Jimmy Johnson, Studio Staple of Southern Soul and Pop, Dies at 76
By Bill Friskics-Warren
Sept. 6, 2019
Jimmy Johnson, center, with his fellow studio musicians David Hood, left, and Junior Lowe in 1968 at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Ala. Mr. Johnson began his career at FAME before he, Mr. Hood and two other musicians opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound.House of Fame LLC/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images
Jimmy Johnson, the session guitarist and studio engineer who contributed to hundreds of hit records while helping to define the sound of Southern pop and soul music in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday in Florence, Ala. He was 76.
His death, at Northwest Alabama Medical Center, was confirmed by his longtime friend and collaborator David Hood, who said Mr. Johnson had been struggling with kidney failure.
A highly intuitive musician, Mr. Johnson achieved early acclaim in the 1960s as the rhythm guitarist in the house band at the producer Rick Hall’s FAME Studiosin Muscle Shoals, Ala. His undulating swells and bluesy, staccato fills can be heard on recordings like “Respect,” Aretha Franklin’s first No. 1 pop hit, and Wilson Pickett’s “Funky Broadway” and “Land of 1,000 Dances,” both of which reached the Top 10.
In 1969 Mr. Johnson and three of his associates from FAME — the drummer Roger Hawkins, the keyboardist Barry Beckett and Mr. Hood, the ensemble’s bass player — parted ways with Mr. Hall in a dispute over money. That April they opened their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in a former coffin warehouse in nearby Sheffield, Ala.
Billing themselves as the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, the four men proceeded to play on scores of landmark recordings. They were heard on the gospel-steeped “I’ll Take You There,” a No. 1 pop and R&B hit for the Staple Singers in 1972. They also backed Paul Simon on his 1973 Top 10 single “Kodachrome” and Rod Stewart on the gossamer ballad “Tonight’s the Night (Gonna Be Alright),” released in 1976. It topped the pop chart for eight weeks.
Admired for their blend of expressiveness and restraint, Mr. Johnson and his bandmates honed a less-is-more approach to playing marked by a seemingly unerring knack for hitting the right note at just the right time and place. They became as renowned in their day as the Funk Brothers of Motown Records or the Wrecking Crew in Los Angeles.
They were given the nickname the Swampers by the producer Denny Cordell after he heard the pianist Leon Russell extol the virtues of their “funky, soulful, Southern swamp sound.” They were further lionized by the band Lynyrd Skynyrd in their 1974 hit, “Sweet Home Alabama.” (“Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers / And they’ve been known to pick a song or two. / Lord, they get me off so much / They pick me up when I’m feeling blue.”)
In a 2017 interview with Southern Rambler magazine, Mr. Johnson explained what distinguished the Swampers’ extemporized, or “head arranged,” studio work from that of their counterparts in recording centers like New York, where they had played on sessions for the Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler.
“The records in New York were set by arrangers who wrote all of the parts down,” Mr. Johnson said. “It was out of the mind of one guy. In Muscle Shoals we did head sessions where everyone contributes.”
Jimmy Johnson in 2015 outside his home in Sheffield, Ala. He continued to do studio work into the current century.Jay Reeves/Associated Press
Mr. Johnson was more than just an imaginative guitarist; he also ran a successful music publishing company and was an astute and empathetic recording engineer. He was at the mixing board for Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman,” a No. 1 pop and R&B hit in 1966, as well as for Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which, according to Wurlitzer, is the third most popular jukebox record of all time. He also engineered three tracks on the Rolling Stones’ acclaimed 1971 album, “Sticky Fingers,” including “Brown Sugar” and “Wild Horses.”
The Stones’ visit to Muscle Shoals was an example of the Southernization of pop music, in which Mr. Johnson played a crucial part. At the time, many musicians from outside the South wanted to record in the down-home style made famous there.
Jimmy Ray Johnson was born on Feb. 4, 1943, in Sheffield to Ray and Hazel (Roberson) Johnson. His father was an amateur musician who worked at the Reynolds Aluminum Plant in Muscle Shoals. His mother was a homemaker who often hosted out-of-town singers recording at Muscle Shoals Sound for dinner. He earned his first $10 as a guitarist at age 15 when he played a Saturday night sock hop at the National Guard Amory in Tuscumbia, Ala.
In 1962, while still in his teens, Mr. Johnson became the first paid employee at FAME Studios. He answered the telephone, booked studio time and did typing. By the mid-’60s he had begun engineering and playing sessions.
He continued to do studio work into the current century, inspiring new generations of musicians like Jason Isbell and Alabama Shakes.
Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife, Becky (Hardy) Johnson; a son, Jimmy, known as Jay; a daughter, Kimberly Tidwell; a stepdaughter, Alana Parker; and a grandson. His brother, Earl, died in 1977.
Mr. Johnson’s early years as a session musician in Northern Alabama testified not just to the power of musical collaboration but also to the kinship among black and white musicians at a time when the divide over civil rights in this country seemed all but unbridgeable.
“We didn’t know we were making history,” he said of this interracial affinity in an interview with Southern Rambler magazine. “Black or white, we had the same goal: to cut a hit record.”
After the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the all-white Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section’s work on soul music sessions for Atlantic and Stax, two of the era’s most influential record companies, was suspended. To Mr. Johnson’s relief, the suspension was temporary.
“We were an integral part of Atlantic and Stax and thought that might be it,” he recalled in that interview. “We were told we wouldn’t be cutting any more black records, and those were our favorite records.”
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 7, 2019, Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Jimmy Johnson, 76; Heard on Hundreds of Hits. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Sales of vinyl records have enjoyed constant growth in recent years. At the same time, CD sales are in a nosedive. Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) mid-year report suggested that CD sales were declining three times as fast as vinyl sales were growing. In February, the RIAA reported that vinyl sales accounted for more than a third of the revenue coming from physical releases.
This trend continues in RIAA’s 2019 mid-year report, which came out on Thursday. Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales. Vinyl revenue grew by 12.8% in the second half of 2018 and 12.9% in the first six months of 2019, while the revenue from CDs barely budged. If these trends hold, records will soon be generating more money than compact discs.
Despite vinyl’s growth, streaming still dominates the music industry — records accounted for just 4 percent of total revenues in the first half of 2019. In contrast, paid subscriptions to streaming services generated 62 percent of industry revenues.
“We welcome [the growth in vinyl],” Tom Corson, now the co-chairman and CEO of Warner Records, told Rolling Stone in 2015. “It’s a sexy, cool product. It represents an investment in music that’s an emotional one. [But] it is a small percentage of our business. It’s not going to make or break our year. We devote the right amount of resources to it, but it’s not something where we have a department for it.”
Still, the vinyl resurgence has been a boon for some artists, especially classic rock groups. The Beatles sold over 300,000 records in 2018, while Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and Queen all sold over 100,000.
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Christie’s will auction off a trumpet both designed and played by Miles Davisnext month. Commissioned by Davis in 1980, the Martin Company horn features a distinctive gilt pattern showing crescent moons and stars, with the word “Miles” inscribed inside the bell. Christie’s estimates the instrument’s value at between $70,000 and $100,000.
The trumpet is one of three commissioned by Davis around the time he reemerged from a five-year performing and recording hiatus. The horn up for auction features a deep-blue lacquer finish; a red one with the same celestial pattern remains in Davis’ family’s possession, while a black one is buried with Davis in the Bronx’s Woodlawn Cemetery. The model is a Martin Committee — named because it was designed by a team of five — which was favored by top jazz trumpeters from the Forties through the Sixties, and used by Davis throughout his career. The present owner of the blue “Moon and Stars” trumpet acquired it from jazz guitarist and sometime Davis collaborator George Benson.
“[A] trumpet like this — top quality in its field, beautifully made and, most important, with impeccable provenance — is definitely top in class,” Becky MacGuire of Christie’s tells Rolling Stone in a statement.
A video released in conjunction with the auction announcement shows contemporary jazz luminary Keyon Harrold — who recorded the trumpet passages heard in Don Cheadle’s 2016 Davis biopic Miles Ahead — playing the horn. In the New York–set clip, he discusses how “the fire of the music here” brought him to New York from his home of Ferguson, Missouri, near Davis’ birthplace of Alton, Illinois.
“Miles being one of the coolest of the cool, his energy on the scene really, really inspired greatness,” Harrold says, accompanied by footage of him improvising on the “Moon and Stars” horn in an empty club.
“This is a classic. This is a relic. As a trumpet player holding this horn, this is amazing,” Harrold says of the instrument, while the camera pans over its features. “Knowing the history of Miles as being very, very detail-oriented, I can imagine he designed this totally himself. He was a visual artist as well. The layout of this is so beautiful: the moon, the stars. Just looking at the design, it’s just flawless.”
The Miles Davis “Moon and Stars” trumpet will feature in “The Exceptional Sale” at Christie’s in New York on October 29th.
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Mary Lyerly Alexander, 92, of Philadelphia, best known to jazz fans as John Coltrane’s beloved “Cousin Mary,” died Saturday, Aug. 31.
Besides inspiring one of the iconic saxophonist’s most well-known compositions, Ms. Alexander worked for much of her life to help keep Coltrane’s legacy alive in Philadelphia. She founded the John W. Coltrane Cultural Society, introducing children across the city to jazz, and hosting a series of backyard concerts at the Strawberry Mansion house she and Coltrane shared during the 1950s.
She was also an inviting presence and enthusiastic supporter of the Philly jazz scene for decades. Carla Washington, Ms. Alexander’s longtime friend and the community engagement manager at the Clef Club of Jazz and Performing Arts, said, “Cousin Mary was the mother of jazz in Philadelphia.”
Ms. Alexander lived in the John Coltrane House, now a National Historic Landmark, until 2004. A stroke in December 2005 rendered her speechless, and she spent her final years living at the Watermark nursing home at Logan Square.
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Born on July 23, 1927, Ms. Alexander was 10 months younger than her famous cousin. The two grew up together, as young children in High Point, N.C., and later as teenagers in Philadelphia. Coltrane bought the house on North 33rd Street with the help of a G.I. loan in 1952 for himself as well as his mother, aunt, and cousin.
Coltrane left the house when he moved to New York City in 1958, shortly after joining Miles Davis’ band. Coltrane died in 1967 of liver cancer. His mother remained in the house until her death in 1977, after which Ms. Alexander acquired and moved back into the property.
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The tune “Cousin Mary” first appeared on Coltrane’s landmark Atlantic Records debut, Giant Steps, in 1960. In the album’s liner notes, “Trane” described his cousin as “a very earthy, folksy, swinging person. The figure is riff-like and although the changes are not conventional blues progressions, I tried to retain the flavor of the blues.”
Coltrane went on to record the piece several times over his career, and it’s entered the repertoire of numerous jazz musicians, from Stanley Jordan to Archie Shepp and Brad Mehldau. According to legendary saxophonist Jimmy Heath, “the composition John wrote was very applicable to [Ms. Alexander’s] personality. She was a very pleasant, music-loving person who John had high respect for.”
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“I knew how close we were,” Ms. Alexander told producer Joel Dorn in 1995, “but I never thought he’d write a tune for me.”
In the ensuing decades, Ms. Alexander did everything possible to repay the honor. She was originally a member of the TraneStop Resource Institute, founded in 1979 by the educator Arnold Boyd. Five years later, Alexander left to form the John W. Coltrane Cultural Society, with a group of local jazz artists and supporters including organist Shirley Scott, vocalist Dottie Smith, professor Linda Williams, and writer Marilyn Kai Jewett.
COURTESY OF THE CLEF CLUB
Mary Lyerly Alexander, best known to jazz fans as John Coltrane’s beloved ‘Cousin Mary.’
Carla Washington and her husband, Clef Club artistic director Lovett Hines, also worked closely with the Cultural Society. “When Mary told you a story about John Coltrane, you knew it was the truth,” Hines said. “She tried to keep his legacy alive by just living it. She was really spiritually and artistically connected to him, and it was an education and a wonderful experience being around her.”
Washington recalled Ms. Alexander as an astute critic with a playful sense of humor, whose gauge for good music was how close it drove her to the edge of her seat. “We would go to a concert and Mary would say, ‘Well, I wasn’t on the edge!’ or ‘I almost fell off the chair!’ She was so supportive of the music and cultural organizations here in Philadelphia. She made her rounds, and was a people person, and she just lit up a room when she walked in.”
The cultural society’s main focus was its educational outreach, which conducted classes and workshops in schools, libraries, recreation centers, and other youth-focused venues with local artists. “Wherever children were, she wanted to introduce them to jazz,” Washington recalled. “The musicians loved her and loved doing that. They understood her vision.”
The group’s annual series of backyard concerts, held throughout the 1990s, hosted such luminaries as Ravi Coltrane, Bootsie Barnes, and Odean Pope, who was a close friend of Coltrane’s during the saxophonist’s Philadelphia years.
“I’m so grateful that I lived in Cousin Mary’s time because she was so delightful,” Pope said. “She was a very special woman and was so supportive of not only John but all musicians that she came in contact with. She really couldn’t get enough of listening to the great music that was being developed during that time.”
Ms. Alexander’s husband, Billy, died in 1995. She leaves no survivors.
The Clef Club is planning to host a memorial tribute in September, with a date and performers to be determined.
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Citiview presents “WILLstock 2019:
WILL FRIEDWALD’S BIRTHDAY BONANZA”
Please RSVP at the Triad Theater Website (click here).
Monday Sep 16 @ 9PM
Triad Theater, 158 W 72nd ST
$10 cover (to pay for the space & the tech guy etc)
two-drink minimum
WILL FRIEDWALD’S BIRTHDAY BONANZA
It’s two shows in one!
1. Live performances by some of the brightest contemporary stars in the jazz & cabaret firmament!
2. A Clip Joint Special! Classic music and comedy videos that will blow your mind, on the big screen and super-duper a/v system of the Triad,
Curated by Will Friedwald, Wall Street Journal & Citiview columnist and author of ten books on music.
(PS: this is NOT a big birthday, but it will be a double-big birthday bonanza! In lieu of presents, please bring more people!)
Dress code: Formal
gentlemen: tuxedos, business suits
ladies: gowns, heels, and / or swimwear
appx timetable:
8:45PM – doors open
9:00PM – Clip Joint (film show) starts
10:30PM – Live performances start!
piano: Pete Malinverni ( Head of Jazz Studies, Purchase College, SUNY at SUNY Purchase College)
On stage:
Kat Edmonson
Marissa Mulder
Anais Reno & Juliette Kurtzman
Eric Comstock & Barbara Fasano
Karen Oberlin & David Hajdu
The Ladybugs
Eric Yves Garcia
Hannah Jane Peterson
Michael & Mardie
Saxy Susie Clausen & Ukulele Andrew Poretz
Plus guest stars and many more to be announced.
On Screen:
Frank Sinatra
Nat King Cole
Ella Fitzgerald
Judy Garland
Bobby Darin
Woody Herman
Count Basie
Joe Williams
Mel Torme
Buddy Greco
Louis Armstrong
Marilyn Maye
Perry Como
Dean Martin
Doris Day
Benny Goodman
Puddles Pity Party
plus “Scratch,” the Wonder Crab!
and ALL YOUR FAVORITES!
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Author: Will Friedwald
Will Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, VANITY FAIR and PLAYBOY magazine and reviews current shows forTHE CITIVIEW NEW YORK. He also is the author of nine books, including the award-winning A BIOGRAPHICAL GUIDE TO THE GREAT JAZZ AND POP SINGERS, SINATRA: THE SONG IS YOU, STARDUST MELODIES, TONY BENNETT: THE GOOD LIFE, LOONEY TUNES & MERRIE MELODIES, and JAZZ SINGING. He has written over 600 liner notes for compact discs, received ten Grammy nominations, and appears frequently on television and other documentaries. He is also a consultant and curator for Apple Music.
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‘Complete Woody Herman Decca, Mars, MGM Sessions (1943-54)’ Review: A Decade of Many Changes
A new collection reveals Herman’s genius as a bandleader, musician, coach and more, as well as the evolving sound of the group he headed.
By
Will Friedwald
Aug. 26, 2019 11:57 am ET
Woody Herman Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
It’s March 25, 1946, and you’ve come to Carnegie Hall to hear the most exciting jazz orchestra then playing, Woody Herman and His Orchestra—known to fans and followers as “The Thundering Herd.” Herman starts the concert agreeably enough with “Caldonia,” the Louis Jordan R&B classic that was also a hit for him, and then he launches into “Bijou,” the darndest thing you’ve ever heard. It begins with a polyrhythmic pattern like none ever known previously in jazz, as expressed by an unusual combination of vibes, bass and percussion; this is immediately followed by another off-kilter staccato rhythmic passage, this one played mostly by the brass.
Did composer and arranger Ralph Burns provide a hint when he gave “Bijou” the subtitle “Rhumba a la Jazz?” It’s more like a misleading clue: The piece is more Middle Eastern than Pan-American, as Jon Hendricks realized when he wrote a lyric to “Bijou” a decade or so later and set the scene in Istanbul. The first solo instrument is leader Herman’s distinctive alto saxophone, which functions as a sideshow barker, beckoning us into a tent where a scantily clad belly dancer begins to undulate, slowly shedding her seven veils. This central “dance” is executed by the stunning trombonist Bill Harris, who transforms this singularly exotic number into something more down to earth: It’s like coming across a blues singer in the middle of a little street in Singapore.
Herman’s 1946 Carnegie Hall concert is documented in an 80-minute recording that is the centerpiece of the new Mosaic Records seven-CD package “Complete Woody Herman Decca, Mars, MGM Sessions (1943-54).” But the boxed set begins in 1943, when Herman’s orchestra was still being billed as “The Band That Plays the Blues,” and this is what distinguished them from virtually any other white band of that period. (During the Carnegie concert, Herman even sings the songbook standard “I’ll Get By” as if it were a 12-bar blues.) The earlier tracks borrow heavily from Duke Ellington, even to the point of featuring several key Ellingtonians, such as Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster.
It was with the arrival in 1944 of pianist Ralph Burns—who quickly became Herman’s dominant arranging voice, and worked with the remarkable rhythm section of bassist Chubby Jackson and drummer Dave Tough—that the band found its own distinctive sound: grounded in the fundamentals but facing the future. Even its basic variations on the blues (“Panacea”) sound unique. The Herd genuflected in the direction of the nascent bebop revolution, but—more important—they embodied the euphoric spirit that accompanied the ending of World War II. The Herd thunders with the ecstatic energy of an American battalion marching—make that swinging—into Paris or Berlin. There’s an inherent optimism in the band’s music.
While the first three discs document the birth and the height of the original Herd (1943-46), the remaining four CDs bring us the Third Herd of 1951-54, as documented on two records labels. The MGM recordings include some overtly commercial material, scorned by jazz purists then and now; still, there are lovely collaborations with crooner Billy Eckstine and movie soundtrack composer David Rose. But the box’s most satisfying material from the early 1950s comes from the Mars label, which Herman owned and operated for several years in partnership with music publisher and friend Howard Richman.
Richman briefly steered Herman in a direction no one could have foreseen: He was the only major American swing band leader to record a whole series of big-band calypsos. The taste and imagination of Herman and Burns led to an inspired orchestral jazz treatment of “Jump in the Line” utilizing flutes and bongos that surely was an inspiration for Harry Belafonte almost a decade later. Nearly every session here contains some previously buried treasure: The same 1952 date that included “Jump in the Line” yielded Burns’s highly imaginative paraphrase of “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” in which the familiar riff melody is played, well, sort of sideways, and Burns’s original “Terrissita,” essentially a gorgeous sequel to “Bijou” that continually shifts meters and keys in a genuinely exotic fashion yet never stops swinging.
Burns’s brilliance is all over this box, no less than Herman’s genius as a bandleader, musician, coach, cheerleader, editor, blues shouter, musical dramaturge, and—as his increasingly younger sidemen called him—“Road Father,” helping his musicians to do the best work possible. In these two somewhat random chunks of Herd history, Herman gives us 141 examples of why his orchestra—which lasted more than half a century from beginning to end—was among the greatest in all of American music.
—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.
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Clora Bryant, a trumpeter who was widely considered one of the finest jazz musicians on the West Coast — but who ran into gender-based limitations on how famous she could become — died on Aug. 23 in Los Angeles. She was 92.
Her son Darrin Milton said she died at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after suffering a heart attack at home.
A self-described “trumpetiste,” Ms. Bryant came of age in the 1940s, aligning herself with the emerging bebop movement. But she never lost the brawny elocution and gregarious air of a classic big-band player, even as she became a fixture of Los Angeles’s modern jazz scene.
Often faced with sexist discrimination, without support from a major record label or an agent, Ms. Bryant did not come forth as a bandleader until middle age. By that point the jazz mainstream had moved on to fusion, a style she never embraced.
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And even when jazz history became a subject of major academic concern in the late 1970s and ’80s, she was rarely celebrated at the level of her male counterparts, who had enjoyed greater support throughout their careers.
But among themselves, those same musicians often recognized her virtuosity, and she played with many of them. Dizzy Gillespie, an inventor of bebop, found himself dazzled upon first hearing her in the mid-1950s, and took to calling her his protégé.
“If you close your eyes, you’ll say it’s a man playing,” Gillespie said in an interview for “Trumpetistically, Clora Bryant,” a documentary directed by Zeinabu Davis. (He apparently intended it as a compliment.) “She has the feeling of the trumpet. The feeling, not just the notes.”
Writing in The Los Angeles Times in 1992, when Ms. Bryant was in her mid-60s, Dick Wagner noted that she retained her beguiling powers. “When Bryant plays the blues, the sound is low, almost guttural, a smoldering fire,” he wrote. “When she plays a fast tune, the sound is piercing — the fire erupts.”
Clora Larea Bryant was born on May 30, 1927, in Denison, Tex., the youngest of three children of Charles and Eulila Bryant. Her father was a day laborer. Her mother was a homemaker who died when Clora was 3, leaving him to raise his children alone on a salary of $7 a week.
Ms. Bryant credited her success as a trumpeter to her father’s tireless support. “Nobody ever told me, ‘You can’t play the trumpet, you’re a girl,’” she said in a 2007 interview with JazzTimes magazine. “My father told me, ‘It’s going to be a challenge, but if you’re going to do it, I’m behind you all the way.’ And he was.”
She started out on the piano but took up the trumpet after her high school established an orchestra and marching band. Showing preternatural talent, she often woke up at dawn to take private lessons before the school day began.
In 1943 she declined scholarships to the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio and Bennett College in North Carolina to attend Prairie View A&M University — a historically black school outside Houston — because it had an all-female 16-piece jazz band. “When I found out they had an all-girl band there, that’s where I was going,” she said in a wide-ranging six-hour interview with Steven Isoardi for the University of California, Los Angeles’s oral history program.
In 1946 Ms. Bryant joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the country’s leading all-female swing ensemble, where she was a featured soloist.Ernest Mac Crafton Miller
But in 1945, after two years at Prairie View, Ms. Bryant moved with her family to Los Angeles and transferred to U.C.L.A. (Her father had been run out of Texas by a group of white people who accused him of stealing paint.) She immediately found her way to Central Avenue, the bustling nucleus of black life in the city, where jazz clubs abounded.
After hearing the trumpeter Howard McGhee at the Downbeat, she fell in love with bebop. She was underage, so she stood just outside the door, transfixed. But she soon found her way inside.
“I would not go without my horn,” she told Dr. Isoardi, remembering attending nightclubs like the Downbeat and the Club Alabam. “If I knew there was going to be somebody there, I’d have my horn with me, because I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to try to learn something.”
In 1946 Ms. Bryant joined the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the country’s leading all-female swing ensemble, where she was a featured soloist. (Jazz bands led by women had become popular during World War II, and many of these ensembles continued to thrive for years afterward.)
Soon after, she joined the Queens of Rhythm, another large group. When its drummer left, she learned drums to fill the role. A crowd-pleaser, she sometimes played trumpet with one hand while drumming with the other.
Ms. Bryant married the bassist Joe Stone in the late 1940s, and the couple had two children. In one publicity photo with the Queens of Rhythm, she subtly conceals an eight-month pregnancy. She and Mr. Stone eventually divorced, and she raised their children as a single parent, continuing to perform all the while.
Ms. Bryant is survived by her four children — April and Charles Stone, from her marriage to Mr. Stone, and Kevin and Darrin Milton, from her relationship with the drummer Leslie Milton — as well as nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Her brothers, Frederick and Melvin, died before her.
Throughout much of the 1950s she regularly led jam sessions around Los Angeles. She also played in the house band at the Alabam, where she backed up visiting stars like Billie Holiday and Josephine Baker. She moved to New York for a brief time but soon returned to Los Angeles, where she would stay for the rest of her life, remaining a well-known performer and a mentor to younger musicians.
In 1956, the trombonist Melba Liston arranged for Ms. Bryant to meet Gillespie when he toured Los Angeles. He took her under his wing and gave her a trumpet mouthpiece that she would use for decades. Ms. Bryant later returned the favor, leading the charge to get Gillespie his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She recorded her sole album as a leader, “Gal With a Horn,” for Mode Records in 1957. To satisfy audiences, Ms. Bryant had taken up singing onstage, and the label’s executives demanded — against her wishes — that she sing on the album’s eight tunes. But it is her trumpet solos that stand out: She often leaps out of the gate with a stoutly articulated melody before spiraling into coiled runs, her bold delivery reflecting the influence of Louis Armstrong as much as first-wave bebop pioneers like Gillespie and Fats Navarro.
By the mid-1950s, Ms. Bryant was performing around the country with various groups and accompanying the vocalist Billy Williams in his popular Las Vegas revue. They appeared together on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and Ms. Bryant contributed a track to Williams’s album “The Billy Williams Revue.”
In the 1970s and ’80s Ms. Bryant stepped forward more as a leader, fronting a combo she called Swi-Bop. She toured internationally and often performed with her brother Melvin, a singer. In the late 1980s and ’90s, her son Kevin was Swi-Bop’s regular drummer.
In 1988, with tensions easing between the United States and Russia, Ms. Bryant wrote a letter to Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, saying she hoped to become “the first lady horn player to be invited to your country to perform.” His cultural ministry invited her to the Soviet Union, where she toured the next year.
Ms. Bryant retired from playing trumpet in the 1990s after suffering a heart attack and undergoing quadruple bypass surgery. She committed herself to preserving and passing on jazz’s legacy, giving lectures at colleges and universities, working with children in grade schools around Los Angeles and coediting a book on Los Angeles jazz history.
In 2002 the Kennedy Center presented Ms. Bryant with a lifetime achievement award at its Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival. She sang some of her own compositions at the event, flanked by younger musicians.
At the conclusion of Ms. Davis’s documentary, Ms. Bryant acknowledges the frustration of having been passed over while watching her male counterparts rise to stardom, but she expresses a dauntless pride nonetheless.
“I’m sitting here broke as the Ten Commandments, but I’m still rich,” she says. “With love and friendship and music. And I’m rich in life.”
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His vivid imagery, hypersexualized and full of futuristic themes, helped create the mythology of George Clinton’s groundbreaking group.
Pedro Bell in 2009. His psychedelic album covers for the pioneering band Funkadelic featured topless women, space imagery and mutants and, as one curator put it, “placed African-American reality in the context of a science fiction future.”Jean Lachat/Chicago Sun-Times
Pedro Bell, whose mind-bending album covers for the band Funkadelic gave visual definition to its signature sound in the 1970s and ’80s, died on Tuesday in Evergreen Park, Ill., near Chicago. He was 69.
George Clinton, the brains behind Funkadelic, announced his death on his Facebook page. Mr. Bell had been in poor health for many years.
Mr. Bell created his first cover for Funkadelic, the pioneering band that merged funk and psychedelic rock, in 1973. The album was “Cosmic Slop,” and it featured a topless woman, space imagery and mutants. Though Funkadelic and its sister act, Parliament, had been around for several years, Mr. Bell’s artwork and the liner notes he wrote under the name Sir Lleb (“Bell” spelled backward) helped define Funkadelic and its elaborate mythology.
Some of the images on Mr. Bell’s original cover for the 1981 Funkadelic album, “The Electric Spanking of War Babies,” raised alarm at Warner Bros. Records. “I made a mess of money on that one,” he later said. “They paid me to censor the cover.”
“Bell portrayed the members of Funkadelic as ‘The Invasion Force,’ a Technicolor assortment of alien superheroes, afronauts, mutants and cosmic warriors,” Lodown magazine once wrote in an article about him. “Their mission was to fight the good fight, ‘to rise and prevail’ in the ideological and musical ‘Funk Wars.’”
Mr. Bell referred to his artworks as “scartoons.” But Pan Wendt, who with Luis Jacob curated a 2009 exhibition at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto called “Funkaesthetics” that included Mr. Bell’s work, said they were hardly frivolous.
“The artwork of Pedro Bell was an essential component of the alternately utopian and dystopian world of P-Funk, which placed African-American reality in the context of a science fiction future that was both scary and hopeful,” Mr.Wendt said by email. “Pedro was a brilliant autodidact who was a key source of George Clinton’s ideology through his readings of science fiction, media theory and environmentalist tracts, as well as his knowledge of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism.”
After his heyday as part of the Funkadelic inner circle, though, Mr. Bell encountered financial and medical difficulties. At the time of the “Funkaesthetics” exhibition he was living in a shabby single-room-occupancy hotel in Chicago, his eyesight almost gone, his kidneys failing.
“I spent many hours talking with him, often in the middle of the night, as dialysis made him woozy during the daytime,” Mr. Wendt said, “and it was clear from these conversations that P-Funk’s worldview was deeply indebted to his analysis and imagination.”
Mr. Bell was born on June 11, 1950, in Chicago. In 2010, when some of his art was included in an exhibition called “What Makes Us Smile?” at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, Mr. Bell recorded a biographical interview, conducted by his brother Maillo Tsuru Postelwait. In the interview he said that his father, John, “had four main jobs: a disgraced cop, postal worker, jackleg preacher, and a lifetime subscriber to the Ike Turner School of Domestic Disharmony.” His mother, Annette, he said, was a “Genius Humanitarian and Super Nurse, 1969 Dodge Charger purchaser, and late-in-life shifted to pharmaceutical drug abuser, via White Coat Syndrome.”
George Clinton’s solo album “Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends” (1985).Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” (1978)..
“I’m a self-taught Pagan,” he said, “who tried and completed around 156,000 credit hours at Bradley and Roosevelt universities, with a million credit hours in Weed Science and Decadent Sex (The Joy of Flex) and Last Pocket 8-Ball to balance out the damage of formal education.”
In his memoir, “Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain’t That Funkin’ Kinda Hard on You?” (2014, written with Ben Greenman), Mr. Clinton recalled how Mr. Bell came to his attention.
“Around 1972 or so, we started to get letters from a young artist in Chicago named Pedro Bell,” he wrote. “He doodled these intricate, wild worlds, filled with crazy hypersexual characters and strange slogans.”
Mr. Bell’s letters arrived in hand-decorated envelopes, bizarre miniature works of art that sparked official alarm.
“After a few months of delivering Pedro’s letters to us,” Mr. Clinton wrote, “the postmaster general wanted to know if I was involved in some kind of subversive organization.”
“Pedro’s correspondence,” he added, “gave me an idea for how we could move Funkadelic up a notch, how we could take what we were doing musically, and onstage, and capture some of that anarchic energy in the album packages.”
It was a time before streaming audio and viral videos, when an album’s cover art, especially for performers who did not get a lot of Top 40 radio play, was vital to capturing the attention of consumers. Mr. Clinton, who used Mr. Bell’s art on his solo records as well, acknowledged as much.
“To this day, Pedro’s covers are many people’s point of entry for Funkadelic albums,” he wrote. “When people talk about ‘Cosmic Slop,’ for example, they talk as much about the cover art as anything else: the way that the screaming face is inset into the woman’s Afro, her vampire fangs, the map on one nipple and the stereo dial on the other, the strange yellow bug off to the right of the woman with Pedro’s signature along its body.”
In addition to his album covers, Mr. Bell created artwork like “Fyrebyrd Watch Your Rear” (1987), marker on board.Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome“Black Diamond Steel Lookin’ Good” (1987), also marker on board.Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York/Rome
Rebecca Alban Hoffberger, founder of the American Visionary Art Museum, which focuses on outsider art, said that the “What Makes Us Smile?” exhibition included as guest co-curator Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” who suggested including Mr. Bell’s work.
“Fabulous, energetic, fun, smart — Pedro Bell is a real unsung hero,” she said in a telephone interview. But when the museum reached out to Mr. Bell, she said, he had little of his own art to offer; a museum overseas, she said, had borrowed much of it for an exhibition and not returned it.
“We bent over backwards to give him a lot of peace, because he had been hurt,” she said.
He was, however, able to provide the cover art he did for Mr. Clinton’s 1985 album, “Some of My Best Jokes Are Friends.”
Information on Mr. Bell’s survivors was not immediately available.
One of Mr. Bell’s more scandalous covers, for the 1981 Funkadelic album, “The Electric Spanking of War Babies,” raised alarm at Warner Bros. Records, which was concerned about the naked woman inside a phallic-looking spaceship he had included.
“I made a mess of money on that one,” he told Juxtapoz magazine in 1998. “They paid me to censor the cover.”
Mr. Clinton was especially fond of what Mr. Bell came up with for Funkadelic’s “Standing on the Verge of Getting It On” (1974): an alien landscape that was both scary and whimsical.
“It was a combination of Ralph Bakshi and Samuel R. Delany and Superfly and Fat Albert and Philip K. Dick and Krazy Kat and Flash Gordon,” he wrote in his book, “all mixed together in Pedro’s brain with some kind of blender that hadn’t even been invented yet.”
Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. @genznyt • Facebook
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 31, 2019, Section B, Page 16 of the New York edition with the headline: Pedro Bell, Psychedelic Artist Behind Funkadelic Album Covers, Dies at 69. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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A new mural near the corner of 14th and U Streets NW features a 70-foot-high portrait of a postman playing a saxophone, leaning nonchalantly against a wall. It is a towering tribute to a figure who rarely sought the spotlight — but who ended up becoming a DMV legend anyway.
The man is Buck Hill, widely known as “the wailin’ mailman,” who for half a century doubled as a renowned jazz saxophonist and a daily-mail carrier in his hometown. The artwork is now the tallest mural in D.C. paying tribute to any individual figure, according to Nancee Lyons, a spokesperson for the D.C. Department of Public Works.
It was officially unveiled on Tuesday at noon, in a ceremony at the corner of 14th and U. A range of speakers — from jazz musicians to a representative of the postal workers’ union — addressed a crowd of roughly 60 people. A jazz trio also performed, featuring vocalist Donald Tillery, pianist Terry Marshall and drummer Earl Ivey.
MuralsDC, a collaborative project by the D.C. DPR and the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, sponsored the creation of the mural.
The Arizona-based muralist Joe Pagac was hired to create a piece at the 14th St. location, but MuralsDC allowed him to choose the subject. Pagac consulted with the Georgetown University history professor Maurice Jackson before settling on Hill, who seemed appropriate given the U Street corridor’s history as the heart-center of D.C.’s jazz community. (Go-go legend Chuck Brown was also considered as an option, Lyons said, but his visage can already be seen in multiple murals across the city.)
At Tuesday’s ceremony, several elders in the D.C. jazz community spoke, including Rusty Hassan, a scholar, educator and longtime radio host; Davey Yarborough, the recently retired head of jazz studies at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts; and Rev. Sandra Butler-Truesdale, a DJ, author and advocate for D.C. music history. Other speakers included Brian Renfroe, the executive vice president of the National Association of Letter Carriers; Chris Geldart, the director of the D.C. DPR; and Pagac.
The ceremony’s context also threw a light on some painful realities in the neighborhood where the mural was created. Hill’s image is a clear callback to the years when D.C. was widely known as Chocolate City, and when U Street was a bustling incubator of Black culture. While elements of U Street’s rich history remain intact, the corridor has been aggressively gentrified, with property costs skyrocketing and luxury apartments and condominiums springing up. “As much as I love seeing Buck on that wall, I’d love to see some affordable housing so people who look like him could live here,” Butler-Truesdale said in her remarks, according to the WAMU reporter Mikaela Lefrak.
The mural itself adorns the side of Elysium Fourteen, a shiny new apartment complex located above a SoulCycle and Lululemon store.
I’m at the dedication of DC’s new Buck Hill mural and the guy next to me just said, “It’s been a minute since I’ve seen this many black people at 14th and U.” The neighborhood’s certainly changed a lot since Hill’s time.
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HIGH POINT — Last September, Phyllis Bridges feared what might happen to one of the city’s most significant cultural and historical structures — the house where legendary jazz icon John Coltrane grew up.
Only a year later, the High Point historian is preparing for a celebration. This week, a marker will be publicly unveiled at the Coltrane house, recognizing the 91-year-old residence on Underhill Street as a historic landmark and earmarking the structure for future preservation.
“This is another piece of important history that’s going to be marked, and it’s long overdue,” said Bridges, who spearheaded the campaign to secure the market. “There’s still a lot more we need to do to preserve our African-American history, but this is one marker that should’ve been done a long time ago, so I’m excited that we’re finally getting it done.”
The marker will be unveiled Friday during a public celebration at the house. The house will also be open for tours, and an exhibit about the history of the house will be on display.
Bridges said the house will also be open next weekend when the John Coltrane International Jazz and Blues Festival is taking place in High Point.
“It’s perfect timing,” she said. “We want people who are visiting for the festival to be able to have the experience of seeing the house, too. And hopefully even the musicians who are here performing will want to see it while they’re in town.”
Although Coltrane was born in Hamlet, North Carolina, his family moved to High Point when he was only 3 months old. He grew up here, attending Leonard Street School and William Penn High School. He lived in the compact, two-story house on Underhill Street from 1928, when it was built, until 1943, when he graduated from William Penn. It was during those years that Coltrane developed his love for music and began to blossom as a performer, first playing the clarinet and later the saxophone.
“His entire family was passionate about music, so there was always music in the household,” Coltrane scholar David Tegnell told The Enterprise for a story last year. “…John’s cousin, who also lived in that house and was like a sister to him, said he sat at the kitchen table day and night and practiced all the time.”
The house stands empty now, but it’s hard not to speculate about the layout and decor of the house when Coltrane lived there.
“I would love to know which room he was in, but we just don’t know,” Bridges said as she walked through the house one afternoon this past week. “And I would love to know where the piano was.”
Presumably, Coltrane slept in one of the four small bedrooms upstairs, and the family piano would’ve been in one of two downstairs rooms — the living room or the dining room. Coltrane moved the piano to Philadelphia in 1952, and now it’s owned by the High Point Museum and is on display there.
While the historic marker being unveiled this week will honor Coltrane, it will also pay homage to the man who built the house — Coltrane’s maternal grandfather, the Rev. W.W. Blair, an ex-slave and outspoken activist from Chowan County who was elected a county commissioner there and later became a presiding elder of the AME Zion Church.
“In High Point,” the marker will read, “he led citizen groups that lobbied successfully for additional schools for African-American children. John Coltrane owed his stable upbringing and early musical education to his grandfather’s efforts.”
The Coltrane house was built in the Dutch Colonial style, according to Benjamin Briggs, who wrote a book about architecture in High Point and who serves on a committee working to preserve the house.
“It was a fine home for High Point at that period,” Briggs said. “The neighborhood at that time was full of white-collar and professional African-American citizens, and the housing styles were comparable to neighborhoods such as Johnson Street and to a degree even Parkway (Avenue). It was built in the 1920s, which was a very popular period for Dutch Colonial houses.”
According to Briggs, the house is in good shape structurally, largely because it was so well-built.
“Some of the original architecture features on the inside date back to its construction,” he said. “The original windows are there. A lot of what we call the original fabric of the interior is still there. What we would not want to see is that the house had been gutted, and we did not find that here, so that gives the house a high level of integrity.”
One of the challenges now, he said, is interpreting the interior of the house, or figuring out how to make it look authentic.
“We’re hoping family members will have old photographs with details that might help us understand what it looked like on the inside,” Briggs said. “You can’t help but wonder what rugs were on the floor, what pictures were on the walls, and what curtains were on the windows.”
In the meantime, Bridges and other volunteers have been busy getting the house ready for its public debut on Friday.
“It’s been awesome,” Bridges said. “There’s a lot of excitement in the air about all of this.”
jtomlin@hpenews.com | 336-888-3579
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Want to go?
An event celebrating the unveiling of the historic marker at John Coltrane’s childhood home will be held Friday, from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., at 118 Underhill St.
The marker will be unveiled at noon.
The event will also include a food truck, live music by SonDown, tours of the house and an exhibit about Coltrane, the history of the house, and the man who built it — the Rev. W.W. Blair, Coltrane’s maternal grandfather.
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Painter, printmaker and sculptor Oliver Lee Jackson on the artist who inspires him
Transcript
John Yang: The work of American artist Oliver Lee Jackson explores, among many things, themes of music in American and African cultures. It is currently on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Born in 1935, Jackson sometimes collaborates with musicians, and some of the music in this piece was written for him.
We asked Jackson which artist has influenced his work. He took us to the old masters wing of the National Gallery to see Girl With a Red Hat painted in the Netherlands by Johannes Vermeer 3.5 centuries ago.
Jackson’s story is part of Canvas, our ongoing arts and culture series.
Oliver Lee Jackson: He’s a maker. The effect is supposed to take you into a dream world. That’s what it does.
My name is Oliver Lee Jackson. I make things, paintings, sculptures, et cetera.
This is all about light. Ain’t no light in the painting. The light’s out here. But you believe it. This is intense. This is not casual stuff. It’s not art. This is making.
Our canvas is not a three-dimensional world. It is a flat plain, so we have got to make a world. How do you do it? You make the architecture. How will it stand? What will push here so that you can get something to happen that evokes in other people a feeling?
The piece is really about joy that creates an interior intimacy. Try to express that by just duplicating it again and again, intimate relationships and images everywhere.
These colors never stop showing themselves clearly and evenly throughout. The pink throughout doesn’t shift. So the harmonies are never lessened by the play of the light.
This one was very, very physical in a specific kind of roughness here and the building up of the paint here, kind of sickness here and there that evoke feelings in you.
As you move across this visually, you can’t help but in the inside shift. It’s impossible that you cannot. When it’s happening in you, it’s like a kind of symphony that is directed.
He has to make the effects. He makes them with slanting that thing, forcing you to feel space. This is what pulls you. It’s not the red hat. It’s the red. There ain’t no hat in there. That’s an excuse for the red, this big slash of red against all that cool blue and those tertiaries and this slash of white.
To be able to pull that off is to make a punch, just a punch. It’s like getting in somebody’s face. When anybody looks at this, apart from the subject matter, is that.
I chose gestures that tell everything I want to say. In this arena, which is the whole world, everything seems to be connected to everything else. And there’s actually three of this, three of this.
In the space, it’s closed. They’re all closed in. They don’t shift outside. That means this is a potent area in which these forms interact.
I understand these marks, the scraping, everything, every bone. You do this, what does this require in relation to that? What is it — what are the requirements? There’s relationships. They never stop until it’s complete.
My aesthetics put it together. Hopefully, it does some work as a machine to you. And that’s personal between you and it.
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Jim Eigo laughs as he points out an old Shaun Cassidy album in his store, Original Vinyl Records, in Warwick. According to Eigo, if you like “hardcore funk – Prince meets the Neville Brothers meets the Meters” – check out Sons of Kemet, the British group whose latest album is “Your Queen is a Reptile.” [ELAINE A. RUXTON/TIMES HERALD-RECORD]
Have the times changed one too many times for you to keep up with new music?
Do you still love to rock, but don’t really keep track of what’s goin’ on?
It’s time for the 55 Plus Guide to New Music for Older People – according to six folks in the musical know about everything from rock, folk and jazz to country, Latin music and hip hop.
Our experts include Greg Gattine, 57, program director of one of the hippest, boundary-breaking commercial radio stations around, WDST-FM in Woodstock; Jason Tougaw, 50, host of Jeffersonville public radio station WJFF-FM’s genre-bending Friday night Mix Tape show; Bobby Olivier, 29, a contributing writer for Billboard magazine; Don Lefsky, 59, the owner of one of the region’s pioneering independent record stores, Jack’s Rhythms in New Paltz; Rene Campos, 62, owner of the hip hop/Latin music record store/electronics shop in Newburgh, DMU; and Jim Eigo, 72, a record business veteran and owner of Original Vinyl Records in Warwick and the jazz promotion company, Jazz Promo Services.
They’ve listed some of their favorite new music, with musical reference points for us older folks.
Greg Gattine
If you like rootsy Americana soul, ala the Band, Nathaniel Rateliff’s “Tearing at the Seams” might just be for you.
If you’re into the Allman Brothers’ southern guitar jams, you’ll rock to a favorite of many of our panel, the Tedeschi-Trucks Band, featuring Derek Trucks, the son of the late Allman Brother Butch Trucks. Their latest is “Signs.”
If smart, sassy country singers like Loretta Lynne and Tammy Wynette move you, you’ll be swayed by Brandi Carlile’s provocative and soulful “by the way, I forgive you” and Margo Price’s new one, “All American Made.”
If you dig that “old Lou Reed, Bowie, Stones vibe,” you’ll like The Nude Party and their self-titled album.
And if you’re a fan of Willie Nelson, check out his son, Lukas, and his rockin’ rootsy band, Promise of the Real, whose new album is “Turn Off the News (Build a Garden).”
Bobby Olivier
If you’re a Bob Dylan fan – and love soaring African vocal music – you’ll like Kenyan native J.S. Ondara’s “Tales of America.” “He feels like the next Leon Bridges.”
If you shimmy and swoon over Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, you’ll be moved by Bridges, whose latest album is “Good Thing.”
If female indie folk rock meets the Traveling Wilburys sounds intriguing, why not try boygenius, the “emo folk supergroup” of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacas.
If you’re just born to love Bruce Springsteen, you’ll dig Gaslight Anthem and its lead singer Brian Fallon’s “Sleepwalkers.” “He’s the millennial Springsteen.”
The Phoebe Bridgers-Conor Oberst collaboration “Better Oblivion Community Center” is Olivier’s favorite album of the year and it sounds like what would happen “if Sonny and Cher grew up on garage bands.”
Jason Tougaw
If you’re sweet on the Mamas and the Papas, you might swoon over the “eclectic orchestral pop with country folk elements” of “Case/Lang/Veirs” (Neko Caso, k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs).
If you’re into the smooth soul of Al Green, you’ll melt over Curtis Harding’s “Face Your Fear.” “This isn’t neo soul; it’s pure soul.”
If you like the Zombies and the Byrds, you’ll dig Ages and Ages’ “Me You They We.”
Johnny Cash meets Sly and the Family Stone? Check out The Tall Pines’ “Skeletons of Soul.”
Can’t get enough of that rootsy Band sound? The new album by the rock country duo of Shovels and Rope, “By Blood,” could be for you.
Is “very classic country like Patsy Cline” enticing? Then listen to Laura Cantrell’s tribute to Kitty Wells, “Kitty Wells’ Dresses.″
Don Lefsky
Do you still bang a gong for the late Marc Bolan? Then check out the garage rocker who not only sounds a bit like the T Rex front man but recorded a bunch of T Rex songs – Ty Segall, whose many albums include “Manipulator” and “Melted.”
Can’t get enough of that psychedelic garage rock – maybe with a harder Black Sabbath-like edge? The band with the ever-changing members and “huh?” name, Thee Oh Sees, might tickle your fun lovin’ fancy on albums like “Castlemania” and “Ork.”
If you like Young Marble Giants or the Raincoats, the “mellow but quirky” Cate Le Bon may tempt you. The Welsh singer who sings in Welsh and English has a new album, “Reward.″
If your taste runs to guitar-accented African-based world music, check out Mdou Moctar of Niger, whose latest album is “Ilan: The Creator.”
Jim Eigo
If you dig “hardcore funk – Prince meets the Neville Brothers meets the Meters” – check out Sons of Kemet, the British group whose latest album is “Your Queen is a Reptile.”
Soul, funk and jazz rolled into one is the scintillating sound of Ghost Note, co-led by two percussionists from Snarky Puppy. Their new album, “Swagism,” features Prince’s former bassist, MonoLeon.
Kamasi Washington may sound “kind of like warmed-over Pharoah Sanders, but it’s really good, some deep stuff.” The sax player’s latest is “Heaven and Earth.”
Dave Stryker’s “8 Track” features the guitarist and his Hammond organ heavy band reworking classic pop tunes from the ’70s like “I’ll Be Around,” “Wichita Lineman” and “Never My Love.”
Black roots music ala Taj Mahal comes alive via the Ebony Hillbillies, who use old-timey instrumentation like washboard, violin and banjo. Their most recent album is 2015′s “Slappin’ a Rabbit.”
Rene Campos
If you’re into salsa with a Columbian accent, check out Grupo Niche, the veteran salsa group that’s still shaking and swaying with live performances and albums like “Tocando El Cielo con Las Manos.”
Reggae with a Spanish accent? Then the reggaeton music of Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny is the place to go. The superstar who collaborated with Drake and Cardi B has an album, “X100PRE,” and a host of videos.
Merengue blended with hip-hop, rap and R&B? Might sound familiar if you’ve heard Pitbull or Shakira, but the Dominican singer-songwriter Omega is the pioneer and his latest album is “Mi Libertad.”
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Nonagenarian guitarist George Freeman will be among the Chicago musicians stepping into the spotlight at the Chicago Jazz Festival. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune) (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)
One of the charms of the Chicago Jazz Festival – dating to its inception in 1979 – has been the spotlight it aims at Chicago musicians.
For while out-of-town stars help draw crowds, Chicago artists get to reach a wider public than at any other time of the year.
This year’s festival will underscore the point during downtown events at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion and adjacent stages Aug. 29 through Sept. 1 (plus daytime shows Aug. 29 at the Chicago Cultural Center).
Legendary Chicago jazz guitarist George Freeman, 92, performs regularly in the city’s jazz rooms (and beyond), and blues harmonica master Billy Branch works the Chicago scene when he’s not touring the world. But rarely do you get to hear them performing live together, a seasoned jazzman riffing with a profound upholder of the city’s blues traditions.
They collaborate on Freeman’s latest album, “George the Bomb!” (on the Chicago-based Southport label), Freeman’s slashing guitar lines enriched by Branch’s raspy vocals and full-throated harmonica work. Two generations and musical idioms meet up here, exchanging ideas and reminding listeners that the blues remains the root of it all.
George Freeman and Billy Branch play at 4:15 p.m. Aug. 30 at the Pritzker Pavilion.
It may seem hard to believe, but the Art Ensemble of Chicago marks its 50th anniversary this year with a two-disc recording and a Jazz Festival appearance. Original members Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors Maghostut and Joseph Jarman have passed away, leaving multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell and percussionist Famoudou Don Moye as surviving members.
But the open-eared sensibility, historically informed improvisation and stylistically far-reaching character of the Art Ensemble endures and flourishes, thanks to Mitchell and Moye’s collaboration with new generations of experimenters on the double album “We Are on the Edge: A 50th Anniversary Celebration” (Pi Recordings). The lineup includes flutist Nicole Michell, cellist Tomeka Reid, bassists Junius Paul and Silvia Bolognesi, trumpeter Hugh Ragin and many more. The music transcends category, conveys a spiritual core and extends beyond instrumentals to embrace spoken word and chant.
The Art Ensemble of Chicago performs at 7:45 p.m. Aug. 30 at the Pritzker Pavilion.
Chicago’s jazz traditions stretch back to the dawn of the 20th century or earlier, depending on how you view the chronology. But surely no ensemble in the city today illuminates the emergence of jazz as a sophisticated popular music or revives its historic performance practices more persuasively than the Fat Babies. The band lays claim to that era anew on its latest release, “Uptown” (the group’s fourth album on Chicago-based Delmark Records), which combines vintage scores with newly composed work penned in period style.
The recording’s title, of course, refers to the neighborhood where the band has held forth for years in an appropriately historic room, the Green Mill Jazz Club. Listen to the gorgeous reed and brass voicings in Bennie Moten’s “Harmony Blues,” the bristling syncopation that drives Jesse Stone’s 1920s vintage “Ruff Scufflin’” and the sheer rhythmic buoyancy and joyous spirit of the Andy Kirk band’s “Traveling That Rocky Road,” and you’re encountering vintage repertory performed with felicity to the era but buoyed by contemporary energy. To hear this music with the acoustical clarity unavailable to early-period jazz musicians is to gain deeper understanding of the inner workings of these scores.
Then, too, the Fat Babies offers newly composed work that very sounds as if it might have been penned about century ago – but without wallowing in nostalgia, as in the ebullient title track. Yes, the album’s vocals suggest a nostalgic throwback, echoing the era before Frank Sinatra forever altered our expectations of what jazz singing can be. But the Fat Babies’ instrumentals are nonpareil.
The Fat Babies perform at 1:50 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Von Freeman Pavilion.
Other Chicago attractions not to be missed:
Mike Reed’s “The City Was Yellow.” Chicago drummer-composer-impresario Reed has been working for years on creating a kind of “Real Book” – or catalog – of compositions created by Chicago artists between 1980 and 2010. Reed gives the project its highest profile presentation yet with cornetist Rob Mazurek, flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonists Ari Brown and Geof Bradfield, trombonist Steve Berry, guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Matt Ulery. 6:30 p.m. Aug. 29 at the Pritzker Pavilion.
Miguel de la Cerna Trio. Perhaps best known as Chicago singer Dee Alexander’s pianist and music director, de la Cerna stands as a versatile soloist and bandleader who deserves our attention. He’ll be joined by bassist Dennis Carroll and drummer Greg Artry. 11:30 a.m. Aug. 30 at the Von Freeman Pavilion.
After Dark. This sextet explores and revels in the music of Chicago jazz hero Von Freeman – who died in 2012 at age 88 – and his era. That means music steeped in the realm of bebop. The all-star Chicago band features guitarist Michael Allemana; saxophonists Geof Bradfield, Scott Burns and Rajiv Halim; and bassist Clark Sommers and drummer Dana Hall. Noon Aug. 30 at the Jazz and Heritage Pavilion.
Kenwood Academy Jazz Band. How many other high school jazz ensembles can claim to have performed, recorded and played the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. with pianist and MacArthur Fellowship winner Jason Moran? Here’s hoping this set will include excerpts from Kenwood’s famous collaboration with Moran, “Looks of a Lot.” 2:10 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Young Jazz Lions stage on the Harris Theater Rooftop Terrace.
Frank Catalano Quartet. A herculean saxophonist who divides his time between Chicago, New York and the road, Catalano makes most venues sound too small for his immense sound and galvanic force. He’ll be joined by drummer Mike Clark, pianist John Roothaan and bassist Greg Geary. 3 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Jazz and Heritage Pavilion.
Ryan Cohan’s “Originations.” It’s hard to say what Chicagoan Cohan does better – play the piano or compose. Listeners can judge for themselves as Cohan and several top Chicago musicians perform Cohan’s “Originations,” a multi-movement suite for jazz sextet and string quartet. Among the players: reedists John Wojciechwoski and Geof Bradfield; trumpeter Tito Carrillo; bassist James Cammack; drummer Michael Raynor; and the KAIA String Quartet. 5:25 p.m. Aug. 31 at the Pritzker Pavilion.
Russ Johnson Quartet. Though he teaches at the University of Wisconsin, trumpeter Johnson long has been a vital contributor to some of Chicago’s most innovative groups. On this occasion, he’ll be joined by saxophonist Greg Ward, bassist Clark Sommers and drummer Dana Hall. 1:50 p.m. Sept. 1 at the Von Freeman Pavilion.
Howard Reich is the Tribune’s Emmy-winning arts critic; author of six books, including “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel”; and writer-producer of three documentaries. He holds two honorary doctoral degrees and served on the Pulitzer music jury four times, including for the first jazz winner, “Blood on the Fields.”
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Connie Lester, whose robust and affirming style on saxophone proved a perfect fit for the soul jazz of the 1960s and beyond — notably in organ combos, and especially around a thriving scene in Newark — died on Tuesday in Edison, N.J.
He was 88. His death was confirmed by his daughter Toni Lester, who did not provide a cause.
An authoritative voice on alto, tenor and soprano saxophones, Lester also played clarinet and piano. He formed a sterling reputation as a sideman, over the course of a long career largely based in his home state of New Jersey.
He appears on a 1962 album by singer Joe Carroll, Man with a Happy Sound, alongside some of the leading musicians of the era, like pianist Ray Bryant and guitarist Grant Green.
But found his strongest niche with Hammond B-3 organ players, including Larry Young and Rhoda Scott. He appears, credited as Conrad Lester, on two Blue Note albums by organist Freddie Roach. On the first of these, a classic 1963 outing called Mo’ Greens Please, Lester’s rhythmic poise and bebop fluency are apparent with every phrase he plays. Here is the album closer, a cover of the Top 40 pop hit “Two Different Worlds.”
Lester is also featured on Roach’s 1964 Blue Note album All That’s Good, in a band that includes guitarist Calvin Newborn, drummer Clarence Johnston and vocalists Phyllis Smith, Marvin Robinson and Willie Tate.
As the swinging soul-jazz era of the ‘60s led to a more backbeat-driven model in the ‘70s, Lester didn’t lose a step. He did some stalwart work in that decade with organist Jimmy McGriff, notably on a 1974 album for the Groove Merchant label.
That album, Main Squeeze, features Lester with two of his fondest musical partners, guitarist Jimmy Ponder and drummer Eddie Gladden. The balance of strength and elegance in Lester’s sound is well captured on this version of “Misty”; he begins his alto solo two minutes into the track, snapping a dreamy reverie into focus.
Whatever the stylistic requirements of the gig, Lester was known for an emotional directness in his style — a quality that spoke to the depth of his training in the black community, as Bob Porter articulates in his book Soul Jazz.“If the history of soul jazz must be told in the music of its biggest stars and most successful performers,” reflects Porter, “it doesn’t mean that there were not dozens of others who contributed quality music to the scene.”
Samuel Conrad Lester was born in Roselle, N.J., on June 12, 1931. He was mostly self-taught as a musician, picking up the clarinet and the saxophone during his elementary years. Among his early heroes were Lester Young and Charlie Parker, respectively the leading saxophonists of the swing and bebop eras; his own style would draw from both examples.
Lester happened to come up at a time when Newark was exploding with jazz talent and well stocked with clubs like the Key Club and Sparky Js, on the same stretch of Halsey Street. He was in his early 20s when he got his first gig at Lloyd’s Manor, a bebop stronghold on Beacon Street.
According to Barbara J. Kukla’s history Swing City: Newark Nightlife, 1925-50, Lloyd’s was a headquarters for three jazz modernists who fed off each other’s vibe — James Moody, Babs Gonzales and Danford (Larue) Jordan. Of the three, Jordan made the biggest impression on young Lester. “A lot of my phrasing comes from Larue,” he told Kukla. “He did some strange things.”
Lester’s bond with the Newark scene of his youth was abiding, even as he became a veteran and mentor himself. He was a member of the Newark Jazz Elders, formed in 2002 by reporter and historian Guy Sterling, as a showcase for Lester’s valiant peer group. (“A quiet, dignified man and a thorough professional” is how Sterling characterized the saxophonist this week.)
Lester is survived by his wife, Melba; two daughters, Toni and Traci Lester; a granddaughter, Hailey Lester; and many nieces, nephews and cousins.
Among his honors was a proclamation from the City of Newark, for “decades of contributions to the residents of this great metropolis through music and the sounds of jazz.” In 2007 the state of New Jersey issued a proclamation to the Newark Jazz Elders, citing “their extraordinary contributions to the cultural richness of our largest city, our state and our country.”
Throughout his career, Lester took particular pride in his early experience on the bandstand, at places like the Key Club. “If you didn’t know your horn,” he says in Swing City, “you couldn’t come to Newark.”
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IN BASIL DEARDEN’S 1962 FILM All Night Long, a husband and wife celebrate their first wedding anniversary. The husband is black. The wife is white. Both are American jazz musicians living in London. The couple arrives at a surprise party hosted by a friend at his spacious loft on the south bank of the Thames. Iconic bandleader and composer Charles Mingus is at the party, drinking scotch and playing his double bass. Pianist Dave Brubeck arrives a bit later, led by British saxophonist Johnny Dankworth. Guests of the married couple step out onto the fire escape to smoke joints and chat about their complicated romantic lives. On the bandstand, the musicians incorporate Brazilian rhythms into their bebop. All Night Long depicts the urban scene of avant-garde jazz, its characters several steps ahead of the era’s conservative status quo.
Dearden’s film wasn’t the first to use jazz as a means of staking out a counterculture frontier. Since the advent of sound, movies treated jazz as a marker of modernity and youth, a soundtrack to a fledgling America further distancing itself from Europe and charting a path through its second century. Examples include the first feature with synchronized dialogue, The Jazz Singer (1927), about a young man during the “Roaring Twenties” reconciling his dreams of musical success with his European-Jewish, immigrant family background; Blues in the Night (1941), about a band of boxcar-riding jazz musicians raised on Depression-era poverty; and New Orleans (1947), a historical fantasy about how a society of symphony-attending, top-hat-wearing Southern aristocrats come to enjoy the jazz they hear played by their black household help.
These films all share a glaringly obvious issue: race. Even the most deliberate and self-aware, Blues in the Night, is less than thoughtful about the problems of portraying a predominantly African-American art form in a movie that casts white people as both the lead actors and the most visible musicians. In large part, the reason for these deficiencies was censorship — until a series of landmark First Amendment cases during the 1950s, the Hays Code prevented filmmakers from showing, among other activities, the weirdly clinical-sounding “miscegenation” — as well as studio intervention. Take New Orleans: the project was originally planned as a vehicle for Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, two of the most celebrated musicians in the world at the time, yet the studio worried about the commercial viability of a film led by black superstars, employing several screenwriters to minimize Armstrong and Holiday’s roles. In the final cut, Holiday is relegated to playing a singing maid and Armstrong a musician beholden and subservient to the white man who owns his club.
By the time All Night Long was produced, government censorship was far less common and far-reaching. (The British Board of Film Censors became increasingly lenient contemporaneously with the United States’s MPAA.) The reticence of studio executives to make progressive films persisted, however, which is why the social utopia of All Night Long turns bizarrely dystopian by its end. The anniversary party fizzles out when the husband takes his wife to an upstairs bedroom and chokes her, racked with jealousy about a perceived affair, before he hits the saxophone player in his band repeatedly, sending him flying over the banister of the spiral staircase in the center of the apartment. How could the loft be anything besides an opportunity for an action-packed climax? It’s the movies, after all. Just like Chekhov said: the gun hanging on the wall in the first act must go off in the third.
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That is, of course, unless you’re making a movie with jazz form. Just as jazz and other avant-garde movements in the 20th century — atonal music, for example — freed musicians from long-ingrained compositional assumptions, jazz cinema freed filmmakers from such constructs as the three-act screenplay. These structural innovations undermined the rigid Hollywood production model, leading to more dynamic and intuitive collaborations and scripts rewritten according to the on-set improvisations of the cast and crew. The independent film movement of the 1950s and the introduction of a jazz sensibility to movies were part and parcel of the same phenomenon. In New York City, a dense hotbed of artistic collaboration where independent film experienced a renaissance in the postwar years, artists learned from other art forms. The thriving jazz scene taught two luminaries of independent cinema, Shirley Clarke and John Cassavetes, new methods of approaching their films.
Trained as a dancer, Shirley Clarke, who referred to her cinematic practice as “a choreography of editing,” began her career making movies infused with the sensibilities of other disciplines. Her first short, Dance in the Sun (1953), was a highly influential attempt to capture the feeling of modern dance on film. Her 1958 short Bridges-Go-Round consists of two versions, the first scored by jazz saxophonist Teo Macero, the second by electronic musicians Bebe and Louis Barron. Using music and architecture as a theme, rather than dance, Clarke’s metaphor of choreography holds true.
Released in 1961, her debut feature, The Connection, is essential and instructive in its forging of a jazz form. Based on Jack Gelber’s 1959 play of the same name and acted by members of the experimental theatrical troupe The Living Theater, The Connection follows a group of multiracial musicians as they jam, hang out, and wait for their heroin dealer to arrive at a friend’s Manhattan apartment. The narrative structure is multifaceted: much of it leads up to the arrival of the dealer (Carl Lee), but after he appears, the film follows each character as, one by one, they get a fix in the bathroom. Neither hired guns instructed to read a script, nor stars insisting on being shot from only one side, Clarke’s actors are players in an ensemble — a band — familiar with each other’s idiosyncrasies and styles. Because many were in the original play, the cast is also intimate with the source material: they know how to riff and expand on Gelber’s story, complementing its essential qualities. Like the “free jazz” that composers such as Ornette Coleman were developing during the period, which advertised itself (falsely) as improvisational, the tension between the appearance of improvisation and the reality of composition is essential to Clarke’s movie. Clarke is a bandleader holding tight reins over her players, feigning looseness so that their personalities can come through naturally.
The apparent autonomy Clarke gives to her cast is in part a product of her self-consciousness about being a white filmmaker whose films are largely about black people. Later movies of hers include The Cool World (1963), a Dizzy Gillespie–scored drama about youth gangs in Harlem, and Portrait of Jason (1967), a documentary about a black gay prostitute that consists entirely of him monologuing about his life and experiences. She also directed a brilliant amalgam of fiction and documentary, Ornette: Made in America (1985), about Ornette Coleman.
In Clarke’s career alone, we can see a logical future for jazz form in film. While it originated in films with jazz content, the vocabulary of jazz form became as amorphous and progressive as jazz itself, a tool kit that enabled filmmakers’ adventurous instincts, rather than a set of standards tying them to the methods and aesthetics of their 1950s forebears. Still, The Connection is interesting in part because it teaches viewers exactly how to make a film in Shirley Clarke’s way. Woven into the story is a metanarrative about a director, played by William Redfield, who wants to film a documentary depicting the real experience of smack-shooting musicians; unfortunately for Redfield’s character, he makes his subjects feel unnatural every time he turns his camera on them. The director’s mistakes are countered by the approach of his cameraman, J. J. (Roscoe Lee Browne), who is considerably more relaxed, letting the musicians act and move freely, and reacting, improvisationally, to their movements in turn.
The influence of this vérité-adjacent style is obvious and pervasive in film, particularly in the work of documentarians such as Frederick Wiseman — who helped fund The Connection and produced The Cool World — and Errol Morris, whose The Fog of War (2003) is heavily indebted to Portrait of Jason. Yet The Connection was not widely seen in the United States, in large part because of censorship. The police shut the film down after a couple of showings in New York, arresting the projectionist. Clarke’s later movies were also suppressed. If jazz is a good barometer for freedom, to cite Duke Ellington, then clearly America’s midcentury needle was quivering somewhere in the low numbers.
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In the late 1950s, Clarke lent her filmmaking equipment to a young Greek American from Long Island who had recently graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and started his own acting workshop, having been denied entrance to Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actors Studio. Admirers today like to call John Cassavetes “The Father of Independent Cinema.” He earned the title based on a series of pointedly character-driven domestic dramas, most notably A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977), all of which exhibit an original jazz form, as well as a movie that was actually about the jazz scene in New York, Shadows (1959). Unlike Clarke’s, Cassavetes’s oeuvre has been posthumously, thoroughly revived.
Cassavetes got the money to make Shadows because he went on Jean Shepherd’s Manhattan-broadcasted, hipster-beloved radio show and pleaded with listeners to help him usher in a less studio-dominated American cinema. Oddballs from all over began to show up at his workshop, bringing donations, a desire to help out, and little idea what this undertaking might entail.
Akin to Shirley Clarke, Cassavetes innovated the form and process of filmmaking largely in order to create a movie about an interracial society in an era when studio films had provided virtually no precedents. Shadows centers on three siblings, played by actors of different races, all of whom were enrolled in Cassavetes’s workshop. The narrative is based on an exercise from class: a light-skinned black woman, Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), has sex with a white man, Tony (Anthony Ray), who assumes she’s Caucasian; the next day, she brings him home to the apartment she shares with her siblings, where Tony meets her jazz-singer brother Hugh (Hugh Hurd) and his manager (Rupert Crosse), both of whom are clearly African American. Cassavetes asked his cast to imagine what happens after Lelia introduces Hugh as her brother.
The film ends with a title card informing its audience that the entire narrative was improvised. As Ray Carney writes in his essential resource Cassavetes on Cassavetes (2001), this boast was a lie, a canny piece of advertising Cassavetes used because he knew that improvisation — from the “first thought, best thought” claims of the Beat poets to bebop soloing — was en vogue. The truth is much more complicated: Cassavetes rewrote his screenplay constantly, building scenes based on the spontaneity of his ensemble. The moments of improvisation in Shadows were largely ones of motion. Freestyle acting, rather than blocking or storyboarding, determined the film’s cinematography, with the cameramen intuiting and reacting to the movements of the ensemble around the set.
Like Clarke, Cassavetes, who referred to himself as a “tyrant” of a filmmaker, encouraged his cast to express themselves within the context of his direction, the way even the biggest control-freak of a bandleader sometimes takes cues from the musicians on his bandstand. Perhaps this is why Shadows is an effective movie about race: the movie’s black characters are given the freedom to bring their own experience to bear on the narrative, rather than following scripted choices set down by a screenwriter and director.
Cassavetes developed a style out of his own limitations, which were many. He was an unconfident and unhoned writer, composing later movies by performing the various parts in front of an assistant, who transcribed. He was unable to afford filming permits, so he filmed street sequences at night when he could avoid the police, capturing his actors from the distance of bright restaurant interiors and the cover of theater marquees. He forgot to hire a script supervisor and ended up with a disorganized jumble of takes and a narrative that lurches, as though plot points were unintentionally elided. The score rarely syncs up with the action, and in certain sequences the music and images are entirely dissonant. The incidental noise in the soundtrack, a huge influence on later generations of independent filmmakers, was an accident Cassavetes and his crew spent many hours trying to correct.
The filmmaker and archivist Ross Lipman has cataloged how Cassavetes’s various attempts to score the film failed. At one point, the director asked Charles Mingus, already a famous jazz musician who was about to release his classic Mingus Ah Um (1959), to record an accompaniment in several hours, believing that jazz artists played on feeling alone, never writing their compositions down. Clearly, Cassavetes was thinking of his own practices, not Mingus’s.
Cassavetes felt galvanized by the looseness and freedom he (mis)read into jazz, which enabled him to make a film with little knowledge or money. At the very least, he shared one quality with Mingus — an ability to bully the people he worked with into doing what he wanted them to do. In a functional sense, both the radical filmmaker and the radical jazz composer were as domineering and rigid as the mainstream structures they railed against.
When Shadows premiered at New York’s Paris Theater in 1958, Cassavetes and most of the attendees considered it a complete failure. Mingus was so mad about the music that he stormed out of the theater and told a fawning photographer to go fuck himself. An early and important champion, Jonas Mekas raved about the film in The Village Voice, writing that it had the power to “influence and change the tone, subject matter, and style of the entire independent American cinema.” Cassavetes spent an exhausting year reworking the movie, before it premiered again at the very end of 1959. The second cut garnered a lot of attention, including the interest of Hollywood studios, with whom the director made two films before he gave up. It only took him a few weeks on Paramount Pictures’s lot, where he was filming Too Late Blues (1961), before he tried to buck the studio’s culture:
Art cannot be accomplished under pressure. It’s a free feeling. So I bought some beer and kept putting it on set. Everybody kept on saying, “You can’t do that.” And the first day, everybody got drunk. And the second day, half the people got drunk. And the third day, there was an occasional glass of beer taken. And the fourth day, everybody just knew it was there and was proud of it because they felt that they were entitled to some kind of reward for their effort and they weren’t being treated like children, like employees — that they were part of the effort.
Paramount had told Cassavetes he would receive a five-movie deal if Too Late Blues was successful, but they issued a number of injunctions that prevented him from completing a movie he believed in. One of the most constraining of these had to do with deadlines. Shadows had taken the director two years to finish, but he had only six weeks to film Too Late Blues. Cassavetes wanted to cast his wife, the actress Gena Rowlands, and the older star Montgomery Clift in the lead roles, but the studio insisted on featuring an up-and-coming Stella Stevens alongside teen idol Bobby Darin. The director also wanted to shoot in the familiar bars and clubs of New York, but the studio demanded he shoot on backlots; as a result, he changed the location of the film to Los Angeles. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing — after all, the band of musicians at the center of Too Late Blues was played by Caucasian actors, and the West Coast jazz scene had a reputation for being much whiter than the New York scene at the time. Still, Cassavetes was largely compelled to work without a cast who knew his method, and Paramount made things worse by demanding that the filmmaker, as unsure about his own writing as ever, stick rigidly to the screenplay.
A bona fide example of how jazz form fails in the context of a studio system, Too Late Blues is nonetheless a much better film than its director believed. The movie follows a jazz pianist, Ghost (Darin), who plays parks and orphanages with his quartet, subsequently sabotaging a record deal that might have given him his big break when he quits his band in the studio. He ends up meeting a middle-aged rich woman named “Countess” (Marilyn Clark), apparently basedon the proudly unconventional jazz patron “Baroness” Pannonica de Koenigswarter, who supports his music in exchange for sexual favors. The film’s caustic portrait of the music business also includes a culturally ignorant record executive, Milt Frielobe (Val Avery).
Cassavetes’s take on the music business is prophetic. After all, the industry would open up during the 1960s, largely removing “in-house” creators like Frielobe from the studio so that producers, recording engineers, and artists could work more independently. In a similar vein, the film industry would eventually create faux-independent “sister” studios to capitalize on independent filmmakers making personal movies on low budgets. Yet even if the flat people that populate Too Late Blues are of historical interest, they’re unfortunate missteps for Cassavetes, a director whose movies rely on actors developing surprising, realistic characters. He reflected later on his experience at Paramount:
There is no such thing as a low-budget picture at a major studio. At least not from a director’s point of view. Once you say it’s a low-budget picture it’s like being a man with no credit in a rich neighborhood. In a huge studio like Paramount, a small-budget film means absolutely nothing. The film is always seen in terms of its immediate profit. As soon as you tell them you have any high ambitions for a low-budget picture, they look at you as if you were a complete fool. […] You cannot make a personal film under those conditions.
Cassavetes directed one more project for a Hollywood studio, the powerful A Child Is Waiting (1963), whose interesting qualities its director would never admit. He hated the film because the producer, Stanley Kramer, re-edited his footage after seeing a rough cut. Furious, Cassavetes purportedly physically assaulted Kramer, cementing his reputation as persona non grata in Hollywood. So he sat in the Laurel Canyon home he paid for with his studio contract and the money Rowlands was making from her own successful career, drinking and brooding about how he was going nowhere:
Look, I admit it. I was difficult. I love to be liked, but I’ll fight anybody who tries to stop me from doing what I want to do. I’m a bigmouth. A troublemaker. Temperamental. I only care about people who care about their work. Sure, Kramer and I are now enemies. But it was good for my self-respect to fight him every inch of the way. I lost, but he’ll think twice before hiring a young director again. It’s a question of manhood.
Cassavetes returned with the independent movie Faces in 1968, beginning the most productive and creative decade of his career. The film stars Rowlands, alongside John Marley, Seymour Cassel, and Lynn Carlin, who once said the director hit her on set in order to provoke the response he wanted in a scene. John Cassavetes fought everyone, every inch of the way — and then he died in his 50s from cirrhosis of the liver.
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Filmmakers like Clarke and Cassavetes were revolutionaries with strong personalities, which is perhaps why their films are so astonishingly artistically successful. How can art be collaborative and still express a singular vision? This question, which haunts both film and music, is one to which Cassavetes alludes in Too Late Blues. Not every director is a tyrant, but every director who isn’t a tyrant isn’t necessarily a fair-minded, democratic leader. The spectrum of artistic failure is as wide as the spectrum of personal failure, and neither comes into starker focus than in the system of studio filmmaking.
Remember All Night Long? How that cool loft party with all those famous people went south when the guy choked his wife and almost killed that other dude? Well, the scene was a rewrite of Othello, at the time one of the few stories about an interracial romance in the Western canon. The filmmakers’ decision to anchor a narrative about the contemporary jazz scene by citing a Shakespearean classic, instead of finding their own modern way of telling the story (à la Clarke and Cassavetes), was problematic enough — yet manageable, in the right hands. Othello ends when the titular character murders his wife, and the debate among the filmmakers about how to navigate the movie’s final act demonstrates how the forced collaboration of the studio system can prevent a film from adopting a jazz form.
The movie’s director, Basil Dearden, and his frequent collaborator, the set designer/producer Michael Relph, were the polar opposites of an auteur like Cassavetes. Tireless, consistent, and easy to work with, Dearden and Relph were known for being reliable company men who cooperated with the studio brass. In his obituary in the Guardian, Relph was cited as having “[p]owers of patience, tact and persuasion” — certainly, good practical skills for a studio filmmaker to have.
Dearden and Relph were notable among British filmmakers for making movies about taboo social issues, which did not mean that their perspectives on race were forward-thinking. When they signed onto All Night Long, the duo was fresh off of Sapphire (1959), a movie about the murder of a black London art student that was progressive in intent yet overly didactic and offensive in execution. One wonders what Dearden and Relph’s actual politics might have been — whether, for example, they were as broad-minded about queer rights as their best film, Victim (1961), about a closeted gay lawyer (and the first British feature to use the word “homosexual”), suggested. Dearden and Relph hid behind their movies, as well as behind their midcentury stiff upper lips.
One of the two screenwriters of All Night Long, Paul Jarrico, was decidedly more progressive. A former chairman of the Los Angeles chapter of the American Communist Party, Jarrico was blacklisted after he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Far more of a pariah in Los Angeles than Cassavetes ever was, the screenwriter fled to the New Mexico desert, where he and his exiled friends managed to make the socialist masterpiece Salt of the Earth (1954), in spite of the lead actress being deported to Mexico, the crew being assaulted on set, and laboratories refusing to process the film. Jarrico was largely unable to work during much of his prime, scrounging up the occasional job by using a fake name. Still, speaking to Patrick McGilligan in the 1990s, he claimed to have “personally found many positive aspects to being blacklisted. I don’t recommend being blacklisted to others. But it really allowed me to have experiences that I would not otherwise have had.”
Complementing Jarrico’s political convictions was the jazz knowledge of his co-screenwriter Nel King, one of many women who found a place in midcentury Hollywood as a film editor before she moved to Manhattan and began writing for television and editing books. King hung out at jazz clubs, palling around with Charles Mingus, whose classic memoir Beneath the Underdog (1971) she edited — a disastrous experience, since the notoriously single-minded Mingus was impossible to deal with. King got Mingus involved with All Night Long, his role being some mixture of actor, performer, and musical advisor. Of course, he clashed constantly with the film’s composer, Philip Green.
King and Jarrico had previously tried to produce the movie in the United States, but United Artists would only commit if the African-American star Lena Horne played the lead female role. According to Larry Ceplair’s The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico (2007), UA did not want to be involved with a project that had an interracial relationship at its center. After refusing the studio’s demand, the screenwriting duo hooked up with Bob Roberts, another blacklisted American trying to begin a new career in England, who produced the film for The Rank Organisation.
Jarrico and King’s screenplay was altered, particularly at the end, and Jarrico apparently lost some faith in the project before production finished. Still, the film is propulsive, irreverent, and satirically intelligent, as well as being frank about race — until the problematic climax. Krin Gabbard’s 2016 book Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus describes the filmmakers’ debates over possible endings, all of which seem contrived and in desperate need of the intuitive jazz processes of Cassavetes and Clarke. Does the married couple stay alive? Do they stay together? Does Johnny Cousin call the husband a “nigger,” causing him to flee the loft in anger? Reading Gabbard’s account, one is struck by the absurdity of a bunch of white filmmakers arguing over the reality of a black person and a white person in love. The opinions of Paul Harris, who plays the husband, and Marti Stevens, who plays the wife, were either never recorded or never proffered by the actors.
¤
The sort of racial timidity that ultimately sank All Night Long would be unlikely on a film set today, but this does not mean that Hollywood has gotten braver. The economic concerns of the culture industries have always entailed a kind of social gradualism — at best — that ensures maximization of profit and preservation of the company image. Undoubtedly, studio executives weigh the risks of diminishing audiences every time they decide to include a black character, or a gay character, or a trans character in a film. The only constant is greed and economic shrewdness, and while it’s worthy of celebration that a more diverse range of experiences are being depicted on screen today, the greed of the powerful will always harm the less powerful.
For good reason, much attention has been paid in recent years to debunking the lionization of men like Cassavetes and Mingus, who had reputations for being brutal and belligerent. Yet consider the undisturbed (if decidedly smaller) legacy of Basil Dearden, who lived his public life protected by studios and their bureaucratic workings, before he died in a car accident near Heathrow Airport at the age of 60. Run a Google search for images of Dearden and one will find mostly stills from his movies, along with one prominent photograph of him on the set of All Night Long demonstrating to Paul Harris how to strangle Marti Stevens. Dearden is staring at someone off-screen while the actor watches and the actress lies expressionless and passive beneath her director’s hands.
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The vast majority of filmmakers end up like session musicians, moving from gig to gig without ever establishing control over their own expression, assembling a band, or releasing an album. The condition of being an artist in a complex society is to learn, over and over again, what it means to compromise with the circumstances at hand.
In a speech he gave in 2016, President Obama quoted Duke Ellington’s quip on jazz being a barometer for freedom, adding: “Has there ever been any greater improvisation than America itself?” I won’t begrudge Barack this line; after all, my entire essay is predicated on the notion that jazz makes a great metaphor. But America’s improvisation was always too improvised to be just, and the contributions of a number of artists have been sacrificed in the self-erasing venture that is the collaboration of a society. The screenwriter Nel King, for example, died without receiving the credit she believed she deserved for her work on Mingus’s autobiography. Paul Jarrico spent his life either compromising with film studios or reeling from the ways they compromised his livelihood and well-being. He devoted the end of his career to restoring the credits of writers whose contributions had been excised from movies because of the blacklist. He died in 1997, driving back from an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the beginnings of the HUAC hearings. The event was organized as an apologia by the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the Screen Directors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America, all of whom had sold out their members half a century earlier. Jarrico fell asleep at the wheel and hit a tree, dying instantly.
That same year, Shirley Clarke died in a Boston hospital, following a stroke. The New York Times ran an obituary. Hopefully she knew that, unlike most jazz artists, she had managed to solo during the improvised narrative of her time.
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From: Linda Calandra Porter <lindacalandraporter@gmail.com>
Bob was transferred from ICU last night to a surgical floor.
Considering he had hemmorhage of femoral artery during 1st crucial Aug 5th operation, 9 transfusions, second surgery Aug 6th to save his right leg, he endured over 15 hours of anuerysm surgery on both legs , he is finally doing well.
Bob told me to tell everyone that he’s improving.
He’s not taking calls however l read him txt, and email messages whenever possible.
Many thanks for your kind words and good wishes.
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Forged in Bondage, Black Music is the Sound of Freedom
By WESLEY MORRIS AUG. 14, 2019
Photo illustration by Michael Paul Britto
or centuries, black music, forged in bondage, has been the sound of complete artistic freedom. o wonder everybody is always stealing it.
By Wesley MorrisAUG. 14, 2019
I’ve got a friend who’s an incurable Pandora guy, and one Saturday while we were making dinner, he found a station called Yacht Rock. “A tongue-in-cheek name for the breezy sounds of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock” is Pandora’s definition, accompanied by an exhortation to “put on your Dockers, pull up a deck chair and relax.” With a single exception, the passengers aboard the yacht were all dudes. With two exceptions, they were all white. But as the hours passed and dozens of songs accrued, the sound gravitated toward a familiar quality that I couldn’t give language to but could practically taste: an earnest Christian yearning that would reach, for a moment, into Baptist rawness, into a known warmth. I had to laugh — not because as a category Yacht Rock is absurd, but because what I tasted in that absurdity was black.
I started putting each track under investigation. Which artists would saunter up to the racial border? And which could do their sauntering without violating it? I could hear degrees of blackness in the choir-loft certitude of Doobie Brothers-era Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes”; in the rubber-band soul of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again”; in the malt-liquor misery of Ace’s “How Long” and the toy-boat wistfulness of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.”
Then Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It” arrived and took things far beyond the line. “This Is It” was a hit in 1979 and has the requisite smoothness to keep the yacht rocking. But Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby. What bowls you over is the intensity of his yearning — teary in the verses, snarling during the chorus. He sounds as if he’s baring it all yet begging to wring himself out even more.
Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again. The problem is rich. If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem; if it can make Teena Marie sing everything — “Square Biz,” “Revolution,” “Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” — like she knows her way around a pack of Newports; if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn; if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America.
It’s proof, too, that American music has been fated to thrive in an elaborate tangle almost from the beginning. Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both. The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducted with dismaying ranges of consent.
Diana Ross and the Supremes with Paul McCartney in London in 1968. Getty Images
“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.
But there’s something even more fundamental, too. My friend Delvyn Case, a musician who teaches at Wheaton College, explained in an email that improvisation is one of the most crucial elements in what we think of as black music: “The raising of individual creativity/expression to the highest place within the aesthetic world of a song.” Without improvisation, a listener is seduced into the composition of the song itself and not the distorting or deviating elements that noise creates. Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.
What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit.
And the spirit travels from host to host, racially indiscriminate about where it settles, selective only about who can withstand being possessed by it. The rockin’ backwoods blues so bewitched Elvis Presley that he believed he’d been called by blackness. Chuck Berry sculpted rock ’n’ roll with uproarious guitar riffs and lascivious winks at whiteness. Mick Jagger and Robert Plant and Steve Winwood and Janis Joplin and the Beatles jumped, jived and wailed the black blues. Tina Turner wrested it all back, tripling the octane in some of their songs. Since the 1830s, the historian Ann Douglas writes in “Terrible Honesty,” her history of popular culture in the 1920s, “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.” What we’ve been dealing with ever since is more than a catchall word like “appropriation” can approximate. The truth is more bounteous and more spiritual than that, more confused. That confusion is the DNA of the American sound.
It’s in the wink-wink costume funk of Beck’s “Midnite Vultures” from 1999, an album whose kicky nonsense deprecations circle back to the popular culture of 150 years earlier. It’s in the dead-serious, nostalgic dance-floor schmaltz of Bruno Mars. It’s in what we once called “blue-eyed soul,” a term I’ve never known what to do with, because its most convincing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele — never winked at black people, so black people rarely batted an eyelash. Flaws and all, these are homeowners as opposed to renters. No matter what, though, a kind of gentrification tends to set in, underscoring that black people have often been rendered unnecessary to attempt blackness. Take Billboard’s Top 10 songs of 2013: It’s mostly nonblack artists strongly identified with black music, for real and for kicks: Robin Thicke, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the dude who made “The Harlem Shake.”
Sometimes all the inexorable mixing leaves me longing for something with roots that no one can rip all the way out. This is to say that when we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.
Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy” Rice, “the negro par excellence.” Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating.
The blackface performer Thomas Dartmouth Rice (T.D. Rice) who pioneered the “Jim Crow” character, in a portrait from the mid-1800s. From The New York Public Library
In 1830, Rice was a nobody actor in his early 20s, touring with a theater company in Cincinnati (or Louisville; historians don’t know for sure), when, the story goes, he saw a decrepit, possibly disfigured old black man singing while grooming a horse on the property of a white man whose last name was Crow. On went the light bulb. Rice took in the tune and the movements but failed, it seems, to take down the old man’s name. So in his song based on the horse groomer, he renamed him: “Weel about and turn about jus so/Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” And just like that, Rice had invented the fellow who would become the mascot for two centuries of legalized racism.
That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man — or something like him, because Rice’s get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person’s and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old man’s melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.
Rice repeated the act again, night after night, for audiences so profoundly rocked that he was frequently mobbed during performances. Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.
Other performers came and conquered, particularly the Virginia Minstrels, who exploded in 1843, burned brightly then burned out after only months. In their wake, P.T. Barnum made a habit of booking other troupes for his American Museum; when he was short on performers, he blacked up himself. By the 1840s, minstrel acts were taking over concert halls, doing wildly clamored-for residencies in Boston, New York and Philadelphia.
A blackface minstrel would sing, dance, play music, give speeches and cut up for white audiences, almost exclusively in the North, at least initially. Blackface was used for mock operas and political monologues (they called them stump speeches), skits, gender parodies and dances. Before the minstrel show gave it a reliable home, blackface was the entertainment between acts of conventional plays. Its stars were the Elvis, the Beatles, the ’NSync of the 19th century. The performers were beloved and so, especially, were their songs.
Sheet music of “Jim Crow Jubilee: A Collection of Negro Melodies,” published in 1847. Shutterstock
During minstrelsy’s heyday, white songwriters like Stephen Foster wrote the tunes that minstrels sang, tunes we continue to sing. Edwin Pearce Christy’s group the Christy Minstrels formed a band — banjo, fiddle, bone castanets, tambourine — that would lay the groundwork for American popular music, from bluegrass to Motown. Some of these instruments had come from Africa; on a plantation, the banjo’s body would have been a desiccated gourd. In “Doo-Dah!” his book on Foster’s work and life, Ken Emerson writes that the fiddle and banjo were paired for the melody, while the bones “chattered” and the tambourine “thumped and jingled a beat that is still heard ’round the world.”
But the sounds made with these instruments could be only imagined as black, because the first wave of minstrels were Northerners who’d never been meaningfully South. They played Irish melodies and used Western choral harmonies, not the proto-gospel call-and-response music that would make life on a plantation that much more bearable. Black artists were on the scene, like the pioneer bandleader Frank Johnson and the borderline-mythical Old Corn Meal, who started as a street vendor and wound up the first black man to perform, as himself, on a white New Orleans stage. His stuff was copied by George Nichols, who took up blackface after a start in plain-old clowning. Yet as often as not, blackface minstrelsy tethered black people and black life to white musical structures, like the polka, which was having a moment in 1848. The mixing was already well underway: Europe plus slavery plus the circus, times harmony, comedy and drama, equals Americana.
And the muses for so many of the songs were enslaved Americans, people the songwriters had never met, whose enslavement they rarely opposed and instead sentimentalized. Foster’s minstrel-show staple “Old Uncle Ned,” for instance, warmly if disrespectfully eulogizes the enslaved the way you might a salaried worker or an uncle:
Den lay down de shubble and de hoe,
Hang up de fiddle and de bow:
No more hard work for poor Old Ned —
He’s gone whar de good Niggas go,
No more hard work for poor Old Ned —
He’s gone whar de good Niggas go.
Such an affectionate showcase for poor old (enslaved, soon-to-be-dead) Uncle Ned was as essential as “air,” in the white critic Bayard Taylor’s 1850 assessment; songs like this were the “true expressions of the more popular side of the national character,” a force that follows “the American in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving Day.” He’s not wrong. Minstrelsy’s peak stretched from the 1840s to the 1870s, years when the country was as its most violently and legislatively ambivalent about slavery and Negroes; years that included the Civil War and Reconstruction, the ferocious rhetorical ascent of Frederick Douglass, John Brown’s botched instigation of a black insurrection at Harpers Ferry and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Minstrelsy’s ascent also coincided with the publication, in 1852, of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a polarizing landmark that minstrels adapted for the stage, arguing for and, in simply remaining faithful to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, against slavery. These adaptations, known as U.T.C.s, took over the art form until the end of the Civil War. Perhaps minstrelsy’s popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slavery’s fun house.
What blackface minstrelsy gave the country during this period was an entertainment of skill, ribaldry and polemics. But it also lent racism a stage upon which existential fear could become jubilation, contempt could become fantasy. Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.
Ma Rainey, an early blues singer who performed in black minstrel shows, with her band. Redferns via Getty Images
But where did this leave a black performer? If blackface was the country’s cultural juggernaut, who would pay Negroes money to perform as themselves? When they were hired, it was only in a pinch. Once, P.T. Barnum needed a replacement for John Diamond, his star white minstrel. In a New York City dance hall, Barnum found a boy, who, it was reported at the time, could outdo Diamond (and Diamond was good). The boy, of course, was genuinely black. And his being actually black would have rendered him an outrageous blight on a white consumer’s narrow presumptions. As Thomas Low Nichols would write in his 1864 compendium, “Forty Years of American Life,” “There was not an audience in America that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” So Barnum “greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ ” This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnum’s minstrel Pinocchio.
After the Civil War, black performers had taken up minstrelsy, too, corking themselves, for both white and black audiences — with a straight face or a wink, depending on who was looking. Black troupes invented important new dances with blue-ribbon names (the buck-and-wing, the Virginia essence, the stop-time). But these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audience’s expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off. According to Henry T. Sampson’s book, “Blacks in Blackface,” there were no sets or effects, so the black blackface minstrel show was “a developer of ability because the artist was placed on his own.” How’s that for being twice as good? Yet that no-frills excellence could curdle into an entirely other, utterly degrading double consciousness, one that predates, predicts and probably informs W.E.B. DuBois’s more self-consciously dignified rendering.
American popular culture was doomed to cycles not only of questioned ownership, challenged authenticity, dubious propriety and legitimate cultural self-preservation but also to the prison of black respectability, which, with brutal irony, could itself entail a kind of appropriation. It meant comportment in a manner that seemed less black and more white. It meant the appearance of refinement and polish. It meant the cognitive dissonance of, say, Nat King Cole’s being very black and sounding — to white America, anyway, with his frictionless baritone and diction as crisp as a hospital corner — suitably white. He was perfect for radio, yet when he got a TV show of his own, it was abruptly canceled, his brown skin being too much for even the black and white of a 1955 television set. There was, perhaps, not a white audience in America, particularly in the South, that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the majestic singing of a real Negro.
The modern conundrum of the black performer’s seeming respectable, among black people, began, in part, as a problem of white blackface minstrels’ disrespectful blackness. Frederick Douglass wrote that they were “the filthy scum of white society.” It’s that scum that’s given us pause over everybody from Bert Williams and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson to Flavor Flav and Kanye West. Is their blackness an act? Is the act under white control? Just this year, Harold E. Doley Jr., an affluent black Republican in his 70s, was quoted in The Times lamenting West and his alignment with Donald Trump as a “bad and embarrassing minstrel show” that “served to only drive black people away from the G.O.P.”
Tina Turner performing at a festival in Lake Amador, Calif., on Oct. 4, 1969. Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images
But it’s from that scum that a robust, post-minstrel black American theater sprung as a new, black audience hungered for actual, uncorked black people. Without that scum, I’m not sure we get an event as shatteringly epochal as the reign of Motown Records. Motown was a full-scale integration of Western, classical orchestral ideas (strings, horns, woodwinds) with the instincts of both the black church (rhythm sections, gospel harmonies, hand claps) and juke joint Saturday nights (rhythm sections, guitars, vigor). Pure yet “noisy.” Black men in Armani. Black women in ball gowns. Stables of black writers, producers and musicians. Backup singers solving social equations with geometric choreography. And just in time for the hegemony of the American teenager.
Even now it feels like an assault on the music made a hundred years before it. Motown specialized in love songs. But its stars, those songs and their performance of them were declarations of war on the insults of the past and present. The scratchy piccolo at the start of a Four Tops hit was, in its way, a raised fist. Respectability wasn’t a problem with Motown; respectability was its point. How radically optimistic a feat of antiminstrelsy, for it’s as glamorous a blackness as this country has ever mass-produced and devoured.
The proliferation of black music across the planet — the proliferation, in so many senses, of being black — constitutes a magnificent joke on American racism. It also confirms the attraction that someone like Rice had to that black man grooming the horse. But something about that desire warps and perverts its source, lampoons and cheapens it even in adoration. Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.
And yet doesn’t that attraction make sense? This is the music of a people who have survived, who not only won’t stop but also can’t be stopped. Music by a people whose major innovations — jazz, funk, hip-hop — have been about progress, about the future, about getting as far away from nostalgia as time will allow, music that’s thought deeply about the allure of outer space and robotics, music whose promise and possibility, whose rawness, humor and carnality call out to everybody — to other black people, to kids in working class England and middle-class Indonesia. If freedom’s ringing, who on Earth wouldn’t also want to rock the bell?
In 1845, J.K. Kennard, a critic for the newspaper The Knickerbocker, hyperventilated about the blackening of America. Except he was talking about blackface minstrels doing the blackening. Nonetheless, Kennard could see things for what they were:
“Who are our true rulers? The negro poets, to be sure! Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur, than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt,) printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”
What a panicked clairvoyant! The fear of black culture — or “black culture” — was more than a fear of black people themselves. It was an anxiety over white obsolescence. Kennard’s anxiety over black influence sounds as ambivalent as Lorde’s, when, all the way from her native New Zealand, she tsk-ed rap culture’s extravagance on “Royals,” her hit from 2013, while recognizing, both in the song’s hip-hop production and its appetite for a particular sort of blackness, that maybe she’s too far gone:
Every song’s like gold teeth, Grey Goose, trippin’ in the bathroom
Bloodstains, ball gowns, trashin’ the hotel room
We don’t care, we’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams
But everybody’s like Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your timepiece
Jet planes, islands, tigers on a gold leash
We don’t care, we aren’t caught up in your love affair
Beneath Kennard’s warnings must have lurked an awareness that his white brethren had already fallen under this spell of blackness, that nothing would stop its spread to teenage girls in 21st-century Auckland, that the men who “infest our promenades and our concert halls like a colony of beetles” (as a contemporary of Kennard’s put it) weren’t black people at all but white people just like him — beetles and, eventually, Beatles. Our first most original art form arose from our original sin, and some white people have always been worried that the primacy of black music would be a kind of karmic punishment for that sin. The work has been to free this country from paranoia’s bondage, to truly embrace the amplitude of integration. I don’t know how we’re doing.
Lil Nas X, left, and Billy Ray Cyrus perform in Indio, Calif., in 2019. Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
Last spring, “Old Town Road,” a silly, drowsy ditty by the Atlanta songwriter Lil Nas X, was essentially banished from country radio. Lil Nas sounds black, as does the trap beat he’s droning over. But there’s definitely a twang to him that goes with the opening bars of faint banjo and Lil Nas’s lil’ cowboy fantasy. The song snowballed into a phenomenon. All kinds of people — cops, soldiers, dozens of dapper black promgoers — posted dances to it on YouTube and TikTok. Then a crazy thing happened. It charted — not just on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart, either. In April, it showed up on both its Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and its Hot Country Songs chart. A first. And, for now at least, a last.
The gatekeepers of country radio refused to play the song; they didn’t explain why. Then, Billboard determined that the song failed to “embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” This doesn’t warrant translation, but let’s be thorough, anyway: The song is too black for certain white people.
But by that point it had already captured the nation’s imagination and tapped into the confused thrill of integrated culture. A black kid hadn’t really merged white music with black, he’d just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis. The mixing feels historical. Here, for instance, in the song’s sample of a Nine Inch Nails track is a banjo, the musical spine of the minstrel era. Perhaps Lil Nas was too American. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. White singers recorded pretty tributes in support, and one, Billy Ray Cyrus, performed his on a remix with Lil Nas X himself.
The newer version lays Cyrus’s casual grit alongside Lil Nas’s lackadaisical wonder. It’s been No.1 on Billboard’s all-genre Hot 100 singles chart since April, setting a record. And the bottomless glee over the whole thing makes me laugh, too — not in a surprised, yacht-rock way but as proof of what a fine mess this place is. One person’s sign of progress remains another’s symbol of encroachment. Screw the history. Get off my land.
Four hundred years ago, more than 20 kidnapped Africans arrived in Virginia. They were put to work and put through hell. Twenty became millions, and some of those people found — somehow — deliverance in the power of music. Lil Nas X has descended from those millions and appears to be a believer in deliverance. The verses of his song flirt with Western kitsch, what young black internetters branded, with adorable idiosyncrasy and a deep sense of history, the “yee-haw agenda.” But once the song reaches its chorus (“I’m gonna take my horse to the Old Town Road, and ride til I can’t no more”), I don’t hear a kid in an outfit. I hear a cry of ancestry. He’s a westward-bound refugee; he’s an Exoduster. And Cyrus is down for the ride. Musically, they both know: This land is their land.
Wesley Morris is a staff writer for the magazine, a critic at large for The New York Times and a co-host of the podcast “Still Processing.” He was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
Source photograph of Beyoncé: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images; Holiday: Paul Hoeffler/Redferns, via Getty Images; Turner: Gai Terrell/Redferns, via Getty Images; Richards: Chris Walter/WireImage, via Getty Images; Lamar: Bennett Raglin/Getty Images
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Inside the shell of a modest house in East St. Louis, there is nothing to let a visitor know that one of the nation’s most noted musicians once called it home.
The interior of the one-story structure is skeletal — all bare studs and dust. But when Lauren Parks and Jasper Gery Pearson are inside, they can see the space where a young Miles Davis got his start in life, years before creating the music that would make him one of the biggest names in jazz. They hope to turn the trumpeter’s childhood home into a museum and educational space that will inspire children.
Outside, the site is a hive of activity as contractors remove trash, staple shingles to the roof and plan further cleanup.
Parks and Pearson decided five years ago to turn the structure into a museum and educational center. If all goes as they plan, it will open this fall.
“You know, I don’t see the concrete aspect of this structure,” Parks said. “I see children. I hear music. I see bustling of children and learning and excitement.”
The project began in 2011 but the real work began in earnest less than a month ago. That’s when contractors began gutting the structure in order to strip it down to bare bones before rebuilding it in the style of the 1920s, when Davis lived in East St. Louis. Although the structure is stripped to the studs, Parks and Pearson have great plans for the future.
First, they intend the structure to be a repository of artifacts from Davis’ time in the city, from old shoes to objects that have yet to be determined.
Second, they want the completed museum to preserve anecdotes and stories from Davis’s childhood to which no other museum has access. These stories are meant to highlight how the jazz legend’s spirit and accomplishments remain ingrained in the city.
Third, Parks and Pearson expect to develop educational programs that includes music classes, history lessons, and community stewardship targeted specifically at 6- to 12-year-olds. The project founders are working out a partnership with the local school district to develop concurrent programs in the classroom and at the museum. Once the building is complete, they hope to turn their attention to developing a small outdoor performance space so kids can share what they’ve learned with friends and family.
The project is not just an attempt to preserve Davis’ legacy. It’s also a bid to develop life-long community engagement and civic pride in East St. Louis.
“We’re looking to give our kids a little sense of home. That’s why we called this place HOME, House of Miles East St. Louis,” Pearson said. “So when you think of home you think not only about the front door and the back door but the whole community.”
The demolition and renovation is primarily supported through individual donations and a grant from Lowe’s Home Improvement. Founders are additionally seeking to crowd-source funding online. The project also has partnered with Creative Exchange Lab – Center for Architecture + Design StL to help develop a strategic plan for how best to engage residents and visitors.
Parks and Pearson will be presenting the project 5:30 p.m., Thursday, at Creative Exchange Lab in Grand Center in St. Louis. They’ll be discussing the development of the museum concept and making a case for why it’s integral to developing better infrastructure in East. St. Louis.
What: House of Miles: A Miles Davis Memorial Project
When: 5:30 Thursday, August 11th, 2016
Where: Center for Architecture + Design STL. 3307 Washington Blvd, St. Louis
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Inside the shell of a modest house in East St. Louis, there is nothing to let a visitor know that one of the nation’s most noted musicians once called it home.
The interior of the one-story structure is skeletal — all bare studs and dust. But when Lauren Parks and Jasper Gery Pearson are inside, they can see the space where a young Miles Davis got his start in life, years before creating the music that would make him one of the biggest names in jazz. They hope to turn the trumpeter’s childhood home into a museum and educational space that will inspire children.
Outside, the site is a hive of activity as contractors remove trash, staple shingles to the roof and plan further cleanup.
Parks and Pearson decided five years ago to turn the structure into a museum and educational center. If all goes as they plan, it will open this fall.
“You know, I don’t see the concrete aspect of this structure,” Parks said. “I see children. I hear music. I see bustling of children and learning and excitement.”
The project began in 2011 but the real work began in earnest less than a month ago. That’s when contractors began gutting the structure in order to strip it down to bare bones before rebuilding it in the style of the 1920s, when Davis lived in East St. Louis. Although the structure is stripped to the studs, Parks and Pearson have great plans for the future.
First, they intend the structure to be a repository of artifacts from Davis’ time in the city, from old shoes to objects that have yet to be determined.
Second, they want the completed museum to preserve anecdotes and stories from Davis’s childhood to which no other museum has access. These stories are meant to highlight how the jazz legend’s spirit and accomplishments remain ingrained in the city.
Third, Parks and Pearson expect to develop educational programs that includes music classes, history lessons, and community stewardship targeted specifically at 6- to 12-year-olds. The project founders are working out a partnership with the local school district to develop concurrent programs in the classroom and at the museum. Once the building is complete, they hope to turn their attention to developing a small outdoor performance space so kids can share what they’ve learned with friends and family.
The project is not just an attempt to preserve Davis’ legacy. It’s also a bid to develop life-long community engagement and civic pride in East St. Louis.
“We’re looking to give our kids a little sense of home. That’s why we called this place HOME, House of Miles East St. Louis,” Pearson said. “So when you think of home you think not only about the front door and the back door but the whole community.”
The demolition and renovation is primarily supported through individual donations and a grant from Lowe’s Home Improvement. Founders are additionally seeking to crowd-source funding online. The project also has partnered with Creative Exchange Lab – Center for Architecture + Design StL to help develop a strategic plan for how best to engage residents and visitors.
Parks and Pearson will be presenting the project 5:30 p.m., Thursday, at Creative Exchange Lab in Grand Center in St. Louis. They’ll be discussing the development of the museum concept and making a case for why it’s integral to developing better infrastructure in East. St. Louis.
What: House of Miles: A Miles Davis Memorial Project
When: 5:30 Thursday, August 11th, 2016
Where: Center for Architecture + Design STL. 3307 Washington Blvd, St. Louis
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Jazz Legend Louis Armstrong to Be Subject of Next Film From Imagine Documentaries
Brian Welk
Photo by Jack Bradley, Courtesy of the Louis Armstrong House Museum
Following the release of “Pavarotti,” the next music-centric, documentary film from Imagine Documentaries will focus on the life of jazz legend, singer and trumpeter Louis Armstrong, the company’s president Justin Wilkes announced Monday.
Imagine will partner with the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation to produce the “definitive” documentary on Louis Armstrong, also known as “Satchmo,” “Satch” and “Pops.” The foundation will provide access to hundreds of hours of audio recordings, film footage, photographs, personal diaries and ephemera for use in the film as part of the deal between the two companies.
Production is scheduled to commence on the currently untitled film this fall.
“I find it difficult to imagine a voice more globally recognized than that of Louis Armstrong,” Wilkes said in a statement. “And yet, the story behind the voice; of the music, the man, and the impact he had on our world have never been fully recognized on film. As the song goes, we’re honored to bring him ‘back to where he belongs.’”
“This is a perfect time to remind the world of the power, depth and beauty in Louis Armstrong’s music and story, especially as we celebrate fifty years of Armstrong’s generosity in establishing the Foundation,” Stanley Crouch, president of The Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation said in a statement. “He was born in poverty in one of the roughest neighborhoods in New Orleans, Louisiana. Absorbing the multilayered music and culture of that fascinating place and time, he went on to heal and educate the country and world with the depth of his playing, singing and undying belief in the value of our common humanity. The life and times, trials, tribulations and triumphs of Louis Armstrong still has much to show the world. He is an iconic genius whose rich musical, social and philosophical insights are timeless.”
Armstrong was also an avid biographer, keeping a daily audio diary on reel-to-reel tape from the early 1950s to the day he died in 1971, and the film will chronicle those audio diaries as well.
Armstrong was one of the most influential jazz figures of his day and a chart-topping performer known for his raspy, gravelly voice, scat singing and his offstage charisma and wit, as well as an explosive temper. The New Orleans-born musician made seminal recordings with his mentor Joe “King” Oliver and would even knock The Beatles off the top of the charts in 1964 with a number one record that successfully reached a diverse audience in a racially divided America. He won one Grammy award and was also recognized posthumously with a Grammy for Lifetime Achievement, and he was further inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Within the last year, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Documentaries arm also kicked off work on “DADS,” a film about the recent California wildfires called “Rebuilding Paradise” and a film about NBA All-Star Dwyane Wade. The division recently teamed up with Apple to produce a slate of feature documentaries and docuseries, under an exclusive, first-look deal.
News of the documentary was first reported by Deadline.
14 Music Biopics in the Works After ‘Rocketman,’ From Elvis Presley to Aretha Franklin (Photos)
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Carole King, Boy George, Celine Dion and more are looking for their “Bohemian Rhapsody” moment
With the box office and awards season success of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” music biopics are roaring back. “Rocketman,” based on the life of Elton John, just released this past weekend, and several others are currently in the works, including films about Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Bob Marley, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
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The Night Charlie Parker Soared in South Central L.A.
WILLIAM GOTTLIEB/REDFERNS
In Los Angeles the past is fragile. Yet, for all the fast-forward erasure—razed landmarks, dramatically altered vistas, and, more recently, the hard press (and anguish) of gentrification—the city still holds a cache of rich built history. One shortcut might reveal an inventory of off-the-beaten-path structures that have eluded developers’ desires, or tucked-away jewels lost amid a hodgepodge of architectural styles or on-the-fly renovations.
This has been, in certain respects, the case with 3219 South Central Avenue. For decades, the storefront has been one of those addresses that have nested various small enterprises—in this case, a sewing factory, a café, a butcher, office space, a discount store. Most likely, the proprietors of adjacent businesses and the neighbors who wheeled their metal fold-up shopping carts past it had little idea what one of its most glamorous identities had been.
Growing up in L.A., I learned long ago that to get back to the past, I’d have to rely on the power of story. I leaned hard on people’s stowed-away histories—their stray memories and their internal maps. They were a pathway, like the device in that old Ray Bradbury story “A Sound of Thunder” that allowed you to wander back in time to view history. The caveat: just be careful how you step, or you break the spell, change the future.
My path to this particular past was jazz musician and composer Buddy Collette. I popped up on his porch one afternoon 25 years ago with a notebook, a cassette recorder, and a lot of questions about the old jazz scene that had coalesced, from the 1920s into the mid-1950s, along Central Avenue—“Jazz Street,” as some of the older locals I’d grown up around called it. I was, as a reporter, working on a profile of Buddy, and he was always generous with his time and his stories. His memories were expansive. And because he was a musician, his ear was tuned to sense details of time and place that gave the stories a lush, surround-sound quality.
He had been a major figure in the amalgamation of L.A.’s segregated musicians’ unions, black and white, that integrated under Local 47 in 1953. Buddy was avid about places where musicians came to unify—to play, yes, but also to share and commiserate; how they got the word around about what was going on—musically and politically. Gossip, too. How they all “vibed.” Our initial meeting turned into many. Buddy was set on reanimating Central Avenue for me, its history and eminence, but also its meaning.
COURTESY OF THE TOM & ETHEL BRADLEY CENTER AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE Jack’s attracted greats like Buddy Collette, Duke Ellington, and Dexter Gordon. Radio host Bill Sampson (standing at left microphone) and his band often played at Jack’s for KAGH.
‘RELAXIN’ AT CAMARILLO’
That first afternoon, in 1995, we slipped into my car and from his mid-city home in Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile district wound east, then south on surface streets toward Central. The place he wanted me to see, first stop, was 3219, a place he referred to as “Jack’s Basket.” I drove, he narrated—a sweet, silky solo.
Central seemed wiped clean of any sentimental remnant of that former era, or so I thought. I’d taken myself there many times before, hoping to find some piece of the past: an awning, a staircase, a fading ghost sign. Buddy knew where to look; that was the difference. I had missed the building because I didn’t know what to focus on, but there it was hiding in plain sight: a brick facade—low-key, revealing nothing. This was true especially in neighborhoods that had been “abandoned” or “de-invested” in, as addresses and structures acquired new identities and rode incognito into the future—this was what had happened with Jack’s Basket, formally known as Jack’s Basket Room.
Street and jazz lore has long put forth that Jack’s Basket Room was operated by Jack Johnson the heavyweight champion. Jazz historian Steven Isoardi, who coedited Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles, an extensive collection of vivid and essential oral histories about the scene, has been trying for years to uncover a sturdy link in that story—photos, business licenses, press clippings—but it’s all too tenuous. “That Johnson owned clubs on Central is indisputable, but Jack’s? It’s a bit of a mystery,” he says. City records add another layer of story, and record that in 1944 owner Sam “Jack” Jackson applied for a business permit and he sold the building in 1955. Jack’s had a listing until the early 1950s in The Negro Motorist’s Green Book, a guide pointing black travelers to businesses that were, in the era of Jim Crow laws, safe to visit and patronize.
The Basket Room hosted after-hours jam sessions that flew ’til dawn and was known for its fried-chicken-and-french-fry combos served in wicker baskets. They didn’t have a liquor license, Buddy recalled, but you could BYOB or be pointed a couple of doors down to pick up a package or two. Setups and mixers were provided in-house. As saxophonist Marshal Royal remembered in Central Avenue Sounds, “It wasn’t highly decorated or anything, was sort of the barny type, and had some tables in there. It didn’t have sawdust on the floor, but it was probably the next thing to that.”
If Buddy hadn’t flagged it, I would have once more sailed past that nondescript brick building. He signaled with one long index finger angled toward 33rd Street, suggesting we look for parking there. I found a slot, and then Buddy and I walked up to Central. It’s now been so long that I don’t remember what business was inside—or if there was one. I was filled up with Buddy’s stories about the street: The tiny galaxy of rooms—the Downbeat, Club Alabam, the Last Word, the Gaiety, the Jungle Room. Jack’s special late-Monday-night jam sessions that attracted local and visiting musicians to sit in after their club date at a down-the-street venue or across-town studio recording session was through. Buddy was mapping an L.A. that could just as well have been the moon. These places he described didn’t have much in common with romanticized jazz-life images of shadows and smoke; they were full of sweat, exhaustion, laughter, and the mustiness of a taproom—they hosted people mingling after a long day of work, and the music was always the connector.
“When Duke Ellington came to town, you listened for the word: ‘Well, is he going to be at Jack’s Basket or Ivie’s Chicken Shack?’ The word…was even stronger than the newspapers,” Buddy told me.
In its boom years in the mid-to-late 1940s, Jack’s hosted matinees and free Christmas banquets for “underprivileged children,” and of course, those famous late-night sessions that would run until four or five in the morning. “That was when the Basket Room was really clicking,” Buddy would write in his memoir, Jazz Generations: A Life in American Music and Society. “There was always gonna be a jam session…and everybody would come with their own story.”
The most famous night, hands down, occurred more than 70 years ago, in early 1947, when Charlie Parker was released from Camarillo State Hospital. Word on the street lit up with musicians reporting that he was suited up and headed for Jack’s, alto in tow. Buddy would recall the evening in his memoir: “[Bird] had been quite ill, having problems with drugs and going through other things. There was an announcement that he was going to come and jam.”
Players—local and those just passing through—thirty or forty, Buddy remembered, made sure to be front and center, “wanting to show Parker how they could play. All the tenor and alto players were there—Sonny Criss, Wardell Gray, Dexter Gordon, Gene Phillips, Teddy Edwards, Jay McNeely, and on and on. They all played and Bird sat there and smiled…. Finally, Bird got up there and I don’t think he played more than three or four choruses. But he told a complete story, caught all the nuances, tapered off to the end. Nobody played a note after that. Everybody just packed up their horns and went on home, because it was so complete, so right.”
Seems anyone in the know about the Basket Room lands on that Parker story. Since Buddy’s been gone (now almost 10 years), I still hear versions from musicians who were in the room and those who were far too young to be, the latter stories rendered in such precise detail that it’s like they were there. Jazz guitarist and composer Anthony Wilson, son of the late trumpeter and bandleader Gerald Wilson, recalls his father’s own excitement as he occupied one of those chairs, bearing witness to history. “[Jack’s] was like a sort of hub of the community. Word got out that Charlie Parker was coming. There was a huge crowd inside and outside the place. He said Bird looked strong and healthy and that it was a thrill to see.”
It was some phoenix move as only Parker could have managed: Bird passing through Los Angeles and, if only for a moment, turning his bad luck into gold in front of an astonished audience. Parker would go on to record a series of West Coast sessions for Dial Records in Southern California, including, in February 1947, “Relaxin’ at Camarillo,” his famous nod to that six-month detox stint. And his Dial dates in October and November of 1947 produced selections that are considered by many to be some of “the most lyrical in Parker’s entire output,” according to The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD. “ ‘Bird of Paradise’ is based on the sequence of ‘All The Things You Are,’ with an introduction (Bird and Miles [Davis]) that was to become one of the thumbprints of bebop.” What gives that evening even more of an air of majesty is that it was a night of West Coast magic that doesn’t survive in formal recordings or published photos, but does still live vividly in stories.
COURTESY OF THE TOM & ETHEL BRADLEY CENTER AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE Jack’s Basket Room, open from 1939 to 1951, and its after-hours jam sessions were at the heart of L.A.’s jazz scene.
PLAIN SIGHT
Jack’s was a joint, yes, but it was also a nexus. And arguably, of greater significance than that one incandescent night when Bird soared was the strength of the network the club linked and fostered—the conversations it spurred and the gigs it inspired. At the center was Jack’s, and at the center of Jack’s was music—from the clientele who were players to the radio broadcasts and the famous “cutting” sessions where musicians would display their prowess. Heavy hitters waltzed through: Ellington, Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray, Lucky Thompson, Paul Gonsalves, Art Farmer, Barney Kessel.
After-hours spots like Jack’s were essential one-stop catch-alls—a place to play, to find work, and to go get one’s head straight. By 1948 or so, postwar Los Angeles was changing. “There were a few jobs left and then eventually everything dried up,” bassist David Bryant told Isoardi in Central Avenue Sounds. “Musicians that played jazz also played other kinds of music…. I mean to live they had to. All the commercial, top forty and all that shit. They were good musicians. That’s why they used to have after-hour places so they could come in after they got off their gig. They had to get the shit out of their systems. So they’d go to sessions and play until morning.”
As I stood with Buddy that afternoon looking at a faded brick building, its facade and windows covered with a clutter of signage advertising new businesses, proprietors, and promises, we were both comforted to see that Jack’s was still standing through all the scene changes and neighborhood neglect and urban uprisings and population shifts. A quiet, open secret.
‘NUTHIN BUT A BIRD’
But Bird wouldn’t be the only figure to attempt a resurrection at 3219. Back in 2015, I received a call from Isoardi alerting me that something was stirring at the old Basket Room.
Isoardi had participated in a panel discussion at the South L.A. youth nonprofit A Place Called Home, a lead-up event to the annual Central Avenue Jazz Festival. He was sharing stories about the rich history of the avenue and how much of it had vanished. “Then I mention 3219 South Central and how it was one of the landmarks left…and this young couple sitting in back jumped up. ‘We just bought the place!’ Here was this energetic couple wanting to do something.”
In quick fashion, the couple, a designer and a general contractor, refocused their plan of rehabbing the building as an all-purpose, rentable community gathering space, bent on finding a way to honor the building’s history. They began to research wall and floor treatments in an attempt to re-create the interior, down to the checkerboard floor. They wanted to bring Jack’s back, they told Isoardi, to its full glory.
I wanted a glimpse, just one glimpse, of all this in motion. I met up with Isoardi at the site one afternoon in early 2017 and stood, for the very first time, inside that empty “barny” room, amid a scatter of bricks and dust—just roof and frame—and tried to tune in the echoes of the past. I listened to Isoardi talk and imagined the future: concerts and open houses for neighborhood kids, a garden out back. Once some of the grime had been cleared away, you could make out tracings of Jack’s original signage laced along the top edge of the facade, including a chicken head logo and a lyric fragment from an old jump tune: “Chicken ain’t nuthin but a bird.”
About a year later, Isoardi visited again. “We’d been gathering photos and testimonies and hoping we could open with energy,” he told me recently. “They were talking about a June opening, and by early ’18 they were ready for the build. Everyone’s attitude was: What do you need? How can we help?”
That June opening would never take place. About three months after Isoardi’s visit, I received a jolting two-line email from him. “Jack’s burned down.” Apparently arson. How bad? We didn’t know yet. The years of work spent trying to re-create the spirit of Jack’s, literally brick by brick, were now rubble; the whole of it would be red tagged and ordered to be demolished within two weeks.
If tensions had been festering among any neighbors, the couple knew nothing of them, Isoardi noted. In fact, they’d been building solid goodwill, talking with local musicians and community members about offering the space for meetings and music education. If there was anti-gentrification animosity, they didn’t feel it. But a 2 a.m. fire certainly begins to stoke those fears.
COURTESY OF THE TOM & ETHEL BRADLEY CENTER AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGEThe building that once housed Jack’s was destroyed by a mysterious fire in 2018.
A FULL STORY
A year gone, the clock ticks; the owners still tread water in insurance-payout purgatory, Isoardi tells me. The site where Jack’s once stood is ringed by chain link, just a big dirt lot. What happens next is anybody’s guess.
I’m reminded again of that Bradbury story and how precariously positioned the past is. In that tale about time travel, participants are expressly ordered not to step off the path, not to change the course of history. The most minute alteration can have consequences. Did the restoration activity spark too much attention? Might Jack’s still be here if it was still riding incognito? It’s a question that has weight.
But what I know to be truer about Los Angeles is that even though Jack’s had cheated time, that building, in its weathered and frail condition, most likely wasn’t long for the world. If someone else had gotten to it, it might have ended up transformed into some mixed-use monstrosity, something soulless and disconnected to its past. What’s most tragic to me is that the new owners were trying to do it right, trying to give a gift back to the neighborhood—for residents to use and shape—as well as honoring a legacy. What was in the works, says Isoardi, was much more difficult and painstaking to do. It was from the heart.
But as I know Buddy would say to them: They now have a story—distinct and original—an arc that ties them, and their best intentions, to this place. They are now part of the lore of the avenue. Part of its history. And in time, they will tell their full story, “so complete, so right.”
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Jim Cullum Jr., who brought classic jazz from the River Walk to the world, has died at 77
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1of16Jim Cullum Jr. plays at the 2016 Distinction in the Arts awards ceremony, which honored him.Photo: Kin Man Hui / Staff file photo2of16Jim Cullum Jr. plays in the second line after the the funeral for Pete Fountain, a jazz clarinet legend, in New Orleans, La., on August 17th, 2016.Photo: Bryan Tarnowski /Bryan Tarnowski for the San Antonio Express-News3of16Local jazz great Jim Cullum, playing his familiar brass cornet, joins the rest of his group, The Jim Cullum Jazz Band, in a performance at the Pearl Stable to celebrate their 20th anniversary of their public radio program “Riverwalk Jazz” on Wednesday, October 7, 2009. They were playing in front of an audience during a taping for the show. Photo: KIN MAN HUI /San Antonio Express-News
Jim Cullum Jr., who promoted jazz in San Antonio and San Antonio to the world, died at his Anastacia Place home Sunday of an apparent heart attack. He was 77.
Cullum led his eponymous jazz band for almost 50 years, had an encyclopedic knowledge of his chosen genre and helped spur development of the River Walk by bringing live music to its banks and sending that music to jazz lovers worldwide.
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“He loved this city,” said his longtime companion, Donna Cloud. “He was Mr. San Antonio, and he was always grateful for the love the city gave back to him. He never forgot that and he never took that for granted.”
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What this music revival means for Polish cultural identity
Transcript
Amna Nawaz: Young musicians in Poland are reviving what they are calling the country’s golden era, which was cut short by the Nazi invasion and Second World War.
1930s dances such as the fox-trot and tango are making a comeback, as people of all ages flock to listen to a number of ensembles playing songs that died, along with many of those who used to perform them.
Once known as the Paris of the East, the Polish capital, Warsaw, is pulsating again, as special correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports for our arts and culture series, Canvas.
Malcolm Brabant: In the courtyard of a trendy Warsaw bar, the small dance orchestra is starting to swing, as is its leader, Noam Zylberberg.
Noam Zylberberg: It’s an interesting time. It’s the beginning of pop music. It’s influenced by early jazz. But, at the same time, all the musicians who were working at the time were classically trained musicians.
So, it’s a very classical sound on the one hand. On the other hand, it’s this sound looking for itself, looking for its identity.
Malcolm Brabant: Family identity is at the core of this revival.
Zylberberg moved to Warsaw four years ago after studying conducting in Israel. His grandparents were Polish, but left before the Germans invaded. After their deaths, Zylberberg became curious about their past, and this led to a fascination with the pre-war music scene in Warsaw.
Noam Zylberberg: We don’t play so much concerts. We play for dancing, because we care about also preserving the original meaning of this music. This was music for dancing.
When we play, people enjoy, and this is the reaction that we get. And so we enjoy. It’s just a lot of fun.
We’re honoring the musicians, the composers, the arrangers, band leaders, all of those people who were involved in creating this very unique scene in Warsaw in the 1930s.
Malcolm Brabant: Many of the musicians who made Warsaw such a vibrant place in the 1930s were Jews. Some of them escaped the Holocaust. But others perished inside the Warsaw ghetto or in the death camps, and their music died with them.
The scars of war are plain to see in Warsaw. The Germans flattened the city before retreating from the Soviet Red Army. Arches containing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier are all that remain of a fabulous palace.
The Polish capital was stunning before the war, but the Germans systematically destroyed it in revenge for the Warsaw uprising in 1944. This area, Warsaw Old Town, is anything but. It was meticulously reconstructed after the war.
There’s nothing left of the old Jewish quarter, just a pastiche of a neighborhood street and the museum of the history of Polish Jews, and an original recording of a song called “Abdul Bey.”
And this is jazz band Mlynarski-Masecki version of “Abdul Bey,” a crazy Polish-Jewish-Palestinian fox-trot about a chieftain with four wives and a camel.
Marcin Masecki started learning the piano when he was 3 years old. He’s a multitalented classical and avant-garde pianist.
Jan Emil Mlynarski trained as a drummer, but he also plays the banjo mandolin and sings.
Marcin Masecki: For us, there’s a feeling, definite feeling of something that was developing, brutally cut, you know? The American jazz standards is like a classic — classical music in the States.
For us, it was cut by the war and then covered by 50 years of communism. So, we never had a chance to build a relationship with that epoch. And it seems to me that we’re doing this now.
Jan Emil Mlynarski: My family comes from Warsaw. I heard stories about the old days. The Warsaw scene was huge.
It’s a beautiful, very complex music. I always wanted to be one of these guys from the, you know, black-and-white photograph. This is a very important part of my life. Of course, I’m a traditionalist. I love to wear a tuxedo and just be in that time.
Marcin Masecki: Just how important is history? History creates your identity.
So, for me, it’s a way of discovering our national identity. I’m not trying to sound nationalist. It’s not any better than any other, but it’s just something that we have been denied for quite some time as a nation. So, it’s kind of fascinating that we had this huge thing going on that is kind of forgotten.
We love this kind of music, and we love music from the ’20s and ’30s from every country, actually. But, for us, it has added value of developing our classical reference, you know, our golden era. So, it’s kind of a building some kind of legend almost.
Anna Wypijewska: It’s very enjoyable, very powerful, sensual. I really, really enjoy dancing with my friends. And I like the atmosphere and music and everything around.
Bogdan Popescu: It’s beautiful. It’s the best thing I could do on a Saturday evening, basically. They’re all young, and they’re basically playing music from the ’40s, from the ’30s.
So, that’s a really nice approach to it, basically. I mean, no one would expect a young orchestra to play such music. So, it’s ideal. I love it. It’s really nice.
Malcolm Brabant: This band is well-versed in American swing, but they had to unlearn that style to give this music its unique Polish accent, which heavily features the tango.
Noam Zylberberg: The Polish tango is based on the Argentinean tango. It is a sexy dance. It is a passionate dance, but in a more Central Eastern European manner. This means it’s more polite.
Malcolm Brabant: Despite trying to faithfully reproduce the sound of the ’30s, Zylberberg says he’s not turning back the clock.
Noam Zylberberg: It’s similar in the sense that people come to enjoy this music and dance together with this music. On the other hand, we live in a different world. It’s not going to be the same, and we don’t want it to be the same. We just want to keep this music alive, you know? Just keep it alive.
Malcolm Brabant: For the moment, they’re certainly succeeding.
For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Malcolm Brabant in Warsaw.
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The clarinetist and saxophonist Bob Wilber, left, in an undated photo with Sidney Bechet, his mentor and biggest influence. “I modeled myself after Bechet,” he once said. “He was very complimented by this because he felt time was passing him by.”William Gottlieb/Redferns, via Getty Images
Bob Wilber, a clarinetist and saxophonist who fell in love with swing and early jazz just as those styles were going out of fashion and then became an important carrier of their legacy, died on Sunday in Chipping Campden, England. He was 91.
The death was confirmed by his wife, the British vocalist Pug Horton, his only immediate survivor. He had lived in New York City for most of his life before settling in England.
Mr. Wilber began his professional career while still a teenager as the leader of the Wildcats, one of the first bands devoted to reviving the jazz of the 1920s and ’30s. His love for the old guard soon endeared him to the pioneering New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet, who became his mentor and biggest influence.
“I modeled myself after Bechet,” Mr. Wilber told John S. Wilson of The New York Times in 1980. “He was very complimented by this because he felt time was passing him by. All the talk then was of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. He felt his music would die unless it was passed on to younger players.”
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Over a long apprenticeship, Mr. Wilber developed his own take on Bechet’s style, with its ribbony vibrato and stoutly articulated melodies, first on clarinet and then on soprano saxophone. For much of Mr. Wilber’s career his affiliation with Bechet would be both a calling card and a cross to bear; he would never fully escape his identity as Bechet’s top protégé.
The Wildcats — which sometimes employed a racially integrated lineup, a rarity for the era — recorded a number of well-received sides for the Commodore and Riverside labels, a few of them featuring Bechet as a guest star.
Mr. Wilber soon grew tired of the comparisons to Bechet, and of the murmurs he heard that he would never define his own approach. He studied briefly in the early 1950s with two leading modernists, the pianist Lennie Tristano and the saxophonist Lee Konitz, before being drafted into the Army in 1952. He spent two years playing in a military ensemble in New York while studying with Leon Russianoff, working to expand his identity on the clarinet.
Mr. Wilber performed at a Jazz at Lincoln Center concert in honor of Benny Goodman’s centennial in 2009. He was best known for reviving the traditional jazz of the 1920s and ’30s.Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
After his discharge, Mr. Wilber and some Wildcats alumni formed a band called the Six, which aimed to interpolate recent developments in bebop and West Coast jazz into a traditional framework. The band released one album in 1955. Writing in DownBeat, Nat Hentoff commended it for playing “without regard to restrictions of schools or styles.” But the Six failed to catch on with listeners in either camp, and soon disbanded.
Mr. Wilber said that he had twice been invited to join Louis Armstrong’s touring band but declined because it would have required him to be on the road for a year at a time.
After making an album of Bechet’s music in 1960, he recorded only occasionally in the coming decade, most notably the album “Close as Pages in a Book,” a collaboration with the vocalist Maxine Sullivan.
In his searching, often self-lacerating autobiography, “Music Was Not Enough”(1987, with Derek Webster), Mr. Wilber described feeling underappreciated and at sea in the middle years of his career. His “mild and almost self-apologetic demeanor in a world that demanded dynamism and charisma,” he wrote, “were real and painful problems.”
But in 1968 he became a member of the World’s Greatest Jazz Band, a standard-bearing group devoted to Dixieland and swing, and it reinvigorated him. He began playing the alto saxophone more often — a clear attempt to put some distance between himself and Bechet — and gave himself a makeover, growing a beard and swapping his glasses for contact lenses. “For the first time the world was able to look into my face,” he wrote.
“He took off; he sparkled,” Ms. Horton said in an interview. “He was his own man again.”
Mr. Wilber’s work in the World’s Greatest Jazz Band helped solidify his reputation as a leading preservationist, just as jazz history was becoming a topic of broad academic interest. In the mid-70s he and Kenny Davern — also a clarinetist and soprano saxophonist — formed Soprano Summit, an all-star combo whose fervid renditions of old repertoire made it a favorite among fans of traditional jazz.
After their marriage in 1976, Mr. Wilber and Ms. Horton formed Bechet Legacy, a band devoted to his mentor’s music, which recorded intermittently over the next two decades.
Mr. Wilber became the musical director for George Wein’s New York Jazz Repertory Company in the mid-1970s, and the inaugural director of the Smithsonian Jazz Repertory Ensemble soon after. He won a 1985 Grammy Award for his arrangements of Duke Ellington’s music for the soundtrack of the Francis Ford Coppola film “The Cotton Club.”
Mr. Wilber at the Newport Jazz Festival in 2013. As a youth he slept on a couch in Bechet’s parlor for six months.Alan Nahigian
In his last decades, living primarily in England, he continued to tour and record frequently. From the 1980s to the 2010s he released dozens of albums.
Robert Sage Wilber was born on March 15, 1928, in New York City. His mother, Mary Eliza Wilber, died when he was less than a year old. His father, Allen, a partner in a publishing firm that sold college textbooks, remarried when Bob was 5 and moved the family to suburban Scarsdale, N.Y., north of the city.
Allen Wilber, an amateur pianist, encouraged Bob’s budding love of jazz and took him to Carnegie Hall in 1943 for Duke Ellington’s first concert there.
A shy student, Bob connected with classmates most easily through music, and in high school he started hosting jam sessions at his house. He and his friends sometimes sneaked into New York City to go to jazz clubs.
He spent a semester at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester before dropping out, frustrated with its focus on Western classical music.
“I said, ‘Well, Dad, I just want to hang around and listen to all these great musicians, maybe meet them, maybe get a chance to sit in and play with them,’ ” Mr. Wilber remembered in a 1998 interview with the Jazz Archive at Hamilton College in upstate New York. “He says, ‘Son, you want to spend the rest of your life blowing your lungs out in smoky dives?’ I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what I want to do.’ ”
In 1946, after Bechet refashioned his home in Brooklyn as a music school, Mr. Wilber became his first serious student. He also began sleeping on a couch in Bechet’s parlor and ended up staying for about six months.
Speaking to Whitney Balliett decades later for a profile in The New Yorker, Mr. Wilber remembered Bechet’s teachings.
“He was particular about form: Give the listener the melody first, then play variations on it, then give it to him again. And tell a story every time you play.”
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 10, 2019, Section B, Page 14 of the New York edition with the headline: Bob Wilber, 91, Champion Of Jazz’s Legacy, Is Dead. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Art Neville, a New Orleans Funk Fixture, Is Dead at 81 By Neil Genzlinger
July 23, 2019
Art Neville performing with the Neville Brothers at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 2009. The group, formed in 1977, closed the festival for many years.Cheryl Gerber for The New York Times
Art Neville, the oldest of the Neville Brothers, the seminal New Orleans band, and a fixture of the Louisiana music scene for 65 years, died on Monday at his home in New Orleans. He was 81.
Among those announcing the death was Louisiana’s governor, John Bel Edwards, who said in a statement that Mr. Neville “took the unique sound of New Orleans and played it for the world to enjoy.” Mr. Neville’s brother Aaron, in a post on his Facebook page, called him “the patriarch of the Neville tribe, big chief, a legend from way way back, my first inspiration.”
The cause was not given, but Mr. Neville had experienced a variety of health problems in recent years. He announced his retirement last year.
The Neville Brothers, formed in 1977, consisted of Arthur, Charles, Aaron and Cyril Neville. The group, working a mélange of musical styles and influences, released a string of albums including “Fiyo on the Bayou” (1981) and “Yellow Moon” (1989). Sign up for the Louder Newsletter Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.
Although the band did not generate pop hits, it was known for propulsive live shows. The brothers performed all over the world and for years closed the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, popularly known as Jazz Fest.
Mr. Neville’s influence, though, predated the Neville Brothers and encompassed a series of groups — the best-known was the Meters — and solo recordings.
“With the Hawketts in 1955, he recorded the Carnival perennial ‘Mardi Gras Mambo,’ ” the singer and music historian Billy Vera said by email. “His early 1960s ‘All These Things’ is the all-time Louisiana slow-dance classic. His Meters’ gem, ‘Cissy Strut,’ was on every bar band’s set list in the early ’70s.”
The Meters in the 1970s, from left: the guitarist Leo Nocentelli, the bassist George Porter Jr., the drummer Joseph (Zigaboo) Modeliste and Mr. Neville. “The Meters may not have created New Orleans funk,” the author of the book “Funk” wrote, “but they certainly showed everyone what it was.”Gilles Petard/Redferns, via Getty Images
Arthur Lanon Neville was born on Dec. 17, 1937, in New Orleans to Arthur and Amelia (Landry) Neville. He played the organ, and in a 2000 interview with The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., he recalled first encountering the instrument when his grandmother took him to a church that she cleaned near his home on Valence Street in New Orleans when he was about 3.
“She was on one side of the altar and I was on the other side, and I seen this big old thing and I said, ‘Aha, I want to find out what this is,’ ” he said. “And I turned the little switch and hit one of the low keys. It scared the daylights out of me, but that was the first keyboard I played.”
For him and his brothers, music was always part of the story.
“Ever since we were kids we were doing this,” he said. “Anything we’d get around we’d beat on and we’d sing.”
Mr. Neville was just a teenager when he joined the Hawketts. He sang lead on the group’s version of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” which had recently been recorded by the singer Jody Leviens, and a local disc jockey persuaded the group to record the song themselves. By 1955 it was charting locally; it went on to become a staple of Mardi Gras season in New Orleans.
“He started his solo career out cutting insane rockin’ R&B songs like ‘Cha Dooky-Doo,’ ‘Oooh-Whee Baby,’ ‘Zing Zing’ and ‘What’s Going On,’ ” Ira Padnos, a historian of the region’s music and founder of the festival the Ponderosa Stomp, said by email.
Mr. Neville spent several years in the Navy in the late 1950s. In the early ′60s he began working with the prolific musician, songwriter and producer Allen Toussaint, made soul records like “All These Things” (1962) and formed a six-piece group, the Neville Sounds, which in 1968 morphed into the Meters. Dave Thompson, in his book “Funk” (2001), called the Meters “the ultimate New Orleans funk combo.”
The band became a fixture in New Orleans clubs, backed bigger names like Dr. John (who died last month) and Robert Palmer on records, and toured with Dr. John, the Rolling Stones and others.
The Neville Brothers in 1981; from left, Charles, Aaron, Art and Cyril. Reviewing a performance that year, one critic said the brothers “rewrote the dictionary of soul, uniting funk, doo-wop, reggae and salsa under the banner of New Orleans rhythm and blues.”Paul Natkin/Getty Images
“The Meters may not have created New Orleans funk,” Mr. Thompson wrote, “but they certainly showed everyone what it was.”
The Meters’ songs, often sampled by later generations of musicians, “became the genetic building blocks of hip-hop,” Dr. Padnos said.
The Neville Brothers’ wide-ranging repertoire included politically tinged songs like “My Blood” and “Sister Rosa” (about Rosa Parks) as well as covers of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo” and many more.
The brothers’ live shows were full of energy and innovation. Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, called their 1981 performance at the Savoy in Manhattan “one of the year’s more extraordinary pop events.”
“The four brothers — Art, Charles, Aaron and Cyril — rewrote the dictionary of soul,” Mr. Holden said, “uniting funk, doo-wop, reggae and salsa under the banner of New Orleans rhythm and blues.”
Charles Neville died last year. In addition to his brothers Aaron and Cyril, Mr. Neville’s survivors include his wife, Lorraine Neville; a sister, Athelgra Neville Gabriel; a son, Ian; and two daughters, Arthel and Amelia Neville.
In a 1987 interview with Rolling Stone, Mr. Neville talked about the Neville Brothers’ multifaceted music and drew a comparison to his grandmother’s apple cobbler, made memorable by a secret ingredient.
“You could taste it,” he said, “but you couldn’t identify what it was. That’s what made them apple cobblers so treacherous. That’s the same thing we do with the music.”
A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2019, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Art Neville, Part of Family That ‘Rewrote the Dictionary of Soul,’ Is Dead at 81. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Blue Note Records at 80: Can a Symbol of Jazz’s Past Help Shape Its Future? By Giovanni Russonello
July 26, 2019
The name Blue Note Records calls to mind a once-regnant sound in jazz: the hard-bop of the 1950s and ’60s, with its springy four-beat swing rhythm, its spare-but-lush horn harmonies, its flinty, percussive piano playing. Imagine a smoky room with a horn player blowing fiercely over a strolling standup bass, and you’re hearing the Blue Note sound. Think of a modernist, cobalt-hued album cover, with blocky title text and a photo of a studious young musician hunkered over an instrument, and you’re envisioning the Blue Note look.
It’s been a long time since that fantasy was a reality — for jazz or for Blue Note, which turns 80 this year. Since the 1960s, the label has been through numerous corporate mergers, partial shutdowns and creative readjustments, all while working to keep pace with shifts that have left jazz in a state of diffusion: Much of its forward motion is happening on the fringes, and there’s hardly a mainstream sound to speak of.
“Jazz” today encompasses an entire ocean of post-collegiate musical work: highbrow traditionalism, renegade funk, droning free improvisations. Jazz musicians now have to be improvisers deeply trained in the American tradition, with roots in the blues. Beyond that, almost anything goes. Sign up for the Louder Newsletter Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.
When the musician and producer Don Was took over as Blue Note’s president in 2012, “The mission was to keep the Blue Note aesthetic alive, and carry it forward,” he said in a recent phone interview. So what does that mean, exactly? What is jazz today, when the very notion of genre seems to have gone defunct?
In the past few years, the star pianists Robert Glasper and Jason Moran both declined to renew their contracts after well over a decade on Blue Note. Mr. Glasper is increasingly making music beyond the pale of jazz, while Mr. Moran is concentrating more heavily on multidisciplinary work and releasing his own albums. In a D.I.Y. age, some artists might see diminished benefits in associating with a legacy organization that sports the tagline “The Finest in Jazz Since 1939.”
Robert Glasper’s “Black Radio,” the first full album with his electric band, the Experiment, won the Grammy in 2013 for best R&B album.Peter van Breukelen
But Mr. Was has managed to pull together a roster that has its own uncontainable energy, and a healthy mixed identity.
Last year the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire put out a twisty album called “Origami Harvest” with a string quartet, a rapper and a three-piece jazz band playing together. This spring the vibraphonist Joel Ross led a traditional-looking quintet through 12 fresh, deeply felt original tracks on his debut album, “Kingmaker.” The pianist James Francies released his own fine debut, “Flight,”and the drummer-composer Kendrick Scott continued a strong run with the sonic tapestry of “A Wall Becomes a Bridge.”
“The old ’50s and ’60s Blue Note era is still like the Old Testament for any jazz musician, but it’s grown beyond that,” said Michael Cuscuna, a record producer who worked to enshrine much of the Blue Note catalog in reissues and archival releases.
He spoke highly of the younger generation, saying he was astonished by the expanse of their talents. “They go all the way back to the beginning, and they’re charting the path for tomorrow.” Blue Note’s Beginnings, and ’80s Revival
Blue Note knows that history is its greatest asset. Each time the label hits a major anniversary, it takes a long look back, and repackages the past. This year, Blue Note has been rolling out vinyl reissues from its midcentury glory days; limited-run canvas prints of old album covers; even a commemorative G-Shock watch, with release-party concerts in New York and Los Angeles.
The label started as a passion project. Its first stewards, Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, were German-Jewish immigrants who had fled the Third Reich, and shared a devotion to jazz.
Their early recordings came with a manifesto printed on the cover: Jazz, it said, “is expression and communication, a musical and social manifestation, and Blue Note records are concerned with identifying its impulse, not its sensational and commercial adornments.” From the start, Lion and Wolff were concerned with finding the musicians on jazz’s cutting edge, and letting them tell their stories. Before hard-bop became Blue Note’s stock-in-trade, their releases ranged from swing to Dixieland.
Francis Wolff and Alfred Lion at the Blue Note office in New York, in April 1959.Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images
Lion typically produced the records and Wolff photographed the recording sessions, which, starting in the 1950s, were almost always engineered by Rudy Van Gelder, who ran his own small studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. It was there that Art Blakey recorded the various iterations of his ensemble, the Jazz Messengers; where Herbie Hancock made his first and best albums as a leader; where Wayne Shorter cut some of the most cited recordings in jazz history.
In “Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes,” a thoughtful documentary looking at Blue Note’s first 80 years and its present day, Mr. Shorter recalls that Lion and Wolff were openly hostile to commercial imperatives, but aware of the music’s real worth. “They were hearing this music not only as music,” he says, “but as a valued treasure.”
By the mid-60s, Lion’s deteriorating health led him and Wolff to sell the label to Liberty Records, which was quickly acquired by an insurance company. Jazz’s popularity was on the wane, and under new supervision Blue Note’s output took a turn toward airy funk records. Many have not aged particularly well, though some — like Donald Byrd’s “Black Byrd” and Bobbi Humphrey’s “Blacks and Blues” — caught the spirit of the times, and became hits.
In the late 1970s, the higher-ups at EMI — which had acquired Liberty’s catalog — let Blue Note wind down. Mr. Cuscuna, the record producer, continued to reissue a handful of items from the back catalog, but for the better part of a decade, the label released no new albums.
Finally, in the mid-80s, after coming under the aegis of Capitol Records, Blue Note was revived, and the executive Bruce Lundvall came in to run it. He brought a dedication to jazz, and to the original ideals set out by Lion and Wolff. He took seriously the Young Lions — a group of fresh-faced musicians intent on reviving that classic hard-bop sound, among other parts of jazz’s earlier history — but he also invested in artists uninterested in traditionalism: kitchen-sink conceptualists like Geri Allen, Greg Osby and Jason Moran. It’s possible to hear multiple different histories of jazz in the 1990s, depending on which Blue Note records you pick up.
The trumpeter Terence Blanchard, who joined Blue Note in the ’90s and still records for the label today, straddled the divide. But he felt at home with Lundvall. He’d gotten pressure while on Columbia to make “concept records,” which are easier to market, but at Blue Note, he said, “Bruce wanted me to be me.”
Terence Blanchard said the executive Bruce Lundvall, who helped revive Blue Note in the mid-80s, “wanted me to be me.”Peter Van Breukelen/Redferns, via Getty Images
Peer-to-peer sharing upended the record industry around the turn of the millennium, and Blue Note declined to renew contracts with some of its artists. But then in 2002 came a kind of deliverance: Lundvall took a chance on Norah Jones, an unknown 22-year-old pianist and vocalist who was just getting her feet wet in New York’s jazz and singer-songwriter scenes.
“He wasn’t sure what I was all about, and I wasn’t sure what I was about either,” Ms. Jones recalled recently. “So he gave me some money to make demos.” That material eventually led to “Come Away With Me,” Ms. Jones’s debut, which sold roughly 30 million copies worldwide.
Norah Jones’s blockbuster album, “Come Away With Me,” shifted Blue Note’s profile and trajectory.Amy T. Zielinski/Redferns, via Getty Images
In a 2009 article in The New York Times, Lundvall said that he had begun to reimagine Blue Note’s profile after that release, envisioning that albums in “the adult sophisticated pop area” could now help subsidize the label’s investment in cutting-edge jazz. After Ms. Jones broke, he signed Van Morrison, Al Green and others with broad baby boomer appeal.
But it’s possible to see Ms. Jones’s album — lazing in the breach between folk, jazz, country and soul — as part of a tradition that already existed at Blue Note.
The vocalist Cassandra Wilson had recorded a couple of boldly spartan, creatively devastating albums for Blue Note in the mid-1990s, when she was one of those anti-conservatism dissenters. They directly inspired Ms. Jones. “To me, that was sort of like, ‘Oh yeah, I can totally be on this label and still find myself in other genres,’” Ms. Jones said. “It was very inspirational.”
Ms. Jones, in turn, became an inspiration to Kandace Springs, a young vocalist and pianist who is currently preparing her third full-length album for Blue Note. It will feature a duet with Ms. Jones, both women singing and accompanying each other on electric keyboard.
Kandace Springs, one of Blue Note’s signature younger artists, is preparing her third full-length album for the label.Steve Jennings/WireImage, via Getty Images A Modern Sound for the 21st Century
Roughly 90 percent of the 1,200 or so titles in the Blue Note catalog are now available on Apple Music and Spotify, and about three-fourths of the company’s album revenue last year came from streaming and sales of its vast catalog, according to the label. Just a quarter came from new releases.
But the label reinvests much of that revenue in promoting its new artists — even when the returns tend to be modest. With jazz and experimental music catching a fresh gust of interest from young listeners, Blue Note sees an opportunity to put its cachet to work, and re-establish itself as an influence on the music’s future.
If Mr. Lundvall found his meal ticket in the Starbucks set, Mr. Was is tilting toward a more youthful listenership. He appears to be thinking about the twin popularity of streaming and vinyl among consumers under 50. But he’s also staying the course with older Blue Note fans: the seasoned straight-ahead jazz listeners, and those boomers at the coffeehouse.
Mr. Was’s first signee for Blue Note was Gregory Porter, a baritone whose powerful gentility has made him one of the label’s biggest sellers. A month after Mr. Was’s arrival, Mr. Glasper released “Black Radio,” the first full album with his electric band, the Experiment. It sold the equivalent of more than 300,000 albums, and won the Grammy in 2013 for best R&B album.
To some degree, “Black Radio” illuminated a Blue Note history — running through Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” “Black Byrd,” the acid jazz records Charlie Hunter was making for the label in the 1990s and Madlib’s album of Blue Note remixes, “Shades of Blue,” from 2003 — that could continue into the present. Mr. Was signed the Experiment’s bassist, Derrick Hodge, to his own deal after the success of “Black Radio.” The following year, Blue Note released its first record by José James, a hushed baritone with a D’Angelo-like funk band behind him.
Meanwhile, he spruced up the label’s commitment to its legacy figures: instrumentalists like Dr. Lonnie Smith, Ron Carter and Wayne Shorter, each of whom has a long Blue Note history. They’ve all released albums in the past couple of years, and each one pushed into bold territory: Mr. Shorter’s LP had help from a chamber orchestra, and included an original graphic novel; Mr. Carter’s record was a collaboration with the radical Brooklyn poet and painter Danny Simmons.
Certainly, there are huge portions of the jazz world that Blue Note doesn’t represent. Since the 2000s it has backed away from what small relationship it had to the free-improvising avant-garde. And its roster lacks, for instance, any female instrumentalist who doesn’t also sing. But the label has its ears open to a busy present day, and it seems fair to infer that the boundaries are moving only outward under Mr. Was’s leadership.
The vibraphonist Joel Ross offered 12 fresh, deeply felt original tracks on his debut album, “Kingmaker.”Tom Jamieson for The New York Times “Kingmaker,” the debut album from the 24-year-old vibraphonist Joel Ross, is a record that seems to have both devotees and casual listeners talking. It’s full of tightly layered compositions with crossing rhythms and downhill momentum, and a chatty, hyper-articulate vibe that feels distinctly millennial. You can hear his debt not only to the Blue Note vibraphone tradition — Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson in particular — but to Herbie Hancock’s records on the label in the ’60s, and to Mr. Akinmusire, a 37-year-old trumpeter whose slippery influence is all over Mr. Ross’s writing.
“Kingmaker” is built of beautifully indeterminate music, both historical and hip in the way Roy Hargrove’s was in the 1990s, or Lee Morgan’s in the 1960s. But Mr. Ross is not quick to impose any big narrative thread around his generation.
“A lot of the music from Ambrose’s generation and Glasper, I feel like they were just finding and pushing the limits on how jazz could be fused with other styles,” he said in an interview. “We want to take the fusings and build something that’s still as traditional, and honest to us.”
Mr. Was, for his part, said Blue Note intends to come along for the ride. “I think in the ’60s there was a Blue Note sound, and you could put the needle down and you’d know that it was a Blue Note record before you even knew whose record it was,” he said.
“You can’t do that today, mainly because artists are used to having a little bit more freedom. You can’t tell them who’s going to design their cover for them, you can’t tell them who’s going to mix their record, and you can’t force them to conform to a company sound,” he added. “So they’re all different, and I’m proud of all of them, and they all add up to a total picture.”
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Madison jazz legend and radio host dies after battle with cancer Jamie Perez
Madison jazz legend and radio host dies after battle with cancer
MADISON, Wis. – From 2-5 p.m. on WORT FM,every Wednesday, jazz music listeners could hear Gary Alderman’s voice hosting his Journeys Into Jazz show.
Alderman introduced his shows with a signature “Welcome to Journeys Into Jazz. I’m Gary Alderman, and we’re here every Wednesday from 2 o’ clock until 5.”
Alderman signed off from his show for the last time in May. He died Sunday at age 76 after a battle with a rare form of cancer known as mantel cell lymphoma.
Alderman earned a Ph.D. in microbiology from University of Wisconsin, Madison. He worked professionally in that field for 10 years, before switching over to become a collector, dealer, and DJ of jazz music.
Alderman worked as a volunteer at WORT FM around 1982. In 1984, he took over as a show host.
“He’s been hosting a weekly show ever since then,” said Sybil Augustine, Alderman’s supervisor and WORT FM music director.
Every Wednesday afternoon, Alderman would create a playlist with an emphasis on music performed on the Hammond B3 Organ. He was known to playfully quiz his audience, drawing from his extensive knowledge of jazz music.
Augustine could tell Alderman loved music because every time they spoke about music, “he would always say to me, ‘But does it swing?'”
Alderman’s son, David Alderman, said in 2003, Alderman received the “Jazz Ambassador Award” at the Jazz @ 5 downtown Madison concert series for his dedication to the local promotion of jazz. In 2008, he was selected as the “Jazz Personality of the Year by mayoral proclamation.
Alderman’s passion for jazz was intense, Augustine said, remembering seeing his jazz collection for the first time.
“He’s been collecting jazz for the last 50 years,” Augustine said. “It was a valuable collection, in the millions of dollars.”
Alderman’s family is working to sell his collection of music.
David Alderman said in a statement, “My dad’s energy was infectious. His passion and knowledge of all things jazz was unmatched and will be deeply missed.”
Alderman is survived by his wife of 51 years, Debby Alderman; his son, David Alderman; his daughter, Julie Bartell and her husband Chad Bartell; and his grandsons Nolan Bartell, 11, and Sawyer Bartell, 9.
Alderman’s family is planning a public party to honor his life for some time in September at the Brink Lounge. Details will be published on the Brink Lounge’s website. Get your weather forecast from people who actually live in your community. We update with short, easy-to-use video forecasts you can watch on your phone every day. Download the iOS or Android app here.
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The Inspired Sounds of a Newly Released Dexter Gordon Set | The New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/recommends/listen/the-inspired-sounds-of-a-newly-released-dexter-gordon-set?utm_campaign=aud-dev The Inspired Sounds of a Newly Released Dexter Gordon Set
Dexter Gordon, the seminal tenor saxophonist of the bop movement, remained largely in the same framework of musical ideas from early in his career to his last recordings. Gordon, who was born in 1923, started to record at the age of eighteen, was already a notable solo artist at twenty-two, and continued recording until the nineteen-eighties. (He died in 1990.) Within that wide span of time, there’s relatively little variety in the repertory that he played, the formation of his bands, and his own musical material. But there’s vast divergence from performance to performance. For musicians whose ideas are in perpetual advance, the thrills offered by those ideas often take precedence over the details of specific performances, whereas the essence of Gordon’s artistry, within his self-defined framework, is the spirit of the moment, the sense of inspiration and imagination, of emotional engagement and excitement that the specific event sparks—and the newly released two-disk set “Dexter Gordon Quartet at the Subway Club 1973” (Elemental Music) is among his most inspired recordings.
Gordon, who lived in Europe from 1962 to 1976, performed there far more frequently than he’d have been able to do in the United States at the time, when jazz clubs were closing, and he was recorded far more frequently there than would have been possible here, because record labels were going through a time of contraction as well. As a result, there’s a plethora of live and studio recordings of Gordon in Europe from the late sixties through the mid-seventies, and more keep coming out, at a brisk pace. Most of them are good, some are great, and the new release is one of the finest I’ve heard. It actually features recordings from three different concerts (and venues, and years); the first disk, recorded at a basement club in Cologne, captures a musical miracle on the wing.
From the start, Gordon—playing with a local trio of musicians including two Americans, the pianist Irv Rochlin and the drummer Tony Inzalaco, and the Dutch bassist Henk Haverhoek—is bold, probing, and energized. His first tune is Antônio Carlos Jobim’s bossa-nova classic “Wave”; as the reissue coördinator, Michael Cuscuna (who recorded Gordon throughout his return to the United States, starting in 1976), notes, Gordon sticks close to the melody. But there’s nothing tentative or reticent about the performance; rather, Gordon toys with the melody with a feline ferocity. His tone has a rainbow of overtones and a rough edge of excitement, and, even in stating the theme, he slows it down to savor, flourish, inflect, and shred individual notes, playing far behind Inzalaco’s beat with a sly and sensuous elasticity. Gordon composes his solo—which runs more than eleven minutes—in short, sharply carved phrases that he strings together with a rarefied eloquence, tossing in fragments of the melody for sheer delight; he plays with a majestic sense of contained fury.
A long-heralded master of the ballad, Gordon plays “Didn’t We” with a yearning and breathy vulnerability, returning for a second solo, while restating the theme, in a time-stopping coda of tremulous delicacy. The mildly comedic Western chestnut “On the Trail” is treated like a contrapuntal comedy, with Gordon merely nudging the melody before taking off at a loping tempo, to toss off swirling and jagged phrases and emphatic long notes throughout the spectrum of his horn, offering whistles nearly too high for the human ear and low-note blasts on the Richter scale. The tender tune “Secret Love” is taken at a propulsively fast tempo, and Gordon takes the melody apart before he even states it, buzzing through it energetically with a revel in the very sound of his saxophone (the recording, by an unnamed engineer, catches it avidly); there are moments when individual notes and short bursts could be the apotheosis of saxophone. It’s the sound of an athletic, physical joy in creation. (There’s only one other recording of Gordon that I know of in which he plays with such unleashed sonic splendor: an album featuring a performance from Montreux in 1970.)
The second disk features the final performance from 1973, another uptempo version of a standard, “It’s You or No One,” that starts with a peculiar and wondrous Scotch—like skip and drone before taking off at a fast pace. The fifteen-minute improvisation, though, isn’t quite in the realm of its four predecessors. It feels a bit more habit-bound; its drama and its inspiration aren’t as focussed as on the first disk. The second disk also features two tracks recorded in the Hague, in 1971, and two more, from Stuttgart, in 1965, also with local trios; a highlight is Gordon’s brief but far-reaching second solo on Thelonious Monk’s “ ’Round Midnight,” from the earlier concert. But it’s the first disk that’s among the highlights of Gordon’s recorded legacy.
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In Memoriam: Frank de la Rosa
by Kevin Johnson Monday, July 22nd, 2019
Bassist Frank de la Rosa, who played with a who’s who of jazz artists, has passed away. He was 85 years old.
Born Francisco de la Rosa, he was the son of a bassist but first picked up percussion instruments in Latin night clubs. He served in the US Army from 1953 to 1955. He began playing double bass at the age of 23 and took lessons with renowned bass teacher Frederick Zimmermann. He moved to Las Vegas and became the house bassist for the Sands Hotel from 1960 to 1963, where he performed with the Rat Pack, Paul Anka, Chubby Checker, Barbra Streisand, and Nat King Cole.
“It was like going to college and learning how to play in a big band and orchestras,” he said in a 2013 interview with the Camas-Washougal Post-Record. “That’s when the Mafia ran Vegas. They ran the Strip and the whole town. They took care of the musicians, but you had to watch your p’s and q’s.”
His career then took him to Los Angeles, where he performed with Harry “Sweets” Edison and the Don Ellis Orchestra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. He retired from bass playing in 2003.
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Frank de la Rosa.
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Art Neville, Member of Neville Brothers, Meters, Dies at 81 By The Associated Press
July 22, 2019
NEW ORLEANS — Art Neville, a member of a storied New Orleans musical family who performed with his siblings in The Neville Brothers band and founded the groundbreaking funk group The Meters, died Monday. The artist nicknamed “Poppa Funk” was 81.
Neville’s manager, Kent Sorrell, said Neville died at his home.
“Art ‘Poppa Funk’ Neville passed away peacefully this morning at home with his adoring wife, Lorraine, by his side,” Sorrell said in an email.
The cause of death was not immediately available but Neville had battled a number of health issues including complications from back surgery.
“Louisiana lost an icon today,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said in a news release.
The Neville Brothers spent some of their childhood in the now demolished Calliope housing project in New Orleans and some at a family home in uptown New Orleans. Sign Up for The Daily Newsletter Every Friday, get an exclusive look at how one of the week’s biggest news stories on “The Daily” podcast came together.
In a 2003 interview with Offbeat magazine, Art Neville described going to a Methodist church as a child where he had his first encounter with a keyboard.
“My grandmother used to clean the pulpit. She was in there cleaning it one day and I guess she was babysitting me ’cause I was in there with her. She went to one side and all of a sudden I was on the side where the organ was,” he said. “Something told me to turn it on. I reached up and pressed a bass note and it scared the daylights out of me!”
That experience helped kick off a lifelong career as a keyboardist and vocalist.
The Neville Brothers — Art, Charles, Cyril and Aaron — started singing as kids but then went their separate ways in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1954 Art Neville was in high school when he sang the lead on the Hawketts’ remake of a country song called “Mardi Gras Mambo.”
He told the public radio show “American Routes” how he was recruited by the Hawketts. “I don’t know how they found out where I lived,” he said in the interview. “But they needed a piano player. And they came up to the house and they asked my mother and father could I go.”
More than 60 years later, the song remains a staple of the Carnival season, but that longevity never translated into financial success for Art Neville who received no money for it.
“It made me a big shot around school,” Art said with a laugh during a 1993 interview with The Associated Press.
In the late ’60s, Art Neville was a founding member of The Meters, a pioneering American funk band that also included Cyril Neville, Leo Nocentelli (guitar), George Porter Jr. (bass) and Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste (drums).
The Meters were the house band for Allen Toussaint’s New Orleans soul classics and opened for the Rolling Stones’ tour of the Americas in 1975 and of Europe in 1976.
They also became known for their session work with Paul McCartney, Robert Palmer and Patti LaBelle and recordings with Dr. John.
The Meters broke up in 1977, but members of the band have played together in groups such as the Funky Meters and the Meter Men. And in more recent years The Meters have reunited for various performances and have often been cited as an inspiration for other groups.
Flea, the bass player for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, paid homage to The Meters when he invited members of the group onstage to perform with the Chili Peppers during a 2016 performance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.
“We are their students,” Flea said.
As The Meters were breaking up, The Neville Brothers were coming together. In 1978 they recorded their first Neville Brothers album.
Charles died in 2018.
For years, The Neville Brothers were the closing act at Jazz Fest. After 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the four brothers — like many New Orleanians — were scattered across the country while the city struggled to recover. They returned to anchor the festival in 2007.
“This is how it should be,” Art Neville said during a news conference with festival organizers announcing their return to the annual event. “We’re a part of Jazz Fest.”
He shared in three Grammy awards: with The Neville Brothers for “Healing Chant,” in 1989; with a group of musicians on the Stevie Ray Vaughn tribute “SRV Shuffle in 1996; and with The Meters when they got a lifetime achievement in 2018.
“Art will be deeply missed by many, but remembered for imaginatively bringing New Orleans funk to life,” the Recording Academy, which awards the Grammys, said in a news release.
Neville announced his retirement in December.
___
This corrects previous versions of this story by deleting reference to Aaron Neville having been a member of the Meters.
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Madison street named after jazz musician Richard Davis NBC15 StaffSat 8:14 PM, Jul 20, 2019
The city held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to honor the legendary musician and former UW-Madison professor. Davis’ colleagues spoke about his successful career and his work toward ending racism in the community.
Some of Davis’ former students played music at the event. Wilder Deitz said he owes his career to Davis.
“After graduating with my social work degree, which is what I went into school wanting to do, because of Richard’s teaching, I had the confidence to become a full-time musician, and here I am several years later, succeeding in that career in large part due to Richard,” Deitz said.
Davis was not in attendance, but organizers said he watched a live stream of the event. A plaque will soon be put up on the street to give the public more information about Davis’ life, career and contributions to the community.
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Her husband was an L.A. jazz legend. At 94, she’s becoming one herself
Saxophonist Charles Owens’ quartet was onstage blowing a hard blues as part of the 70th anniversary celebration of Hermosa Beach’s historic Lighthouse Café jazz jam when Gloria Cadena stood up from her table.
She was clutching a manila folder full of papers and approached the stage. She whispered something into Owens’ ear and then moved the tip bucket closer to the front of the stage. That day, June 26, was her 94th birthday, but Cadena wasn’t really at the club to celebrate. She was there to work.
“I was always in the background, calling the musicians and helping my husband book,” said Cadena, the Lighthouse’s resident jazz promoter, between sets but before cake. “He died in 2008 but I’m still doing the same things.” Since Ozzie’s death, she does those tasks alone: booking, promoting and even greeting folks at the door.
She pointed across the room at a black-and-white framed picture on the wall of a young man and woman, Gloria and Ozzie Cadena. “That’s us on our wedding day, 1950.”
Gloria Cadena, 94, the widow of Oscar Cadena, founder of the jazz jam at the Lighthouse Cafe in Hermosa Beach, checks out the scene during a 70-year tribute to the famed live jazz venue. (Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)
For nearly 20 years, the Cadenas were the most influential jazz promoters in the South Bay, booking the Lighthouse on occasion as well as other beachy venues like the now-defunct Sangria.
The summer before the Cadenas got married, the sand-strewn doorway of Hermosa Beach’s Lighthouse first lit up the swinging beacon that would come to define an entire genre of music from San Diego to Seattle. Never mind the fact that Los Angeles had a homegrown jazz scene stretching back before Prohibition or that during World War II, Central Avenue was a 24 -hour neighborhood boasting sessions by neighborhood kids like Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus and Buddy Collette. For much of the world, the West Coast jazz aesthetic was defined when bassist Howard Rumsey hosted his first Sunday jam session in the flailing, brick-lined, sun-dappled bar.
Seventy years later, the phrase “West Coast Jazz” still conjures seagulls and short-sleeves and the Lighthouse still swings on Sunday mornings. But for one hour on a Wednesday, as the sun set beyond the volleyball nets, the bustling Hermosa Beach Pier Plaza lit up with the sounds of contemporary jazz compliments of local pianist David Benoit and his quintet. Several hundred flip-flop-clad dog walkers and huddled tourists filled the fold-out chairs, the brisk un-summer temperatures helping to sell a few souvenir sweatshirts.
Earlier in the day, KKJZ broadcast live from the plaza, celebrating the Lighthouse’s anniversary and Gloria Cadena’s birthday with those who couldn’t find cheap beach parking. While Benoit played to the sand, inside the Lighthouse was a rotating collection of musicians taking the stage to honor the Cadenas and the decades of jazz history held in the narrow club. There were two cakes made to celebrate the milestones. The rear of the Lighthouse Cafe, as seen in the 2016 film “La La Land.” (Dale Robinette / Lionsgate)
In 1949, Rumsey’s jam session was a quick success, attracting musicians like Miles Davis, Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan throughout the next couple decades. The session could sometimes last more than half a day and more than two dozen albums were recorded in the club by the likes of Lee Morgan, Elvin Jones and the Jazz Crusaders. The club became known as the “Jazz Corner of the West,” an inverted Village Vanguard with more sunburns and fewer people falling down the stairs.
By the time Ozzie Cadena arrived in California from Newark, N.J., jazz at the Lighthouse had been running for a quarter century and Rumsey had moved on to his Concerts by the Sea venture. Cadena was not alone when he moved. He brought Gloria and his children, including his restless adolescent son Dez, who would go on to blow out his larynx with the L.A. hardcore band Black Flag before he gave up vocal duties to Henry Rollins, and who’d later become a fixture, as guitarist, with horror-punk group the Misfits. He has since moved back to New Jersey but continues to play including with numerous bands including a group called FLAG composed of past members of Black Flag.
“In the beginning of 1974, Dad just came home one day and said, ‘In June, we are moving to California,’” recalls a raspy Dez Cadena, now 58. “My mom said, ‘Where?’ He had fallen in love with Hermosa Beach. It wasn’t even L.A. It was Hermosa Beach. And the Lighthouse.”
The elder Cadena had been an A&R man for Savoy Records from 1954 to 1959. He arranged sessions for Milt Jackson and Cannonball Adderley at the behest of tyrannical label owner Herman Lubinsky. He went on to produce soul-jazz classics for Prestige Records while running a successful record store in the Garden State. He became enraptured with Hermosa Beach while visiting California for a Fantasy Records session in Berkeley. Old friends from New Jersey like musicians Yusef Lateef and Charles Earland would stay with the Cadenas when they would swing out west on tour. The late Ozzie Cadena, producer and A&R man for Savoy Records and the onetime promoter of the Lighthouse Cafe jazz jam. (Kevin Cody / Easy Reader)
While Ozzie spent his youth on the engineer’s side of the studio, Dez was making musical waves of his own in town. “The parallels between punk rock and jazz music are extremely close. Jazz was looked down upon in my dad’s day. With punk rock, nobody could figure us out. Even the hippies couldn’t figure us out and the city certainly couldn’t figure us out.”
Dez’s generational détente reached its peak in 1980 when Black Flag hosted a gig at the Church, a former Baptist church only blocks away from the Lighthouse that had become a squatters’ home to South Bay punk pioneers like Redd Kross and the Descendants. In a swift embrace of negative press, Black Flag got themselves kicked out of Hermosa Beach for riotous behavior. All the while, Cadena’s parents were wrestling with preserving the musical legacy of the generation before — older, more sharply dressed but no less angry.
It wasn’t until the late 1980s, after the club was bought by its current owner, South Bay restaurateur Paul Hennessy, that the Cadenas started booking at the Lighthouse. Their first act? Woody Herman. For the next 20 years, the Cadenas would go on to protect the legacy of the Lighthouse, hiring top local talent and helping to install a series of plaques in the plaza commemorating visitations from swinging dignitaries like the Jazz Messengers as well as the home team, Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars which featured more than 50 musicians over the years, including Hampton Hawes, Sonny Criss and Max Roach.
To kick off the festivities last month, Ozzie and Gloria were honored by the city of Hermosa Beach. Mayor pro tem Mary Campbell unveiled a plaque entitled “The Promoters,” recognizing their importance to the history of jazz on both coasts. Nearly 100 people gathered for the short ceremony in the middle of the plaza. Patrons fill the tables inside the Lighthouse Cafe on June 26 for a birthday gathering. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
Gloria stood quietly listening to guests like Owens and guitarist Jacques Lesure say a few nice things about her. She seemed more preoccupied with the gig than the family members who had gathered to help celebrate. After a round of “Happy Birthday,” Gloria briefly took the microphone. “Let’s keep the jazz going!” she announced before returning to her table at the front of the stage.
“I get the feeling if Ozzie was around he would say something like, ‘Oh, don’t bother with me. It’s for the musicians,’” says Dez. “That’s what he always said. That’s why he did the things he did. He always fought for the musicians. Hermosa is a beach party town with a lot of young people. The clubs want to make money, sell drinks. That’s why they started booking reggae and rock.”
Of course, it takes more than just a dedication to jazz to keep a nightclub filled at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in a youthful beach town. The calendar at the Lighthouse boasts live-band karaoke and salsa night, but jazz keeps itself in the rotation three days a week.
There are several framed images before the L-shaped hallway that leads to the back parking lot. Ozzie is in one working the club. Gloria is the photo next to him. Beside that is a large, signed movie poster for the Oscar-winning 2016 film “La La Land.” The suburban, hard-bop Technicolor fantasy made good use of the Lighthouse and subsequently breathed life into the club, attracting a few lookie-loos who are less concerned with Duke Ellington’s small ensemble work than they are with where Ryan Gosling may have checked his phone while waiting for film to roll. Either way, business is good and jazz musicians still have a reliable gig in town.
Toward the end of the plaza, there is a mural adorned with flowers and surfers. Howard Rumsey with his upright bass is front and center next to Chet Baker. To their left, above the mermaid, is Black Flag. Onstage and off, the Cadenas ’ legacy is everywhere in Hermosa Beach — from the spike-haired skate rats riding on the pier to the embossed brass plaques proclaiming “ JAZZ.”
“I just wish my husband was here to enjoy this,” said Gloria amid the crowd of familiar faces. “I did it to keep it all going. I mean, what else would I do?”
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Jerry Lawson, Lead Singer of the Persuasions, Is Dead at 75 By Peter Keepnews
July 12, 2019
Jerry Lawson, the original lead singer of the Persuasions, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in 1992. The Persuasions began 30 years earlier as a casual and nameless ensemble on the basketball courts and front stoops of Brooklyn.William E. Sauro/The New York Times
Jerry Lawson, the original lead singer of the Persuasions, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in 1992. The Persuasions began 30 years earlier as a casual and nameless ensemble on the basketball courts and front stoops of Brooklyn.William E. Sauro/The New York Times Jerry Lawson, who for four decades was the lead singer of the Persuasions, a group that revived the art of a cappella singing and attracted a loyal worldwide following, died on Wednesday in Phoenix. He was 75.
His death was confirmed by his wife, Julie. She said that Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare neurological disorder, had compromised Mr. Lawson’s immune system.
Led by Mr. Lawson’s smooth, warm baritone, the Persuasions sang R&B, rock, blues, gospel and pop with no instrumental accompaniment, long after the doo-wop era that their sound evoked and long before the recent “Pitch Perfect” movies brought new attention to a cappella singing.
“Thirty-eight years and we still ain’t got no band, man!” Mr. Lawson said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2000. “That’s the story right there.”
Their many fans included Frank Zappa, who released their first album, “Acappella,” on his Straight label in 1970, and Joni Mitchell, who took them on the road as her opening act in 1979 and sang with them on two tracks of her album “Shadows and Light,” released the next year. They were acknowledged as an influence by Boyz II Men, Take 6, Rockapella and other vocal groups.
The Persuasions recorded some two dozen albums, including tributes to Zappa, the Beatles and the Grateful Dead.
Jerome Eugene Lawson was born on Jan. 23, 1944, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to Estella Braxton Lawson and George Johnson. He grew up in Apopka, Fla., northwest of Orlando, where he began singing at the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church as a child.
The Persuasions began as a casual and nameless ensemble on the basketball courts and front stoops of Brooklyn in 1962. “It was just five guys who used to stand on the corner or go down to the subway station every night and just do this,” Jimmy Hayes, another original member, told The A.P. in 2000.
The other original members were Joseph Russell, Herbert Rhoad and Jayotis Washington. Mr. Washington is the only one still alive.
The eclecticism that was the key to the Persuasions’ appeal is probably also what kept them from reaching pop stardom; the music business found them hard to categorize.
“They’ve never gotten their due,” Rip Rense, who produced some of their records, told The A.P. “In another country like Japan they’d be declared a living treasure.”
The Persuasions in concert in the 1980s. From left: Jayotis Washington, Herbert (Toubo) Rhoad, Joe Russell, Jerry Lawson and Jimmy Hayes.David Gans
The Persuasions in concert in the 1980s. From left: Jayotis Washington, Herbert (Toubo) Rhoad, Joe Russell, Jerry Lawson and Jimmy Hayes.David Gans
Mr. Lawson left the group in 2002. A few years later he joined a much younger group of San Francisco a cappella singers who had based themselves on the Persuasions. As Jerry Lawson and the Talk of the Town, the group released an album in 2007 and appeared on the NBC music competition show “The Sing-Off” in 2011.
He released his first and only solo album, “Just a Mortal Man,” in 2015.
In addition to his wife of 44 years, Julie (Hurwitz) Lawson, Mr. Lawson is survived by his father; two daughters, Yvette and Wanda Lawson; and a grandson.
A documentary about Mr. Lawson, “The Jerry Lawson Story — Just a Mortal Man,” is scheduled to be released this year.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on July 14, 2019, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Jerry Lawson, 75, Baritone Lead Singer Of A Capella Group the Persuasions, Dies. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Nat King Cole’s Early Years Are Getting the Archival Treatment By Giovanni Russonello
July 19, 2019 Nat King Cole made some of the most ubiquitous recordings in American history as a star for Capitol Records in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. But the vast trove of music he recorded in the years before joining Capitol has always remained something of a mystery.
Now Resonance Records is putting a spotlight on those first years of his career with “Hittin’ the Ramp: The Early Years (1936-43),” a boxed set collecting all of the nearly 200 tracks Cole recorded as a budding artist, including some never-before-released material. It will be available on Nov. 1, as a 10-LP set and as a seven-CD set. (The label does not have immediate plans to make the collection available on streaming services.)
This anthology is the first to bring together every record Cole made between his recording debut at age 17 and his signing with Capitol. These recordings are often left off official discographies, which tend to focus almost exclusively on his Capitol years. Many have fallen out of print.
“Hittin’ the Ramp” is the most ambitious undertaking in Resonance’s 10-year history as a small but increasingly mighty jazz label focused on archival releases. “We’ve done important projects before, but this is almost on another level in terms of the amount of material, the research involved, and everything that goes into it,” Zev Feldman, a co-president of Resonance, said in an interview. Sign up for the Louder Newsletter Stay on top of the latest in pop and jazz with reviews, interviews, podcasts and more from The New York Times music critics.
The idea grew out of a conversation Mr. Feldman had with the music historian Will Friedwald, who suggested that Resonance undertake the project to help restore Cole’s early musical history. Mr. Friedwald served as a co-producer for the project and wrote the main essay in the liner notes that will accompany the discs.
Cole’s honeydew baritone was the central focus on his Capitol albums, and it made him into a path-blazing star: In addition to being a perpetual chart-topping musician, he became the first African-American to host a nationally syndicated variety show.
But he had originally intended to simply make his way as a piano player. His career began in Chicago as a stride pianist whose chops instilled awe in local critics and audiences. Some of the tracks on “Hittin’ the Ramp” are instrumentals; over all, the collection puts a rare focus on Cole’s dexterous piano playing.
Some early recordings with his trio also find Cole developing a synergy with the guitarist Oscar Moore, who would record on many of Cole’s most famous Capitol sides. An earlier version of this article described incorrectly Will Friedwald’s role in the Resonance Records project. He is a co-producer of it, not just a consultant.
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Jazz’s Sisterhood: Regina Carter, Renee Rosnes, and More Women Transforming the Genre
July 9, 2019
For a century, jazz was a men’s club. Now a vanguard of women virtuosi—including these 16 standouts—are reshaping this most American of art forms. IN THE KEY OF W Artemis, the all-woman supergroup, features a septet of jazz giants: Allison Miller, Noriko Ueda (with bass), Melissa Aldana, Anat Cohen, Ingrid Jensen, music director Renee Rosnes, and Cécile McLorin Salvant.
Half a century ago, the acclaimed music critic George T. Simon said everything you need to know about sexism in jazz: “Only God can make a tree, and only men can play good jazz.” This gender bias has deep roots. Jazz has always been a boys’ club, a macho art form reserved for brash, fast-fingered men living on the road, in cramped quarters, hustling from gig to gig. And despite playing a pioneering role in integration and the civil rights movement, jazz has had an abysmal record on gender.
The pantheon of jazz giants is overwhelmingly male, comprising musicians who even neophytes know on a first-name basis: Louis and Duke, Dizzy and Miles. Women, meanwhile, have long been celebrated as exceptions. Nothing reinforces this fact better than the Village Vanguard, the legendary club in Manhattan’s West Village, where the photos and posters on the dark-green walls constitute a de facto Jazz Hall of Fame. Amid the dozens of male faces there are exactly seven women: Dorothy Donegan, Dinah Washington, Nina Simone, and Shirley Horn, all pianists and singers; pianist and composer Geri Allen; bebop guitarist Mary Osborne, whose poster hangs in an unenviable spot opposite the ice machine; as well as a poster of experimental guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson, the only woman on this list who is still alive. “I’m so embarrassed to say it, but with female performers at the Vanguard, I barely need two hands to count them,” admits Deborah Gordon, who since 1989 has been comanaging the club (founded by her father, Max, in 1935, and later run by her mother, Lorraine). “It’s so hard being a jazz musician anyway. Why wouldn’t it be harder being a female jazz musician? It’s one more strike.” IN THE GROOVE
Bassist-composer Linda May Han Oh, photographed at the Manderley Bar at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel, Home of Sleep No More. THE FAIRER SAX
Roxy Coss, foreground, founded the Women in Jazz Organization to promote professional female and gender nonbinary jazz musicians. Tia Fuller is the second female solo artist with a Grammy nomination for best jazz instrumental album.
But hold off, just yet, with that sobbing trombone. Every decade or so, a new crop of artists emerge, seemingly on cue, to make their mark on jazz. And today, it is women at the vanguard, shattering what’s left of jazz’s so-called brass ceiling. The musicians pictured here offer proof of the innovation and leadership coming from an unprecedented number of women in the field, a snapshot of the freshest faces of 21st-century jazz: women instrumentalists who have sizzle right now.
Jane Ira Bloom.
Back in the day, women typically found their sweet spot as vocalists: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O’Day, Lena Horne, Betty Carter, and many, many others. (Their descendants, including Diana Krall, Dianne Reeves, and Cassandra Wilson, are among the most revered voices in jazz. And women, in fact, have dominated the recent cabaret revival.) Standing at the mic was long considered the “natural” place for women—they could perform while still being seen as adornments, as objects of romantic or sexual fantasy. “There’s a lot of history that could have happened,” says drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who, in 2014, became the first woman to win the Grammy for best jazz instrumental album. “We don’t know who had the potential to really be great. If Ella could scat any man under the table with her voice, who’s to say she couldn’t have done it on an instrument?”
Pianist-composer Kris Davis photographed at the Manderley Bar at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel, Home of Sleep No More.
Female players have always had it harder than singers, fighting for the spotlight in a nocturnal genre that couldn’t quite reconcile their perceived femininity with the image of them blowing into horns or pounding on drums. “I’m in a book called Trumpet Kings,” says Canadian horn virtuoso Ingrid Jensen. “I’m honored! But why the hell is it called Trumpet Kings? ‘Cause that’s what jazz is: It’s kings. If you look at all these jazz books, you’d never see a cool picture of a woman sweating with a scrunched-up face like mine when I’m playing.”
The tune is changing, in large part, because there are more points of entry for women. Jazz’s primary system of tutelage—the clubs and jam sessions where young people learn the trade by trial and error, under the watchful eye of their elders—is far more inclusive. So, too, are the formal jazz-study hubs for aspiring musicians, such as the Juilliard School, Berklee College of Music, the University of North Texas College of Music, the Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts, and the University of Michigan, which have opened the music to women and other students from all backgrounds. “Discontent at the way women have been treated in jazz has been bubbling up for so long that it’s reached a boiling point and the lid’s popped off,” says music critic David Hajdu. “Some fearless women plowed through with machetes so that another generation can say, ‘This is possible. Maybe there’s a place for me.’ Women as performers, composers, and innovators is the story in jazz today.” THE LUMINARY
Five-time Grammy-winning composer and orchestra leader Maria Schneider received this year’s NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship, the highest honor in American jazz. POWER CHORD
Guitarist-composer Mary Halvorson is known for avant-garde performances that push the edges of 21st-century jazz. CLARION CALL Grammy-winning saxophonist-composer Jane Ira Bloom. One of her most recent inspirations: Emily Dickinson’s poetry. WORLD ON A STRING
Regina Carter, a MacArthur genius fellow, is her generation’s premier jazz violinist. Those assembled here are among the most in-demand jazz musicians in the business. They perform as bandleaders and sidewomen, produce concerts, and teach at leading music schools. Each of them says she would prefer to discuss her music, not her gender. Few have had the benefit of female mentors. And most didn’t realize there was anything exceptional about being a woman in jazz until they got to college or started playing in the real world. “I think I had blinders on,” recalls saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, “because I was so busy trying to prepare myself to be the best professional musician I could be.” All have, at some point, been told a variation of the backhanded compliment “You play good for a girl” or “You play like a man.” They’ve arrived at shows only to have microphones waiting for them (the assumption being that they’re singers) or people asking them where the bass or brass player is (their reply: “You’re looking at her”).
Tia Fuller.
These days women are headlining at concerts and clubs, at New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center, and at festivals from Newport to New Orleans to Chicago, from San Diego to Monterey to Portland. In December, sax standout Tia Fuller became only the second woman in 60 years to land a Grammy nomination for best jazz instrumental album. Last year, women nabbed a record 12 Jazz Journalist Association Jazz Awards (Maria Schneider took home three—for best composer, arranger, and large ensemble), and for the first time ever, the Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism award went to a woman, Patricia Willard. Vocalist Jazzmeia Horn has amassed a shelfful of honors, as has vocalist-bassist-composer Esperanza Spalding (the first jazz performer to land a Grammy for best new artist), who is very consciously shedding her jazz identity, tipping further into art pop and funk.
At the same time, important contemporary jazz artists—by embracing the avant-garde movement and borrowing from hip-hop and other genres—have given their peers a safe space, less tethered to the macho roots that have characterized traditional jazz. “It’s not uncommon for me to play in bands where women outnumber men, or where men and women are equal,” says guitarist Mary Halvorson. “The more women out there doing it, the more it encourages young women to start.”
Drummer-producer-educator Terri Lyne Carrington, photographed at the Manderley Bar at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel, Home of Sleep No More.
Roxy Coss.
A true watershed came last year, when seven of the best jazz musicians in the world—hailing from the U.S., Canada, France, Chile, Israel, and Japan—performed together at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, receiving two standing ovations. Devoted jazz followers in the audience said they couldn’t remember ever witnessing such a scene. That’s because the ensemble, Artemis, was composed entirely of women. As the audience roared, the band members turned toward their music director, pianist Renee Rosnes, and applauded her. Those ovations were as much for Rosnes as for the group she helped mobilize—and the pivotal jazz moment she helped spark. (Artemis, which went on to perform at the fabled Newport Jazz Festival, will play one of the great stages in American music later this year: Carnegie Hall’s Isaac Stern Auditorium.)
Maria Schneider.
“I’m hoping for a future when people don’t look at it like a novelty act,” says Rosnes, “and people will laugh at articles like this and wonder, ‘Can you imagine? They had to write like that about women in jazz?’ ” Imagine that.
Regina Carter. Styled by Nicole Chapoteau. HAIR BY CHELSEA GEHR, LINH NGUYEN, YUKIKO TAJIMA, AND COREY TUTTLE; MAKEUP BY CHELSEA GEHR, MARYGENE, DEANNA MELLUSO, AND RISAKO MATSUSHITA; MANICURES BY ERI HANDA, LIANG, AND ISADORA RIOS; SET DESIGN BY LAUREN BAHR AND J. J. CHAN; FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS. More Great Stories from Vanity Fair
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Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Is Under Threat. This Campaign Aims to Save It
The National Trust is hoping to preserve the North Carolina house where Simone first learned to play piano Brigit Katz (Nancy Pierce, courtesy of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.)
smithsonian.com
July 15, 2019 1:59PM
Nina Simone was born in a small, clapboard house in Tryon, North Carolina, in 1933. It was there that Simone began teaching herself to play piano when she was just three years old, the start of a stunning trajectory that saw her become one of the most iconic, indomitable figures of American music history. But the home at 30 East Livingston Street is now badly in need of preservation.
Previous attempts to restore the home were not successful. Last year, Andrew R. Chow of theNew York Times reported that Kevin McIntyre, a former economic development director, had purchased the property in 2005 and poured $100,000 of his own funds into a preservation project, only to lose the home to “money troubles.” When the home came onto the market in 2017, it seemed likely that it would be demolished—so four African American artists stepped in to rescue it. Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu collectively purchased the property for $95,000. “My feeling when I learned that this house existed was just an incredible urgency to make sure it didn’t go away,” Johnson told Randy Kennedy of the Times in 2017. The following year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation declared the home a “National Treasure,” making it one of less than 100 sites to receive the designation.
Now, the National Trust is asking the public to contribute to efforts to save the modest house, Liz Stinson reports for Curbed. Donations will help the Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, which seeks to preserve sites with important connections to African American history, develop a plan for the home’s preservation, perform urgent stabilization work on the exterior of the house and “identify future uses and protection” for the site.
The house, though dilapidated, is a living relic of Simone’s formative years in Tryon. Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, she showed her prodigious musical talent playing piano accompaniments for her church’s choir. Simone caught the attention of Muriel Mazzanovich, an Englishwoman who had moved to the North Carolina town and who happened to be a classical piano teacher. Mazzanovich gave Simone lessons at her Tryon home and established a fund to support the young pianist’s training.
In 1943, Simone was due to perform at a local library, as a thank you to the patrons who had contributed to the fund. It was the height of the Jim Crow years, and Simone’s parents were told that they would need to give up their seats, at their own daughter’s recital, to white audience members. Simone, 11 years old, refused to play until her mother and father were allowed to return to the front row—a sign of the fervent advocacy that would permeate her later work. Many of Simone’s most enduring songs explore the African American experience and the fight for civil rights. “Mississippi Goddam” grappled with the murder of Medgar Evers by a Klu Klux Klan member and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Alabama. “Four Women” explored archetypes of black womanhood. “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.
The site where Simone lived with her family, fell in love with music and experienced the racial injustices that would spark her zeal for civil rights activism “provides an important lens” to understanding and celebrating her life, explains Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, speaking on the need to preserve the home. “This modest home in Tryon, North Carolina embodies the story of a young black girl who transcended the constraints placed on her in the Jim Crow south, to become the voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” he says. Editor’s note, 7/15/19: This story has been updated to correct the proper spelling of Tryon, North Carolina.
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5 Things I’ve Learned About Producing Jazz Records Al PryorJun 18, 2019
Musical advice from a multiple Grammy Award winner
I’ve been a staff producer and executive at record labels like Sony, Mack Avenue and Gramavision before recently striking out on my own. (Some jazz fans might even remember me as the founding music and program director for the storied jazz station WBGO 88.3 FM). My involvement in the recording arts got its start in commercial broadcasting. After grad school, I landed at a regional public radio station where I was simultaneously exposed to both Dr. Billy Taylor’s “Jazz as America’s classical music” philosophy, and Rudolf Serkin’s chamber music series in Marlboro, VT. And through another happy accident, I spent an afternoon in the Maestro’s presence with him alternately playing and offering his musings on music and life. Those kinds of experiences shaped my approach to producing jazz records. Here’s some of what I’ve learned along the way. 1. Use what works
My approach as a producer is to exploit techniques that have evolved over the years to record and mix both acoustic and electronic instruments. This applies to the aesthetics as well. So whether it’s the concert hall sound of Wilma Cozart and Bob Fine of Mercury Living Presence records, or the extraordinary studio sound achieved by Rudy Van Gelder or Al Schmidt and Tommy LiPuma, it’s about whatever will capture and convey the artist’s vision. 2. P is for preparation and pre-production
Jazz may be an improvisatory art form, but that doesn’t mean everything should be improvised! A little preparation can go a long way. Gather information about repertoire (including scores and/or lead sheets), instrumentation, featured soloists, potential overdubs, and any mics and outboard processing gear that your engineer might require. I also like to get a floor plan of the studio for the engineer to map out the positioning of the artists and mic placement/isolation. And if your budget can withstand it, ask for some set-up time in the studio the night before recording session. 3. Rehearsing new music is essential, playing it on the road is even better
Generations ago, it’s reported that musicians said that the difference between Blue Note Records and every other jazz label was “three days of paid rehearsal.” Most artists don’t have the luxury of going into the studio for an extended period of time to write, rehearse, track and mix their albums. So it’s essential to rehearse the music you plan to record, be it in a rehearsal room, living room or even your garage. That way you can use your limited recording studio time to the full advantage. Even better, intersperse new music in your live shows to gain insight into the construction of your next recording project. When I’m producing an artist, I try to attend as many rehearsals and shows as possible to gain insight and successfully capture the artist’s vision when we enter the studio. 4. Creating a positive atmosphere yields the best results
I still consider the opportunity to be in the recording studio with artists and engineers as an experience to be approached with both joy and reverence. One thing every successful record I’ve ever worked on has in common is an enjoyable studio experience. A positive mood can go a long way towards getting lasting performances that touch the listener’s heart and soul. That kind of positive energy cannot be accomplished by technical execution alone. 5. Don’t wait to “fix it in the mix”
Believe me when I tell you that it is the bane of every engineer’s existence to hear an artist or producer ask for something in the mixing or mastering session that should have been addressed previously. We’ve all gotten used to the power of digital audio workstations and software, but the laws of physics will not be denied. Choosing to ignore them inevitably leads to unhappy results. So fix it before the mix! Al Pryor is three-time Grammy Award winner who has worked with artists like Cécile Mclorin Salvant, Danilo Perez and Harry Belafonte. He runs Al Pryor Productions LLC and can be reached at acpjazz@gmail.com
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Jim’s skill at getting the word out to the right media in the right way at the right time has resulted in my enjoying audiences ranging from a full house to standing room only. I recommend him highly.
Author: Will Friedwald
Jim Eigo laughs as he points out an old Shaun Cassidy album in his store, Original Vinyl Records, in Warwick. According to Eigo, if you like “hardcore funk – Prince meets the Neville Brothers meets the Meters” – check out Sons of Kemet, the British group whose latest album is “Your Queen is a Reptile.” [ELAINE A. RUXTON/TIMES HERALD-RECORD]
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COURTESY OF THE TOM & ETHEL BRADLEY CENTER AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE 
COURTESY OF THE TOM & ETHEL BRADLEY CENTER AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE 
COURTESY OF THE TOM & ETHEL BRADLEY CENTER AT CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE
