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New Leadership Chosen for World’s Largest Jazz Archive | Rutgers University – Newark
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/news/new-leadership-chosen-worlds-largest-jazz-archive
** New Leadership Chosen for World’s Largest Jazz Archive
————————————————————
BY PETER ENGLOT //
INSTITUTE OF JAZZ STUDIES (http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/tags/institute-jazz-studies)
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark prepared to play on a bigger stage
Rutgers University–Newark (RU-N) Chancellor Nancy Cantor has appointed the tandem of a multi-talented jazz champion and a revered keeper of the jazz flame to empower the Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) to “play on a much bigger stage while connecting new audiences to jazz.”
Cantor has announced the selection of Wayne Winborne as executive director of IJS, the world’s largest and most comprehensive jazz archive, and Vincent Pelote as director of operations. The appointments follow exhaustive national searches for both positions that included consultation and interviews with leading figures in the jazz world.
Following the retirement of longtime director and jazz fixture Dan Morgenstern, the IJS leadership was restructured to transform the position into two posts: a director of operations, whose focus will be the curation of the archive, and an executive director charged with forging partnerships to elevate the visibility and appreciation of the archive locally, nationally, and globally. A key goal articulated at the outset of the searches was to build awareness of this jazz gem, which for nearly 50 years has been revered among scholars all over the world and other members of the jazz cognoscenti, such as Ken Burns, who mined the archives for his landmark PBS documentary series, Jazz. Although the IJS, with holdings that include more than 150,000 precious recordings, is well-known among scholars and musicians of the jazz world, it is not yet well-known outside the circle of jazz insiders.
Cantor is thrilled with the results of the searches. The tandem of Winborne and Pelote, she says, combines “very deep and very broad knowledge of jazz, extensive connections with contemporary jazz artists, experience in education and in producing performances and programming, and the personalities and management skills to strengthen and significantly augment partnerships to lead the IJS into a new era of visibility and impact.”
John Schreiber, president and CEO of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, a well-known jazz impresario himself, co-chaired the search that found Winborne and is eager to start collaborating with him and the IJS. “I’m delighted to welcome Wayne home to Newark as the new leader of IJS. With deep experience that intersects philanthropy, education and corporate America, he possesses an irresistible passion for jazz and an impressive background as a jazz record producer, historian and advocate. All of us at the Arts Center can’t wait to start jammin’ with Wayne!”
Sterling Bland, the other executive director search co-chair, who is an English professor in the RU-N College of Arts & Sciences and has written extensively on jazz, is equally energized about what Winborne will bring to the university’s academic programming around jazz through the faculty appointment he will hold as professor of professional practice. “Wayne impressed faculty members from Arts & Sciences with his experience, his knowledge of IJS and the jazz idiom, his ability to teach innovative courses, and his personal warmth,” says Bland. “He’s positioned to contribute significantly to the experience of graduate students in the M.A. program in Jazz History and Research and undergraduate students in the music program in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media, as well as collaborate fruitfully with faculty and students across departments, programs, and research centers.”
Winborne, a resident of Brooklyn, N.Y., has headed his own firm for the past five years, the Winborne Group, a consulting company with offices in New York City and Los Angeles that specializes in business development, strategic planning, fundraising, diversity, multicultural marketing, and program design and facilitation. For eight years prior to that, he was vice president for business diversity outreach at Prudential Financial in Newark, where he facilitated business and recruitment opportunities in targeted, diverse communities through corporate sponsorships, marketing partnerships, and related business development activities.
Previously, Winborne was director of program and policy research at The National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ), program officer at the Ford Foundation, senior research coordinator at the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College, and adjunct lecturer in psychology and research methods at New York University and the City University of New York’s Baruch and Medgar Evers Colleges. He has authored a number of publications related to diversity and management in corporate, nonprofit, and philanthropic settings.
Along with this impressive melding of business and academic experience, Winborne also has extensive knowledge of jazz and extensive relationships with artists and producers throughout the genre. He has served as advisor and consultant to artists and musicians and worked with filmmakers, playwrights, and theater producers. Winborne has produced recordings for the MaxJazz, HighNote, and Savant labels, including “Daybreak” by Bruce Barth and the just-released “Feeling Good” by Mary Stallings. He also has taught jazz history and appreciation at Stanford University.
Winborne also brings to the IJS an extensive record of success in fundraising in the jazz and nonprofit communities, as well as a network of collaborations with an array of cultural institutions. He has served on the boards of local and national nonprofit organizations ranging from the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, to the Asian American Justice Center, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, and the Social and Public Art Resource Center. He earned degrees from Stanford and New York University.
“I can’t wait to get started,” says Winborne. “There is so much to build upon: the IJS’ phenomenal holdings, experienced and committed staff, rich history, and its presence in Newark, the intellectual resources of the university, and the great good will among so many possible collaborators across Newark, the New York metro area, and the jazz world. IJS is poised to realize fully the bold vision Chancellor Cantor has developed. I’m honored to have been chosen to be a part of this exciting next chapter.”
For his part, Pelote, a resident of Bayonne, N.J., is a well-known figure in the jazz community in Newark, the New York City metropolitan area, and beyond, having played a pivotal role at the IJS for 37 years. Most recently, he served as head of collections services and sound archivist, bringing expertise in music education as well as library science and archival management to all of his many roles at IJS over the years. An experienced teacher, broadcaster, and principal investigator on major grants supporting the IJS, Pelote has published several discographies, including one on Lionel Hampton in the celebrated vibraphonist’s autobiography. Nationally, he has served as president of the Association of Recorded Sound Collections. Pelote also is an accomplished jazz guitarist, and a graduate of Rutgers University, with a B.A. in music education, and a master of library science.
Cantor sees IJS’ new leadership as poised to ignite precisely the kind of collaboration needed to take the institute to a whole new level through innovation and collaboration. “With the considerable strengths of the IJS staff and support of community partners such as NJPAC—with whom we expect to announce a new, jazz-centered partnership in the coming weeks—and other key stakeholders, we will polish the IJS as a crown jewel of jazz and of Newark to realize the institute’s and our collective potential.”
About the Institute of Jazz Studies
The Institute of Jazz Studies (http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/IJS/index1.html) at Rutgers University – Newark is the largest and most comprehensive library and archive of jazz and jazz-related materials in the world. IJS was founded in 1952 with a donation of the vast collection of jazz lover and pioneering historian Marshall Stearns. In 1966 the IJS became part of Rutgers University, and in 1994 moved to its current home at the John Cotton Dana Library, 185 University Ave., Newark. The collection includes extensive and rare recordings, publications, instruments, and artifacts of jazz history, and is the designated repository for archives of jazz greats including Benny Carter and Mary Lou Williams. IJS presented decades of radio programs on WBGO, Newark public radio, as well as “Jazz Research Roundtables” presenting the world’s foremost jazz scholars, and concerts of leading jazz performers. More information is available at http://newarkwww.rutgers.edu/IJS/index1.html.
About Rutgers University–Newark
Rutgers University-Newark (RU-N) is a diverse, urban, public research university that is an anchor institution in New Jersey’s largest city and cultural capital. Nearly 11,500 students are currently enrolled at its 38-acre campus in a wide range of undergraduate and graduate degree programs offered through the Newark College of Arts and Sciences, University College, the Graduate School-Newark, Rutgers Business School – Newark and New Brunswick, the School of Law-Newark, the School of Criminal Justice, and the School of Public Affairs and Administration. An engine of discovery, innovation, and social mobility, RU-N has a remarkable legacy of producing high-impact scholarship that is connected to the great questions and challenges of the world. A pivotal strength is that RU-N brings an exceptional diversity of people to this work—students, faculty, staff, and community partners—increasing it innovation, creativity, engagement, and relevance for our time and the times ahead. For
more information please visit www.newark.rutgers.edu (http://www.newark.rutgers.edu/) .
Media contact:
Peter Englot
Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs and Chief of Staff
Office of the Chancellor
Rutgers University–Newark
123 Washington Street, Suite 590
Newark, NJ 07079
973-353-5541
peter.englot@rutgers.edu (mailto:peter.englot@rutgers.edu)
Photo by Theo Anderson.
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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KFAI’s ‘Jet Set Planet’ unearths music that can make you cringe, but also proves irresistible – StarTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.startribune.com/kfai-s-jet-set-planet-unearths-music-that-can-make-you-cringe-but-also-proves-irresistible/310088001/#11
http://www.startribune.com/kfai-s-jet-set-planet-unearths-music-that-can-make-you-cringe-but-also-proves-irresistible/310088001/#11
By Kim Ode (http://www.startribune.com/kim-ode/10645551/)
Star Tribune
** KFAI’s ‘Jet Set Planet’ unearths music that can make you cringe, but also proves irresistible
————————————————————
Glen Leslie has made a resigned peace with listeners who cringe during “Jet Set Planet,” his radio show on KFAI.
These are people who have heard him spinning such vinyl relics as Henry Mancini covering “Theme From Police Woman,” the 101 Strings exploring “House of the Rising Sun” or Claudine Longet (Google her — really) exhaling that Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows.”
“Some people, they’re really into kitsch,” Leslie said, sighing. “But I don’t like kitsch, and I have so much trouble with irony. I really like this stuff. I rarely play a song strictly for a gag. I find it brilliant for some reason.”
Leslie is the Pied Piper of aural ham, luring listeners into what he considers a parallel universe backed by lounge music from the groovitude of the ’60s and ’70s.
Some artists once were household names: Dig Mitch Miller and the Gang singing “Give Peace a Chance.” But the playlist mostly delights in musicians you’ve never heard of playing music you don’t recognize, but is reminiscent of riding an elevator in the old Dayton’s building.
Yet here’s the thing: The beats are solid, the riffs inventive and the hooks invasive. You may wonder why some of these tunes ever were recorded, but they clearly were recorded by some of the best musicians around.
Still: Why?
In his 10th year of bringing bongos, “sleazy” listening and what he calls “the ‘schree’ of 10,000 Strings” into consenting eardrums, Leslie has given the question some thought.
Tastes were changing, he explained, with big bands, house bands and session musicians shifting from foxtrots at nightclubs to backdrops for TV shows, commercials, shopping malls, elevators and callers being put on hold.
Home stereo systems were becoming all the rage — think of parties on “Mad Men” or “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — stoking a need for music that created a mood. And no kidding, this music (some of it, anyway) makes you want to let go and bossa your nova.
“What makes this music so amazing is the super-well-trained musicians doing it,” said Leslie, whose mop of hair, though prematurely silver at 53, calls to mind a young Brian Wilson.
“It’s known as ‘the era when gigs were plentiful.’ All the guys from the ’40s were trying to get hip. Some weird things could happen when they’d do a Beatles cover. They were so far above the music.
“This, at its core, is ‘Jet Set Planet.’ ”
The crate-digger culture
After putting a vintage Rival Ice-O-Matic through its deafening paces, Leslie pours rum, falernum, bitters and more over the crushed ice, all in the service of Beachcomber Punch, a relic recipe from Excelsior’s old Mai Tai Bar.
Passing a highball glass to his wife, Carol, he slid onto a swivel stool before his tiki bar’s faux bamboo. A 6-foot island totem anchored a corner lit by a hanging lamp festooned with scallop shells.
“This is one of the most fun things to do,” Leslie said after the first sip. “Listen to music and drink cocktails at a bar.”
A basement room of the New Hope rambler is lined with a catacomb of shelves holding 6,000 or so records. He’s been collecting albums for years, avoiding the easy pickings of eBay or Craigslist for the serendipity of scrounging or, in the lingo of the obsession, crate-digging.
Ron Thums, KFAI’s interim general manager, admires Leslie’s vinyl archaeology.
“The crate-digger is all about finding those gems, going to a river that’s been panned out and finding those hidden nuggets,” Thums said. “It’s finding the architectural gem hidden in the squalid slum.
“Glen may love a track because it’s great, or he may love it because of how terrible it is,” he added. “He’s a guy who traverses these worlds, and the charm is that he makes sense out of something you or I independently would not make sense of.”
Attending the right party
Leslie’s opening remarks for each show create a sort of macramé wall hanging woven from a deep knowledge of music and history. Also, a sincere fascination with the vision that caused Those Fantabulous Strings to record “Help!”
He pulls an album by Ray Charles, “but the other Ray Charles,” who directed the Ray Charles Singers. “You know you’re at the right party when people say they’re into ‘the other Ray Charles’ and everyone knows what they’re talking about,” Leslie said with a satisfied smile.
“Jet Set Planet” has risen from an initial graveyard shift to the 9-10:30 p.m. slot on Fridays. You can hear the show anytime, via program archive downloads at www. kfai.org/jet-set-planet. Leslie also does occasional live gigs as Higher Than Fi, showing up at Bev’s Wine Bar in Minneapolis on most second Saturdays or setting the mood at the recent Art-a-Whirl.
He did not set out to champion lounge music.
Leslie began DJ-ing in college in Portland, Maine, in the ’80s, playing rock and indie labels. Another show featured thrift store vinyl. Leslie was intrigued, then hooked.
He moved to Milwaukee, then to Minneapolis, where he’s an administrator in the geography department at the University of Minnesota. He’d known of KFAI, whose diverse programming ranges beyond the mainstream, and volunteered to do a similar show.
They turned him down.
“I mean, it’s not the kind of music I would ever play at home,” Thums said, adding with a laugh that the station soon said yes. “Jet Set Planet,” he said, “is one of the nichiest of the niches. There are maybe two or three other shows like this in the country, and Glen is pretty much what makes this one work.”
The past in the present tense
A word about the album covers: omigod.
The early days of the Jet Set era predated feminism, while its later days perhaps delighted in poking it with a sharp stick.
Hence, covers with nude women reclining with artfully crossed legs and strategically placed objects. When women are clothed, think Barbarella.
Some covers have a pop-art, Peter Max vibe, while others are lush with jungle themes. Vietnam? You decide.
There is breaking surf, menacing cigarette holders, canyons of cleavage, rivers of lava, Vaseline-lensed visages and men who suavely predestined today’s Dos Equis’ “The Most Interesting Man in the World” ads.
Leslie can only be grateful he’s doing a radio show.
Students at the university sometimes learn that the familiar paper-pusher (his term for his day job) has an on-air life. Indeed, the show feels strangely contemporary, due to Leslie conscientiously speaking in the present tense and not playing the nostalgia card.
“A friend told me that ‘Jet Set Planet’ is like a popular radio station in an alternate universe,” he said. “And I push that.”
So he’ll keep spinning and scrounging, always on the lookout for that personal Holy Grail, an album by the Hellers, whose members included Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
Could he find it online? Maybe. But he won’t look. If he’s meant to find it, he’ll find it the way people once bought records, flipping through the bins, slap, slap, slap, looking for the one that will start the party in his other universe.
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=61d4115478) | 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=61d4115478&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
KFAI’s ‘Jet Set Planet’ unearths music that can make you cringe, but also proves irresistible – StarTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.startribune.com/kfai-s-jet-set-planet-unearths-music-that-can-make-you-cringe-but-also-proves-irresistible/310088001/#11
http://www.startribune.com/kfai-s-jet-set-planet-unearths-music-that-can-make-you-cringe-but-also-proves-irresistible/310088001/#11
By Kim Ode (http://www.startribune.com/kim-ode/10645551/)
Star Tribune
** KFAI’s ‘Jet Set Planet’ unearths music that can make you cringe, but also proves irresistible
————————————————————
Glen Leslie has made a resigned peace with listeners who cringe during “Jet Set Planet,” his radio show on KFAI.
These are people who have heard him spinning such vinyl relics as Henry Mancini covering “Theme From Police Woman,” the 101 Strings exploring “House of the Rising Sun” or Claudine Longet (Google her — really) exhaling that Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows.”
“Some people, they’re really into kitsch,” Leslie said, sighing. “But I don’t like kitsch, and I have so much trouble with irony. I really like this stuff. I rarely play a song strictly for a gag. I find it brilliant for some reason.”
Leslie is the Pied Piper of aural ham, luring listeners into what he considers a parallel universe backed by lounge music from the groovitude of the ’60s and ’70s.
Some artists once were household names: Dig Mitch Miller and the Gang singing “Give Peace a Chance.” But the playlist mostly delights in musicians you’ve never heard of playing music you don’t recognize, but is reminiscent of riding an elevator in the old Dayton’s building.
Yet here’s the thing: The beats are solid, the riffs inventive and the hooks invasive. You may wonder why some of these tunes ever were recorded, but they clearly were recorded by some of the best musicians around.
Still: Why?
In his 10th year of bringing bongos, “sleazy” listening and what he calls “the ‘schree’ of 10,000 Strings” into consenting eardrums, Leslie has given the question some thought.
Tastes were changing, he explained, with big bands, house bands and session musicians shifting from foxtrots at nightclubs to backdrops for TV shows, commercials, shopping malls, elevators and callers being put on hold.
Home stereo systems were becoming all the rage — think of parties on “Mad Men” or “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — stoking a need for music that created a mood. And no kidding, this music (some of it, anyway) makes you want to let go and bossa your nova.
“What makes this music so amazing is the super-well-trained musicians doing it,” said Leslie, whose mop of hair, though prematurely silver at 53, calls to mind a young Brian Wilson.
“It’s known as ‘the era when gigs were plentiful.’ All the guys from the ’40s were trying to get hip. Some weird things could happen when they’d do a Beatles cover. They were so far above the music.
“This, at its core, is ‘Jet Set Planet.’ ”
The crate-digger culture
After putting a vintage Rival Ice-O-Matic through its deafening paces, Leslie pours rum, falernum, bitters and more over the crushed ice, all in the service of Beachcomber Punch, a relic recipe from Excelsior’s old Mai Tai Bar.
Passing a highball glass to his wife, Carol, he slid onto a swivel stool before his tiki bar’s faux bamboo. A 6-foot island totem anchored a corner lit by a hanging lamp festooned with scallop shells.
“This is one of the most fun things to do,” Leslie said after the first sip. “Listen to music and drink cocktails at a bar.”
A basement room of the New Hope rambler is lined with a catacomb of shelves holding 6,000 or so records. He’s been collecting albums for years, avoiding the easy pickings of eBay or Craigslist for the serendipity of scrounging or, in the lingo of the obsession, crate-digging.
Ron Thums, KFAI’s interim general manager, admires Leslie’s vinyl archaeology.
“The crate-digger is all about finding those gems, going to a river that’s been panned out and finding those hidden nuggets,” Thums said. “It’s finding the architectural gem hidden in the squalid slum.
“Glen may love a track because it’s great, or he may love it because of how terrible it is,” he added. “He’s a guy who traverses these worlds, and the charm is that he makes sense out of something you or I independently would not make sense of.”
Attending the right party
Leslie’s opening remarks for each show create a sort of macramé wall hanging woven from a deep knowledge of music and history. Also, a sincere fascination with the vision that caused Those Fantabulous Strings to record “Help!”
He pulls an album by Ray Charles, “but the other Ray Charles,” who directed the Ray Charles Singers. “You know you’re at the right party when people say they’re into ‘the other Ray Charles’ and everyone knows what they’re talking about,” Leslie said with a satisfied smile.
“Jet Set Planet” has risen from an initial graveyard shift to the 9-10:30 p.m. slot on Fridays. You can hear the show anytime, via program archive downloads at www. kfai.org/jet-set-planet. Leslie also does occasional live gigs as Higher Than Fi, showing up at Bev’s Wine Bar in Minneapolis on most second Saturdays or setting the mood at the recent Art-a-Whirl.
He did not set out to champion lounge music.
Leslie began DJ-ing in college in Portland, Maine, in the ’80s, playing rock and indie labels. Another show featured thrift store vinyl. Leslie was intrigued, then hooked.
He moved to Milwaukee, then to Minneapolis, where he’s an administrator in the geography department at the University of Minnesota. He’d known of KFAI, whose diverse programming ranges beyond the mainstream, and volunteered to do a similar show.
They turned him down.
“I mean, it’s not the kind of music I would ever play at home,” Thums said, adding with a laugh that the station soon said yes. “Jet Set Planet,” he said, “is one of the nichiest of the niches. There are maybe two or three other shows like this in the country, and Glen is pretty much what makes this one work.”
The past in the present tense
A word about the album covers: omigod.
The early days of the Jet Set era predated feminism, while its later days perhaps delighted in poking it with a sharp stick.
Hence, covers with nude women reclining with artfully crossed legs and strategically placed objects. When women are clothed, think Barbarella.
Some covers have a pop-art, Peter Max vibe, while others are lush with jungle themes. Vietnam? You decide.
There is breaking surf, menacing cigarette holders, canyons of cleavage, rivers of lava, Vaseline-lensed visages and men who suavely predestined today’s Dos Equis’ “The Most Interesting Man in the World” ads.
Leslie can only be grateful he’s doing a radio show.
Students at the university sometimes learn that the familiar paper-pusher (his term for his day job) has an on-air life. Indeed, the show feels strangely contemporary, due to Leslie conscientiously speaking in the present tense and not playing the nostalgia card.
“A friend told me that ‘Jet Set Planet’ is like a popular radio station in an alternate universe,” he said. “And I push that.”
So he’ll keep spinning and scrounging, always on the lookout for that personal Holy Grail, an album by the Hellers, whose members included Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
Could he find it online? Maybe. But he won’t look. If he’s meant to find it, he’ll find it the way people once bought records, flipping through the bins, slap, slap, slap, looking for the one that will start the party in his other universe.
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=61d4115478) | 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=61d4115478&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
KFAI’s ‘Jet Set Planet’ unearths music that can make you cringe, but also proves irresistible – StarTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.startribune.com/kfai-s-jet-set-planet-unearths-music-that-can-make-you-cringe-but-also-proves-irresistible/310088001/#11
http://www.startribune.com/kfai-s-jet-set-planet-unearths-music-that-can-make-you-cringe-but-also-proves-irresistible/310088001/#11
By Kim Ode (http://www.startribune.com/kim-ode/10645551/)
Star Tribune
** KFAI’s ‘Jet Set Planet’ unearths music that can make you cringe, but also proves irresistible
————————————————————
Glen Leslie has made a resigned peace with listeners who cringe during “Jet Set Planet,” his radio show on KFAI.
These are people who have heard him spinning such vinyl relics as Henry Mancini covering “Theme From Police Woman,” the 101 Strings exploring “House of the Rising Sun” or Claudine Longet (Google her — really) exhaling that Beach Boys classic “God Only Knows.”
“Some people, they’re really into kitsch,” Leslie said, sighing. “But I don’t like kitsch, and I have so much trouble with irony. I really like this stuff. I rarely play a song strictly for a gag. I find it brilliant for some reason.”
Leslie is the Pied Piper of aural ham, luring listeners into what he considers a parallel universe backed by lounge music from the groovitude of the ’60s and ’70s.
Some artists once were household names: Dig Mitch Miller and the Gang singing “Give Peace a Chance.” But the playlist mostly delights in musicians you’ve never heard of playing music you don’t recognize, but is reminiscent of riding an elevator in the old Dayton’s building.
Yet here’s the thing: The beats are solid, the riffs inventive and the hooks invasive. You may wonder why some of these tunes ever were recorded, but they clearly were recorded by some of the best musicians around.
Still: Why?
In his 10th year of bringing bongos, “sleazy” listening and what he calls “the ‘schree’ of 10,000 Strings” into consenting eardrums, Leslie has given the question some thought.
Tastes were changing, he explained, with big bands, house bands and session musicians shifting from foxtrots at nightclubs to backdrops for TV shows, commercials, shopping malls, elevators and callers being put on hold.
Home stereo systems were becoming all the rage — think of parties on “Mad Men” or “The Dick Van Dyke Show” — stoking a need for music that created a mood. And no kidding, this music (some of it, anyway) makes you want to let go and bossa your nova.
“What makes this music so amazing is the super-well-trained musicians doing it,” said Leslie, whose mop of hair, though prematurely silver at 53, calls to mind a young Brian Wilson.
“It’s known as ‘the era when gigs were plentiful.’ All the guys from the ’40s were trying to get hip. Some weird things could happen when they’d do a Beatles cover. They were so far above the music.
“This, at its core, is ‘Jet Set Planet.’ ”
The crate-digger culture
After putting a vintage Rival Ice-O-Matic through its deafening paces, Leslie pours rum, falernum, bitters and more over the crushed ice, all in the service of Beachcomber Punch, a relic recipe from Excelsior’s old Mai Tai Bar.
Passing a highball glass to his wife, Carol, he slid onto a swivel stool before his tiki bar’s faux bamboo. A 6-foot island totem anchored a corner lit by a hanging lamp festooned with scallop shells.
“This is one of the most fun things to do,” Leslie said after the first sip. “Listen to music and drink cocktails at a bar.”
A basement room of the New Hope rambler is lined with a catacomb of shelves holding 6,000 or so records. He’s been collecting albums for years, avoiding the easy pickings of eBay or Craigslist for the serendipity of scrounging or, in the lingo of the obsession, crate-digging.
Ron Thums, KFAI’s interim general manager, admires Leslie’s vinyl archaeology.
“The crate-digger is all about finding those gems, going to a river that’s been panned out and finding those hidden nuggets,” Thums said. “It’s finding the architectural gem hidden in the squalid slum.
“Glen may love a track because it’s great, or he may love it because of how terrible it is,” he added. “He’s a guy who traverses these worlds, and the charm is that he makes sense out of something you or I independently would not make sense of.”
Attending the right party
Leslie’s opening remarks for each show create a sort of macramé wall hanging woven from a deep knowledge of music and history. Also, a sincere fascination with the vision that caused Those Fantabulous Strings to record “Help!”
He pulls an album by Ray Charles, “but the other Ray Charles,” who directed the Ray Charles Singers. “You know you’re at the right party when people say they’re into ‘the other Ray Charles’ and everyone knows what they’re talking about,” Leslie said with a satisfied smile.
“Jet Set Planet” has risen from an initial graveyard shift to the 9-10:30 p.m. slot on Fridays. You can hear the show anytime, via program archive downloads at www. kfai.org/jet-set-planet. Leslie also does occasional live gigs as Higher Than Fi, showing up at Bev’s Wine Bar in Minneapolis on most second Saturdays or setting the mood at the recent Art-a-Whirl.
He did not set out to champion lounge music.
Leslie began DJ-ing in college in Portland, Maine, in the ’80s, playing rock and indie labels. Another show featured thrift store vinyl. Leslie was intrigued, then hooked.
He moved to Milwaukee, then to Minneapolis, where he’s an administrator in the geography department at the University of Minnesota. He’d known of KFAI, whose diverse programming ranges beyond the mainstream, and volunteered to do a similar show.
They turned him down.
“I mean, it’s not the kind of music I would ever play at home,” Thums said, adding with a laugh that the station soon said yes. “Jet Set Planet,” he said, “is one of the nichiest of the niches. There are maybe two or three other shows like this in the country, and Glen is pretty much what makes this one work.”
The past in the present tense
A word about the album covers: omigod.
The early days of the Jet Set era predated feminism, while its later days perhaps delighted in poking it with a sharp stick.
Hence, covers with nude women reclining with artfully crossed legs and strategically placed objects. When women are clothed, think Barbarella.
Some covers have a pop-art, Peter Max vibe, while others are lush with jungle themes. Vietnam? You decide.
There is breaking surf, menacing cigarette holders, canyons of cleavage, rivers of lava, Vaseline-lensed visages and men who suavely predestined today’s Dos Equis’ “The Most Interesting Man in the World” ads.
Leslie can only be grateful he’s doing a radio show.
Students at the university sometimes learn that the familiar paper-pusher (his term for his day job) has an on-air life. Indeed, the show feels strangely contemporary, due to Leslie conscientiously speaking in the present tense and not playing the nostalgia card.
“A friend told me that ‘Jet Set Planet’ is like a popular radio station in an alternate universe,” he said. “And I push that.”
So he’ll keep spinning and scrounging, always on the lookout for that personal Holy Grail, an album by the Hellers, whose members included Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer.
Could he find it online? Maybe. But he won’t look. If he’s meant to find it, he’ll find it the way people once bought records, flipping through the bins, slap, slap, slap, looking for the one that will start the party in his other universe.
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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Worth the wait: Downtown bus shelter doubles as tiny jazz club | TribLIVE
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/8716818-74/jazz-bus-liberty#axzz3fn233YN8
** Worth the wait: Downtown bus shelter doubles as tiny jazz club
————————————————————
Strains of a saxophone drifted along Liberty Avenue, followed by a sultry female vocalist scatting over the swing of a big band.
“This is really nice,” said Debbie DeVaughn, leaning against the wall of the bus stop Friday afternoon. “I like it.”
Welcome to Pittsburgh’s Smallest Jazz Club, a slick bus shelter at Ninth and Liberty featuring piped-in jazz from overhead speakers and photos of players along its interior. The project is the brainchild of MCG Jazz, a promotional program of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and supported by a $1,000 grant from Awesome Pittsburgh.
DeVaughn, 60, of Wilkinsburg, who shopped at Pittsburgh Popcorn, waited for a bus to head up Liberty. Although she didn’t have a schedule, and the stop lacked a bench, DeVaughn didn’t mind the wait.
The typical symphony of this Downtown street — truck engines, honked horns and chattering passersby — had newfound style.
“It takes you away from, ‘Where’s the bus?’” DeVaughn said. “You’re looking around, bobbing your head. I don’t even mind standing up.”
MCG Jazz marketing manager Amy Kline said the project is designed to promote the program and the city’s scene. The organization has a Facebook page.
“The intent is to promote jazz music as Pittsburgh’s greatest arts export, and to remind people that jazz music — and art — is fun, familiar and everywhere,” she said.
Dean Emily Keebler of Awesome Pittsburgh said the foundation chose to support the project to “strengthen the longtime Pittsburgh jazz community and contribute to the overall cultural and artistic diversity of the region.”
Along Liberty Avenue, the sound floats just outside the three-sided terminal, catching the ears of non-riders.
Craig Fox, 39, of Mt. Lebanon wasn’t waiting for a bus but heard the music as he stopped to check his phone nearby. The idea, he said, could be replicated elsewhere.
“You could do it with all kinds of music,” he said.
Melissa Daniels is a Trib Total Media staff writer. Reach her at 412-380-8511 or mdaniels@tribweb.com (mailto:mdaniels@tribweb.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=efaf8d8324) | 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=efaf8d8324&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Worth the wait: Downtown bus shelter doubles as tiny jazz club | TribLIVE
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/8716818-74/jazz-bus-liberty#axzz3fn233YN8
** Worth the wait: Downtown bus shelter doubles as tiny jazz club
————————————————————
Strains of a saxophone drifted along Liberty Avenue, followed by a sultry female vocalist scatting over the swing of a big band.
“This is really nice,” said Debbie DeVaughn, leaning against the wall of the bus stop Friday afternoon. “I like it.”
Welcome to Pittsburgh’s Smallest Jazz Club, a slick bus shelter at Ninth and Liberty featuring piped-in jazz from overhead speakers and photos of players along its interior. The project is the brainchild of MCG Jazz, a promotional program of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and supported by a $1,000 grant from Awesome Pittsburgh.
DeVaughn, 60, of Wilkinsburg, who shopped at Pittsburgh Popcorn, waited for a bus to head up Liberty. Although she didn’t have a schedule, and the stop lacked a bench, DeVaughn didn’t mind the wait.
The typical symphony of this Downtown street — truck engines, honked horns and chattering passersby — had newfound style.
“It takes you away from, ‘Where’s the bus?’” DeVaughn said. “You’re looking around, bobbing your head. I don’t even mind standing up.”
MCG Jazz marketing manager Amy Kline said the project is designed to promote the program and the city’s scene. The organization has a Facebook page.
“The intent is to promote jazz music as Pittsburgh’s greatest arts export, and to remind people that jazz music — and art — is fun, familiar and everywhere,” she said.
Dean Emily Keebler of Awesome Pittsburgh said the foundation chose to support the project to “strengthen the longtime Pittsburgh jazz community and contribute to the overall cultural and artistic diversity of the region.”
Along Liberty Avenue, the sound floats just outside the three-sided terminal, catching the ears of non-riders.
Craig Fox, 39, of Mt. Lebanon wasn’t waiting for a bus but heard the music as he stopped to check his phone nearby. The idea, he said, could be replicated elsewhere.
“You could do it with all kinds of music,” he said.
Melissa Daniels is a Trib Total Media staff writer. Reach her at 412-380-8511 or mdaniels@tribweb.com (mailto:mdaniels@tribweb.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=efaf8d8324) | 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=efaf8d8324&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
Worth the wait: Downtown bus shelter doubles as tiny jazz club | TribLIVE
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://triblive.com/news/allegheny/8716818-74/jazz-bus-liberty#axzz3fn233YN8
** Worth the wait: Downtown bus shelter doubles as tiny jazz club
————————————————————
Strains of a saxophone drifted along Liberty Avenue, followed by a sultry female vocalist scatting over the swing of a big band.
“This is really nice,” said Debbie DeVaughn, leaning against the wall of the bus stop Friday afternoon. “I like it.”
Welcome to Pittsburgh’s Smallest Jazz Club, a slick bus shelter at Ninth and Liberty featuring piped-in jazz from overhead speakers and photos of players along its interior. The project is the brainchild of MCG Jazz, a promotional program of Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, and supported by a $1,000 grant from Awesome Pittsburgh.
DeVaughn, 60, of Wilkinsburg, who shopped at Pittsburgh Popcorn, waited for a bus to head up Liberty. Although she didn’t have a schedule, and the stop lacked a bench, DeVaughn didn’t mind the wait.
The typical symphony of this Downtown street — truck engines, honked horns and chattering passersby — had newfound style.
“It takes you away from, ‘Where’s the bus?’” DeVaughn said. “You’re looking around, bobbing your head. I don’t even mind standing up.”
MCG Jazz marketing manager Amy Kline said the project is designed to promote the program and the city’s scene. The organization has a Facebook page.
“The intent is to promote jazz music as Pittsburgh’s greatest arts export, and to remind people that jazz music — and art — is fun, familiar and everywhere,” she said.
Dean Emily Keebler of Awesome Pittsburgh said the foundation chose to support the project to “strengthen the longtime Pittsburgh jazz community and contribute to the overall cultural and artistic diversity of the region.”
Along Liberty Avenue, the sound floats just outside the three-sided terminal, catching the ears of non-riders.
Craig Fox, 39, of Mt. Lebanon wasn’t waiting for a bus but heard the music as he stopped to check his phone nearby. The idea, he said, could be replicated elsewhere.
“You could do it with all kinds of music,” he said.
Melissa Daniels is a Trib Total Media staff writer. Reach her at 412-380-8511 or mdaniels@tribweb.com (mailto:mdaniels@tribweb.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=efaf8d8324) | 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=efaf8d8324&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
Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/nyregion/son-of-jazz-legend-finds-his-fathers-legacy-lives-in-a-club-in-the-village.html?_r=0
** Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village
————————————————————
Photo
Milton Mesirow, 79, known as Mezz Jr., whose father was the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow.Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Spike Wilner stepped in front of the crowd at Mezzrow (https://www.mezzrow.com/) , a Greenwich Village jazz club he opened in September, and introduced a bearded man sitting against the wall as the son of the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/08/09/79472796.html?pageNumber=40) , for whom Mr. Wilner named the club.
For the son, Milton Mesirow, 79, it was his first visit to the club, and he had just met Mr. Wilner minutes earlier.
Mr. Mesirow, who said he is Mr. Mezzrow’s only child, had shown up on a recent weeknight to enjoy some music but also because he was curious about this club that had opened without his knowledge.
Mr. Wilner had not asked whether anyone owned the rights to Mr. Mezzrow’s name and seemed relieved that their conversation earlier in the evening had gone amiably.
“We’re very grateful to him for not suing us,” Mr. Wilner joked to the crowd, prompting one member of the audience to respond, “He’s just waiting for you to get off the ground.”
The long, narrow grotto-style club seems successful already, and Mr. Mesirow appeared impressed as he looked at the walls adorned with photos and memorabilia about his father.
Photo
Outside Mezzrow, a jazz club in Greenwich Village named after Mr. Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
There was a framed poster-size caricature of Mr. Mezzrow hanging above a Steinway piano and an old copy of the jazzman’s colorful autobiography, “Really the Blues,” (http://www.amazon.com/Really-The-Blues-Mezz-Mezzrow/dp/0806512059) displayed on something of a candlelit Buddhist altar, an indication of the reverence that Mr. Wilner, a Buddhist, displays for Mr. Mezzrow’s life and legacy.
Mr. Mezzrow, who performed mostly from the 1930s through the ’50s and died in 1972, came from a Jewish family in Chicago — born Milton Mesirow — but sympathized so fully with the African-American experience that he came to identify with it himself.
He was known for embracing African-American culture and for playing with great black musicians like Sidney Bechet (http://www.sidneybechet.org/about-sidney-bechet/) and organizing and financing record sessions with them. He also became well known as a dealer and proponent of marijuana, with “mezz” or “mezzrow” becoming slang for a marijuana joint in the era when he was performing.
His wife, Johnnie Mae Mezzrow, who was black, died several years before her husband. They lived with their son for years in Harlem, said Mr. Mesirow, who is known widely as Mezz Jr. and lives in Warwick, N.Y.
After hearing about the club from a neighbor, Jim Eigo, who is a jazz publicist, Mr. Mesirow drove to the club, which is on West 10th Street, across Seventh Avenue South from Smalls Jazz Club (http://www.smallsjazzclub.com/indexnew.cfm) , which Mr. Wilner also runs.
Mr. Mesirow and his partner, Gwen Schaffer, an artist, sat near the bandstand as Bob Dorough, a pianist, performed.
Mr. Wilner came over and told Mr. Mesirow that he chose his father as the theme for the club because “I felt he was a symbol” and that he felt a kinship with him as “a Jewish man who embraced African-American culture and art form.”
He said he admired Mr. Mezzrow’s playing, his autobiography and his views on an array of topics such as marijuana and interracial marriage.
In Harlem, Mr. Mezzrow indulged his desire to live as a black jazz musician, “hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can,” as he wrote in the book.
Once, after being arrested for selling marijuana, Mr. Mezzrow insisted on being placed in the segregated jail’s section for blacks.
Photo
The Bob Dorough trio performing in June at Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
“He was listed as Negro on his draft card” in World War II, said Mr. Mesirow, who grew up largely in New York City and later moved to Paris to be with his father, whose “base was the nearest hotel.”
Mr. Mesirow said he became a jazz drummer and “played with some of the greats, but I saw it wasn’t going to pay my dinner bill.”
Mr. Mesirow said he met Ms. Schaffer at a Paris jazz club in 1961 and she told him she had read his father’s book. They now make custom illustrations of collectible cars for T-shirts. He still holds out hope for a film based on his father’s autobiography.
Mr. Wilner and Mr. Mesirow both agreed that long before the controversy over Rachel Dolezal — the leader of a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State who portrayed herself as black though her parents say she was born white (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show.html?_r=0) — Mr. Mezzrow’s book raised probing questions about racial identity.
“It’s great literature,” Mr. Wilner told Mr. Mesirow, adding that the book deals with universal themes like “the blues, what every human suffers through.”
Mr. Mesirow said he was “honored” the club bore his father’s name. But he said he would still explore whether he had any legal rights to the name.
“I’d have to look into the legality of the name, because remember, Mezzrow was technically his pen name,” he said.
As for his own racial identification, Mr. Mesirow said that because of his light skin, he is sometimes taken for a white man, but that he had also experienced racism while living in predominantly white areas.
“I’m black — you can’t get away from it,” he said. “In the South they used to say if you’re one-tenth black, you’re black,” he said.
His religious affiliation, he said, is more straightforward.
“My father put me in a shul, and my mother’s side tried to make me a Baptist,” he said. “So when I’m asked what my religion is, I just say ‘jazz.’ ”
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=88b808e7ed) | 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=88b808e7ed&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
Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/nyregion/son-of-jazz-legend-finds-his-fathers-legacy-lives-in-a-club-in-the-village.html?_r=0
** Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village
————————————————————
Photo
Milton Mesirow, 79, known as Mezz Jr., whose father was the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow.Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Spike Wilner stepped in front of the crowd at Mezzrow (https://www.mezzrow.com/) , a Greenwich Village jazz club he opened in September, and introduced a bearded man sitting against the wall as the son of the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/08/09/79472796.html?pageNumber=40) , for whom Mr. Wilner named the club.
For the son, Milton Mesirow, 79, it was his first visit to the club, and he had just met Mr. Wilner minutes earlier.
Mr. Mesirow, who said he is Mr. Mezzrow’s only child, had shown up on a recent weeknight to enjoy some music but also because he was curious about this club that had opened without his knowledge.
Mr. Wilner had not asked whether anyone owned the rights to Mr. Mezzrow’s name and seemed relieved that their conversation earlier in the evening had gone amiably.
“We’re very grateful to him for not suing us,” Mr. Wilner joked to the crowd, prompting one member of the audience to respond, “He’s just waiting for you to get off the ground.”
The long, narrow grotto-style club seems successful already, and Mr. Mesirow appeared impressed as he looked at the walls adorned with photos and memorabilia about his father.
Photo
Outside Mezzrow, a jazz club in Greenwich Village named after Mr. Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
There was a framed poster-size caricature of Mr. Mezzrow hanging above a Steinway piano and an old copy of the jazzman’s colorful autobiography, “Really the Blues,” (http://www.amazon.com/Really-The-Blues-Mezz-Mezzrow/dp/0806512059) displayed on something of a candlelit Buddhist altar, an indication of the reverence that Mr. Wilner, a Buddhist, displays for Mr. Mezzrow’s life and legacy.
Mr. Mezzrow, who performed mostly from the 1930s through the ’50s and died in 1972, came from a Jewish family in Chicago — born Milton Mesirow — but sympathized so fully with the African-American experience that he came to identify with it himself.
He was known for embracing African-American culture and for playing with great black musicians like Sidney Bechet (http://www.sidneybechet.org/about-sidney-bechet/) and organizing and financing record sessions with them. He also became well known as a dealer and proponent of marijuana, with “mezz” or “mezzrow” becoming slang for a marijuana joint in the era when he was performing.
His wife, Johnnie Mae Mezzrow, who was black, died several years before her husband. They lived with their son for years in Harlem, said Mr. Mesirow, who is known widely as Mezz Jr. and lives in Warwick, N.Y.
After hearing about the club from a neighbor, Jim Eigo, who is a jazz publicist, Mr. Mesirow drove to the club, which is on West 10th Street, across Seventh Avenue South from Smalls Jazz Club (http://www.smallsjazzclub.com/indexnew.cfm) , which Mr. Wilner also runs.
Mr. Mesirow and his partner, Gwen Schaffer, an artist, sat near the bandstand as Bob Dorough, a pianist, performed.
Mr. Wilner came over and told Mr. Mesirow that he chose his father as the theme for the club because “I felt he was a symbol” and that he felt a kinship with him as “a Jewish man who embraced African-American culture and art form.”
He said he admired Mr. Mezzrow’s playing, his autobiography and his views on an array of topics such as marijuana and interracial marriage.
In Harlem, Mr. Mezzrow indulged his desire to live as a black jazz musician, “hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can,” as he wrote in the book.
Once, after being arrested for selling marijuana, Mr. Mezzrow insisted on being placed in the segregated jail’s section for blacks.
Photo
The Bob Dorough trio performing in June at Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
“He was listed as Negro on his draft card” in World War II, said Mr. Mesirow, who grew up largely in New York City and later moved to Paris to be with his father, whose “base was the nearest hotel.”
Mr. Mesirow said he became a jazz drummer and “played with some of the greats, but I saw it wasn’t going to pay my dinner bill.”
Mr. Mesirow said he met Ms. Schaffer at a Paris jazz club in 1961 and she told him she had read his father’s book. They now make custom illustrations of collectible cars for T-shirts. He still holds out hope for a film based on his father’s autobiography.
Mr. Wilner and Mr. Mesirow both agreed that long before the controversy over Rachel Dolezal — the leader of a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State who portrayed herself as black though her parents say she was born white (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show.html?_r=0) — Mr. Mezzrow’s book raised probing questions about racial identity.
“It’s great literature,” Mr. Wilner told Mr. Mesirow, adding that the book deals with universal themes like “the blues, what every human suffers through.”
Mr. Mesirow said he was “honored” the club bore his father’s name. But he said he would still explore whether he had any legal rights to the name.
“I’d have to look into the legality of the name, because remember, Mezzrow was technically his pen name,” he said.
As for his own racial identification, Mr. Mesirow said that because of his light skin, he is sometimes taken for a white man, but that he had also experienced racism while living in predominantly white areas.
“I’m black — you can’t get away from it,” he said. “In the South they used to say if you’re one-tenth black, you’re black,” he said.
His religious affiliation, he said, is more straightforward.
“My father put me in a shul, and my mother’s side tried to make me a Baptist,” he said. “So when I’m asked what my religion is, I just say ‘jazz.’ ”
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
Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/nyregion/son-of-jazz-legend-finds-his-fathers-legacy-lives-in-a-club-in-the-village.html?_r=0
** Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village
————————————————————
Photo
Milton Mesirow, 79, known as Mezz Jr., whose father was the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow.Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Spike Wilner stepped in front of the crowd at Mezzrow (https://www.mezzrow.com/) , a Greenwich Village jazz club he opened in September, and introduced a bearded man sitting against the wall as the son of the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/08/09/79472796.html?pageNumber=40) , for whom Mr. Wilner named the club.
For the son, Milton Mesirow, 79, it was his first visit to the club, and he had just met Mr. Wilner minutes earlier.
Mr. Mesirow, who said he is Mr. Mezzrow’s only child, had shown up on a recent weeknight to enjoy some music but also because he was curious about this club that had opened without his knowledge.
Mr. Wilner had not asked whether anyone owned the rights to Mr. Mezzrow’s name and seemed relieved that their conversation earlier in the evening had gone amiably.
“We’re very grateful to him for not suing us,” Mr. Wilner joked to the crowd, prompting one member of the audience to respond, “He’s just waiting for you to get off the ground.”
The long, narrow grotto-style club seems successful already, and Mr. Mesirow appeared impressed as he looked at the walls adorned with photos and memorabilia about his father.
Photo
Outside Mezzrow, a jazz club in Greenwich Village named after Mr. Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
There was a framed poster-size caricature of Mr. Mezzrow hanging above a Steinway piano and an old copy of the jazzman’s colorful autobiography, “Really the Blues,” (http://www.amazon.com/Really-The-Blues-Mezz-Mezzrow/dp/0806512059) displayed on something of a candlelit Buddhist altar, an indication of the reverence that Mr. Wilner, a Buddhist, displays for Mr. Mezzrow’s life and legacy.
Mr. Mezzrow, who performed mostly from the 1930s through the ’50s and died in 1972, came from a Jewish family in Chicago — born Milton Mesirow — but sympathized so fully with the African-American experience that he came to identify with it himself.
He was known for embracing African-American culture and for playing with great black musicians like Sidney Bechet (http://www.sidneybechet.org/about-sidney-bechet/) and organizing and financing record sessions with them. He also became well known as a dealer and proponent of marijuana, with “mezz” or “mezzrow” becoming slang for a marijuana joint in the era when he was performing.
His wife, Johnnie Mae Mezzrow, who was black, died several years before her husband. They lived with their son for years in Harlem, said Mr. Mesirow, who is known widely as Mezz Jr. and lives in Warwick, N.Y.
After hearing about the club from a neighbor, Jim Eigo, who is a jazz publicist, Mr. Mesirow drove to the club, which is on West 10th Street, across Seventh Avenue South from Smalls Jazz Club (http://www.smallsjazzclub.com/indexnew.cfm) , which Mr. Wilner also runs.
Mr. Mesirow and his partner, Gwen Schaffer, an artist, sat near the bandstand as Bob Dorough, a pianist, performed.
Mr. Wilner came over and told Mr. Mesirow that he chose his father as the theme for the club because “I felt he was a symbol” and that he felt a kinship with him as “a Jewish man who embraced African-American culture and art form.”
He said he admired Mr. Mezzrow’s playing, his autobiography and his views on an array of topics such as marijuana and interracial marriage.
In Harlem, Mr. Mezzrow indulged his desire to live as a black jazz musician, “hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can,” as he wrote in the book.
Once, after being arrested for selling marijuana, Mr. Mezzrow insisted on being placed in the segregated jail’s section for blacks.
Photo
The Bob Dorough trio performing in June at Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
“He was listed as Negro on his draft card” in World War II, said Mr. Mesirow, who grew up largely in New York City and later moved to Paris to be with his father, whose “base was the nearest hotel.”
Mr. Mesirow said he became a jazz drummer and “played with some of the greats, but I saw it wasn’t going to pay my dinner bill.”
Mr. Mesirow said he met Ms. Schaffer at a Paris jazz club in 1961 and she told him she had read his father’s book. They now make custom illustrations of collectible cars for T-shirts. He still holds out hope for a film based on his father’s autobiography.
Mr. Wilner and Mr. Mesirow both agreed that long before the controversy over Rachel Dolezal — the leader of a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State who portrayed herself as black though her parents say she was born white (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show.html?_r=0) — Mr. Mezzrow’s book raised probing questions about racial identity.
“It’s great literature,” Mr. Wilner told Mr. Mesirow, adding that the book deals with universal themes like “the blues, what every human suffers through.”
Mr. Mesirow said he was “honored” the club bore his father’s name. But he said he would still explore whether he had any legal rights to the name.
“I’d have to look into the legality of the name, because remember, Mezzrow was technically his pen name,” he said.
As for his own racial identification, Mr. Mesirow said that because of his light skin, he is sometimes taken for a white man, but that he had also experienced racism while living in predominantly white areas.
“I’m black — you can’t get away from it,” he said. “In the South they used to say if you’re one-tenth black, you’re black,” he said.
His religious affiliation, he said, is more straightforward.
“My father put me in a shul, and my mother’s side tried to make me a Baptist,” he said. “So when I’m asked what my religion is, I just say ‘jazz.’ ”
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=88b808e7ed) | 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=88b808e7ed&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
Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/nyregion/son-of-jazz-legend-finds-his-fathers-legacy-lives-in-a-club-in-the-village.html?_r=0
** Son of Mezz Mezzrow Finds His Father’s Legacy Lives in a Jazz Club in the Village
————————————————————
Photo
Milton Mesirow, 79, known as Mezz Jr., whose father was the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow.Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Spike Wilner stepped in front of the crowd at Mezzrow (https://www.mezzrow.com/) , a Greenwich Village jazz club he opened in September, and introduced a bearded man sitting against the wall as the son of the jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/08/09/79472796.html?pageNumber=40) , for whom Mr. Wilner named the club.
For the son, Milton Mesirow, 79, it was his first visit to the club, and he had just met Mr. Wilner minutes earlier.
Mr. Mesirow, who said he is Mr. Mezzrow’s only child, had shown up on a recent weeknight to enjoy some music but also because he was curious about this club that had opened without his knowledge.
Mr. Wilner had not asked whether anyone owned the rights to Mr. Mezzrow’s name and seemed relieved that their conversation earlier in the evening had gone amiably.
“We’re very grateful to him for not suing us,” Mr. Wilner joked to the crowd, prompting one member of the audience to respond, “He’s just waiting for you to get off the ground.”
The long, narrow grotto-style club seems successful already, and Mr. Mesirow appeared impressed as he looked at the walls adorned with photos and memorabilia about his father.
Photo
Outside Mezzrow, a jazz club in Greenwich Village named after Mr. Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
There was a framed poster-size caricature of Mr. Mezzrow hanging above a Steinway piano and an old copy of the jazzman’s colorful autobiography, “Really the Blues,” (http://www.amazon.com/Really-The-Blues-Mezz-Mezzrow/dp/0806512059) displayed on something of a candlelit Buddhist altar, an indication of the reverence that Mr. Wilner, a Buddhist, displays for Mr. Mezzrow’s life and legacy.
Mr. Mezzrow, who performed mostly from the 1930s through the ’50s and died in 1972, came from a Jewish family in Chicago — born Milton Mesirow — but sympathized so fully with the African-American experience that he came to identify with it himself.
He was known for embracing African-American culture and for playing with great black musicians like Sidney Bechet (http://www.sidneybechet.org/about-sidney-bechet/) and organizing and financing record sessions with them. He also became well known as a dealer and proponent of marijuana, with “mezz” or “mezzrow” becoming slang for a marijuana joint in the era when he was performing.
His wife, Johnnie Mae Mezzrow, who was black, died several years before her husband. They lived with their son for years in Harlem, said Mr. Mesirow, who is known widely as Mezz Jr. and lives in Warwick, N.Y.
After hearing about the club from a neighbor, Jim Eigo, who is a jazz publicist, Mr. Mesirow drove to the club, which is on West 10th Street, across Seventh Avenue South from Smalls Jazz Club (http://www.smallsjazzclub.com/indexnew.cfm) , which Mr. Wilner also runs.
Mr. Mesirow and his partner, Gwen Schaffer, an artist, sat near the bandstand as Bob Dorough, a pianist, performed.
Mr. Wilner came over and told Mr. Mesirow that he chose his father as the theme for the club because “I felt he was a symbol” and that he felt a kinship with him as “a Jewish man who embraced African-American culture and art form.”
He said he admired Mr. Mezzrow’s playing, his autobiography and his views on an array of topics such as marijuana and interracial marriage.
In Harlem, Mr. Mezzrow indulged his desire to live as a black jazz musician, “hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can,” as he wrote in the book.
Once, after being arrested for selling marijuana, Mr. Mezzrow insisted on being placed in the segregated jail’s section for blacks.
Photo
The Bob Dorough trio performing in June at Mezzrow. Credit Michael Appleton for The New York Times
“He was listed as Negro on his draft card” in World War II, said Mr. Mesirow, who grew up largely in New York City and later moved to Paris to be with his father, whose “base was the nearest hotel.”
Mr. Mesirow said he became a jazz drummer and “played with some of the greats, but I saw it wasn’t going to pay my dinner bill.”
Mr. Mesirow said he met Ms. Schaffer at a Paris jazz club in 1961 and she told him she had read his father’s book. They now make custom illustrations of collectible cars for T-shirts. He still holds out hope for a film based on his father’s autobiography.
Mr. Wilner and Mr. Mesirow both agreed that long before the controversy over Rachel Dolezal — the leader of a N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Washington State who portrayed herself as black though her parents say she was born white (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show.html?_r=0) — Mr. Mezzrow’s book raised probing questions about racial identity.
“It’s great literature,” Mr. Wilner told Mr. Mesirow, adding that the book deals with universal themes like “the blues, what every human suffers through.”
Mr. Mesirow said he was “honored” the club bore his father’s name. But he said he would still explore whether he had any legal rights to the name.
“I’d have to look into the legality of the name, because remember, Mezzrow was technically his pen name,” he said.
As for his own racial identification, Mr. Mesirow said that because of his light skin, he is sometimes taken for a white man, but that he had also experienced racism while living in predominantly white areas.
“I’m black — you can’t get away from it,” he said. “In the South they used to say if you’re one-tenth black, you’re black,” he said.
His religious affiliation, he said, is more straightforward.
“My father put me in a shul, and my mother’s side tried to make me a Baptist,” he said. “So when I’m asked what my religion is, I just say ‘jazz.’ ”
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=88b808e7ed) | 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=88b808e7ed&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-dies-at-75-jazz-pianist-embraced-individualism.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150709
** Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75
————————————————————
By BEN RATLIFF
Photo
Masabumi Kikuchi in 2012. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Masabumi Kikuchi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmYU_Y3Hp8A) , a Japanese jazz pianist known to New York audiences in his final decades for his highly idiosyncratic approach, often heard in his work with the drummer Paul Motian, died on Monday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 75.
The cause was a subdural hematoma, his daughter, Abi Kikuchi, said. He lived in Manhattan.
Conversant in many styles of jazz, Mr. Kikuchi recorded with major figures in both the United States and Japan, including the arranger Gil Evans, the drummer Elvin Jones, the saxophonist Joe Henderson and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino. But his power during his somewhat reclusive later years was less quantifiable in terms of specific style. His playing had a kind of cloistered originality, with long silences, and a keyboard touch that could be delicate or combative; he often sang or moaned as he unspooled his ideas.
Mr. Motian, who died in 2011, was one of the few bandleaders with whom Mr. Kikuchi worked from the 1990s onward. Although he played standards in Mr. Motian’s various groups, which he could do with extreme care (one of many examples is “If You Could See Me Now,” from Mr. Motian’s album “Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. 1” ), Mr. Kikuchi preferred a kind of highly sensitive and often provocative free improvisation, which he liked to describe as “floating.”
“I never felt virtuosic at all, in my life, even for a moment,” Mr. Kikuchi said in an interview (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-finds-new-direction-with-sunrise.html?_r=0) in 2012 with The New York Times. “Because I don’t have any technique. So I have had to develop my own language.”
Mr. Kikuchi was born in Tokyo on Oct. 19, 1939. He and his family moved north to a rural area in Aizuwakamatsu, in Fukushima prefecture, after the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Kikuchi is survived by a brother, Masaharu.
As a young musician, studying at an arts high school in Tokyo and buying secondhand records that he assumed had been left behind by American soldiers, Mr. Kikuchi was influenced by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. During his early professional years in Japan, he recorded a series of popular bossa nova records with the saxophonist Sadao Watanabe. In 1969 he briefly attended Berklee College of Music in Boston; in 1974 he returned to the United States and moved to New York City.
His early recordings as a leader often followed the examples of McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea and the sound of Miles Davis’s electric period. He recorded a string of solo synthesizer records in the 1980s for Japanese labels. But after starting to work with Mr. Motian in 1990, he turned back to acoustic piano and his own imperatives.
Starting in the 2000s, Mr. Kikuchi released hardly any music commercially, yet recorded a great amount of it, alone and with others including the bassist Thomas Morgan and the guitarist Todd Neufeld, on professional equipment in his loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — including, by his own count, more than 50 solo albums. In 2012 ECM released “Sunrise,” an acclaimed trio album with Mr. Motian and Mr. Morgan.
“He can’t, or won’t, contour his thinking or approach to fit somebody’s ideal,” the saxophonist Greg Osby, who recorded with Mr. Kikuchi several times, said in a 2012 interview. “You call him because you want what he offers.”
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=4833a7af8a) | 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=4833a7af8a&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
Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-dies-at-75-jazz-pianist-embraced-individualism.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150709
** Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75
————————————————————
By BEN RATLIFF
Photo
Masabumi Kikuchi in 2012. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Masabumi Kikuchi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmYU_Y3Hp8A) , a Japanese jazz pianist known to New York audiences in his final decades for his highly idiosyncratic approach, often heard in his work with the drummer Paul Motian, died on Monday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 75.
The cause was a subdural hematoma, his daughter, Abi Kikuchi, said. He lived in Manhattan.
Conversant in many styles of jazz, Mr. Kikuchi recorded with major figures in both the United States and Japan, including the arranger Gil Evans, the drummer Elvin Jones, the saxophonist Joe Henderson and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino. But his power during his somewhat reclusive later years was less quantifiable in terms of specific style. His playing had a kind of cloistered originality, with long silences, and a keyboard touch that could be delicate or combative; he often sang or moaned as he unspooled his ideas.
Mr. Motian, who died in 2011, was one of the few bandleaders with whom Mr. Kikuchi worked from the 1990s onward. Although he played standards in Mr. Motian’s various groups, which he could do with extreme care (one of many examples is “If You Could See Me Now,” from Mr. Motian’s album “Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. 1” ), Mr. Kikuchi preferred a kind of highly sensitive and often provocative free improvisation, which he liked to describe as “floating.”
“I never felt virtuosic at all, in my life, even for a moment,” Mr. Kikuchi said in an interview (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-finds-new-direction-with-sunrise.html?_r=0) in 2012 with The New York Times. “Because I don’t have any technique. So I have had to develop my own language.”
Mr. Kikuchi was born in Tokyo on Oct. 19, 1939. He and his family moved north to a rural area in Aizuwakamatsu, in Fukushima prefecture, after the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Kikuchi is survived by a brother, Masaharu.
As a young musician, studying at an arts high school in Tokyo and buying secondhand records that he assumed had been left behind by American soldiers, Mr. Kikuchi was influenced by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. During his early professional years in Japan, he recorded a series of popular bossa nova records with the saxophonist Sadao Watanabe. In 1969 he briefly attended Berklee College of Music in Boston; in 1974 he returned to the United States and moved to New York City.
His early recordings as a leader often followed the examples of McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea and the sound of Miles Davis’s electric period. He recorded a string of solo synthesizer records in the 1980s for Japanese labels. But after starting to work with Mr. Motian in 1990, he turned back to acoustic piano and his own imperatives.
Starting in the 2000s, Mr. Kikuchi released hardly any music commercially, yet recorded a great amount of it, alone and with others including the bassist Thomas Morgan and the guitarist Todd Neufeld, on professional equipment in his loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — including, by his own count, more than 50 solo albums. In 2012 ECM released “Sunrise,” an acclaimed trio album with Mr. Motian and Mr. Morgan.
“He can’t, or won’t, contour his thinking or approach to fit somebody’s ideal,” the saxophonist Greg Osby, who recorded with Mr. Kikuchi several times, said in a 2012 interview. “You call him because you want what he offers.”
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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Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-dies-at-75-jazz-pianist-embraced-individualism.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150709
** Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75
————————————————————
By BEN RATLIFF
Photo
Masabumi Kikuchi in 2012. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Masabumi Kikuchi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmYU_Y3Hp8A) , a Japanese jazz pianist known to New York audiences in his final decades for his highly idiosyncratic approach, often heard in his work with the drummer Paul Motian, died on Monday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 75.
The cause was a subdural hematoma, his daughter, Abi Kikuchi, said. He lived in Manhattan.
Conversant in many styles of jazz, Mr. Kikuchi recorded with major figures in both the United States and Japan, including the arranger Gil Evans, the drummer Elvin Jones, the saxophonist Joe Henderson and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino. But his power during his somewhat reclusive later years was less quantifiable in terms of specific style. His playing had a kind of cloistered originality, with long silences, and a keyboard touch that could be delicate or combative; he often sang or moaned as he unspooled his ideas.
Mr. Motian, who died in 2011, was one of the few bandleaders with whom Mr. Kikuchi worked from the 1990s onward. Although he played standards in Mr. Motian’s various groups, which he could do with extreme care (one of many examples is “If You Could See Me Now,” from Mr. Motian’s album “Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. 1” ), Mr. Kikuchi preferred a kind of highly sensitive and often provocative free improvisation, which he liked to describe as “floating.”
“I never felt virtuosic at all, in my life, even for a moment,” Mr. Kikuchi said in an interview (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-finds-new-direction-with-sunrise.html?_r=0) in 2012 with The New York Times. “Because I don’t have any technique. So I have had to develop my own language.”
Mr. Kikuchi was born in Tokyo on Oct. 19, 1939. He and his family moved north to a rural area in Aizuwakamatsu, in Fukushima prefecture, after the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Kikuchi is survived by a brother, Masaharu.
As a young musician, studying at an arts high school in Tokyo and buying secondhand records that he assumed had been left behind by American soldiers, Mr. Kikuchi was influenced by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. During his early professional years in Japan, he recorded a series of popular bossa nova records with the saxophonist Sadao Watanabe. In 1969 he briefly attended Berklee College of Music in Boston; in 1974 he returned to the United States and moved to New York City.
His early recordings as a leader often followed the examples of McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea and the sound of Miles Davis’s electric period. He recorded a string of solo synthesizer records in the 1980s for Japanese labels. But after starting to work with Mr. Motian in 1990, he turned back to acoustic piano and his own imperatives.
Starting in the 2000s, Mr. Kikuchi released hardly any music commercially, yet recorded a great amount of it, alone and with others including the bassist Thomas Morgan and the guitarist Todd Neufeld, on professional equipment in his loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — including, by his own count, more than 50 solo albums. In 2012 ECM released “Sunrise,” an acclaimed trio album with Mr. Motian and Mr. Morgan.
“He can’t, or won’t, contour his thinking or approach to fit somebody’s ideal,” the saxophonist Greg Osby, who recorded with Mr. Kikuchi several times, said in a 2012 interview. “You call him because you want what he offers.”
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.
Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-dies-at-75-jazz-pianist-embraced-individualism.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150709
** Masabumi Kikuchi Jazz Pianist Who Embraced Individualism, Dies at 75
————————————————————
By BEN RATLIFF
Photo
Masabumi Kikuchi in 2012. Credit Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Masabumi Kikuchi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmYU_Y3Hp8A) , a Japanese jazz pianist known to New York audiences in his final decades for his highly idiosyncratic approach, often heard in his work with the drummer Paul Motian, died on Monday at a hospital in Manhasset, N.Y. He was 75.
The cause was a subdural hematoma, his daughter, Abi Kikuchi, said. He lived in Manhattan.
Conversant in many styles of jazz, Mr. Kikuchi recorded with major figures in both the United States and Japan, including the arranger Gil Evans, the drummer Elvin Jones, the saxophonist Joe Henderson and the trumpeter Terumasa Hino. But his power during his somewhat reclusive later years was less quantifiable in terms of specific style. His playing had a kind of cloistered originality, with long silences, and a keyboard touch that could be delicate or combative; he often sang or moaned as he unspooled his ideas.
Mr. Motian, who died in 2011, was one of the few bandleaders with whom Mr. Kikuchi worked from the 1990s onward. Although he played standards in Mr. Motian’s various groups, which he could do with extreme care (one of many examples is “If You Could See Me Now,” from Mr. Motian’s album “Live at the Village Vanguard Vol. 1” ), Mr. Kikuchi preferred a kind of highly sensitive and often provocative free improvisation, which he liked to describe as “floating.”
“I never felt virtuosic at all, in my life, even for a moment,” Mr. Kikuchi said in an interview (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/arts/music/masabumi-kikuchi-finds-new-direction-with-sunrise.html?_r=0) in 2012 with The New York Times. “Because I don’t have any technique. So I have had to develop my own language.”
Mr. Kikuchi was born in Tokyo on Oct. 19, 1939. He and his family moved north to a rural area in Aizuwakamatsu, in Fukushima prefecture, after the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. In addition to his daughter, Mr. Kikuchi is survived by a brother, Masaharu.
As a young musician, studying at an arts high school in Tokyo and buying secondhand records that he assumed had been left behind by American soldiers, Mr. Kikuchi was influenced by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. During his early professional years in Japan, he recorded a series of popular bossa nova records with the saxophonist Sadao Watanabe. In 1969 he briefly attended Berklee College of Music in Boston; in 1974 he returned to the United States and moved to New York City.
His early recordings as a leader often followed the examples of McCoy Tyner, Chick Corea and the sound of Miles Davis’s electric period. He recorded a string of solo synthesizer records in the 1980s for Japanese labels. But after starting to work with Mr. Motian in 1990, he turned back to acoustic piano and his own imperatives.
Starting in the 2000s, Mr. Kikuchi released hardly any music commercially, yet recorded a great amount of it, alone and with others including the bassist Thomas Morgan and the guitarist Todd Neufeld, on professional equipment in his loft in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan — including, by his own count, more than 50 solo albums. In 2012 ECM released “Sunrise,” an acclaimed trio album with Mr. Motian and Mr. Morgan.
“He can’t, or won’t, contour his thinking or approach to fit somebody’s ideal,” the saxophonist Greg Osby, who recorded with Mr. Kikuchi several times, said in a 2012 interview. “You call him because you want what he offers.”
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=4833a7af8a) | 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=4833a7af8a&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing – By Nat Hentoff The Daily Beast
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/04/born-in-the-usa-how-louis-armstrong-taught-us-to-swing.html
POPS
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07.04.1512:05 AM ET
By Nat Hentoff (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/nat-hentoff.html)
** Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing
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This genius with a trumpet did not invent jazz, as some have said, but when he got through with it, America’s homegrown art form was changed almost beyond recognition.
Louis Armstrong was a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on July 4, 1900. At least that’s the story Armstrong told. “They named me the firecracker baby,” he said. Who cares that it wasn’t true—he was actually born on August 4, 1901 and died on July 6, 1971—it fit his legend. And it is no exaggeration to call Armstrong, one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced, a legend.
In his terrific book, The History of Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Jazz-Ted-Gioia/dp/0195399706) , Daily Beast contributor Ted Gioia (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/ted-gioia.html) put it like this: “Revolutions, whether in arts or matters of state, create a new world only by sacrificing the old. With jazz, it is no different. To be sure, Louis Armstrong, who closed the book on the dynastic tradition in New Orleans jazz—putting an end to its colorful lineage of Kings Bolden, Keppart, and Oliver—stands out as an unlikely regicide. Armstrong always spoke with deference, bordering on awe, of his musical roots, and with especial devotion of his mention Joe Oliver. Yet the evidence of the grooves do not lie: the superiority of Armstrong’s musicianship, the unsurpassed linear momentum of his improvised lines, could serve only to make Oliver, Morton, Bolden, and the whole New Orleans ensemble tradition look passé, a horse-and-buggy cantering by Henry Ford’s
assembly line. The New Orleans pioneers exit stage left, Armstrong on trumpet enters stage right heralding the new Age of the Soloist.”
Let’s turn now to Nat Hentoff, the devoted enthusiast and chronicler of jazz music, for this take on Armstrong from Jazz Is (http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Nat-Hentoff-ebook/dp/B0046XQH7M/) . Reprinted with permission, please enjoy this appreciation of a true American genius (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZvqvNYJmC4) on Independence Day.
—Alex Belth
Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”
His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.
His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”
There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” [Emphasis added. N.H.]
‘If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,’ one of his old sidemen said, ‘how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?’
And that reminded me of what happened one night in the early ’30s, when a delegation of top brass from the Boston Symphony Orchestra—all of them unfamiliar with jazz but brought there by rumor of genius—stood in Louis Armstrong’s dressing room and asked him to play a passage they had heard in his act. Louis picked up his horn and obliged, performing the requested passage and then improvising a dazzling stream of variations.
Shaking their heads, these “legitimate” trumpet players left the room, one of them saying, “I watched his fingers and I still don’t know how he does it. I also don’t know how it is that, playing there all by himself, he sounded as if a whole orchestra were behind him. I never heard a musician like this, and I thought he was just a colored entertainer.”
But during the previous decade, in a series of deeply influential recordings, Louis had already shown to all who would listen that he was the first toweringly creative soloist in jazz. He did not create jazz, as André Hodeir, the French critic, has claimed; but Louis in the ‘20s did transcend and extend the beginnings of jazz in collective improvisation. As Gunther Schuller (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/arts/music/gunther-schuller-composer-who-synthesized-classical-and-jazz-dies-at-89.html?_r=0) has observed in his book, Early Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/Early-Jazz-Musical-Development-History/dp/0195040430/) , Louis established “the general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come.” Schuller was writing in particular about a 1928 recording, West End Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPgh7nxTQT4) , in which, he asserts, Armstrong served notice that “jazz could never again revert to being solely an entertainment or folk music … [Jazz now] had the
potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression.”
Except for true jazz believers in his own country and throughout the world, this concept of Louis Armstrong as a most serious, stunningly innovative artist is unfamiliar. During the last forty years of his life, most of Armstrong’s audiences saw Louis as an entertainer—his hands stretched out wide, in one of them a trumpet and a large, white handkerchief, and on his face the broadest and seemingly most durable grin in the history of Western man. He was often seen in the movies and on prime-time television variety shows, and he had a number of hit records, but he was by no means held in awe by the general public. Yet this was the man who had changed the very shape of jazz as fundamentally and permanently as Beethoven had changed the shape of the symphony.
But the musicians knew. In Chicago, when they came to marvel—and to try to steal some secrets—as Louis played with King Oliver. And then, in 1924, when Louis at the age of 24 made his first appearance in New York, the musicians there also knew. Loiuis had come to play with Fletcher Henderson’s big band. There were no jazz critics then. Nobody but the musicians took the music seriously, so they are our historians. Rex Stewart, long before he himself became an international force with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, remembered: “We had never heard anybody improvise that way—the brilliance and boldness of his ideas, the fantastic way he developed them, the deepness of his swing, and that gloriously full, clear sound. It was stunning! I went mad with the rest of the musicians. I tried to walk like him, talk like him, eat like him, sleep like him. I even bought a pair of big policeman shoes like he used to wear and I stood outside his apartment waiting for him to come out so I could
look at him.”
Before Louis Armstrong came to his blazing maturity in the ’20s there had, of course, been other notable jazz soloists. Some, like Buddy Bolden in New Orleans, are forever misted in legend because they never recorded. Others, like King Joe Oliver and players in Chicago, New York, and then Southwest were often forcefully, pungently distinctive. But none had the sweep, the extended melodic imagination, and the rhythmic inventiveness of Louis. None could make simplicity so profound or high-register fireworks so dramatically cohesive. And none, above all, had ever before so dominated the jazz ensemble, whether small combo or big band. The first fully liberated jazz soloist, Armstrong hugely influenced soloists on all instruments, and he helped free all who followed. They were still part of a collectively swinging group, but they had a lot more space in which to stretch out for themselves.
Gunther Schuller, an instrumentalist and a composer, emphasized in Early Jazz the four salient elements which set Louis apart from all the jazz musicians who had preceded him: “… (1) his superior choice of notes and the resultant shape of his lines; (2) his incomparable basic quality of tone; (3) his equally incomparable sense of swing, that is, the sureness with which notes are placed in the time continuum and the remarkably varied attack and release properties of his phrasing; (4) and, perhaps his most individualistic contribution, the subtly varied repertory of vibratos and shakes with which Armstrong colors and embellishes individual notes. The importance of the last fact cannot be emphasized enough, since it gives an Armstrong solo that peculiar sense of inner drive and forward momentum. Armstrong was incapable of not swinging.”
Back in New Orleans, when he was still a boy—who had learned to play trumpet in a waifs’ home where he had been sequestered for celebrating New Year’s Eve by shooting off a gun—Louis had already shown unmistakable signs that he was becoming a soloist unlike any New Orleans had ever heard or even imagined. Trumpeter Mutt Carey, known as the “Blues King of New Orleans” when Louis was a lad, once let the teenager take his chair in Kid Ory’s band, one of the city’s most crisply proficient combos.
“That Louis,” Carey recalled, “played more blues than I ever heard in my life. It never had struck my mind the blues could be interpreted so many different ways. Every time he played a chorus it was different, and yet you knew it was the blues.”
On that day Mutt abdicated as the city’s blues king.
Almost from the first time he picked up a horn, Louis has exemplified Duke Ellington’s dictum, “Nobody is as serious about music as a jazz musician is serious about music.”
“When I pick up that horn,” Louis, at 60, told Gilbert Millstein, “that’s all. The world’s behind me, and I don’t concentrate on nothing but that horn. I mean I don’t feel no different about that horn now than I did when I was playing in New Orleans. No, that’s my living and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make them right. Any part of the day, you’re liable to see me doing something toward [playing] that night … I don’t want a million dollars. See what I mean? There’s no medals. I mean, you got to live with that horn. That’s why I married four times. The chicks didn’t live with that horn. If they had, they would figure out, ‘Why should I get him all upset and get to fighting and hit him in the chops, it’s liable to hurt him?’”
And because music was the consuming passion, obsession, and pride of his life, Louis took care of himself so that he would always be in condition, so that younger players like Dizzy Gillespie could marvel at what Dizzy called Louis’s “phenomenal chops.” And in the years of his ascent he had to be in condition for jam sessions.
Many of those sessions were cooperative rather than competitive. As Louis once said of after-hours improvising with Bix Beiderbecke in Chicago in the late ’20s: “Everybody was feeling each other’s note or chord, blending with other instead of trying to cut each other.”
There were times, however, when these were martial sessions. As when, also in the ’20s, Johnny Dunn, the top trumpet-gun in New York, confronted Louis at the Dreamland in Chicago. They traded choruses for a while, Louis playing with his eyes closed. “All of a sudden,” Armstrong recalled, “I didn’t hear anything. Johnny Dunn had just eased away.”
It was so hard to cut Louis in a session, not only because of his soaring inventiveness, but also because of the extraordinary power with which he played. Critic Ralph Gleason once quoted Louis as telling of how he had sat in one night with Count Basie’s band in Florida. “I was just having fun,” said Louis, “and Count said to me, ‘Damn! I ain’t never heard that much strong horn played in all my life!’ Now, Count Basie’s trumpet players are all good musicians,” Louis continued, “but they run away from their notes. Why? Because they don’t keep their lips fortified.”
It also took a lot of self-fortification for Louis to keep on coping with the Jim Crow that was an obbligato to his life. For many, many years, famed as he was in Europe, when he’d go on the road in his own country, only certain places, black places, would house and feed Louis and his band. All black jazz musicians, no matter how lauded for their contributions to America’s “indigenous art form,” were pariahs on the road until comparatively recent times. A member of the Count Basie band, which had just come off the road in the early ’50s, told me: “Can you imagine what it feels like to begin pulling up to a gas station and see the attendant running like the hell to lock the men’s room. No, you can’t imagine it.”
In Louis Armstrong’s life one of many pungent illustrations of that dimension of the black experience took place in 1931, when Louis, having triumphed in New York and Chicago, returned to his home town, which was waiting to pay tribute. There were crowds and banners and a week’s engagement at a prestigious club where no black band had ever played. On opening night Louis waited for the radio announcer to start the club’s regular broadcast, but the latter could not bring himself, as he said within Louis’s hearing, to “announce that nigger man.” Turning to his musicians Louis asked for a resounding chord and proceeded to announce the show himself. “It was the first time,” Louis said to his first biographer, the Belgian Robert Goffin, that “a Negro spoke on the radio down there.”
Twenty-six years later, when Louis Armstrong had long since been comfortably established in the public mind as a most genial and wholly uncontroversial minstrel, millions of Americans were shocked at Armstrong’s reaction when Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas mightily resisted school integration in that state, the Supreme Court notwithstanding, while President Eisenhower temporized. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” Louis told the press, “the government can go to hell!” As for the widely beloved Ike, Louis observed, “The President has no guts.”
In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King’s march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, “They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.”
For black musicians who had come up with Louis in the ’20s and ’30s, this nongrinning Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was no surprise. “If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,” one of his old sidemen said, “how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?”
Yet most of Louis’s onstage high spirits were not feigned. He greatly enjoyed entertaining, getting through, pleasing an audience. And he certainly enjoyed the act of music. For him playing was a celebration of that act and he often celebrated it with wit. “A lot of people underestimate Louis’s musical sense of humor,” Dizzy Gillespie once said. “Many times, listening, I used to laugh right in the middle of his solos.”
Because Louis Armstrong was so much the entertainer from the ’30s on, there were some who maintained that Louis had stopped being a vital musician. But, as Martin Williams has observed in The Jazz Tradition:
“Well into his sixties, Armstrong would play on some evenings in an astonishing way—astonishing not so much because of what he played as that he played it with such power, sureness, firmness, authority, such commanding presence as to be beyond category, almost (as they say of Beethoven’s late quartets) to be beyond music. When he played this way, matters of style, other jazzmen, and most other musicians simply drop away as we hear his eloquence. The show biz personality act, the coasting, the forced jokes and sometimes forced geniality, the emotional tenor of much of Armstrong’s music past and present (that of a marvelously exuberant but complex child)—all these drop away and we hear a surpassing artist create for us, each of us, a surpassing art.”
Or as clarinetist Edmond Hall, who was with Louis on the road for a long time during Armstrong’s “entertaining” years, once said, “There’d be times when, even on a number I’d heard so often, Louis’s sound would just get cracking and I’d get goose pimples.”
Not too long before Louis died in 1971, a young trumpet player and I were listening to him in a huge hotel room. Louis had been jiving his way through Mack the Knife and then, without an introduction, moved into his old theme, When It’s Sleepy Time Down South. Staying close to the melody, Louis was subtly adding a new dimension to the song, a chilling and yet exhilarating fusion of poignancy and strength. There were tears in the eyes of the musician standing next to me. “Man,” he said, “Pops makes you feel so good.”
And also of Pops it could be said what he said of King Oliver: “My, what a punch that man had … And could he shout a tune! Ump!”
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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Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=b50aed83fd) | 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=b50aed83fd&e=[UNIQID])
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Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing – By Nat Hentoff The Daily Beast
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/04/born-in-the-usa-how-louis-armstrong-taught-us-to-swing.html
POPS
————————————————————
07.04.1512:05 AM ET
By Nat Hentoff (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/nat-hentoff.html)
** Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing
————————————————————
This genius with a trumpet did not invent jazz, as some have said, but when he got through with it, America’s homegrown art form was changed almost beyond recognition.
Louis Armstrong was a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on July 4, 1900. At least that’s the story Armstrong told. “They named me the firecracker baby,” he said. Who cares that it wasn’t true—he was actually born on August 4, 1901 and died on July 6, 1971—it fit his legend. And it is no exaggeration to call Armstrong, one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced, a legend.
In his terrific book, The History of Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Jazz-Ted-Gioia/dp/0195399706) , Daily Beast contributor Ted Gioia (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/ted-gioia.html) put it like this: “Revolutions, whether in arts or matters of state, create a new world only by sacrificing the old. With jazz, it is no different. To be sure, Louis Armstrong, who closed the book on the dynastic tradition in New Orleans jazz—putting an end to its colorful lineage of Kings Bolden, Keppart, and Oliver—stands out as an unlikely regicide. Armstrong always spoke with deference, bordering on awe, of his musical roots, and with especial devotion of his mention Joe Oliver. Yet the evidence of the grooves do not lie: the superiority of Armstrong’s musicianship, the unsurpassed linear momentum of his improvised lines, could serve only to make Oliver, Morton, Bolden, and the whole New Orleans ensemble tradition look passé, a horse-and-buggy cantering by Henry Ford’s
assembly line. The New Orleans pioneers exit stage left, Armstrong on trumpet enters stage right heralding the new Age of the Soloist.”
Let’s turn now to Nat Hentoff, the devoted enthusiast and chronicler of jazz music, for this take on Armstrong from Jazz Is (http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Nat-Hentoff-ebook/dp/B0046XQH7M/) . Reprinted with permission, please enjoy this appreciation of a true American genius (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZvqvNYJmC4) on Independence Day.
—Alex Belth
Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”
His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.
His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”
There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” [Emphasis added. N.H.]
‘If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,’ one of his old sidemen said, ‘how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?’
And that reminded me of what happened one night in the early ’30s, when a delegation of top brass from the Boston Symphony Orchestra—all of them unfamiliar with jazz but brought there by rumor of genius—stood in Louis Armstrong’s dressing room and asked him to play a passage they had heard in his act. Louis picked up his horn and obliged, performing the requested passage and then improvising a dazzling stream of variations.
Shaking their heads, these “legitimate” trumpet players left the room, one of them saying, “I watched his fingers and I still don’t know how he does it. I also don’t know how it is that, playing there all by himself, he sounded as if a whole orchestra were behind him. I never heard a musician like this, and I thought he was just a colored entertainer.”
But during the previous decade, in a series of deeply influential recordings, Louis had already shown to all who would listen that he was the first toweringly creative soloist in jazz. He did not create jazz, as André Hodeir, the French critic, has claimed; but Louis in the ‘20s did transcend and extend the beginnings of jazz in collective improvisation. As Gunther Schuller (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/arts/music/gunther-schuller-composer-who-synthesized-classical-and-jazz-dies-at-89.html?_r=0) has observed in his book, Early Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/Early-Jazz-Musical-Development-History/dp/0195040430/) , Louis established “the general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come.” Schuller was writing in particular about a 1928 recording, West End Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPgh7nxTQT4) , in which, he asserts, Armstrong served notice that “jazz could never again revert to being solely an entertainment or folk music … [Jazz now] had the
potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression.”
Except for true jazz believers in his own country and throughout the world, this concept of Louis Armstrong as a most serious, stunningly innovative artist is unfamiliar. During the last forty years of his life, most of Armstrong’s audiences saw Louis as an entertainer—his hands stretched out wide, in one of them a trumpet and a large, white handkerchief, and on his face the broadest and seemingly most durable grin in the history of Western man. He was often seen in the movies and on prime-time television variety shows, and he had a number of hit records, but he was by no means held in awe by the general public. Yet this was the man who had changed the very shape of jazz as fundamentally and permanently as Beethoven had changed the shape of the symphony.
But the musicians knew. In Chicago, when they came to marvel—and to try to steal some secrets—as Louis played with King Oliver. And then, in 1924, when Louis at the age of 24 made his first appearance in New York, the musicians there also knew. Loiuis had come to play with Fletcher Henderson’s big band. There were no jazz critics then. Nobody but the musicians took the music seriously, so they are our historians. Rex Stewart, long before he himself became an international force with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, remembered: “We had never heard anybody improvise that way—the brilliance and boldness of his ideas, the fantastic way he developed them, the deepness of his swing, and that gloriously full, clear sound. It was stunning! I went mad with the rest of the musicians. I tried to walk like him, talk like him, eat like him, sleep like him. I even bought a pair of big policeman shoes like he used to wear and I stood outside his apartment waiting for him to come out so I could
look at him.”
Before Louis Armstrong came to his blazing maturity in the ’20s there had, of course, been other notable jazz soloists. Some, like Buddy Bolden in New Orleans, are forever misted in legend because they never recorded. Others, like King Joe Oliver and players in Chicago, New York, and then Southwest were often forcefully, pungently distinctive. But none had the sweep, the extended melodic imagination, and the rhythmic inventiveness of Louis. None could make simplicity so profound or high-register fireworks so dramatically cohesive. And none, above all, had ever before so dominated the jazz ensemble, whether small combo or big band. The first fully liberated jazz soloist, Armstrong hugely influenced soloists on all instruments, and he helped free all who followed. They were still part of a collectively swinging group, but they had a lot more space in which to stretch out for themselves.
Gunther Schuller, an instrumentalist and a composer, emphasized in Early Jazz the four salient elements which set Louis apart from all the jazz musicians who had preceded him: “… (1) his superior choice of notes and the resultant shape of his lines; (2) his incomparable basic quality of tone; (3) his equally incomparable sense of swing, that is, the sureness with which notes are placed in the time continuum and the remarkably varied attack and release properties of his phrasing; (4) and, perhaps his most individualistic contribution, the subtly varied repertory of vibratos and shakes with which Armstrong colors and embellishes individual notes. The importance of the last fact cannot be emphasized enough, since it gives an Armstrong solo that peculiar sense of inner drive and forward momentum. Armstrong was incapable of not swinging.”
Back in New Orleans, when he was still a boy—who had learned to play trumpet in a waifs’ home where he had been sequestered for celebrating New Year’s Eve by shooting off a gun—Louis had already shown unmistakable signs that he was becoming a soloist unlike any New Orleans had ever heard or even imagined. Trumpeter Mutt Carey, known as the “Blues King of New Orleans” when Louis was a lad, once let the teenager take his chair in Kid Ory’s band, one of the city’s most crisply proficient combos.
“That Louis,” Carey recalled, “played more blues than I ever heard in my life. It never had struck my mind the blues could be interpreted so many different ways. Every time he played a chorus it was different, and yet you knew it was the blues.”
On that day Mutt abdicated as the city’s blues king.
Almost from the first time he picked up a horn, Louis has exemplified Duke Ellington’s dictum, “Nobody is as serious about music as a jazz musician is serious about music.”
“When I pick up that horn,” Louis, at 60, told Gilbert Millstein, “that’s all. The world’s behind me, and I don’t concentrate on nothing but that horn. I mean I don’t feel no different about that horn now than I did when I was playing in New Orleans. No, that’s my living and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make them right. Any part of the day, you’re liable to see me doing something toward [playing] that night … I don’t want a million dollars. See what I mean? There’s no medals. I mean, you got to live with that horn. That’s why I married four times. The chicks didn’t live with that horn. If they had, they would figure out, ‘Why should I get him all upset and get to fighting and hit him in the chops, it’s liable to hurt him?’”
And because music was the consuming passion, obsession, and pride of his life, Louis took care of himself so that he would always be in condition, so that younger players like Dizzy Gillespie could marvel at what Dizzy called Louis’s “phenomenal chops.” And in the years of his ascent he had to be in condition for jam sessions.
Many of those sessions were cooperative rather than competitive. As Louis once said of after-hours improvising with Bix Beiderbecke in Chicago in the late ’20s: “Everybody was feeling each other’s note or chord, blending with other instead of trying to cut each other.”
There were times, however, when these were martial sessions. As when, also in the ’20s, Johnny Dunn, the top trumpet-gun in New York, confronted Louis at the Dreamland in Chicago. They traded choruses for a while, Louis playing with his eyes closed. “All of a sudden,” Armstrong recalled, “I didn’t hear anything. Johnny Dunn had just eased away.”
It was so hard to cut Louis in a session, not only because of his soaring inventiveness, but also because of the extraordinary power with which he played. Critic Ralph Gleason once quoted Louis as telling of how he had sat in one night with Count Basie’s band in Florida. “I was just having fun,” said Louis, “and Count said to me, ‘Damn! I ain’t never heard that much strong horn played in all my life!’ Now, Count Basie’s trumpet players are all good musicians,” Louis continued, “but they run away from their notes. Why? Because they don’t keep their lips fortified.”
It also took a lot of self-fortification for Louis to keep on coping with the Jim Crow that was an obbligato to his life. For many, many years, famed as he was in Europe, when he’d go on the road in his own country, only certain places, black places, would house and feed Louis and his band. All black jazz musicians, no matter how lauded for their contributions to America’s “indigenous art form,” were pariahs on the road until comparatively recent times. A member of the Count Basie band, which had just come off the road in the early ’50s, told me: “Can you imagine what it feels like to begin pulling up to a gas station and see the attendant running like the hell to lock the men’s room. No, you can’t imagine it.”
In Louis Armstrong’s life one of many pungent illustrations of that dimension of the black experience took place in 1931, when Louis, having triumphed in New York and Chicago, returned to his home town, which was waiting to pay tribute. There were crowds and banners and a week’s engagement at a prestigious club where no black band had ever played. On opening night Louis waited for the radio announcer to start the club’s regular broadcast, but the latter could not bring himself, as he said within Louis’s hearing, to “announce that nigger man.” Turning to his musicians Louis asked for a resounding chord and proceeded to announce the show himself. “It was the first time,” Louis said to his first biographer, the Belgian Robert Goffin, that “a Negro spoke on the radio down there.”
Twenty-six years later, when Louis Armstrong had long since been comfortably established in the public mind as a most genial and wholly uncontroversial minstrel, millions of Americans were shocked at Armstrong’s reaction when Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas mightily resisted school integration in that state, the Supreme Court notwithstanding, while President Eisenhower temporized. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” Louis told the press, “the government can go to hell!” As for the widely beloved Ike, Louis observed, “The President has no guts.”
In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King’s march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, “They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.”
For black musicians who had come up with Louis in the ’20s and ’30s, this nongrinning Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was no surprise. “If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,” one of his old sidemen said, “how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?”
Yet most of Louis’s onstage high spirits were not feigned. He greatly enjoyed entertaining, getting through, pleasing an audience. And he certainly enjoyed the act of music. For him playing was a celebration of that act and he often celebrated it with wit. “A lot of people underestimate Louis’s musical sense of humor,” Dizzy Gillespie once said. “Many times, listening, I used to laugh right in the middle of his solos.”
Because Louis Armstrong was so much the entertainer from the ’30s on, there were some who maintained that Louis had stopped being a vital musician. But, as Martin Williams has observed in The Jazz Tradition:
“Well into his sixties, Armstrong would play on some evenings in an astonishing way—astonishing not so much because of what he played as that he played it with such power, sureness, firmness, authority, such commanding presence as to be beyond category, almost (as they say of Beethoven’s late quartets) to be beyond music. When he played this way, matters of style, other jazzmen, and most other musicians simply drop away as we hear his eloquence. The show biz personality act, the coasting, the forced jokes and sometimes forced geniality, the emotional tenor of much of Armstrong’s music past and present (that of a marvelously exuberant but complex child)—all these drop away and we hear a surpassing artist create for us, each of us, a surpassing art.”
Or as clarinetist Edmond Hall, who was with Louis on the road for a long time during Armstrong’s “entertaining” years, once said, “There’d be times when, even on a number I’d heard so often, Louis’s sound would just get cracking and I’d get goose pimples.”
Not too long before Louis died in 1971, a young trumpet player and I were listening to him in a huge hotel room. Louis had been jiving his way through Mack the Knife and then, without an introduction, moved into his old theme, When It’s Sleepy Time Down South. Staying close to the melody, Louis was subtly adding a new dimension to the song, a chilling and yet exhilarating fusion of poignancy and strength. There were tears in the eyes of the musician standing next to me. “Man,” he said, “Pops makes you feel so good.”
And also of Pops it could be said what he said of King Oliver: “My, what a punch that man had … And could he shout a tune! Ump!”
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=b50aed83fd) | 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=b50aed83fd&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
Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing – By Nat Hentoff The Daily Beast
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/04/born-in-the-usa-how-louis-armstrong-taught-us-to-swing.html
POPS
————————————————————
07.04.1512:05 AM ET
By Nat Hentoff (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/nat-hentoff.html)
** Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing
————————————————————
This genius with a trumpet did not invent jazz, as some have said, but when he got through with it, America’s homegrown art form was changed almost beyond recognition.
Louis Armstrong was a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on July 4, 1900. At least that’s the story Armstrong told. “They named me the firecracker baby,” he said. Who cares that it wasn’t true—he was actually born on August 4, 1901 and died on July 6, 1971—it fit his legend. And it is no exaggeration to call Armstrong, one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced, a legend.
In his terrific book, The History of Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Jazz-Ted-Gioia/dp/0195399706) , Daily Beast contributor Ted Gioia (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/ted-gioia.html) put it like this: “Revolutions, whether in arts or matters of state, create a new world only by sacrificing the old. With jazz, it is no different. To be sure, Louis Armstrong, who closed the book on the dynastic tradition in New Orleans jazz—putting an end to its colorful lineage of Kings Bolden, Keppart, and Oliver—stands out as an unlikely regicide. Armstrong always spoke with deference, bordering on awe, of his musical roots, and with especial devotion of his mention Joe Oliver. Yet the evidence of the grooves do not lie: the superiority of Armstrong’s musicianship, the unsurpassed linear momentum of his improvised lines, could serve only to make Oliver, Morton, Bolden, and the whole New Orleans ensemble tradition look passé, a horse-and-buggy cantering by Henry Ford’s
assembly line. The New Orleans pioneers exit stage left, Armstrong on trumpet enters stage right heralding the new Age of the Soloist.”
Let’s turn now to Nat Hentoff, the devoted enthusiast and chronicler of jazz music, for this take on Armstrong from Jazz Is (http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Nat-Hentoff-ebook/dp/B0046XQH7M/) . Reprinted with permission, please enjoy this appreciation of a true American genius (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZvqvNYJmC4) on Independence Day.
—Alex Belth
Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”
His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.
His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”
There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” [Emphasis added. N.H.]
‘If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,’ one of his old sidemen said, ‘how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?’
And that reminded me of what happened one night in the early ’30s, when a delegation of top brass from the Boston Symphony Orchestra—all of them unfamiliar with jazz but brought there by rumor of genius—stood in Louis Armstrong’s dressing room and asked him to play a passage they had heard in his act. Louis picked up his horn and obliged, performing the requested passage and then improvising a dazzling stream of variations.
Shaking their heads, these “legitimate” trumpet players left the room, one of them saying, “I watched his fingers and I still don’t know how he does it. I also don’t know how it is that, playing there all by himself, he sounded as if a whole orchestra were behind him. I never heard a musician like this, and I thought he was just a colored entertainer.”
But during the previous decade, in a series of deeply influential recordings, Louis had already shown to all who would listen that he was the first toweringly creative soloist in jazz. He did not create jazz, as André Hodeir, the French critic, has claimed; but Louis in the ‘20s did transcend and extend the beginnings of jazz in collective improvisation. As Gunther Schuller (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/arts/music/gunther-schuller-composer-who-synthesized-classical-and-jazz-dies-at-89.html?_r=0) has observed in his book, Early Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/Early-Jazz-Musical-Development-History/dp/0195040430/) , Louis established “the general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come.” Schuller was writing in particular about a 1928 recording, West End Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPgh7nxTQT4) , in which, he asserts, Armstrong served notice that “jazz could never again revert to being solely an entertainment or folk music … [Jazz now] had the
potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression.”
Except for true jazz believers in his own country and throughout the world, this concept of Louis Armstrong as a most serious, stunningly innovative artist is unfamiliar. During the last forty years of his life, most of Armstrong’s audiences saw Louis as an entertainer—his hands stretched out wide, in one of them a trumpet and a large, white handkerchief, and on his face the broadest and seemingly most durable grin in the history of Western man. He was often seen in the movies and on prime-time television variety shows, and he had a number of hit records, but he was by no means held in awe by the general public. Yet this was the man who had changed the very shape of jazz as fundamentally and permanently as Beethoven had changed the shape of the symphony.
But the musicians knew. In Chicago, when they came to marvel—and to try to steal some secrets—as Louis played with King Oliver. And then, in 1924, when Louis at the age of 24 made his first appearance in New York, the musicians there also knew. Loiuis had come to play with Fletcher Henderson’s big band. There were no jazz critics then. Nobody but the musicians took the music seriously, so they are our historians. Rex Stewart, long before he himself became an international force with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, remembered: “We had never heard anybody improvise that way—the brilliance and boldness of his ideas, the fantastic way he developed them, the deepness of his swing, and that gloriously full, clear sound. It was stunning! I went mad with the rest of the musicians. I tried to walk like him, talk like him, eat like him, sleep like him. I even bought a pair of big policeman shoes like he used to wear and I stood outside his apartment waiting for him to come out so I could
look at him.”
Before Louis Armstrong came to his blazing maturity in the ’20s there had, of course, been other notable jazz soloists. Some, like Buddy Bolden in New Orleans, are forever misted in legend because they never recorded. Others, like King Joe Oliver and players in Chicago, New York, and then Southwest were often forcefully, pungently distinctive. But none had the sweep, the extended melodic imagination, and the rhythmic inventiveness of Louis. None could make simplicity so profound or high-register fireworks so dramatically cohesive. And none, above all, had ever before so dominated the jazz ensemble, whether small combo or big band. The first fully liberated jazz soloist, Armstrong hugely influenced soloists on all instruments, and he helped free all who followed. They were still part of a collectively swinging group, but they had a lot more space in which to stretch out for themselves.
Gunther Schuller, an instrumentalist and a composer, emphasized in Early Jazz the four salient elements which set Louis apart from all the jazz musicians who had preceded him: “… (1) his superior choice of notes and the resultant shape of his lines; (2) his incomparable basic quality of tone; (3) his equally incomparable sense of swing, that is, the sureness with which notes are placed in the time continuum and the remarkably varied attack and release properties of his phrasing; (4) and, perhaps his most individualistic contribution, the subtly varied repertory of vibratos and shakes with which Armstrong colors and embellishes individual notes. The importance of the last fact cannot be emphasized enough, since it gives an Armstrong solo that peculiar sense of inner drive and forward momentum. Armstrong was incapable of not swinging.”
Back in New Orleans, when he was still a boy—who had learned to play trumpet in a waifs’ home where he had been sequestered for celebrating New Year’s Eve by shooting off a gun—Louis had already shown unmistakable signs that he was becoming a soloist unlike any New Orleans had ever heard or even imagined. Trumpeter Mutt Carey, known as the “Blues King of New Orleans” when Louis was a lad, once let the teenager take his chair in Kid Ory’s band, one of the city’s most crisply proficient combos.
“That Louis,” Carey recalled, “played more blues than I ever heard in my life. It never had struck my mind the blues could be interpreted so many different ways. Every time he played a chorus it was different, and yet you knew it was the blues.”
On that day Mutt abdicated as the city’s blues king.
Almost from the first time he picked up a horn, Louis has exemplified Duke Ellington’s dictum, “Nobody is as serious about music as a jazz musician is serious about music.”
“When I pick up that horn,” Louis, at 60, told Gilbert Millstein, “that’s all. The world’s behind me, and I don’t concentrate on nothing but that horn. I mean I don’t feel no different about that horn now than I did when I was playing in New Orleans. No, that’s my living and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make them right. Any part of the day, you’re liable to see me doing something toward [playing] that night … I don’t want a million dollars. See what I mean? There’s no medals. I mean, you got to live with that horn. That’s why I married four times. The chicks didn’t live with that horn. If they had, they would figure out, ‘Why should I get him all upset and get to fighting and hit him in the chops, it’s liable to hurt him?’”
And because music was the consuming passion, obsession, and pride of his life, Louis took care of himself so that he would always be in condition, so that younger players like Dizzy Gillespie could marvel at what Dizzy called Louis’s “phenomenal chops.” And in the years of his ascent he had to be in condition for jam sessions.
Many of those sessions were cooperative rather than competitive. As Louis once said of after-hours improvising with Bix Beiderbecke in Chicago in the late ’20s: “Everybody was feeling each other’s note or chord, blending with other instead of trying to cut each other.”
There were times, however, when these were martial sessions. As when, also in the ’20s, Johnny Dunn, the top trumpet-gun in New York, confronted Louis at the Dreamland in Chicago. They traded choruses for a while, Louis playing with his eyes closed. “All of a sudden,” Armstrong recalled, “I didn’t hear anything. Johnny Dunn had just eased away.”
It was so hard to cut Louis in a session, not only because of his soaring inventiveness, but also because of the extraordinary power with which he played. Critic Ralph Gleason once quoted Louis as telling of how he had sat in one night with Count Basie’s band in Florida. “I was just having fun,” said Louis, “and Count said to me, ‘Damn! I ain’t never heard that much strong horn played in all my life!’ Now, Count Basie’s trumpet players are all good musicians,” Louis continued, “but they run away from their notes. Why? Because they don’t keep their lips fortified.”
It also took a lot of self-fortification for Louis to keep on coping with the Jim Crow that was an obbligato to his life. For many, many years, famed as he was in Europe, when he’d go on the road in his own country, only certain places, black places, would house and feed Louis and his band. All black jazz musicians, no matter how lauded for their contributions to America’s “indigenous art form,” were pariahs on the road until comparatively recent times. A member of the Count Basie band, which had just come off the road in the early ’50s, told me: “Can you imagine what it feels like to begin pulling up to a gas station and see the attendant running like the hell to lock the men’s room. No, you can’t imagine it.”
In Louis Armstrong’s life one of many pungent illustrations of that dimension of the black experience took place in 1931, when Louis, having triumphed in New York and Chicago, returned to his home town, which was waiting to pay tribute. There were crowds and banners and a week’s engagement at a prestigious club where no black band had ever played. On opening night Louis waited for the radio announcer to start the club’s regular broadcast, but the latter could not bring himself, as he said within Louis’s hearing, to “announce that nigger man.” Turning to his musicians Louis asked for a resounding chord and proceeded to announce the show himself. “It was the first time,” Louis said to his first biographer, the Belgian Robert Goffin, that “a Negro spoke on the radio down there.”
Twenty-six years later, when Louis Armstrong had long since been comfortably established in the public mind as a most genial and wholly uncontroversial minstrel, millions of Americans were shocked at Armstrong’s reaction when Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas mightily resisted school integration in that state, the Supreme Court notwithstanding, while President Eisenhower temporized. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” Louis told the press, “the government can go to hell!” As for the widely beloved Ike, Louis observed, “The President has no guts.”
In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King’s march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, “They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.”
For black musicians who had come up with Louis in the ’20s and ’30s, this nongrinning Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was no surprise. “If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,” one of his old sidemen said, “how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?”
Yet most of Louis’s onstage high spirits were not feigned. He greatly enjoyed entertaining, getting through, pleasing an audience. And he certainly enjoyed the act of music. For him playing was a celebration of that act and he often celebrated it with wit. “A lot of people underestimate Louis’s musical sense of humor,” Dizzy Gillespie once said. “Many times, listening, I used to laugh right in the middle of his solos.”
Because Louis Armstrong was so much the entertainer from the ’30s on, there were some who maintained that Louis had stopped being a vital musician. But, as Martin Williams has observed in The Jazz Tradition:
“Well into his sixties, Armstrong would play on some evenings in an astonishing way—astonishing not so much because of what he played as that he played it with such power, sureness, firmness, authority, such commanding presence as to be beyond category, almost (as they say of Beethoven’s late quartets) to be beyond music. When he played this way, matters of style, other jazzmen, and most other musicians simply drop away as we hear his eloquence. The show biz personality act, the coasting, the forced jokes and sometimes forced geniality, the emotional tenor of much of Armstrong’s music past and present (that of a marvelously exuberant but complex child)—all these drop away and we hear a surpassing artist create for us, each of us, a surpassing art.”
Or as clarinetist Edmond Hall, who was with Louis on the road for a long time during Armstrong’s “entertaining” years, once said, “There’d be times when, even on a number I’d heard so often, Louis’s sound would just get cracking and I’d get goose pimples.”
Not too long before Louis died in 1971, a young trumpet player and I were listening to him in a huge hotel room. Louis had been jiving his way through Mack the Knife and then, without an introduction, moved into his old theme, When It’s Sleepy Time Down South. Staying close to the melody, Louis was subtly adding a new dimension to the song, a chilling and yet exhilarating fusion of poignancy and strength. There were tears in the eyes of the musician standing next to me. “Man,” he said, “Pops makes you feel so good.”
And also of Pops it could be said what he said of King Oliver: “My, what a punch that man had … And could he shout a tune! Ump!”
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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Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing – By Nat Hentoff The Daily Beast
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** http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/04/born-in-the-usa-how-louis-armstrong-taught-us-to-swing.html
POPS
————————————————————
07.04.1512:05 AM ET
By Nat Hentoff (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/nat-hentoff.html)
** Born On The Fourth Of July: How Louis Armstrong Taught Us to Swing
————————————————————
This genius with a trumpet did not invent jazz, as some have said, but when he got through with it, America’s homegrown art form was changed almost beyond recognition.
Louis Armstrong was a Yankee Doodle Dandy, born on July 4, 1900. At least that’s the story Armstrong told. “They named me the firecracker baby,” he said. Who cares that it wasn’t true—he was actually born on August 4, 1901 and died on July 6, 1971—it fit his legend. And it is no exaggeration to call Armstrong, one of the greatest artists this country has ever produced, a legend.
In his terrific book, The History of Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/The-History-Jazz-Ted-Gioia/dp/0195399706) , Daily Beast contributor Ted Gioia (http://www.thedailybeast.com/contributors/ted-gioia.html) put it like this: “Revolutions, whether in arts or matters of state, create a new world only by sacrificing the old. With jazz, it is no different. To be sure, Louis Armstrong, who closed the book on the dynastic tradition in New Orleans jazz—putting an end to its colorful lineage of Kings Bolden, Keppart, and Oliver—stands out as an unlikely regicide. Armstrong always spoke with deference, bordering on awe, of his musical roots, and with especial devotion of his mention Joe Oliver. Yet the evidence of the grooves do not lie: the superiority of Armstrong’s musicianship, the unsurpassed linear momentum of his improvised lines, could serve only to make Oliver, Morton, Bolden, and the whole New Orleans ensemble tradition look passé, a horse-and-buggy cantering by Henry Ford’s
assembly line. The New Orleans pioneers exit stage left, Armstrong on trumpet enters stage right heralding the new Age of the Soloist.”
Let’s turn now to Nat Hentoff, the devoted enthusiast and chronicler of jazz music, for this take on Armstrong from Jazz Is (http://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Nat-Hentoff-ebook/dp/B0046XQH7M/) . Reprinted with permission, please enjoy this appreciation of a true American genius (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZvqvNYJmC4) on Independence Day.
—Alex Belth
Louis Armstrong, summoned by King Oliver, came up to Chicago in the summer of 1922, Buster Bailey reports that “Louis upset Chicago. All the musicians came to hear Louis. What made Louis upset Chicago so? His execution, for one thing, and his ideas, his drive. Well, they didn’t call it drive, they called it ‘attack’ at the time. Yes, that’s what it was, man. They got crazy for his feeling.”
His feeling. Even toward the end of his life, when many of the same tunes would be played night after night, month after month, Louis could still, as trombonist Trummy Young remembers, make a sideman cry.
His feeling. Billie Holiday, a young girl in Baltimore, listening to Louis’s recordings: “He didn’t say any words, but somehow it just moved me so. It sounded so sad and sweet, all at the same time. It sounded like he was making love to me. That’s how I wanted to sing.”
There has been no jazz musician so widely, deeply, durably influential as Louis. And no trumpet player who could do all he could do on the horn. Once, Louis told journalist Gilbert Millstein, “I’m playin’ a date in Florida, livin’ in the colored section and I’m playin’ my horn for myself one afternoon. A knock come on the door and there’s an old, gray-haired flute player from the Philadelphia Orchestra, down there for his health. Walking through that neighborhood, he heard this horn, playing Cavalleria Rusticana, which he said he never heard phrased like that before. To him it was as if an orchestra was behind it.” [Emphasis added. N.H.]
‘If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,’ one of his old sidemen said, ‘how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?’
And that reminded me of what happened one night in the early ’30s, when a delegation of top brass from the Boston Symphony Orchestra—all of them unfamiliar with jazz but brought there by rumor of genius—stood in Louis Armstrong’s dressing room and asked him to play a passage they had heard in his act. Louis picked up his horn and obliged, performing the requested passage and then improvising a dazzling stream of variations.
Shaking their heads, these “legitimate” trumpet players left the room, one of them saying, “I watched his fingers and I still don’t know how he does it. I also don’t know how it is that, playing there all by himself, he sounded as if a whole orchestra were behind him. I never heard a musician like this, and I thought he was just a colored entertainer.”
But during the previous decade, in a series of deeply influential recordings, Louis had already shown to all who would listen that he was the first toweringly creative soloist in jazz. He did not create jazz, as André Hodeir, the French critic, has claimed; but Louis in the ‘20s did transcend and extend the beginnings of jazz in collective improvisation. As Gunther Schuller (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/arts/music/gunther-schuller-composer-who-synthesized-classical-and-jazz-dies-at-89.html?_r=0) has observed in his book, Early Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/Early-Jazz-Musical-Development-History/dp/0195040430/) , Louis established “the general stylistic direction of jazz for several decades to come.” Schuller was writing in particular about a 1928 recording, West End Blues (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPgh7nxTQT4) , in which, he asserts, Armstrong served notice that “jazz could never again revert to being solely an entertainment or folk music … [Jazz now] had the
potential capacity to compete with the highest order of previously known musical expression.”
Except for true jazz believers in his own country and throughout the world, this concept of Louis Armstrong as a most serious, stunningly innovative artist is unfamiliar. During the last forty years of his life, most of Armstrong’s audiences saw Louis as an entertainer—his hands stretched out wide, in one of them a trumpet and a large, white handkerchief, and on his face the broadest and seemingly most durable grin in the history of Western man. He was often seen in the movies and on prime-time television variety shows, and he had a number of hit records, but he was by no means held in awe by the general public. Yet this was the man who had changed the very shape of jazz as fundamentally and permanently as Beethoven had changed the shape of the symphony.
But the musicians knew. In Chicago, when they came to marvel—and to try to steal some secrets—as Louis played with King Oliver. And then, in 1924, when Louis at the age of 24 made his first appearance in New York, the musicians there also knew. Loiuis had come to play with Fletcher Henderson’s big band. There were no jazz critics then. Nobody but the musicians took the music seriously, so they are our historians. Rex Stewart, long before he himself became an international force with Duke Ellington’s orchestra, remembered: “We had never heard anybody improvise that way—the brilliance and boldness of his ideas, the fantastic way he developed them, the deepness of his swing, and that gloriously full, clear sound. It was stunning! I went mad with the rest of the musicians. I tried to walk like him, talk like him, eat like him, sleep like him. I even bought a pair of big policeman shoes like he used to wear and I stood outside his apartment waiting for him to come out so I could
look at him.”
Before Louis Armstrong came to his blazing maturity in the ’20s there had, of course, been other notable jazz soloists. Some, like Buddy Bolden in New Orleans, are forever misted in legend because they never recorded. Others, like King Joe Oliver and players in Chicago, New York, and then Southwest were often forcefully, pungently distinctive. But none had the sweep, the extended melodic imagination, and the rhythmic inventiveness of Louis. None could make simplicity so profound or high-register fireworks so dramatically cohesive. And none, above all, had ever before so dominated the jazz ensemble, whether small combo or big band. The first fully liberated jazz soloist, Armstrong hugely influenced soloists on all instruments, and he helped free all who followed. They were still part of a collectively swinging group, but they had a lot more space in which to stretch out for themselves.
Gunther Schuller, an instrumentalist and a composer, emphasized in Early Jazz the four salient elements which set Louis apart from all the jazz musicians who had preceded him: “… (1) his superior choice of notes and the resultant shape of his lines; (2) his incomparable basic quality of tone; (3) his equally incomparable sense of swing, that is, the sureness with which notes are placed in the time continuum and the remarkably varied attack and release properties of his phrasing; (4) and, perhaps his most individualistic contribution, the subtly varied repertory of vibratos and shakes with which Armstrong colors and embellishes individual notes. The importance of the last fact cannot be emphasized enough, since it gives an Armstrong solo that peculiar sense of inner drive and forward momentum. Armstrong was incapable of not swinging.”
Back in New Orleans, when he was still a boy—who had learned to play trumpet in a waifs’ home where he had been sequestered for celebrating New Year’s Eve by shooting off a gun—Louis had already shown unmistakable signs that he was becoming a soloist unlike any New Orleans had ever heard or even imagined. Trumpeter Mutt Carey, known as the “Blues King of New Orleans” when Louis was a lad, once let the teenager take his chair in Kid Ory’s band, one of the city’s most crisply proficient combos.
“That Louis,” Carey recalled, “played more blues than I ever heard in my life. It never had struck my mind the blues could be interpreted so many different ways. Every time he played a chorus it was different, and yet you knew it was the blues.”
On that day Mutt abdicated as the city’s blues king.
Almost from the first time he picked up a horn, Louis has exemplified Duke Ellington’s dictum, “Nobody is as serious about music as a jazz musician is serious about music.”
“When I pick up that horn,” Louis, at 60, told Gilbert Millstein, “that’s all. The world’s behind me, and I don’t concentrate on nothing but that horn. I mean I don’t feel no different about that horn now than I did when I was playing in New Orleans. No, that’s my living and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make them right. Any part of the day, you’re liable to see me doing something toward [playing] that night … I don’t want a million dollars. See what I mean? There’s no medals. I mean, you got to live with that horn. That’s why I married four times. The chicks didn’t live with that horn. If they had, they would figure out, ‘Why should I get him all upset and get to fighting and hit him in the chops, it’s liable to hurt him?’”
And because music was the consuming passion, obsession, and pride of his life, Louis took care of himself so that he would always be in condition, so that younger players like Dizzy Gillespie could marvel at what Dizzy called Louis’s “phenomenal chops.” And in the years of his ascent he had to be in condition for jam sessions.
Many of those sessions were cooperative rather than competitive. As Louis once said of after-hours improvising with Bix Beiderbecke in Chicago in the late ’20s: “Everybody was feeling each other’s note or chord, blending with other instead of trying to cut each other.”
There were times, however, when these were martial sessions. As when, also in the ’20s, Johnny Dunn, the top trumpet-gun in New York, confronted Louis at the Dreamland in Chicago. They traded choruses for a while, Louis playing with his eyes closed. “All of a sudden,” Armstrong recalled, “I didn’t hear anything. Johnny Dunn had just eased away.”
It was so hard to cut Louis in a session, not only because of his soaring inventiveness, but also because of the extraordinary power with which he played. Critic Ralph Gleason once quoted Louis as telling of how he had sat in one night with Count Basie’s band in Florida. “I was just having fun,” said Louis, “and Count said to me, ‘Damn! I ain’t never heard that much strong horn played in all my life!’ Now, Count Basie’s trumpet players are all good musicians,” Louis continued, “but they run away from their notes. Why? Because they don’t keep their lips fortified.”
It also took a lot of self-fortification for Louis to keep on coping with the Jim Crow that was an obbligato to his life. For many, many years, famed as he was in Europe, when he’d go on the road in his own country, only certain places, black places, would house and feed Louis and his band. All black jazz musicians, no matter how lauded for their contributions to America’s “indigenous art form,” were pariahs on the road until comparatively recent times. A member of the Count Basie band, which had just come off the road in the early ’50s, told me: “Can you imagine what it feels like to begin pulling up to a gas station and see the attendant running like the hell to lock the men’s room. No, you can’t imagine it.”
In Louis Armstrong’s life one of many pungent illustrations of that dimension of the black experience took place in 1931, when Louis, having triumphed in New York and Chicago, returned to his home town, which was waiting to pay tribute. There were crowds and banners and a week’s engagement at a prestigious club where no black band had ever played. On opening night Louis waited for the radio announcer to start the club’s regular broadcast, but the latter could not bring himself, as he said within Louis’s hearing, to “announce that nigger man.” Turning to his musicians Louis asked for a resounding chord and proceeded to announce the show himself. “It was the first time,” Louis said to his first biographer, the Belgian Robert Goffin, that “a Negro spoke on the radio down there.”
Twenty-six years later, when Louis Armstrong had long since been comfortably established in the public mind as a most genial and wholly uncontroversial minstrel, millions of Americans were shocked at Armstrong’s reaction when Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas mightily resisted school integration in that state, the Supreme Court notwithstanding, while President Eisenhower temporized. “The way they are treating my people in the South,” Louis told the press, “the government can go to hell!” As for the widely beloved Ike, Louis observed, “The President has no guts.”
In 1965, as Ralph Gleason has reported, when Martin Luther King’s march on Selma, Alabama, was brutally attacked by local and state constabulary, Louis Armstrong, then in Copenhagen, said after watching the carnage on television, “They would beat Jesus if he was black and marched.”
For black musicians who had come up with Louis in the ’20s and ’30s, this nongrinning Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong was no surprise. “If he had been grinning all the time inside all those years,” one of his old sidemen said, “how would he have been able to play the blues the way he does?”
Yet most of Louis’s onstage high spirits were not feigned. He greatly enjoyed entertaining, getting through, pleasing an audience. And he certainly enjoyed the act of music. For him playing was a celebration of that act and he often celebrated it with wit. “A lot of people underestimate Louis’s musical sense of humor,” Dizzy Gillespie once said. “Many times, listening, I used to laugh right in the middle of his solos.”
Because Louis Armstrong was so much the entertainer from the ’30s on, there were some who maintained that Louis had stopped being a vital musician. But, as Martin Williams has observed in The Jazz Tradition:
“Well into his sixties, Armstrong would play on some evenings in an astonishing way—astonishing not so much because of what he played as that he played it with such power, sureness, firmness, authority, such commanding presence as to be beyond category, almost (as they say of Beethoven’s late quartets) to be beyond music. When he played this way, matters of style, other jazzmen, and most other musicians simply drop away as we hear his eloquence. The show biz personality act, the coasting, the forced jokes and sometimes forced geniality, the emotional tenor of much of Armstrong’s music past and present (that of a marvelously exuberant but complex child)—all these drop away and we hear a surpassing artist create for us, each of us, a surpassing art.”
Or as clarinetist Edmond Hall, who was with Louis on the road for a long time during Armstrong’s “entertaining” years, once said, “There’d be times when, even on a number I’d heard so often, Louis’s sound would just get cracking and I’d get goose pimples.”
Not too long before Louis died in 1971, a young trumpet player and I were listening to him in a huge hotel room. Louis had been jiving his way through Mack the Knife and then, without an introduction, moved into his old theme, When It’s Sleepy Time Down South. Staying close to the melody, Louis was subtly adding a new dimension to the song, a chilling and yet exhilarating fusion of poignancy and strength. There were tears in the eyes of the musician standing next to me. “Man,” he said, “Pops makes you feel so good.”
And also of Pops it could be said what he said of King Oliver: “My, what a punch that man had … And could he shout a tune! Ump!”
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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The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion – WSJ
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rocking-60th-anniversary-of-teenage-rebellion-1436390140
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
1. ARTS IN REVIEW (http://www.wsj.com/public/page/leisure-arts.html)
1. MUSIC REVIEW (http://www.wsj.com/news/types/music-review)
** The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. ENLARGE
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. Photo: James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
By
Marc Myers
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
New York
‘Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets is routinely hailed as rock ’n’ roll’s first recording. But the distinction is unfair, since it assumes that the many R&B recordings that came first had little or nothing to do with rock’s development. What is true is that the song marked the start of a new form of music that championed teenage rebellion against parents and other authority figures. Rock can thank Hollywood for that.
When “Rock Around the Clock” was first released in May 1954, the song barely reached No. 23 on Billboard’s pop chart before fizzling. The single lacked an urban edge, and Haley’s voice sounded square, like a county-fair barker. Then, in one of the oddest flukes in pop music history, “Rock Around the Clock” was included in “Blackboard Jungle,” a feature film starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis about the looming peril of juvenile delinquency in the nation’s schools.
Surprisingly, when the film was released in March 1955, many teenage moviegoers laughed off the film’s frightening morality tale and, instead, danced in theater aisles to “Rock Around the Clock,” which played during the opening and closing credits. Within weeks, the single was re-released by Decca and soon re-entered the charts. By July 9, 1955, the song became the first R&B dance hit to reach #1 on all three of Billboard’s pop charts at the time: in-store sales, disc jockey spins and jukebox plays.
The reason for the song’s appeal the second time around owed much to the film’s teen-noir imagery and the single’s clear fidelity, which allowed the song to be played loud in theaters without distortion. In addition, there was a hypnotic, extended drum solo added to the song’s intro in the film that both excited young audiences and built suspense for the song that followed.
But the jump-blues hit about a 12-hour dance-a-thon did more than generate record sales. By crossing over to the white teenage market nationwide, “Rock Around the Clock”—with its powerful backbeat and twangy guitar—widened the appeal of country-flavored R&B and popularized an emerging genre known as rockabilly. As more white R&B acts like Elvis Presley gained momentum in the months ahead, R&B needed a new, race-neutral radio name. More disc jockeys began calling the music “rock ’n’ roll.”
Hollywood also took note. Though many teens rejected the fear-mongering of “Blackboard Jungle,” the movie was first to explore teens’ angst and their rejection of adult values. A flood of films about misunderstood teens soon followed, including “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), “Jailhouse Rock” (1957), “High School Confidential” (1958), “Blue Denim” (1959) and “A Summer Place” (1959).
The evolution of “Rock Around the Clock,” from commercial flop to social fuse, began soon after producer Milt Gabler signed Haley to Decca in 1954. Gabler, a jazz and R&B producer, brought Haley and the Comets to New York in April to record their first single for the label at the Pythian Temple on West 70th St. The exotic-looking building with its Egyptian Revival facade had been built by Thomas Lamb in 1927 for a fraternal order and featured a large vaulted auditorium that Decca leased for studio space.
“Rock Around the Clock” was written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers and clearly was inspired by Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over.” The song was first recorded in March 1954 by Sonny Dae and His Knights, but their version lacked cohesion or excitement. In April, Haley and the Comets studied Dae’s version the night before their Decca recording session and crafted a bouncier arrangement.
The next day, Haley and the Comets were scheduled to record two sides of a single—“Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town),” a song about the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb detonation that Gabler chose for the A-side, and “Rock Around the Clock.” Since most of the Comets could not read music, the first song took 2½ hours to learn and record, leaving them just 30 minutes to complete two takes of “Rock Around the Clock.” A master was made using the vocals from one and the instrumental from the other, with additional sax and guitar overdubbed. But despite the big sound, the song dropped off the charts by the summer.
At roughly the same time in Los Angeles, movie producer Pandro Berman was reading the galleys of Evan Hunter’s new novel, “The Blackboard Jungle.” When Berman finished, he urged Dore Schary, MGM’s president, to buy the rights. The book, described later by Time magazine as “nightmarish but authentic,” detailed the near-deadly struggle by fictional teacher Richard Dadier to control and inspire delinquent students at a New York high school.
Schary agreed to the purchase, and Richard Brooks was chosen to write the screenplay and direct. Actors Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky were cast as students, and Glenn Ford signed on in October 1954 to play Dadier. When shooting on MGM’s “New York” set wrapped in December, Berman dropped by Ford’s home to float the idea of adding a jukebox single to the credits to juice the movie’s plot.
Ford told Brooks that Peter, his 10-year-old son, couldn’t seem to get enough of a record called “Rock Around the Clock.” Brooks borrowed Peter Ford’s 78 single and several others from his collection. Back at MGM, Brooks played the records for his assistant director, who agreed that “Rock Around the Clock” had the right energy. MGM purchased the song’s rights for $5,000.
After the film came out in late March 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was re-released in May and remained a No. 1 hit throughout the summer. It was the same song that had been released a year earlier, but this time it was identified with the movie’s gritty storyline. Haley was no longer viewed as a hayseed but as the voice of leather jackets, switchblades and terrorized teachers.
Over the next 60 years, rock evolved steadily to become a multi-billion-dollar industry, with white and black artists performing today at sold-out concert halls well into their 70s. But perhaps most surprising of all has been rock’s retention of the accidental lesson it first learned when “Rock Around the Clock” was paired with “Blackboard Jungle”—that siding with teens in the struggle against parents and teachers is good for business.
Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music and the arts at JazzWax.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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The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion – WSJ
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rocking-60th-anniversary-of-teenage-rebellion-1436390140
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** The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. ENLARGE
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. Photo: James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
By
Marc Myers
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
New York
‘Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets is routinely hailed as rock ’n’ roll’s first recording. But the distinction is unfair, since it assumes that the many R&B recordings that came first had little or nothing to do with rock’s development. What is true is that the song marked the start of a new form of music that championed teenage rebellion against parents and other authority figures. Rock can thank Hollywood for that.
When “Rock Around the Clock” was first released in May 1954, the song barely reached No. 23 on Billboard’s pop chart before fizzling. The single lacked an urban edge, and Haley’s voice sounded square, like a county-fair barker. Then, in one of the oddest flukes in pop music history, “Rock Around the Clock” was included in “Blackboard Jungle,” a feature film starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis about the looming peril of juvenile delinquency in the nation’s schools.
Surprisingly, when the film was released in March 1955, many teenage moviegoers laughed off the film’s frightening morality tale and, instead, danced in theater aisles to “Rock Around the Clock,” which played during the opening and closing credits. Within weeks, the single was re-released by Decca and soon re-entered the charts. By July 9, 1955, the song became the first R&B dance hit to reach #1 on all three of Billboard’s pop charts at the time: in-store sales, disc jockey spins and jukebox plays.
The reason for the song’s appeal the second time around owed much to the film’s teen-noir imagery and the single’s clear fidelity, which allowed the song to be played loud in theaters without distortion. In addition, there was a hypnotic, extended drum solo added to the song’s intro in the film that both excited young audiences and built suspense for the song that followed.
But the jump-blues hit about a 12-hour dance-a-thon did more than generate record sales. By crossing over to the white teenage market nationwide, “Rock Around the Clock”—with its powerful backbeat and twangy guitar—widened the appeal of country-flavored R&B and popularized an emerging genre known as rockabilly. As more white R&B acts like Elvis Presley gained momentum in the months ahead, R&B needed a new, race-neutral radio name. More disc jockeys began calling the music “rock ’n’ roll.”
Hollywood also took note. Though many teens rejected the fear-mongering of “Blackboard Jungle,” the movie was first to explore teens’ angst and their rejection of adult values. A flood of films about misunderstood teens soon followed, including “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), “Jailhouse Rock” (1957), “High School Confidential” (1958), “Blue Denim” (1959) and “A Summer Place” (1959).
The evolution of “Rock Around the Clock,” from commercial flop to social fuse, began soon after producer Milt Gabler signed Haley to Decca in 1954. Gabler, a jazz and R&B producer, brought Haley and the Comets to New York in April to record their first single for the label at the Pythian Temple on West 70th St. The exotic-looking building with its Egyptian Revival facade had been built by Thomas Lamb in 1927 for a fraternal order and featured a large vaulted auditorium that Decca leased for studio space.
“Rock Around the Clock” was written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers and clearly was inspired by Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over.” The song was first recorded in March 1954 by Sonny Dae and His Knights, but their version lacked cohesion or excitement. In April, Haley and the Comets studied Dae’s version the night before their Decca recording session and crafted a bouncier arrangement.
The next day, Haley and the Comets were scheduled to record two sides of a single—“Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town),” a song about the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb detonation that Gabler chose for the A-side, and “Rock Around the Clock.” Since most of the Comets could not read music, the first song took 2½ hours to learn and record, leaving them just 30 minutes to complete two takes of “Rock Around the Clock.” A master was made using the vocals from one and the instrumental from the other, with additional sax and guitar overdubbed. But despite the big sound, the song dropped off the charts by the summer.
At roughly the same time in Los Angeles, movie producer Pandro Berman was reading the galleys of Evan Hunter’s new novel, “The Blackboard Jungle.” When Berman finished, he urged Dore Schary, MGM’s president, to buy the rights. The book, described later by Time magazine as “nightmarish but authentic,” detailed the near-deadly struggle by fictional teacher Richard Dadier to control and inspire delinquent students at a New York high school.
Schary agreed to the purchase, and Richard Brooks was chosen to write the screenplay and direct. Actors Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky were cast as students, and Glenn Ford signed on in October 1954 to play Dadier. When shooting on MGM’s “New York” set wrapped in December, Berman dropped by Ford’s home to float the idea of adding a jukebox single to the credits to juice the movie’s plot.
Ford told Brooks that Peter, his 10-year-old son, couldn’t seem to get enough of a record called “Rock Around the Clock.” Brooks borrowed Peter Ford’s 78 single and several others from his collection. Back at MGM, Brooks played the records for his assistant director, who agreed that “Rock Around the Clock” had the right energy. MGM purchased the song’s rights for $5,000.
After the film came out in late March 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was re-released in May and remained a No. 1 hit throughout the summer. It was the same song that had been released a year earlier, but this time it was identified with the movie’s gritty storyline. Haley was no longer viewed as a hayseed but as the voice of leather jackets, switchblades and terrorized teachers.
Over the next 60 years, rock evolved steadily to become a multi-billion-dollar industry, with white and black artists performing today at sold-out concert halls well into their 70s. But perhaps most surprising of all has been rock’s retention of the accidental lesson it first learned when “Rock Around the Clock” was paired with “Blackboard Jungle”—that siding with teens in the struggle against parents and teachers is good for business.
Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music and the arts at JazzWax.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.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rocking-60th-anniversary-of-teenage-rebellion-1436390140
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
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** The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. ENLARGE
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. Photo: James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
By
Marc Myers
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
New York
‘Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets is routinely hailed as rock ’n’ roll’s first recording. But the distinction is unfair, since it assumes that the many R&B recordings that came first had little or nothing to do with rock’s development. What is true is that the song marked the start of a new form of music that championed teenage rebellion against parents and other authority figures. Rock can thank Hollywood for that.
When “Rock Around the Clock” was first released in May 1954, the song barely reached No. 23 on Billboard’s pop chart before fizzling. The single lacked an urban edge, and Haley’s voice sounded square, like a county-fair barker. Then, in one of the oddest flukes in pop music history, “Rock Around the Clock” was included in “Blackboard Jungle,” a feature film starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis about the looming peril of juvenile delinquency in the nation’s schools.
Surprisingly, when the film was released in March 1955, many teenage moviegoers laughed off the film’s frightening morality tale and, instead, danced in theater aisles to “Rock Around the Clock,” which played during the opening and closing credits. Within weeks, the single was re-released by Decca and soon re-entered the charts. By July 9, 1955, the song became the first R&B dance hit to reach #1 on all three of Billboard’s pop charts at the time: in-store sales, disc jockey spins and jukebox plays.
The reason for the song’s appeal the second time around owed much to the film’s teen-noir imagery and the single’s clear fidelity, which allowed the song to be played loud in theaters without distortion. In addition, there was a hypnotic, extended drum solo added to the song’s intro in the film that both excited young audiences and built suspense for the song that followed.
But the jump-blues hit about a 12-hour dance-a-thon did more than generate record sales. By crossing over to the white teenage market nationwide, “Rock Around the Clock”—with its powerful backbeat and twangy guitar—widened the appeal of country-flavored R&B and popularized an emerging genre known as rockabilly. As more white R&B acts like Elvis Presley gained momentum in the months ahead, R&B needed a new, race-neutral radio name. More disc jockeys began calling the music “rock ’n’ roll.”
Hollywood also took note. Though many teens rejected the fear-mongering of “Blackboard Jungle,” the movie was first to explore teens’ angst and their rejection of adult values. A flood of films about misunderstood teens soon followed, including “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), “Jailhouse Rock” (1957), “High School Confidential” (1958), “Blue Denim” (1959) and “A Summer Place” (1959).
The evolution of “Rock Around the Clock,” from commercial flop to social fuse, began soon after producer Milt Gabler signed Haley to Decca in 1954. Gabler, a jazz and R&B producer, brought Haley and the Comets to New York in April to record their first single for the label at the Pythian Temple on West 70th St. The exotic-looking building with its Egyptian Revival facade had been built by Thomas Lamb in 1927 for a fraternal order and featured a large vaulted auditorium that Decca leased for studio space.
“Rock Around the Clock” was written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers and clearly was inspired by Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over.” The song was first recorded in March 1954 by Sonny Dae and His Knights, but their version lacked cohesion or excitement. In April, Haley and the Comets studied Dae’s version the night before their Decca recording session and crafted a bouncier arrangement.
The next day, Haley and the Comets were scheduled to record two sides of a single—“Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town),” a song about the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb detonation that Gabler chose for the A-side, and “Rock Around the Clock.” Since most of the Comets could not read music, the first song took 2½ hours to learn and record, leaving them just 30 minutes to complete two takes of “Rock Around the Clock.” A master was made using the vocals from one and the instrumental from the other, with additional sax and guitar overdubbed. But despite the big sound, the song dropped off the charts by the summer.
At roughly the same time in Los Angeles, movie producer Pandro Berman was reading the galleys of Evan Hunter’s new novel, “The Blackboard Jungle.” When Berman finished, he urged Dore Schary, MGM’s president, to buy the rights. The book, described later by Time magazine as “nightmarish but authentic,” detailed the near-deadly struggle by fictional teacher Richard Dadier to control and inspire delinquent students at a New York high school.
Schary agreed to the purchase, and Richard Brooks was chosen to write the screenplay and direct. Actors Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky were cast as students, and Glenn Ford signed on in October 1954 to play Dadier. When shooting on MGM’s “New York” set wrapped in December, Berman dropped by Ford’s home to float the idea of adding a jukebox single to the credits to juice the movie’s plot.
Ford told Brooks that Peter, his 10-year-old son, couldn’t seem to get enough of a record called “Rock Around the Clock.” Brooks borrowed Peter Ford’s 78 single and several others from his collection. Back at MGM, Brooks played the records for his assistant director, who agreed that “Rock Around the Clock” had the right energy. MGM purchased the song’s rights for $5,000.
After the film came out in late March 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was re-released in May and remained a No. 1 hit throughout the summer. It was the same song that had been released a year earlier, but this time it was identified with the movie’s gritty storyline. Haley was no longer viewed as a hayseed but as the voice of leather jackets, switchblades and terrorized teachers.
Over the next 60 years, rock evolved steadily to become a multi-billion-dollar industry, with white and black artists performing today at sold-out concert halls well into their 70s. But perhaps most surprising of all has been rock’s retention of the accidental lesson it first learned when “Rock Around the Clock” was paired with “Blackboard Jungle”—that siding with teens in the struggle against parents and teachers is good for business.
Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music and the arts at JazzWax.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)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rocking-60th-anniversary-of-teenage-rebellion-1436390140
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
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** The Rocking 60th Anniversary of Teenage Rebellion
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. ENLARGE
Bill Haley and His Comets in New York, c. 1955. Photo: James Kriegsmann/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
By
Marc Myers
July 8, 2015 5:15 p.m. ET
New York
‘Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and His Comets is routinely hailed as rock ’n’ roll’s first recording. But the distinction is unfair, since it assumes that the many R&B recordings that came first had little or nothing to do with rock’s development. What is true is that the song marked the start of a new form of music that championed teenage rebellion against parents and other authority figures. Rock can thank Hollywood for that.
When “Rock Around the Clock” was first released in May 1954, the song barely reached No. 23 on Billboard’s pop chart before fizzling. The single lacked an urban edge, and Haley’s voice sounded square, like a county-fair barker. Then, in one of the oddest flukes in pop music history, “Rock Around the Clock” was included in “Blackboard Jungle,” a feature film starring Glenn Ford and Anne Francis about the looming peril of juvenile delinquency in the nation’s schools.
Surprisingly, when the film was released in March 1955, many teenage moviegoers laughed off the film’s frightening morality tale and, instead, danced in theater aisles to “Rock Around the Clock,” which played during the opening and closing credits. Within weeks, the single was re-released by Decca and soon re-entered the charts. By July 9, 1955, the song became the first R&B dance hit to reach #1 on all three of Billboard’s pop charts at the time: in-store sales, disc jockey spins and jukebox plays.
The reason for the song’s appeal the second time around owed much to the film’s teen-noir imagery and the single’s clear fidelity, which allowed the song to be played loud in theaters without distortion. In addition, there was a hypnotic, extended drum solo added to the song’s intro in the film that both excited young audiences and built suspense for the song that followed.
But the jump-blues hit about a 12-hour dance-a-thon did more than generate record sales. By crossing over to the white teenage market nationwide, “Rock Around the Clock”—with its powerful backbeat and twangy guitar—widened the appeal of country-flavored R&B and popularized an emerging genre known as rockabilly. As more white R&B acts like Elvis Presley gained momentum in the months ahead, R&B needed a new, race-neutral radio name. More disc jockeys began calling the music “rock ’n’ roll.”
Hollywood also took note. Though many teens rejected the fear-mongering of “Blackboard Jungle,” the movie was first to explore teens’ angst and their rejection of adult values. A flood of films about misunderstood teens soon followed, including “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955), “Jailhouse Rock” (1957), “High School Confidential” (1958), “Blue Denim” (1959) and “A Summer Place” (1959).
The evolution of “Rock Around the Clock,” from commercial flop to social fuse, began soon after producer Milt Gabler signed Haley to Decca in 1954. Gabler, a jazz and R&B producer, brought Haley and the Comets to New York in April to record their first single for the label at the Pythian Temple on West 70th St. The exotic-looking building with its Egyptian Revival facade had been built by Thomas Lamb in 1927 for a fraternal order and featured a large vaulted auditorium that Decca leased for studio space.
“Rock Around the Clock” was written by Max C. Freedman and James E. Myers and clearly was inspired by Hank Williams’s “Move It on Over.” The song was first recorded in March 1954 by Sonny Dae and His Knights, but their version lacked cohesion or excitement. In April, Haley and the Comets studied Dae’s version the night before their Decca recording session and crafted a bouncier arrangement.
The next day, Haley and the Comets were scheduled to record two sides of a single—“Thirteen Women (And Only One Man in Town),” a song about the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb detonation that Gabler chose for the A-side, and “Rock Around the Clock.” Since most of the Comets could not read music, the first song took 2½ hours to learn and record, leaving them just 30 minutes to complete two takes of “Rock Around the Clock.” A master was made using the vocals from one and the instrumental from the other, with additional sax and guitar overdubbed. But despite the big sound, the song dropped off the charts by the summer.
At roughly the same time in Los Angeles, movie producer Pandro Berman was reading the galleys of Evan Hunter’s new novel, “The Blackboard Jungle.” When Berman finished, he urged Dore Schary, MGM’s president, to buy the rights. The book, described later by Time magazine as “nightmarish but authentic,” detailed the near-deadly struggle by fictional teacher Richard Dadier to control and inspire delinquent students at a New York high school.
Schary agreed to the purchase, and Richard Brooks was chosen to write the screenplay and direct. Actors Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow and Paul Mazursky were cast as students, and Glenn Ford signed on in October 1954 to play Dadier. When shooting on MGM’s “New York” set wrapped in December, Berman dropped by Ford’s home to float the idea of adding a jukebox single to the credits to juice the movie’s plot.
Ford told Brooks that Peter, his 10-year-old son, couldn’t seem to get enough of a record called “Rock Around the Clock.” Brooks borrowed Peter Ford’s 78 single and several others from his collection. Back at MGM, Brooks played the records for his assistant director, who agreed that “Rock Around the Clock” had the right energy. MGM purchased the song’s rights for $5,000.
After the film came out in late March 1955, “Rock Around the Clock” was re-released in May and remained a No. 1 hit throughout the summer. It was the same song that had been released a year earlier, but this time it was identified with the movie’s gritty storyline. Haley was no longer viewed as a hayseed but as the voice of leather jackets, switchblades and terrorized teachers.
Over the next 60 years, rock evolved steadily to become a multi-billion-dollar industry, with white and black artists performing today at sold-out concert halls well into their 70s. But perhaps most surprising of all has been rock’s retention of the accidental lesson it first learned when “Rock Around the Clock” was paired with “Blackboard Jungle”—that siding with teens in the struggle against parents and teachers is good for business.
Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music and the arts at JazzWax.com.
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ECM Records — News: Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
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** Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
————————————————————
This interim website is bridging the gap while we are developing a new one.
Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
Pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, one of jazz’s most original musicians, has died in New York, aged 75. Born in Tokyo, Masabumi Kikuchi, known to musicians everywhere by his nickname Poo, played with Lionel Hampton and Sonny Rollins while still a teenager, and made his recording debut in the early 1960s with Toshiko Akiyoshi and Charlie Mariano. In the 1970s he collaborated with Gil Evans and Elvin Jones and led his own groups, drawing influence from Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, as well as from Stockhausen, Ligeti and Takemitsu. Although he recorded only one studio album for ECM – “Sunrise” released in 2012 – he was an inspiration for musicians associated with the label, including Gary Peacock, Paul Motian and Thomas Morgan, admired for his rigorous individuality and his determined distance from all trends. In his last years Poo began to play a more inner-directed music, pursuing what he termed “floating sound and harmony”, and which he documented on many private
recordings. “I’m more free now”, he announced at 70, “because I started believing in myself. When I sit down at the piano I do not prepare what I will play nor do I think about how to play, and I believe I found the way of putting out something new, and I guess I could call it my own”.
Photo: Arne Reimer
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ECM Records — News: Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
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http://www.ecmrecords.com/news/masabumi-kikuchi-1939-2015/
** Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
————————————————————
This interim website is bridging the gap while we are developing a new one.
Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
Pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, one of jazz’s most original musicians, has died in New York, aged 75. Born in Tokyo, Masabumi Kikuchi, known to musicians everywhere by his nickname Poo, played with Lionel Hampton and Sonny Rollins while still a teenager, and made his recording debut in the early 1960s with Toshiko Akiyoshi and Charlie Mariano. In the 1970s he collaborated with Gil Evans and Elvin Jones and led his own groups, drawing influence from Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, as well as from Stockhausen, Ligeti and Takemitsu. Although he recorded only one studio album for ECM – “Sunrise” released in 2012 – he was an inspiration for musicians associated with the label, including Gary Peacock, Paul Motian and Thomas Morgan, admired for his rigorous individuality and his determined distance from all trends. In his last years Poo began to play a more inner-directed music, pursuing what he termed “floating sound and harmony”, and which he documented on many private
recordings. “I’m more free now”, he announced at 70, “because I started believing in myself. When I sit down at the piano I do not prepare what I will play nor do I think about how to play, and I believe I found the way of putting out something new, and I guess I could call it my own”.
Photo: Arne Reimer
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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ECM Records — News: Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.ecmrecords.com/news/masabumi-kikuchi-1939-2015/
** Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
————————————————————
This interim website is bridging the gap while we are developing a new one.
Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
Pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, one of jazz’s most original musicians, has died in New York, aged 75. Born in Tokyo, Masabumi Kikuchi, known to musicians everywhere by his nickname Poo, played with Lionel Hampton and Sonny Rollins while still a teenager, and made his recording debut in the early 1960s with Toshiko Akiyoshi and Charlie Mariano. In the 1970s he collaborated with Gil Evans and Elvin Jones and led his own groups, drawing influence from Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, as well as from Stockhausen, Ligeti and Takemitsu. Although he recorded only one studio album for ECM – “Sunrise” released in 2012 – he was an inspiration for musicians associated with the label, including Gary Peacock, Paul Motian and Thomas Morgan, admired for his rigorous individuality and his determined distance from all trends. In his last years Poo began to play a more inner-directed music, pursuing what he termed “floating sound and harmony”, and which he documented on many private
recordings. “I’m more free now”, he announced at 70, “because I started believing in myself. When I sit down at the piano I do not prepare what I will play nor do I think about how to play, and I believe I found the way of putting out something new, and I guess I could call it my own”.
Photo: Arne Reimer
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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ECM Records — News: Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.ecmrecords.com/news/masabumi-kikuchi-1939-2015/
** Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
————————————————————
This interim website is bridging the gap while we are developing a new one.
Masabumi Kikuchi (1939-2015)
Pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, one of jazz’s most original musicians, has died in New York, aged 75. Born in Tokyo, Masabumi Kikuchi, known to musicians everywhere by his nickname Poo, played with Lionel Hampton and Sonny Rollins while still a teenager, and made his recording debut in the early 1960s with Toshiko Akiyoshi and Charlie Mariano. In the 1970s he collaborated with Gil Evans and Elvin Jones and led his own groups, drawing influence from Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, as well as from Stockhausen, Ligeti and Takemitsu. Although he recorded only one studio album for ECM – “Sunrise” released in 2012 – he was an inspiration for musicians associated with the label, including Gary Peacock, Paul Motian and Thomas Morgan, admired for his rigorous individuality and his determined distance from all trends. In his last years Poo began to play a more inner-directed music, pursuing what he termed “floating sound and harmony”, and which he documented on many private
recordings. “I’m more free now”, he announced at 70, “because I started believing in myself. When I sit down at the piano I do not prepare what I will play nor do I think about how to play, and I believe I found the way of putting out something new, and I guess I could call it my own”.
Photo: Arne Reimer
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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The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ – WSJ
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-story-behind-janis-joplins-mercedes-benz-1436282817?tesla=y
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
1. ANATOMY OF A SONG (http://www.wsj.com/news/types/anatomy-of-a-song)
** The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
Janis Joplin in 1968 ENLARGE
Janis Joplin in 1968 Photo: Elliott Landy/Corbis
By
Marc Myers
July 7, 2015 11:29 a.m. ET
Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” was an accident. The song’s lyrics were written at a Port Chester, N.Y., bar in August 1970 during an impromptu poetry jam between Joplin and songwriter-friend Bob Neuwirth. The lyrics—a sardonic prayer for a sports car, a color TV and a night on the town—were inspired by the first line of a song written by San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure.
About an hour after the song was completed in Port Chester, Joplin performed it a cappella on a whim when she took the stage at the town’s Capitol Theatre. Then on Oct. 1, when she was in Los Angeles recording her album “Pearl,” she sang “Mercedes Benz” in the studio for fun. After she died of a drug overdose three days later on Oct. 4, the song was added to the album.
Issued as a single in 1971 on the B-side of Joplin’s hit “Cry Baby,” “Mercedes Benz” has since been covered by more than 30 artists and used by Mercedes-Benz in its car ads. In advance of the 45th anniversary of Joplin’s death in October, road manager John Byrne Cooke, Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. McClure, and Clark Pierson and Brad Campbell of Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie Band talked about the song’s evolution. Edited from interviews.
John Byrne Cooke: Back in the summer of 1970, Janis was on tour with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, arriving in New York at the start of August. On Saturday, Aug. 8, Janis and the band performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., and then appeared at Harvard Stadium on Aug. 12. Three days later, she attended her high-school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas, and traveled to Los Angeles in September to record “Pearl” at Sunset Sound. She was happy and knew she was hitting a new level in her singing career.
Bob Neuwirth: I first met Janis before she was famous. We both played the same small clubs in San Francisco in 1965. In early August 1970, I was living in New York when Janis came to town for a series of performances. She was staying at the Hotel Chelsea. On Aug. 8, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to travel an hour north to perform in Port Chester. She felt the opening acts—Seatrain and Runt—would attract a crowd that didn’t understand her music.
Janis had spoken often about how much she admired actress Geraldine Page. I knew Geraldine’s husband, Rip Torn, and since they both were in town, I invited them to come with us late that afternoon in the limo. While Janis was still upstairs getting ready, Rip and Geraldine came over for a drink at El Quijote, a Spanish restaurant in the hotel. I didn’t tell Janis they were coming. I wanted it to be a surprise. When she came down and saw Geraldine, she lit up. A few margaritas later, they were old pals, and we were ready to go. We rode up in one car and the band traveled in another.
Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad St.]. At the table, Janis and Geraldine bonded, and all of us were getting into it. At some point, Janis sang out, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” Earlier, in San Francisco, Janis had heard Michael McClure’s song and it stuck with her. But she couldn’t remember the rest of it.
Michael McClure: Allen Ginsberg introduced me to Bob Dylan when Bob was in San Francisco in December 1965. After we met and hung out, Bob gave me an autoharp— a stringed Appalachian folk instrument. Bob knew I wanted to write songs. I kept the instrument on my mantle for three months before learning to play it. In 1966, while I was writing “Freewheelin’ Frank” with Hells Angel Frank Reynolds, [musician] George Montana came over in the evenings with strange instruments, and we’d add music to the songs I was writing and singing.
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 ENLARGE
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 Photo: Getty Images
One of my songs started, “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz.” The song would get longer and shorter each time I sang it. One day I got a call from [actor-singer] Emmett Grogan. He had heard me sing the song at my house and began singing it with his friends at a local pool hall. On the phone, he said he was shooting pool with Janis and that she was singing it, too. I told him I had nothing against that.
Mr. Neuwirth: At the Port Chester bar, Janis sang the line a few times. Then Rip and Geraldine began banging their beer glasses on the table to keep time. It was like a sea shanty. Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round.
Janis and I were giggling and showing off a bit in front of Rip and Geraldine. The alcohol wasn’t meant to do anything except keep us laughing in that bar, but it assumed control, and the result was “Mercedes Benz.” I figured that what we were doing there was just an exercise to impress Rip and Geraldine and pass the time. Nothing more.
While we were lost in all this blather and laughter, John Cooke, her road manager, came blasting in close to 9 p.m. to tell Janis she was on in 15 minutes. The next thing I knew we were back up the block at the Capitol. Janis came on stage, and after singing “Tell Mama” and “Half Moon,” she surprised everyone by announcing she wanted to sing a new song.
On the bootleg recording from the concert, she says from the stage: “I’d like to do a song of some significance, now. I just wrote it at the bar on the corner, so I don’t know all the words yet. I’m going to do it Acapulco,” which had been my funny way of saying “a cappella.” I think she decided to sing it to further impress Geraldine and Rip.
Janis stomped off the beat and began belting out the lyrics, the way she had done at the bar. The band soon tried to fit in as best they could, and then they reprised the last verse. What’s interesting is that the second verse doesn’t include the “Dialing for Dollars” line. She must have added it later before recording in the studio in L.A., since it’s not on the Harvard Stadium bootleg either.
When Janis finished, she said to the audience: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s not even a song, you know. They turned the jukebox up, and we kept singing it anyway. They turned up ‘Hey Jude’ so loud we had to order another drink.”
Clark Pierson (drummer): The band was pretty surprised she sang “Mercedes Benz” that night. We didn’t have a key for the song and didn’t know how to put it. We also didn’t realize she was going to sing it alone. We just all looked at each other and then tried to follow along. Janis could remember lyrics stone-cold flawlessly, so that wasn’t a surprise to me. The audience was just staring at first, like, what’s going on? Then they had smiles and were clapping along in time. Several nights later she sang it again at Harvard Stadium, which turned out to be her last concert.
Brad Campbell (bassist): On “Mercedes Benz,” Janis wanted to accompany herself on guitar. She took out her Gibson Sunburst and whispered to us, “Watch me boys.” But instead of playing it, she just sang. We eventually played a few notes here and there and sang where we could, figuring she wanted us to follow her.
Mr. McClure: At some point in August 1970, Janis called. She said she was performing the “Mercedes Benz” song but that hers was different than mine. She sang it over the phone. When she was done, I said it was OK. Then I went for my autoharp and sat on the stairs and sang her mine over the phone. Janis’s version was sweet and wry and had the grace of a riddle. Mine was much more outspoken, funny and ironic. Janis laughed and said she liked hers better. I said, “That’s OK, you can sing yours.” And that’s the last I heard of it until “Pearl” came out and I saw my name with Janis’s on the song credit. [Mr. Neuwirth’s name was added later].
Mr. Pierson: On Oct. 1, Full Tilt and Janis were at Sunset Sound in L.A. recording “Pearl” when something happened to the tape recorder that caused everything to come to a halt. As producer Paul Rothchild tried to fix it, we started getting antsy, especially Janis, who didn’t like sitting around. She was still in the vocal booth and could see through the glass that our energy was fading. To kill time and keep us amused, she started to sing “Mercedes Benz” in there.
ENLARGE
Mr. Campbell: I could see Janis in the booth. She beat off time by stomping her feet on the floor with her sandals. The bracelets jangling on her arm and the stomping of her feet provided the rhythmic sound you hear on the record. Her eyes were open as she sang, but they seemed closed, as if she were far away. When the song was done, she said, “That’s it,” followed by her famous cackle. She always surprised herself.
Mr. Neuwirth: Paul Rothchild told me later the problem was with his 2-inch tape recorder. The heads shifted or something and needed to be readjusted. Paul had a ¼-inch safety reel going that ran all the time as a backup in case there was an idea he missed in between takes when the 2-inch main recorder was off. While Paul worked to fix the 2-inch tape recorder, Janis sang “Mercedes Benz” on a whim. Fortunately, the safety tape caught it.
Mr. Cooke: “Mercedes Benz” was the last song Janis recorded. Three days later I found her body in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel. She had overdosed on heroin that was way stronger than street heroin had any right to be. For the next few days, everyone was in shock. That Thursday, Paul Rothchild played for us everything he had on tape. It was almost an album. Paul and the band worked for another 10 days to create the best instrumental tracks to go with the existing vocals. Although she had sung “Mercedes Benz” a cappella, Paul knew we had to use it as is.
Mr. Neuwirth: About 20 years ago, I had a guitar case overflowing with stuff. It was so full I couldn’t close the lid with the instrument inside. I went through all the junk in there and found four square napkins on which I had jotted down the “Mercedes Benz” lyrics in 1970. I have no idea where those napkins are today. I’d love to find them. I put them someplace in my house, but I can’t remember where.
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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The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-story-behind-janis-joplins-mercedes-benz-1436282817?tesla=y
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
1. ANATOMY OF A SONG (http://www.wsj.com/news/types/anatomy-of-a-song)
** The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
Janis Joplin in 1968 ENLARGE
Janis Joplin in 1968 Photo: Elliott Landy/Corbis
By
Marc Myers
July 7, 2015 11:29 a.m. ET
Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” was an accident. The song’s lyrics were written at a Port Chester, N.Y., bar in August 1970 during an impromptu poetry jam between Joplin and songwriter-friend Bob Neuwirth. The lyrics—a sardonic prayer for a sports car, a color TV and a night on the town—were inspired by the first line of a song written by San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure.
About an hour after the song was completed in Port Chester, Joplin performed it a cappella on a whim when she took the stage at the town’s Capitol Theatre. Then on Oct. 1, when she was in Los Angeles recording her album “Pearl,” she sang “Mercedes Benz” in the studio for fun. After she died of a drug overdose three days later on Oct. 4, the song was added to the album.
Issued as a single in 1971 on the B-side of Joplin’s hit “Cry Baby,” “Mercedes Benz” has since been covered by more than 30 artists and used by Mercedes-Benz in its car ads. In advance of the 45th anniversary of Joplin’s death in October, road manager John Byrne Cooke, Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. McClure, and Clark Pierson and Brad Campbell of Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie Band talked about the song’s evolution. Edited from interviews.
John Byrne Cooke: Back in the summer of 1970, Janis was on tour with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, arriving in New York at the start of August. On Saturday, Aug. 8, Janis and the band performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., and then appeared at Harvard Stadium on Aug. 12. Three days later, she attended her high-school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas, and traveled to Los Angeles in September to record “Pearl” at Sunset Sound. She was happy and knew she was hitting a new level in her singing career.
Bob Neuwirth: I first met Janis before she was famous. We both played the same small clubs in San Francisco in 1965. In early August 1970, I was living in New York when Janis came to town for a series of performances. She was staying at the Hotel Chelsea. On Aug. 8, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to travel an hour north to perform in Port Chester. She felt the opening acts—Seatrain and Runt—would attract a crowd that didn’t understand her music.
Janis had spoken often about how much she admired actress Geraldine Page. I knew Geraldine’s husband, Rip Torn, and since they both were in town, I invited them to come with us late that afternoon in the limo. While Janis was still upstairs getting ready, Rip and Geraldine came over for a drink at El Quijote, a Spanish restaurant in the hotel. I didn’t tell Janis they were coming. I wanted it to be a surprise. When she came down and saw Geraldine, she lit up. A few margaritas later, they were old pals, and we were ready to go. We rode up in one car and the band traveled in another.
Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad St.]. At the table, Janis and Geraldine bonded, and all of us were getting into it. At some point, Janis sang out, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” Earlier, in San Francisco, Janis had heard Michael McClure’s song and it stuck with her. But she couldn’t remember the rest of it.
Michael McClure: Allen Ginsberg introduced me to Bob Dylan when Bob was in San Francisco in December 1965. After we met and hung out, Bob gave me an autoharp— a stringed Appalachian folk instrument. Bob knew I wanted to write songs. I kept the instrument on my mantle for three months before learning to play it. In 1966, while I was writing “Freewheelin’ Frank” with Hells Angel Frank Reynolds, [musician] George Montana came over in the evenings with strange instruments, and we’d add music to the songs I was writing and singing.
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 ENLARGE
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 Photo: Getty Images
One of my songs started, “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz.” The song would get longer and shorter each time I sang it. One day I got a call from [actor-singer] Emmett Grogan. He had heard me sing the song at my house and began singing it with his friends at a local pool hall. On the phone, he said he was shooting pool with Janis and that she was singing it, too. I told him I had nothing against that.
Mr. Neuwirth: At the Port Chester bar, Janis sang the line a few times. Then Rip and Geraldine began banging their beer glasses on the table to keep time. It was like a sea shanty. Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round.
Janis and I were giggling and showing off a bit in front of Rip and Geraldine. The alcohol wasn’t meant to do anything except keep us laughing in that bar, but it assumed control, and the result was “Mercedes Benz.” I figured that what we were doing there was just an exercise to impress Rip and Geraldine and pass the time. Nothing more.
While we were lost in all this blather and laughter, John Cooke, her road manager, came blasting in close to 9 p.m. to tell Janis she was on in 15 minutes. The next thing I knew we were back up the block at the Capitol. Janis came on stage, and after singing “Tell Mama” and “Half Moon,” she surprised everyone by announcing she wanted to sing a new song.
On the bootleg recording from the concert, she says from the stage: “I’d like to do a song of some significance, now. I just wrote it at the bar on the corner, so I don’t know all the words yet. I’m going to do it Acapulco,” which had been my funny way of saying “a cappella.” I think she decided to sing it to further impress Geraldine and Rip.
Janis stomped off the beat and began belting out the lyrics, the way she had done at the bar. The band soon tried to fit in as best they could, and then they reprised the last verse. What’s interesting is that the second verse doesn’t include the “Dialing for Dollars” line. She must have added it later before recording in the studio in L.A., since it’s not on the Harvard Stadium bootleg either.
When Janis finished, she said to the audience: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s not even a song, you know. They turned the jukebox up, and we kept singing it anyway. They turned up ‘Hey Jude’ so loud we had to order another drink.”
Clark Pierson (drummer): The band was pretty surprised she sang “Mercedes Benz” that night. We didn’t have a key for the song and didn’t know how to put it. We also didn’t realize she was going to sing it alone. We just all looked at each other and then tried to follow along. Janis could remember lyrics stone-cold flawlessly, so that wasn’t a surprise to me. The audience was just staring at first, like, what’s going on? Then they had smiles and were clapping along in time. Several nights later she sang it again at Harvard Stadium, which turned out to be her last concert.
Brad Campbell (bassist): On “Mercedes Benz,” Janis wanted to accompany herself on guitar. She took out her Gibson Sunburst and whispered to us, “Watch me boys.” But instead of playing it, she just sang. We eventually played a few notes here and there and sang where we could, figuring she wanted us to follow her.
Mr. McClure: At some point in August 1970, Janis called. She said she was performing the “Mercedes Benz” song but that hers was different than mine. She sang it over the phone. When she was done, I said it was OK. Then I went for my autoharp and sat on the stairs and sang her mine over the phone. Janis’s version was sweet and wry and had the grace of a riddle. Mine was much more outspoken, funny and ironic. Janis laughed and said she liked hers better. I said, “That’s OK, you can sing yours.” And that’s the last I heard of it until “Pearl” came out and I saw my name with Janis’s on the song credit. [Mr. Neuwirth’s name was added later].
Mr. Pierson: On Oct. 1, Full Tilt and Janis were at Sunset Sound in L.A. recording “Pearl” when something happened to the tape recorder that caused everything to come to a halt. As producer Paul Rothchild tried to fix it, we started getting antsy, especially Janis, who didn’t like sitting around. She was still in the vocal booth and could see through the glass that our energy was fading. To kill time and keep us amused, she started to sing “Mercedes Benz” in there.
ENLARGE
Mr. Campbell: I could see Janis in the booth. She beat off time by stomping her feet on the floor with her sandals. The bracelets jangling on her arm and the stomping of her feet provided the rhythmic sound you hear on the record. Her eyes were open as she sang, but they seemed closed, as if she were far away. When the song was done, she said, “That’s it,” followed by her famous cackle. She always surprised herself.
Mr. Neuwirth: Paul Rothchild told me later the problem was with his 2-inch tape recorder. The heads shifted or something and needed to be readjusted. Paul had a ¼-inch safety reel going that ran all the time as a backup in case there was an idea he missed in between takes when the 2-inch main recorder was off. While Paul worked to fix the 2-inch tape recorder, Janis sang “Mercedes Benz” on a whim. Fortunately, the safety tape caught it.
Mr. Cooke: “Mercedes Benz” was the last song Janis recorded. Three days later I found her body in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel. She had overdosed on heroin that was way stronger than street heroin had any right to be. For the next few days, everyone was in shock. That Thursday, Paul Rothchild played for us everything he had on tape. It was almost an album. Paul and the band worked for another 10 days to create the best instrumental tracks to go with the existing vocals. Although she had sung “Mercedes Benz” a cappella, Paul knew we had to use it as is.
Mr. Neuwirth: About 20 years ago, I had a guitar case overflowing with stuff. It was so full I couldn’t close the lid with the instrument inside. I went through all the junk in there and found four square napkins on which I had jotted down the “Mercedes Benz” lyrics in 1970. I have no idea where those napkins are today. I’d love to find them. I put them someplace in my house, but I can’t remember where.
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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The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-story-behind-janis-joplins-mercedes-benz-1436282817?tesla=y
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
1. ANATOMY OF A SONG (http://www.wsj.com/news/types/anatomy-of-a-song)
** The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
Janis Joplin in 1968 ENLARGE
Janis Joplin in 1968 Photo: Elliott Landy/Corbis
By
Marc Myers
July 7, 2015 11:29 a.m. ET
Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” was an accident. The song’s lyrics were written at a Port Chester, N.Y., bar in August 1970 during an impromptu poetry jam between Joplin and songwriter-friend Bob Neuwirth. The lyrics—a sardonic prayer for a sports car, a color TV and a night on the town—were inspired by the first line of a song written by San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure.
About an hour after the song was completed in Port Chester, Joplin performed it a cappella on a whim when she took the stage at the town’s Capitol Theatre. Then on Oct. 1, when she was in Los Angeles recording her album “Pearl,” she sang “Mercedes Benz” in the studio for fun. After she died of a drug overdose three days later on Oct. 4, the song was added to the album.
Issued as a single in 1971 on the B-side of Joplin’s hit “Cry Baby,” “Mercedes Benz” has since been covered by more than 30 artists and used by Mercedes-Benz in its car ads. In advance of the 45th anniversary of Joplin’s death in October, road manager John Byrne Cooke, Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. McClure, and Clark Pierson and Brad Campbell of Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie Band talked about the song’s evolution. Edited from interviews.
John Byrne Cooke: Back in the summer of 1970, Janis was on tour with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, arriving in New York at the start of August. On Saturday, Aug. 8, Janis and the band performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., and then appeared at Harvard Stadium on Aug. 12. Three days later, she attended her high-school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas, and traveled to Los Angeles in September to record “Pearl” at Sunset Sound. She was happy and knew she was hitting a new level in her singing career.
Bob Neuwirth: I first met Janis before she was famous. We both played the same small clubs in San Francisco in 1965. In early August 1970, I was living in New York when Janis came to town for a series of performances. She was staying at the Hotel Chelsea. On Aug. 8, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to travel an hour north to perform in Port Chester. She felt the opening acts—Seatrain and Runt—would attract a crowd that didn’t understand her music.
Janis had spoken often about how much she admired actress Geraldine Page. I knew Geraldine’s husband, Rip Torn, and since they both were in town, I invited them to come with us late that afternoon in the limo. While Janis was still upstairs getting ready, Rip and Geraldine came over for a drink at El Quijote, a Spanish restaurant in the hotel. I didn’t tell Janis they were coming. I wanted it to be a surprise. When she came down and saw Geraldine, she lit up. A few margaritas later, they were old pals, and we were ready to go. We rode up in one car and the band traveled in another.
Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad St.]. At the table, Janis and Geraldine bonded, and all of us were getting into it. At some point, Janis sang out, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” Earlier, in San Francisco, Janis had heard Michael McClure’s song and it stuck with her. But she couldn’t remember the rest of it.
Michael McClure: Allen Ginsberg introduced me to Bob Dylan when Bob was in San Francisco in December 1965. After we met and hung out, Bob gave me an autoharp— a stringed Appalachian folk instrument. Bob knew I wanted to write songs. I kept the instrument on my mantle for three months before learning to play it. In 1966, while I was writing “Freewheelin’ Frank” with Hells Angel Frank Reynolds, [musician] George Montana came over in the evenings with strange instruments, and we’d add music to the songs I was writing and singing.
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 ENLARGE
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 Photo: Getty Images
One of my songs started, “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz.” The song would get longer and shorter each time I sang it. One day I got a call from [actor-singer] Emmett Grogan. He had heard me sing the song at my house and began singing it with his friends at a local pool hall. On the phone, he said he was shooting pool with Janis and that she was singing it, too. I told him I had nothing against that.
Mr. Neuwirth: At the Port Chester bar, Janis sang the line a few times. Then Rip and Geraldine began banging their beer glasses on the table to keep time. It was like a sea shanty. Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round.
Janis and I were giggling and showing off a bit in front of Rip and Geraldine. The alcohol wasn’t meant to do anything except keep us laughing in that bar, but it assumed control, and the result was “Mercedes Benz.” I figured that what we were doing there was just an exercise to impress Rip and Geraldine and pass the time. Nothing more.
While we were lost in all this blather and laughter, John Cooke, her road manager, came blasting in close to 9 p.m. to tell Janis she was on in 15 minutes. The next thing I knew we were back up the block at the Capitol. Janis came on stage, and after singing “Tell Mama” and “Half Moon,” she surprised everyone by announcing she wanted to sing a new song.
On the bootleg recording from the concert, she says from the stage: “I’d like to do a song of some significance, now. I just wrote it at the bar on the corner, so I don’t know all the words yet. I’m going to do it Acapulco,” which had been my funny way of saying “a cappella.” I think she decided to sing it to further impress Geraldine and Rip.
Janis stomped off the beat and began belting out the lyrics, the way she had done at the bar. The band soon tried to fit in as best they could, and then they reprised the last verse. What’s interesting is that the second verse doesn’t include the “Dialing for Dollars” line. She must have added it later before recording in the studio in L.A., since it’s not on the Harvard Stadium bootleg either.
When Janis finished, she said to the audience: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s not even a song, you know. They turned the jukebox up, and we kept singing it anyway. They turned up ‘Hey Jude’ so loud we had to order another drink.”
Clark Pierson (drummer): The band was pretty surprised she sang “Mercedes Benz” that night. We didn’t have a key for the song and didn’t know how to put it. We also didn’t realize she was going to sing it alone. We just all looked at each other and then tried to follow along. Janis could remember lyrics stone-cold flawlessly, so that wasn’t a surprise to me. The audience was just staring at first, like, what’s going on? Then they had smiles and were clapping along in time. Several nights later she sang it again at Harvard Stadium, which turned out to be her last concert.
Brad Campbell (bassist): On “Mercedes Benz,” Janis wanted to accompany herself on guitar. She took out her Gibson Sunburst and whispered to us, “Watch me boys.” But instead of playing it, she just sang. We eventually played a few notes here and there and sang where we could, figuring she wanted us to follow her.
Mr. McClure: At some point in August 1970, Janis called. She said she was performing the “Mercedes Benz” song but that hers was different than mine. She sang it over the phone. When she was done, I said it was OK. Then I went for my autoharp and sat on the stairs and sang her mine over the phone. Janis’s version was sweet and wry and had the grace of a riddle. Mine was much more outspoken, funny and ironic. Janis laughed and said she liked hers better. I said, “That’s OK, you can sing yours.” And that’s the last I heard of it until “Pearl” came out and I saw my name with Janis’s on the song credit. [Mr. Neuwirth’s name was added later].
Mr. Pierson: On Oct. 1, Full Tilt and Janis were at Sunset Sound in L.A. recording “Pearl” when something happened to the tape recorder that caused everything to come to a halt. As producer Paul Rothchild tried to fix it, we started getting antsy, especially Janis, who didn’t like sitting around. She was still in the vocal booth and could see through the glass that our energy was fading. To kill time and keep us amused, she started to sing “Mercedes Benz” in there.
ENLARGE
Mr. Campbell: I could see Janis in the booth. She beat off time by stomping her feet on the floor with her sandals. The bracelets jangling on her arm and the stomping of her feet provided the rhythmic sound you hear on the record. Her eyes were open as she sang, but they seemed closed, as if she were far away. When the song was done, she said, “That’s it,” followed by her famous cackle. She always surprised herself.
Mr. Neuwirth: Paul Rothchild told me later the problem was with his 2-inch tape recorder. The heads shifted or something and needed to be readjusted. Paul had a ¼-inch safety reel going that ran all the time as a backup in case there was an idea he missed in between takes when the 2-inch main recorder was off. While Paul worked to fix the 2-inch tape recorder, Janis sang “Mercedes Benz” on a whim. Fortunately, the safety tape caught it.
Mr. Cooke: “Mercedes Benz” was the last song Janis recorded. Three days later I found her body in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel. She had overdosed on heroin that was way stronger than street heroin had any right to be. For the next few days, everyone was in shock. That Thursday, Paul Rothchild played for us everything he had on tape. It was almost an album. Paul and the band worked for another 10 days to create the best instrumental tracks to go with the existing vocals. Although she had sung “Mercedes Benz” a cappella, Paul knew we had to use it as is.
Mr. Neuwirth: About 20 years ago, I had a guitar case overflowing with stuff. It was so full I couldn’t close the lid with the instrument inside. I went through all the junk in there and found four square napkins on which I had jotted down the “Mercedes Benz” lyrics in 1970. I have no idea where those napkins are today. I’d love to find them. I put them someplace in my house, but I can’t remember where.
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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Warwick, Ny 10990
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The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’ – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-story-behind-janis-joplins-mercedes-benz-1436282817?tesla=y
1. ARTS (http://www.wsj.com/news/arts)
1. ANATOMY OF A SONG (http://www.wsj.com/news/types/anatomy-of-a-song)
** The Story Behind Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’
————————————————————
By
MARC MYERS
Janis Joplin in 1968 ENLARGE
Janis Joplin in 1968 Photo: Elliott Landy/Corbis
By
Marc Myers
July 7, 2015 11:29 a.m. ET
Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” was an accident. The song’s lyrics were written at a Port Chester, N.Y., bar in August 1970 during an impromptu poetry jam between Joplin and songwriter-friend Bob Neuwirth. The lyrics—a sardonic prayer for a sports car, a color TV and a night on the town—were inspired by the first line of a song written by San Francisco beat poet Michael McClure.
About an hour after the song was completed in Port Chester, Joplin performed it a cappella on a whim when she took the stage at the town’s Capitol Theatre. Then on Oct. 1, when she was in Los Angeles recording her album “Pearl,” she sang “Mercedes Benz” in the studio for fun. After she died of a drug overdose three days later on Oct. 4, the song was added to the album.
Issued as a single in 1971 on the B-side of Joplin’s hit “Cry Baby,” “Mercedes Benz” has since been covered by more than 30 artists and used by Mercedes-Benz in its car ads. In advance of the 45th anniversary of Joplin’s death in October, road manager John Byrne Cooke, Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. McClure, and Clark Pierson and Brad Campbell of Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie Band talked about the song’s evolution. Edited from interviews.
John Byrne Cooke: Back in the summer of 1970, Janis was on tour with the Full Tilt Boogie Band, arriving in New York at the start of August. On Saturday, Aug. 8, Janis and the band performed at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, N.Y., and then appeared at Harvard Stadium on Aug. 12. Three days later, she attended her high-school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas, and traveled to Los Angeles in September to record “Pearl” at Sunset Sound. She was happy and knew she was hitting a new level in her singing career.
Bob Neuwirth: I first met Janis before she was famous. We both played the same small clubs in San Francisco in 1965. In early August 1970, I was living in New York when Janis came to town for a series of performances. She was staying at the Hotel Chelsea. On Aug. 8, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about having to travel an hour north to perform in Port Chester. She felt the opening acts—Seatrain and Runt—would attract a crowd that didn’t understand her music.
Janis had spoken often about how much she admired actress Geraldine Page. I knew Geraldine’s husband, Rip Torn, and since they both were in town, I invited them to come with us late that afternoon in the limo. While Janis was still upstairs getting ready, Rip and Geraldine came over for a drink at El Quijote, a Spanish restaurant in the hotel. I didn’t tell Janis they were coming. I wanted it to be a surprise. When she came down and saw Geraldine, she lit up. A few margaritas later, they were old pals, and we were ready to go. We rode up in one car and the band traveled in another.
Around 7 p.m., after the Capitol sound check, we had a couple of hours to kill before Seatrain and Runt finished their sets. So the four of us walked to a bar about three minutes away called Vahsen’s [at 30 Broad St.]. At the table, Janis and Geraldine bonded, and all of us were getting into it. At some point, Janis sang out, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” Earlier, in San Francisco, Janis had heard Michael McClure’s song and it stuck with her. But she couldn’t remember the rest of it.
Michael McClure: Allen Ginsberg introduced me to Bob Dylan when Bob was in San Francisco in December 1965. After we met and hung out, Bob gave me an autoharp— a stringed Appalachian folk instrument. Bob knew I wanted to write songs. I kept the instrument on my mantle for three months before learning to play it. In 1966, while I was writing “Freewheelin’ Frank” with Hells Angel Frank Reynolds, [musician] George Montana came over in the evenings with strange instruments, and we’d add music to the songs I was writing and singing.
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 ENLARGE
Bob Neuwirth in 1970 Photo: Getty Images
One of my songs started, “Come on, God, and buy me a Mercedes Benz.” The song would get longer and shorter each time I sang it. One day I got a call from [actor-singer] Emmett Grogan. He had heard me sing the song at my house and began singing it with his friends at a local pool hall. On the phone, he said he was shooting pool with Janis and that she was singing it, too. I told him I had nothing against that.
Mr. Neuwirth: At the Port Chester bar, Janis sang the line a few times. Then Rip and Geraldine began banging their beer glasses on the table to keep time. It was like a sea shanty. Janis came up with words for the first verse. I was in charge of writing them down on bar napkins with a ballpoint pen. She came up with the second verse, too, about a color TV. I suggested words here and there, and came up with the third verse—about asking the Lord to buy us a night on the town and another round.
Janis and I were giggling and showing off a bit in front of Rip and Geraldine. The alcohol wasn’t meant to do anything except keep us laughing in that bar, but it assumed control, and the result was “Mercedes Benz.” I figured that what we were doing there was just an exercise to impress Rip and Geraldine and pass the time. Nothing more.
While we were lost in all this blather and laughter, John Cooke, her road manager, came blasting in close to 9 p.m. to tell Janis she was on in 15 minutes. The next thing I knew we were back up the block at the Capitol. Janis came on stage, and after singing “Tell Mama” and “Half Moon,” she surprised everyone by announcing she wanted to sing a new song.
On the bootleg recording from the concert, she says from the stage: “I’d like to do a song of some significance, now. I just wrote it at the bar on the corner, so I don’t know all the words yet. I’m going to do it Acapulco,” which had been my funny way of saying “a cappella.” I think she decided to sing it to further impress Geraldine and Rip.
Janis stomped off the beat and began belting out the lyrics, the way she had done at the bar. The band soon tried to fit in as best they could, and then they reprised the last verse. What’s interesting is that the second verse doesn’t include the “Dialing for Dollars” line. She must have added it later before recording in the studio in L.A., since it’s not on the Harvard Stadium bootleg either.
When Janis finished, she said to the audience: “Thank you, thank you, thank you. That’s not even a song, you know. They turned the jukebox up, and we kept singing it anyway. They turned up ‘Hey Jude’ so loud we had to order another drink.”
Clark Pierson (drummer): The band was pretty surprised she sang “Mercedes Benz” that night. We didn’t have a key for the song and didn’t know how to put it. We also didn’t realize she was going to sing it alone. We just all looked at each other and then tried to follow along. Janis could remember lyrics stone-cold flawlessly, so that wasn’t a surprise to me. The audience was just staring at first, like, what’s going on? Then they had smiles and were clapping along in time. Several nights later she sang it again at Harvard Stadium, which turned out to be her last concert.
Brad Campbell (bassist): On “Mercedes Benz,” Janis wanted to accompany herself on guitar. She took out her Gibson Sunburst and whispered to us, “Watch me boys.” But instead of playing it, she just sang. We eventually played a few notes here and there and sang where we could, figuring she wanted us to follow her.
Mr. McClure: At some point in August 1970, Janis called. She said she was performing the “Mercedes Benz” song but that hers was different than mine. She sang it over the phone. When she was done, I said it was OK. Then I went for my autoharp and sat on the stairs and sang her mine over the phone. Janis’s version was sweet and wry and had the grace of a riddle. Mine was much more outspoken, funny and ironic. Janis laughed and said she liked hers better. I said, “That’s OK, you can sing yours.” And that’s the last I heard of it until “Pearl” came out and I saw my name with Janis’s on the song credit. [Mr. Neuwirth’s name was added later].
Mr. Pierson: On Oct. 1, Full Tilt and Janis were at Sunset Sound in L.A. recording “Pearl” when something happened to the tape recorder that caused everything to come to a halt. As producer Paul Rothchild tried to fix it, we started getting antsy, especially Janis, who didn’t like sitting around. She was still in the vocal booth and could see through the glass that our energy was fading. To kill time and keep us amused, she started to sing “Mercedes Benz” in there.
ENLARGE
Mr. Campbell: I could see Janis in the booth. She beat off time by stomping her feet on the floor with her sandals. The bracelets jangling on her arm and the stomping of her feet provided the rhythmic sound you hear on the record. Her eyes were open as she sang, but they seemed closed, as if she were far away. When the song was done, she said, “That’s it,” followed by her famous cackle. She always surprised herself.
Mr. Neuwirth: Paul Rothchild told me later the problem was with his 2-inch tape recorder. The heads shifted or something and needed to be readjusted. Paul had a ¼-inch safety reel going that ran all the time as a backup in case there was an idea he missed in between takes when the 2-inch main recorder was off. While Paul worked to fix the 2-inch tape recorder, Janis sang “Mercedes Benz” on a whim. Fortunately, the safety tape caught it.
Mr. Cooke: “Mercedes Benz” was the last song Janis recorded. Three days later I found her body in her room at the Landmark Motor Hotel. She had overdosed on heroin that was way stronger than street heroin had any right to be. For the next few days, everyone was in shock. That Thursday, Paul Rothchild played for us everything he had on tape. It was almost an album. Paul and the band worked for another 10 days to create the best instrumental tracks to go with the existing vocals. Although she had sung “Mercedes Benz” a cappella, Paul knew we had to use it as is.
Mr. Neuwirth: About 20 years ago, I had a guitar case overflowing with stuff. It was so full I couldn’t close the lid with the instrument inside. I went through all the junk in there and found four square napkins on which I had jotted down the “Mercedes Benz” lyrics in 1970. I have no idea where those napkins are today. I’d love to find them. I put them someplace in my house, but I can’t remember where.
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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The Anxious Ease of Apple Music – The New Yorker
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-anxious-ease-of-apple-music
** The Anxious Ease of Apple Music
————————————————————
By Alex Ross
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Ross-Apple-Music1-1200.jpgWhen the iTunes store first arose, in 2003, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. The new Apple cares less. Credit Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty “These services treat you like a criminal,” Steve Jobs said of streaming-music companies, in an Apple keynote address in 2003 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6DX5NaPvk4&feature=youtu.be&t=22m1s) . “And they are subscription-based, and we think subscriptions are the wrong path. One of the reasons we think this is because people bought their music for as long as we can remember. . . . When you own your music, it never goes away.” Jobs was introducing the iTunes Store, which updated the old model of the recorded-music library. Purchasing a digital track or album, Jobs said, was now “the hottest way to acquire music.” For some years, it was. Then streaming services began to claim an ever greater share
of the market, even as they struggled to turn a profit. Last week, surrendering to the apparently inevitable, Apple introduced Apple Music, its own subscription music bundle. For $9.99 a month, you win unlimited access to a library of more than thirty million tracks, from Michel van der Aa to ZZ Top.
I have doubts about the aesthetics and ethics of streaming, as I wrote in a column last summer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/classical-cloud) . But as a longtime Apple user—almost everything I have written since 1987 has been composed on a Mac—I had little choice but to give Apple Music a spin. And the verbal fanfare on Apple’s Web site makes enticing promises: “We are profoundly passionate about music. It’s a force that’s driven and inspired us from day one. So we’ve set out to make it better.” How can one resist? The world’s wealthiest, coolest corporation is not only bringing you music but making it better. Music, it seems, is a trusty app that has some usability issues, and is due for an upgrade.
Although the huge storehouse of tracks forms the core of Apple Music, the service also offers features designed to widen your musical horizons, to adapt your musical taste to daily needs, and to connect you with artists and other fans. There’s a page called “New” that is dominated by the big stars of today and yesterday: Pharrell Williams, Eminem, the Rolling Stones, and Taylor Swift. (After challenging Apple’s stance on royalties (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/business/media/taylor-swift-criticizes-apples-terms-for-streaming-music-service.html) , Swift allowed the company to stream her album “1989.”) There’s an array of Internet radio stations. A page called “For You” supplies playlists tailored to your preferences, which can be calibrated by expanding or contracting genre balloons. I double-clicked “Classical” and “Experimental,” and was served a fair amount of obvious fare, along with a few pleasingly offbeat choices (James Tenney, Merzbow). And there’s a social-media
page called “Connect.” For me, it proposed Gustavo Dudamel.
Classical music has long been a kind of black hole in the streaming universe. Spotify, Pandora, and the others organize their libraries around artists, albums, and tracks; the existence of beings called Composers, who write music but may not be involved in its performance, confuses matters. Last summer, I described a few of the struggles of listening to classical music on Spotify: sorting through randomized movements of symphonies; scrutinizing tiny reproductions of an album cover for clues about who is playing; searching elsewhere on the Internet for information. Anastasia Tsioulcas, in an article for NPR Music (http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right) , reports much more extensively on the headaches of classical streaming, not least the effects of poor sound quality.
When the iTunes store first arose, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. Classical releases sometimes appeared on the main page, and a “Composer” field made it easy to navigate multi-composer albums. The new Apple cares less: composers have dropped from sight. In one listing, the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth is identified as a “Song by Daniel Barenboim.” Apple Music improves on Spotify in terms of legibility: you can easily see who’s singing on opera recordings, and because the reproductions of album covers are bigger you can often suss out composers’ names, even if they’re not listed in the app. But in the case of an absorbing new DG album titled “Time Present and Time Past,” with the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and the Concerto Köln, an arty cover (http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/us/cat/4794481) gives no clue as to who wrote what, and you have to go elsewhere to pin down all the composers (J. S. and C. P. E. Bach, Geminiani, Górecki,
Reich, Alessandro Scarlatti). The irony is that the hidden metadata knows the score, even though it’s not telling: “Time Present and Time Past” shows up in searches for each composer.
No heads will roll in Cupertino on account of these grumblings. The majority of the population that ignores classical music will shrug and go back to the new Jamie xx record. (I’m enjoying his track “The Rest Is Noise.”) Yet Apple’s unwillingness to accommodate—in this first iteration, at least—defining features of a thousand-year tradition is symptomatic of general trends in the streaming business. You sense declining interest in the particulars of genres, in the personalities of artists, in political messages, in cultural contexts. Differences are flattened out: music really does stream, in an evenly regulated flow. One zone of Apple Music offers playlists tailored to various activities and moods: “Waking Up,” “Working,” “Chilling Out,” “Cooking,” “Getting It On,” and “Breaking Up.” All that’s needed is one for “Dying.” As the Times critic Ben Ratliff recently said (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/arts/music/seeking-genuine-discovery-on-music-streaming-services.h
tml?_r=0) , on the subject of streaming playlists, “I always feel as if I’m shopping somewhere, and the music reflects What Our Customers Like to Listen To. The experience can feel benignly inhuman.”
You can easily tune out the bespoke Muzak and exploit the library for your own eccentric ends. Still, the pressure from the margin to the center is strong. Despite “Think Different” maxims redolent of the old Steve Jobs script—“It’s your music. Do what you like with it.”—you’re encouraged to gravitate toward the music that everyone else is listening to. This is what happens all across the corporatized Internet: to quote the old adage of Adorno and Horkheimer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers) , you have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” The musician, writer, and publisher Damon Krukowski, a longtime critic of the streaming business, calls it the return of the monoculture. “What Apple is doing to music retail,” Krukowski said on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dada_drummer/status/615853749555331072) , “is exactly what I saw chains do to books in the nineties: kill indie competition, then eliminate the product.”
As for the economic question, performing artists and composers are unlikely to receive more compensation from Apple Music than they do from Spotify, Pandora, and other extant streaming services, whose practices have been widely criticized (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/if-you-care-about-music-should-you-ditch-spotify) . Krukowski observes (http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/post/122815453683/evolution-of-the-itunes-icon-over-its-first-ten) that forty-three per cent of his digital income—from recordings by Galaxie 500 and by Damon and Naomi—comes from iTunes. As Apple sidelines downloads, that revenue will fall sharply. Although Congress has made noises (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/07/02/apple-enters-the-music-streaming-business-amidst-royalty-dispute/) about strengthening creative rights, a phalanx of lobbyists (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying-firms-117001.html) is likely to defang any new
legislation. To be sure, there is money to be made from streaming: major labels with large back catalogues reap a considerable profit, and superstars like Swift see sizable checks when tracks receive many millions of plays. It’s the all too familiar winner-takes-all economy in action.
So, contrary to plan, Apple has not necessarily succeeded in making music better. Then again, it might not be doing long-term damage; indeed, it might not be having much effect at all. The musicologist Deirdre Loughridge recently published a blog post (https://spookyandthemetronome.wordpress.com/tag/listening-habits/) about the history of music-subscription services, which date back to sheet-music lending libraries in the eighteenth century. By the eighteen-thirties, pundits were fretting that such libraries were undercutting the economics of the music business and altering the nature of listening. “One enjoys superficially, one always wants something new,” a critic groused in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. A few decades later, a piano teacher wrote, “Music lending libraries could very well be called ‘music snacking libraries.’” Almost identical complaints are being levelled at Spotify, YouTube, and the rest. These anxieties are now forgotten because, as Loughridge
notes, the very existence of music-lending libraries has been forgotten. If they hurt music sales, the damage was soon repaired. Loughridge suggests that this obscure history should promote a “healthier skepticism toward claims that any model represents ‘the’ answer for the music industry.”
We never cease to be mesmerized by the vessel in which music is contained, whether it’s the piano (http://www.therestisnoise.com/2013/06/fear-of-the-gadget.html) , the phonograph, the MP3, or the Cloud. We think that machines are saving music or destroying it. Their impact is undoubtedly profound, but we seldom see the complexity of the transformation amid the hysteria of surface change. At the same time, the anxiety around music and technology is deep-seated, however excessive it may seem a century or two down the road. It is rooted in the elemental fear of life slipping away in half-experienced moments. For that mortal feeling, music itself, in its sensually clobbering immediacy, provides a cure. We become dependent on technology simply because we don’t want our transient ecstasies to stop.
Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
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=c3e5168050) | 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=c3e5168050&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
The Anxious Ease of Apple Music – The New Yorker
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-anxious-ease-of-apple-music
** The Anxious Ease of Apple Music
————————————————————
By Alex Ross
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Ross-Apple-Music1-1200.jpgWhen the iTunes store first arose, in 2003, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. The new Apple cares less. Credit Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty “These services treat you like a criminal,” Steve Jobs said of streaming-music companies, in an Apple keynote address in 2003 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6DX5NaPvk4&feature=youtu.be&t=22m1s) . “And they are subscription-based, and we think subscriptions are the wrong path. One of the reasons we think this is because people bought their music for as long as we can remember. . . . When you own your music, it never goes away.” Jobs was introducing the iTunes Store, which updated the old model of the recorded-music library. Purchasing a digital track or album, Jobs said, was now “the hottest way to acquire music.” For some years, it was. Then streaming services began to claim an ever greater share
of the market, even as they struggled to turn a profit. Last week, surrendering to the apparently inevitable, Apple introduced Apple Music, its own subscription music bundle. For $9.99 a month, you win unlimited access to a library of more than thirty million tracks, from Michel van der Aa to ZZ Top.
I have doubts about the aesthetics and ethics of streaming, as I wrote in a column last summer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/classical-cloud) . But as a longtime Apple user—almost everything I have written since 1987 has been composed on a Mac—I had little choice but to give Apple Music a spin. And the verbal fanfare on Apple’s Web site makes enticing promises: “We are profoundly passionate about music. It’s a force that’s driven and inspired us from day one. So we’ve set out to make it better.” How can one resist? The world’s wealthiest, coolest corporation is not only bringing you music but making it better. Music, it seems, is a trusty app that has some usability issues, and is due for an upgrade.
Although the huge storehouse of tracks forms the core of Apple Music, the service also offers features designed to widen your musical horizons, to adapt your musical taste to daily needs, and to connect you with artists and other fans. There’s a page called “New” that is dominated by the big stars of today and yesterday: Pharrell Williams, Eminem, the Rolling Stones, and Taylor Swift. (After challenging Apple’s stance on royalties (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/business/media/taylor-swift-criticizes-apples-terms-for-streaming-music-service.html) , Swift allowed the company to stream her album “1989.”) There’s an array of Internet radio stations. A page called “For You” supplies playlists tailored to your preferences, which can be calibrated by expanding or contracting genre balloons. I double-clicked “Classical” and “Experimental,” and was served a fair amount of obvious fare, along with a few pleasingly offbeat choices (James Tenney, Merzbow). And there’s a social-media
page called “Connect.” For me, it proposed Gustavo Dudamel.
Classical music has long been a kind of black hole in the streaming universe. Spotify, Pandora, and the others organize their libraries around artists, albums, and tracks; the existence of beings called Composers, who write music but may not be involved in its performance, confuses matters. Last summer, I described a few of the struggles of listening to classical music on Spotify: sorting through randomized movements of symphonies; scrutinizing tiny reproductions of an album cover for clues about who is playing; searching elsewhere on the Internet for information. Anastasia Tsioulcas, in an article for NPR Music (http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right) , reports much more extensively on the headaches of classical streaming, not least the effects of poor sound quality.
When the iTunes store first arose, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. Classical releases sometimes appeared on the main page, and a “Composer” field made it easy to navigate multi-composer albums. The new Apple cares less: composers have dropped from sight. In one listing, the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth is identified as a “Song by Daniel Barenboim.” Apple Music improves on Spotify in terms of legibility: you can easily see who’s singing on opera recordings, and because the reproductions of album covers are bigger you can often suss out composers’ names, even if they’re not listed in the app. But in the case of an absorbing new DG album titled “Time Present and Time Past,” with the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and the Concerto Köln, an arty cover (http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/us/cat/4794481) gives no clue as to who wrote what, and you have to go elsewhere to pin down all the composers (J. S. and C. P. E. Bach, Geminiani, Górecki,
Reich, Alessandro Scarlatti). The irony is that the hidden metadata knows the score, even though it’s not telling: “Time Present and Time Past” shows up in searches for each composer.
No heads will roll in Cupertino on account of these grumblings. The majority of the population that ignores classical music will shrug and go back to the new Jamie xx record. (I’m enjoying his track “The Rest Is Noise.”) Yet Apple’s unwillingness to accommodate—in this first iteration, at least—defining features of a thousand-year tradition is symptomatic of general trends in the streaming business. You sense declining interest in the particulars of genres, in the personalities of artists, in political messages, in cultural contexts. Differences are flattened out: music really does stream, in an evenly regulated flow. One zone of Apple Music offers playlists tailored to various activities and moods: “Waking Up,” “Working,” “Chilling Out,” “Cooking,” “Getting It On,” and “Breaking Up.” All that’s needed is one for “Dying.” As the Times critic Ben Ratliff recently said (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/arts/music/seeking-genuine-discovery-on-music-streaming-services.h
tml?_r=0) , on the subject of streaming playlists, “I always feel as if I’m shopping somewhere, and the music reflects What Our Customers Like to Listen To. The experience can feel benignly inhuman.”
You can easily tune out the bespoke Muzak and exploit the library for your own eccentric ends. Still, the pressure from the margin to the center is strong. Despite “Think Different” maxims redolent of the old Steve Jobs script—“It’s your music. Do what you like with it.”—you’re encouraged to gravitate toward the music that everyone else is listening to. This is what happens all across the corporatized Internet: to quote the old adage of Adorno and Horkheimer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers) , you have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” The musician, writer, and publisher Damon Krukowski, a longtime critic of the streaming business, calls it the return of the monoculture. “What Apple is doing to music retail,” Krukowski said on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dada_drummer/status/615853749555331072) , “is exactly what I saw chains do to books in the nineties: kill indie competition, then eliminate the product.”
As for the economic question, performing artists and composers are unlikely to receive more compensation from Apple Music than they do from Spotify, Pandora, and other extant streaming services, whose practices have been widely criticized (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/if-you-care-about-music-should-you-ditch-spotify) . Krukowski observes (http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/post/122815453683/evolution-of-the-itunes-icon-over-its-first-ten) that forty-three per cent of his digital income—from recordings by Galaxie 500 and by Damon and Naomi—comes from iTunes. As Apple sidelines downloads, that revenue will fall sharply. Although Congress has made noises (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/07/02/apple-enters-the-music-streaming-business-amidst-royalty-dispute/) about strengthening creative rights, a phalanx of lobbyists (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying-firms-117001.html) is likely to defang any new
legislation. To be sure, there is money to be made from streaming: major labels with large back catalogues reap a considerable profit, and superstars like Swift see sizable checks when tracks receive many millions of plays. It’s the all too familiar winner-takes-all economy in action.
So, contrary to plan, Apple has not necessarily succeeded in making music better. Then again, it might not be doing long-term damage; indeed, it might not be having much effect at all. The musicologist Deirdre Loughridge recently published a blog post (https://spookyandthemetronome.wordpress.com/tag/listening-habits/) about the history of music-subscription services, which date back to sheet-music lending libraries in the eighteenth century. By the eighteen-thirties, pundits were fretting that such libraries were undercutting the economics of the music business and altering the nature of listening. “One enjoys superficially, one always wants something new,” a critic groused in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. A few decades later, a piano teacher wrote, “Music lending libraries could very well be called ‘music snacking libraries.’” Almost identical complaints are being levelled at Spotify, YouTube, and the rest. These anxieties are now forgotten because, as Loughridge
notes, the very existence of music-lending libraries has been forgotten. If they hurt music sales, the damage was soon repaired. Loughridge suggests that this obscure history should promote a “healthier skepticism toward claims that any model represents ‘the’ answer for the music industry.”
We never cease to be mesmerized by the vessel in which music is contained, whether it’s the piano (http://www.therestisnoise.com/2013/06/fear-of-the-gadget.html) , the phonograph, the MP3, or the Cloud. We think that machines are saving music or destroying it. Their impact is undoubtedly profound, but we seldom see the complexity of the transformation amid the hysteria of surface change. At the same time, the anxiety around music and technology is deep-seated, however excessive it may seem a century or two down the road. It is rooted in the elemental fear of life slipping away in half-experienced moments. For that mortal feeling, music itself, in its sensually clobbering immediacy, provides a cure. We become dependent on technology simply because we don’t want our transient ecstasies to stop.
Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
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 Anxious Ease of Apple Music – The New Yorker
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-anxious-ease-of-apple-music
** The Anxious Ease of Apple Music
————————————————————
By Alex Ross
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Ross-Apple-Music1-1200.jpgWhen the iTunes store first arose, in 2003, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. The new Apple cares less. Credit Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty “These services treat you like a criminal,” Steve Jobs said of streaming-music companies, in an Apple keynote address in 2003 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6DX5NaPvk4&feature=youtu.be&t=22m1s) . “And they are subscription-based, and we think subscriptions are the wrong path. One of the reasons we think this is because people bought their music for as long as we can remember. . . . When you own your music, it never goes away.” Jobs was introducing the iTunes Store, which updated the old model of the recorded-music library. Purchasing a digital track or album, Jobs said, was now “the hottest way to acquire music.” For some years, it was. Then streaming services began to claim an ever greater share
of the market, even as they struggled to turn a profit. Last week, surrendering to the apparently inevitable, Apple introduced Apple Music, its own subscription music bundle. For $9.99 a month, you win unlimited access to a library of more than thirty million tracks, from Michel van der Aa to ZZ Top.
I have doubts about the aesthetics and ethics of streaming, as I wrote in a column last summer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/classical-cloud) . But as a longtime Apple user—almost everything I have written since 1987 has been composed on a Mac—I had little choice but to give Apple Music a spin. And the verbal fanfare on Apple’s Web site makes enticing promises: “We are profoundly passionate about music. It’s a force that’s driven and inspired us from day one. So we’ve set out to make it better.” How can one resist? The world’s wealthiest, coolest corporation is not only bringing you music but making it better. Music, it seems, is a trusty app that has some usability issues, and is due for an upgrade.
Although the huge storehouse of tracks forms the core of Apple Music, the service also offers features designed to widen your musical horizons, to adapt your musical taste to daily needs, and to connect you with artists and other fans. There’s a page called “New” that is dominated by the big stars of today and yesterday: Pharrell Williams, Eminem, the Rolling Stones, and Taylor Swift. (After challenging Apple’s stance on royalties (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/business/media/taylor-swift-criticizes-apples-terms-for-streaming-music-service.html) , Swift allowed the company to stream her album “1989.”) There’s an array of Internet radio stations. A page called “For You” supplies playlists tailored to your preferences, which can be calibrated by expanding or contracting genre balloons. I double-clicked “Classical” and “Experimental,” and was served a fair amount of obvious fare, along with a few pleasingly offbeat choices (James Tenney, Merzbow). And there’s a social-media
page called “Connect.” For me, it proposed Gustavo Dudamel.
Classical music has long been a kind of black hole in the streaming universe. Spotify, Pandora, and the others organize their libraries around artists, albums, and tracks; the existence of beings called Composers, who write music but may not be involved in its performance, confuses matters. Last summer, I described a few of the struggles of listening to classical music on Spotify: sorting through randomized movements of symphonies; scrutinizing tiny reproductions of an album cover for clues about who is playing; searching elsewhere on the Internet for information. Anastasia Tsioulcas, in an article for NPR Music (http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right) , reports much more extensively on the headaches of classical streaming, not least the effects of poor sound quality.
When the iTunes store first arose, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. Classical releases sometimes appeared on the main page, and a “Composer” field made it easy to navigate multi-composer albums. The new Apple cares less: composers have dropped from sight. In one listing, the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth is identified as a “Song by Daniel Barenboim.” Apple Music improves on Spotify in terms of legibility: you can easily see who’s singing on opera recordings, and because the reproductions of album covers are bigger you can often suss out composers’ names, even if they’re not listed in the app. But in the case of an absorbing new DG album titled “Time Present and Time Past,” with the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and the Concerto Köln, an arty cover (http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/us/cat/4794481) gives no clue as to who wrote what, and you have to go elsewhere to pin down all the composers (J. S. and C. P. E. Bach, Geminiani, Górecki,
Reich, Alessandro Scarlatti). The irony is that the hidden metadata knows the score, even though it’s not telling: “Time Present and Time Past” shows up in searches for each composer.
No heads will roll in Cupertino on account of these grumblings. The majority of the population that ignores classical music will shrug and go back to the new Jamie xx record. (I’m enjoying his track “The Rest Is Noise.”) Yet Apple’s unwillingness to accommodate—in this first iteration, at least—defining features of a thousand-year tradition is symptomatic of general trends in the streaming business. You sense declining interest in the particulars of genres, in the personalities of artists, in political messages, in cultural contexts. Differences are flattened out: music really does stream, in an evenly regulated flow. One zone of Apple Music offers playlists tailored to various activities and moods: “Waking Up,” “Working,” “Chilling Out,” “Cooking,” “Getting It On,” and “Breaking Up.” All that’s needed is one for “Dying.” As the Times critic Ben Ratliff recently said (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/arts/music/seeking-genuine-discovery-on-music-streaming-services.h
tml?_r=0) , on the subject of streaming playlists, “I always feel as if I’m shopping somewhere, and the music reflects What Our Customers Like to Listen To. The experience can feel benignly inhuman.”
You can easily tune out the bespoke Muzak and exploit the library for your own eccentric ends. Still, the pressure from the margin to the center is strong. Despite “Think Different” maxims redolent of the old Steve Jobs script—“It’s your music. Do what you like with it.”—you’re encouraged to gravitate toward the music that everyone else is listening to. This is what happens all across the corporatized Internet: to quote the old adage of Adorno and Horkheimer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers) , you have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” The musician, writer, and publisher Damon Krukowski, a longtime critic of the streaming business, calls it the return of the monoculture. “What Apple is doing to music retail,” Krukowski said on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dada_drummer/status/615853749555331072) , “is exactly what I saw chains do to books in the nineties: kill indie competition, then eliminate the product.”
As for the economic question, performing artists and composers are unlikely to receive more compensation from Apple Music than they do from Spotify, Pandora, and other extant streaming services, whose practices have been widely criticized (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/if-you-care-about-music-should-you-ditch-spotify) . Krukowski observes (http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/post/122815453683/evolution-of-the-itunes-icon-over-its-first-ten) that forty-three per cent of his digital income—from recordings by Galaxie 500 and by Damon and Naomi—comes from iTunes. As Apple sidelines downloads, that revenue will fall sharply. Although Congress has made noises (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/07/02/apple-enters-the-music-streaming-business-amidst-royalty-dispute/) about strengthening creative rights, a phalanx of lobbyists (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying-firms-117001.html) is likely to defang any new
legislation. To be sure, there is money to be made from streaming: major labels with large back catalogues reap a considerable profit, and superstars like Swift see sizable checks when tracks receive many millions of plays. It’s the all too familiar winner-takes-all economy in action.
So, contrary to plan, Apple has not necessarily succeeded in making music better. Then again, it might not be doing long-term damage; indeed, it might not be having much effect at all. The musicologist Deirdre Loughridge recently published a blog post (https://spookyandthemetronome.wordpress.com/tag/listening-habits/) about the history of music-subscription services, which date back to sheet-music lending libraries in the eighteenth century. By the eighteen-thirties, pundits were fretting that such libraries were undercutting the economics of the music business and altering the nature of listening. “One enjoys superficially, one always wants something new,” a critic groused in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. A few decades later, a piano teacher wrote, “Music lending libraries could very well be called ‘music snacking libraries.’” Almost identical complaints are being levelled at Spotify, YouTube, and the rest. These anxieties are now forgotten because, as Loughridge
notes, the very existence of music-lending libraries has been forgotten. If they hurt music sales, the damage was soon repaired. Loughridge suggests that this obscure history should promote a “healthier skepticism toward claims that any model represents ‘the’ answer for the music industry.”
We never cease to be mesmerized by the vessel in which music is contained, whether it’s the piano (http://www.therestisnoise.com/2013/06/fear-of-the-gadget.html) , the phonograph, the MP3, or the Cloud. We think that machines are saving music or destroying it. Their impact is undoubtedly profound, but we seldom see the complexity of the transformation amid the hysteria of surface change. At the same time, the anxiety around music and technology is deep-seated, however excessive it may seem a century or two down the road. It is rooted in the elemental fear of life slipping away in half-experienced moments. For that mortal feeling, music itself, in its sensually clobbering immediacy, provides a cure. We become dependent on technology simply because we don’t want our transient ecstasies to stop.
Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
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=c3e5168050) | 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=c3e5168050&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
The Anxious Ease of Apple Music – The New Yorker
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
**
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-anxious-ease-of-apple-music
** The Anxious Ease of Apple Music
————————————————————
By Alex Ross
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Ross-Apple-Music1-1200.jpgWhen the iTunes store first arose, in 2003, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. The new Apple cares less. Credit Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty “These services treat you like a criminal,” Steve Jobs said of streaming-music companies, in an Apple keynote address in 2003 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6DX5NaPvk4&feature=youtu.be&t=22m1s) . “And they are subscription-based, and we think subscriptions are the wrong path. One of the reasons we think this is because people bought their music for as long as we can remember. . . . When you own your music, it never goes away.” Jobs was introducing the iTunes Store, which updated the old model of the recorded-music library. Purchasing a digital track or album, Jobs said, was now “the hottest way to acquire music.” For some years, it was. Then streaming services began to claim an ever greater share
of the market, even as they struggled to turn a profit. Last week, surrendering to the apparently inevitable, Apple introduced Apple Music, its own subscription music bundle. For $9.99 a month, you win unlimited access to a library of more than thirty million tracks, from Michel van der Aa to ZZ Top.
I have doubts about the aesthetics and ethics of streaming, as I wrote in a column last summer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/08/classical-cloud) . But as a longtime Apple user—almost everything I have written since 1987 has been composed on a Mac—I had little choice but to give Apple Music a spin. And the verbal fanfare on Apple’s Web site makes enticing promises: “We are profoundly passionate about music. It’s a force that’s driven and inspired us from day one. So we’ve set out to make it better.” How can one resist? The world’s wealthiest, coolest corporation is not only bringing you music but making it better. Music, it seems, is a trusty app that has some usability issues, and is due for an upgrade.
Although the huge storehouse of tracks forms the core of Apple Music, the service also offers features designed to widen your musical horizons, to adapt your musical taste to daily needs, and to connect you with artists and other fans. There’s a page called “New” that is dominated by the big stars of today and yesterday: Pharrell Williams, Eminem, the Rolling Stones, and Taylor Swift. (After challenging Apple’s stance on royalties (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/business/media/taylor-swift-criticizes-apples-terms-for-streaming-music-service.html) , Swift allowed the company to stream her album “1989.”) There’s an array of Internet radio stations. A page called “For You” supplies playlists tailored to your preferences, which can be calibrated by expanding or contracting genre balloons. I double-clicked “Classical” and “Experimental,” and was served a fair amount of obvious fare, along with a few pleasingly offbeat choices (James Tenney, Merzbow). And there’s a social-media
page called “Connect.” For me, it proposed Gustavo Dudamel.
Classical music has long been a kind of black hole in the streaming universe. Spotify, Pandora, and the others organize their libraries around artists, albums, and tracks; the existence of beings called Composers, who write music but may not be involved in its performance, confuses matters. Last summer, I described a few of the struggles of listening to classical music on Spotify: sorting through randomized movements of symphonies; scrutinizing tiny reproductions of an album cover for clues about who is playing; searching elsewhere on the Internet for information. Anastasia Tsioulcas, in an article for NPR Music (http://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/04/411963624/why-cant-streaming-services-get-classical-music-right) , reports much more extensively on the headaches of classical streaming, not least the effects of poor sound quality.
When the iTunes store first arose, it did well by classical music and other genres outside the pop hegemony. Classical releases sometimes appeared on the main page, and a “Composer” field made it easy to navigate multi-composer albums. The new Apple cares less: composers have dropped from sight. In one listing, the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth is identified as a “Song by Daniel Barenboim.” Apple Music improves on Spotify in terms of legibility: you can easily see who’s singing on opera recordings, and because the reproductions of album covers are bigger you can often suss out composers’ names, even if they’re not listed in the app. But in the case of an absorbing new DG album titled “Time Present and Time Past,” with the harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani and the Concerto Köln, an arty cover (http://www.deutschegrammophon.com/us/cat/4794481) gives no clue as to who wrote what, and you have to go elsewhere to pin down all the composers (J. S. and C. P. E. Bach, Geminiani, Górecki,
Reich, Alessandro Scarlatti). The irony is that the hidden metadata knows the score, even though it’s not telling: “Time Present and Time Past” shows up in searches for each composer.
No heads will roll in Cupertino on account of these grumblings. The majority of the population that ignores classical music will shrug and go back to the new Jamie xx record. (I’m enjoying his track “The Rest Is Noise.”) Yet Apple’s unwillingness to accommodate—in this first iteration, at least—defining features of a thousand-year tradition is symptomatic of general trends in the streaming business. You sense declining interest in the particulars of genres, in the personalities of artists, in political messages, in cultural contexts. Differences are flattened out: music really does stream, in an evenly regulated flow. One zone of Apple Music offers playlists tailored to various activities and moods: “Waking Up,” “Working,” “Chilling Out,” “Cooking,” “Getting It On,” and “Breaking Up.” All that’s needed is one for “Dying.” As the Times critic Ben Ratliff recently said (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/arts/music/seeking-genuine-discovery-on-music-streaming-services.h
tml?_r=0) , on the subject of streaming playlists, “I always feel as if I’m shopping somewhere, and the music reflects What Our Customers Like to Listen To. The experience can feel benignly inhuman.”
You can easily tune out the bespoke Muzak and exploit the library for your own eccentric ends. Still, the pressure from the margin to the center is strong. Despite “Think Different” maxims redolent of the old Steve Jobs script—“It’s your music. Do what you like with it.”—you’re encouraged to gravitate toward the music that everyone else is listening to. This is what happens all across the corporatized Internet: to quote the old adage of Adorno and Horkheimer (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/naysayers) , you have the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” The musician, writer, and publisher Damon Krukowski, a longtime critic of the streaming business, calls it the return of the monoculture. “What Apple is doing to music retail,” Krukowski said on Twitter (https://twitter.com/dada_drummer/status/615853749555331072) , “is exactly what I saw chains do to books in the nineties: kill indie competition, then eliminate the product.”
As for the economic question, performing artists and composers are unlikely to receive more compensation from Apple Music than they do from Spotify, Pandora, and other extant streaming services, whose practices have been widely criticized (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/sasha-frere-jones/if-you-care-about-music-should-you-ditch-spotify) . Krukowski observes (http://internationalsadhits.tumblr.com/post/122815453683/evolution-of-the-itunes-icon-over-its-first-ten) that forty-three per cent of his digital income—from recordings by Galaxie 500 and by Damon and Naomi—comes from iTunes. As Apple sidelines downloads, that revenue will fall sharply. Although Congress has made noises (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2015/07/02/apple-enters-the-music-streaming-business-amidst-royalty-dispute/) about strengthening creative rights, a phalanx of lobbyists (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/spotify-washington-lobbying-firms-117001.html) is likely to defang any new
legislation. To be sure, there is money to be made from streaming: major labels with large back catalogues reap a considerable profit, and superstars like Swift see sizable checks when tracks receive many millions of plays. It’s the all too familiar winner-takes-all economy in action.
So, contrary to plan, Apple has not necessarily succeeded in making music better. Then again, it might not be doing long-term damage; indeed, it might not be having much effect at all. The musicologist Deirdre Loughridge recently published a blog post (https://spookyandthemetronome.wordpress.com/tag/listening-habits/) about the history of music-subscription services, which date back to sheet-music lending libraries in the eighteenth century. By the eighteen-thirties, pundits were fretting that such libraries were undercutting the economics of the music business and altering the nature of listening. “One enjoys superficially, one always wants something new,” a critic groused in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. A few decades later, a piano teacher wrote, “Music lending libraries could very well be called ‘music snacking libraries.’” Almost identical complaints are being levelled at Spotify, YouTube, and the rest. These anxieties are now forgotten because, as Loughridge
notes, the very existence of music-lending libraries has been forgotten. If they hurt music sales, the damage was soon repaired. Loughridge suggests that this obscure history should promote a “healthier skepticism toward claims that any model represents ‘the’ answer for the music industry.”
We never cease to be mesmerized by the vessel in which music is contained, whether it’s the piano (http://www.therestisnoise.com/2013/06/fear-of-the-gadget.html) , the phonograph, the MP3, or the Cloud. We think that machines are saving music or destroying it. Their impact is undoubtedly profound, but we seldom see the complexity of the transformation amid the hysteria of surface change. At the same time, the anxiety around music and technology is deep-seated, however excessive it may seem a century or two down the road. It is rooted in the elemental fear of life slipping away in half-experienced moments. For that mortal feeling, music itself, in its sensually clobbering immediacy, provides a cure. We become dependent on technology simply because we don’t want our transient ecstasies to stop.
Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
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=c3e5168050) | 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=c3e5168050&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
‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review By Martin Johnson WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** ‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review (http://www.wsj.com/articles/duke-ellington-his-orchestra-the-conny-plank-session-review-1436303867)
————————————————————
Duke Ellington in 1971. ENLARGE
Duke Ellington in 1971. Photo: Getty Images
By
Martin Johnson
July 7, 2015 5:19 p.m. ET
During the final 12 years of his life, Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was notably eclectic in his musical endeavors, but a new recording “Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session” (Grönland, July 10 release) shows the maestro working an even broader range of musical territory.
The recording feature six tracks, four previously unreleased, from a 1970 session in Cologne featuring the Ellington Orchestra with Plank at the helm. Plank (1940-1987) was an up-and-coming producer at that time, but his work with a wide variety of performers including Kraftwerk, Brian Eno,Devo, Killing Joke, Neu!, A Flock of Seagulls and Eurythmics made him a pioneer of both synthesizer-based rock as well as ambient music. Yet, he too was eclectic in his musical pursuits. In 1969, he produced “The Living Music” (Atavistic), by the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and “Nipples” (Calig) by saxophonist Peter Brötzmann; they are seminal recordings in the European free jazz canon.
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. ENLARGE
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. Photo: David Corio/Getty Images
The tapes were discovered by representatives of the label who were perusing the Plank estate. Stories vary about how the session came about and even the date of the recording. Ellingtonia, the online discography of Duke’s work, cites July 9, 1970, but the tapes say April 27 of that year. One version of the story is that the Ellington band was looking for a place to rehearse and Plank volunteered his studio in exchange for recording the proceedings. The other version is that Ellington hired Plank to make the recordings. Either way, great music was made by these men with contrasting specialties.
The recording features only two tracks but unlike vintage jazz reissues where alternate takes offer only subtle tweaks on the original, these pieces show Ellington making substantial revisions to each performance. The 29 minute program begins with three takes of “Alerado,” a piece by Wild Bill Davis. The first rendition is a smooth up-tempo number highlighted by vibrant solos by a flutist and trumpeter (both uncredited) and the composer. The second take is slower, almost a walking tempo, and the solos are pithier. The third version of the tune is slower still, with harder rhythmic accents and a different mood; the piece is more somber and it features an uncredited saxophone solo and a longer more complex solo by the composer.
“Afrique,” the other piece, is indicative of Ellington’s restless creativity. The piece begins with an array of horns accenting a percolating rhythm by an uncredited drummer. With impressive solo work by Davis and peppery work by the horns, the piece sounds like the Ellington classic “Daybreak Express” given a modernist approach. The second take features a duet between a reserved, probing tenor saxophonist and Ellington, who takes an arch, minimalist approach to the song. The third rendition features vocalese, big organ swells from Davis, and an abstract tenor saxophone solo. According to Ellingtonia, saxophonists Paul Gonsalves and Harold Ashby are on the date, but the solos aren’t credited. There seems to be little connection between these recordings and the synth pop that Plank produced in the ’80s, but in the live, you-are-in-the-studio sound of these tracks with Duke it is easy to see the influence that these sessions had on Plank’s work with Mr. Eno.
The brevity of this album notwithstanding, it makes a solid argument for reevaluating the late phase of Ellington’s work. On his live recordings of this period, he is the stereotypical aging master cranking out the hits, but his studio work tells a substantially different story. These six tracks are consistent with the work of a man who invited two modern jazz masters, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach, to record in a trio that released “Money Jungle” (United Artists) in 1962. He also probed the connections between jazz and American vernacular music in his “New Orleans Suite” (Atlantic, 1970), and his three Sacred Concerts from 1965, 1968 and 1973. In addition, recordings like “The Far East Suite” (Bluebird, 1967) and “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” (Fantasy, 1971) reveal Ellington’s pioneering efforts to blend jazz and international sounds. Finally, the latter recording also displays an Ellingtonian take on rock.
During the final years of his life, jazz was quickly changing, but a close look at Ellington’s studio work shows that he was staying ahead of the times.
Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.
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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‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review By Martin Johnson WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** ‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review (http://www.wsj.com/articles/duke-ellington-his-orchestra-the-conny-plank-session-review-1436303867)
————————————————————
Duke Ellington in 1971. ENLARGE
Duke Ellington in 1971. Photo: Getty Images
By
Martin Johnson
July 7, 2015 5:19 p.m. ET
During the final 12 years of his life, Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was notably eclectic in his musical endeavors, but a new recording “Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session” (Grönland, July 10 release) shows the maestro working an even broader range of musical territory.
The recording feature six tracks, four previously unreleased, from a 1970 session in Cologne featuring the Ellington Orchestra with Plank at the helm. Plank (1940-1987) was an up-and-coming producer at that time, but his work with a wide variety of performers including Kraftwerk, Brian Eno,Devo, Killing Joke, Neu!, A Flock of Seagulls and Eurythmics made him a pioneer of both synthesizer-based rock as well as ambient music. Yet, he too was eclectic in his musical pursuits. In 1969, he produced “The Living Music” (Atavistic), by the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and “Nipples” (Calig) by saxophonist Peter Brötzmann; they are seminal recordings in the European free jazz canon.
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. ENLARGE
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. Photo: David Corio/Getty Images
The tapes were discovered by representatives of the label who were perusing the Plank estate. Stories vary about how the session came about and even the date of the recording. Ellingtonia, the online discography of Duke’s work, cites July 9, 1970, but the tapes say April 27 of that year. One version of the story is that the Ellington band was looking for a place to rehearse and Plank volunteered his studio in exchange for recording the proceedings. The other version is that Ellington hired Plank to make the recordings. Either way, great music was made by these men with contrasting specialties.
The recording features only two tracks but unlike vintage jazz reissues where alternate takes offer only subtle tweaks on the original, these pieces show Ellington making substantial revisions to each performance. The 29 minute program begins with three takes of “Alerado,” a piece by Wild Bill Davis. The first rendition is a smooth up-tempo number highlighted by vibrant solos by a flutist and trumpeter (both uncredited) and the composer. The second take is slower, almost a walking tempo, and the solos are pithier. The third version of the tune is slower still, with harder rhythmic accents and a different mood; the piece is more somber and it features an uncredited saxophone solo and a longer more complex solo by the composer.
“Afrique,” the other piece, is indicative of Ellington’s restless creativity. The piece begins with an array of horns accenting a percolating rhythm by an uncredited drummer. With impressive solo work by Davis and peppery work by the horns, the piece sounds like the Ellington classic “Daybreak Express” given a modernist approach. The second take features a duet between a reserved, probing tenor saxophonist and Ellington, who takes an arch, minimalist approach to the song. The third rendition features vocalese, big organ swells from Davis, and an abstract tenor saxophone solo. According to Ellingtonia, saxophonists Paul Gonsalves and Harold Ashby are on the date, but the solos aren’t credited. There seems to be little connection between these recordings and the synth pop that Plank produced in the ’80s, but in the live, you-are-in-the-studio sound of these tracks with Duke it is easy to see the influence that these sessions had on Plank’s work with Mr. Eno.
The brevity of this album notwithstanding, it makes a solid argument for reevaluating the late phase of Ellington’s work. On his live recordings of this period, he is the stereotypical aging master cranking out the hits, but his studio work tells a substantially different story. These six tracks are consistent with the work of a man who invited two modern jazz masters, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach, to record in a trio that released “Money Jungle” (United Artists) in 1962. He also probed the connections between jazz and American vernacular music in his “New Orleans Suite” (Atlantic, 1970), and his three Sacred Concerts from 1965, 1968 and 1973. In addition, recordings like “The Far East Suite” (Bluebird, 1967) and “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” (Fantasy, 1971) reveal Ellington’s pioneering efforts to blend jazz and international sounds. Finally, the latter recording also displays an Ellingtonian take on rock.
During the final years of his life, jazz was quickly changing, but a close look at Ellington’s studio work shows that he was staying ahead of the times.
Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.
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=7e113dfea5) | 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=7e113dfea5&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
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USA
‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review By Martin Johnson WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** ‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review (http://www.wsj.com/articles/duke-ellington-his-orchestra-the-conny-plank-session-review-1436303867)
————————————————————
Duke Ellington in 1971. ENLARGE
Duke Ellington in 1971. Photo: Getty Images
By
Martin Johnson
July 7, 2015 5:19 p.m. ET
During the final 12 years of his life, Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was notably eclectic in his musical endeavors, but a new recording “Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session” (Grönland, July 10 release) shows the maestro working an even broader range of musical territory.
The recording feature six tracks, four previously unreleased, from a 1970 session in Cologne featuring the Ellington Orchestra with Plank at the helm. Plank (1940-1987) was an up-and-coming producer at that time, but his work with a wide variety of performers including Kraftwerk, Brian Eno,Devo, Killing Joke, Neu!, A Flock of Seagulls and Eurythmics made him a pioneer of both synthesizer-based rock as well as ambient music. Yet, he too was eclectic in his musical pursuits. In 1969, he produced “The Living Music” (Atavistic), by the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and “Nipples” (Calig) by saxophonist Peter Brötzmann; they are seminal recordings in the European free jazz canon.
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. ENLARGE
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. Photo: David Corio/Getty Images
The tapes were discovered by representatives of the label who were perusing the Plank estate. Stories vary about how the session came about and even the date of the recording. Ellingtonia, the online discography of Duke’s work, cites July 9, 1970, but the tapes say April 27 of that year. One version of the story is that the Ellington band was looking for a place to rehearse and Plank volunteered his studio in exchange for recording the proceedings. The other version is that Ellington hired Plank to make the recordings. Either way, great music was made by these men with contrasting specialties.
The recording features only two tracks but unlike vintage jazz reissues where alternate takes offer only subtle tweaks on the original, these pieces show Ellington making substantial revisions to each performance. The 29 minute program begins with three takes of “Alerado,” a piece by Wild Bill Davis. The first rendition is a smooth up-tempo number highlighted by vibrant solos by a flutist and trumpeter (both uncredited) and the composer. The second take is slower, almost a walking tempo, and the solos are pithier. The third version of the tune is slower still, with harder rhythmic accents and a different mood; the piece is more somber and it features an uncredited saxophone solo and a longer more complex solo by the composer.
“Afrique,” the other piece, is indicative of Ellington’s restless creativity. The piece begins with an array of horns accenting a percolating rhythm by an uncredited drummer. With impressive solo work by Davis and peppery work by the horns, the piece sounds like the Ellington classic “Daybreak Express” given a modernist approach. The second take features a duet between a reserved, probing tenor saxophonist and Ellington, who takes an arch, minimalist approach to the song. The third rendition features vocalese, big organ swells from Davis, and an abstract tenor saxophone solo. According to Ellingtonia, saxophonists Paul Gonsalves and Harold Ashby are on the date, but the solos aren’t credited. There seems to be little connection between these recordings and the synth pop that Plank produced in the ’80s, but in the live, you-are-in-the-studio sound of these tracks with Duke it is easy to see the influence that these sessions had on Plank’s work with Mr. Eno.
The brevity of this album notwithstanding, it makes a solid argument for reevaluating the late phase of Ellington’s work. On his live recordings of this period, he is the stereotypical aging master cranking out the hits, but his studio work tells a substantially different story. These six tracks are consistent with the work of a man who invited two modern jazz masters, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach, to record in a trio that released “Money Jungle” (United Artists) in 1962. He also probed the connections between jazz and American vernacular music in his “New Orleans Suite” (Atlantic, 1970), and his three Sacred Concerts from 1965, 1968 and 1973. In addition, recordings like “The Far East Suite” (Bluebird, 1967) and “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” (Fantasy, 1971) reveal Ellington’s pioneering efforts to blend jazz and international sounds. Finally, the latter recording also displays an Ellingtonian take on rock.
During the final years of his life, jazz was quickly changing, but a close look at Ellington’s studio work shows that he was staying ahead of the times.
Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.
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=7e113dfea5) | 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=7e113dfea5&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review By Martin Johnson WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** ‘Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session’ Review (http://www.wsj.com/articles/duke-ellington-his-orchestra-the-conny-plank-session-review-1436303867)
————————————————————
Duke Ellington in 1971. ENLARGE
Duke Ellington in 1971. Photo: Getty Images
By
Martin Johnson
July 7, 2015 5:19 p.m. ET
During the final 12 years of his life, Duke Ellington (1899-1974) was notably eclectic in his musical endeavors, but a new recording “Duke Ellington & His Orchestra: The Conny Plank Session” (Grönland, July 10 release) shows the maestro working an even broader range of musical territory.
The recording feature six tracks, four previously unreleased, from a 1970 session in Cologne featuring the Ellington Orchestra with Plank at the helm. Plank (1940-1987) was an up-and-coming producer at that time, but his work with a wide variety of performers including Kraftwerk, Brian Eno,Devo, Killing Joke, Neu!, A Flock of Seagulls and Eurythmics made him a pioneer of both synthesizer-based rock as well as ambient music. Yet, he too was eclectic in his musical pursuits. In 1969, he produced “The Living Music” (Atavistic), by the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and “Nipples” (Calig) by saxophonist Peter Brötzmann; they are seminal recordings in the European free jazz canon.
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. ENLARGE
Connie Plank in his studio in 1982. Photo: David Corio/Getty Images
The tapes were discovered by representatives of the label who were perusing the Plank estate. Stories vary about how the session came about and even the date of the recording. Ellingtonia, the online discography of Duke’s work, cites July 9, 1970, but the tapes say April 27 of that year. One version of the story is that the Ellington band was looking for a place to rehearse and Plank volunteered his studio in exchange for recording the proceedings. The other version is that Ellington hired Plank to make the recordings. Either way, great music was made by these men with contrasting specialties.
The recording features only two tracks but unlike vintage jazz reissues where alternate takes offer only subtle tweaks on the original, these pieces show Ellington making substantial revisions to each performance. The 29 minute program begins with three takes of “Alerado,” a piece by Wild Bill Davis. The first rendition is a smooth up-tempo number highlighted by vibrant solos by a flutist and trumpeter (both uncredited) and the composer. The second take is slower, almost a walking tempo, and the solos are pithier. The third version of the tune is slower still, with harder rhythmic accents and a different mood; the piece is more somber and it features an uncredited saxophone solo and a longer more complex solo by the composer.
“Afrique,” the other piece, is indicative of Ellington’s restless creativity. The piece begins with an array of horns accenting a percolating rhythm by an uncredited drummer. With impressive solo work by Davis and peppery work by the horns, the piece sounds like the Ellington classic “Daybreak Express” given a modernist approach. The second take features a duet between a reserved, probing tenor saxophonist and Ellington, who takes an arch, minimalist approach to the song. The third rendition features vocalese, big organ swells from Davis, and an abstract tenor saxophone solo. According to Ellingtonia, saxophonists Paul Gonsalves and Harold Ashby are on the date, but the solos aren’t credited. There seems to be little connection between these recordings and the synth pop that Plank produced in the ’80s, but in the live, you-are-in-the-studio sound of these tracks with Duke it is easy to see the influence that these sessions had on Plank’s work with Mr. Eno.
The brevity of this album notwithstanding, it makes a solid argument for reevaluating the late phase of Ellington’s work. On his live recordings of this period, he is the stereotypical aging master cranking out the hits, but his studio work tells a substantially different story. These six tracks are consistent with the work of a man who invited two modern jazz masters, bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach, to record in a trio that released “Money Jungle” (United Artists) in 1962. He also probed the connections between jazz and American vernacular music in his “New Orleans Suite” (Atlantic, 1970), and his three Sacred Concerts from 1965, 1968 and 1973. In addition, recordings like “The Far East Suite” (Bluebird, 1967) and “The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” (Fantasy, 1971) reveal Ellington’s pioneering efforts to blend jazz and international sounds. Finally, the latter recording also displays an Ellingtonian take on rock.
During the final years of his life, jazz was quickly changing, but a close look at Ellington’s studio work shows that he was staying ahead of the times.
Mr. Johnson writes about jazz for the Journal.
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=7e113dfea5) | 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=7e113dfea5&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
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USA
Bassist Calls for Equal Credits on Apple Music (and Beyond)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** Bassist Calls for Equal Credits on Apple Music (and Beyond)
————————————————————
By Andrew Flanagan (http://www.billboard.com/author/andrew-flanagan-1494180) | July 06, 2015 10:41 AM EDT
“We want to know who’s playing the music we’re hearing, who produced it, who arranged it, where it was recorded and by whom,” reads the MoveOn petition page (http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/show-the-album-credits.fb50?source=s.icn.fb&r_by=2220927) for ‘Show the Album Credits on Apple Music!’
Bassist Jon Burr launched the campaign yesterday (July 5), following the explosive launch week of Apple Music, which garnered many positive reviews, particularly around the service’s free Beats 1 international radio station.
“We chose to target Apple at this time because the rollout of Apple Music is missing this category of information,” the petition’s creator, Jon Burr (https://twitter.com/jonburr) , tells Billboard.
“Apple has shown a willingness to listen to feedback in the past, and is sensitive to their user base (which contains many of these same creatives). As the leader in technology and music marketing, if they set a trend, others may follow.”
Metadata is a problem that has plagued the digital music space for years (http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/digital-and-mobile/1560778/how-inconsistent-metadata-impedes-music-industry-growth) , suffering from a lack of standardization around music files and their internal cataloguing of contributors to the work they contain. The lack, or incompleteness, of metadata can adversely affect artist payouts as well — if the robot doesn’t know where to look, if doesn’t know which palm to place the penny.
“We understand that doing this will create a burden on these services — many just don’t have access to the information due to the way digital music is delivered to them,” says Burr. “If we can encourage a cultural shift going forward and develop enhanced supply chains, we’ll be making the kind of progress needed by musicians, composers, lyricists, engineers, photographers, designers, and other contributing creatives.”
Spotify and Pandora, Apple Music’s biggest competitors, do not list comprehensive credits either when songs are played. Recordings within YouTube that have been scanned into the company’s “sort-of-switched-on” (still in beta) Music Key program do list label, publisher, composer(s) and performers (as in this Percy Mayfield recording (https://youtu.be/XgY7NjVPEl4) ).
Spotify refused to comment for this report. A request for comment from Pandora wasn’t immediately returned.
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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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA