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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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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)

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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

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October 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Jonas Mekas Refuses to Fade – The New York Times

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/jonas-mekas-refuses-to-fade.html?_r=0

** Jonas Mekas Refuses to Fade
————————————————————

By JOHN LELAND OCT. 16, 2015
By JOHN LELAND (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/john_leland/index.html) OCT. 16, 2015

Jonas Mekas took his first photograph at age 17, when Soviet tanks rolled into his village in Lithuania. He immigrated to New York when he was almost 27, made his first autobiographical film at 46, started his website at 83 and, at 92, presided over a gigantic installation of his work at a Burger King in Venice, during this summer’s Biennale. A few weeks ago, at a party in the East Village, Mr. Mekas assessed his life as a subject.

“I’m so boring,” he said. “Nothing dramatic happens — no hospitals or surgeries. I have nothing interesting to report.”

Mr. Mekas, who will turn 93 on Christmas Eve, is one of six New Yorkers over the age of 85 that I have been following since the beginning of the year.

Their stories have been unpredictable and event-filled over that time. But none has moved as puckishly as his.

On a Saturday afternoon in March, for instance, it involved a descent into a Greenwich Village jazz club, the Zinc Bar, where Mr. Mekas held court at a table of student opera singers visiting from Lithuania. He had come to read from an unpublished novella called “Requiem for a Manual Typewriter,” about the bewildering prospect of trying to decide what to write about. Like most of his work, it took the shape of a diary and spoke in a voice of wonder. “Have you ever thought about how amazing, really amazing, life is?” Mr. Mekas read on stage, to laughter from a full house.

** 85 and Up
————————————————————

Later, at the table, Mr. Mekas and the teenage opera students were joined by two New York writers in their 70s, Lynne Tillman and Amy Taubin, whose careers he had supported — a typical scattering of ages and backgrounds, with Mr. Mekas at the center, a generation older than the next in line.

“All my friends, when I say I’m going to New York, they say, are you going to meet Jonas Mekas?” said Bernardas Garbaciauskas, 17, a baritone. “Many young people find him inspiring. What Jonas Mekas was doing years ago with his film diaries, Instagram and Facebook are doing now. Jonas Mekas (http://jonasmekas.com/) is the future.”

What makes some people seem to stop living in old age, and others to hum along with no visible loss of energy? Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Cornell University who specializes in life span development, calls this “the most extraordinary question. Why do people turn out this way? I don’t think we have an answer. Of what we do know, some is exactly what you’d think, and some is surprising.”

Each of the other five people interviewed for the series struggles with physical challenges: failing knees or eyes, poor circulation, sore joints, spells of loneliness. Two are all but housebound, one lives in a nursing home, the other two in buildings for older adults, with various levels of care.

Mr. Mekas, by comparison, lives like someone much younger.

This year alone, besides the Biennale installation, he is completing work on two books, sorting through several unfinished films, compiling his materials on Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground for an exhibition in Paris, continuing to post video diaries on his website and trying to raise $6 million to build a cafe and library at Anthology Film Archives (http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/) , the financially struggling nonprofit institution he helped start in 1970. In between, there have been readings to give, openings and screenings to attend, new friends to meet, old ones to revisit, preferably over wine.

Mr. Mekas, second from right, and Andy Warhol, far right, in 1966. Matt Hoffman

“He’s the reason I’m energetic,” said Phong Bui, 50, who publishes a free arts magazine called the Brooklyn Rail (http://www.brooklynrail.org/) , and has become a part of Mr. Mekas’s universe. “We have found a way to feed off other people’s energies as well, by being somewhat selfless. We both love being in the center of the tornado. When you’re in the center you’re not touched.”

Mr. Mekas, when asked what kept him going, pointed to disruptions in his youth — first when the Soviets occupied Lithuania in 1940, then when he was interned in a Nazi forced labor camp, then his five years in displaced persons camps in Germany after the war. A sickly child, he surprised neighbors by surviving even that long.

“When I landed in New York I was 27,” he said, bending the chronology slightly, “but since I had missed so much I decided to remain 27, you see, because there was so much to catch up, and I am still trying to catch up.”

His life, he said, was a series of good breaks:

“People say, ‘Oh, it’s so sad through what you had to go.’ No, I’m happy that I was uprooted, because I was dropped in New York in the most exciting period, when all the classical arts had reached culmination, like Balanchine and Martha Graham, and something else was coming in. I caught Marlon Brando and Tennessee Williams and Miller; I saw the end of the old when I came in ’49, and I saw the beginning of the new, John Cage and Buckminster Fuller and the Living Theater and the Beat Generation. And I was a sponge for all of it.”

Another day, he said, “I trace everything to my childhood on a farm.”
A film strip by Mr. Mekas showing John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Jonas Mekas

Anyone who has spent much time around older people has noticed that those who are more engaged with the world tend to be more resilient to the changes that come with age. Little is known about the biological mechanisms at work inside the brain. Do good health and sharp wits lead people to be more purposeful and engaged? Or does purpose work at a cellular level to make the brain and body resistant to the woes of old age?

“This hasn’t gotten a lot of focus in the scientific literature,” said Patricia Boyle, a neuropsychologist and researcher at the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center, a part of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “We focus on disease, on what predicts bad outcomes. We need to understand what predicts human flourishing. They’re not flip sides of the same coin.”

In a long-term survey (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3389510/) of more than 1,400 older people, Dr. Boyle and a research team observed what others in the field had noted: that people who felt their life had a goal or purpose showed lower rates of memory loss and other diseases associated with old age.

The researchers wanted to know why.

They examined the brain tissues of 246 people who died during the study. The autopsy results, reported in Archives of General Psychiatry, were striking. The brains of people who had very different levels of cognitive decline often showed similar levels of damage from Alzheimer’s — what neurologists call “plaques” and “tangles” in the brain circuitry. The brains that functioned better, it turned out, belonged to people who in surveys had indicated more purpose in life.

In other words, what was going on at the cellular level seemed to affect people differently according to whether they had a life’s goal.

Mr. Mekas, left, with Allen Ginsberg and Richard Roud, circa 1965. Elliott Landy

Dr. Boyle proposed a concept of “reserve,” borrowed from physiology. Most systems in our bodies are able to sustain some level of damage before they start to malfunction. Having a purpose in life may not slow the formation of plaques and tangles, but it appears to increase the reserve that the brains can call on before they start to break down, perhaps by spurring other healthy brain connections that compensate for the decline.

The stronger the purpose, the more it added to the reserve.

The results held up even after the researchers controlled for differences in exercise levels, education and other factors.

Dr. Boyle said the results were just a first step toward understanding why some people aged differently, but that their implications were vast. People’s sense of purpose, she said, “is something we can change.”

“Part of it is getting people to sit down and say, ‘What do I want my life to look like at the end of the day?’” she said. “‘What do I want my mark to be?’ ”

For Mr. Mekas, this has never been an issue.

Mr. Mekas in New York, circa 1955. Gideon Bachmann

On a recent afternoon in his Brooklyn loft, where he lives with his son, Sebastian, 33, he talked about what motivated him to keep making art. On the wall was a handwritten mission statement he created for the designer Agnès B., a friend: “Keep dancing. Keep singing. Have a good drink and do not get too serious.”

“Something is in you that propels you,” he said. “It’s part of your very essence, what you are. Like, go back to Greeks and muses. How they explained that, the muse enters you at birth or later, and you have no choice. It becomes part of you. You just have to do it.”

His hands shake slightly, and he started wearing glasses after laser surgery a few years ago, but otherwise he has made few concessions to age. If anything, he said, he has become more “obsessed” with his writing and filmmaking since he moved to Brooklyn from SoHo in 2005 (after he separated from his wife, Hollis Melton), because he has cut down on the time and energy he spent at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan.

“I don’t feel like I’m working,” he said one day in his apartment, sorting through a binder of film frames for a project that was still taking shape. “It’s fun. And when I grew up on a farm we did not consider that we were working. We were just doing what had to be done that day. We had to plant certain things, to milk certain cows. The concept of workers came when the Soviets came in and organized the workers. Suddenly everybody was a worker. But we were not workers until then. So I’m continuing what I was doing when I was growing up: I’m just doing what has to be done.”

Mr. Mekas does not take vacations or weekends off — though he travels for his exhibitions — and does not begin his days with plans. Instead, he said, he wakes up without intention or worry. “I’m not seeking,” he said. “I’m not a thinking person, and I’m not planning. The best I could describe it is I make angels work.”

He has avoided what Dr. Pillemer of Cornell identifies as the debilitating factors of old age: physical or mental disability, extreme poverty and low levels of happiness or well-being earlier in life. In New York City, 58 percent of people age 85 and older say they have problems walking, and 31 percent say they have cognitive difficulty, according to an analysis of census data for The New York Times by Susan Weber-Stoger of Queens College. One in five say they have hearing problems and half say they have trouble living independently; 19 percent live in poverty.

Though Mr. Mekas cut back on drinking a few years ago, he still enjoys wine with friends. When he leaves the house he carries a pepperoni and some bread in case he gets hungry — and to share with friends, he said.

“I think he’s amused by his aging,” said the filmmaker Ken Jacobs, 82, a friend since the early 1960s. “He doesn’t hide his age. He wears a hat too much, but you can see he’s an old guy.”

Mr. Mekas at home in Brooklyn. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

In one way, Mr. Mekas has not been able to avoid the losses of old age. His youngest brother, Adolfas, died in 2011 at 85. In February, Mr. Mekas was given a Courage Award by his longtime friend Yoko Ono, 82, at a dinner at which he reminisced with another honoree, Ornette Coleman, who used to rehearse in Mr. Mekas’s loft. In July, Mr. Coleman died at age 85. If Mr. Mekas grieved, he did not do so in public. He had little to say after the death. What was there to say? Life went on.

“I’m not a very introspective person,” he said one day at the Anyway Cafe in the East Village, over pickled herring and beer. “When you come from a farmer’s background — village life — people live, they don’t analyze themselves. It’s more communal, more like being, living, communicating with friends, neighbors. I’m not analyzing myself, even if I’m being diaristic in video and writing. It’s self-centered, but if you read Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, they’re very introspective and convoluted, but I’m not that type of person, so my diaries are not that personal.”

In an unpublished 2005 poem, Mr. Mekas encapsulates much of his attitude toward old age: “I worked all my life to become young / no, you can’t persuade me to get old / I will die twenty seven.”

A benefit of living so long, and of keeping good company, is that many of his belongings have become quite valuable. Mr. Mekas arrived in the United States in 1949 with only three bags of books and one set of clothes, but he has spent the time since acquiring. He paid most of his son’s college tuition bills by selling five posters from Andy Warhol’s film “My Hustler” for $10,000 each. For the last eight years he has lived on proceeds from his sale of materials from the 1960s “anti-art” Fluxus movement to a museum in Vilnius, Lithuania.

“But now it’s the end,” he said. “So now it’s complex. I know that the Smithsonian is buying a copy of ‘Walden’ ” — Mr. Mekas’s first autobiographical film — “so that will pay maybe a year’s rent.” In the last few months, he got notice that his rent would rise 12 percent and received an offer from a family-run foundation to cover the increase for the next three years. Still, he said, he will most likely have to move eventually.

“Since I landed in New York I always managed to survive,” he said. “Always something came. Angels are watching. If I can’t figure it out, angels will figure it out. I just do every day what I do.”

Mr. Mekas displays a button from the 1960s showing him with his wife, Hollis, and daughter Oona. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

His angels are both metaphorical and literal. Mr. Mekas believes specifically in “other realities” containing “angels and fairies,” but also more broadly in forces aligned toward beauty and art, and he is determined to move among them.

“Consciously or unconsciously, I made a choice,” he said. “My time is limited, I choose art and beauty, vague as those terms are, against ugliness and horrors in which we live today. I feel my duty not to betray those poets, scientists, saints, singers, troubadours of the past centuries who did everything so that humanity would become more beautiful. I have to continue in my small way their work.” Detachment from these forces, he said, is what causes so many people to get old.

“What keeps him alive is that he is an enthusiast,” said Johan Kugelberg, 50, a curator and an owner of Boo-Hooray gallery, who is publishing a collection of Mr. Mekas’s writings and photographs called “Anecdotes, or a Dance With Fred Astaire.” He described Mr. Mekas as “the anti-Warhol, Obi-Wan Kenobi to Warhol’s Darth Vader. He is my hero because he never succumbs to the dark side. And neither will I, because of Jonas.”

In the meantime, Mr. Mekas surrounds himself with younger people and new art. On an October day, he enthused about having just seen a digital exhibition that was so new, he could not say whether it was good or bad, art or not art, but he knew he could never master the technology. It did not upset him; it excited him. “We’re at the beginning of many things,” he said.

In a 1974 essay, “On Happiness,” Mr. Mekas concludes with a meditation on a plate of grapes that might serve as his summary of his life. “This plate is my Paradise,” he wrote. “I don’t want anything else — no country house, no car, no dacha, no life insurance, no riches. It’s this plate of grapes that I want. It’s this plate of grapes that makes me really happy. To eat my grapes and enjoy them and want nothing else — that is happiness, that’s what makes me happy.”

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October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Jonas Mekas Refuses to Fade – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/jonas-mekas-refuses-to-fade.html?_r=0

** Jonas Mekas Refuses to Fade
————————————————————

By JOHN LELAND OCT. 16, 2015
By JOHN LELAND (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/john_leland/index.html) OCT. 16, 2015

“I’m so boring,” he said. “Nothing dramatic happens — no hospitals or surgeries. I have nothing interesting to report.”

Mr. Mekas, who will turn 93 on Christmas Eve, is one of six New Yorkers over the age of 85 that I have been following since the beginning of the year.

Their stories have been unpredictable and event-filled over that time. But none has moved as puckishly as his.

** 85 and Up
————————————————————

Mr. Mekas, by comparison, lives like someone much younger.

Mr. Mekas, second from right, and Andy Warhol, far right, in 1966. Matt Hoffman

His life, he said, was a series of good breaks:

Another day, he said, “I trace everything to my childhood on a farm.”
A film strip by Mr. Mekas showing John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Jonas Mekas

The researchers wanted to know why.

In other words, what was going on at the cellular level seemed to affect people differently according to whether they had a life’s goal.

Mr. Mekas, left, with Allen Ginsberg and Richard Roud, circa 1965. Elliott Landy

The stronger the purpose, the more it added to the reserve.

The results held up even after the researchers controlled for differences in exercise levels, education and other factors.

“Part of it is getting people to sit down and say, ‘What do I want my life to look like at the end of the day?’” she said. “‘What do I want my mark to be?’ ”

For Mr. Mekas, this has never been an issue.

Mr. Mekas in New York, circa 1955. Gideon Bachmann

Mr. Mekas at home in Brooklyn. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

In an unpublished 2005 poem, Mr. Mekas encapsulates much of his attitude toward old age: “I worked all my life to become young / no, you can’t persuade me to get old / I will die twenty seven.”

Mr. Mekas displays a button from the 1960s showing him with his wife, Hollis, and daughter Oona. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

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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October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Jonas Mekas Refuses to Fade – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/jonas-mekas-refuses-to-fade.html?_r=0

** Jonas Mekas Refuses to Fade
————————————————————

By JOHN LELAND OCT. 16, 2015
By JOHN LELAND (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/john_leland/index.html) OCT. 16, 2015

“I’m so boring,” he said. “Nothing dramatic happens — no hospitals or surgeries. I have nothing interesting to report.”

Mr. Mekas, who will turn 93 on Christmas Eve, is one of six New Yorkers over the age of 85 that I have been following since the beginning of the year.

Their stories have been unpredictable and event-filled over that time. But none has moved as puckishly as his.

** 85 and Up
————————————————————

Mr. Mekas, by comparison, lives like someone much younger.

Mr. Mekas, second from right, and Andy Warhol, far right, in 1966. Matt Hoffman

His life, he said, was a series of good breaks:

Another day, he said, “I trace everything to my childhood on a farm.”
A film strip by Mr. Mekas showing John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Jonas Mekas

The researchers wanted to know why.

In other words, what was going on at the cellular level seemed to affect people differently according to whether they had a life’s goal.

Mr. Mekas, left, with Allen Ginsberg and Richard Roud, circa 1965. Elliott Landy

The stronger the purpose, the more it added to the reserve.

The results held up even after the researchers controlled for differences in exercise levels, education and other factors.

“Part of it is getting people to sit down and say, ‘What do I want my life to look like at the end of the day?’” she said. “‘What do I want my mark to be?’ ”

For Mr. Mekas, this has never been an issue.

Mr. Mekas in New York, circa 1955. Gideon Bachmann

Mr. Mekas at home in Brooklyn. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

In an unpublished 2005 poem, Mr. Mekas encapsulates much of his attitude toward old age: “I worked all my life to become young / no, you can’t persuade me to get old / I will die twenty seven.”

Mr. Mekas displays a button from the 1960s showing him with his wife, Hollis, and daughter Oona. Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

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)

Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Frank Gilroy, Pilitzer winner, dies

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/playwrights/frank-d-gilroy-playwright-dies/

** Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Frank D Gilroy dies
————————————————————

By Martin Chilton

Frank D Gilroy, whose play The Subject Was Roses won a Pulitzer Prize, has died of natural causes aged 89.

Bronx-born Gilroy, who had served in the Army, wrote about a veteran’s troubled return home after the Second World War. The 1964 play also won a Tony Award and Gilroy wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated 1968 film adaptation starring Jack Albertson and Patricia Neal.

Gilroy, who died in New York, wrote more than 30 other plays but The Subject Was Roses was his only major theatrical success. When the play was revived off Broadway in 1991, with John Mahoney, Gilroy said: “I’d like to walk into a room sometime and be introduced as the author of something other than that play. There’s always one thing in a career that has more impact than anything else. In my case, The Subject Was Roses was that thing.”

In fact, Gilroy, who attended Yale Drama School, had a distinguished career as a versatile writer of television shows and films. He wrote TV westerns including The Rifleman” and Have Gun Will Travel, and created the homicide detective Amos Burke (played by Gene Barry) for the series Burke’s Law.

Gilroy wrote the 1956 film The Fastest Gun Alive, which starred Glenn Ford, and 1970’s The Only Game in Town, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty and Desperate Characters starring Shirley MacLaine. He also wrote and directed From Noon Till Three in 1976, a comedy western starring Charles Bronson.

He was also known in the jazz (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/what-to-listen-to/best-jazz-albums-of-2015/) world for his 1985 film The Gig, which he wrote and directed. The Gig is a highly-regarded independent movie about a group of five amateur jazz musicians who accept a gig in the Catskills. Trumpeter and cornet player Warren Vaché stars as himself in the film.

Frank Gilroy wrote and directed the jazz film The Gig, in which trumpeter Warren Vaché starred as himself

Gilroy’s three sons all work in the film industry. Tony Gilroy wrote the first three Bourne films and Dan Gilroy wrote the film noir Nightcrawler, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, with John Gilroy working as the film’s editor.

Gilroy is survived by Ruth, his wife of 62 years.

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 Promo Services
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October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Frank Gilroy, Pilitzer winner, dies

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/playwrights/frank-d-gilroy-playwright-dies/

** Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Frank D Gilroy dies
————————————————————

By Martin Chilton

Frank D Gilroy, whose play The Subject Was Roses won a Pulitzer Prize, has died of natural causes aged 89.

Frank Gilroy wrote and directed the jazz film The Gig, in which trumpeter Warren Vaché starred as himself

Gilroy is survived by Ruth, his wife of 62 years.

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)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Frank Gilroy, Pilitzer winner, dies

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/playwrights/frank-d-gilroy-playwright-dies/

** Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Frank D Gilroy dies
————————————————————

By Martin Chilton

Frank D Gilroy, whose play The Subject Was Roses won a Pulitzer Prize, has died of natural causes aged 89.

Frank Gilroy wrote and directed the jazz film The Gig, in which trumpeter Warren Vaché starred as himself

Gilroy is survived by Ruth, his wife of 62 years.

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)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

The historic Charlie Parker Residence is for sale on Avenue B

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://evgrieve.com/2015/10/the-historic-charlie-parker-residence.html

Charlie Parker Residence Owner Judy Sneed

Photos by Jim Eigo

** The historic Charlie Parker Residence is for sale on Avenue B
————————————————————
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-AONIf0hzO94/Vg6qFn3Ms5I/AAAAAAACbzA/Y6ebgtXLSbs/s1600/800px-Charlie_Parker_Residence_151_Avenue_B.jpg

The listing for 151 Avenue B (http://www.charlieparkerresidence.net/) between East Ninth Street and East 10th Street arrived on Streeteasy (http://streeteasy.com/building/151-avenue-b-manhattan/house) today. (Halstead (https://www.halstead.com/) is the broker, though the link appears not to work at the moment.)

Built circa 1849 and bordering Tompkins Square Park to the East, individually designated by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, The Charlie Parker Residence is a rare example of a Gothic Revival style townhouse. Original details include the double wood doors, a trefoil relief beneath the projecting box cornice, slender hood moldings above most windows and the well-preserved pointed archway with clustered colonettes that is surmounted by a prominent horizontal molding.

There are 4 full-floor apartments: Garden floor, former home of Jazz great, Charlie Parker, Parlor floor, the third floor and fourth floors, each with 2 bedrooms. The Penthouse, with a huge private deck, is set-back with 1 bedroom and extra loft space. Handled with care throughout the years, this elegant building holds court in the vibrant neighborhood of the East Village.

It also has the honor of 3 designations: The New City Landmarks Preservation Foundation, The State Register of Historic Places and The National Register of Historic Places. The archway is featured in Bricks and Brownstones by Charles Lockwood. Great for investors OR it can be converted into an owner’s duplex with income or single family.

Price: $9.25 million.

According the Charlie Parker Residence website (http://www.charlieparkerresidence.net/) , Parker lived here from 1950-1954. “With Chan Richardson and their three children, Parker occupied the ground floor apartment at the height of his career.”

Image via Wikepedia Commons

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 Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

The historic Charlie Parker Residence is for sale on Avenue B

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://evgrieve.com/2015/10/the-historic-charlie-parker-residence.html

Charlie Parker Residence Owner Judy Sneed

Photos by Jim Eigo

Price: $9.25 million.

Image via Wikepedia Commons

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)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

The historic Charlie Parker Residence is for sale on Avenue B

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://evgrieve.com/2015/10/the-historic-charlie-parker-residence.html

Charlie Parker Residence Owner Judy Sneed

Photos by Jim Eigo

Price: $9.25 million.

Image via Wikepedia Commons

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)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

October 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

A Gramophone D.J. Cranks Up the Volume – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/a-gramophone-dj-cranks-up-the-volume.html?_r=0

** A Gramophone D.J. Cranks Up the Volume
————————————————————

Character Study (http://www.nytimes.com/column/character-study)

By COREY KILGANNON (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/corey_kilgannon/index.html)

“I want to replicate the listening experience from 100 years ago,” Michael Cumella says.Christian Hansen for The New York Times

A swell Saturday night crowd packed the Midtown Manhattan lounge where Michael Cumella was cranking out the tunes.

He reached for the handle on the side of a century-old wooden Victrola and turned it rapidly to keep the music pumping.

“I’m spreading the gospel of the gramophone,” said Mr. Cumella, 52, a record-spinner of a different sort (http://michaelcumella.com/phonographdj/%20) than your average scratch-and-cut beatmaster or festival-rocking hipster fresh from Berlin.

Those types may rock the party, but Mr. Cumella rocks the parlor, with a fleet of nonelectric antique phonographs that spin 78 r.p.m. records and Edison-era cylinder recordings.

This Jazz Age D.J. has built a reputation among like-minded music lovers in New York City. This particular evening was his regular monthly gig at the Campbell Apartment, (http://www.hospitalityholdings.com/#/establishments/the_campbell_apartment) a nightspot located in Grand Central Terminal (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grand_central_terminal_nyc/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) .

Using two turntables — a 1906 Victor and a 1905 Columbia — and a microphone and a modest P.A. system, he spun dance tunes from 1920s jazz bands, as he does the second Saturday of each month at the bar.

He looked out over the crowd, this high priest of low fidelity, and grabbed another heavy old disc from its brown paper sleeve: Bessie Smith’s “Yellow Dog Blues.”

He dropped the weighty metal tone arm on the fast-spinning record and from the phonograph horn came a faraway sound. It had a rich tonal core that melted away the hisses and scratches. It sounded robust and natural, even through the microphone Mr. Cumella had set in the horn.

“People think it’s a trick — they don’t believe it’s acoustic,” said Mr. Cumella, an affable fellow who dresses with a Gatsby-era flair.

“I want to replicate the listening experience from 100 years ago without filtering or equalizing the sound,” he said. “It’s a completely different sonic experience to stand in front of it and feel it. It’s a physical experience.”

His assistant, Michael Haar, another old-time D.J. who also cuts hair as Mike the Barber (http://mikewillcutyou.com/) , put on a 1929 record of Annette Hanshaw singing “Mean to Me.”

“I want people to have contact with the machines,” Mr. Cumella said. “I say, ‘Here, stick your head in the horn.’ The closer you are, the more you get the sound experience.”

Mr. Cumella, who is divorced and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, earns his living as a freelance video editor and producer, but also has a sideline as a gramophone repairman who makes house calls.

This month is the 20th anniversary of the Antique Phonograph Show with MAC, his radio program on WFMU, the Jersey City, N.J., radio station. (http://wfmu.org/playlists/AP)

Mr. Cumella grew up in Nutley, N.J., with perfectly contemporaneous musical tastes, collecting pop and rock records, but developed a fondness for older recordings after falling in love with music from cartoons.

He fixated on the windup phonograph era after buying a Victrola and a pile of records at a garage sale.

Having worked weddings and parties armed with crates of LPs, he began finding gigs playing old-time music at parties. “A friend told me one day, ‘This is your thing; you have to run with it,’ ” he said.

“Now I feel like I’ve been building to this my whole life,” said Mr. Cumella, who owns some 2,000 LPs from a variety of eras, and roughly 1,500 78s, as well as several hundred cylinders.

Mr. Cumella now mostly limits his collecting to music that was acoustically recorded up to the late 1920s, when Americans were switching over to electric phonographs. His taste runs from good dance band records to early jazz, blues and country, as well as novelty records.

During a recent house call in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, he inspected a 1910 unit made by the Victor Talking Machine Company, which Lee Chappell, an event and club promoter, bought for $180 in a Williamsburg antiques store.

To test the unit, Mr. Cumella removed the needle apparatus and sang through the tone arm in a vaudevillian twang, “Yes sir, that’s my baby.” Then he opened the machine and found that the steel spring that drives the turntable needed replacing.

On another night, he went to WFMU’s studios and set up the three old phonographs he keeps there, for a live broadcast.

One of the units, an Edison cylinder player, was equipped with a brass horn nearly five feet long.

Mr. Cumella set down his tan fedora on a guitar amplifier in Studio B, a room used for live performances, and stood like a maestro before a music stand and a tall microphone.

He pulled a stack of records in worn paper sleeves from his leather satchel. First he played “Too Much Mustard,” by the Victor Military Band, then Ernest Stoneman’s 1925 recording of “Jack and Joe.”

The agile D.J. danced continuously from the microphone to the old music players, cranking them up often and sometimes making adjustments during the songs.

“Some people say it would be easier if I just pre-record the music,” he said, “but that would defeat the whole purpose of the show.”

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 Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

October 16, 2015 / No Comments / More