 3, 1951. As he shaved to prepare for a gig at Birdland, Schaap said, Young listened intently on the radio as the Giants faced the Dodgers in a playoff.
“When Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ’Round the World, Young was so excited, he cut himself pretty badly,” Schaap said. “It was a noticeable cut, and he had some difficulty playing that night.”
Eventually, all the best musicians moved to New York, and the Kansas City scene died out.
There were other factors in its demise, said McKemy, the museum employee. They included World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , the construction of an interstate highway that cut through the area, and the downfall of Pendergast, who was convicted of income tax evasion. Soon, the police were cracking down on the vice industries.
Still, the Kansas City scene’s decline allowed for the rise of bebop, which grew in New York with Parker as the ace of its rotation.
Parker died at 34 (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F02E4DC133AE53BBC4D52DFB566838E649EDE) in 1955 and was buried in Blue Summit, Mo. The gravestone is just four miles from Kauffman Stadium, where the Mets and the Royals played the first two games of the World Series, improvising a new link between two cities that have history after all.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=4d7461e4b9) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=4d7461e4b9&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Leon Bibb, Actor, Folk Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 93 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/arts/music/leon-bibb-actor-folk-singer-and-civil-rights-activist-dies-at-93.html?emc=eta1
** Leon Bibb, Actor, Folk Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 93
————————————————————
By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) OCT. 26, 2015
Leon Bibb appearing in the 1979 television special “Mister Candyman.” CBC, via Photofest
Leon Bibb, an actor turned folk singer whose powerful, elegant baritone voice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPYtlAKzeyM) made him a prominent figure in the folk-music revival and a stirring performer at the landmark civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, including the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, died on Friday in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 93.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Dorie Bibb Clay.
Mr. Bibb made his Broadway debut in 1946, one of three black singers in the chorus of “Annie Get Your Gun,” and went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for best supporting actor in the song-and-poetry revue “A Hand Is on the Gate,” whose cast also included Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones, in 1967.
The next year he appeared as the love interest of Victoria Mallory, a white actress, in City Center’s revival of “Carnival,” a daring bit of casting at the time. “People may be attracted to the interracial love in the play,” Mr. Bibb told The New York Times (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9901E0DC123BE73ABC4053DFB4678383679EDE) . “I don’t knock it — but it isn’t the most important thing. To cast black actors in roles where they can bring an extra dimension to the story is important.”
It was the dearth of parts for black actors that motivated Mr. Bibb to remold himself as a folk singer in the mid-1950s, drawing on the spirituals that one of his aunts had sung to him as a child in Louisville, Ky. Albums like “Leon Bibb Sings Folk Songs,” released by the Vanguard label in 1959, and frequent performances on the television show “Hootenanny” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATwSG_7QEvM) made him one of the more prominent folk singers of the era. A regular at clubs like the Bitter End and the Village Gate in New York and the hungry i in San Francisco, he sang at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and reached a broad television audience that same year when he sang “Sinner Man,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5YWEmNO4f4) one of his signature songs, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Mr. Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965 he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.
“He was really committed to the cause of civil rights, and he was hugely inspiring,” Mr. Belafonte said in a telephone interview. “Between him and Mahalia Jackson, we had all the music we needed for the movement.”
Charles Leon Aurthello Bibb was born on Feb. 7, 1922, in Louisville, where his father was a postal worker and his mother was a homemaker. He sang in church choirs as a boy and in the glee club of Louisville Municipal College (https://louisville.edu/lmc/inside.html) , which he attended for two years.
From left, the singers and civil rights activists Mary Travers, Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, Joan Baez and Oscar Brand in 1965 outside the Alabama state capitol at the end of the third march from Selma to Montgomery. Charles Shaw/Getty Images
He trained briefly with the Army Air Forces, hoping to fly with the Tuskegee Airmen, but was discharged from the military because of a rheumatic heart.
Mr. Bibb moved to New York to act in musicals and, while working at a Horn & Hardart automat, landed a role in “Annie Get Your Gun.” He appeared in several more Broadway productions, all of them short runs, and national tours. In 1957 he played Jim in “Livin’ the Life,” a musical adaptation of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
He had supporting roles opposite Sidney Poitier, another friend from the American Negro Theater, in the films “For Love of Ivy” (1968) and “The Lost Man” (1969).
“Of all of us, he was probably the most talented, probably because of that beautiful baritone voice,” Mr. Belafonte said, speaking of the actors associated with the American Negro Theater. “We were all envious.”
As a folk singer, Mr. Bibb was first on record on “Hootenanny Tonight,” an anthology album assembled by the editor of Sing Out! magazine in 1954. Under the name Lee Charles, he recorded an album with the folk quartet the Skifflers and a solo album of spirituals for Riverside Records, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” before recording under his own name for Vanguard and other labels.
In 1968 he helped create “Someone New,” a television show on WNBC in New York on which, as host, he introduced unknown performers like the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, still in his early teens, and Barry Manilow, teamed with his singing partner at the time, Jeanne Lucas.
While on tour with the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” he became enchanted with Vancouver and moved there in the early 1970s. For the next 40 years he performed frequently in Canada and the United States.
Mr. Bibb’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Dorie and his son, Eric, a singer and musician, he is survived by his partner, Christine Anton; another daughter, Amy Bibb-Ford; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
His last New York appearance was in 2007 at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square with his fellow folk singer Odetta and his son. He performed last year in Victoria, British Columbia.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=dd4e2f8b67) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=dd4e2f8b67&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Leon Bibb, Actor, Folk Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 93 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/arts/music/leon-bibb-actor-folk-singer-and-civil-rights-activist-dies-at-93.html?emc=eta1
** Leon Bibb, Actor, Folk Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 93
————————————————————
By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) OCT. 26, 2015
Leon Bibb appearing in the 1979 television special “Mister Candyman.” CBC, via Photofest
Leon Bibb, an actor turned folk singer whose powerful, elegant baritone voice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPYtlAKzeyM) made him a prominent figure in the folk-music revival and a stirring performer at the landmark civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, including the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, died on Friday in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 93.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Dorie Bibb Clay.
Mr. Bibb made his Broadway debut in 1946, one of three black singers in the chorus of “Annie Get Your Gun,” and went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for best supporting actor in the song-and-poetry revue “A Hand Is on the Gate,” whose cast also included Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones, in 1967.
The next year he appeared as the love interest of Victoria Mallory, a white actress, in City Center’s revival of “Carnival,” a daring bit of casting at the time. “People may be attracted to the interracial love in the play,” Mr. Bibb told The New York Times (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9901E0DC123BE73ABC4053DFB4678383679EDE) . “I don’t knock it — but it isn’t the most important thing. To cast black actors in roles where they can bring an extra dimension to the story is important.”
It was the dearth of parts for black actors that motivated Mr. Bibb to remold himself as a folk singer in the mid-1950s, drawing on the spirituals that one of his aunts had sung to him as a child in Louisville, Ky. Albums like “Leon Bibb Sings Folk Songs,” released by the Vanguard label in 1959, and frequent performances on the television show “Hootenanny” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATwSG_7QEvM) made him one of the more prominent folk singers of the era. A regular at clubs like the Bitter End and the Village Gate in New York and the hungry i in San Francisco, he sang at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and reached a broad television audience that same year when he sang “Sinner Man,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5YWEmNO4f4) one of his signature songs, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Mr. Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965 he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.
“He was really committed to the cause of civil rights, and he was hugely inspiring,” Mr. Belafonte said in a telephone interview. “Between him and Mahalia Jackson, we had all the music we needed for the movement.”
Charles Leon Aurthello Bibb was born on Feb. 7, 1922, in Louisville, where his father was a postal worker and his mother was a homemaker. He sang in church choirs as a boy and in the glee club of Louisville Municipal College (https://louisville.edu/lmc/inside.html) , which he attended for two years.
From left, the singers and civil rights activists Mary Travers, Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, Joan Baez and Oscar Brand in 1965 outside the Alabama state capitol at the end of the third march from Selma to Montgomery. Charles Shaw/Getty Images
He trained briefly with the Army Air Forces, hoping to fly with the Tuskegee Airmen, but was discharged from the military because of a rheumatic heart.
Mr. Bibb moved to New York to act in musicals and, while working at a Horn & Hardart automat, landed a role in “Annie Get Your Gun.” He appeared in several more Broadway productions, all of them short runs, and national tours. In 1957 he played Jim in “Livin’ the Life,” a musical adaptation of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
He had supporting roles opposite Sidney Poitier, another friend from the American Negro Theater, in the films “For Love of Ivy” (1968) and “The Lost Man” (1969).
“Of all of us, he was probably the most talented, probably because of that beautiful baritone voice,” Mr. Belafonte said, speaking of the actors associated with the American Negro Theater. “We were all envious.”
As a folk singer, Mr. Bibb was first on record on “Hootenanny Tonight,” an anthology album assembled by the editor of Sing Out! magazine in 1954. Under the name Lee Charles, he recorded an album with the folk quartet the Skifflers and a solo album of spirituals for Riverside Records, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” before recording under his own name for Vanguard and other labels.
In 1968 he helped create “Someone New,” a television show on WNBC in New York on which, as host, he introduced unknown performers like the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, still in his early teens, and Barry Manilow, teamed with his singing partner at the time, Jeanne Lucas.
While on tour with the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” he became enchanted with Vancouver and moved there in the early 1970s. For the next 40 years he performed frequently in Canada and the United States.
Mr. Bibb’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Dorie and his son, Eric, a singer and musician, he is survived by his partner, Christine Anton; another daughter, Amy Bibb-Ford; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
His last New York appearance was in 2007 at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square with his fellow folk singer Odetta and his son. He performed last year in Victoria, British Columbia.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Leon Bibb, Actor, Folk Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 93 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/27/arts/music/leon-bibb-actor-folk-singer-and-civil-rights-activist-dies-at-93.html?emc=eta1
** Leon Bibb, Actor, Folk Singer and Civil Rights Activist, Dies at 93
————————————————————
By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) OCT. 26, 2015
Leon Bibb appearing in the 1979 television special “Mister Candyman.” CBC, via Photofest
Leon Bibb, an actor turned folk singer whose powerful, elegant baritone voice (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPYtlAKzeyM) made him a prominent figure in the folk-music revival and a stirring performer at the landmark civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s, including the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, died on Friday in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was 93.
The death was confirmed by his daughter Dorie Bibb Clay.
Mr. Bibb made his Broadway debut in 1946, one of three black singers in the chorus of “Annie Get Your Gun,” and went on to earn a Tony Award nomination for best supporting actor in the song-and-poetry revue “A Hand Is on the Gate,” whose cast also included Cicely Tyson and James Earl Jones, in 1967.
The next year he appeared as the love interest of Victoria Mallory, a white actress, in City Center’s revival of “Carnival,” a daring bit of casting at the time. “People may be attracted to the interracial love in the play,” Mr. Bibb told The New York Times (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9901E0DC123BE73ABC4053DFB4678383679EDE) . “I don’t knock it — but it isn’t the most important thing. To cast black actors in roles where they can bring an extra dimension to the story is important.”
It was the dearth of parts for black actors that motivated Mr. Bibb to remold himself as a folk singer in the mid-1950s, drawing on the spirituals that one of his aunts had sung to him as a child in Louisville, Ky. Albums like “Leon Bibb Sings Folk Songs,” released by the Vanguard label in 1959, and frequent performances on the television show “Hootenanny” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATwSG_7QEvM) made him one of the more prominent folk singers of the era. A regular at clubs like the Bitter End and the Village Gate in New York and the hungry i in San Francisco, he sang at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and reached a broad television audience that same year when he sang “Sinner Man,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5YWEmNO4f4) one of his signature songs, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Mr. Bibb became involved in the civil rights movement early on, taking part in voter-registration drives in the South and performing at the 1963 March on Washington. In 1965 he performed in front of the statehouse in Montgomery with Joan Baez, Oscar Brand and Harry Belafonte, whom he had known since their acting days at the American Negro Theater in Harlem.
“He was really committed to the cause of civil rights, and he was hugely inspiring,” Mr. Belafonte said in a telephone interview. “Between him and Mahalia Jackson, we had all the music we needed for the movement.”
Charles Leon Aurthello Bibb was born on Feb. 7, 1922, in Louisville, where his father was a postal worker and his mother was a homemaker. He sang in church choirs as a boy and in the glee club of Louisville Municipal College (https://louisville.edu/lmc/inside.html) , which he attended for two years.
From left, the singers and civil rights activists Mary Travers, Harry Belafonte, Leon Bibb, Joan Baez and Oscar Brand in 1965 outside the Alabama state capitol at the end of the third march from Selma to Montgomery. Charles Shaw/Getty Images
He trained briefly with the Army Air Forces, hoping to fly with the Tuskegee Airmen, but was discharged from the military because of a rheumatic heart.
Mr. Bibb moved to New York to act in musicals and, while working at a Horn & Hardart automat, landed a role in “Annie Get Your Gun.” He appeared in several more Broadway productions, all of them short runs, and national tours. In 1957 he played Jim in “Livin’ the Life,” a musical adaptation of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
He had supporting roles opposite Sidney Poitier, another friend from the American Negro Theater, in the films “For Love of Ivy” (1968) and “The Lost Man” (1969).
“Of all of us, he was probably the most talented, probably because of that beautiful baritone voice,” Mr. Belafonte said, speaking of the actors associated with the American Negro Theater. “We were all envious.”
As a folk singer, Mr. Bibb was first on record on “Hootenanny Tonight,” an anthology album assembled by the editor of Sing Out! magazine in 1954. Under the name Lee Charles, he recorded an album with the folk quartet the Skifflers and a solo album of spirituals for Riverside Records, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” before recording under his own name for Vanguard and other labels.
In 1968 he helped create “Someone New,” a television show on WNBC in New York on which, as host, he introduced unknown performers like the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, still in his early teens, and Barry Manilow, teamed with his singing partner at the time, Jeanne Lucas.
While on tour with the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” he became enchanted with Vancouver and moved there in the early 1970s. For the next 40 years he performed frequently in Canada and the United States.
Mr. Bibb’s two marriages ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Dorie and his son, Eric, a singer and musician, he is survived by his partner, Christine Anton; another daughter, Amy Bibb-Ford; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
His last New York appearance was in 2007 at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square with his fellow folk singer Odetta and his son. He performed last year in Victoria, British Columbia.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Jazz In Connecticut — The Early Years By OWEN McNALLY
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http://www.hartfordjazzsociety.com/courant-jazz.html
** Jazz In Connecticut — The Early Years
By OWEN McNALLY
————————————————————
With fabled clubs in the North End rocking with the sound of jazz, classic big bands and big-name instrumentalists and singers routinely blowing-off the roof at Foot Guard Hall on High Street, or shaking the foundations of the State Theater on Village Street, Hartford’s vibrant, pre and post-World War II scene was the city’s first “Golden Age of Jazz.”
Jazz was not only flourishing artistically, but was very much the music of the day for young people through the 1930s, all of the ‘40s and well into the 1950s. At its zenith in Hartford, jazz was everywhere and for everyone. Typically among the jazz fold were the young adults and slightly older, more urbane patrons who in the ‘50s regularly dug the suave, swinging sounds of the elegant jazz pianist Teddy Wilson at the legendary Heublein Hotel lounge in downtown Hartford.
One of the city’s crown jewel venues of the 20th century, the lounge in the venerable hotel was a softly lit, elegant jazz spa right out of a vintage, black-and-white Hollywood flick. It was a sophisticated, posh place where, if you wore a jacket and a tie and acted like an adult, you could get served a Scotch on-the-rocks or an extra-dry martini even if you were a couple years under 21, then the legal age for getting a drink in Connecticut.
A younger, less inhibited set of jazz lovers in that era danced in the aisles at Hartford’s hallowed cultural center, The Bushnell Memorial, at Norman Granz’s fabled Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts, upsetting the management’s sense of propriety a bit.
Moved by that JATP-generated passion, more unruly patrons in the mezzanine shouted out, “Go, man, go!’ to the steamy, honking, erotically-charged tenor saxophone riffs of the swaggering Illinois Jacquet, the master machismo music-maker. Sedentary swingers, in sedate contrast, merely tapped their feet to a swinging, surreal scat solo by Ella Fitzgerald. Or with Zen-like hipness, the coolest of cool JATP fans, experiencing their very own introspective, natural high, would quietly savor a mesmerizing, melodically inventive, gossamer solo by the divinely inspired tenor saxophonist Lester Young, JATP’s jazz Buddha whose spiritual solos were as holy as a Gregorian chant.
For all its power and glory from the 1930s through the 1950s, jazz didn’t exactly start off like a ball of fire in Hartford. Its shock of the new qualities were just too shocking and too new for skeptical critics and elitist listeners who, nearly as far back as 100 years ago, found it noisy, noisome, uncultivated and uncouth.
In the early 1920s jazz’s reception and public perception varied in Hartford from irate complaints from Colt Park neighborhood residents about “dance music jazzing from the park’s pavilion” to a somewhat lukewarm notice in The Courant praising a Navy jazz band “for enthralling crowds at The Capitol Theater” where the jazzy sailors shared the vaudeville bill with trick bicyclists, a singing/dancing child act, acrobats, contortionists and a singing monologist—hardly promising signs of things to come for America’s new music in Hartford.
Celebrated orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, somewhat grandiloquently billed as “The King of Jazz,” fared far less well than The Capitol’s novelty sailor band in a Courant review of the portly maestro’s performance in 1924 at Foot Guard Hall. Looking down his nose (or perhaps holding it) a rather snooty, culturally patronizing Courant reviewer declared that the rotund bandleader’s orotund attempts at gussying up jazz failed miserably to measure up to “good music as (it) has been generally understood by cultured people these many years.”
“It gets terribly monotonous in its rhythms to those whose ears have been attuned to that which they fondly and firmly believe is infinitely and eternally better in music,” the dyspeptic Courant scribe lamented.
A positive economic side effect of jazz—at least for the piano tuning business—was cited in a sarcastic Courant news item in the 1920s reporting, with a derisive tone, that the outbreak of the excessively heavy pounding by jazz pianists was putting pianos across the nation out of tune “in about half the time it took formerly.”
Adding insult to mockery, The Courant in 1926 polled its readership on whether the performance of jazz should be permitted in public on Sundays. With 1,143 readers voting to keep Sunday safe from the corrupting temptations of jazz, the convention-flouting music lost by a landslide as only 349 readers lined up in favor of allowing Satan’s latest sinful, musical concoction to profane the Sabbath.
But as the Jazz Age evolved and modern popular culture—everything from silent films, the rising radio-craze, flapper fashions, hip flasks and hip music—became an irresistibly powerful social force, praise began to crescendo for jazz in The Courant as the syncopated sounds became increasingly popular in Hartford, converting perhaps even some of the paper’s once avid, anti-jazz readers.
By the 1930s, Duke Ellington and his singer Ivy Anderson received a rave review in The Courant for being “especially musically intelligent.” Even as the stock market plunged, jazz’s stock was rising in Hartford. Count Basie and his orchestra, for example, were royally hailed for playing at an upscale ball held at, of all places, the prestigious Hartford Club, with absolutely no caveat emptors issued by The Courant writer about the primal crudities of jazz offending the cultivated listener’s superior musical sensibilities.
A performance at the State Theater featuring the swinging Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra and diva Billie Holiday was even awarded the highest accolade by a Courant entertainment writer for what she described as its “pop and oomph,” which seems to have superseded the paper’s earlier critical category for jazz as strictly sturm und drang.
By the late 1930s and ‘40s, jazz had shifted into high gear in Hartford. Its influence was mushrooming everywhere. You could catch it at such then wildly popular but now long forgotten venues as the Paddock in East Hartford, where such national notables as pianist Art Hodes and trumpeter Will Bill Davison wailed. Or you could test your luck at the city’s once flourishing Clover Leaf where, at least according to local legend, the storied pianist/composer Jelly Roll Morton was hired to help bibulously ecstatic Hartfordites celebrate the glorious repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
During its first Golden Age in Hartford, jazz was hot and accessible, although its conservative detractors still thought it not quite proper; perhaps even a sinful primrose path leading directly to drunkenness, drugs and debauchery.
Long before college radio, you could hear jazz on the air on WTIC on a pioneering show called “Gems of American Jazz.” Hosted by Connecticut’s “foremost jazz musicologist” George Malcolm-Smith, it debuted in 1942, establishing a hip, or maybe back then, a hep radio tradition carried on in more recent times by invaluable college FM radio stations beaming their jazz message across the state.
One of the city’s most flamboyant and devout early supporters of jazz, Malcolm-Smith (1901-1984) was a noted comic novelist, a founder and onetime president of the Hartford Jazz Society (HJS) and a sometime jazz critic for The Courant.
Dashing, dapper and madly in love with jazz in all its forms, he was a celebrated figure about town. A humorous man of intellectual substance, he accentuated his elegant manner by smoking his favorite brand with a cigarette holder held and bandied about in the grand gestural manner of FDR. Perhaps because he had a deep sense of history and of the lasting value of the music, Malcolm-Smith’s voluminous, chatty but information-packed “Swinger” newsletters for the HJS are an invaluable chronicle of the Society’s formative years, a rare archive of written documents waiting to be mined by a jazz historian.
A raconteur and bon vivant, Malcolm-Smith was a genuine 20th century Hartford wit. His banter and cultural erudition would have made him right at home exchanging quips and barbs with such heavyweight humorists as Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel’s famously funny roundtable gatherings.
In that long ago happily abundant, first Golden Age of Jazz, you could hear jazz live just about anywhere in Hartford. It could be Art Tatum or Stan Kenton on stage at The Bushnell. Or it could be the young Dave Mackay, the brilliant, blind pianist, Lennie Tristano protégé and Trinity College undergrad grooving high before an excited, packed house at one of the two, swinging Elks Clubs in the North End.
You could duck into a downtown bar or restaurant, grab a drink and, if you were lucky, catch a smokin’ set by one of the gifted Connecticut jazz heroes of the day like alto saxophonist Jack O’Connor, a hard-playing, hard-living player of prodigious talent. His hometown fans claimed that at his passionate, fluent best, O’Connor was at least the equal of alto greats Phil Woods or Gene Quill—maybe even sharper than Quill. Taking a few steps down Asylum Street and into an inviting restaurant, you might walk-in on the awesome musings of the marvelous, Hartford piano virtuoso Ray Cassarino. A world-class artist Cassarino designed astounding, sonic architectural structures in the air by building on the virtually infinite possibilities of an 88-note Steinway grand.
It was the best of times back then when a young, gifted Horace Silver and the mysterious, enigmatic, tragically doomed jazz genius Gigi Gryce walked the streets of Hartford—giants in our midst—and were playing and making history in jazz clubs in the Capital City. In one of the most dramatic events in all of Hartford’s jazz history, Silver, a Norwalk native and future jazz immortal, was discovered one night by the famous tenor saxophonist Stan Getz who just happened to show up after a gig at the State Theater, sweeping into the Club Sundown where he was bowled over by Silver’s hard-swinging piano solos and rhythmic comping that rocked the house.
Much as it is today, Hartford, even back then long before jazz became fervently embraced by academia, was a fertile breeding ground of promising young talent. Gifted musicians back then taught themselves how to improvise by listening to recordings of the masters and by playing at jam sessions where they learned hands-on from their elders, a generational method of learning and teaching as ancient as the medieval craft guilds. There were no classroom lectures, no formal seminars, just visceral life experiences, high-noon showdowns in gloriously loud, cramped, smoke-filled clubs like the vibrant ones in the North End. These were real-life, unforgiving testing grounds where you had better know how to swing and have mastered the chord changes to everything, not just blues changes and “I Got Rhythm” changes.
Jazz was a do-it-yourself art form back then, not yet thought of as morally or aesthetically fit for the college classroom. It was more like a love that dared not speak its name. Or so it was perceived by more prudish tastemakers and rigid gate-keepers of culture and the then grooveless groves of academe.
Today, of course, the classroom has enormous impact in perpetually rejuvenating jazz through widespread education programs that yearly produce fresh armies of highly trained musicians and composers.
Right here close to home, the jazz scene has been enormously enriched in recent decades through extraordinary jazz education programs at high schools, like West Hartford’s award-winning Hall High. On the college level, there are such prestigious programs of higher learning in the area as The Hartt School’s Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the University of Hartford. In nearby Middletown, there’s Wesleyan University’s acclaimed world and jazz music studies overseen by a formidable brain trust that has included such intellectual and performance luminaries as Bill Barron, Ed Blackwell, Anthony Braxton and Jay Hoggard, among others.
In the post-war era’s jazz boom, Hartford’s Young Lions like Cliff Gunn, Walter Bolden and Harold Holt jammed in local clubs with the city’s best and brightest, as well as with visiting jazz potentates from the Big Apple. Unlike the jazz concerts at The Bushnell, Foot Guard Hall or the State Theater, venues in the remarkably swinging club scene in the North End—at nightspots like Club Sundown and The Subway—coming attractions were promoted mostly by word of mouth. Unless you were completely up to speed with the dynamic North End scene, you might well run into somebody downtown one day and discover that a visiting grandee from the Big Apple like Sonny Stitt had played superbly at one of the clubs just the night before.
Visiting jazz giants like Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins were among a host of jazz titans and semi-titans who thought of Hartford as a happy stomping ground. For them it seemed stocked with fine players, skilled rhythm sections, and, conveniently, was a relatively short drive or train ride from New York or Boston.
At the time, bebop was the radical “new thing.” It was revolutionary both musically and as a social force foreshadowing such dramatic
changes blowin’ in the wind for America as the Civil Rights, Black Consciousness and Black Arts movements. As it is today with its array of conservatory-trained practitioners, Hartford even back then was hip, no mere provincial outpost suffering from a cultural cringe just because it happens to be located half-way between the mega-metropolises of New York City and Boston.
Back then, young, jazz-addicted, Hartford keyboard neophytes like Emery Austin Smith (one of the city’s last grand patriarchs from that original Golden Age who’s still playing and in his prime today) and Norman Macklin were not only auto-didactic students of swing pianists like Earl Hines and Billy Kyle, but were also diligently honing their chops on the then cutting-edge style of such master beboppers as Bud Powell and Al Haig.
Even Hartford’s burbs were crackling with jazz as the Truman Era faded into the Eisenhower Era. But, in some cases, venues on the outskirts of town favored a more mainstream style, digging classic, pre-bebop swingers like Eddie Condon, Hot Lips Page and the godlike Sidney Bechet, who were among the many more traditional greats jamming in Newington at the Matarese Circle, then one of the area’s many red-hot spots for jazz. Among the Connecticut notables jammng there were the then well-known multi-instrumentalist Dick Cary, a Hartford native, and pianist Jack O’Brien, a Middletown native, who was among the first American jazz musicians to perform throughout Europe in the 1920s.
As part of his movable feast in Paris, O’Brien, a closet jazz intellectual, became acquainted with such modern cultural icons as the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein and the French composer Maurice Ravel. During the Depression, O’Brien, who was as celebrated for his imagination and outrageous Irish wit as he was for his bold piano playing, worked at the old Club Hollywood in Rocky Hill, a nightspot owned by his boyhood friend, the famous bandleader Tony Pastor.
All that wide-spread jazz activity in Hartford and elsewhere in the state was an accurate barometer of national popular tastes of that period. It was a time when jazz—yes, jazz—had massive public appeal everywhere from concert halls like Carnegie Hall to local gin mills and juke joints. It was on the radio and even on the silver screen.
Jazz back then was the rock ‘n’ roll of its day, complete with superstars like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, two bona fide American idols of the period who happily performed in Hartford.
Ellington, who began appearing in Hartford in the 1930s, was one of the major pioneering black artists whose music leapt over the hurdles of the period’s steep racist barriers, mesmerizing a crossover audience of blacks and whites with his consummate artistry and aristocratic image. In Terry Teachout’s new, acclaimed biography, “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington,” he writes that Ellington began writing his masterpiece, the “Black, Brown and Beige” suite, in 1942 backstage at the State Theater where his band was sharing the bill with Frank Sinatra. Early in 1943, the grandiose work, which had begun in humble settings at the State Theater, premiered at Ellington’s debut performance at Carnegie Hall.
Goodman, “the King of Swing,” liked Connecticut so much that he eventually enthroned himself in a regal home in Stamford. The clarinetist/bandleader was a transplant among a number of other jazz greats who settled permanently in Connecticut, including Dave Brubeck in Wilton and Gerry Mulligan in Darien.
As with any historical Golden Age—even one as lustrous as Hartford’s—there’s a tendency to romanticize the period. Especially so when looking back on jazz, an art form that since those long gone halcyon days, has been frequently diagnosed as very close to death, its financial status often hanging by a thin thread.
Jazz’s darkest hour, both in Connecticut and nationwide, was in the early 1960s when rock seemed like the irresistible force that would crush jazz under the sheer weight of its phenomenal commercial success that threatened to suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace.
So when you look back from the perspective of jazz’s too frequent near-death experiences over the past few decades, that Golden Age from long ago seems even more golden, even more lead-free. It was, after all, an era when jazz was jumpin’ in Hartford and around the state, alive and well from the robust, full houses at Foot Guard Hall to the now mythic-seeming big band concerts that consistently drew huge, enthusiastic turnouts at Lake Compounce in Bristol.
But, perhaps, the truth of the matter is that Hartford at this present moment in 2014– despite all the usual jazz ailments, including the Darwinian cycle of the rise and sometimes rapid demise of jazz venues– is enjoying its very own, new Golden Age. Not just 60 or 70 years ago, but right here and now in this present, fleeting moment.
Among the vital signs of today’s new 24-karat Jazz Age is the most obvious fact that the local scene is teeming with talent, locally grown and increasingly nationally renowned. An extremely jazz-friendly Hartford has become noted as a manufacturing center for the creation of fine, domestically-raised products ranging from the dazzling double bassist Dezron Douglas to the remarkable Curtis brothers, pianist Zaccai Curtis and bassist Luques Curtis, local jazz favorites since they were child prodigies dazzling local fans everywhere from Bushnell Park to Real Art Ways.
Talent is evident virtually everywhere within earshot, whether with well-established figures like trombonist Steve Davis, bassist Nat Reeves and saxophonist Rene McLean, noted professor/performers at The Hartt School, to the long honor roll of extraordinary musicians who have emerged just from Hall High School alone. Among the litany of Hall hallmarks are the Grammy-nominated pianist Brad Mehldau, an important stylistic influence on the whole succeeding generation of pianists coming up behind him; plus his classmate and friend, saxophonist, Joel Frahm; drummer Richie Barshay and saxophonists Erica von Kleist, Kris Allen and Noah Preminger, just to name a few examples from a litany of worthies.
Another tangible and delightful sign of the present day Golden Age is the vast array, almost a glut of first-rate concerts and festivals offered in Hartford and throughout the state itself.
In Hartford alone you can sample the Monday Night Jazz Series in Bushnell Park; The Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz, also in the downtown park, and the Baby Grand Jazz Series at the Hartford Public Library. Rather amazingly, all are free of charge. During the year, Hartford’s Artists Collective and Real Art Ways also chime in with first-rate jazz presentations. Thanks to the empathetic ear of its Executive Director Will K. Wilkins, RAW keeps the new music flame alive in Hartford, stoking it with, for example, its acclaimed “Improvisations” series curated by the cutting-edge cornetist/trumpeter Stephen Haynes and bassist/guitarist Joe Morris.
Along with the weekly “Monday Night Jazz” series at Black-eyed Sally’s and impresario/fashion designer Dan Blow’s cornucopia of jazz and cabaret offerings at his boutique, Japanalia Eiko, plus his Sunday jazz brunches at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, there are no signs of either the death of or even the dearth of jazz in Hartford. Even if you hate jazz, it would be hard to avoid it in town.
And in yet another sign of robust health, the latest newcomer on the scene in Connecticut is Old Lyme’s superb Side Door Jazz Club, which is presenting a parade of such top-name performers as Fred Hersch and Nicholas Payton with its celebratory fare.
Besides all these big, knockout presentations, jazz is even bobbing- and-weaving its stylish way through a wide variety of seemingly offbeat venues, resounding everywhere from pizza parlors in Bloomfield and Bethel to a French bakery/café in West Hartford Center, to Ed Krech’s free Saturday matinee jam sessions held right in his brick-and-mortar, bin-lined, mom-and-pop jazz record shop in Wethersfield.
Other vital life-signs statewide include the nationally heralded Litchfield Jazz Festival (LJF), a creation of one of the greatest behind-the-scenes forces in Connecticut jazz history, Vita Muir. A one-woman cultural industry, Muir single-handedly created the festival which has become a premier cultural event in Connecticut with its widely varied, jazz cordon bleu fare. Likewise, for trad jazz aficionados there’s the Hot Steamed Jazz Festival in Essex, specializing in red-hot traditional music.
New Haven, another major Connecticut city with a glorious jazz history, celebrates its own jazz heritage with the New Haven Jazz Festival, a free event that draws many thousands to the historic New Haven Green. The festival, which is rooted in deep pride and vital consciousness of the history of jazz in the Elm City, loves to present headliners with New Haven roots. Among these are such extraordinary players as saxophonist Wayne Escoffery. Born in London, Escoffery grew up in New Haven before coming to Hartford to study with his great mentor, Jackie McLean.
As in Hartford, there are many fascinating facets to the mosaic that makes up the Elm City’s jazz history.
In a nationally celebrated news event during World War II, for example, the famous big band leader Glenn Miller, who had enlisted in the Army Air Corps, was headquartered in New Haven for 1 ½ years, marshaling his big band music as a wartime morale and recruitment booster.
Miller, who was then a captain, formed and led the 418th Army Air Force Band made up of servicemen who had been musically skilled civilians before the war. Led by the big band maestro in full military regalia, the band of soldier/musicians presented concerts for Yale students and local residents, and marched in patriotic parades in New Haven to a jazzy beat undreamed of by the “American March King,” John Philip Sousa.
Most famously, Miller and his military band broadcast live, weekly radio shows from Yale’s Woolsey Hall, upbeat recruitment programs orchestrated to attract young men to enlist in the Air Corps. While living full-time in New Haven, Miller reportedly stayed at the historic, downtown Taft Hotel. Growing impatient with his stateside duty, the patriotic bandleader volunteered to play for the troops overseas despite the obvious danger. Six months after leaving New Haven, Miller was dead, disappearing mysteriously on a flight from England to Paris where he was scheduled to entertain the troops. His body was never recovered.
Mirroring Hartford’s urban-rooted jazz history in many ways, New Haven also has a non-profit, all-volunteer, jazz advocacy group, called Jazz Haven. Jazz Haven, with staunch jazz warriors like Doug Morrill often at the forefront, has helped keep jazz alive in New Haven, much as The Hartford Jazz Society has done in Hartford for more than a half century.
New Haven’s illustrious jazz history also boasts Yale’s prestigious Duke Ellington Fellowship Program, created and run by Professor Willie Ruff, the noted French horn player, double bassist, jazz savant, historian, memoirist and partner with pianist Dwike Mitchell in the celebrated Mitchell/Ruff Duo. The distinguished program has paid homage to creative luminaries ranging from such towering cultural figures as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson to such jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck. (In another Elm City historical note, superstar clarinetist/bandleader Artie Shaw was raised in New Haven. Among musicians born in the Elm City were bandleader/trombonist Buddy Morrow and the excellent, if sadly underrated pianist/accordionist Pete Jolly).
Yet another centerpiece of New Haven’s vital jazz legacy is Firehouse 12, a nationally celebrated bastion for the performance and the recording of cutting-edge music. Firehouse 12 is an invaluable haven for new music, just as the relative newcomer to the Connecticut jazz scene, Jeff & Joels’ Houseparty in Guilford, is a great, foot-stomping, partying refuge for good, old-time sounds like ragtime, New Orleans, boogie-woogie, swing, stride and blues.
While today’s active jazz scene marks one of Hartford’s brightest hours, the early 1960s were, in many ways, among its darkest, even though there have always been some inspiring points of light. Through those Dark Ages, its saviors leading the way to enlightenment have long included such old standby, life-saving forces as The Hartford Jazz Society,
Ironically, however, it was the death of the beloved Heublein—a victim of Hartford’s unbridled passion in the early ‘60s for the bulldozer and wrecking ball of urban renewal—that led to the birth of the HJS, one of the most pivotal events in the city’s jazz history.
Art Fine, another one of the central, behind-the-scenes forces on behalf of jazz, and his circle of jazz-loving friends frequented the Heublein in the 1950s, a congenial spa to have a drink and hear jazz greats like Dave McKenna, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, Zoot Sims or Cannonball Addelerley. (The Heublein’s dream team fare was booked by Paul Landerman (1916-2008), one of Connecticut’s most famous society bandleaders, jazz impresarios, booking agents and concert presenters.)
Fine’s kindred jazz spirits, including Malcolm-Smith, met often after work over drinks and the top-shelf jazz served at the Heublein. All were appalled, even horrified by the impending doom of the Heublein, which they viewed as a historically catastrophic blow for jazz in Hartford. Something had to be done. Plans had to be made. Fine’s hilltop home in Bloomfield became the new meeting place for the jazz devout where they could thrash out their ideas about saving jazz, which they believed was being uprooted by the destruction of the iconic Heublein.
Fine’s spacious home, the new suburban salon for the Heublein refugees, eventually became the jazz-friendly site for great, Gatsby-like parties where there was no shortage of camaraderie, food and drink, But first came the seminal planning sessions for what to do about the imperiled state of jazz in Hartford.
As the HJS was launched, Fine’s living room, which was graced with a beautiful and well-tuned piano, was often alive with the sound of music, including that of the great pianist Randy Weston, one of Fine’s many close jazz friends who also became a lifetime pal with the HJS.
As part of Fine’s new, live and glorious, in-house soundtrack—especially at his fabled birthday parties and pre-concert and post-concert festivities—there were the brassy notes of trumpeter Roy Eldridge one night, the hard, gritty tenor sounds of the great Booker Ervin some other night. Or it could be generated by other special guests like the great Willie “The Lion” Smith rollicking away on the piano for Fine and his house full of partying jazz lovers.
“Oh, God it was wild!” recalls Lucy Marsters, a former HJS president and longtime friend of Fine.
“Art’s parties were the greatest! His home was open. I went into Art’s kitchen one night, and the next thing I knew I was having a drink with Kenny Burrell, the great jazz guitarist!” Marsters says, her voice still full of wonder even all these decades later.
That homey ambience at Fine’s fests and the collegial sense of bonding together for a worthy cause was, in some ways, a foreshadowing of Dr. Steven Sussman’s annual “Jazz for Juvenile Diabetes,” star-studded benefit concerts that started out in the Hartford physician’s living room.
The far-sighted idea of creating the Hartford Jazz Society was conceived, appropriately enough, on a hilltop with a splendid view and wide horizon.
Fine and his fellow jazz visionaries would gather casually on the lawn in front of his home, mapping out their strategic plans for saving jazz in Hartford. Out of these convivial conventions of the founders on the lawn was created a non-profit organization whose army of unpaid volunteers, over the decades, has helped keep jazz afloat even while the HJS itself has had to weather some hard, financially life-threatening times of its own. No one ever said jazz was easy.
Fine, a pragmatic, highly successful businessman with high philosophical ideals, took pride in the HJS’s great musical accomplishments, but also felt, as a founding father and the HJS’s first president, that the socially idealistic, culturally liberal group was way ahead of its time on such vital social and historical issues as race in America.
“I think that the Jazz Society’s most important accomplishment wasn’t just the music, so much as the fact that it was one of the first totally integrated social organizations in the area. Blacks and whites socialized naturally, with no strain, no pretensions,” Fine told The Courant in 1985 when the HJS was celebrating its silver anniversary.
“The Jazz Society provided a framework for amicable integration, and in that sense it was way ahead of its time. Back then when we were just getting started in 1960, the musicians’ union was still segregated. There was a white union for white musicians and a black union for black musicians—a sociological and historical fact that gives you an indication of the tenor of the times,” he said.
Fine died in late 2007 at 96, but his legacy lives on through the HJS, a remarkable accomplishment for a man who never played a note in his life.
Jazz has had a number of saviors over the last half-century or so besides rugged individualists and idealists like Fine and dedicated groups like the HJS, who have often provided life-support for jazz.
Among these miracle workers are such jazz heroes as Jackie McLean and his wife, Dollie, and bassist Paul Brown, the much revered Big Daddy of the ongoing concept of free, outdoor jazz festivals in Hartford.
Besides founding the Artists Collective and what is now called The Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at U of H, Jackie McLean, a Harlem native, brought big name recognition and cultural cachet to Hartford when he settled here with his family and began teaching at the University of Hartford, becoming a nationally respected, innovative jazz educator. Graduates of McLean’s influential program are performing and recording throughout the jazz world, constituting a living, ever expanding legacy for the NEA Jazz Master who died at 74 in 2006.
Brown, another Hartford jazz saint, in the early 1960s began the still-running Monday Night Jazz Series, one of the most lasting achievements in the city’s jazz history.
As a concert-producer, Brown, a globe-trotting professional bassist, brought an amazing array of talent to town, including Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and the Modern Jazz Quartet. All this was accomplished despite his having to work on a shoestring budget. In later years, Brown somehow kept the popular series going despite its facing virtual extinction from season-to-season because of chronic, life-threatening shortfalls in funding.
From the Monday Night Jazz series, which is now presented by the HJS, was spun off The Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz (GHFJ), which was initially created as an homage to Brown, Hartford’s master builder of jazz festivals. A free outdoor bash in Bushnell Park, the GHFJ serves a menu rooted in contemporary jazz. Like its older sibling, the Monday Night Jazz series, the GHFJ every summer fills the downtown park with thousands of fans.
The history of jazz in Hartford not only has a great narrative line, but is also packed with a colorful cast of leading, dedicated characters, in addition to such prime movers as Fine, the McLeans and Brown.
Among these is John Chapin, a onetime Hartford cop who a couple decades ago ran two of the finest, most upscale jazz clubs in Hartford history, Lloyds and Shenanigans.
A well-liked, affable and charismatic club owner, Chapin took enormous pride in presenting high-quality music in a cosmopolitan ambience. His signature mix of chic and substance attracted the smart set from Hartford as well as from the surrounding suburbs, audiences with New Yorker magazine-like demographics in terms of education and earning power.
During his remarkable but tantalizingly too short run, Chapin provided one of the city’s richest, most invaluable direct pipelines to top talent from New York and Boston, bringing to town both well-established performers and stars of the future.
Every week, he consistently presented jazz and folk greats, introducing Hartford audiences to such young, then unknown performers as Harry Connick Jr. and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Jazz piano lovers in the 1980s blissfully basked in Chapin’s ongoing stream of such keyboard masters as Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, McCoy Tyner, Dick Wellstood, Dave McKenna and, very near the end of his career, Teddy Wilson.
Chapin served Big Apple sophistication in Hartford and at Hartford prices. Even after all these years, his two outstanding clubs still set the highest benchmark standards for quality venues in Hartford.
Another key pillar of jazz in Hartford was Al Casasanta whose precious legacy for the music was his now legendary 880 Club, one of the greatest, most nourishing hothouses for jazz the city has ever seen.
A lovable diamond-in-the-rough, Casasanta was a good-hearted, down-to-earth figure who transformed his South End neighborhood bar into the 880 Club, an unpretentious nightspot that took its name from its address at 880 Maple Ave.
By day, the 880 was a blue-collar neighborhood bar, a kind of Cheers where everybody knows your name. By night, it magically transformed into a classic, packed, noisy, smoke-filled, extremely friendly, relaxed jazz club. It was a cozy nook where you might hear anybody from Al Cohn or Junior Cook to Tom Harrell or John Scofield, backed by the house rhythm section that featured pianist and music director Don DePalma, Mike Duquette on drums and Nat Reeves on bass. It was the place where many young promising musicians, like alto saxophonist Sue Terry and flutist Ali Ryerson, gained invaluable experience jamming in a challenging, live setting with such seasoned, 880 regulars as DePalma, the colorful vibraphonist Matt Emirzian and the inventive drummer Larry DiNatale.
Casasanta, who died at 63 in 1995, was loved by musicians who worked for him (a most rare experience for a club owner), as well as by his patrons who idolized his cramped, gritty club much the way devout Red Sox fans are forever devoted to Fenway Park.
There was so much love for Al, in fact, that the genial, charismatic Italian-American became known affectionately and with the deepest respect as the Godfather of Jazz. It was a title he prized, and an accurate reflection of his deeply principled, heart-felt loyalty to the music, the musicians and his patrons.
Through the best of times and the worst of times financially, Casasanta stuck tenaciously and courageously with jazz for years even though good friends and advisers constantly implored him to dump jazz—rarely ever much of a money-maker—and go after easy money by turning the 880 into a topless bar.
Casasanta, who wanted no part of that deal, explained to The Courant: “When I die they can put a G clef on my coffin instead of a dollar sign.”
Another fascinating central character in Hartford’s historical narrative is Mort Fega (1921-2005), a well-known jazz radio veteran from the New York scene, a classy record company owner and producer who had many influential friends, including Miles Davis, and connections with seemingly everybody in the performing and recording side of the music business.
Fega, who spoke his razor-sharp mind candidly and caustically, caused a much needed stir in a too complacent jazz community after arriving here in the 1970s. Lifting the level of discourse to new, challenging heights with his mellow-toned radio voice and his sometimes combative signature style of intellectual and street-smart hipness, he evangelized, always passionately and often provocatively, for modern jazz, both on the air and with his many blue-chip concert presentations.
Without compromise, fear or favor, Fega always conducted his business with a sense of high style and perfectionist fervor. An Air Force combat veteran of World War II who had flown bombing missions over Germany and Nazi-occupied France, he spoke fearlessly and with invigorating, edgy candor.
No one, he asserted, could ever give him worse flak than he got from the Nazis. His direct, unaffected manner deeply irritated some, profoundly inspired others, while perpetually ruffling a lot of feathers that sorely needed ruffling.
Characterizing himself as “a jackleg preacher for jazz,” Fega was a catalytic force for revitalizing change, particularly during the height of his influence in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. As a promoter, proselytizer and guru, he was sagacious, pugnacious and sardonic—sometimes all three simultaneously. Most significantly, he did much good for jazz in Hartford before moving in the 1980s with his wife, Muriel, to Delray Beach, Fla., where he continued to pursue his sacred calling as a jackleg preacher for jazz.
Hartford has risen to its respectable status in the jazz world today not just through the efforts of all the well-known, influential advocates who have shaped the music’s history over the decades, but also thanks to many figures toiling away every day in the jazz trenches.
These include countless devoted teachers, musicians, fans, supporters in all walks of life, organizations and even the many venues that have come and gone over the decades. These sometimes relatively unsung but no less important contributors to the music’s history range over a diverse legion of dedicated jazz crusaders from early heavyweight champions of jazz like the Hartford Jazz Society’s Sam Johnson and such present day HJS advocates as Bill Sullivan to trumpeter/bandleader/educator Ray Gonzalez, Hartford’s dynamo sparkplug for Latin jazz, and vocalist Nicki Mathis, who uses her art and organizational skills in her long-running war against sexism and racism.
Among these jazz legionnaires are such warriors as: Kevin McCabe, a concert presenter and irrepressible Defender of the Faith in contemporary jazz; the jazz-inspired, expressionist painter/concert presenter Andres Chaparro; photographer/radio host Maurice Robertson; bassist Paul Fuller, an evidently inexhaustible, multi-tasking champion for jazz; the late Ed Strong, a joyfully charismatic HJS president, a life-force and irresistible master recruiter of jazz converts; the photographer/actor Harry Lichtenbaum, former HJS president and dedicated archivist of historic materials related to Hartford jazz and his idol Frank Sinatra; and Paul Lewis, a club owner who held out gallantly for many years at West Hartford’s sadly departed Szechuan Tokyo Restaurant. Despite his years of loving, herculean efforts on behalf of jazz, Lewis’s lease for his jazz-friendly restaurant was ended and his magnificent venture sank. It was a titanic loss still felt by regional patrons and musicians
alike.
While jazz in Hartford has had its share of secular saints and martyrs, like Fine, the McLeans, Brown, Casasanta and Lewis, it has also been blessed with a direct line of sorts to a higher power thanks to the invaluable, jazz-friendly support from the city’s historic Asylum Hill Congregational Church (AHCC). Its splendid sanctuary has often afforded a welcoming haven for many great, even historic jazz concerts. Jazz should, in fact, give thanks to AHCC for the devoted support years back from the church’s trumpet playing, Rev. Gary Miller, a now retired senior minister, and, in recent years, for the many pro-jazz stands affirmed by the bold deeds of Steven Mitchell, minister of music and arts.
All of these historic figures and other shakers-and-doers and many complex economic, social and cultural forces, have somehow transformed a medium-sized city like Hartford into a wonderfully and disproportionately significant factor in the wide world of jazz in 2014.
Word of Hartford’s proud jazz history has been spread nationally and internationally by the constantly growing number of high-quality musicians who have been schooled and shaped by the capital city’s vibrant jazz scene, and then gone out on their own and made their mark in the jazz world itself.
Dezron Douglas, who was born and raised here, reports that the buzz on the New York club scene today is that there is now “the Hartford sound,” a style so individual that it has a name and a historic, geographical and stylistic category all its own.
Few cities—even those many times larger than Hartford—can point to such a proud jazz history that has produced a distinctive sound uniquely its own. That’s a ringing endorsement any city might well savor among its prized cultural accomplishments. It even has the resonant sounding glow of a new Golden Age of Jazz for Hartford, one that’s happening right now and has no expiration date.
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Jazz In Connecticut — The Early Years By OWEN McNALLY
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** Jazz In Connecticut — The Early Years
By OWEN McNALLY
————————————————————
With fabled clubs in the North End rocking with the sound of jazz, classic big bands and big-name instrumentalists and singers routinely blowing-off the roof at Foot Guard Hall on High Street, or shaking the foundations of the State Theater on Village Street, Hartford’s vibrant, pre and post-World War II scene was the city’s first “Golden Age of Jazz.”
Jazz was not only flourishing artistically, but was very much the music of the day for young people through the 1930s, all of the ‘40s and well into the 1950s. At its zenith in Hartford, jazz was everywhere and for everyone. Typically among the jazz fold were the young adults and slightly older, more urbane patrons who in the ‘50s regularly dug the suave, swinging sounds of the elegant jazz pianist Teddy Wilson at the legendary Heublein Hotel lounge in downtown Hartford.
One of the city’s crown jewel venues of the 20th century, the lounge in the venerable hotel was a softly lit, elegant jazz spa right out of a vintage, black-and-white Hollywood flick. It was a sophisticated, posh place where, if you wore a jacket and a tie and acted like an adult, you could get served a Scotch on-the-rocks or an extra-dry martini even if you were a couple years under 21, then the legal age for getting a drink in Connecticut.
A younger, less inhibited set of jazz lovers in that era danced in the aisles at Hartford’s hallowed cultural center, The Bushnell Memorial, at Norman Granz’s fabled Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts, upsetting the management’s sense of propriety a bit.
Moved by that JATP-generated passion, more unruly patrons in the mezzanine shouted out, “Go, man, go!’ to the steamy, honking, erotically-charged tenor saxophone riffs of the swaggering Illinois Jacquet, the master machismo music-maker. Sedentary swingers, in sedate contrast, merely tapped their feet to a swinging, surreal scat solo by Ella Fitzgerald. Or with Zen-like hipness, the coolest of cool JATP fans, experiencing their very own introspective, natural high, would quietly savor a mesmerizing, melodically inventive, gossamer solo by the divinely inspired tenor saxophonist Lester Young, JATP’s jazz Buddha whose spiritual solos were as holy as a Gregorian chant.
For all its power and glory from the 1930s through the 1950s, jazz didn’t exactly start off like a ball of fire in Hartford. Its shock of the new qualities were just too shocking and too new for skeptical critics and elitist listeners who, nearly as far back as 100 years ago, found it noisy, noisome, uncultivated and uncouth.
In the early 1920s jazz’s reception and public perception varied in Hartford from irate complaints from Colt Park neighborhood residents about “dance music jazzing from the park’s pavilion” to a somewhat lukewarm notice in The Courant praising a Navy jazz band “for enthralling crowds at The Capitol Theater” where the jazzy sailors shared the vaudeville bill with trick bicyclists, a singing/dancing child act, acrobats, contortionists and a singing monologist—hardly promising signs of things to come for America’s new music in Hartford.
Celebrated orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, somewhat grandiloquently billed as “The King of Jazz,” fared far less well than The Capitol’s novelty sailor band in a Courant review of the portly maestro’s performance in 1924 at Foot Guard Hall. Looking down his nose (or perhaps holding it) a rather snooty, culturally patronizing Courant reviewer declared that the rotund bandleader’s orotund attempts at gussying up jazz failed miserably to measure up to “good music as (it) has been generally understood by cultured people these many years.”
“It gets terribly monotonous in its rhythms to those whose ears have been attuned to that which they fondly and firmly believe is infinitely and eternally better in music,” the dyspeptic Courant scribe lamented.
A positive economic side effect of jazz—at least for the piano tuning business—was cited in a sarcastic Courant news item in the 1920s reporting, with a derisive tone, that the outbreak of the excessively heavy pounding by jazz pianists was putting pianos across the nation out of tune “in about half the time it took formerly.”
Adding insult to mockery, The Courant in 1926 polled its readership on whether the performance of jazz should be permitted in public on Sundays. With 1,143 readers voting to keep Sunday safe from the corrupting temptations of jazz, the convention-flouting music lost by a landslide as only 349 readers lined up in favor of allowing Satan’s latest sinful, musical concoction to profane the Sabbath.
But as the Jazz Age evolved and modern popular culture—everything from silent films, the rising radio-craze, flapper fashions, hip flasks and hip music—became an irresistibly powerful social force, praise began to crescendo for jazz in The Courant as the syncopated sounds became increasingly popular in Hartford, converting perhaps even some of the paper’s once avid, anti-jazz readers.
By the 1930s, Duke Ellington and his singer Ivy Anderson received a rave review in The Courant for being “especially musically intelligent.” Even as the stock market plunged, jazz’s stock was rising in Hartford. Count Basie and his orchestra, for example, were royally hailed for playing at an upscale ball held at, of all places, the prestigious Hartford Club, with absolutely no caveat emptors issued by The Courant writer about the primal crudities of jazz offending the cultivated listener’s superior musical sensibilities.
A performance at the State Theater featuring the swinging Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra and diva Billie Holiday was even awarded the highest accolade by a Courant entertainment writer for what she described as its “pop and oomph,” which seems to have superseded the paper’s earlier critical category for jazz as strictly sturm und drang.
By the late 1930s and ‘40s, jazz had shifted into high gear in Hartford. Its influence was mushrooming everywhere. You could catch it at such then wildly popular but now long forgotten venues as the Paddock in East Hartford, where such national notables as pianist Art Hodes and trumpeter Will Bill Davison wailed. Or you could test your luck at the city’s once flourishing Clover Leaf where, at least according to local legend, the storied pianist/composer Jelly Roll Morton was hired to help bibulously ecstatic Hartfordites celebrate the glorious repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
During its first Golden Age in Hartford, jazz was hot and accessible, although its conservative detractors still thought it not quite proper; perhaps even a sinful primrose path leading directly to drunkenness, drugs and debauchery.
Long before college radio, you could hear jazz on the air on WTIC on a pioneering show called “Gems of American Jazz.” Hosted by Connecticut’s “foremost jazz musicologist” George Malcolm-Smith, it debuted in 1942, establishing a hip, or maybe back then, a hep radio tradition carried on in more recent times by invaluable college FM radio stations beaming their jazz message across the state.
One of the city’s most flamboyant and devout early supporters of jazz, Malcolm-Smith (1901-1984) was a noted comic novelist, a founder and onetime president of the Hartford Jazz Society (HJS) and a sometime jazz critic for The Courant.
Dashing, dapper and madly in love with jazz in all its forms, he was a celebrated figure about town. A humorous man of intellectual substance, he accentuated his elegant manner by smoking his favorite brand with a cigarette holder held and bandied about in the grand gestural manner of FDR. Perhaps because he had a deep sense of history and of the lasting value of the music, Malcolm-Smith’s voluminous, chatty but information-packed “Swinger” newsletters for the HJS are an invaluable chronicle of the Society’s formative years, a rare archive of written documents waiting to be mined by a jazz historian.
A raconteur and bon vivant, Malcolm-Smith was a genuine 20th century Hartford wit. His banter and cultural erudition would have made him right at home exchanging quips and barbs with such heavyweight humorists as Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel’s famously funny roundtable gatherings.
In that long ago happily abundant, first Golden Age of Jazz, you could hear jazz live just about anywhere in Hartford. It could be Art Tatum or Stan Kenton on stage at The Bushnell. Or it could be the young Dave Mackay, the brilliant, blind pianist, Lennie Tristano protégé and Trinity College undergrad grooving high before an excited, packed house at one of the two, swinging Elks Clubs in the North End.
You could duck into a downtown bar or restaurant, grab a drink and, if you were lucky, catch a smokin’ set by one of the gifted Connecticut jazz heroes of the day like alto saxophonist Jack O’Connor, a hard-playing, hard-living player of prodigious talent. His hometown fans claimed that at his passionate, fluent best, O’Connor was at least the equal of alto greats Phil Woods or Gene Quill—maybe even sharper than Quill. Taking a few steps down Asylum Street and into an inviting restaurant, you might walk-in on the awesome musings of the marvelous, Hartford piano virtuoso Ray Cassarino. A world-class artist Cassarino designed astounding, sonic architectural structures in the air by building on the virtually infinite possibilities of an 88-note Steinway grand.
It was the best of times back then when a young, gifted Horace Silver and the mysterious, enigmatic, tragically doomed jazz genius Gigi Gryce walked the streets of Hartford—giants in our midst—and were playing and making history in jazz clubs in the Capital City. In one of the most dramatic events in all of Hartford’s jazz history, Silver, a Norwalk native and future jazz immortal, was discovered one night by the famous tenor saxophonist Stan Getz who just happened to show up after a gig at the State Theater, sweeping into the Club Sundown where he was bowled over by Silver’s hard-swinging piano solos and rhythmic comping that rocked the house.
Much as it is today, Hartford, even back then long before jazz became fervently embraced by academia, was a fertile breeding ground of promising young talent. Gifted musicians back then taught themselves how to improvise by listening to recordings of the masters and by playing at jam sessions where they learned hands-on from their elders, a generational method of learning and teaching as ancient as the medieval craft guilds. There were no classroom lectures, no formal seminars, just visceral life experiences, high-noon showdowns in gloriously loud, cramped, smoke-filled clubs like the vibrant ones in the North End. These were real-life, unforgiving testing grounds where you had better know how to swing and have mastered the chord changes to everything, not just blues changes and “I Got Rhythm” changes.
Jazz was a do-it-yourself art form back then, not yet thought of as morally or aesthetically fit for the college classroom. It was more like a love that dared not speak its name. Or so it was perceived by more prudish tastemakers and rigid gate-keepers of culture and the then grooveless groves of academe.
Today, of course, the classroom has enormous impact in perpetually rejuvenating jazz through widespread education programs that yearly produce fresh armies of highly trained musicians and composers.
Right here close to home, the jazz scene has been enormously enriched in recent decades through extraordinary jazz education programs at high schools, like West Hartford’s award-winning Hall High. On the college level, there are such prestigious programs of higher learning in the area as The Hartt School’s Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the University of Hartford. In nearby Middletown, there’s Wesleyan University’s acclaimed world and jazz music studies overseen by a formidable brain trust that has included such intellectual and performance luminaries as Bill Barron, Ed Blackwell, Anthony Braxton and Jay Hoggard, among others.
In the post-war era’s jazz boom, Hartford’s Young Lions like Cliff Gunn, Walter Bolden and Harold Holt jammed in local clubs with the city’s best and brightest, as well as with visiting jazz potentates from the Big Apple. Unlike the jazz concerts at The Bushnell, Foot Guard Hall or the State Theater, venues in the remarkably swinging club scene in the North End—at nightspots like Club Sundown and The Subway—coming attractions were promoted mostly by word of mouth. Unless you were completely up to speed with the dynamic North End scene, you might well run into somebody downtown one day and discover that a visiting grandee from the Big Apple like Sonny Stitt had played superbly at one of the clubs just the night before.
Visiting jazz giants like Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins were among a host of jazz titans and semi-titans who thought of Hartford as a happy stomping ground. For them it seemed stocked with fine players, skilled rhythm sections, and, conveniently, was a relatively short drive or train ride from New York or Boston.
At the time, bebop was the radical “new thing.” It was revolutionary both musically and as a social force foreshadowing such dramatic
changes blowin’ in the wind for America as the Civil Rights, Black Consciousness and Black Arts movements. As it is today with its array of conservatory-trained practitioners, Hartford even back then was hip, no mere provincial outpost suffering from a cultural cringe just because it happens to be located half-way between the mega-metropolises of New York City and Boston.
Back then, young, jazz-addicted, Hartford keyboard neophytes like Emery Austin Smith (one of the city’s last grand patriarchs from that original Golden Age who’s still playing and in his prime today) and Norman Macklin were not only auto-didactic students of swing pianists like Earl Hines and Billy Kyle, but were also diligently honing their chops on the then cutting-edge style of such master beboppers as Bud Powell and Al Haig.
Even Hartford’s burbs were crackling with jazz as the Truman Era faded into the Eisenhower Era. But, in some cases, venues on the outskirts of town favored a more mainstream style, digging classic, pre-bebop swingers like Eddie Condon, Hot Lips Page and the godlike Sidney Bechet, who were among the many more traditional greats jamming in Newington at the Matarese Circle, then one of the area’s many red-hot spots for jazz. Among the Connecticut notables jammng there were the then well-known multi-instrumentalist Dick Cary, a Hartford native, and pianist Jack O’Brien, a Middletown native, who was among the first American jazz musicians to perform throughout Europe in the 1920s.
As part of his movable feast in Paris, O’Brien, a closet jazz intellectual, became acquainted with such modern cultural icons as the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein and the French composer Maurice Ravel. During the Depression, O’Brien, who was as celebrated for his imagination and outrageous Irish wit as he was for his bold piano playing, worked at the old Club Hollywood in Rocky Hill, a nightspot owned by his boyhood friend, the famous bandleader Tony Pastor.
All that wide-spread jazz activity in Hartford and elsewhere in the state was an accurate barometer of national popular tastes of that period. It was a time when jazz—yes, jazz—had massive public appeal everywhere from concert halls like Carnegie Hall to local gin mills and juke joints. It was on the radio and even on the silver screen.
Jazz back then was the rock ‘n’ roll of its day, complete with superstars like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, two bona fide American idols of the period who happily performed in Hartford.
Ellington, who began appearing in Hartford in the 1930s, was one of the major pioneering black artists whose music leapt over the hurdles of the period’s steep racist barriers, mesmerizing a crossover audience of blacks and whites with his consummate artistry and aristocratic image. In Terry Teachout’s new, acclaimed biography, “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington,” he writes that Ellington began writing his masterpiece, the “Black, Brown and Beige” suite, in 1942 backstage at the State Theater where his band was sharing the bill with Frank Sinatra. Early in 1943, the grandiose work, which had begun in humble settings at the State Theater, premiered at Ellington’s debut performance at Carnegie Hall.
Goodman, “the King of Swing,” liked Connecticut so much that he eventually enthroned himself in a regal home in Stamford. The clarinetist/bandleader was a transplant among a number of other jazz greats who settled permanently in Connecticut, including Dave Brubeck in Wilton and Gerry Mulligan in Darien.
As with any historical Golden Age—even one as lustrous as Hartford’s—there’s a tendency to romanticize the period. Especially so when looking back on jazz, an art form that since those long gone halcyon days, has been frequently diagnosed as very close to death, its financial status often hanging by a thin thread.
Jazz’s darkest hour, both in Connecticut and nationwide, was in the early 1960s when rock seemed like the irresistible force that would crush jazz under the sheer weight of its phenomenal commercial success that threatened to suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace.
So when you look back from the perspective of jazz’s too frequent near-death experiences over the past few decades, that Golden Age from long ago seems even more golden, even more lead-free. It was, after all, an era when jazz was jumpin’ in Hartford and around the state, alive and well from the robust, full houses at Foot Guard Hall to the now mythic-seeming big band concerts that consistently drew huge, enthusiastic turnouts at Lake Compounce in Bristol.
But, perhaps, the truth of the matter is that Hartford at this present moment in 2014– despite all the usual jazz ailments, including the Darwinian cycle of the rise and sometimes rapid demise of jazz venues– is enjoying its very own, new Golden Age. Not just 60 or 70 years ago, but right here and now in this present, fleeting moment.
Among the vital signs of today’s new 24-karat Jazz Age is the most obvious fact that the local scene is teeming with talent, locally grown and increasingly nationally renowned. An extremely jazz-friendly Hartford has become noted as a manufacturing center for the creation of fine, domestically-raised products ranging from the dazzling double bassist Dezron Douglas to the remarkable Curtis brothers, pianist Zaccai Curtis and bassist Luques Curtis, local jazz favorites since they were child prodigies dazzling local fans everywhere from Bushnell Park to Real Art Ways.
Talent is evident virtually everywhere within earshot, whether with well-established figures like trombonist Steve Davis, bassist Nat Reeves and saxophonist Rene McLean, noted professor/performers at The Hartt School, to the long honor roll of extraordinary musicians who have emerged just from Hall High School alone. Among the litany of Hall hallmarks are the Grammy-nominated pianist Brad Mehldau, an important stylistic influence on the whole succeeding generation of pianists coming up behind him; plus his classmate and friend, saxophonist, Joel Frahm; drummer Richie Barshay and saxophonists Erica von Kleist, Kris Allen and Noah Preminger, just to name a few examples from a litany of worthies.
Another tangible and delightful sign of the present day Golden Age is the vast array, almost a glut of first-rate concerts and festivals offered in Hartford and throughout the state itself.
In Hartford alone you can sample the Monday Night Jazz Series in Bushnell Park; The Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz, also in the downtown park, and the Baby Grand Jazz Series at the Hartford Public Library. Rather amazingly, all are free of charge. During the year, Hartford’s Artists Collective and Real Art Ways also chime in with first-rate jazz presentations. Thanks to the empathetic ear of its Executive Director Will K. Wilkins, RAW keeps the new music flame alive in Hartford, stoking it with, for example, its acclaimed “Improvisations” series curated by the cutting-edge cornetist/trumpeter Stephen Haynes and bassist/guitarist Joe Morris.
Along with the weekly “Monday Night Jazz” series at Black-eyed Sally’s and impresario/fashion designer Dan Blow’s cornucopia of jazz and cabaret offerings at his boutique, Japanalia Eiko, plus his Sunday jazz brunches at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, there are no signs of either the death of or even the dearth of jazz in Hartford. Even if you hate jazz, it would be hard to avoid it in town.
And in yet another sign of robust health, the latest newcomer on the scene in Connecticut is Old Lyme’s superb Side Door Jazz Club, which is presenting a parade of such top-name performers as Fred Hersch and Nicholas Payton with its celebratory fare.
Besides all these big, knockout presentations, jazz is even bobbing- and-weaving its stylish way through a wide variety of seemingly offbeat venues, resounding everywhere from pizza parlors in Bloomfield and Bethel to a French bakery/café in West Hartford Center, to Ed Krech’s free Saturday matinee jam sessions held right in his brick-and-mortar, bin-lined, mom-and-pop jazz record shop in Wethersfield.
Other vital life-signs statewide include the nationally heralded Litchfield Jazz Festival (LJF), a creation of one of the greatest behind-the-scenes forces in Connecticut jazz history, Vita Muir. A one-woman cultural industry, Muir single-handedly created the festival which has become a premier cultural event in Connecticut with its widely varied, jazz cordon bleu fare. Likewise, for trad jazz aficionados there’s the Hot Steamed Jazz Festival in Essex, specializing in red-hot traditional music.
New Haven, another major Connecticut city with a glorious jazz history, celebrates its own jazz heritage with the New Haven Jazz Festival, a free event that draws many thousands to the historic New Haven Green. The festival, which is rooted in deep pride and vital consciousness of the history of jazz in the Elm City, loves to present headliners with New Haven roots. Among these are such extraordinary players as saxophonist Wayne Escoffery. Born in London, Escoffery grew up in New Haven before coming to Hartford to study with his great mentor, Jackie McLean.
As in Hartford, there are many fascinating facets to the mosaic that makes up the Elm City’s jazz history.
In a nationally celebrated news event during World War II, for example, the famous big band leader Glenn Miller, who had enlisted in the Army Air Corps, was headquartered in New Haven for 1 ½ years, marshaling his big band music as a wartime morale and recruitment booster.
Miller, who was then a captain, formed and led the 418th Army Air Force Band made up of servicemen who had been musically skilled civilians before the war. Led by the big band maestro in full military regalia, the band of soldier/musicians presented concerts for Yale students and local residents, and marched in patriotic parades in New Haven to a jazzy beat undreamed of by the “American March King,” John Philip Sousa.
Most famously, Miller and his military band broadcast live, weekly radio shows from Yale’s Woolsey Hall, upbeat recruitment programs orchestrated to attract young men to enlist in the Air Corps. While living full-time in New Haven, Miller reportedly stayed at the historic, downtown Taft Hotel. Growing impatient with his stateside duty, the patriotic bandleader volunteered to play for the troops overseas despite the obvious danger. Six months after leaving New Haven, Miller was dead, disappearing mysteriously on a flight from England to Paris where he was scheduled to entertain the troops. His body was never recovered.
Mirroring Hartford’s urban-rooted jazz history in many ways, New Haven also has a non-profit, all-volunteer, jazz advocacy group, called Jazz Haven. Jazz Haven, with staunch jazz warriors like Doug Morrill often at the forefront, has helped keep jazz alive in New Haven, much as The Hartford Jazz Society has done in Hartford for more than a half century.
New Haven’s illustrious jazz history also boasts Yale’s prestigious Duke Ellington Fellowship Program, created and run by Professor Willie Ruff, the noted French horn player, double bassist, jazz savant, historian, memoirist and partner with pianist Dwike Mitchell in the celebrated Mitchell/Ruff Duo. The distinguished program has paid homage to creative luminaries ranging from such towering cultural figures as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson to such jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck. (In another Elm City historical note, superstar clarinetist/bandleader Artie Shaw was raised in New Haven. Among musicians born in the Elm City were bandleader/trombonist Buddy Morrow and the excellent, if sadly underrated pianist/accordionist Pete Jolly).
Yet another centerpiece of New Haven’s vital jazz legacy is Firehouse 12, a nationally celebrated bastion for the performance and the recording of cutting-edge music. Firehouse 12 is an invaluable haven for new music, just as the relative newcomer to the Connecticut jazz scene, Jeff & Joels’ Houseparty in Guilford, is a great, foot-stomping, partying refuge for good, old-time sounds like ragtime, New Orleans, boogie-woogie, swing, stride and blues.
While today’s active jazz scene marks one of Hartford’s brightest hours, the early 1960s were, in many ways, among its darkest, even though there have always been some inspiring points of light. Through those Dark Ages, its saviors leading the way to enlightenment have long included such old standby, life-saving forces as The Hartford Jazz Society,
Ironically, however, it was the death of the beloved Heublein—a victim of Hartford’s unbridled passion in the early ‘60s for the bulldozer and wrecking ball of urban renewal—that led to the birth of the HJS, one of the most pivotal events in the city’s jazz history.
Art Fine, another one of the central, behind-the-scenes forces on behalf of jazz, and his circle of jazz-loving friends frequented the Heublein in the 1950s, a congenial spa to have a drink and hear jazz greats like Dave McKenna, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, Zoot Sims or Cannonball Addelerley. (The Heublein’s dream team fare was booked by Paul Landerman (1916-2008), one of Connecticut’s most famous society bandleaders, jazz impresarios, booking agents and concert presenters.)
Fine’s kindred jazz spirits, including Malcolm-Smith, met often after work over drinks and the top-shelf jazz served at the Heublein. All were appalled, even horrified by the impending doom of the Heublein, which they viewed as a historically catastrophic blow for jazz in Hartford. Something had to be done. Plans had to be made. Fine’s hilltop home in Bloomfield became the new meeting place for the jazz devout where they could thrash out their ideas about saving jazz, which they believed was being uprooted by the destruction of the iconic Heublein.
Fine’s spacious home, the new suburban salon for the Heublein refugees, eventually became the jazz-friendly site for great, Gatsby-like parties where there was no shortage of camaraderie, food and drink, But first came the seminal planning sessions for what to do about the imperiled state of jazz in Hartford.
As the HJS was launched, Fine’s living room, which was graced with a beautiful and well-tuned piano, was often alive with the sound of music, including that of the great pianist Randy Weston, one of Fine’s many close jazz friends who also became a lifetime pal with the HJS.
As part of Fine’s new, live and glorious, in-house soundtrack—especially at his fabled birthday parties and pre-concert and post-concert festivities—there were the brassy notes of trumpeter Roy Eldridge one night, the hard, gritty tenor sounds of the great Booker Ervin some other night. Or it could be generated by other special guests like the great Willie “The Lion” Smith rollicking away on the piano for Fine and his house full of partying jazz lovers.
“Oh, God it was wild!” recalls Lucy Marsters, a former HJS president and longtime friend of Fine.
“Art’s parties were the greatest! His home was open. I went into Art’s kitchen one night, and the next thing I knew I was having a drink with Kenny Burrell, the great jazz guitarist!” Marsters says, her voice still full of wonder even all these decades later.
That homey ambience at Fine’s fests and the collegial sense of bonding together for a worthy cause was, in some ways, a foreshadowing of Dr. Steven Sussman’s annual “Jazz for Juvenile Diabetes,” star-studded benefit concerts that started out in the Hartford physician’s living room.
The far-sighted idea of creating the Hartford Jazz Society was conceived, appropriately enough, on a hilltop with a splendid view and wide horizon.
Fine and his fellow jazz visionaries would gather casually on the lawn in front of his home, mapping out their strategic plans for saving jazz in Hartford. Out of these convivial conventions of the founders on the lawn was created a non-profit organization whose army of unpaid volunteers, over the decades, has helped keep jazz afloat even while the HJS itself has had to weather some hard, financially life-threatening times of its own. No one ever said jazz was easy.
Fine, a pragmatic, highly successful businessman with high philosophical ideals, took pride in the HJS’s great musical accomplishments, but also felt, as a founding father and the HJS’s first president, that the socially idealistic, culturally liberal group was way ahead of its time on such vital social and historical issues as race in America.
“I think that the Jazz Society’s most important accomplishment wasn’t just the music, so much as the fact that it was one of the first totally integrated social organizations in the area. Blacks and whites socialized naturally, with no strain, no pretensions,” Fine told The Courant in 1985 when the HJS was celebrating its silver anniversary.
“The Jazz Society provided a framework for amicable integration, and in that sense it was way ahead of its time. Back then when we were just getting started in 1960, the musicians’ union was still segregated. There was a white union for white musicians and a black union for black musicians—a sociological and historical fact that gives you an indication of the tenor of the times,” he said.
Fine died in late 2007 at 96, but his legacy lives on through the HJS, a remarkable accomplishment for a man who never played a note in his life.
Jazz has had a number of saviors over the last half-century or so besides rugged individualists and idealists like Fine and dedicated groups like the HJS, who have often provided life-support for jazz.
Among these miracle workers are such jazz heroes as Jackie McLean and his wife, Dollie, and bassist Paul Brown, the much revered Big Daddy of the ongoing concept of free, outdoor jazz festivals in Hartford.
Besides founding the Artists Collective and what is now called The Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at U of H, Jackie McLean, a Harlem native, brought big name recognition and cultural cachet to Hartford when he settled here with his family and began teaching at the University of Hartford, becoming a nationally respected, innovative jazz educator. Graduates of McLean’s influential program are performing and recording throughout the jazz world, constituting a living, ever expanding legacy for the NEA Jazz Master who died at 74 in 2006.
Brown, another Hartford jazz saint, in the early 1960s began the still-running Monday Night Jazz Series, one of the most lasting achievements in the city’s jazz history.
As a concert-producer, Brown, a globe-trotting professional bassist, brought an amazing array of talent to town, including Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and the Modern Jazz Quartet. All this was accomplished despite his having to work on a shoestring budget. In later years, Brown somehow kept the popular series going despite its facing virtual extinction from season-to-season because of chronic, life-threatening shortfalls in funding.
From the Monday Night Jazz series, which is now presented by the HJS, was spun off The Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz (GHFJ), which was initially created as an homage to Brown, Hartford’s master builder of jazz festivals. A free outdoor bash in Bushnell Park, the GHFJ serves a menu rooted in contemporary jazz. Like its older sibling, the Monday Night Jazz series, the GHFJ every summer fills the downtown park with thousands of fans.
The history of jazz in Hartford not only has a great narrative line, but is also packed with a colorful cast of leading, dedicated characters, in addition to such prime movers as Fine, the McLeans and Brown.
Among these is John Chapin, a onetime Hartford cop who a couple decades ago ran two of the finest, most upscale jazz clubs in Hartford history, Lloyds and Shenanigans.
A well-liked, affable and charismatic club owner, Chapin took enormous pride in presenting high-quality music in a cosmopolitan ambience. His signature mix of chic and substance attracted the smart set from Hartford as well as from the surrounding suburbs, audiences with New Yorker magazine-like demographics in terms of education and earning power.
During his remarkable but tantalizingly too short run, Chapin provided one of the city’s richest, most invaluable direct pipelines to top talent from New York and Boston, bringing to town both well-established performers and stars of the future.
Every week, he consistently presented jazz and folk greats, introducing Hartford audiences to such young, then unknown performers as Harry Connick Jr. and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Jazz piano lovers in the 1980s blissfully basked in Chapin’s ongoing stream of such keyboard masters as Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, McCoy Tyner, Dick Wellstood, Dave McKenna and, very near the end of his career, Teddy Wilson.
Chapin served Big Apple sophistication in Hartford and at Hartford prices. Even after all these years, his two outstanding clubs still set the highest benchmark standards for quality venues in Hartford.
Another key pillar of jazz in Hartford was Al Casasanta whose precious legacy for the music was his now legendary 880 Club, one of the greatest, most nourishing hothouses for jazz the city has ever seen.
A lovable diamond-in-the-rough, Casasanta was a good-hearted, down-to-earth figure who transformed his South End neighborhood bar into the 880 Club, an unpretentious nightspot that took its name from its address at 880 Maple Ave.
By day, the 880 was a blue-collar neighborhood bar, a kind of Cheers where everybody knows your name. By night, it magically transformed into a classic, packed, noisy, smoke-filled, extremely friendly, relaxed jazz club. It was a cozy nook where you might hear anybody from Al Cohn or Junior Cook to Tom Harrell or John Scofield, backed by the house rhythm section that featured pianist and music director Don DePalma, Mike Duquette on drums and Nat Reeves on bass. It was the place where many young promising musicians, like alto saxophonist Sue Terry and flutist Ali Ryerson, gained invaluable experience jamming in a challenging, live setting with such seasoned, 880 regulars as DePalma, the colorful vibraphonist Matt Emirzian and the inventive drummer Larry DiNatale.
Casasanta, who died at 63 in 1995, was loved by musicians who worked for him (a most rare experience for a club owner), as well as by his patrons who idolized his cramped, gritty club much the way devout Red Sox fans are forever devoted to Fenway Park.
There was so much love for Al, in fact, that the genial, charismatic Italian-American became known affectionately and with the deepest respect as the Godfather of Jazz. It was a title he prized, and an accurate reflection of his deeply principled, heart-felt loyalty to the music, the musicians and his patrons.
Through the best of times and the worst of times financially, Casasanta stuck tenaciously and courageously with jazz for years even though good friends and advisers constantly implored him to dump jazz—rarely ever much of a money-maker—and go after easy money by turning the 880 into a topless bar.
Casasanta, who wanted no part of that deal, explained to The Courant: “When I die they can put a G clef on my coffin instead of a dollar sign.”
Another fascinating central character in Hartford’s historical narrative is Mort Fega (1921-2005), a well-known jazz radio veteran from the New York scene, a classy record company owner and producer who had many influential friends, including Miles Davis, and connections with seemingly everybody in the performing and recording side of the music business.
Fega, who spoke his razor-sharp mind candidly and caustically, caused a much needed stir in a too complacent jazz community after arriving here in the 1970s. Lifting the level of discourse to new, challenging heights with his mellow-toned radio voice and his sometimes combative signature style of intellectual and street-smart hipness, he evangelized, always passionately and often provocatively, for modern jazz, both on the air and with his many blue-chip concert presentations.
Without compromise, fear or favor, Fega always conducted his business with a sense of high style and perfectionist fervor. An Air Force combat veteran of World War II who had flown bombing missions over Germany and Nazi-occupied France, he spoke fearlessly and with invigorating, edgy candor.
No one, he asserted, could ever give him worse flak than he got from the Nazis. His direct, unaffected manner deeply irritated some, profoundly inspired others, while perpetually ruffling a lot of feathers that sorely needed ruffling.
Characterizing himself as “a jackleg preacher for jazz,” Fega was a catalytic force for revitalizing change, particularly during the height of his influence in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. As a promoter, proselytizer and guru, he was sagacious, pugnacious and sardonic—sometimes all three simultaneously. Most significantly, he did much good for jazz in Hartford before moving in the 1980s with his wife, Muriel, to Delray Beach, Fla., where he continued to pursue his sacred calling as a jackleg preacher for jazz.
Hartford has risen to its respectable status in the jazz world today not just through the efforts of all the well-known, influential advocates who have shaped the music’s history over the decades, but also thanks to many figures toiling away every day in the jazz trenches.
These include countless devoted teachers, musicians, fans, supporters in all walks of life, organizations and even the many venues that have come and gone over the decades. These sometimes relatively unsung but no less important contributors to the music’s history range over a diverse legion of dedicated jazz crusaders from early heavyweight champions of jazz like the Hartford Jazz Society’s Sam Johnson and such present day HJS advocates as Bill Sullivan to trumpeter/bandleader/educator Ray Gonzalez, Hartford’s dynamo sparkplug for Latin jazz, and vocalist Nicki Mathis, who uses her art and organizational skills in her long-running war against sexism and racism.
Among these jazz legionnaires are such warriors as: Kevin McCabe, a concert presenter and irrepressible Defender of the Faith in contemporary jazz; the jazz-inspired, expressionist painter/concert presenter Andres Chaparro; photographer/radio host Maurice Robertson; bassist Paul Fuller, an evidently inexhaustible, multi-tasking champion for jazz; the late Ed Strong, a joyfully charismatic HJS president, a life-force and irresistible master recruiter of jazz converts; the photographer/actor Harry Lichtenbaum, former HJS president and dedicated archivist of historic materials related to Hartford jazz and his idol Frank Sinatra; and Paul Lewis, a club owner who held out gallantly for many years at West Hartford’s sadly departed Szechuan Tokyo Restaurant. Despite his years of loving, herculean efforts on behalf of jazz, Lewis’s lease for his jazz-friendly restaurant was ended and his magnificent venture sank. It was a titanic loss still felt by regional patrons and musicians
alike.
While jazz in Hartford has had its share of secular saints and martyrs, like Fine, the McLeans, Brown, Casasanta and Lewis, it has also been blessed with a direct line of sorts to a higher power thanks to the invaluable, jazz-friendly support from the city’s historic Asylum Hill Congregational Church (AHCC). Its splendid sanctuary has often afforded a welcoming haven for many great, even historic jazz concerts. Jazz should, in fact, give thanks to AHCC for the devoted support years back from the church’s trumpet playing, Rev. Gary Miller, a now retired senior minister, and, in recent years, for the many pro-jazz stands affirmed by the bold deeds of Steven Mitchell, minister of music and arts.
All of these historic figures and other shakers-and-doers and many complex economic, social and cultural forces, have somehow transformed a medium-sized city like Hartford into a wonderfully and disproportionately significant factor in the wide world of jazz in 2014.
Word of Hartford’s proud jazz history has been spread nationally and internationally by the constantly growing number of high-quality musicians who have been schooled and shaped by the capital city’s vibrant jazz scene, and then gone out on their own and made their mark in the jazz world itself.
Dezron Douglas, who was born and raised here, reports that the buzz on the New York club scene today is that there is now “the Hartford sound,” a style so individual that it has a name and a historic, geographical and stylistic category all its own.
Few cities—even those many times larger than Hartford—can point to such a proud jazz history that has produced a distinctive sound uniquely its own. That’s a ringing endorsement any city might well savor among its prized cultural accomplishments. It even has the resonant sounding glow of a new Golden Age of Jazz for Hartford, one that’s happening right now and has no expiration date.
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Jazz In Connecticut — The Early Years By OWEN McNALLY
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** Jazz In Connecticut — The Early Years
By OWEN McNALLY
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With fabled clubs in the North End rocking with the sound of jazz, classic big bands and big-name instrumentalists and singers routinely blowing-off the roof at Foot Guard Hall on High Street, or shaking the foundations of the State Theater on Village Street, Hartford’s vibrant, pre and post-World War II scene was the city’s first “Golden Age of Jazz.”
Jazz was not only flourishing artistically, but was very much the music of the day for young people through the 1930s, all of the ‘40s and well into the 1950s. At its zenith in Hartford, jazz was everywhere and for everyone. Typically among the jazz fold were the young adults and slightly older, more urbane patrons who in the ‘50s regularly dug the suave, swinging sounds of the elegant jazz pianist Teddy Wilson at the legendary Heublein Hotel lounge in downtown Hartford.
One of the city’s crown jewel venues of the 20th century, the lounge in the venerable hotel was a softly lit, elegant jazz spa right out of a vintage, black-and-white Hollywood flick. It was a sophisticated, posh place where, if you wore a jacket and a tie and acted like an adult, you could get served a Scotch on-the-rocks or an extra-dry martini even if you were a couple years under 21, then the legal age for getting a drink in Connecticut.
A younger, less inhibited set of jazz lovers in that era danced in the aisles at Hartford’s hallowed cultural center, The Bushnell Memorial, at Norman Granz’s fabled Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) concerts, upsetting the management’s sense of propriety a bit.
Moved by that JATP-generated passion, more unruly patrons in the mezzanine shouted out, “Go, man, go!’ to the steamy, honking, erotically-charged tenor saxophone riffs of the swaggering Illinois Jacquet, the master machismo music-maker. Sedentary swingers, in sedate contrast, merely tapped their feet to a swinging, surreal scat solo by Ella Fitzgerald. Or with Zen-like hipness, the coolest of cool JATP fans, experiencing their very own introspective, natural high, would quietly savor a mesmerizing, melodically inventive, gossamer solo by the divinely inspired tenor saxophonist Lester Young, JATP’s jazz Buddha whose spiritual solos were as holy as a Gregorian chant.
For all its power and glory from the 1930s through the 1950s, jazz didn’t exactly start off like a ball of fire in Hartford. Its shock of the new qualities were just too shocking and too new for skeptical critics and elitist listeners who, nearly as far back as 100 years ago, found it noisy, noisome, uncultivated and uncouth.
In the early 1920s jazz’s reception and public perception varied in Hartford from irate complaints from Colt Park neighborhood residents about “dance music jazzing from the park’s pavilion” to a somewhat lukewarm notice in The Courant praising a Navy jazz band “for enthralling crowds at The Capitol Theater” where the jazzy sailors shared the vaudeville bill with trick bicyclists, a singing/dancing child act, acrobats, contortionists and a singing monologist—hardly promising signs of things to come for America’s new music in Hartford.
Celebrated orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, somewhat grandiloquently billed as “The King of Jazz,” fared far less well than The Capitol’s novelty sailor band in a Courant review of the portly maestro’s performance in 1924 at Foot Guard Hall. Looking down his nose (or perhaps holding it) a rather snooty, culturally patronizing Courant reviewer declared that the rotund bandleader’s orotund attempts at gussying up jazz failed miserably to measure up to “good music as (it) has been generally understood by cultured people these many years.”
“It gets terribly monotonous in its rhythms to those whose ears have been attuned to that which they fondly and firmly believe is infinitely and eternally better in music,” the dyspeptic Courant scribe lamented.
A positive economic side effect of jazz—at least for the piano tuning business—was cited in a sarcastic Courant news item in the 1920s reporting, with a derisive tone, that the outbreak of the excessively heavy pounding by jazz pianists was putting pianos across the nation out of tune “in about half the time it took formerly.”
Adding insult to mockery, The Courant in 1926 polled its readership on whether the performance of jazz should be permitted in public on Sundays. With 1,143 readers voting to keep Sunday safe from the corrupting temptations of jazz, the convention-flouting music lost by a landslide as only 349 readers lined up in favor of allowing Satan’s latest sinful, musical concoction to profane the Sabbath.
But as the Jazz Age evolved and modern popular culture—everything from silent films, the rising radio-craze, flapper fashions, hip flasks and hip music—became an irresistibly powerful social force, praise began to crescendo for jazz in The Courant as the syncopated sounds became increasingly popular in Hartford, converting perhaps even some of the paper’s once avid, anti-jazz readers.
By the 1930s, Duke Ellington and his singer Ivy Anderson received a rave review in The Courant for being “especially musically intelligent.” Even as the stock market plunged, jazz’s stock was rising in Hartford. Count Basie and his orchestra, for example, were royally hailed for playing at an upscale ball held at, of all places, the prestigious Hartford Club, with absolutely no caveat emptors issued by The Courant writer about the primal crudities of jazz offending the cultivated listener’s superior musical sensibilities.
A performance at the State Theater featuring the swinging Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra and diva Billie Holiday was even awarded the highest accolade by a Courant entertainment writer for what she described as its “pop and oomph,” which seems to have superseded the paper’s earlier critical category for jazz as strictly sturm und drang.
By the late 1930s and ‘40s, jazz had shifted into high gear in Hartford. Its influence was mushrooming everywhere. You could catch it at such then wildly popular but now long forgotten venues as the Paddock in East Hartford, where such national notables as pianist Art Hodes and trumpeter Will Bill Davison wailed. Or you could test your luck at the city’s once flourishing Clover Leaf where, at least according to local legend, the storied pianist/composer Jelly Roll Morton was hired to help bibulously ecstatic Hartfordites celebrate the glorious repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
During its first Golden Age in Hartford, jazz was hot and accessible, although its conservative detractors still thought it not quite proper; perhaps even a sinful primrose path leading directly to drunkenness, drugs and debauchery.
Long before college radio, you could hear jazz on the air on WTIC on a pioneering show called “Gems of American Jazz.” Hosted by Connecticut’s “foremost jazz musicologist” George Malcolm-Smith, it debuted in 1942, establishing a hip, or maybe back then, a hep radio tradition carried on in more recent times by invaluable college FM radio stations beaming their jazz message across the state.
One of the city’s most flamboyant and devout early supporters of jazz, Malcolm-Smith (1901-1984) was a noted comic novelist, a founder and onetime president of the Hartford Jazz Society (HJS) and a sometime jazz critic for The Courant.
Dashing, dapper and madly in love with jazz in all its forms, he was a celebrated figure about town. A humorous man of intellectual substance, he accentuated his elegant manner by smoking his favorite brand with a cigarette holder held and bandied about in the grand gestural manner of FDR. Perhaps because he had a deep sense of history and of the lasting value of the music, Malcolm-Smith’s voluminous, chatty but information-packed “Swinger” newsletters for the HJS are an invaluable chronicle of the Society’s formative years, a rare archive of written documents waiting to be mined by a jazz historian.
A raconteur and bon vivant, Malcolm-Smith was a genuine 20th century Hartford wit. His banter and cultural erudition would have made him right at home exchanging quips and barbs with such heavyweight humorists as Bob Benchley and Dorothy Parker at the Algonquin Hotel’s famously funny roundtable gatherings.
In that long ago happily abundant, first Golden Age of Jazz, you could hear jazz live just about anywhere in Hartford. It could be Art Tatum or Stan Kenton on stage at The Bushnell. Or it could be the young Dave Mackay, the brilliant, blind pianist, Lennie Tristano protégé and Trinity College undergrad grooving high before an excited, packed house at one of the two, swinging Elks Clubs in the North End.
You could duck into a downtown bar or restaurant, grab a drink and, if you were lucky, catch a smokin’ set by one of the gifted Connecticut jazz heroes of the day like alto saxophonist Jack O’Connor, a hard-playing, hard-living player of prodigious talent. His hometown fans claimed that at his passionate, fluent best, O’Connor was at least the equal of alto greats Phil Woods or Gene Quill—maybe even sharper than Quill. Taking a few steps down Asylum Street and into an inviting restaurant, you might walk-in on the awesome musings of the marvelous, Hartford piano virtuoso Ray Cassarino. A world-class artist Cassarino designed astounding, sonic architectural structures in the air by building on the virtually infinite possibilities of an 88-note Steinway grand.
It was the best of times back then when a young, gifted Horace Silver and the mysterious, enigmatic, tragically doomed jazz genius Gigi Gryce walked the streets of Hartford—giants in our midst—and were playing and making history in jazz clubs in the Capital City. In one of the most dramatic events in all of Hartford’s jazz history, Silver, a Norwalk native and future jazz immortal, was discovered one night by the famous tenor saxophonist Stan Getz who just happened to show up after a gig at the State Theater, sweeping into the Club Sundown where he was bowled over by Silver’s hard-swinging piano solos and rhythmic comping that rocked the house.
Much as it is today, Hartford, even back then long before jazz became fervently embraced by academia, was a fertile breeding ground of promising young talent. Gifted musicians back then taught themselves how to improvise by listening to recordings of the masters and by playing at jam sessions where they learned hands-on from their elders, a generational method of learning and teaching as ancient as the medieval craft guilds. There were no classroom lectures, no formal seminars, just visceral life experiences, high-noon showdowns in gloriously loud, cramped, smoke-filled clubs like the vibrant ones in the North End. These were real-life, unforgiving testing grounds where you had better know how to swing and have mastered the chord changes to everything, not just blues changes and “I Got Rhythm” changes.
Jazz was a do-it-yourself art form back then, not yet thought of as morally or aesthetically fit for the college classroom. It was more like a love that dared not speak its name. Or so it was perceived by more prudish tastemakers and rigid gate-keepers of culture and the then grooveless groves of academe.
Today, of course, the classroom has enormous impact in perpetually rejuvenating jazz through widespread education programs that yearly produce fresh armies of highly trained musicians and composers.
Right here close to home, the jazz scene has been enormously enriched in recent decades through extraordinary jazz education programs at high schools, like West Hartford’s award-winning Hall High. On the college level, there are such prestigious programs of higher learning in the area as The Hartt School’s Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the University of Hartford. In nearby Middletown, there’s Wesleyan University’s acclaimed world and jazz music studies overseen by a formidable brain trust that has included such intellectual and performance luminaries as Bill Barron, Ed Blackwell, Anthony Braxton and Jay Hoggard, among others.
In the post-war era’s jazz boom, Hartford’s Young Lions like Cliff Gunn, Walter Bolden and Harold Holt jammed in local clubs with the city’s best and brightest, as well as with visiting jazz potentates from the Big Apple. Unlike the jazz concerts at The Bushnell, Foot Guard Hall or the State Theater, venues in the remarkably swinging club scene in the North End—at nightspots like Club Sundown and The Subway—coming attractions were promoted mostly by word of mouth. Unless you were completely up to speed with the dynamic North End scene, you might well run into somebody downtown one day and discover that a visiting grandee from the Big Apple like Sonny Stitt had played superbly at one of the clubs just the night before.
Visiting jazz giants like Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins were among a host of jazz titans and semi-titans who thought of Hartford as a happy stomping ground. For them it seemed stocked with fine players, skilled rhythm sections, and, conveniently, was a relatively short drive or train ride from New York or Boston.
At the time, bebop was the radical “new thing.” It was revolutionary both musically and as a social force foreshadowing such dramatic
changes blowin’ in the wind for America as the Civil Rights, Black Consciousness and Black Arts movements. As it is today with its array of conservatory-trained practitioners, Hartford even back then was hip, no mere provincial outpost suffering from a cultural cringe just because it happens to be located half-way between the mega-metropolises of New York City and Boston.
Back then, young, jazz-addicted, Hartford keyboard neophytes like Emery Austin Smith (one of the city’s last grand patriarchs from that original Golden Age who’s still playing and in his prime today) and Norman Macklin were not only auto-didactic students of swing pianists like Earl Hines and Billy Kyle, but were also diligently honing their chops on the then cutting-edge style of such master beboppers as Bud Powell and Al Haig.
Even Hartford’s burbs were crackling with jazz as the Truman Era faded into the Eisenhower Era. But, in some cases, venues on the outskirts of town favored a more mainstream style, digging classic, pre-bebop swingers like Eddie Condon, Hot Lips Page and the godlike Sidney Bechet, who were among the many more traditional greats jamming in Newington at the Matarese Circle, then one of the area’s many red-hot spots for jazz. Among the Connecticut notables jammng there were the then well-known multi-instrumentalist Dick Cary, a Hartford native, and pianist Jack O’Brien, a Middletown native, who was among the first American jazz musicians to perform throughout Europe in the 1920s.
As part of his movable feast in Paris, O’Brien, a closet jazz intellectual, became acquainted with such modern cultural icons as the American expatriate writer Gertrude Stein and the French composer Maurice Ravel. During the Depression, O’Brien, who was as celebrated for his imagination and outrageous Irish wit as he was for his bold piano playing, worked at the old Club Hollywood in Rocky Hill, a nightspot owned by his boyhood friend, the famous bandleader Tony Pastor.
All that wide-spread jazz activity in Hartford and elsewhere in the state was an accurate barometer of national popular tastes of that period. It was a time when jazz—yes, jazz—had massive public appeal everywhere from concert halls like Carnegie Hall to local gin mills and juke joints. It was on the radio and even on the silver screen.
Jazz back then was the rock ‘n’ roll of its day, complete with superstars like Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington, two bona fide American idols of the period who happily performed in Hartford.
Ellington, who began appearing in Hartford in the 1930s, was one of the major pioneering black artists whose music leapt over the hurdles of the period’s steep racist barriers, mesmerizing a crossover audience of blacks and whites with his consummate artistry and aristocratic image. In Terry Teachout’s new, acclaimed biography, “Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington,” he writes that Ellington began writing his masterpiece, the “Black, Brown and Beige” suite, in 1942 backstage at the State Theater where his band was sharing the bill with Frank Sinatra. Early in 1943, the grandiose work, which had begun in humble settings at the State Theater, premiered at Ellington’s debut performance at Carnegie Hall.
Goodman, “the King of Swing,” liked Connecticut so much that he eventually enthroned himself in a regal home in Stamford. The clarinetist/bandleader was a transplant among a number of other jazz greats who settled permanently in Connecticut, including Dave Brubeck in Wilton and Gerry Mulligan in Darien.
As with any historical Golden Age—even one as lustrous as Hartford’s—there’s a tendency to romanticize the period. Especially so when looking back on jazz, an art form that since those long gone halcyon days, has been frequently diagnosed as very close to death, its financial status often hanging by a thin thread.
Jazz’s darkest hour, both in Connecticut and nationwide, was in the early 1960s when rock seemed like the irresistible force that would crush jazz under the sheer weight of its phenomenal commercial success that threatened to suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace.
So when you look back from the perspective of jazz’s too frequent near-death experiences over the past few decades, that Golden Age from long ago seems even more golden, even more lead-free. It was, after all, an era when jazz was jumpin’ in Hartford and around the state, alive and well from the robust, full houses at Foot Guard Hall to the now mythic-seeming big band concerts that consistently drew huge, enthusiastic turnouts at Lake Compounce in Bristol.
But, perhaps, the truth of the matter is that Hartford at this present moment in 2014– despite all the usual jazz ailments, including the Darwinian cycle of the rise and sometimes rapid demise of jazz venues– is enjoying its very own, new Golden Age. Not just 60 or 70 years ago, but right here and now in this present, fleeting moment.
Among the vital signs of today’s new 24-karat Jazz Age is the most obvious fact that the local scene is teeming with talent, locally grown and increasingly nationally renowned. An extremely jazz-friendly Hartford has become noted as a manufacturing center for the creation of fine, domestically-raised products ranging from the dazzling double bassist Dezron Douglas to the remarkable Curtis brothers, pianist Zaccai Curtis and bassist Luques Curtis, local jazz favorites since they were child prodigies dazzling local fans everywhere from Bushnell Park to Real Art Ways.
Talent is evident virtually everywhere within earshot, whether with well-established figures like trombonist Steve Davis, bassist Nat Reeves and saxophonist Rene McLean, noted professor/performers at The Hartt School, to the long honor roll of extraordinary musicians who have emerged just from Hall High School alone. Among the litany of Hall hallmarks are the Grammy-nominated pianist Brad Mehldau, an important stylistic influence on the whole succeeding generation of pianists coming up behind him; plus his classmate and friend, saxophonist, Joel Frahm; drummer Richie Barshay and saxophonists Erica von Kleist, Kris Allen and Noah Preminger, just to name a few examples from a litany of worthies.
Another tangible and delightful sign of the present day Golden Age is the vast array, almost a glut of first-rate concerts and festivals offered in Hartford and throughout the state itself.
In Hartford alone you can sample the Monday Night Jazz Series in Bushnell Park; The Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz, also in the downtown park, and the Baby Grand Jazz Series at the Hartford Public Library. Rather amazingly, all are free of charge. During the year, Hartford’s Artists Collective and Real Art Ways also chime in with first-rate jazz presentations. Thanks to the empathetic ear of its Executive Director Will K. Wilkins, RAW keeps the new music flame alive in Hartford, stoking it with, for example, its acclaimed “Improvisations” series curated by the cutting-edge cornetist/trumpeter Stephen Haynes and bassist/guitarist Joe Morris.
Along with the weekly “Monday Night Jazz” series at Black-eyed Sally’s and impresario/fashion designer Dan Blow’s cornucopia of jazz and cabaret offerings at his boutique, Japanalia Eiko, plus his Sunday jazz brunches at The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, there are no signs of either the death of or even the dearth of jazz in Hartford. Even if you hate jazz, it would be hard to avoid it in town.
And in yet another sign of robust health, the latest newcomer on the scene in Connecticut is Old Lyme’s superb Side Door Jazz Club, which is presenting a parade of such top-name performers as Fred Hersch and Nicholas Payton with its celebratory fare.
Besides all these big, knockout presentations, jazz is even bobbing- and-weaving its stylish way through a wide variety of seemingly offbeat venues, resounding everywhere from pizza parlors in Bloomfield and Bethel to a French bakery/café in West Hartford Center, to Ed Krech’s free Saturday matinee jam sessions held right in his brick-and-mortar, bin-lined, mom-and-pop jazz record shop in Wethersfield.
Other vital life-signs statewide include the nationally heralded Litchfield Jazz Festival (LJF), a creation of one of the greatest behind-the-scenes forces in Connecticut jazz history, Vita Muir. A one-woman cultural industry, Muir single-handedly created the festival which has become a premier cultural event in Connecticut with its widely varied, jazz cordon bleu fare. Likewise, for trad jazz aficionados there’s the Hot Steamed Jazz Festival in Essex, specializing in red-hot traditional music.
New Haven, another major Connecticut city with a glorious jazz history, celebrates its own jazz heritage with the New Haven Jazz Festival, a free event that draws many thousands to the historic New Haven Green. The festival, which is rooted in deep pride and vital consciousness of the history of jazz in the Elm City, loves to present headliners with New Haven roots. Among these are such extraordinary players as saxophonist Wayne Escoffery. Born in London, Escoffery grew up in New Haven before coming to Hartford to study with his great mentor, Jackie McLean.
As in Hartford, there are many fascinating facets to the mosaic that makes up the Elm City’s jazz history.
In a nationally celebrated news event during World War II, for example, the famous big band leader Glenn Miller, who had enlisted in the Army Air Corps, was headquartered in New Haven for 1 ½ years, marshaling his big band music as a wartime morale and recruitment booster.
Miller, who was then a captain, formed and led the 418th Army Air Force Band made up of servicemen who had been musically skilled civilians before the war. Led by the big band maestro in full military regalia, the band of soldier/musicians presented concerts for Yale students and local residents, and marched in patriotic parades in New Haven to a jazzy beat undreamed of by the “American March King,” John Philip Sousa.
Most famously, Miller and his military band broadcast live, weekly radio shows from Yale’s Woolsey Hall, upbeat recruitment programs orchestrated to attract young men to enlist in the Air Corps. While living full-time in New Haven, Miller reportedly stayed at the historic, downtown Taft Hotel. Growing impatient with his stateside duty, the patriotic bandleader volunteered to play for the troops overseas despite the obvious danger. Six months after leaving New Haven, Miller was dead, disappearing mysteriously on a flight from England to Paris where he was scheduled to entertain the troops. His body was never recovered.
Mirroring Hartford’s urban-rooted jazz history in many ways, New Haven also has a non-profit, all-volunteer, jazz advocacy group, called Jazz Haven. Jazz Haven, with staunch jazz warriors like Doug Morrill often at the forefront, has helped keep jazz alive in New Haven, much as The Hartford Jazz Society has done in Hartford for more than a half century.
New Haven’s illustrious jazz history also boasts Yale’s prestigious Duke Ellington Fellowship Program, created and run by Professor Willie Ruff, the noted French horn player, double bassist, jazz savant, historian, memoirist and partner with pianist Dwike Mitchell in the celebrated Mitchell/Ruff Duo. The distinguished program has paid homage to creative luminaries ranging from such towering cultural figures as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson to such jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie and Dave Brubeck. (In another Elm City historical note, superstar clarinetist/bandleader Artie Shaw was raised in New Haven. Among musicians born in the Elm City were bandleader/trombonist Buddy Morrow and the excellent, if sadly underrated pianist/accordionist Pete Jolly).
Yet another centerpiece of New Haven’s vital jazz legacy is Firehouse 12, a nationally celebrated bastion for the performance and the recording of cutting-edge music. Firehouse 12 is an invaluable haven for new music, just as the relative newcomer to the Connecticut jazz scene, Jeff & Joels’ Houseparty in Guilford, is a great, foot-stomping, partying refuge for good, old-time sounds like ragtime, New Orleans, boogie-woogie, swing, stride and blues.
While today’s active jazz scene marks one of Hartford’s brightest hours, the early 1960s were, in many ways, among its darkest, even though there have always been some inspiring points of light. Through those Dark Ages, its saviors leading the way to enlightenment have long included such old standby, life-saving forces as The Hartford Jazz Society,
Ironically, however, it was the death of the beloved Heublein—a victim of Hartford’s unbridled passion in the early ‘60s for the bulldozer and wrecking ball of urban renewal—that led to the birth of the HJS, one of the most pivotal events in the city’s jazz history.
Art Fine, another one of the central, behind-the-scenes forces on behalf of jazz, and his circle of jazz-loving friends frequented the Heublein in the 1950s, a congenial spa to have a drink and hear jazz greats like Dave McKenna, Roy Eldridge, Teddy Wilson, Zoot Sims or Cannonball Addelerley. (The Heublein’s dream team fare was booked by Paul Landerman (1916-2008), one of Connecticut’s most famous society bandleaders, jazz impresarios, booking agents and concert presenters.)
Fine’s kindred jazz spirits, including Malcolm-Smith, met often after work over drinks and the top-shelf jazz served at the Heublein. All were appalled, even horrified by the impending doom of the Heublein, which they viewed as a historically catastrophic blow for jazz in Hartford. Something had to be done. Plans had to be made. Fine’s hilltop home in Bloomfield became the new meeting place for the jazz devout where they could thrash out their ideas about saving jazz, which they believed was being uprooted by the destruction of the iconic Heublein.
Fine’s spacious home, the new suburban salon for the Heublein refugees, eventually became the jazz-friendly site for great, Gatsby-like parties where there was no shortage of camaraderie, food and drink, But first came the seminal planning sessions for what to do about the imperiled state of jazz in Hartford.
As the HJS was launched, Fine’s living room, which was graced with a beautiful and well-tuned piano, was often alive with the sound of music, including that of the great pianist Randy Weston, one of Fine’s many close jazz friends who also became a lifetime pal with the HJS.
As part of Fine’s new, live and glorious, in-house soundtrack—especially at his fabled birthday parties and pre-concert and post-concert festivities—there were the brassy notes of trumpeter Roy Eldridge one night, the hard, gritty tenor sounds of the great Booker Ervin some other night. Or it could be generated by other special guests like the great Willie “The Lion” Smith rollicking away on the piano for Fine and his house full of partying jazz lovers.
“Oh, God it was wild!” recalls Lucy Marsters, a former HJS president and longtime friend of Fine.
“Art’s parties were the greatest! His home was open. I went into Art’s kitchen one night, and the next thing I knew I was having a drink with Kenny Burrell, the great jazz guitarist!” Marsters says, her voice still full of wonder even all these decades later.
That homey ambience at Fine’s fests and the collegial sense of bonding together for a worthy cause was, in some ways, a foreshadowing of Dr. Steven Sussman’s annual “Jazz for Juvenile Diabetes,” star-studded benefit concerts that started out in the Hartford physician’s living room.
The far-sighted idea of creating the Hartford Jazz Society was conceived, appropriately enough, on a hilltop with a splendid view and wide horizon.
Fine and his fellow jazz visionaries would gather casually on the lawn in front of his home, mapping out their strategic plans for saving jazz in Hartford. Out of these convivial conventions of the founders on the lawn was created a non-profit organization whose army of unpaid volunteers, over the decades, has helped keep jazz afloat even while the HJS itself has had to weather some hard, financially life-threatening times of its own. No one ever said jazz was easy.
Fine, a pragmatic, highly successful businessman with high philosophical ideals, took pride in the HJS’s great musical accomplishments, but also felt, as a founding father and the HJS’s first president, that the socially idealistic, culturally liberal group was way ahead of its time on such vital social and historical issues as race in America.
“I think that the Jazz Society’s most important accomplishment wasn’t just the music, so much as the fact that it was one of the first totally integrated social organizations in the area. Blacks and whites socialized naturally, with no strain, no pretensions,” Fine told The Courant in 1985 when the HJS was celebrating its silver anniversary.
“The Jazz Society provided a framework for amicable integration, and in that sense it was way ahead of its time. Back then when we were just getting started in 1960, the musicians’ union was still segregated. There was a white union for white musicians and a black union for black musicians—a sociological and historical fact that gives you an indication of the tenor of the times,” he said.
Fine died in late 2007 at 96, but his legacy lives on through the HJS, a remarkable accomplishment for a man who never played a note in his life.
Jazz has had a number of saviors over the last half-century or so besides rugged individualists and idealists like Fine and dedicated groups like the HJS, who have often provided life-support for jazz.
Among these miracle workers are such jazz heroes as Jackie McLean and his wife, Dollie, and bassist Paul Brown, the much revered Big Daddy of the ongoing concept of free, outdoor jazz festivals in Hartford.
Besides founding the Artists Collective and what is now called The Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at U of H, Jackie McLean, a Harlem native, brought big name recognition and cultural cachet to Hartford when he settled here with his family and began teaching at the University of Hartford, becoming a nationally respected, innovative jazz educator. Graduates of McLean’s influential program are performing and recording throughout the jazz world, constituting a living, ever expanding legacy for the NEA Jazz Master who died at 74 in 2006.
Brown, another Hartford jazz saint, in the early 1960s began the still-running Monday Night Jazz Series, one of the most lasting achievements in the city’s jazz history.
As a concert-producer, Brown, a globe-trotting professional bassist, brought an amazing array of talent to town, including Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and the Modern Jazz Quartet. All this was accomplished despite his having to work on a shoestring budget. In later years, Brown somehow kept the popular series going despite its facing virtual extinction from season-to-season because of chronic, life-threatening shortfalls in funding.
From the Monday Night Jazz series, which is now presented by the HJS, was spun off The Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz (GHFJ), which was initially created as an homage to Brown, Hartford’s master builder of jazz festivals. A free outdoor bash in Bushnell Park, the GHFJ serves a menu rooted in contemporary jazz. Like its older sibling, the Monday Night Jazz series, the GHFJ every summer fills the downtown park with thousands of fans.
The history of jazz in Hartford not only has a great narrative line, but is also packed with a colorful cast of leading, dedicated characters, in addition to such prime movers as Fine, the McLeans and Brown.
Among these is John Chapin, a onetime Hartford cop who a couple decades ago ran two of the finest, most upscale jazz clubs in Hartford history, Lloyds and Shenanigans.
A well-liked, affable and charismatic club owner, Chapin took enormous pride in presenting high-quality music in a cosmopolitan ambience. His signature mix of chic and substance attracted the smart set from Hartford as well as from the surrounding suburbs, audiences with New Yorker magazine-like demographics in terms of education and earning power.
During his remarkable but tantalizingly too short run, Chapin provided one of the city’s richest, most invaluable direct pipelines to top talent from New York and Boston, bringing to town both well-established performers and stars of the future.
Every week, he consistently presented jazz and folk greats, introducing Hartford audiences to such young, then unknown performers as Harry Connick Jr. and Mary Chapin Carpenter. Jazz piano lovers in the 1980s blissfully basked in Chapin’s ongoing stream of such keyboard masters as Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, McCoy Tyner, Dick Wellstood, Dave McKenna and, very near the end of his career, Teddy Wilson.
Chapin served Big Apple sophistication in Hartford and at Hartford prices. Even after all these years, his two outstanding clubs still set the highest benchmark standards for quality venues in Hartford.
Another key pillar of jazz in Hartford was Al Casasanta whose precious legacy for the music was his now legendary 880 Club, one of the greatest, most nourishing hothouses for jazz the city has ever seen.
A lovable diamond-in-the-rough, Casasanta was a good-hearted, down-to-earth figure who transformed his South End neighborhood bar into the 880 Club, an unpretentious nightspot that took its name from its address at 880 Maple Ave.
By day, the 880 was a blue-collar neighborhood bar, a kind of Cheers where everybody knows your name. By night, it magically transformed into a classic, packed, noisy, smoke-filled, extremely friendly, relaxed jazz club. It was a cozy nook where you might hear anybody from Al Cohn or Junior Cook to Tom Harrell or John Scofield, backed by the house rhythm section that featured pianist and music director Don DePalma, Mike Duquette on drums and Nat Reeves on bass. It was the place where many young promising musicians, like alto saxophonist Sue Terry and flutist Ali Ryerson, gained invaluable experience jamming in a challenging, live setting with such seasoned, 880 regulars as DePalma, the colorful vibraphonist Matt Emirzian and the inventive drummer Larry DiNatale.
Casasanta, who died at 63 in 1995, was loved by musicians who worked for him (a most rare experience for a club owner), as well as by his patrons who idolized his cramped, gritty club much the way devout Red Sox fans are forever devoted to Fenway Park.
There was so much love for Al, in fact, that the genial, charismatic Italian-American became known affectionately and with the deepest respect as the Godfather of Jazz. It was a title he prized, and an accurate reflection of his deeply principled, heart-felt loyalty to the music, the musicians and his patrons.
Through the best of times and the worst of times financially, Casasanta stuck tenaciously and courageously with jazz for years even though good friends and advisers constantly implored him to dump jazz—rarely ever much of a money-maker—and go after easy money by turning the 880 into a topless bar.
Casasanta, who wanted no part of that deal, explained to The Courant: “When I die they can put a G clef on my coffin instead of a dollar sign.”
Another fascinating central character in Hartford’s historical narrative is Mort Fega (1921-2005), a well-known jazz radio veteran from the New York scene, a classy record company owner and producer who had many influential friends, including Miles Davis, and connections with seemingly everybody in the performing and recording side of the music business.
Fega, who spoke his razor-sharp mind candidly and caustically, caused a much needed stir in a too complacent jazz community after arriving here in the 1970s. Lifting the level of discourse to new, challenging heights with his mellow-toned radio voice and his sometimes combative signature style of intellectual and street-smart hipness, he evangelized, always passionately and often provocatively, for modern jazz, both on the air and with his many blue-chip concert presentations.
Without compromise, fear or favor, Fega always conducted his business with a sense of high style and perfectionist fervor. An Air Force combat veteran of World War II who had flown bombing missions over Germany and Nazi-occupied France, he spoke fearlessly and with invigorating, edgy candor.
No one, he asserted, could ever give him worse flak than he got from the Nazis. His direct, unaffected manner deeply irritated some, profoundly inspired others, while perpetually ruffling a lot of feathers that sorely needed ruffling.
Characterizing himself as “a jackleg preacher for jazz,” Fega was a catalytic force for revitalizing change, particularly during the height of his influence in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. As a promoter, proselytizer and guru, he was sagacious, pugnacious and sardonic—sometimes all three simultaneously. Most significantly, he did much good for jazz in Hartford before moving in the 1980s with his wife, Muriel, to Delray Beach, Fla., where he continued to pursue his sacred calling as a jackleg preacher for jazz.
Hartford has risen to its respectable status in the jazz world today not just through the efforts of all the well-known, influential advocates who have shaped the music’s history over the decades, but also thanks to many figures toiling away every day in the jazz trenches.
These include countless devoted teachers, musicians, fans, supporters in all walks of life, organizations and even the many venues that have come and gone over the decades. These sometimes relatively unsung but no less important contributors to the music’s history range over a diverse legion of dedicated jazz crusaders from early heavyweight champions of jazz like the Hartford Jazz Society’s Sam Johnson and such present day HJS advocates as Bill Sullivan to trumpeter/bandleader/educator Ray Gonzalez, Hartford’s dynamo sparkplug for Latin jazz, and vocalist Nicki Mathis, who uses her art and organizational skills in her long-running war against sexism and racism.
Among these jazz legionnaires are such warriors as: Kevin McCabe, a concert presenter and irrepressible Defender of the Faith in contemporary jazz; the jazz-inspired, expressionist painter/concert presenter Andres Chaparro; photographer/radio host Maurice Robertson; bassist Paul Fuller, an evidently inexhaustible, multi-tasking champion for jazz; the late Ed Strong, a joyfully charismatic HJS president, a life-force and irresistible master recruiter of jazz converts; the photographer/actor Harry Lichtenbaum, former HJS president and dedicated archivist of historic materials related to Hartford jazz and his idol Frank Sinatra; and Paul Lewis, a club owner who held out gallantly for many years at West Hartford’s sadly departed Szechuan Tokyo Restaurant. Despite his years of loving, herculean efforts on behalf of jazz, Lewis’s lease for his jazz-friendly restaurant was ended and his magnificent venture sank. It was a titanic loss still felt by regional patrons and musicians
alike.
While jazz in Hartford has had its share of secular saints and martyrs, like Fine, the McLeans, Brown, Casasanta and Lewis, it has also been blessed with a direct line of sorts to a higher power thanks to the invaluable, jazz-friendly support from the city’s historic Asylum Hill Congregational Church (AHCC). Its splendid sanctuary has often afforded a welcoming haven for many great, even historic jazz concerts. Jazz should, in fact, give thanks to AHCC for the devoted support years back from the church’s trumpet playing, Rev. Gary Miller, a now retired senior minister, and, in recent years, for the many pro-jazz stands affirmed by the bold deeds of Steven Mitchell, minister of music and arts.
All of these historic figures and other shakers-and-doers and many complex economic, social and cultural forces, have somehow transformed a medium-sized city like Hartford into a wonderfully and disproportionately significant factor in the wide world of jazz in 2014.
Word of Hartford’s proud jazz history has been spread nationally and internationally by the constantly growing number of high-quality musicians who have been schooled and shaped by the capital city’s vibrant jazz scene, and then gone out on their own and made their mark in the jazz world itself.
Dezron Douglas, who was born and raised here, reports that the buzz on the New York club scene today is that there is now “the Hartford sound,” a style so individual that it has a name and a historic, geographical and stylistic category all its own.
Few cities—even those many times larger than Hartford—can point to such a proud jazz history that has produced a distinctive sound uniquely its own. That’s a ringing endorsement any city might well savor among its prized cultural accomplishments. It even has the resonant sounding glow of a new Golden Age of Jazz for Hartford, one that’s happening right now and has no expiration date.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist | Music News | Tiny Mix Tapes
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** RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist
————————————————————
By WILLCOMA (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/writer/willcoma) on Oct 26 2015
RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist
The music world has lost one of its preeminent forces in the elegant, tirelessly devoted Lee Shaw. With both her infectiously obvious love of the form and professional yet intuitive chops, those of us who’ve been lucky enough to see her perform will miss her dearly. She wasn’t just one of the key redeeming entities of New York’s capital district; she was also a reminder that you’re able to do what you love and thrive anywhere if you’ve taken the time to refine your talent.
After learning classical piano at college in her home state of Oklahoma, Shaw pursued her Masters at Chicago’s American Conservatory of Music. Due to a solid repertoire of popular songs of the time, Shaw was able to get regular solo work in Chicago. Although she’d intended to land a gig as a classical accompanist, a Count Basie concert had her making a hard left toward jazz (she claimed she never heard the word till she went to college). She met drummer Stan Shaw and the two became collaborators and eventually husband and wife. It is said that Oscar Peterson saw her play just once and offered to be her teacher. After studying with Peterson and honing her craft with years of countless gigs, she went on to teach John Medeski, whom she made a concert recording (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/together-again-live-at-the-egg-john-medeski-arc-artists-recording-collective-review-by-bruce-lindsay.php) with in 2009.
After her husband fell ill in the mid 90s, the pianist, composer, and band leader formed a new trio with bassist Rich Syracuse and drummer Jeff Siegel. Shaw played right up to the end (sometimes with an oxygen tank) with remarkable poise, grace, and good humor. It’s a shame jazz only gets mainstream attention when it has to do with excess or tragedy. Here is someone who lived the demanding life of a touring musician and came out with nothing but gratitude. We need more stories like hers, lest we forget that passionate hard work can be its own reward.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist | Music News | Tiny Mix Tapes
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http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/rip-lee-shaw-renowned-jazz-pianist
** RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist
————————————————————
By WILLCOMA (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/writer/willcoma) on Oct 26 2015
RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist
The music world has lost one of its preeminent forces in the elegant, tirelessly devoted Lee Shaw. With both her infectiously obvious love of the form and professional yet intuitive chops, those of us who’ve been lucky enough to see her perform will miss her dearly. She wasn’t just one of the key redeeming entities of New York’s capital district; she was also a reminder that you’re able to do what you love and thrive anywhere if you’ve taken the time to refine your talent.
After learning classical piano at college in her home state of Oklahoma, Shaw pursued her Masters at Chicago’s American Conservatory of Music. Due to a solid repertoire of popular songs of the time, Shaw was able to get regular solo work in Chicago. Although she’d intended to land a gig as a classical accompanist, a Count Basie concert had her making a hard left toward jazz (she claimed she never heard the word till she went to college). She met drummer Stan Shaw and the two became collaborators and eventually husband and wife. It is said that Oscar Peterson saw her play just once and offered to be her teacher. After studying with Peterson and honing her craft with years of countless gigs, she went on to teach John Medeski, whom she made a concert recording (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/together-again-live-at-the-egg-john-medeski-arc-artists-recording-collective-review-by-bruce-lindsay.php) with in 2009.
After her husband fell ill in the mid 90s, the pianist, composer, and band leader formed a new trio with bassist Rich Syracuse and drummer Jeff Siegel. Shaw played right up to the end (sometimes with an oxygen tank) with remarkable poise, grace, and good humor. It’s a shame jazz only gets mainstream attention when it has to do with excess or tragedy. Here is someone who lived the demanding life of a touring musician and came out with nothing but gratitude. We need more stories like hers, lest we forget that passionate hard work can be its own reward.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist | Music News | Tiny Mix Tapes
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/rip-lee-shaw-renowned-jazz-pianist
** RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist
————————————————————
By WILLCOMA (http://www.tinymixtapes.com/writer/willcoma) on Oct 26 2015
RIP: Lee Shaw, renowned jazz pianist
The music world has lost one of its preeminent forces in the elegant, tirelessly devoted Lee Shaw. With both her infectiously obvious love of the form and professional yet intuitive chops, those of us who’ve been lucky enough to see her perform will miss her dearly. She wasn’t just one of the key redeeming entities of New York’s capital district; she was also a reminder that you’re able to do what you love and thrive anywhere if you’ve taken the time to refine your talent.
After learning classical piano at college in her home state of Oklahoma, Shaw pursued her Masters at Chicago’s American Conservatory of Music. Due to a solid repertoire of popular songs of the time, Shaw was able to get regular solo work in Chicago. Although she’d intended to land a gig as a classical accompanist, a Count Basie concert had her making a hard left toward jazz (she claimed she never heard the word till she went to college). She met drummer Stan Shaw and the two became collaborators and eventually husband and wife. It is said that Oscar Peterson saw her play just once and offered to be her teacher. After studying with Peterson and honing her craft with years of countless gigs, she went on to teach John Medeski, whom she made a concert recording (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/together-again-live-at-the-egg-john-medeski-arc-artists-recording-collective-review-by-bruce-lindsay.php) with in 2009.
After her husband fell ill in the mid 90s, the pianist, composer, and band leader formed a new trio with bassist Rich Syracuse and drummer Jeff Siegel. Shaw played right up to the end (sometimes with an oxygen tank) with remarkable poise, grace, and good humor. It’s a shame jazz only gets mainstream attention when it has to do with excess or tragedy. Here is someone who lived the demanding life of a touring musician and came out with nothing but gratitude. We need more stories like hers, lest we forget that passionate hard work can be its own reward.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Rare Jazz Photo THE FOUR STRINGS – 1947 – Pittsburgh Jazz Network
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http://jazzburgher.ning.com/photo/1992552:Photo:8174?commentId=1992552%3AComment%3A44122
L-R: Joe Kennedy, Jr, Edgar Willis, Ray Crawford, Sam Johnson (seated)
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Rare Jazz Photo THE FOUR STRINGS – 1947 – Pittsburgh Jazz Network
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http://jazzburgher.ning.com/photo/1992552:Photo:8174?commentId=1992552%3AComment%3A44122
L-R: Joe Kennedy, Jr, Edgar Willis, Ray Crawford, Sam Johnson (seated)
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Rare Jazz Photo THE FOUR STRINGS – 1947 – Pittsburgh Jazz Network
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L-R: Joe Kennedy, Jr, Edgar Willis, Ray Crawford, Sam Johnson (seated)
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Mark Murphy, an Unconventional Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 83 – The New York Times
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/arts/music/mark-murphy-an-unconventional-jazz-vocalist-dies-at-83.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151025
** Mark Murphy, an Unconventional Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 83
————————————————————
By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html) OCT. 25, 2015
Mark Murphy performing at Birdland in 2005. Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Mark Murphy, an iconoclastic jazz vocalist who drew inspiration from such varied sources as the sound of his hometown factory whistle and the words of the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, died on Thursday in Englewood, N.J. He was 83.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his manager, Jean-Pierre Leduc, said.
A resonant baritone, Mr. Murphy was nominated for six Grammy Awards (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) and was cited multiple times by readers of Down Beat magazine as male vocalist of the year.
In his book “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers” (2010), the jazz critic Will Friedwald wrote that Mr. Murphy and the similarly adventurous singer Betty Carter (http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/28/arts/betty-carter-innovative-jazz-vocalist-is-dead-at-69.html) , who died in 1998, “were the co-founders of the school of swinging eclecticism in jazz vocals, major influences on virtually all the well-regarded singers of the current generation.”
Celebrated for his interpretations of songs by Cole Porter, Antônio Carlos Jobim and other great songwriters, Mr. Murphy was perhaps equally well known for his own lyrics to jazz classics like the saxophonist Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0AAzQNGCCI) and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay,” which he recorded as “On the Red Clay.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdF0AcklZNs)
He ranged from bebop to ballads, torch songs to scat singing, from vocalizing Kerouac’s poetry to experimenting with rhythms inspired by the whistle that summoned his neighbors in upstate New York to the local wool mill.
Mr. Leduc said that Mr. Murphy, who spent most of the 1960s in London, was the first jazz singer to record the Beatles hit “She Loves You.”
Mark Howe Murphy was born in Syracuse on March 14, 1932. His parents, Dwight Murphy Sr. and the former Margaret Howe, met at the local Methodist church, where his father was the choir director.
Mr. Murphy died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home, where he had been living for several years. He is survived by his sister, Sheila Bidwell. His partner, Eddie O’Sullivan, died in 1990.
Mr. Murphy was raised in Fulton, N.Y., where his grandmother and aunt were church organists. (His aunt also played in a swing band.) He began taking piano lessons when he was 7 and joined his brother’s six-piece jazz band as a singer when he was a teenager.
As he began performing regularly, he drew encouragement from a chance encounter with Sammy Davis Jr. at a jazz club. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1953, he moved to New York City, where he worked as both an actor and a singer before settling on music as a career. His first album, “Meet Mark Murphy,” was released on the Decca label in 1956.
Over the years Mr. Murphy recorded some 50 albums for various record companies, most notably for the small jazz label Muse from 1973 to 1991. He continued to perform in New York nightclubs well into his 70s. His last appearance was at Joe’s Pub in 2013.
Unlike most male jazz and pop singers, Mr. Murphy “doesn’t adopt the usual masculine poses,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/arts/music/a-worldweary-soul-singing-like-a-postbeat-minstrel.html) in 2005.
“Instead of playing the seducer or the comforter when crooning,” he added, “or the preening, self-assured leader of the pack when swinging, he embodies a wandering post-Beat minstrel, a restless soul, world-weary hipster and die-hard romantic ruminating on old loves.”
Musicians can learn improvisation only by doing, Mr. Murphy told the website All About Jazz (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/mark-murphy-inside-the-mystery-mark-murphy-by-suzanne-lorge.php) in 2009.
“The way I learned was, I’d just get up there, and at first the more complex parts of the improv weren’t there,” he said. “But you try them again and it flows a little more. You have to fall in love with it, and that’s what gives you the courage and the inspiration to go on further and further and further. And then, all of a sudden, things start to happen.”
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Mark Murphy, an Unconventional Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 83 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/arts/music/mark-murphy-an-unconventional-jazz-vocalist-dies-at-83.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151025
** Mark Murphy, an Unconventional Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 83
————————————————————
By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html) OCT. 25, 2015
Mark Murphy performing at Birdland in 2005. Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Mark Murphy, an iconoclastic jazz vocalist who drew inspiration from such varied sources as the sound of his hometown factory whistle and the words of the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, died on Thursday in Englewood, N.J. He was 83.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his manager, Jean-Pierre Leduc, said.
A resonant baritone, Mr. Murphy was nominated for six Grammy Awards (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) and was cited multiple times by readers of Down Beat magazine as male vocalist of the year.
In his book “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers” (2010), the jazz critic Will Friedwald wrote that Mr. Murphy and the similarly adventurous singer Betty Carter (http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/28/arts/betty-carter-innovative-jazz-vocalist-is-dead-at-69.html) , who died in 1998, “were the co-founders of the school of swinging eclecticism in jazz vocals, major influences on virtually all the well-regarded singers of the current generation.”
Celebrated for his interpretations of songs by Cole Porter, Antônio Carlos Jobim and other great songwriters, Mr. Murphy was perhaps equally well known for his own lyrics to jazz classics like the saxophonist Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0AAzQNGCCI) and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay,” which he recorded as “On the Red Clay.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdF0AcklZNs)
He ranged from bebop to ballads, torch songs to scat singing, from vocalizing Kerouac’s poetry to experimenting with rhythms inspired by the whistle that summoned his neighbors in upstate New York to the local wool mill.
Mr. Leduc said that Mr. Murphy, who spent most of the 1960s in London, was the first jazz singer to record the Beatles hit “She Loves You.”
Mark Howe Murphy was born in Syracuse on March 14, 1932. His parents, Dwight Murphy Sr. and the former Margaret Howe, met at the local Methodist church, where his father was the choir director.
Mr. Murphy died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home, where he had been living for several years. He is survived by his sister, Sheila Bidwell. His partner, Eddie O’Sullivan, died in 1990.
Mr. Murphy was raised in Fulton, N.Y., where his grandmother and aunt were church organists. (His aunt also played in a swing band.) He began taking piano lessons when he was 7 and joined his brother’s six-piece jazz band as a singer when he was a teenager.
As he began performing regularly, he drew encouragement from a chance encounter with Sammy Davis Jr. at a jazz club. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1953, he moved to New York City, where he worked as both an actor and a singer before settling on music as a career. His first album, “Meet Mark Murphy,” was released on the Decca label in 1956.
Over the years Mr. Murphy recorded some 50 albums for various record companies, most notably for the small jazz label Muse from 1973 to 1991. He continued to perform in New York nightclubs well into his 70s. His last appearance was at Joe’s Pub in 2013.
Unlike most male jazz and pop singers, Mr. Murphy “doesn’t adopt the usual masculine poses,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/arts/music/a-worldweary-soul-singing-like-a-postbeat-minstrel.html) in 2005.
“Instead of playing the seducer or the comforter when crooning,” he added, “or the preening, self-assured leader of the pack when swinging, he embodies a wandering post-Beat minstrel, a restless soul, world-weary hipster and die-hard romantic ruminating on old loves.”
Musicians can learn improvisation only by doing, Mr. Murphy told the website All About Jazz (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/mark-murphy-inside-the-mystery-mark-murphy-by-suzanne-lorge.php) in 2009.
“The way I learned was, I’d just get up there, and at first the more complex parts of the improv weren’t there,” he said. “But you try them again and it flows a little more. You have to fall in love with it, and that’s what gives you the courage and the inspiration to go on further and further and further. And then, all of a sudden, things start to happen.”
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Mark Murphy, an Unconventional Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 83 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/arts/music/mark-murphy-an-unconventional-jazz-vocalist-dies-at-83.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151025
** Mark Murphy, an Unconventional Jazz Vocalist, Dies at 83
————————————————————
By SAM ROBERTS (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/sam_roberts/index.html) OCT. 25, 2015
Mark Murphy performing at Birdland in 2005. Rahav Segev for The New York Times
Mark Murphy, an iconoclastic jazz vocalist who drew inspiration from such varied sources as the sound of his hometown factory whistle and the words of the Beat novelist Jack Kerouac, died on Thursday in Englewood, N.J. He was 83.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, his manager, Jean-Pierre Leduc, said.
A resonant baritone, Mr. Murphy was nominated for six Grammy Awards (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) and was cited multiple times by readers of Down Beat magazine as male vocalist of the year.
In his book “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers” (2010), the jazz critic Will Friedwald wrote that Mr. Murphy and the similarly adventurous singer Betty Carter (http://www.nytimes.com/1998/09/28/arts/betty-carter-innovative-jazz-vocalist-is-dead-at-69.html) , who died in 1998, “were the co-founders of the school of swinging eclecticism in jazz vocals, major influences on virtually all the well-regarded singers of the current generation.”
Celebrated for his interpretations of songs by Cole Porter, Antônio Carlos Jobim and other great songwriters, Mr. Murphy was perhaps equally well known for his own lyrics to jazz classics like the saxophonist Oliver Nelson’s “Stolen Moments” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0AAzQNGCCI) and the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay,” which he recorded as “On the Red Clay.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdF0AcklZNs)
He ranged from bebop to ballads, torch songs to scat singing, from vocalizing Kerouac’s poetry to experimenting with rhythms inspired by the whistle that summoned his neighbors in upstate New York to the local wool mill.
Mr. Leduc said that Mr. Murphy, who spent most of the 1960s in London, was the first jazz singer to record the Beatles hit “She Loves You.”
Mark Howe Murphy was born in Syracuse on March 14, 1932. His parents, Dwight Murphy Sr. and the former Margaret Howe, met at the local Methodist church, where his father was the choir director.
Mr. Murphy died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home, where he had been living for several years. He is survived by his sister, Sheila Bidwell. His partner, Eddie O’Sullivan, died in 1990.
Mr. Murphy was raised in Fulton, N.Y., where his grandmother and aunt were church organists. (His aunt also played in a swing band.) He began taking piano lessons when he was 7 and joined his brother’s six-piece jazz band as a singer when he was a teenager.
As he began performing regularly, he drew encouragement from a chance encounter with Sammy Davis Jr. at a jazz club. After graduating from Syracuse University in 1953, he moved to New York City, where he worked as both an actor and a singer before settling on music as a career. His first album, “Meet Mark Murphy,” was released on the Decca label in 1956.
Over the years Mr. Murphy recorded some 50 albums for various record companies, most notably for the small jazz label Muse from 1973 to 1991. He continued to perform in New York nightclubs well into his 70s. His last appearance was at Joe’s Pub in 2013.
Unlike most male jazz and pop singers, Mr. Murphy “doesn’t adopt the usual masculine poses,” Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/01/arts/music/a-worldweary-soul-singing-like-a-postbeat-minstrel.html) in 2005.
“Instead of playing the seducer or the comforter when crooning,” he added, “or the preening, self-assured leader of the pack when swinging, he embodies a wandering post-Beat minstrel, a restless soul, world-weary hipster and die-hard romantic ruminating on old loves.”
Musicians can learn improvisation only by doing, Mr. Murphy told the website All About Jazz (http://www.allaboutjazz.com/mark-murphy-inside-the-mystery-mark-murphy-by-suzanne-lorge.php) in 2009.
“The way I learned was, I’d just get up there, and at first the more complex parts of the improv weren’t there,” he said. “But you try them again and it flows a little more. You have to fall in love with it, and that’s what gives you the courage and the inspiration to go on further and further and further. And then, all of a sudden, things start to happen.”
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Smash Your Baggage – Smalls Paradise Entertainers – YouTube
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGMHaIWz6Zg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGMHaIWz6Zg
Nightclub owner Ed Small opened Small’s Paradise on 22 October 1925. The large basement club featured a big band and floor shows and could accommodate 1,500 patrons. Customers vied for space on the postage-stamp-size dance floor while Charleston-dancing waiters brought Chinese food and bootleg liquor to the small tables. One waiter who went on to greater fame was Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X. He worked at Small’s in 1943.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Small’s was considered one of the Big Three nightgclubs in Harlem, along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. But unlike the other clubs, Small’s was always integrated, drawing an audience of local and visiting blacks as well as well-to-do whites from downtown.
Charlie Johnson & His Orchestra was the house band for the first decade. After hours, musicians from Harlem and downtown stopped by to jam. Small’s Sunday night jam sessions became legendery.
While nightlife dimmed in Harlem by the mid-1930s and other clubs closed or relocated downtown, Small’s remained open. In the 1960s, basketball great Wilt Chamberlain bought Small’s and dubbed the club Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise. The club finally closed in 1986.
The building that for so many years hosted great music and dancing was converted to the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change in 2004. The public high school is sponsored by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, associated with Abyssinian Baptist Church.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Smash Your Baggage – Smalls Paradise Entertainers – YouTube
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGMHaIWz6Zg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGMHaIWz6Zg
Nightclub owner Ed Small opened Small’s Paradise on 22 October 1925. The large basement club featured a big band and floor shows and could accommodate 1,500 patrons. Customers vied for space on the postage-stamp-size dance floor while Charleston-dancing waiters brought Chinese food and bootleg liquor to the small tables. One waiter who went on to greater fame was Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X. He worked at Small’s in 1943.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Small’s was considered one of the Big Three nightgclubs in Harlem, along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. But unlike the other clubs, Small’s was always integrated, drawing an audience of local and visiting blacks as well as well-to-do whites from downtown.
Charlie Johnson & His Orchestra was the house band for the first decade. After hours, musicians from Harlem and downtown stopped by to jam. Small’s Sunday night jam sessions became legendery.
While nightlife dimmed in Harlem by the mid-1930s and other clubs closed or relocated downtown, Small’s remained open. In the 1960s, basketball great Wilt Chamberlain bought Small’s and dubbed the club Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise. The club finally closed in 1986.
The building that for so many years hosted great music and dancing was converted to the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change in 2004. The public high school is sponsored by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, associated with Abyssinian Baptist Church.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Smash Your Baggage – Smalls Paradise Entertainers – YouTube
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGMHaIWz6Zg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGMHaIWz6Zg
Nightclub owner Ed Small opened Small’s Paradise on 22 October 1925. The large basement club featured a big band and floor shows and could accommodate 1,500 patrons. Customers vied for space on the postage-stamp-size dance floor while Charleston-dancing waiters brought Chinese food and bootleg liquor to the small tables. One waiter who went on to greater fame was Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X. He worked at Small’s in 1943.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Small’s was considered one of the Big Three nightgclubs in Harlem, along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. But unlike the other clubs, Small’s was always integrated, drawing an audience of local and visiting blacks as well as well-to-do whites from downtown.
Charlie Johnson & His Orchestra was the house band for the first decade. After hours, musicians from Harlem and downtown stopped by to jam. Small’s Sunday night jam sessions became legendery.
While nightlife dimmed in Harlem by the mid-1930s and other clubs closed or relocated downtown, Small’s remained open. In the 1960s, basketball great Wilt Chamberlain bought Small’s and dubbed the club Big Wilt’s Small’s Paradise. The club finally closed in 1986.
The building that for so many years hosted great music and dancing was converted to the Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning and Social Change in 2004. The public high school is sponsored by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, associated with Abyssinian Baptist Church.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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USA
MARK MURPHY sings Farmers Market and Again JAZZ LIVE! – YouTube
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TqUkg4kPcY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TqUkg4kPcY
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
MARK MURPHY sings Farmers Market and Again JAZZ LIVE! – YouTube
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TqUkg4kPcY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TqUkg4kPcY
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
MARK MURPHY sings Farmers Market and Again JAZZ LIVE! – YouTube
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TqUkg4kPcY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TqUkg4kPcY
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native, dies at age 83 | syracuse.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/10/grammy-nominated_jazz_vocalist_mark_murphy_a_syracuse_native_dies_at_age_83.html
** Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native, dies at age 83
————————————————————
By George Owens | gowens@syracuse.com (http://connect.syracuse.com/staff/gowens/posts.html)
MarkMurphy.jpg
http://media.syracuse.com/entertainment_impact/photo/markmurphy2jpg-152b18927207fe98.jpgMark MurphyUndated file photo
Jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native who was raised in Fulton, died Thursday in New Jersey after a lengthy illness, his manager said. Murphy was 83.
The Syracuse University alumnus was a six-time Grammy Award nominee who released more than 40 albums in a career that spanned more than a half-century. His debut album, “Meet Mark Murphy,” was released in 1956. His final album, “A Beautiful Friendship: Remembering Shirley Horn,” was released in 2012 (http://gearboxrecords.tumblr.com/post/58077731600/mark-murphy-a-beautiful-friendship-remembering) .
Murphy was born in Syracuse on March 14, 1932. Murphy made occasional stops in Central New York in recent years, including a performance at Jazz Fest in 1998 (http://syracusejazzfest.com/history) and a performance in Fulton in 2008.
“Syracuse was my first big city, ” Murphy told The Post-Standard in 1998 (http://blog.syracuse.com/listenup/2008/07/syracuses_own_mark_murphy_tour.html) . “I was an acting student at the university. And I was either playing on weekends in Fulton or Oswego, or I was down at the Casablanca in downtown Syracuse. Those days, it was the Italian bop center. A couple of blocks away was the Ebony Club, which was the African-American bop center. In the Ebony, I saw Sammy Davis Jr. bopping and tapping his feet.
“He was gigging at the Three Rivers Inn. That was the showplace in the old days. He asked me to come to the show. I think I even sat in, ” he says. “If this guy thought I was good, then I thought I could be something.”
He worked as an actor in London in the 1960s before returning to the U.S., where he began recording highly acclaimed albums for the Muse label including tributes to Jack Kerouac and Nat King Cole.
Murphy died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J., Jean-Pierre Leduc, Murphy’s manager, told The Associated Press.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native, dies at age 83 | syracuse.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/10/grammy-nominated_jazz_vocalist_mark_murphy_a_syracuse_native_dies_at_age_83.html
** Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native, dies at age 83
————————————————————
By George Owens | gowens@syracuse.com (http://connect.syracuse.com/staff/gowens/posts.html)
MarkMurphy.jpg
http://media.syracuse.com/entertainment_impact/photo/markmurphy2jpg-152b18927207fe98.jpgMark MurphyUndated file photo
Jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native who was raised in Fulton, died Thursday in New Jersey after a lengthy illness, his manager said. Murphy was 83.
The Syracuse University alumnus was a six-time Grammy Award nominee who released more than 40 albums in a career that spanned more than a half-century. His debut album, “Meet Mark Murphy,” was released in 1956. His final album, “A Beautiful Friendship: Remembering Shirley Horn,” was released in 2012 (http://gearboxrecords.tumblr.com/post/58077731600/mark-murphy-a-beautiful-friendship-remembering) .
Murphy was born in Syracuse on March 14, 1932. Murphy made occasional stops in Central New York in recent years, including a performance at Jazz Fest in 1998 (http://syracusejazzfest.com/history) and a performance in Fulton in 2008.
“Syracuse was my first big city, ” Murphy told The Post-Standard in 1998 (http://blog.syracuse.com/listenup/2008/07/syracuses_own_mark_murphy_tour.html) . “I was an acting student at the university. And I was either playing on weekends in Fulton or Oswego, or I was down at the Casablanca in downtown Syracuse. Those days, it was the Italian bop center. A couple of blocks away was the Ebony Club, which was the African-American bop center. In the Ebony, I saw Sammy Davis Jr. bopping and tapping his feet.
“He was gigging at the Three Rivers Inn. That was the showplace in the old days. He asked me to come to the show. I think I even sat in, ” he says. “If this guy thought I was good, then I thought I could be something.”
He worked as an actor in London in the 1960s before returning to the U.S., where he began recording highly acclaimed albums for the Muse label including tributes to Jack Kerouac and Nat King Cole.
Murphy died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J., Jean-Pierre Leduc, Murphy’s manager, told The Associated Press.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native, dies at age 83 | syracuse.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2015/10/grammy-nominated_jazz_vocalist_mark_murphy_a_syracuse_native_dies_at_age_83.html
** Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native, dies at age 83
————————————————————
By George Owens | gowens@syracuse.com (http://connect.syracuse.com/staff/gowens/posts.html)
MarkMurphy.jpg
http://media.syracuse.com/entertainment_impact/photo/markmurphy2jpg-152b18927207fe98.jpgMark MurphyUndated file photo
Jazz vocalist Mark Murphy, a Syracuse native who was raised in Fulton, died Thursday in New Jersey after a lengthy illness, his manager said. Murphy was 83.
The Syracuse University alumnus was a six-time Grammy Award nominee who released more than 40 albums in a career that spanned more than a half-century. His debut album, “Meet Mark Murphy,” was released in 1956. His final album, “A Beautiful Friendship: Remembering Shirley Horn,” was released in 2012 (http://gearboxrecords.tumblr.com/post/58077731600/mark-murphy-a-beautiful-friendship-remembering) .
Murphy was born in Syracuse on March 14, 1932. Murphy made occasional stops in Central New York in recent years, including a performance at Jazz Fest in 1998 (http://syracusejazzfest.com/history) and a performance in Fulton in 2008.
“Syracuse was my first big city, ” Murphy told The Post-Standard in 1998 (http://blog.syracuse.com/listenup/2008/07/syracuses_own_mark_murphy_tour.html) . “I was an acting student at the university. And I was either playing on weekends in Fulton or Oswego, or I was down at the Casablanca in downtown Syracuse. Those days, it was the Italian bop center. A couple of blocks away was the Ebony Club, which was the African-American bop center. In the Ebony, I saw Sammy Davis Jr. bopping and tapping his feet.
“He was gigging at the Three Rivers Inn. That was the showplace in the old days. He asked me to come to the show. I think I even sat in, ” he says. “If this guy thought I was good, then I thought I could be something.”
He worked as an actor in London in the 1960s before returning to the U.S., where he began recording highly acclaimed albums for the Muse label including tributes to Jack Kerouac and Nat King Cole.
Murphy died at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J., Jean-Pierre Leduc, Murphy’s manager, told The Associated Press.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=8d1e962286) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=8d1e962286&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Chris’ Jazz Cafe Now Lets Customers Leave Tips for Live Music | News | Philadelphia Magazine
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/10/21/tipping-musicians-chris-jazz-cafe/
By Victor Fiorillo (http://www.phillymag.com/author/vfiorillo/) | October 21, 2015 at 2:46 pm
** Music Venue Stirs Controversy By Letting Customers Add Tips for Live Music
————————————————————
http://cdn.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tipping-musicians-chris-jazz-cafe-philadelphia.jpg
Left: A receipt from Chris’ Jazz Cafe / Right: Longtime Philly saxophonist Victor North, who cautiously calls the tipping policy “a worthy experiment.”
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about tipping, first with prolific restaurateur Danny Meyer — he of Shake Shack fame — declaring (http://www.eater.com/2015/10/14/9532729/danny-meyer-drops-tipping-chefs-restaurateurs-reactions) that he was abolishing tipping at his New York City restaurants, and then with a compelling New York Times op-ed that connects tipping to race and flat out declares that “tipping is wrong.” (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/why-tipping-is-wrong.html) Normally, tipping controversies erupt around the food industry, but now we’ve learned of one brewing in Philadelphia’s music scene, thanks to Center City music venue Chris’ Jazz Cafe.
On October 8th, the Sansom Street jazz club, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, instituted a new policy allowing patrons to add a “live music tip” to their check at the end of the night. And as far as we know, it’s a new concept for Philadelphia, save for the old tip jar on the piano concept, of course.
Bar manager John Jordan raised the idea at a staff meeting (he had seen a photo of a similar check somewhere on Facebook), and owner Mark DeNinno decided to implement it immediately. In addition to simply allowing customers to leave a gratuity for a band that they like, DeNinno is also using the tipping option to combat the frequent problem of people who simply will not pay a cover.
“Some people come here and refuse to pay a $5 cover,” says DeNinno, who adds that in the first week, over $500 in live music tips were left by customers. “This way, we tell them to have a seat, and when they’re ready to go, they can choose to leave something at the end.”
Now, it is probably important to note here that while all of those tips will go directly to the musicians in many cases, in some cases, they will not.
Here’s how it works. Stay with me for a minute.
If a person has paid the cover in advance and they leave a live music tip, the band gets the full tip.
But if they refuse to pay the cover and then they leave a tip, it can go one of two ways. If the deal for the show is a door split, as is the case with most of the mid-week shows (commonly, the band gets 70% of door sales while the house takes 30%), then the tip is divided according to those same percentages.
On the other hand, if the deal for the show is a flat fee and the door sales haven’t hit that mark yet, the amount left on the live music tip line goes to the venue until the house recoups the remainder of what it must pay the band at the end of the night. But, again, only if the customer wouldn’t pay a cover.
“The most expensive seat in a restaurant like this is the empty one,” says DeNinno, explaining that if a prospective patron turns around and walks out upon hearing that there’s a cover, then neither Chris’ nor the musicians have a chance of seeing any money from that person.
“I love it,” says pianist James Santangelo, who leads the late night jazz jam at Chris’ every Saturday. And why wouldn’t he love it? “This past Saturday, we got our full guaranteed fee that we’re very happy with, but we also got about $200 in tips.”
Philadelphia saxophonist Victor North has been a fixture at Chris’ and the Philadelphia jazz scene at large for over 20 years. (Like Santangelo, he gets a guaranteed flat rate for his shows.) He calls the new live music tipping policy “a worthy experiment.” The way North sees it, Philadelphians are notorious for griping about paying covers.
“They’ll stop at the door when they find out about a cover, and they really have to think about it, unless it was their intention to go to see the band in the first place,” he says. “But Philadelphians do tend to tip fairly well. So I see this as a great option for the city as we are.”
North laments that musicians have been having a harder and harder time getting paid to begin with but also points out that dedicated Philadelphia jazz clubs have almost dwindled into non-existence. In other words, if you want to play jazz in Philadelphia, you don’t have a ton of options.
“The tips are a good idea,” he says. “As long as it doesn’t — and I don’t think it was intended to — replace the idea of paying musicians who get a guaranteed amount of money.”
But not everyone is in favor of the idea.
I spoke with one disapproving local jazz musician, who asked us not to use his name for fear of losing gigs at Chris’. (Again, few options for jazz players in this city.) He’s played gigs there for a split of the door, and at shows like that, it’s not uncommon for only a handful of people to show up.
So if you’re a four-piece band with a $10 cover, and only 20 people pay that cover, your payout at the end of the night based on a 70/30 split is just $140, to be divided among the players. For the club to take 30-percent of the live music tips left by those who don’t want to pay a cover seems unfair to him. “I already feel like I’m being robbed,” he says. Still, he takes the gigs — and remember, if a customer walks out the door without paying a cover, his band would get zero from that person.
Philadelphia musician Anthony Tidd is the Creative Music Program Director for the Kimmel Center as well as a frequent customer at Chris’. While he has issues with the tipping program, he doesn’t take aim at Chris’ itself.
“The problem is not Chris’ Jazz Cafe,” he insisted last week in a Facebook post about the live music tips. “Clubs are always going to do whatever they can to make money and increase profit. The problem is the art culture of Philly. One cannot talk about how great a city is for Art, and then say that there are almost no venues that support said Art. If Philly was a city that truly appreciated art, then some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians would [not have just] one jazz venue to choose from.”
As for the tips, he called Chris’ program “insulting.”
“To me, the entire concept of tipping is backwards and has no place in what is supposed to be Philly’s last surviving jazz venue,” he wrote in a subsequent post. “Professional musicians, of a level high enough to be hired in the first place, should not have to play for tips. People tip because they know that the server or bartender cannot survive on what the restaurant is paying them. Period! In other words, the restaurant passes on the cost of service (having a staff) to the customer. Then if the customer doesn’t want to tip, they get bitched out by the staff for being stingy, when the staff should really be looking at the owner who is underpaying them by at least 20%. Including this for musicians is not a positive move……It’s insulting.”
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
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USA
Chris’ Jazz Cafe Now Lets Customers Leave Tips for Live Music | News | Philadelphia Magazine
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/10/21/tipping-musicians-chris-jazz-cafe/
By Victor Fiorillo (http://www.phillymag.com/author/vfiorillo/) | October 21, 2015 at 2:46 pm
** Music Venue Stirs Controversy By Letting Customers Add Tips for Live Music
————————————————————
http://cdn.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tipping-musicians-chris-jazz-cafe-philadelphia.jpg
Left: A receipt from Chris’ Jazz Cafe / Right: Longtime Philly saxophonist Victor North, who cautiously calls the tipping policy “a worthy experiment.”
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about tipping, first with prolific restaurateur Danny Meyer — he of Shake Shack fame — declaring (http://www.eater.com/2015/10/14/9532729/danny-meyer-drops-tipping-chefs-restaurateurs-reactions) that he was abolishing tipping at his New York City restaurants, and then with a compelling New York Times op-ed that connects tipping to race and flat out declares that “tipping is wrong.” (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/why-tipping-is-wrong.html) Normally, tipping controversies erupt around the food industry, but now we’ve learned of one brewing in Philadelphia’s music scene, thanks to Center City music venue Chris’ Jazz Cafe.
On October 8th, the Sansom Street jazz club, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, instituted a new policy allowing patrons to add a “live music tip” to their check at the end of the night. And as far as we know, it’s a new concept for Philadelphia, save for the old tip jar on the piano concept, of course.
Bar manager John Jordan raised the idea at a staff meeting (he had seen a photo of a similar check somewhere on Facebook), and owner Mark DeNinno decided to implement it immediately. In addition to simply allowing customers to leave a gratuity for a band that they like, DeNinno is also using the tipping option to combat the frequent problem of people who simply will not pay a cover.
“Some people come here and refuse to pay a $5 cover,” says DeNinno, who adds that in the first week, over $500 in live music tips were left by customers. “This way, we tell them to have a seat, and when they’re ready to go, they can choose to leave something at the end.”
Now, it is probably important to note here that while all of those tips will go directly to the musicians in many cases, in some cases, they will not.
Here’s how it works. Stay with me for a minute.
If a person has paid the cover in advance and they leave a live music tip, the band gets the full tip.
But if they refuse to pay the cover and then they leave a tip, it can go one of two ways. If the deal for the show is a door split, as is the case with most of the mid-week shows (commonly, the band gets 70% of door sales while the house takes 30%), then the tip is divided according to those same percentages.
On the other hand, if the deal for the show is a flat fee and the door sales haven’t hit that mark yet, the amount left on the live music tip line goes to the venue until the house recoups the remainder of what it must pay the band at the end of the night. But, again, only if the customer wouldn’t pay a cover.
“The most expensive seat in a restaurant like this is the empty one,” says DeNinno, explaining that if a prospective patron turns around and walks out upon hearing that there’s a cover, then neither Chris’ nor the musicians have a chance of seeing any money from that person.
“I love it,” says pianist James Santangelo, who leads the late night jazz jam at Chris’ every Saturday. And why wouldn’t he love it? “This past Saturday, we got our full guaranteed fee that we’re very happy with, but we also got about $200 in tips.”
Philadelphia saxophonist Victor North has been a fixture at Chris’ and the Philadelphia jazz scene at large for over 20 years. (Like Santangelo, he gets a guaranteed flat rate for his shows.) He calls the new live music tipping policy “a worthy experiment.” The way North sees it, Philadelphians are notorious for griping about paying covers.
“They’ll stop at the door when they find out about a cover, and they really have to think about it, unless it was their intention to go to see the band in the first place,” he says. “But Philadelphians do tend to tip fairly well. So I see this as a great option for the city as we are.”
North laments that musicians have been having a harder and harder time getting paid to begin with but also points out that dedicated Philadelphia jazz clubs have almost dwindled into non-existence. In other words, if you want to play jazz in Philadelphia, you don’t have a ton of options.
“The tips are a good idea,” he says. “As long as it doesn’t — and I don’t think it was intended to — replace the idea of paying musicians who get a guaranteed amount of money.”
But not everyone is in favor of the idea.
I spoke with one disapproving local jazz musician, who asked us not to use his name for fear of losing gigs at Chris’. (Again, few options for jazz players in this city.) He’s played gigs there for a split of the door, and at shows like that, it’s not uncommon for only a handful of people to show up.
So if you’re a four-piece band with a $10 cover, and only 20 people pay that cover, your payout at the end of the night based on a 70/30 split is just $140, to be divided among the players. For the club to take 30-percent of the live music tips left by those who don’t want to pay a cover seems unfair to him. “I already feel like I’m being robbed,” he says. Still, he takes the gigs — and remember, if a customer walks out the door without paying a cover, his band would get zero from that person.
Philadelphia musician Anthony Tidd is the Creative Music Program Director for the Kimmel Center as well as a frequent customer at Chris’. While he has issues with the tipping program, he doesn’t take aim at Chris’ itself.
“The problem is not Chris’ Jazz Cafe,” he insisted last week in a Facebook post about the live music tips. “Clubs are always going to do whatever they can to make money and increase profit. The problem is the art culture of Philly. One cannot talk about how great a city is for Art, and then say that there are almost no venues that support said Art. If Philly was a city that truly appreciated art, then some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians would [not have just] one jazz venue to choose from.”
As for the tips, he called Chris’ program “insulting.”
“To me, the entire concept of tipping is backwards and has no place in what is supposed to be Philly’s last surviving jazz venue,” he wrote in a subsequent post. “Professional musicians, of a level high enough to be hired in the first place, should not have to play for tips. People tip because they know that the server or bartender cannot survive on what the restaurant is paying them. Period! In other words, the restaurant passes on the cost of service (having a staff) to the customer. Then if the customer doesn’t want to tip, they get bitched out by the staff for being stingy, when the staff should really be looking at the owner who is underpaying them by at least 20%. Including this for musicians is not a positive move……It’s insulting.”
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Chris’ Jazz Cafe Now Lets Customers Leave Tips for Live Music | News | Philadelphia Magazine
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http://www.phillymag.com/news/2015/10/21/tipping-musicians-chris-jazz-cafe/
By Victor Fiorillo (http://www.phillymag.com/author/vfiorillo/) | October 21, 2015 at 2:46 pm
** Music Venue Stirs Controversy By Letting Customers Add Tips for Live Music
————————————————————
http://cdn.phillymag.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/tipping-musicians-chris-jazz-cafe-philadelphia.jpg
Left: A receipt from Chris’ Jazz Cafe / Right: Longtime Philly saxophonist Victor North, who cautiously calls the tipping policy “a worthy experiment.”
Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about tipping, first with prolific restaurateur Danny Meyer — he of Shake Shack fame — declaring (http://www.eater.com/2015/10/14/9532729/danny-meyer-drops-tipping-chefs-restaurateurs-reactions) that he was abolishing tipping at his New York City restaurants, and then with a compelling New York Times op-ed that connects tipping to race and flat out declares that “tipping is wrong.” (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/10/16/opinion/why-tipping-is-wrong.html) Normally, tipping controversies erupt around the food industry, but now we’ve learned of one brewing in Philadelphia’s music scene, thanks to Center City music venue Chris’ Jazz Cafe.
On October 8th, the Sansom Street jazz club, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, instituted a new policy allowing patrons to add a “live music tip” to their check at the end of the night. And as far as we know, it’s a new concept for Philadelphia, save for the old tip jar on the piano concept, of course.
Bar manager John Jordan raised the idea at a staff meeting (he had seen a photo of a similar check somewhere on Facebook), and owner Mark DeNinno decided to implement it immediately. In addition to simply allowing customers to leave a gratuity for a band that they like, DeNinno is also using the tipping option to combat the frequent problem of people who simply will not pay a cover.
“Some people come here and refuse to pay a $5 cover,” says DeNinno, who adds that in the first week, over $500 in live music tips were left by customers. “This way, we tell them to have a seat, and when they’re ready to go, they can choose to leave something at the end.”
Now, it is probably important to note here that while all of those tips will go directly to the musicians in many cases, in some cases, they will not.
Here’s how it works. Stay with me for a minute.
If a person has paid the cover in advance and they leave a live music tip, the band gets the full tip.
But if they refuse to pay the cover and then they leave a tip, it can go one of two ways. If the deal for the show is a door split, as is the case with most of the mid-week shows (commonly, the band gets 70% of door sales while the house takes 30%), then the tip is divided according to those same percentages.
On the other hand, if the deal for the show is a flat fee and the door sales haven’t hit that mark yet, the amount left on the live music tip line goes to the venue until the house recoups the remainder of what it must pay the band at the end of the night. But, again, only if the customer wouldn’t pay a cover.
“The most expensive seat in a restaurant like this is the empty one,” says DeNinno, explaining that if a prospective patron turns around and walks out upon hearing that there’s a cover, then neither Chris’ nor the musicians have a chance of seeing any money from that person.
“I love it,” says pianist James Santangelo, who leads the late night jazz jam at Chris’ every Saturday. And why wouldn’t he love it? “This past Saturday, we got our full guaranteed fee that we’re very happy with, but we also got about $200 in tips.”
Philadelphia saxophonist Victor North has been a fixture at Chris’ and the Philadelphia jazz scene at large for over 20 years. (Like Santangelo, he gets a guaranteed flat rate for his shows.) He calls the new live music tipping policy “a worthy experiment.” The way North sees it, Philadelphians are notorious for griping about paying covers.
“They’ll stop at the door when they find out about a cover, and they really have to think about it, unless it was their intention to go to see the band in the first place,” he says. “But Philadelphians do tend to tip fairly well. So I see this as a great option for the city as we are.”
North laments that musicians have been having a harder and harder time getting paid to begin with but also points out that dedicated Philadelphia jazz clubs have almost dwindled into non-existence. In other words, if you want to play jazz in Philadelphia, you don’t have a ton of options.
“The tips are a good idea,” he says. “As long as it doesn’t — and I don’t think it was intended to — replace the idea of paying musicians who get a guaranteed amount of money.”
But not everyone is in favor of the idea.
I spoke with one disapproving local jazz musician, who asked us not to use his name for fear of losing gigs at Chris’. (Again, few options for jazz players in this city.) He’s played gigs there for a split of the door, and at shows like that, it’s not uncommon for only a handful of people to show up.
So if you’re a four-piece band with a $10 cover, and only 20 people pay that cover, your payout at the end of the night based on a 70/30 split is just $140, to be divided among the players. For the club to take 30-percent of the live music tips left by those who don’t want to pay a cover seems unfair to him. “I already feel like I’m being robbed,” he says. Still, he takes the gigs — and remember, if a customer walks out the door without paying a cover, his band would get zero from that person.
Philadelphia musician Anthony Tidd is the Creative Music Program Director for the Kimmel Center as well as a frequent customer at Chris’. While he has issues with the tipping program, he doesn’t take aim at Chris’ itself.
“The problem is not Chris’ Jazz Cafe,” he insisted last week in a Facebook post about the live music tips. “Clubs are always going to do whatever they can to make money and increase profit. The problem is the art culture of Philly. One cannot talk about how great a city is for Art, and then say that there are almost no venues that support said Art. If Philly was a city that truly appreciated art, then some of the world’s greatest jazz musicians would [not have just] one jazz venue to choose from.”
As for the tips, he called Chris’ program “insulting.”
“To me, the entire concept of tipping is backwards and has no place in what is supposed to be Philly’s last surviving jazz venue,” he wrote in a subsequent post. “Professional musicians, of a level high enough to be hired in the first place, should not have to play for tips. People tip because they know that the server or bartender cannot survive on what the restaurant is paying them. Period! In other words, the restaurant passes on the cost of service (having a staff) to the customer. Then if the customer doesn’t want to tip, they get bitched out by the staff for being stingy, when the staff should really be looking at the owner who is underpaying them by at least 20%. Including this for musicians is not a positive move……It’s insulting.”
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Ernie Santosuosso, Globe critic who covered music from Miles Davis to Springsteen, dies at 93 – The Boston Globe
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/20/ernie-santosuosso-globe-critic-who-covered-music-from-miles-davis-springsteen-dies/5DKJRottfN210XNKQXaJhN/story.html
** Ernie Santosuosso, 93; Globe critic for music from rock to jazz
————————————————————
By Bryan Marquard (https://www.bostonglobe.com/staff/marquard) GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 21, 2015
Boston Globe critic Ernie Santosuosso covered all sorts of music from the 1960s on, though his preference was jazz.
Ernie Santosuosso sat in a hotel room with the Beatles in 1965, hours before the band’s final Boston performance, which he reviewed for the Globe from a perch next to “a set of ominous-looking speakers.” Given the proximity, he wrote, “I didn’t miss a note,” despite Beatlemania’s famous screaming fans.
As a Globe critic, Mr. Santosuosso ranged across popular music, interviewing the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney, but his heart was always in jazz, a realm where one assignment remained his most memorable.
“When will I learn never to ask Miles Davis what he’s going to play? After putting the question to him Tuesday night, I could tell by the familiar glower that I should have worn a shield,” Mr. Santosuosso wrote in 1972. “ ‘I don’t talk about my music,’ he rasped back. ‘I just want you to listen.’ . . . Not wanting to push my luck, I decided to listen first.” As for the trumpeter’s playing, he added: “In brief, the music of Miles Davis never bores.”
Mr. Santosuosso, who was long considered the dean of Boston jazz critics and who helped launch the Boston Globe Jazz Festival in 1966, died Monday in Southwood at Norwell Nursing Center. He was 93 and had lived in Braintree for many years.
Though he penned some 3,500 reviews and interviews for the Globe over the course of 31 years, he was a late bloomer as a writer. Hired initially as a copy editor, Mr. Santosuosso was 42 when a Globe arts editor asked him to conduct a post-concert dressing room interview with Johnny Mathis in 1965. Mr. Santosuosso described the singer as “a 29-year-old, 5-foot-7-inch, 150-pound will-o’-the-wisp who, only minutes earlier, had returned a conqueror over a packed opening night house.”
About a dozen years later, Mr. Santosuosso moved into writing about jazz nearly full time, easing away from pop music as punk rock flowered. But he began his critic duties during the British invasion and reviewed nearly every popular musician who played in Boston during rock music’s ascendancy in the 1960s and early 1970s. “If I had my druthers, and I do, I would ascribe to the Beatles, alone, the stamp of virtuosity in the field of rock ’n’ roll,” he wrote in 1965.
Younger writers whom Mr. Santosuosso inspired and mentored thought he possessed a virtuosity of his own. “He helped me write quickly. He set an example,” said Steve Morse, a former Globe pop music critic Mr. Santosuosso brought into the newspaper.
“He was one of the fastest deadline writers I’ve ever seen. His fingers would be a blur over the typewriter,” Morse said. “I would be wracking my brain and working up a terrific anxiety, and Ernie would kind of calm me down and say, ‘Don’t deliberate too much. Just write what you feel and get it out there.’ He was a true daily newspaperman.”
John S. Driscoll, who was managing editor and then editor of the Globe during part of Mr. Santosuosso’s tenure, said that “beyond music he was a very learned guy. He was a good man. He was always fun to be around, but you knew he was dependable and capable. It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Former Globe managing editor Thomas Mulvoy recalled that “whenever the name Ernie Santosuosso came up in conversation inside and outside the Globe, the words ‘such a gentleman’ followed in very short order. Tucked behind his warm and engaging nature was a keen mind that, in his reporting and critical writings, centered on the essence of things, especially when it came to jazz in its many forms.”
The oldest of six siblings, Mr. Santosuosso was born at home in Dorchester. His father, Benjamin Santosuosso, was a cobbler and an Italian immigrant. His mother, the former Margaret Litto, was a meat wrapper whose parents were from Italy.
Mr. Santosuosso went to English High School and planned to become a French or Latin teacher when he went to Boston College. Instead, he joined the student newspaper, was editor by his senior year, and became a BC correspondent for the Boston Post. After graduating in 1943, he served in the Army and was stationed in the South Pacific, telling the college’s magazine in 1984 that he “wasn’t in any great danger. I think I tripped in the mess hall once.”
Returning home, he went to Boston College Law School, but found the experience so stressful that he walked out of a class his final year and never returned. He spent a decade working as a carpenter, tutoring students in French, Latin, and math, and writing for a community newspaper before the Globe hired him at the end of the 1950s as a part-time copy editor.
In 1963, he married Janet Flynn, who worked for New England Telephone and with whom he traveled often. Known for his whimsy on and off the page, Mr. Santosuosso wrote a 1976 travel piece about one of their trips in the Caribbean: “The vacation cruise has been described as an epicurean orgy in which copious amounts of food delicacies, round-the-clock revelry, and 57 varieties of Bingo are within comfortable reach of the passenger.” When his wife died in 2000, he fondly recalled her love of fashion and clothes, saying she held a “black belt” in shopping.
They did not have children and Mr. Santosuosso was a generous, attentive uncle. “Every Easter, he and his wife hosted a huge Easter egg hunt for the nieces and nephews, and then the grand-nieces and the grand-nephews,” said one of his nieces, Michele Callinan of Holbrook.
He also was a dedicated parishioner and usher at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree. In retirement, Callinan said, “you would find him at not just one Mass on Sunday, but at multiple Masses.
Mr. Santosuosso leaves three siblings, Agnes Brown of North Quincy, Alfred of Braintree, and Therese Macdermott of Holbrook.
A funeral Mass will be said at 12:30 p.m. Friday in St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree.
Mr. Santosuosso’s conversations with musicians had an easy intimacy, even though he often was 20 or 30 years older than the rock stars he interviewed. In 1977, he spoke with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones and wrote that neither seemed “disturbed over advancing age or the tag of venerability they are destined to acquire.” The musicians were then in their early-30s. “I guess I’ll settle down when I’m a lot older,” Jagger told him.
Despite his preference for jazz, Mr. Santosuosso’s tastes were expansive. A 1978 list of albums he recommended as holiday gifts included work by musicians including Donna Summer, Billy Joel, Ella Fitzgerald, the Dexter Gordon Quartet, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, and Steely Dan. On another occasion, Mr. Santosuosso wrote that Judy Garland was the most exciting performer he had seen, “even on her worst nights.”
“Ernie always looked for the good in musicians,” recalled Morse, his former colleague. “He helped a lot of musicians and was more of an encouraging critic. Ernie saw the positive side of someone’s music. He was not cynical or jaded, and I think that was his best quality as a writer.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com (mailto:bmarquard@globe.com) .
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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Ernie Santosuosso, Globe critic who covered music from Miles Davis to Springsteen, dies at 93 – The Boston Globe
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/20/ernie-santosuosso-globe-critic-who-covered-music-from-miles-davis-springsteen-dies/5DKJRottfN210XNKQXaJhN/story.html
** Ernie Santosuosso, 93; Globe critic for music from rock to jazz
————————————————————
By Bryan Marquard (https://www.bostonglobe.com/staff/marquard) GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 21, 2015
Boston Globe critic Ernie Santosuosso covered all sorts of music from the 1960s on, though his preference was jazz.
Ernie Santosuosso sat in a hotel room with the Beatles in 1965, hours before the band’s final Boston performance, which he reviewed for the Globe from a perch next to “a set of ominous-looking speakers.” Given the proximity, he wrote, “I didn’t miss a note,” despite Beatlemania’s famous screaming fans.
As a Globe critic, Mr. Santosuosso ranged across popular music, interviewing the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney, but his heart was always in jazz, a realm where one assignment remained his most memorable.
“When will I learn never to ask Miles Davis what he’s going to play? After putting the question to him Tuesday night, I could tell by the familiar glower that I should have worn a shield,” Mr. Santosuosso wrote in 1972. “ ‘I don’t talk about my music,’ he rasped back. ‘I just want you to listen.’ . . . Not wanting to push my luck, I decided to listen first.” As for the trumpeter’s playing, he added: “In brief, the music of Miles Davis never bores.”
Mr. Santosuosso, who was long considered the dean of Boston jazz critics and who helped launch the Boston Globe Jazz Festival in 1966, died Monday in Southwood at Norwell Nursing Center. He was 93 and had lived in Braintree for many years.
Though he penned some 3,500 reviews and interviews for the Globe over the course of 31 years, he was a late bloomer as a writer. Hired initially as a copy editor, Mr. Santosuosso was 42 when a Globe arts editor asked him to conduct a post-concert dressing room interview with Johnny Mathis in 1965. Mr. Santosuosso described the singer as “a 29-year-old, 5-foot-7-inch, 150-pound will-o’-the-wisp who, only minutes earlier, had returned a conqueror over a packed opening night house.”
About a dozen years later, Mr. Santosuosso moved into writing about jazz nearly full time, easing away from pop music as punk rock flowered. But he began his critic duties during the British invasion and reviewed nearly every popular musician who played in Boston during rock music’s ascendancy in the 1960s and early 1970s. “If I had my druthers, and I do, I would ascribe to the Beatles, alone, the stamp of virtuosity in the field of rock ’n’ roll,” he wrote in 1965.
Younger writers whom Mr. Santosuosso inspired and mentored thought he possessed a virtuosity of his own. “He helped me write quickly. He set an example,” said Steve Morse, a former Globe pop music critic Mr. Santosuosso brought into the newspaper.
“He was one of the fastest deadline writers I’ve ever seen. His fingers would be a blur over the typewriter,” Morse said. “I would be wracking my brain and working up a terrific anxiety, and Ernie would kind of calm me down and say, ‘Don’t deliberate too much. Just write what you feel and get it out there.’ He was a true daily newspaperman.”
John S. Driscoll, who was managing editor and then editor of the Globe during part of Mr. Santosuosso’s tenure, said that “beyond music he was a very learned guy. He was a good man. He was always fun to be around, but you knew he was dependable and capable. It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Former Globe managing editor Thomas Mulvoy recalled that “whenever the name Ernie Santosuosso came up in conversation inside and outside the Globe, the words ‘such a gentleman’ followed in very short order. Tucked behind his warm and engaging nature was a keen mind that, in his reporting and critical writings, centered on the essence of things, especially when it came to jazz in its many forms.”
The oldest of six siblings, Mr. Santosuosso was born at home in Dorchester. His father, Benjamin Santosuosso, was a cobbler and an Italian immigrant. His mother, the former Margaret Litto, was a meat wrapper whose parents were from Italy.
Mr. Santosuosso went to English High School and planned to become a French or Latin teacher when he went to Boston College. Instead, he joined the student newspaper, was editor by his senior year, and became a BC correspondent for the Boston Post. After graduating in 1943, he served in the Army and was stationed in the South Pacific, telling the college’s magazine in 1984 that he “wasn’t in any great danger. I think I tripped in the mess hall once.”
Returning home, he went to Boston College Law School, but found the experience so stressful that he walked out of a class his final year and never returned. He spent a decade working as a carpenter, tutoring students in French, Latin, and math, and writing for a community newspaper before the Globe hired him at the end of the 1950s as a part-time copy editor.
In 1963, he married Janet Flynn, who worked for New England Telephone and with whom he traveled often. Known for his whimsy on and off the page, Mr. Santosuosso wrote a 1976 travel piece about one of their trips in the Caribbean: “The vacation cruise has been described as an epicurean orgy in which copious amounts of food delicacies, round-the-clock revelry, and 57 varieties of Bingo are within comfortable reach of the passenger.” When his wife died in 2000, he fondly recalled her love of fashion and clothes, saying she held a “black belt” in shopping.
They did not have children and Mr. Santosuosso was a generous, attentive uncle. “Every Easter, he and his wife hosted a huge Easter egg hunt for the nieces and nephews, and then the grand-nieces and the grand-nephews,” said one of his nieces, Michele Callinan of Holbrook.
He also was a dedicated parishioner and usher at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree. In retirement, Callinan said, “you would find him at not just one Mass on Sunday, but at multiple Masses.
Mr. Santosuosso leaves three siblings, Agnes Brown of North Quincy, Alfred of Braintree, and Therese Macdermott of Holbrook.
A funeral Mass will be said at 12:30 p.m. Friday in St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree.
Mr. Santosuosso’s conversations with musicians had an easy intimacy, even though he often was 20 or 30 years older than the rock stars he interviewed. In 1977, he spoke with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones and wrote that neither seemed “disturbed over advancing age or the tag of venerability they are destined to acquire.” The musicians were then in their early-30s. “I guess I’ll settle down when I’m a lot older,” Jagger told him.
Despite his preference for jazz, Mr. Santosuosso’s tastes were expansive. A 1978 list of albums he recommended as holiday gifts included work by musicians including Donna Summer, Billy Joel, Ella Fitzgerald, the Dexter Gordon Quartet, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, and Steely Dan. On another occasion, Mr. Santosuosso wrote that Judy Garland was the most exciting performer he had seen, “even on her worst nights.”
“Ernie always looked for the good in musicians,” recalled Morse, his former colleague. “He helped a lot of musicians and was more of an encouraging critic. Ernie saw the positive side of someone’s music. He was not cynical or jaded, and I think that was his best quality as a writer.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com (mailto:bmarquard@globe.com) .
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=8174876a4a) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=8174876a4a&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Ernie Santosuosso, Globe critic who covered music from Miles Davis to Springsteen, dies at 93 – The Boston Globe
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/20/ernie-santosuosso-globe-critic-who-covered-music-from-miles-davis-springsteen-dies/5DKJRottfN210XNKQXaJhN/story.html
** Ernie Santosuosso, 93; Globe critic for music from rock to jazz
————————————————————
By Bryan Marquard (https://www.bostonglobe.com/staff/marquard) GLOBE STAFF OCTOBER 21, 2015
Boston Globe critic Ernie Santosuosso covered all sorts of music from the 1960s on, though his preference was jazz.
Ernie Santosuosso sat in a hotel room with the Beatles in 1965, hours before the band’s final Boston performance, which he reviewed for the Globe from a perch next to “a set of ominous-looking speakers.” Given the proximity, he wrote, “I didn’t miss a note,” despite Beatlemania’s famous screaming fans.
As a Globe critic, Mr. Santosuosso ranged across popular music, interviewing the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney, but his heart was always in jazz, a realm where one assignment remained his most memorable.
“When will I learn never to ask Miles Davis what he’s going to play? After putting the question to him Tuesday night, I could tell by the familiar glower that I should have worn a shield,” Mr. Santosuosso wrote in 1972. “ ‘I don’t talk about my music,’ he rasped back. ‘I just want you to listen.’ . . . Not wanting to push my luck, I decided to listen first.” As for the trumpeter’s playing, he added: “In brief, the music of Miles Davis never bores.”
Mr. Santosuosso, who was long considered the dean of Boston jazz critics and who helped launch the Boston Globe Jazz Festival in 1966, died Monday in Southwood at Norwell Nursing Center. He was 93 and had lived in Braintree for many years.
Though he penned some 3,500 reviews and interviews for the Globe over the course of 31 years, he was a late bloomer as a writer. Hired initially as a copy editor, Mr. Santosuosso was 42 when a Globe arts editor asked him to conduct a post-concert dressing room interview with Johnny Mathis in 1965. Mr. Santosuosso described the singer as “a 29-year-old, 5-foot-7-inch, 150-pound will-o’-the-wisp who, only minutes earlier, had returned a conqueror over a packed opening night house.”
About a dozen years later, Mr. Santosuosso moved into writing about jazz nearly full time, easing away from pop music as punk rock flowered. But he began his critic duties during the British invasion and reviewed nearly every popular musician who played in Boston during rock music’s ascendancy in the 1960s and early 1970s. “If I had my druthers, and I do, I would ascribe to the Beatles, alone, the stamp of virtuosity in the field of rock ’n’ roll,” he wrote in 1965.
Younger writers whom Mr. Santosuosso inspired and mentored thought he possessed a virtuosity of his own. “He helped me write quickly. He set an example,” said Steve Morse, a former Globe pop music critic Mr. Santosuosso brought into the newspaper.
“He was one of the fastest deadline writers I’ve ever seen. His fingers would be a blur over the typewriter,” Morse said. “I would be wracking my brain and working up a terrific anxiety, and Ernie would kind of calm me down and say, ‘Don’t deliberate too much. Just write what you feel and get it out there.’ He was a true daily newspaperman.”
John S. Driscoll, who was managing editor and then editor of the Globe during part of Mr. Santosuosso’s tenure, said that “beyond music he was a very learned guy. He was a good man. He was always fun to be around, but you knew he was dependable and capable. It doesn’t get much better than that.”
Former Globe managing editor Thomas Mulvoy recalled that “whenever the name Ernie Santosuosso came up in conversation inside and outside the Globe, the words ‘such a gentleman’ followed in very short order. Tucked behind his warm and engaging nature was a keen mind that, in his reporting and critical writings, centered on the essence of things, especially when it came to jazz in its many forms.”
The oldest of six siblings, Mr. Santosuosso was born at home in Dorchester. His father, Benjamin Santosuosso, was a cobbler and an Italian immigrant. His mother, the former Margaret Litto, was a meat wrapper whose parents were from Italy.
Mr. Santosuosso went to English High School and planned to become a French or Latin teacher when he went to Boston College. Instead, he joined the student newspaper, was editor by his senior year, and became a BC correspondent for the Boston Post. After graduating in 1943, he served in the Army and was stationed in the South Pacific, telling the college’s magazine in 1984 that he “wasn’t in any great danger. I think I tripped in the mess hall once.”
Returning home, he went to Boston College Law School, but found the experience so stressful that he walked out of a class his final year and never returned. He spent a decade working as a carpenter, tutoring students in French, Latin, and math, and writing for a community newspaper before the Globe hired him at the end of the 1950s as a part-time copy editor.
In 1963, he married Janet Flynn, who worked for New England Telephone and with whom he traveled often. Known for his whimsy on and off the page, Mr. Santosuosso wrote a 1976 travel piece about one of their trips in the Caribbean: “The vacation cruise has been described as an epicurean orgy in which copious amounts of food delicacies, round-the-clock revelry, and 57 varieties of Bingo are within comfortable reach of the passenger.” When his wife died in 2000, he fondly recalled her love of fashion and clothes, saying she held a “black belt” in shopping.
They did not have children and Mr. Santosuosso was a generous, attentive uncle. “Every Easter, he and his wife hosted a huge Easter egg hunt for the nieces and nephews, and then the grand-nieces and the grand-nephews,” said one of his nieces, Michele Callinan of Holbrook.
He also was a dedicated parishioner and usher at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree. In retirement, Callinan said, “you would find him at not just one Mass on Sunday, but at multiple Masses.
Mr. Santosuosso leaves three siblings, Agnes Brown of North Quincy, Alfred of Braintree, and Therese Macdermott of Holbrook.
A funeral Mass will be said at 12:30 p.m. Friday in St. Francis of Assisi Church in Braintree.
Mr. Santosuosso’s conversations with musicians had an easy intimacy, even though he often was 20 or 30 years older than the rock stars he interviewed. In 1977, he spoke with Mick Jagger and Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones and wrote that neither seemed “disturbed over advancing age or the tag of venerability they are destined to acquire.” The musicians were then in their early-30s. “I guess I’ll settle down when I’m a lot older,” Jagger told him.
Despite his preference for jazz, Mr. Santosuosso’s tastes were expansive. A 1978 list of albums he recommended as holiday gifts included work by musicians including Donna Summer, Billy Joel, Ella Fitzgerald, the Dexter Gordon Quartet, Willie Nelson, Linda Ronstadt, and Steely Dan. On another occasion, Mr. Santosuosso wrote that Judy Garland was the most exciting performer he had seen, “even on her worst nights.”
“Ernie always looked for the good in musicians,” recalled Morse, his former colleague. “He helped a lot of musicians and was more of an encouraging critic. Ernie saw the positive side of someone’s music. He was not cynical or jaded, and I think that was his best quality as a writer.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com (mailto:bmarquard@globe.com) .
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/t-magazine/frank-sinatra-and-billie-holiday-bond.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151019
** Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way
————————————————————
Critic at Large (http://www.nytimes.com/column/critic-at-large)
By JODY ROSEN
More than just contemporaries, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday were mutual admirers who pushed each other musically. From left: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In life, the two may have been miles apart in circumstance and success. But as each other’s great influences, they’ll be forever one.
BILLIE HOLIDAY, née Eleanora Fagan, was born in Philadelphia, 100 years ago this past April 7. Eight months later, on Dec. 12, 1915, Francis Albert Sinatra arrived, about 95 miles up the coast in Hoboken, N.J. The birth of these two great — arguably, greatest — popular singers, in the same year, a century ago, might be deemed a cosmic fluke, an accident of history. You could also call it history in action. They were born into a still-primitive pop music universe, but changes were afoot. By the time they turned pro, as teenagers in the 1930s, American music had been reshaped by modernity: by the blues and jazz and suave Broadway pop, by electrical recording and microphones and radio. This new brand of music and set of technological tools were ideally suited to Holiday and Sinatra’s talents — an artistry based on uncommon musical and emotional intelligence and expressed through miraculously shrewd and subtle vocal phrasing. Had Eleanora and Francis been born in another year,
had they come of age in a different musical world, they might never have become Lady Day and the Voice.
They were linked by more than just the coincidence of their birth year. We associate Holiday and Sinatra with other muses and collaborators — she with the saxophonist Lester Young, he with the arranger Nelson Riddle — but throughout their careers, the singers exerted a powerful pull on one another. Their paths crossed early. Sinatra first saw Holiday perform sometime in the late ’30s; he became an instant devotee. In 1944, Holiday told columnist Earl Wilson that she’d offered Sinatra advice on his singing. ‘‘I told him certain notes at the end he could bend. … Bending those notes — that’s all I helped Frankie with.’’ Sinatra made no secret of his debt to Holiday: ‘‘It is Billie Holiday … who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me,’’ he said in 1958. In ‘‘Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra,’’ from 2003, George Jacobs, the singer’s former valet, writes that Sinatra visited Holiday in her New York City hospital room in July 1959, shortly befo
re her death from drug and alcohol-related liver and heart disease. When Holiday died, Sinatra holed up in his penthouse for two days, weeping, drinking and playing her records.
Continue reading the main story
The Holiday-Sinatra bond, in other words, was a classic relationship of guru and disciple. Certainly, Holiday was the more precocious of the two. She began singing in Harlem jazz clubs at age 16 and cut her first records as an 18-year-old in 1933. By the time she returned to the studio in 1935, she was a revelation — neither the white balladeers who dominated the Hit Parade nor the black blues queens from whose ranks she emerged provided a precedent for her. By traditional measures, she didn’t have much of an instrument. Her voice was small and slight. She delivered songs in a midrange drawl that cracked and creaked when she ventured north and south — a bit shrill in the upper register, a touch hoarse on the low end. Yet the result was inviting and beguiling. Like a cool enveloping mist, it was a sound to get lost in.
Her approach to rhythm was cunning. She meandered around the beat, slyly elongating and truncating syllables, gliding down for a landing in surprising places. Sinatra was captivated by the third song she ever recorded, ‘‘I Wished on the Moon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD7b1ts2fUg) ,’’ a stock-standard Tin Pan Alley ballad that Holiday, with deft tugs at the melody, transforms into something deeper: a celebration of ecstatic new romance tinged with the melancholy awareness that love fades.
Sinatra signing an autograph for Holiday in the 1940s.
On that record, as on so many others, you can hear Holiday batting bedroom eyes. She was a beautiful woman, but it was her husky voice, and the knowledge of earthly pleasures that it conveyed, that made her a sex symbol. As for Sinatra, even as a tyro — a babyfaced 25-year-old fronting Tommy Dorsey’s band in a bow tie too big for his string-bean frame — the throb in his song was unmistakable. From Holiday, he’d learned that, ideally, musical seduction was a subtle art. His come-ons were staked on telling details: minute vocal shading, delicately dabbed colors, the teasing extra half-beat pause before the headlong plunge into the chorus. Those notes that Holiday told him to bend — they bent toward the boudoir.
Of course, the message of Holiday and Sinatra wasn’t just sex. It was pain. To put the matter in genre terms: Both Holiday and Sinatra were torch singers. In Sinatra’s case, this was a novelty. Torch singing had traditionally been women’s work, but his records made the case that a bruiser in a fedora could love as hard, could hurt as bad, as any dame. He proclaimed himself an ‘‘18-karat manic depressive,’’ and you could hear it even in up-tempo songs like his tumultuous 1956 version of ‘‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiSKXxWgA4w) ’’: the singer gusting from ecstasy to despair and back again, along the crests and crashes of Riddle’s orchestrations. His ballads cut even deeper. On albums like ‘‘In the Wee Small Hours,’’ Sinatra cast himself as a noir gumshoe, pursuing an insoluble case: ‘‘What is this thing called love? … Who can solve its mystery?’’ Holiday played a more traditional role. In ‘‘My Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=IQlehVpcAes) ,’’ ‘‘Don’t Explain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45YPO2FyXVI) ’’ and other torch ballads, she was the bruised diva, doomed to masochistic love with callous men. But there was more: a spirit of resiliency and unflappable cool in the face of cruelty you could detect in all her music, from the most standard pop-jazz genre fare to the anti-lynching anthem ‘‘Strange Fruit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI) .’’ In Holiday’s hands, a torch song was also a protest song.
The fates of the two singers can stand as a parable about race in 20th-century America. Holiday was an adored cult artist who never reached superstardom during her lifetime. When she died, at age 44, she had 70 cents in her bank account. She spent her last days in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital under police guard; she’d been placed under arrest in her hospital bed, on drug possession charges. Sinatra outlived his hero by 39 years. He released dozens of albums, including a few of the best ever made, and a handful of duds, too. He was feted by presidents and died a multimillionaire.
Today, Holiday and Sinatra are so shrouded in myth it can be hard to see them clearly. But when you listen to their records, the clouds part. Frequently, you find them playing against type. Sinatra is often celebrated as the swaggering Rat-Packer, Holiday as a tragic balladeer. Yet it’s Holiday’s music that percolates with greater joie de vivre, and Sinatra’s that scrapes darker depths. One of my favorite parlor games is to listen to the singers’ versions of the same songs: to hear the hay that they both made of ‘‘All of Me’’ or ‘‘Day In, Day Out,’’ to observe their different angles of attack on ‘‘Night and Day’’ — Holiday’s playful and insouciant, Sinatra’s grand, booming, brooding. Then there are those moments when the two giants directly address one other. Sinatra was the acolyte, but the flow of influence reversed on Holiday’s lavishly orchestrated ‘‘Lady in Satin’’ (1958), an homage to Sinatra’s Capitol Records concept albums. Holiday made the connection
explicit by opening the LP with a tremulous version of ‘‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’’ Sinatra’s signature torch song, co-written by the man himself. A few years later, Sinatra answered back on a recording of the standard ‘‘Yesterdays,’’ a Holiday staple. At the 1:11 mark of that song, Sinatra sings the word ‘‘then,’’ unleashing a dramatically low and rumbling descending vocal line. Keen-eared listeners picked it up right away: This was Ol’ Blue Eyes doing his Billie Holiday impression. A century after their births, Holiday and Sinatra are still talking to each other. What a privilege it is to listen in.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/t-magazine/frank-sinatra-and-billie-holiday-bond.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151019
** Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way
————————————————————
Critic at Large (http://www.nytimes.com/column/critic-at-large)
By JODY ROSEN
More than just contemporaries, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday were mutual admirers who pushed each other musically. From left: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In life, the two may have been miles apart in circumstance and success. But as each other’s great influences, they’ll be forever one.
BILLIE HOLIDAY, née Eleanora Fagan, was born in Philadelphia, 100 years ago this past April 7. Eight months later, on Dec. 12, 1915, Francis Albert Sinatra arrived, about 95 miles up the coast in Hoboken, N.J. The birth of these two great — arguably, greatest — popular singers, in the same year, a century ago, might be deemed a cosmic fluke, an accident of history. You could also call it history in action. They were born into a still-primitive pop music universe, but changes were afoot. By the time they turned pro, as teenagers in the 1930s, American music had been reshaped by modernity: by the blues and jazz and suave Broadway pop, by electrical recording and microphones and radio. This new brand of music and set of technological tools were ideally suited to Holiday and Sinatra’s talents — an artistry based on uncommon musical and emotional intelligence and expressed through miraculously shrewd and subtle vocal phrasing. Had Eleanora and Francis been born in another year,
had they come of age in a different musical world, they might never have become Lady Day and the Voice.
They were linked by more than just the coincidence of their birth year. We associate Holiday and Sinatra with other muses and collaborators — she with the saxophonist Lester Young, he with the arranger Nelson Riddle — but throughout their careers, the singers exerted a powerful pull on one another. Their paths crossed early. Sinatra first saw Holiday perform sometime in the late ’30s; he became an instant devotee. In 1944, Holiday told columnist Earl Wilson that she’d offered Sinatra advice on his singing. ‘‘I told him certain notes at the end he could bend. … Bending those notes — that’s all I helped Frankie with.’’ Sinatra made no secret of his debt to Holiday: ‘‘It is Billie Holiday … who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me,’’ he said in 1958. In ‘‘Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra,’’ from 2003, George Jacobs, the singer’s former valet, writes that Sinatra visited Holiday in her New York City hospital room in July 1959, shortly befo
re her death from drug and alcohol-related liver and heart disease. When Holiday died, Sinatra holed up in his penthouse for two days, weeping, drinking and playing her records.
Continue reading the main story
The Holiday-Sinatra bond, in other words, was a classic relationship of guru and disciple. Certainly, Holiday was the more precocious of the two. She began singing in Harlem jazz clubs at age 16 and cut her first records as an 18-year-old in 1933. By the time she returned to the studio in 1935, she was a revelation — neither the white balladeers who dominated the Hit Parade nor the black blues queens from whose ranks she emerged provided a precedent for her. By traditional measures, she didn’t have much of an instrument. Her voice was small and slight. She delivered songs in a midrange drawl that cracked and creaked when she ventured north and south — a bit shrill in the upper register, a touch hoarse on the low end. Yet the result was inviting and beguiling. Like a cool enveloping mist, it was a sound to get lost in.
Her approach to rhythm was cunning. She meandered around the beat, slyly elongating and truncating syllables, gliding down for a landing in surprising places. Sinatra was captivated by the third song she ever recorded, ‘‘I Wished on the Moon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD7b1ts2fUg) ,’’ a stock-standard Tin Pan Alley ballad that Holiday, with deft tugs at the melody, transforms into something deeper: a celebration of ecstatic new romance tinged with the melancholy awareness that love fades.
Sinatra signing an autograph for Holiday in the 1940s.
On that record, as on so many others, you can hear Holiday batting bedroom eyes. She was a beautiful woman, but it was her husky voice, and the knowledge of earthly pleasures that it conveyed, that made her a sex symbol. As for Sinatra, even as a tyro — a babyfaced 25-year-old fronting Tommy Dorsey’s band in a bow tie too big for his string-bean frame — the throb in his song was unmistakable. From Holiday, he’d learned that, ideally, musical seduction was a subtle art. His come-ons were staked on telling details: minute vocal shading, delicately dabbed colors, the teasing extra half-beat pause before the headlong plunge into the chorus. Those notes that Holiday told him to bend — they bent toward the boudoir.
Of course, the message of Holiday and Sinatra wasn’t just sex. It was pain. To put the matter in genre terms: Both Holiday and Sinatra were torch singers. In Sinatra’s case, this was a novelty. Torch singing had traditionally been women’s work, but his records made the case that a bruiser in a fedora could love as hard, could hurt as bad, as any dame. He proclaimed himself an ‘‘18-karat manic depressive,’’ and you could hear it even in up-tempo songs like his tumultuous 1956 version of ‘‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiSKXxWgA4w) ’’: the singer gusting from ecstasy to despair and back again, along the crests and crashes of Riddle’s orchestrations. His ballads cut even deeper. On albums like ‘‘In the Wee Small Hours,’’ Sinatra cast himself as a noir gumshoe, pursuing an insoluble case: ‘‘What is this thing called love? … Who can solve its mystery?’’ Holiday played a more traditional role. In ‘‘My Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=IQlehVpcAes) ,’’ ‘‘Don’t Explain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45YPO2FyXVI) ’’ and other torch ballads, she was the bruised diva, doomed to masochistic love with callous men. But there was more: a spirit of resiliency and unflappable cool in the face of cruelty you could detect in all her music, from the most standard pop-jazz genre fare to the anti-lynching anthem ‘‘Strange Fruit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI) .’’ In Holiday’s hands, a torch song was also a protest song.
The fates of the two singers can stand as a parable about race in 20th-century America. Holiday was an adored cult artist who never reached superstardom during her lifetime. When she died, at age 44, she had 70 cents in her bank account. She spent her last days in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital under police guard; she’d been placed under arrest in her hospital bed, on drug possession charges. Sinatra outlived his hero by 39 years. He released dozens of albums, including a few of the best ever made, and a handful of duds, too. He was feted by presidents and died a multimillionaire.
Today, Holiday and Sinatra are so shrouded in myth it can be hard to see them clearly. But when you listen to their records, the clouds part. Frequently, you find them playing against type. Sinatra is often celebrated as the swaggering Rat-Packer, Holiday as a tragic balladeer. Yet it’s Holiday’s music that percolates with greater joie de vivre, and Sinatra’s that scrapes darker depths. One of my favorite parlor games is to listen to the singers’ versions of the same songs: to hear the hay that they both made of ‘‘All of Me’’ or ‘‘Day In, Day Out,’’ to observe their different angles of attack on ‘‘Night and Day’’ — Holiday’s playful and insouciant, Sinatra’s grand, booming, brooding. Then there are those moments when the two giants directly address one other. Sinatra was the acolyte, but the flow of influence reversed on Holiday’s lavishly orchestrated ‘‘Lady in Satin’’ (1958), an homage to Sinatra’s Capitol Records concept albums. Holiday made the connection
explicit by opening the LP with a tremulous version of ‘‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’’ Sinatra’s signature torch song, co-written by the man himself. A few years later, Sinatra answered back on a recording of the standard ‘‘Yesterdays,’’ a Holiday staple. At the 1:11 mark of that song, Sinatra sings the word ‘‘then,’’ unleashing a dramatically low and rumbling descending vocal line. Keen-eared listeners picked it up right away: This was Ol’ Blue Eyes doing his Billie Holiday impression. A century after their births, Holiday and Sinatra are still talking to each other. What a privilege it is to listen in.
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/19/t-magazine/frank-sinatra-and-billie-holiday-bond.html?emc=edit_tnt_20151019
** Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday: They Did It Their Way
————————————————————
Critic at Large (http://www.nytimes.com/column/critic-at-large)
By JODY ROSEN
More than just contemporaries, Frank Sinatra and Billie Holiday were mutual admirers who pushed each other musically. From left: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
In life, the two may have been miles apart in circumstance and success. But as each other’s great influences, they’ll be forever one.
BILLIE HOLIDAY, née Eleanora Fagan, was born in Philadelphia, 100 years ago this past April 7. Eight months later, on Dec. 12, 1915, Francis Albert Sinatra arrived, about 95 miles up the coast in Hoboken, N.J. The birth of these two great — arguably, greatest — popular singers, in the same year, a century ago, might be deemed a cosmic fluke, an accident of history. You could also call it history in action. They were born into a still-primitive pop music universe, but changes were afoot. By the time they turned pro, as teenagers in the 1930s, American music had been reshaped by modernity: by the blues and jazz and suave Broadway pop, by electrical recording and microphones and radio. This new brand of music and set of technological tools were ideally suited to Holiday and Sinatra’s talents — an artistry based on uncommon musical and emotional intelligence and expressed through miraculously shrewd and subtle vocal phrasing. Had Eleanora and Francis been born in another year,
had they come of age in a different musical world, they might never have become Lady Day and the Voice.
They were linked by more than just the coincidence of their birth year. We associate Holiday and Sinatra with other muses and collaborators — she with the saxophonist Lester Young, he with the arranger Nelson Riddle — but throughout their careers, the singers exerted a powerful pull on one another. Their paths crossed early. Sinatra first saw Holiday perform sometime in the late ’30s; he became an instant devotee. In 1944, Holiday told columnist Earl Wilson that she’d offered Sinatra advice on his singing. ‘‘I told him certain notes at the end he could bend. … Bending those notes — that’s all I helped Frankie with.’’ Sinatra made no secret of his debt to Holiday: ‘‘It is Billie Holiday … who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me,’’ he said in 1958. In ‘‘Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra,’’ from 2003, George Jacobs, the singer’s former valet, writes that Sinatra visited Holiday in her New York City hospital room in July 1959, shortly befo
re her death from drug and alcohol-related liver and heart disease. When Holiday died, Sinatra holed up in his penthouse for two days, weeping, drinking and playing her records.
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The Holiday-Sinatra bond, in other words, was a classic relationship of guru and disciple. Certainly, Holiday was the more precocious of the two. She began singing in Harlem jazz clubs at age 16 and cut her first records as an 18-year-old in 1933. By the time she returned to the studio in 1935, she was a revelation — neither the white balladeers who dominated the Hit Parade nor the black blues queens from whose ranks she emerged provided a precedent for her. By traditional measures, she didn’t have much of an instrument. Her voice was small and slight. She delivered songs in a midrange drawl that cracked and creaked when she ventured north and south — a bit shrill in the upper register, a touch hoarse on the low end. Yet the result was inviting and beguiling. Like a cool enveloping mist, it was a sound to get lost in.
Her approach to rhythm was cunning. She meandered around the beat, slyly elongating and truncating syllables, gliding down for a landing in surprising places. Sinatra was captivated by the third song she ever recorded, ‘‘I Wished on the Moon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD7b1ts2fUg) ,’’ a stock-standard Tin Pan Alley ballad that Holiday, with deft tugs at the melody, transforms into something deeper: a celebration of ecstatic new romance tinged with the melancholy awareness that love fades.
Sinatra signing an autograph for Holiday in the 1940s.
On that record, as on so many others, you can hear Holiday batting bedroom eyes. She was a beautiful woman, but it was her husky voice, and the knowledge of earthly pleasures that it conveyed, that made her a sex symbol. As for Sinatra, even as a tyro — a babyfaced 25-year-old fronting Tommy Dorsey’s band in a bow tie too big for his string-bean frame — the throb in his song was unmistakable. From Holiday, he’d learned that, ideally, musical seduction was a subtle art. His come-ons were staked on telling details: minute vocal shading, delicately dabbed colors, the teasing extra half-beat pause before the headlong plunge into the chorus. Those notes that Holiday told him to bend — they bent toward the boudoir.
Of course, the message of Holiday and Sinatra wasn’t just sex. It was pain. To put the matter in genre terms: Both Holiday and Sinatra were torch singers. In Sinatra’s case, this was a novelty. Torch singing had traditionally been women’s work, but his records made the case that a bruiser in a fedora could love as hard, could hurt as bad, as any dame. He proclaimed himself an ‘‘18-karat manic depressive,’’ and you could hear it even in up-tempo songs like his tumultuous 1956 version of ‘‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiSKXxWgA4w) ’’: the singer gusting from ecstasy to despair and back again, along the crests and crashes of Riddle’s orchestrations. His ballads cut even deeper. On albums like ‘‘In the Wee Small Hours,’’ Sinatra cast himself as a noir gumshoe, pursuing an insoluble case: ‘‘What is this thing called love? … Who can solve its mystery?’’ Holiday played a more traditional role. In ‘‘My Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
=IQlehVpcAes) ,’’ ‘‘Don’t Explain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45YPO2FyXVI) ’’ and other torch ballads, she was the bruised diva, doomed to masochistic love with callous men. But there was more: a spirit of resiliency and unflappable cool in the face of cruelty you could detect in all her music, from the most standard pop-jazz genre fare to the anti-lynching anthem ‘‘Strange Fruit (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Web007rzSOI) .’’ In Holiday’s hands, a torch song was also a protest song.
The fates of the two singers can stand as a parable about race in 20th-century America. Holiday was an adored cult artist who never reached superstardom during her lifetime. When she died, at age 44, she had 70 cents in her bank account. She spent her last days in Manhattan’s Metropolitan Hospital under police guard; she’d been placed under arrest in her hospital bed, on drug possession charges. Sinatra outlived his hero by 39 years. He released dozens of albums, including a few of the best ever made, and a handful of duds, too. He was feted by presidents and died a multimillionaire.
Today, Holiday and Sinatra are so shrouded in myth it can be hard to see them clearly. But when you listen to their records, the clouds part. Frequently, you find them playing against type. Sinatra is often celebrated as the swaggering Rat-Packer, Holiday as a tragic balladeer. Yet it’s Holiday’s music that percolates with greater joie de vivre, and Sinatra’s that scrapes darker depths. One of my favorite parlor games is to listen to the singers’ versions of the same songs: to hear the hay that they both made of ‘‘All of Me’’ or ‘‘Day In, Day Out,’’ to observe their different angles of attack on ‘‘Night and Day’’ — Holiday’s playful and insouciant, Sinatra’s grand, booming, brooding. Then there are those moments when the two giants directly address one other. Sinatra was the acolyte, but the flow of influence reversed on Holiday’s lavishly orchestrated ‘‘Lady in Satin’’ (1958), an homage to Sinatra’s Capitol Records concept albums. Holiday made the connection
explicit by opening the LP with a tremulous version of ‘‘I’m a Fool to Want You,’’ Sinatra’s signature torch song, co-written by the man himself. A few years later, Sinatra answered back on a recording of the standard ‘‘Yesterdays,’’ a Holiday staple. At the 1:11 mark of that song, Sinatra sings the word ‘‘then,’’ unleashing a dramatically low and rumbling descending vocal line. Keen-eared listeners picked it up right away: This was Ol’ Blue Eyes doing his Billie Holiday impression. A century after their births, Holiday and Sinatra are still talking to each other. What a privilege it is to listen in.
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Harold Betters plays at a concert at the Porter Theater in the Greater Connellsville Community Center on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014, which was designated Harold Betters Day in Connellsville.
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By Marilyn Forbes (mailto:mptownnews@aol.com?subject=RE:%2087-year-old%20jazz%20great%20lauded%20by%20Fayette%20County%20NAACP%20story%20on%20TribLIVE.com)
Monday, Oct. 19, 2015, 1:11 a.m.
Updated 2 hours ago
Connellsville’s own “Mr. Trombone” Harold Betters has enjoyed a long and illustrious life in music, receiving numerous recognitions and awards.
Another was added to his collection this month when he received the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fayette County NAACP.
“Mr. Betters has made great contributions in the field of music for the people of Fayette County,” said Fayette NAACP President Gwendolyn Ridgley. “The man and his horn are legendary, and our nation’s audiences have been richly blessed to have heard him.”
With an impressive career that spanned more than four decades, Betters brought his jazz music to audiences all over the country. He recorded and produced more than a dozen albums and CDs, which are still heard on many radio stations.
Betters performed with Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, Slide Hampton, Ramsey Lewis and Urbie Green. The Harold Betters Quartet toured with Ray Charles and appeared with Dick Gregory at the famous Apollo Theater in New York City.
Television appearances have included guest spots on the “Tonight Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Mike Douglas Show.”
Betters was recognized by the Playboy Jazz Poll as one the best trombone players in the country, being named “Mr. Versatile” by Downbeat Magazine, and received the “Man of the Year in Music” from the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.
In Connellsville, Betters was inducted into the 2011 Falcon Foundation Hall of Fame; received the 2014 Most Distinguished Citizen award from the Greater Connellsville Chamber of Commerce; and was honored on Nov. 8, 2014, declared Harold Betters Day in the city.
On that day, Betters was officially presented the key to the city, and the band shell at East Park in Connellsville was named the Harold Betters Band Shell in his honor.
Because he was unable to attend the award presentation, Betters’ son, Curtis, accepted for his father.
“It is truly an honor and a privilege to accept this award on behalf of my father,” Curtis Betters said. “He is truly a remarkable man, and I try every day to emulate him. I am very proud of him and of his accomplishments and achievements.”
Harold Betters, 87, said he was thrilled to be recognized by the NAACP and to receive the prestigious award.
“It is an honor and a privilege to have been given this award by the NAACP,” Harold Betters said, adding that he now wishes to relax and enjoy time with loved ones. “I have enjoyed a long and great musical career, but at this point in life I would like just to relax and enjoy my family, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
Marilyn Forbes is a contributing writer for Trib Total Medi
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Harold Betters plays at a concert at the Porter Theater in the Greater Connellsville Community Center on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014, which was designated Harold Betters Day in Connellsville.
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By Marilyn Forbes (mailto:mptownnews@aol.com?subject=RE:%2087-year-old%20jazz%20great%20lauded%20by%20Fayette%20County%20NAACP%20story%20on%20TribLIVE.com)
Monday, Oct. 19, 2015, 1:11 a.m.
Updated 2 hours ago
Connellsville’s own “Mr. Trombone” Harold Betters has enjoyed a long and illustrious life in music, receiving numerous recognitions and awards.
Another was added to his collection this month when he received the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fayette County NAACP.
“Mr. Betters has made great contributions in the field of music for the people of Fayette County,” said Fayette NAACP President Gwendolyn Ridgley. “The man and his horn are legendary, and our nation’s audiences have been richly blessed to have heard him.”
With an impressive career that spanned more than four decades, Betters brought his jazz music to audiences all over the country. He recorded and produced more than a dozen albums and CDs, which are still heard on many radio stations.
Betters performed with Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, Slide Hampton, Ramsey Lewis and Urbie Green. The Harold Betters Quartet toured with Ray Charles and appeared with Dick Gregory at the famous Apollo Theater in New York City.
Television appearances have included guest spots on the “Tonight Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Mike Douglas Show.”
Betters was recognized by the Playboy Jazz Poll as one the best trombone players in the country, being named “Mr. Versatile” by Downbeat Magazine, and received the “Man of the Year in Music” from the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.
In Connellsville, Betters was inducted into the 2011 Falcon Foundation Hall of Fame; received the 2014 Most Distinguished Citizen award from the Greater Connellsville Chamber of Commerce; and was honored on Nov. 8, 2014, declared Harold Betters Day in the city.
On that day, Betters was officially presented the key to the city, and the band shell at East Park in Connellsville was named the Harold Betters Band Shell in his honor.
Because he was unable to attend the award presentation, Betters’ son, Curtis, accepted for his father.
“It is truly an honor and a privilege to accept this award on behalf of my father,” Curtis Betters said. “He is truly a remarkable man, and I try every day to emulate him. I am very proud of him and of his accomplishments and achievements.”
Harold Betters, 87, said he was thrilled to be recognized by the NAACP and to receive the prestigious award.
“It is an honor and a privilege to have been given this award by the NAACP,” Harold Betters said, adding that he now wishes to relax and enjoy time with loved ones. “I have enjoyed a long and great musical career, but at this point in life I would like just to relax and enjoy my family, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
Marilyn Forbes is a contributing writer for Trib Total Medi
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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87-year-old jazz great lauded by Fayette County NAACP | TribLIVE
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Celeste Van Kirk | Trib Total Media
Harold Betters plays at a concert at the Porter Theater in the Greater Connellsville Community Center on Saturday, Nov. 8, 2014, which was designated Harold Betters Day in Connellsville.
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By Marilyn Forbes (mailto:mptownnews@aol.com?subject=RE:%2087-year-old%20jazz%20great%20lauded%20by%20Fayette%20County%20NAACP%20story%20on%20TribLIVE.com)
Monday, Oct. 19, 2015, 1:11 a.m.
Updated 2 hours ago
Connellsville’s own “Mr. Trombone” Harold Betters has enjoyed a long and illustrious life in music, receiving numerous recognitions and awards.
Another was added to his collection this month when he received the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fayette County NAACP.
“Mr. Betters has made great contributions in the field of music for the people of Fayette County,” said Fayette NAACP President Gwendolyn Ridgley. “The man and his horn are legendary, and our nation’s audiences have been richly blessed to have heard him.”
With an impressive career that spanned more than four decades, Betters brought his jazz music to audiences all over the country. He recorded and produced more than a dozen albums and CDs, which are still heard on many radio stations.
Betters performed with Louis Armstrong, Al Hirt, Slide Hampton, Ramsey Lewis and Urbie Green. The Harold Betters Quartet toured with Ray Charles and appeared with Dick Gregory at the famous Apollo Theater in New York City.
Television appearances have included guest spots on the “Tonight Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Mike Douglas Show.”
Betters was recognized by the Playboy Jazz Poll as one the best trombone players in the country, being named “Mr. Versatile” by Downbeat Magazine, and received the “Man of the Year in Music” from the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce.
In Connellsville, Betters was inducted into the 2011 Falcon Foundation Hall of Fame; received the 2014 Most Distinguished Citizen award from the Greater Connellsville Chamber of Commerce; and was honored on Nov. 8, 2014, declared Harold Betters Day in the city.
On that day, Betters was officially presented the key to the city, and the band shell at East Park in Connellsville was named the Harold Betters Band Shell in his honor.
Because he was unable to attend the award presentation, Betters’ son, Curtis, accepted for his father.
“It is truly an honor and a privilege to accept this award on behalf of my father,” Curtis Betters said. “He is truly a remarkable man, and I try every day to emulate him. I am very proud of him and of his accomplishments and achievements.”
Harold Betters, 87, said he was thrilled to be recognized by the NAACP and to receive the prestigious award.
“It is an honor and a privilege to have been given this award by the NAACP,” Harold Betters said, adding that he now wishes to relax and enjoy time with loved ones. “I have enjoyed a long and great musical career, but at this point in life I would like just to relax and enjoy my family, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”
Marilyn Forbes is a contributing writer for Trib Total Medi
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Tubby Hayes: British jazz’s forgotten genius is being rediscovered, thanks to fans including Martin Freeman | Features | Culture | The Independent
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** Tubby Hayes: British jazz’s forgotten genius is being rediscovered, thanks to fans including Martin Freeman
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‘Every time this guy put a saxophone in his mouth something worthwhile came out’
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* Sunday 18 October 2015
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88
English jazz multi-instrumentalist, Edward Brian “Tubby” Hayes (1935 – 1973) playing the saxophone, circa 1964 Photo by David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images
The sultry chanteuse at the microphone stand, the horn player shrouded in wispy smoke in a darkened room: these are the visuals that speak of jazz. And the tankard of ale? Not so much so. Even less a suburban south Londoner with the ruddy cheeks and portly stature of a butcher’s boy. But “A Pint of Bitter” by Tubby Hayes could yet become a standard, though Tubby has been dead and gone for 42 years.
The tenor saxophonist might be the greatest jazz player you’ve never heard of. Although if you were around in the Sixties, you surely would recall him with his own prime-time television show, when he was Britain’s face of modern jazz. In his time, he played out of his skin in Duke Ellington’s band and blew solo for Ella Fitzgerald. If you’ve watched The Italian Job, and seen Michael Caine and the boys loading minis on to a moving coach, then Tubby played for you too.
But his legacy is about to be more sharply defined. A new documentary film, Tubby Hayes: A Man in a Hurry, is released this month with narration by the actor and Hayes fan Martin Freeman. “Tubby Hayes started everything earlier than most people,” says Freeman explaining why he was drawn to Hayes’s life story. “From a young age he displayed a voracious appetite for life. He burnt the candle at both ends and then started on the middle. A professional jazz musician at just 15, by his untimely death at 38 he had left behind a body of work which has both stood the test of time and has proven to be an inspiration to many like-minded musicians today.”
Hayes might have looked different from the other jazz greats but he ultimately succumbed to the genre’s cruelest cliche, destroyed by heroin like his musical role model Charlie Parker.
The film, written and produced by Mark Baxter and directed by Lee Cogswell, has been executive produced by the musician Paul Weller, another famous admirer of Hayes and the Soho scene he inhabited. “The whole period in London, and Soho in particular, fascinates me,” says Weller. “The new and modern developments in jazz, art, architecture and social mores. The sound of post-war Britain and its youth finding its own feet.”
The documentary has not happened in isolation but is reflective of a growing interest in Hayes’s work among younger music aficionados, as anxious as some of Hayes’s contemporaries to see him get due recognition. The late Ronnie Scott is the most famous name in British jazz, partly because of his Soho club, and it is Ronnie who appears first in the film. “Tubby Hayes. Surely one of the most influential and dominating personalities on the British jazz scene,” he says of his partner in the Jazz Warriors, Britain’s finest modern jazz group.
Tubby cut a remarkable figure in his onstage pomp. With puffed out cheeks, eyes shut, shoulders hunched, he would sink lower and lower as he followed the note. His dress style was the sharp suit and thin tie of the Modernist.
Had things turned out differently for him he would have celebrated his 80th birthday this year. He grew up in Raynes Park, south-west London, with a violinist father, and a mother who had been classically trained as a vocalist. He was five when his father took him to see the music shops of Shaftesbury Avenue and he switched from wanting to follow his dad’s violin playing to choosing to play the saxophone, three of which he’d seen lined up in a window: tenor, alto and baritone. “I knew exactly which one I wanted, I wanted the tenor,” he later told an interviewer.
At school he talked his headmaster into allowing him to wear a fashionable “Boston” haircut, claiming it was his “union card” to enter the clubs he played in the evenings. At 15, he was working professionally and asking Ronnie Scott if he could play alongside him. Scott recalled a “little fat kid” who nearly blew him off stage. “He really was marvellous, even at that age.”
Sir Peter Blake remembers the young Hayes as a “chubby little boy”, while the writer and musician Benny Green dubbed him “The Little Giant”. At 14 stone, Hayes couldn’t argue with the last part but he was sensitive about his 5ft 5in stature.
Tubby also picked up the vibraphone and flute like a natural. Such was his all-round competence that readers of Melody Maker one year voted him best musician, best flute, best vibes and best tenor sax. In 1961, having already turned down an offer from drummer Art Blakey to join America’s great Jazz Messengers, Hayes took up an offer to come to the famous Half Note club in New York. “He was the first English jazz soloist to work in an American jazz club,” says his biographer Simon Spillett. Miles Davis came down especially to see him and Cannonball Adderley was also in the house.
He recorded an album, Tubbs in NY, including the track “A Pint of Bitter”, which would re-emerge on a compilation album 30 years later to posthumously win Hayes a new crowd of fans when his music had all but disappeared.
But despite playing for Henry Mancini and having an album produced by a young Quincy Jones, his American career did not take off. “He was held back by the fact that he was British,” says the broadcaster Robert Elms. “If he’d been born in Brooklyn or he’d been born on the West Coast he would have been right up there, he’d have been playing with Miles Davis.”
And then it even became hard to play in his home town, as jazz haunts changed their allegiance to the new R&B and the Beatles made everything that had gone before seem obsolete. The British jazz scene was almost wiped out and Tubbs started hitting the scotch. And then the smack.
His star faded but that didn’t stop publicity craving Drugs Squad detective Norman Pilcher adding him to a tally of celebrity arrests that included Mick Jagger and George Harrison. His drug problems contributed to the heart condition from which he died in 1973, his music by then obscured by the new soundtrack of glam rock.
Spillett’s biography The Long Shadow of the Little Giant, published in April, began the fight back in setting the record straight. During a decade of research, the writer snuffled out an enormous archive of Tubby’s work and today around 70 albums are available, he says. “Every time this guy put a saxophone in his mouth something worthwhile came out.”
‘Tubby Hayes: A Man in a Hurry’ is available on DVD from 26 Oct
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Tubby Hayes: British jazz’s forgotten genius is being rediscovered, thanks to fans including Martin Freeman | Features | Culture | The Independent
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/tubby-hayes-british-jazz-s-forgotten-genius-is-being-rediscovered-thanks-to-fans-including-martin-a6696881.html
** Tubby Hayes: British jazz’s forgotten genius is being rediscovered, thanks to fans including Martin Freeman
————————————————————
‘Every time this guy put a saxophone in his mouth something worthwhile came out’
* Ian Burrell (http://www.independent.co.uk/author/ian-burrell)
* @iburrell (https://twitter.com/iburrell)
* Sunday 18 October 2015
* 1 comment (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/tubby-hayes-british-jazz-s-forgotten-genius-is-being-rediscovered-thanks-to-fans-including-martin-a6696881.html#commentsDiv)
88
English jazz multi-instrumentalist, Edward Brian “Tubby” Hayes (1935 – 1973) playing the saxophone, circa 1964 Photo by David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images
The sultry chanteuse at the microphone stand, the horn player shrouded in wispy smoke in a darkened room: these are the visuals that speak of jazz. And the tankard of ale? Not so much so. Even less a suburban south Londoner with the ruddy cheeks and portly stature of a butcher’s boy. But “A Pint of Bitter” by Tubby Hayes could yet become a standard, though Tubby has been dead and gone for 42 years.
The tenor saxophonist might be the greatest jazz player you’ve never heard of. Although if you were around in the Sixties, you surely would recall him with his own prime-time television show, when he was Britain’s face of modern jazz. In his time, he played out of his skin in Duke Ellington’s band and blew solo for Ella Fitzgerald. If you’ve watched The Italian Job, and seen Michael Caine and the boys loading minis on to a moving coach, then Tubby played for you too.
But his legacy is about to be more sharply defined. A new documentary film, Tubby Hayes: A Man in a Hurry, is released this month with narration by the actor and Hayes fan Martin Freeman. “Tubby Hayes started everything earlier than most people,” says Freeman explaining why he was drawn to Hayes’s life story. “From a young age he displayed a voracious appetite for life. He burnt the candle at both ends and then started on the middle. A professional jazz musician at just 15, by his untimely death at 38 he had left behind a body of work which has both stood the test of time and has proven to be an inspiration to many like-minded musicians today.”
Hayes might have looked different from the other jazz greats but he ultimately succumbed to the genre’s cruelest cliche, destroyed by heroin like his musical role model Charlie Parker.
The film, written and produced by Mark Baxter and directed by Lee Cogswell, has been executive produced by the musician Paul Weller, another famous admirer of Hayes and the Soho scene he inhabited. “The whole period in London, and Soho in particular, fascinates me,” says Weller. “The new and modern developments in jazz, art, architecture and social mores. The sound of post-war Britain and its youth finding its own feet.”
The documentary has not happened in isolation but is reflective of a growing interest in Hayes’s work among younger music aficionados, as anxious as some of Hayes’s contemporaries to see him get due recognition. The late Ronnie Scott is the most famous name in British jazz, partly because of his Soho club, and it is Ronnie who appears first in the film. “Tubby Hayes. Surely one of the most influential and dominating personalities on the British jazz scene,” he says of his partner in the Jazz Warriors, Britain’s finest modern jazz group.
Tubby cut a remarkable figure in his onstage pomp. With puffed out cheeks, eyes shut, shoulders hunched, he would sink lower and lower as he followed the note. His dress style was the sharp suit and thin tie of the Modernist.
Had things turned out differently for him he would have celebrated his 80th birthday this year. He grew up in Raynes Park, south-west London, with a violinist father, and a mother who had been classically trained as a vocalist. He was five when his father took him to see the music shops of Shaftesbury Avenue and he switched from wanting to follow his dad’s violin playing to choosing to play the saxophone, three of which he’d seen lined up in a window: tenor, alto and baritone. “I knew exactly which one I wanted, I wanted the tenor,” he later told an interviewer.
At school he talked his headmaster into allowing him to wear a fashionable “Boston” haircut, claiming it was his “union card” to enter the clubs he played in the evenings. At 15, he was working professionally and asking Ronnie Scott if he could play alongside him. Scott recalled a “little fat kid” who nearly blew him off stage. “He really was marvellous, even at that age.”
Sir Peter Blake remembers the young Hayes as a “chubby little boy”, while the writer and musician Benny Green dubbed him “The Little Giant”. At 14 stone, Hayes couldn’t argue with the last part but he was sensitive about his 5ft 5in stature.
Tubby also picked up the vibraphone and flute like a natural. Such was his all-round competence that readers of Melody Maker one year voted him best musician, best flute, best vibes and best tenor sax. In 1961, having already turned down an offer from drummer Art Blakey to join America’s great Jazz Messengers, Hayes took up an offer to come to the famous Half Note club in New York. “He was the first English jazz soloist to work in an American jazz club,” says his biographer Simon Spillett. Miles Davis came down especially to see him and Cannonball Adderley was also in the house.
He recorded an album, Tubbs in NY, including the track “A Pint of Bitter”, which would re-emerge on a compilation album 30 years later to posthumously win Hayes a new crowd of fans when his music had all but disappeared.
But despite playing for Henry Mancini and having an album produced by a young Quincy Jones, his American career did not take off. “He was held back by the fact that he was British,” says the broadcaster Robert Elms. “If he’d been born in Brooklyn or he’d been born on the West Coast he would have been right up there, he’d have been playing with Miles Davis.”
And then it even became hard to play in his home town, as jazz haunts changed their allegiance to the new R&B and the Beatles made everything that had gone before seem obsolete. The British jazz scene was almost wiped out and Tubbs started hitting the scotch. And then the smack.
His star faded but that didn’t stop publicity craving Drugs Squad detective Norman Pilcher adding him to a tally of celebrity arrests that included Mick Jagger and George Harrison. His drug problems contributed to the heart condition from which he died in 1973, his music by then obscured by the new soundtrack of glam rock.
Spillett’s biography The Long Shadow of the Little Giant, published in April, began the fight back in setting the record straight. During a decade of research, the writer snuffled out an enormous archive of Tubby’s work and today around 70 albums are available, he says. “Every time this guy put a saxophone in his mouth something worthwhile came out.”
‘Tubby Hayes: A Man in a Hurry’ is available on DVD from 26 Oct
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=dd5dcbface) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=dd5dcbface&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA