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Bob Belden, Jazz Saxophonist, Composer and Historian, Dies at 58 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/arts/music/bob-belden-jazz-saxophonist-and-historian-of-the-music-dies-at-58.html
** Bob Belden, Jazz Saxophonist, Composer and Historian, Dies at 58
————————————————————
Photo
The saxophonist and composer Bob Belden, center, performing with Pete Clagget, on trumpet, and Iranian musicians in Tehran earlier this year. Credit Newsha Tavakolian for The New York Times
Bob Belden, a jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger, bandleader and record producer who was both a historian of the music and a force in moving it forward, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 58.
He died three days after having a heart attack, his sister, Beth Belden Harmstone, said.
Engaged and opinionated, Mr. Belden was part reformist and part conservationist. As a bandleader and record maker, he often looked for ways to connect the jazz tradition to other energies. In February he performed with his group Animation in Tehran, (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/world/rebirth-of-the-cool-american-music-makes-a-return-to-iran.html?_r=0) in a concert brought about in part by the American nonprofit organization Search for Common Ground. It was the first time an American musician had played in Iran since 1979.
Through the 1990s, he worked with a pool of studio musicians to create albums of rearranged songs by Prince, Sting, the Beatles and Carole King, as well as a jazz setting of Puccini’s “Turandot.” He later recorded albums of Miles Davis’s music recast with sitar and tabla (“Miles From India,” nominated for a 2009 Grammy (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) as best contemporary jazz album) and with Andalusian sounds (“Miles Español: New Sketches of Spain,” released in 2011). With Animation, a group he formed in the late 1990s, he combined jazz improvisers, including the trumpeter Tim Hagans, with live replications of electronic drum-and-bass rhythms and a D.J.
Much like Davis, whose work he continued to revisit with various bands and for various ends, Mr. Belden often criticized what he considered misplaced nostalgia within the jazz world. But he was also an authority on the music’s past, working as producer and annotator of many reissues, including Columbia’s long-running series of Davis boxed sets. He received three Grammy Awards for production and liner-note writing for those projects.
James Robert Belden was born on Oct. 31, 1956, in Evanston, Ill. His father, Virgil Ray Belden, an executive with United States Gypsum, was an amateur pianist; his mother, the former Mary Elizabeth Passailaigue, worked in a middle school library and sang in choirs. At an early age, he moved with his family to Goose Creek, S.C., north of Charleston.
In addition to his sister, Mr. Belden is survived by a brother, John.
After mastering several instruments in high school, he entered the University of North Texas College of Music on a scholarship at 16 and majored in composition. He was a member of the One O’Clock Lab Band, the school’s touring jazz ensemble.
After graduating he joined Woody Herman’s big band, and in 1983 he moved to New York, where he composed and arranged music for television as well as taking part in jazz recording sessions before forming his own 12-piece group, with which he made his first record, the suite “Treasure Island,” in 1989.
As an extension of the work he had been doing for Blue Note Records in the 1990s — making his own albums as well as producing and arranging for others’ — Mr. Belden became the label’s head of artists and repertoire in 1997. He quit the job after less than year, citing conflicts between the life of an artist and the life of a record executive. (Mr. Belden died a day after Bruce Lundvall (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-who-revived-blue-note-dies-at-79.html?ref=obituaries) , who had run Blue Note for 25 years.)
He formed a new version of Animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE7JGEzN-qE) in 2011, keeping Mr. Hagans and adding three young musicians from the University of North Texas. A year later the group made the record “Transparent Heart” for the Rare Noise label.
Mr. Belden generally worked fast, but he lingered for years over the music for his 2003 Blue Note album, “Black Dahlia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4RRj2sFcQQ) ,” one of his best-known works. Inspired by the murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947, it was another suite-length work, written for jazz soloists and orchestra and inspired by Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the 1974 movie “Chinatown,” with recurring motifs and chords to connect with particular ideas and characters. It was also an attempt to connect jazz with larger themes and emotions, which Mr. Belden felt he was not hearing enough among younger players.
“Jazz does not reflect what’s going on in society at all,” he told JazzTimes magazine in 2000 (http://jazztimes.com/articles/20210-bob-belden-riddle-me-this) . “Because jazz musicians don’t make music that tells a story. And for the most part it’s because they don’t have a story to tell, except the story of long hours of practicing at Berklee.”
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Bob Belden, Jazz Saxophonist, Composer and Historian, Dies at 58 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/22/arts/music/bob-belden-jazz-saxophonist-and-historian-of-the-music-dies-at-58.html
** Bob Belden, Jazz Saxophonist, Composer and Historian, Dies at 58
————————————————————
Photo
The saxophonist and composer Bob Belden, center, performing with Pete Clagget, on trumpet, and Iranian musicians in Tehran earlier this year. Credit Newsha Tavakolian for The New York Times
Bob Belden, a jazz saxophonist, composer, arranger, bandleader and record producer who was both a historian of the music and a force in moving it forward, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 58.
He died three days after having a heart attack, his sister, Beth Belden Harmstone, said.
Engaged and opinionated, Mr. Belden was part reformist and part conservationist. As a bandleader and record maker, he often looked for ways to connect the jazz tradition to other energies. In February he performed with his group Animation in Tehran, (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/world/rebirth-of-the-cool-american-music-makes-a-return-to-iran.html?_r=0) in a concert brought about in part by the American nonprofit organization Search for Common Ground. It was the first time an American musician had played in Iran since 1979.
Through the 1990s, he worked with a pool of studio musicians to create albums of rearranged songs by Prince, Sting, the Beatles and Carole King, as well as a jazz setting of Puccini’s “Turandot.” He later recorded albums of Miles Davis’s music recast with sitar and tabla (“Miles From India,” nominated for a 2009 Grammy (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) as best contemporary jazz album) and with Andalusian sounds (“Miles Español: New Sketches of Spain,” released in 2011). With Animation, a group he formed in the late 1990s, he combined jazz improvisers, including the trumpeter Tim Hagans, with live replications of electronic drum-and-bass rhythms and a D.J.
Much like Davis, whose work he continued to revisit with various bands and for various ends, Mr. Belden often criticized what he considered misplaced nostalgia within the jazz world. But he was also an authority on the music’s past, working as producer and annotator of many reissues, including Columbia’s long-running series of Davis boxed sets. He received three Grammy Awards for production and liner-note writing for those projects.
James Robert Belden was born on Oct. 31, 1956, in Evanston, Ill. His father, Virgil Ray Belden, an executive with United States Gypsum, was an amateur pianist; his mother, the former Mary Elizabeth Passailaigue, worked in a middle school library and sang in choirs. At an early age, he moved with his family to Goose Creek, S.C., north of Charleston.
In addition to his sister, Mr. Belden is survived by a brother, John.
After mastering several instruments in high school, he entered the University of North Texas College of Music on a scholarship at 16 and majored in composition. He was a member of the One O’Clock Lab Band, the school’s touring jazz ensemble.
After graduating he joined Woody Herman’s big band, and in 1983 he moved to New York, where he composed and arranged music for television as well as taking part in jazz recording sessions before forming his own 12-piece group, with which he made his first record, the suite “Treasure Island,” in 1989.
As an extension of the work he had been doing for Blue Note Records in the 1990s — making his own albums as well as producing and arranging for others’ — Mr. Belden became the label’s head of artists and repertoire in 1997. He quit the job after less than year, citing conflicts between the life of an artist and the life of a record executive. (Mr. Belden died a day after Bruce Lundvall (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-who-revived-blue-note-dies-at-79.html?ref=obituaries) , who had run Blue Note for 25 years.)
He formed a new version of Animation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE7JGEzN-qE) in 2011, keeping Mr. Hagans and adding three young musicians from the University of North Texas. A year later the group made the record “Transparent Heart” for the Rare Noise label.
Mr. Belden generally worked fast, but he lingered for years over the music for his 2003 Blue Note album, “Black Dahlia (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4RRj2sFcQQ) ,” one of his best-known works. Inspired by the murder of Elizabeth Short in Los Angeles in 1947, it was another suite-length work, written for jazz soloists and orchestra and inspired by Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the 1974 movie “Chinatown,” with recurring motifs and chords to connect with particular ideas and characters. It was also an attempt to connect jazz with larger themes and emotions, which Mr. Belden felt he was not hearing enough among younger players.
“Jazz does not reflect what’s going on in society at all,” he told JazzTimes magazine in 2000 (http://jazztimes.com/articles/20210-bob-belden-riddle-me-this) . “Because jazz musicians don’t make music that tells a story. And for the most part it’s because they don’t have a story to tell, except the story of long hours of practicing at Berklee.”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Bruce Lundvall, Who Revived Blue Note, Dies at 79 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-who-revived-blue-note-dies-at-79.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150520
** Bruce Lundvall, Who Revived Blue Note, Dies at 79
————————————————————
** By NATE CHINEN
————————————————————
Bruce Lundvall, the president of the jazz label Blue Note, in 2009. His career in the recording industry encompassed more than half a century. Credit Seth Wenig/Associated Press
Bruce Lundvall, a record executive whose 25-year run at the helm of Blue Note, preceded by top positions at CBS and Elektra, made him one of the most influential figures behind the scenes in recent jazz history, died on Tuesday in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 79.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement released by Blue Note.
Mr. Lundvall’s career in the recording industry encompassed more than half a century, with success across multiple genres. Blue Note had been an important jazz label for decades but had been dormant for years when he revived it under the umbrella of EMI Records in 1984, intent on celebrating its legacy while moving forward.
In “Bruce Lundvall: Playing by Ear,” a biography by Dan Ouellette published by ArtistShare last year, Mr. Lundvall recalled his three-pronged strategy for the label’s revitalization: “We had an important catalog, I could re-sign original Blue Note artists who were still alive and vital, and I had the opportunity to bring in new talent.”
Under his watch, Blue Note became home to pace-setting jazz artists like the singers Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson and Kurt Elling; the saxophonists Joe Lovano and Greg Osby; the guitarists Stanley Jordan, Pat Martino and John Scofield; and the pianists Jacky Terrasson, Jason Moran and Robert Glasper.
He also expanded the label’s stylistic purview, especially after the enormous success of Norah Jones, whose folk-pop-inflected debut album, “Come Away with Me” (2002), sold millions of copies and won eight Grammy Awards. “I don’t know where I would be in the world of music without Bruce as my friend and champion,” Ms. Jones said last year at the Kennedy Center, during a concert celebrating Blue Note’s 75th anniversary (http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/videos/?id=A86662) .
A jazz idealist but also a business-minded pragmatist, Mr. Lundvall shrugged off criticism of Blue Note’s subsequent forays into adult-oriented pop, as seen in albums by the eminent soul singer Al Green and the singer-songwriters Amos Lee and Keren Ann. His business model embraced the idea that success in one area of a label’s roster helped support other areas that were artistically worthy but less commercially viable.
“The hallmark of his tenure is that he proved that you can do the right thing for the music and the musicians and still run a profitable company,” Don Was, who succeeded Mr. Lundvall as Blue Note’s president, said last year.
Bruce Gilbert Lundvall, a grandson of Swedish immigrants, was born on Sept. 13, 1935, in Cliffside Park, N.J. His father, Howard, was a mechanical engineer. His mother, the former Florence McNeille, came from a family of amateur musicians and encouraged his childhood love of jazz.
He is survived by his wife, Kay; three sons, Tor, Kurt and Eric; a brother, Stephen; a sister, Susan Brodie; and two granddaughters.
In his early teenage years Mr. Lundvall cultivated a young aficionado’s tastes, collecting records and circulating the many jazz clubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan. His attempts to become a jazz musician himself (he played saxophone, trumpet and piano) did not go far, but that was no hindrance to his enthusiasm; he held a jazz salon in his family’s attic in Glen Rock, N.J., calling it Duke’s Club. Later, as a student at Bucknell University, he put on concerts, wrote about jazz in the school newspaper and hosted a weekly radio show.
After serving in the Army in the early years of the Cold War — he did counterintelligence work in Stuttgart, Germany — Mr. Lundvall talked his way into an entry-level job at Columbia Records. He remained there for more than 20 years, moving up the ranks to president of Columbia and then of Columbia’s parent company, CBS Records.
While at CBS, he re-signed Miles Davis and many others. Among his additions to the roster were the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, whose signing in 1976 was the beginning of a twilight renaissance; Herbie Hancock, who was just branching into jazz-funk; and Willie Nelson, whose 1975 Columbia debut, “Red Headed Stranger,” became a No. 1 country album and is now considered a modern classic.
Mr. Lundvall left CBS in 1982 to start Elektra Musician, an imprint of Elektra Records, on which he released the first two albums by the singer Bobby McFerrin, along with albums by the Latin star Rubén Blades and an array of jazz acts, including the group Steps Ahead and the trumpeter Woody Shaw.
His move to EMI was contingent not only on the revival of Blue Note but also on the founding of Manhattan Records, an adult-contemporary label. Among his breakout signings to Manhattan was the pop singer-songwriter Richard Marx.
In an industry rife with egos and sharp elbows, Mr. Lundvall generated an unusual amount of good will. He served as chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, as chairman of the Country Music Association and as governor of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He received a Grammy Trustees Award in 2011.
Last year he received a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Foundation of America. He accepted the honor from the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whom he had signed twice: to Columbia in the early 1980s and to Blue Note in the early 2000s.
Shortly after Mr. Lundvall was found to have Parkinson’s disease, he stepped down as president of Blue Note in 2010 and was named chairman emeritus. Last year, after several falls at his home in northern New Jersey, he moved to an assisted-living facility. True to form, he organized a jazz festival (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-creates-sunrise-senior-living-jazz-festival.html) on the grounds, with proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and a lineup featuring artists he supported over the years.
“I’m still in the music business,” he said in a phone interview shortly before the festival. “I love it. It’s like the mob: Once you’re in, you can’t get out.”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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Bruce Lundvall, Who Revived Blue Note, Dies at 79 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-who-revived-blue-note-dies-at-79.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150520
** Bruce Lundvall, Who Revived Blue Note, Dies at 79
————————————————————
** By NATE CHINEN
————————————————————
Bruce Lundvall, the president of the jazz label Blue Note, in 2009. His career in the recording industry encompassed more than half a century. Credit Seth Wenig/Associated Press
Bruce Lundvall, a record executive whose 25-year run at the helm of Blue Note, preceded by top positions at CBS and Elektra, made him one of the most influential figures behind the scenes in recent jazz history, died on Tuesday in Ridgewood, N.J. He was 79.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to a statement released by Blue Note.
Mr. Lundvall’s career in the recording industry encompassed more than half a century, with success across multiple genres. Blue Note had been an important jazz label for decades but had been dormant for years when he revived it under the umbrella of EMI Records in 1984, intent on celebrating its legacy while moving forward.
In “Bruce Lundvall: Playing by Ear,” a biography by Dan Ouellette published by ArtistShare last year, Mr. Lundvall recalled his three-pronged strategy for the label’s revitalization: “We had an important catalog, I could re-sign original Blue Note artists who were still alive and vital, and I had the opportunity to bring in new talent.”
Under his watch, Blue Note became home to pace-setting jazz artists like the singers Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson and Kurt Elling; the saxophonists Joe Lovano and Greg Osby; the guitarists Stanley Jordan, Pat Martino and John Scofield; and the pianists Jacky Terrasson, Jason Moran and Robert Glasper.
He also expanded the label’s stylistic purview, especially after the enormous success of Norah Jones, whose folk-pop-inflected debut album, “Come Away with Me” (2002), sold millions of copies and won eight Grammy Awards. “I don’t know where I would be in the world of music without Bruce as my friend and champion,” Ms. Jones said last year at the Kennedy Center, during a concert celebrating Blue Note’s 75th anniversary (http://www.kennedy-center.org/explorer/videos/?id=A86662) .
A jazz idealist but also a business-minded pragmatist, Mr. Lundvall shrugged off criticism of Blue Note’s subsequent forays into adult-oriented pop, as seen in albums by the eminent soul singer Al Green and the singer-songwriters Amos Lee and Keren Ann. His business model embraced the idea that success in one area of a label’s roster helped support other areas that were artistically worthy but less commercially viable.
“The hallmark of his tenure is that he proved that you can do the right thing for the music and the musicians and still run a profitable company,” Don Was, who succeeded Mr. Lundvall as Blue Note’s president, said last year.
Bruce Gilbert Lundvall, a grandson of Swedish immigrants, was born on Sept. 13, 1935, in Cliffside Park, N.J. His father, Howard, was a mechanical engineer. His mother, the former Florence McNeille, came from a family of amateur musicians and encouraged his childhood love of jazz.
He is survived by his wife, Kay; three sons, Tor, Kurt and Eric; a brother, Stephen; a sister, Susan Brodie; and two granddaughters.
In his early teenage years Mr. Lundvall cultivated a young aficionado’s tastes, collecting records and circulating the many jazz clubs on 52nd Street in Manhattan. His attempts to become a jazz musician himself (he played saxophone, trumpet and piano) did not go far, but that was no hindrance to his enthusiasm; he held a jazz salon in his family’s attic in Glen Rock, N.J., calling it Duke’s Club. Later, as a student at Bucknell University, he put on concerts, wrote about jazz in the school newspaper and hosted a weekly radio show.
After serving in the Army in the early years of the Cold War — he did counterintelligence work in Stuttgart, Germany — Mr. Lundvall talked his way into an entry-level job at Columbia Records. He remained there for more than 20 years, moving up the ranks to president of Columbia and then of Columbia’s parent company, CBS Records.
While at CBS, he re-signed Miles Davis and many others. Among his additions to the roster were the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, whose signing in 1976 was the beginning of a twilight renaissance; Herbie Hancock, who was just branching into jazz-funk; and Willie Nelson, whose 1975 Columbia debut, “Red Headed Stranger,” became a No. 1 country album and is now considered a modern classic.
Mr. Lundvall left CBS in 1982 to start Elektra Musician, an imprint of Elektra Records, on which he released the first two albums by the singer Bobby McFerrin, along with albums by the Latin star Rubén Blades and an array of jazz acts, including the group Steps Ahead and the trumpeter Woody Shaw.
His move to EMI was contingent not only on the revival of Blue Note but also on the founding of Manhattan Records, an adult-contemporary label. Among his breakout signings to Manhattan was the pop singer-songwriter Richard Marx.
In an industry rife with egos and sharp elbows, Mr. Lundvall generated an unusual amount of good will. He served as chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, as chairman of the Country Music Association and as governor of the New York chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He received a Grammy Trustees Award in 2011.
Last year he received a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Foundation of America. He accepted the honor from the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whom he had signed twice: to Columbia in the early 1980s and to Blue Note in the early 2000s.
Shortly after Mr. Lundvall was found to have Parkinson’s disease, he stepped down as president of Blue Note in 2010 and was named chairman emeritus. Last year, after several falls at his home in northern New Jersey, he moved to an assisted-living facility. True to form, he organized a jazz festival (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/arts/music/bruce-lundvall-creates-sunrise-senior-living-jazz-festival.html) on the grounds, with proceeds going to the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and a lineup featuring artists he supported over the years.
“I’m still in the music business,” he said in a phone interview shortly before the festival. “I love it. It’s like the mob: Once you’re in, you can’t get out.”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
RIP Bob Belden
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
RIP Bob Belden. Tom Evered was at the hospital in NYC when Bob transitioned at 1PM EDT today, shortly after having been taken off life support.
James Robert Belden (October 31, 1956 – May 20, 2015) was an American saxophonist, arranger, composer, bandleader and producer.^[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Belden#cite_note-1) He is noted for his Grammy Award winning jazz orchestral recording titled The Black Dahlia (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Black_Dahlia_(musical_composition)&action=edit&redlink=1) .^[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Belden#cite_note-2) He is also a past head of A & R (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_%26_R) for Blue Note Records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Note_Records) .
Belden was born in Evanston, Illinois (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston,_Illinois) , and raised in South Carolina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina) . In his formative years, Belden studied saxophone with Lou Marini Sr., father of famed jazz saxophonist, Lou Marini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Marini) (Buddy Rich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Rich) Big Band, Blood, Sweat and Tears (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_Sweat_%26_Tears) , best known as “Blue Lou” of the Blues Brothers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_Brothers) Band). Belden attended the University of North Texas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_North_Texas) and was a member of the famed One O’Clock Lab Band (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_O%27Clock_Lab_Band) . While at UNT Belden amassed a huge record collection which included every Blue Note album in existence. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of both the musical and the historical aspects of jazz, in addition to
other forms of music such as opera, and contemporary classical music. This has been evident in his work reissuing the music of Miles Davis on Columbia, for which he received Grammy awards. A familiarity with details of recording dates, personnel, and specific takes have proven invaluable in preserving and documenting that period of jazz.
Belden’s works as arranger and composer show an extremely wide ranging versatility, often being compared to the works of Gil Evans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Evans) and Maria Schneider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Schneider_(musician)) . In 2008 he arranged and produced Miles from India (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_from_India) , a world fusion music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fusion_music) record, based on the compositions of Miles Davis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Davis) . In the record he assembled alumni of Davis and musicians of India.^[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Belden#cite_note-3) He continued in this vein with 2011’s Miles Español – New Sketches of Spain (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miles_Espa%C3%B1ol_-_New_Sketches_of_Spain&action=edit&redlink=1) .
In addition to his work as arranger, composer, conductor and A & R director, Belden has contributed numerous liner notes for noted recordings, such as “Lou’s Blues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou%27s_Blues) ” by Lou Marini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Marini) and the Magic City Jazz Orchestra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_City_Jazz_Orchestra) . Some of his liner notes have received Grammy Awards.
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RIP Bob Belden
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
RIP Bob Belden. Tom Evered was at the hospital in NYC when Bob transitioned at 1PM EDT today, shortly after having been taken off life support.
James Robert Belden (October 31, 1956 – May 20, 2015) was an American saxophonist, arranger, composer, bandleader and producer.^[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Belden#cite_note-1) He is noted for his Grammy Award winning jazz orchestral recording titled The Black Dahlia (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Black_Dahlia_(musical_composition)&action=edit&redlink=1) .^[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Belden#cite_note-2) He is also a past head of A & R (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_%26_R) for Blue Note Records (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Note_Records) .
Belden was born in Evanston, Illinois (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evanston,_Illinois) , and raised in South Carolina (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Carolina) . In his formative years, Belden studied saxophone with Lou Marini Sr., father of famed jazz saxophonist, Lou Marini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Marini) (Buddy Rich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Rich) Big Band, Blood, Sweat and Tears (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood,_Sweat_%26_Tears) , best known as “Blue Lou” of the Blues Brothers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_Brothers) Band). Belden attended the University of North Texas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_North_Texas) and was a member of the famed One O’Clock Lab Band (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_O%27Clock_Lab_Band) . While at UNT Belden amassed a huge record collection which included every Blue Note album in existence. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of both the musical and the historical aspects of jazz, in addition to
other forms of music such as opera, and contemporary classical music. This has been evident in his work reissuing the music of Miles Davis on Columbia, for which he received Grammy awards. A familiarity with details of recording dates, personnel, and specific takes have proven invaluable in preserving and documenting that period of jazz.
Belden’s works as arranger and composer show an extremely wide ranging versatility, often being compared to the works of Gil Evans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_Evans) and Maria Schneider (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Schneider_(musician)) . In 2008 he arranged and produced Miles from India (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_from_India) , a world fusion music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_fusion_music) record, based on the compositions of Miles Davis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_Davis) . In the record he assembled alumni of Davis and musicians of India.^[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Belden#cite_note-3) He continued in this vein with 2011’s Miles Español – New Sketches of Spain (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Miles_Espa%C3%B1ol_-_New_Sketches_of_Spain&action=edit&redlink=1) .
In addition to his work as arranger, composer, conductor and A & R director, Belden has contributed numerous liner notes for noted recordings, such as “Lou’s Blues (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou%27s_Blues) ” by Lou Marini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Marini) and the Magic City Jazz Orchestra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_City_Jazz_Orchestra) . Some of his liner notes have received Grammy Awards.
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CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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Zoot Lives! The 1986 Memorial Concert featuring Gerry Mulligan – YouTube
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJsEiVlOqk
Tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims died in March 1985. A year later, a memorial concert was held in his honor. Bret Primack sent along the following video, featuring Gerry Mulligan (bs), Roger Kellaway (p), Bill Crow (b) and Bobby Rosengarden (d). The date of the concert and location aren’t immediately known. The video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJsEiVlOqk&feature=youtu.be) is courtesy of Turk Mauro…
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Zoot Lives! The 1986 Memorial Concert featuring Gerry Mulligan – YouTube
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJsEiVlOqk
Tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims died in March 1985. A year later, a memorial concert was held in his honor. Bret Primack sent along the following video, featuring Gerry Mulligan (bs), Roger Kellaway (p), Bill Crow (b) and Bobby Rosengarden (d). The date of the concert and location aren’t immediately known. The video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuJsEiVlOqk&feature=youtu.be) is courtesy of Turk Mauro…
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Blue Note press release: BRUCE LUNDVALL, LONGTIME BLUE NOTE PRESIDENT, DIES AT 79
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http://www.bluenote.com/news/rip-bruce-lundvall
BRUCE LUNDVALL (SEPTEMBER 13, 1935-MAY 19, 2015)
It’s with great sadness that we announce the passing of beloved music man & longtime President of Blue Note Records, Bruce Lundvall. He was 79 years old. The cause was complications from a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease. Born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1935, Bruce was a lifelong jazz lover whose passion for the music was ignited by Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker & the other beboppers he heard as an underage teenager at clubs along West 52^nd Street in New York City in the 1950s.
A self-described “failed saxophone player,” Bruce took an entry level marketing job at Columbia Records in 1960 and over the following two decades rose to lead the North American division of the label, signing artists including Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Wynton Marsalis & Willie Nelson. After launching the Elektra/Musician label in 1982, he received the offer of a lifetime in 1984 when EMI approached him about reviving Blue Note Records which had been dormant for several years. He jumped at the chance, partnering with producer Michael Cuscuna to bring back the label’s earlier stars like Jimmy Smith, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson & Jackie McLean, and signing new artists including Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Michel Petrucciani, John Scofield, Charlie Hunter and Medeski Martin & Wood.
Under Bruce’s stewardship Blue Note established itself as the most-respected and longest-running jazz label in the world. He presided over a prosperous nearly-30-year period of the label’s history, reaching commercial heights with artists including Bobby McFerrin, Us3, Norah Jones, Al Green and Amos Lee, while recording some of the most important jazz artists of our time including Joe Lovano, Greg Osby, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire, Don Pullen, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Terence Blanchard, Jacky Terrasson, and many others.
“Bruce was a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life human being,” said Don Was, current Blue Note President. “His Joie de Vivre was equaled only by his love for music, impeccable taste and kind heart. He will be sorely missed by all of us who loved and admired him but his spirit will live forever in the music of Blue Note Records.”
Over the course of a music industry career spanning more than 50 years, Bruce was the rare record label executive who was universally loved and trusted. He steadfastly believed in putting artists first, letting the music lead and the commerce follow. Bruce received countless awards including the 2011 GRAMMY Trustees Award and the Jazz Foundation of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as the Chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); Director of the National Association of Recording Artists and Science (NARAS); Director of the T.H. Martell Foundation for Leukemia Research, the industry’s most prestigious charity. He is the namesake of the Montreal Jazz Festival’s Bruce Lundvall Award as well as JazzTimes magazine’s Bruce Lundvall Visionary Award, both of which honor prominent non-musicians who have left a mark on the world of jazz. Bruce’s authorized biography, Playing By Ear by author Dan Ouellette, was released last year.
As a testament to Bruce’s unbreakable spirit, just last year in August 2014 as he struggled against the effects of Parkinson’s, Bruce organized a jazz festival at his assisted-living facility in New Jersey that featured Jones, Reeves, Ravi Coltrane, Chucho Valdes, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes and others as a benefit for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
Bruce is survived by his wife Kay; three sons: Tor, Kurt and his wife Blythe, and Eric and his wife Johanna; as well as two grandchildren: Rayna and Kerstin. A private family service will be followed by a forthcoming public service, details will be announced shortly. In lieu of flowers, Bruce’s family requests that a donation be made to the Michael J. Fox Foundation (https://www.michaeljfox.org/) .
For more information please contact Cem Kurosman at Blue Note Records
(p) 212.786.8634 (tel:212.786.8634) (e) cem.kurosman@umusic.com (mailto:cem.kurosman@umusic.com)
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Blue Note press release: BRUCE LUNDVALL, LONGTIME BLUE NOTE PRESIDENT, DIES AT 79
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.bluenote.com/news/rip-bruce-lundvall
BRUCE LUNDVALL (SEPTEMBER 13, 1935-MAY 19, 2015)
It’s with great sadness that we announce the passing of beloved music man & longtime President of Blue Note Records, Bruce Lundvall. He was 79 years old. The cause was complications from a prolonged battle with Parkinson’s disease. Born in Englewood, New Jersey in 1935, Bruce was a lifelong jazz lover whose passion for the music was ignited by Clifford Brown, Charlie Parker & the other beboppers he heard as an underage teenager at clubs along West 52^nd Street in New York City in the 1950s.
A self-described “failed saxophone player,” Bruce took an entry level marketing job at Columbia Records in 1960 and over the following two decades rose to lead the North American division of the label, signing artists including Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, Stan Getz, Wynton Marsalis & Willie Nelson. After launching the Elektra/Musician label in 1982, he received the offer of a lifetime in 1984 when EMI approached him about reviving Blue Note Records which had been dormant for several years. He jumped at the chance, partnering with producer Michael Cuscuna to bring back the label’s earlier stars like Jimmy Smith, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson & Jackie McLean, and signing new artists including Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Michel Petrucciani, John Scofield, Charlie Hunter and Medeski Martin & Wood.
Under Bruce’s stewardship Blue Note established itself as the most-respected and longest-running jazz label in the world. He presided over a prosperous nearly-30-year period of the label’s history, reaching commercial heights with artists including Bobby McFerrin, Us3, Norah Jones, Al Green and Amos Lee, while recording some of the most important jazz artists of our time including Joe Lovano, Greg Osby, Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Ambrose Akinmusire, Don Pullen, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Terence Blanchard, Jacky Terrasson, and many others.
“Bruce was a one-of-a-kind, larger-than-life human being,” said Don Was, current Blue Note President. “His Joie de Vivre was equaled only by his love for music, impeccable taste and kind heart. He will be sorely missed by all of us who loved and admired him but his spirit will live forever in the music of Blue Note Records.”
Over the course of a music industry career spanning more than 50 years, Bruce was the rare record label executive who was universally loved and trusted. He steadfastly believed in putting artists first, letting the music lead and the commerce follow. Bruce received countless awards including the 2011 GRAMMY Trustees Award and the Jazz Foundation of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as the Chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA); Director of the National Association of Recording Artists and Science (NARAS); Director of the T.H. Martell Foundation for Leukemia Research, the industry’s most prestigious charity. He is the namesake of the Montreal Jazz Festival’s Bruce Lundvall Award as well as JazzTimes magazine’s Bruce Lundvall Visionary Award, both of which honor prominent non-musicians who have left a mark on the world of jazz. Bruce’s authorized biography, Playing By Ear by author Dan Ouellette, was released last year.
As a testament to Bruce’s unbreakable spirit, just last year in August 2014 as he struggled against the effects of Parkinson’s, Bruce organized a jazz festival at his assisted-living facility in New Jersey that featured Jones, Reeves, Ravi Coltrane, Chucho Valdes, Bill Charlap, Renee Rosnes and others as a benefit for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research.
Bruce is survived by his wife Kay; three sons: Tor, Kurt and his wife Blythe, and Eric and his wife Johanna; as well as two grandchildren: Rayna and Kerstin. A private family service will be followed by a forthcoming public service, details will be announced shortly. In lieu of flowers, Bruce’s family requests that a donation be made to the Michael J. Fox Foundation (https://www.michaeljfox.org/) .
For more information please contact Cem Kurosman at Blue Note Records
(p) 212.786.8634 (tel:212.786.8634) (e) cem.kurosman@umusic.com (mailto:cem.kurosman@umusic.com)
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Detroit R&B-jazz singer Ortheia Barnes-Kennerly dead at 70
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** Detroit R&B-jazz singer Ortheia Barnes-Kennerly dead at 70
————————————————————
The Associated PressMay 17, 2015
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/05/17/3637601/detroit-rb-jazz-singer-ortheia.html
DETROIT — Detroit R&B and jazz singer Ortheia Barnes-Kennerly, who opened for Motown greats like Stevie Wonder and later entered the ministry, has died. She was 70.
Barnes-Kennerly died Friday in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she went for a performance, friend and bass player Ralphe Armstrong told the Detroit Free Press. He said she had at least two strokes in recent years and died of heart failure.
Barnes-Kennerly recorded in the 1960s for Detroit’s Mickay Records and Coral Records, a Decca Records label. While never signing with Motown Records, she opened for a number of its stars, including Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight.
If Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul, “Ortheia was the empress,” Armstrong said.
She later turned her career toward speaking and the ministry.
Barnes-Kennerly told the Free Press in 1990 that she never lamented the lack of national success in her music career.
“I love doing my music, but mostly I love making people feel good,” she said. “The music has been good to me. I’ve had furs, cars and diamonds and all that without the million-seller. But it’s more to it than that for me. There’s a higher consciousness that lets me know I’m a part of this universe who has a gift to share, and when I’m sharing that gift, I’m happy.”
A suburban Detroit congresswoman said the world has lost “a gentle and kind spirit.”
“Ortheia Barnes’ love for all people could be felt in her music, in her ministry work, and in her support of all of Detroit,” U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., said in a statement. “Whether you knew her through her music, through her ministry, or through her friendship, you were blessed.”
Her funeral is scheduled for May 26 at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit, Swanson Funeral Home told The Associated Press.
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Detroit R&B-jazz singer Ortheia Barnes-Kennerly dead at 70
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
** Detroit R&B-jazz singer Ortheia Barnes-Kennerly dead at 70
————————————————————
The Associated PressMay 17, 2015
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2015/05/17/3637601/detroit-rb-jazz-singer-ortheia.html
DETROIT — Detroit R&B and jazz singer Ortheia Barnes-Kennerly, who opened for Motown greats like Stevie Wonder and later entered the ministry, has died. She was 70.
Barnes-Kennerly died Friday in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where she went for a performance, friend and bass player Ralphe Armstrong told the Detroit Free Press. He said she had at least two strokes in recent years and died of heart failure.
Barnes-Kennerly recorded in the 1960s for Detroit’s Mickay Records and Coral Records, a Decca Records label. While never signing with Motown Records, she opened for a number of its stars, including Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight.
If Aretha Franklin is the Queen of Soul, “Ortheia was the empress,” Armstrong said.
She later turned her career toward speaking and the ministry.
Barnes-Kennerly told the Free Press in 1990 that she never lamented the lack of national success in her music career.
“I love doing my music, but mostly I love making people feel good,” she said. “The music has been good to me. I’ve had furs, cars and diamonds and all that without the million-seller. But it’s more to it than that for me. There’s a higher consciousness that lets me know I’m a part of this universe who has a gift to share, and when I’m sharing that gift, I’m happy.”
A suburban Detroit congresswoman said the world has lost “a gentle and kind spirit.”
“Ortheia Barnes’ love for all people could be felt in her music, in her ministry work, and in her support of all of Detroit,” U.S. Rep. Brenda Lawrence, D-Mich., said in a statement. “Whether you knew her through her music, through her ministry, or through her friendship, you were blessed.”
Her funeral is scheduled for May 26 at Hartford Memorial Baptist Church in Detroit, Swanson Funeral Home told The Associated Press.
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NJ Jazz Society to celebrate Billy Strayhorn centennial on June 14 – New Jersey Hills: Entertainment
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newjerseyhills.com/entertainment/nj-jazz-society-to-celebrate-billy-strayhorn-centennial-on-june/article_9182ebda-7b10-5009-9de7-35e648ca0b5e.html
** NJ Jazz Society to celebrate Billy Strayhorn centennial on June 14
————————————————————
The New Jersey Jazz Society will celebrate the Billy Strayhorn Centennial on Sunday, June 14, at Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South Street, Morristown.
Billy Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life” when he was just 19 years old. His “Take the A Train” is one of the most recognized tunes of the big band era. Duke Ellington called him “the other half of my heartbeat.”
This November 29 would have been Strayhorn’s 100th birthday, and the New Jersey Jazz Society will celebrate the Billy Strayhorn Centennial with a special concert featuring Michael Hashim’s 15-piece Billy Strayhorn Orchestra at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, June 14, at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.
Alto saxophonist Hashim plays regularly in a trio led by stride pianist Judy Carmichael, but he has frequently performed and recorded music associated with Duke Ellington and, particularly, Billy Strayhorn.
Hashim won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989 in support of “Lotus Blossom,” a CD devoted to Strayhorn’s music, and he was nominated for British Jazz Album of the Year for a second Strayhorn album, “Multicolored Blue,” in 1999.
In the 1980s, Hashim led the Widespread Depression Jazz Orchestra, a traditional band that was very popular in New York. The Village Voice has called him “a saxophonist with a melodic flair and a respect for past conventions.”
The Billy Strayhorn Orchestra’s repertoire contains works Strayhorn wrote for the Ellington Orchestra, including famous pieces such as “Chelsea Bridge” and “Raincheck”; rare, newer versions of hits such as “Take the A Train”; and rarely heard works which Ellington never recorded such as “Swing Dance” and “Cashmere Cutie”.
Among the members of the Strayhorn Orchestra are trombonist Art Baron, saxophonist Bill Easley and baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian. Both Baron and Easley played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra led by Mercer Ellington in the 1970s. Sevian currently tours with the Count Basie Orchestra and was a member of the Mingus Big Band that won a Grammy for “Live at the Jazz Standard” in 2011.
The June 14 concert at Mayo will include an opening act featuring members of the Newark Academy jazz band playing music by Duke Ellington. The Newark Academy jazz band was a finalist in this year’s Essentially Ellington competition sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Tickets for the concert are $20 and $25. To order, visit www.mayoarts.org (http://www.mayoarts.org/) or call (973) 539-8008.
For more information about the New Jersey Jazz Society, visit www.njjs.org (http://www.njjs.org/) .
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
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NJ Jazz Society to celebrate Billy Strayhorn centennial on June 14 – New Jersey Hills: Entertainment
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newjerseyhills.com/entertainment/nj-jazz-society-to-celebrate-billy-strayhorn-centennial-on-june/article_9182ebda-7b10-5009-9de7-35e648ca0b5e.html
** NJ Jazz Society to celebrate Billy Strayhorn centennial on June 14
————————————————————
The New Jersey Jazz Society will celebrate the Billy Strayhorn Centennial on Sunday, June 14, at Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South Street, Morristown.
Billy Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life” when he was just 19 years old. His “Take the A Train” is one of the most recognized tunes of the big band era. Duke Ellington called him “the other half of my heartbeat.”
This November 29 would have been Strayhorn’s 100th birthday, and the New Jersey Jazz Society will celebrate the Billy Strayhorn Centennial with a special concert featuring Michael Hashim’s 15-piece Billy Strayhorn Orchestra at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, June 14, at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.
Alto saxophonist Hashim plays regularly in a trio led by stride pianist Judy Carmichael, but he has frequently performed and recorded music associated with Duke Ellington and, particularly, Billy Strayhorn.
Hashim won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989 in support of “Lotus Blossom,” a CD devoted to Strayhorn’s music, and he was nominated for British Jazz Album of the Year for a second Strayhorn album, “Multicolored Blue,” in 1999.
In the 1980s, Hashim led the Widespread Depression Jazz Orchestra, a traditional band that was very popular in New York. The Village Voice has called him “a saxophonist with a melodic flair and a respect for past conventions.”
The Billy Strayhorn Orchestra’s repertoire contains works Strayhorn wrote for the Ellington Orchestra, including famous pieces such as “Chelsea Bridge” and “Raincheck”; rare, newer versions of hits such as “Take the A Train”; and rarely heard works which Ellington never recorded such as “Swing Dance” and “Cashmere Cutie”.
Among the members of the Strayhorn Orchestra are trombonist Art Baron, saxophonist Bill Easley and baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian. Both Baron and Easley played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra led by Mercer Ellington in the 1970s. Sevian currently tours with the Count Basie Orchestra and was a member of the Mingus Big Band that won a Grammy for “Live at the Jazz Standard” in 2011.
The June 14 concert at Mayo will include an opening act featuring members of the Newark Academy jazz band playing music by Duke Ellington. The Newark Academy jazz band was a finalist in this year’s Essentially Ellington competition sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Tickets for the concert are $20 and $25. To order, visit www.mayoarts.org (http://www.mayoarts.org/) or call (973) 539-8008.
For more information about the New Jersey Jazz Society, visit www.njjs.org (http://www.njjs.org/) .
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=bf13145b00) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=bf13145b00&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
NJ Jazz Society to celebrate Billy Strayhorn centennial on June 14 – New Jersey Hills: Entertainment
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newjerseyhills.com/entertainment/nj-jazz-society-to-celebrate-billy-strayhorn-centennial-on-june/article_9182ebda-7b10-5009-9de7-35e648ca0b5e.html
** NJ Jazz Society to celebrate Billy Strayhorn centennial on June 14
————————————————————
The New Jersey Jazz Society will celebrate the Billy Strayhorn Centennial on Sunday, June 14, at Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South Street, Morristown.
Billy Strayhorn wrote “Lush Life” when he was just 19 years old. His “Take the A Train” is one of the most recognized tunes of the big band era. Duke Ellington called him “the other half of my heartbeat.”
This November 29 would have been Strayhorn’s 100th birthday, and the New Jersey Jazz Society will celebrate the Billy Strayhorn Centennial with a special concert featuring Michael Hashim’s 15-piece Billy Strayhorn Orchestra at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, June 14, at the Mayo Performing Arts Center in Morristown.
Alto saxophonist Hashim plays regularly in a trio led by stride pianist Judy Carmichael, but he has frequently performed and recorded music associated with Duke Ellington and, particularly, Billy Strayhorn.
Hashim won a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1989 in support of “Lotus Blossom,” a CD devoted to Strayhorn’s music, and he was nominated for British Jazz Album of the Year for a second Strayhorn album, “Multicolored Blue,” in 1999.
In the 1980s, Hashim led the Widespread Depression Jazz Orchestra, a traditional band that was very popular in New York. The Village Voice has called him “a saxophonist with a melodic flair and a respect for past conventions.”
The Billy Strayhorn Orchestra’s repertoire contains works Strayhorn wrote for the Ellington Orchestra, including famous pieces such as “Chelsea Bridge” and “Raincheck”; rare, newer versions of hits such as “Take the A Train”; and rarely heard works which Ellington never recorded such as “Swing Dance” and “Cashmere Cutie”.
Among the members of the Strayhorn Orchestra are trombonist Art Baron, saxophonist Bill Easley and baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian. Both Baron and Easley played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra led by Mercer Ellington in the 1970s. Sevian currently tours with the Count Basie Orchestra and was a member of the Mingus Big Band that won a Grammy for “Live at the Jazz Standard” in 2011.
The June 14 concert at Mayo will include an opening act featuring members of the Newark Academy jazz band playing music by Duke Ellington. The Newark Academy jazz band was a finalist in this year’s Essentially Ellington competition sponsored by Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Tickets for the concert are $20 and $25. To order, visit www.mayoarts.org (http://www.mayoarts.org/) or call (973) 539-8008.
For more information about the New Jersey Jazz Society, visit www.njjs.org (http://www.njjs.org/) .
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Jazz on Bones and X-Ray Audio: Chasing the Ghost of Soviet Russia’s Most Dedicated Vinyl Bootlegger | NOISEY
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/soviet-x-ray-audio
** JAZZ ON BONES AND X-RAY AUDIO: CHASING THE GHOST OF SOVIET RUSSIA’S MOST DEDICATED VINYL BOOTLEGGER
————————————————————
Photo courtesy of The X-Ray Audio Project
Imagine living in a world where music is illegal, where simply owning a Beatles record could get you arrested and sent into the wilderness to die. Imagine knowing that, and still buying those records, sharing them with your friends, and spending hours upon hours figuring out how to make your own. Imagine loving music so much that you’re willing to risk your life for a scratchy, two-and-a-half minute recording of “Rock Around the Clock.” Welcome to the Soviet Union in 1950.
During the Stalinist era then up to and after World War II, Soviet Russia was a grim and repressive place. The Communist Party ruled with an iron fist, shielding its citizens from corrosive Western influences like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and of course, rock’n’roll. In the 1950s, it was still nearly impossible for a budding music fan to get their hands on a bonafide jazz or rock’n’roll record. Strict rationing and constant shortages allowed the black market to thrive and supply comrades with both necessary supplies and forbidden pleasures, and thanks to the Party’s Stalinist social realism hangover, “fascist” or “mystic” Western music (especially from the hated Americans and British) were explicitly forbidden. So was anything from Russian-born musicians who happened to be pegged as traitors or dissidents—a blanket designation that encompassed everyone who offended the sensibilities of the state censor, from White Russian emigres to “criminals” who committed
the offense of writing and recording their own music. At that point, musicians were expected to cooperate with the composers union and lyricist’s union to create songs; producing your own was remarkably subversive, and landed several Soviet musicians in the gulag. The gulags themselves had a rich musical tradition (http://in.rbth.com/arts/2014/12/25/masterpieces_created_in_the_gulag_40551.html) (thanks in no small part to the staggering numbers of musicians, artist, and intellectuals shipped off into the frozen waste during Stalin’s heyday), but that’s another story.
During that same span between the late 1940s and 1960s, a youth subculture that seemed custom-made to irritate the government sprang up. The stilyagi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilyagi) —or “style hunters”—were inspired by the post-war return of young soldiers who’d developed a taste for modern trends and foreign influences during their time away from the motherland. They sported fashionable clothes, were largely apolitical, and most importantly, had a ravenous appetite for Western music. One of these young Soviet beatniks, Stanislav Philo, brought back more than just ideas from his tour abroad: he returned from the war lugging a record duplication machine under his arm. Bizarrely enough, these duplication machines were totally legal; after all, what was the harm in letting a citizen record a favorite patriotic march or speech from Comrade Stalin, or allowing her to send a postcard message (http://www.nlr.ru/eng/coll/music/card.html?print=1) back to babushka in the
village? You could find these contraptions all over the place, and a few roubles would buy you the chance to record a short two-minute message and cut a brightly-colored audio “postcard” in minutes. When he got home to Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), Philo set up his machine in the corner of his new photography store, and charged tourists and relatives a few bob to do just that.
Soon after he set up shop, business was booming—not because of the portraits he was selling during daytime hours, of course, but thanks to the illicit bootlegging operation he ran after dark. That little duplication machine was pressed into service to record low-quality dubs of coveted jazz, boogie woogie, and rock’n’roll songs on whatever he had lying around, mostly coated paper. They didn’t last long, sounded terrible, and were easily worn down by steel gramophone needles, but they were cheap, and they were available. What the printing press was to the samizdatpublishers, this little hunk of metal became to a burgeoning scene of jazz fiends. It wasn’t long before a small community of music lovers began haunting his shop, snapping up record after record and lining Philo’s pockets with dirty money. Two fans in particular, Ruslan Bogoslowski and Boris Taigin, (http://vulcanostatale.it/2014/06/rock-on-the-bones/) were there nearly every day, and the reason became clear when
the two men convened at Bogoslowski’s family dacha one night.
Recording ingenuity from Aleks Kolkowski’s collection / Photo by the author
Bogoslowski had been studying Philo’s record duplicator, taking careful notes on its measurements and mechanisms, and using his engineer father’s tools, was able to build his own replica. Not only did it work, it worked better than Philo’s rickety old machine, and the quality of his and Taigin’s records was higher, too, thanks to the inventive new material they used. Somehow, Bogoslowski got the bright idea to cut records onto discarded X-ray fluorography sheets bought and pilfered from workers at the local hospital, who were required to regularly dispose of vast quantities of the highly-flammable files. By carefully cutting the X-rays into circles and burning a hole in the middle (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/how-soviet-kitchens-became-hotbeds-of-dissent-and-culture) with a cigarette, the duo—who dubbed themselves The Golden Dog Gang after the British His Master’s Voice label—cranked out countless bootlegged songs from Louis Armstrong, Ella
Fitzgerald, and The Beatles. They flooded the black market with these cheap precursors to modern flexi discs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) , all adorned with living—and dead—Soviet skulls, hipbones, femurs, and guts. Shattered kneecaps held the strains of “Birdland.” Elvis Presley (http://dangerousminds.net/comments/vintage_x-ray_vinyl_from_russia) warbled out from a broken ribcage. A cracked skull grinned through an anonymous rendition of W. C. Hardy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Ghostly scapulas embraced boogie woogie jams. The dead sang along with the living.
The morbid presentation of these records earned them a variety of colorful code names—“ribs,” “jazz on bones,” (http://English musician Stephen Coates of the band The Real Tuesday Weld launched the ‘The X-Ray Audio Project”) “my grandma’s skeleton,” and the more recognized roentgenizdat. Unfortunately for the Golden Dogs, it also eventually earned them the attention of the authorities, who caught them distributing forbidden music in 1950 and sentenced (http://www.jurablogs.com/go/prison-song-project-musik-knochen) both of them to five years hard labor in Siberia. In a stroke of luck for him (and millions of other Russians), Stalin’s death in 1953 brought relief; thousands of prisoners were granted amnesty, and he headed back home armed with even grander plans.
During those long, cold years in prison, Bogoslowski had figured out a method to separate the two layers of the X-rays themselves, and to transfer designs onto the transparent film. He and Taigin got back to work, this time churning out records with both beautiful folk art and ripped-off Western labels—you’d see albums with Columbia Records insignia written in Russian with a Made in Great Britain stamp. All went well for awhile, until they got arrested and chucked into the gulag again.
When Bogoslowski was released several years later, he had one last big idea—he was going to press his own vinyl records. He figured out a way to soften the wax on existing albums, and in the relative privacy of his shed, he pressed real, black vinyl albums that proved immensely popular. How did he get his hands on the proper material? At that time, record stores stocked scores of vinyl records containing patriotic speeches from Lenin and Stalin, priced dirt cheap to encourage citizens to buy them. Bogoslowski bought up a ton of them, which is ultimately what led to this third and final arrest; no one ever really bought those, speeches, so seeing someone swoop in and hustle out with armloads of them clearly looked suspicious to some whistle-blowing clerk. So, back to the gulag he went for three more years of forced labor… all because he wanted to listen to some jazz.
Fancy bones at the Morbid Anatomy Museum / Photo by the author
By the time Bogoslowski won his freedom, he was returning to a different world. The reel-to-reel tape recorder had arrived, felling the black market bone business for good and signaling the beginning of the government’s gradual thaw towards the West. There was no need for him to continue bootlegging, so he retired into obscurity (and hopefully stayed out of jail). All in all, the reign of bones over Soviet music only lasted about fifteen years, and their original disposable nature means that there are few surviving copies left. The X-ray audio story has captivated people for decades—even Jack White (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/jack-white-is-pressing-his-next-record-project-on-old-medical-x-rays) got in on the action, releasing a pseudo-roentgenizdat of his own in 2013—but Bogoslowski’s story survived only as a historical footnote until recently, when British musician Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld (http://tuesdayweld.com/) began The X-Ray Audio Project.
(http://x-rayaudio.com/)
Last weekend, Coates spoke at an event at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/x-ray-audio-guest-post-by-stephen.html) , spinning the yarn told above while X-Ray Audio collaborator, sound artist, and early sound recording expert Aleks Kolkowski (http://www.phonographies.org/about/aleks-kolkowski/) treated the audience to a few songs from the duo’s collection of “ribs” and recorded a brand-new X-ray flexi on his own machine right before our eyes. Coates first became intrigued by roentgenizdat when he stumbled across one at a flea market (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/x-ray-audio-guest-post-by-stephen.html) while he was on tour in Russia; since then, he’s gone back multiple times to interview old bootleggers and gather the definitive story of jazz on bones. Look for his upcoming book, on the subject, and dive deeper into the world of audio skeletons at the X-Ray Audio Project (http://x-rayaudio.com/) website. He’s a
brilliant storyteller, so try to catch him at an event (http://x-rayaudio.com/) if you can!
Kim Kelly is feverishly trying to find a roentgenizdat of her very own—help her out on Twitter: @grimkim (http://twitter.com/grimkim)
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jazz on Bones and X-Ray Audio: Chasing the Ghost of Soviet Russia’s Most Dedicated Vinyl Bootlegger | NOISEY
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/soviet-x-ray-audio
** JAZZ ON BONES AND X-RAY AUDIO: CHASING THE GHOST OF SOVIET RUSSIA’S MOST DEDICATED VINYL BOOTLEGGER
————————————————————
Photo courtesy of The X-Ray Audio Project
Imagine living in a world where music is illegal, where simply owning a Beatles record could get you arrested and sent into the wilderness to die. Imagine knowing that, and still buying those records, sharing them with your friends, and spending hours upon hours figuring out how to make your own. Imagine loving music so much that you’re willing to risk your life for a scratchy, two-and-a-half minute recording of “Rock Around the Clock.” Welcome to the Soviet Union in 1950.
During the Stalinist era then up to and after World War II, Soviet Russia was a grim and repressive place. The Communist Party ruled with an iron fist, shielding its citizens from corrosive Western influences like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and of course, rock’n’roll. In the 1950s, it was still nearly impossible for a budding music fan to get their hands on a bonafide jazz or rock’n’roll record. Strict rationing and constant shortages allowed the black market to thrive and supply comrades with both necessary supplies and forbidden pleasures, and thanks to the Party’s Stalinist social realism hangover, “fascist” or “mystic” Western music (especially from the hated Americans and British) were explicitly forbidden. So was anything from Russian-born musicians who happened to be pegged as traitors or dissidents—a blanket designation that encompassed everyone who offended the sensibilities of the state censor, from White Russian emigres to “criminals” who committed
the offense of writing and recording their own music. At that point, musicians were expected to cooperate with the composers union and lyricist’s union to create songs; producing your own was remarkably subversive, and landed several Soviet musicians in the gulag. The gulags themselves had a rich musical tradition (http://in.rbth.com/arts/2014/12/25/masterpieces_created_in_the_gulag_40551.html) (thanks in no small part to the staggering numbers of musicians, artist, and intellectuals shipped off into the frozen waste during Stalin’s heyday), but that’s another story.
During that same span between the late 1940s and 1960s, a youth subculture that seemed custom-made to irritate the government sprang up. The stilyagi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilyagi) —or “style hunters”—were inspired by the post-war return of young soldiers who’d developed a taste for modern trends and foreign influences during their time away from the motherland. They sported fashionable clothes, were largely apolitical, and most importantly, had a ravenous appetite for Western music. One of these young Soviet beatniks, Stanislav Philo, brought back more than just ideas from his tour abroad: he returned from the war lugging a record duplication machine under his arm. Bizarrely enough, these duplication machines were totally legal; after all, what was the harm in letting a citizen record a favorite patriotic march or speech from Comrade Stalin, or allowing her to send a postcard message (http://www.nlr.ru/eng/coll/music/card.html?print=1) back to babushka in the
village? You could find these contraptions all over the place, and a few roubles would buy you the chance to record a short two-minute message and cut a brightly-colored audio “postcard” in minutes. When he got home to Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), Philo set up his machine in the corner of his new photography store, and charged tourists and relatives a few bob to do just that.
Soon after he set up shop, business was booming—not because of the portraits he was selling during daytime hours, of course, but thanks to the illicit bootlegging operation he ran after dark. That little duplication machine was pressed into service to record low-quality dubs of coveted jazz, boogie woogie, and rock’n’roll songs on whatever he had lying around, mostly coated paper. They didn’t last long, sounded terrible, and were easily worn down by steel gramophone needles, but they were cheap, and they were available. What the printing press was to the samizdatpublishers, this little hunk of metal became to a burgeoning scene of jazz fiends. It wasn’t long before a small community of music lovers began haunting his shop, snapping up record after record and lining Philo’s pockets with dirty money. Two fans in particular, Ruslan Bogoslowski and Boris Taigin, (http://vulcanostatale.it/2014/06/rock-on-the-bones/) were there nearly every day, and the reason became clear when
the two men convened at Bogoslowski’s family dacha one night.
Recording ingenuity from Aleks Kolkowski’s collection / Photo by the author
Bogoslowski had been studying Philo’s record duplicator, taking careful notes on its measurements and mechanisms, and using his engineer father’s tools, was able to build his own replica. Not only did it work, it worked better than Philo’s rickety old machine, and the quality of his and Taigin’s records was higher, too, thanks to the inventive new material they used. Somehow, Bogoslowski got the bright idea to cut records onto discarded X-ray fluorography sheets bought and pilfered from workers at the local hospital, who were required to regularly dispose of vast quantities of the highly-flammable files. By carefully cutting the X-rays into circles and burning a hole in the middle (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/how-soviet-kitchens-became-hotbeds-of-dissent-and-culture) with a cigarette, the duo—who dubbed themselves The Golden Dog Gang after the British His Master’s Voice label—cranked out countless bootlegged songs from Louis Armstrong, Ella
Fitzgerald, and The Beatles. They flooded the black market with these cheap precursors to modern flexi discs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) , all adorned with living—and dead—Soviet skulls, hipbones, femurs, and guts. Shattered kneecaps held the strains of “Birdland.” Elvis Presley (http://dangerousminds.net/comments/vintage_x-ray_vinyl_from_russia) warbled out from a broken ribcage. A cracked skull grinned through an anonymous rendition of W. C. Hardy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Ghostly scapulas embraced boogie woogie jams. The dead sang along with the living.
The morbid presentation of these records earned them a variety of colorful code names—“ribs,” “jazz on bones,” (http://English musician Stephen Coates of the band The Real Tuesday Weld launched the ‘The X-Ray Audio Project”) “my grandma’s skeleton,” and the more recognized roentgenizdat. Unfortunately for the Golden Dogs, it also eventually earned them the attention of the authorities, who caught them distributing forbidden music in 1950 and sentenced (http://www.jurablogs.com/go/prison-song-project-musik-knochen) both of them to five years hard labor in Siberia. In a stroke of luck for him (and millions of other Russians), Stalin’s death in 1953 brought relief; thousands of prisoners were granted amnesty, and he headed back home armed with even grander plans.
During those long, cold years in prison, Bogoslowski had figured out a method to separate the two layers of the X-rays themselves, and to transfer designs onto the transparent film. He and Taigin got back to work, this time churning out records with both beautiful folk art and ripped-off Western labels—you’d see albums with Columbia Records insignia written in Russian with a Made in Great Britain stamp. All went well for awhile, until they got arrested and chucked into the gulag again.
When Bogoslowski was released several years later, he had one last big idea—he was going to press his own vinyl records. He figured out a way to soften the wax on existing albums, and in the relative privacy of his shed, he pressed real, black vinyl albums that proved immensely popular. How did he get his hands on the proper material? At that time, record stores stocked scores of vinyl records containing patriotic speeches from Lenin and Stalin, priced dirt cheap to encourage citizens to buy them. Bogoslowski bought up a ton of them, which is ultimately what led to this third and final arrest; no one ever really bought those, speeches, so seeing someone swoop in and hustle out with armloads of them clearly looked suspicious to some whistle-blowing clerk. So, back to the gulag he went for three more years of forced labor… all because he wanted to listen to some jazz.
Fancy bones at the Morbid Anatomy Museum / Photo by the author
By the time Bogoslowski won his freedom, he was returning to a different world. The reel-to-reel tape recorder had arrived, felling the black market bone business for good and signaling the beginning of the government’s gradual thaw towards the West. There was no need for him to continue bootlegging, so he retired into obscurity (and hopefully stayed out of jail). All in all, the reign of bones over Soviet music only lasted about fifteen years, and their original disposable nature means that there are few surviving copies left. The X-ray audio story has captivated people for decades—even Jack White (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/jack-white-is-pressing-his-next-record-project-on-old-medical-x-rays) got in on the action, releasing a pseudo-roentgenizdat of his own in 2013—but Bogoslowski’s story survived only as a historical footnote until recently, when British musician Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld (http://tuesdayweld.com/) began The X-Ray Audio Project.
(http://x-rayaudio.com/)
Last weekend, Coates spoke at an event at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/x-ray-audio-guest-post-by-stephen.html) , spinning the yarn told above while X-Ray Audio collaborator, sound artist, and early sound recording expert Aleks Kolkowski (http://www.phonographies.org/about/aleks-kolkowski/) treated the audience to a few songs from the duo’s collection of “ribs” and recorded a brand-new X-ray flexi on his own machine right before our eyes. Coates first became intrigued by roentgenizdat when he stumbled across one at a flea market (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/x-ray-audio-guest-post-by-stephen.html) while he was on tour in Russia; since then, he’s gone back multiple times to interview old bootleggers and gather the definitive story of jazz on bones. Look for his upcoming book, on the subject, and dive deeper into the world of audio skeletons at the X-Ray Audio Project (http://x-rayaudio.com/) website. He’s a
brilliant storyteller, so try to catch him at an event (http://x-rayaudio.com/) if you can!
Kim Kelly is feverishly trying to find a roentgenizdat of her very own—help her out on Twitter: @grimkim (http://twitter.com/grimkim)
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0fa950547d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0fa950547d&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jazz on Bones and X-Ray Audio: Chasing the Ghost of Soviet Russia’s Most Dedicated Vinyl Bootlegger | NOISEY
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://noisey.vice.com/blog/soviet-x-ray-audio
** JAZZ ON BONES AND X-RAY AUDIO: CHASING THE GHOST OF SOVIET RUSSIA’S MOST DEDICATED VINYL BOOTLEGGER
————————————————————
Photo courtesy of The X-Ray Audio Project
Imagine living in a world where music is illegal, where simply owning a Beatles record could get you arrested and sent into the wilderness to die. Imagine knowing that, and still buying those records, sharing them with your friends, and spending hours upon hours figuring out how to make your own. Imagine loving music so much that you’re willing to risk your life for a scratchy, two-and-a-half minute recording of “Rock Around the Clock.” Welcome to the Soviet Union in 1950.
During the Stalinist era then up to and after World War II, Soviet Russia was a grim and repressive place. The Communist Party ruled with an iron fist, shielding its citizens from corrosive Western influences like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and of course, rock’n’roll. In the 1950s, it was still nearly impossible for a budding music fan to get their hands on a bonafide jazz or rock’n’roll record. Strict rationing and constant shortages allowed the black market to thrive and supply comrades with both necessary supplies and forbidden pleasures, and thanks to the Party’s Stalinist social realism hangover, “fascist” or “mystic” Western music (especially from the hated Americans and British) were explicitly forbidden. So was anything from Russian-born musicians who happened to be pegged as traitors or dissidents—a blanket designation that encompassed everyone who offended the sensibilities of the state censor, from White Russian emigres to “criminals” who committed
the offense of writing and recording their own music. At that point, musicians were expected to cooperate with the composers union and lyricist’s union to create songs; producing your own was remarkably subversive, and landed several Soviet musicians in the gulag. The gulags themselves had a rich musical tradition (http://in.rbth.com/arts/2014/12/25/masterpieces_created_in_the_gulag_40551.html) (thanks in no small part to the staggering numbers of musicians, artist, and intellectuals shipped off into the frozen waste during Stalin’s heyday), but that’s another story.
During that same span between the late 1940s and 1960s, a youth subculture that seemed custom-made to irritate the government sprang up. The stilyagi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stilyagi) —or “style hunters”—were inspired by the post-war return of young soldiers who’d developed a taste for modern trends and foreign influences during their time away from the motherland. They sported fashionable clothes, were largely apolitical, and most importantly, had a ravenous appetite for Western music. One of these young Soviet beatniks, Stanislav Philo, brought back more than just ideas from his tour abroad: he returned from the war lugging a record duplication machine under his arm. Bizarrely enough, these duplication machines were totally legal; after all, what was the harm in letting a citizen record a favorite patriotic march or speech from Comrade Stalin, or allowing her to send a postcard message (http://www.nlr.ru/eng/coll/music/card.html?print=1) back to babushka in the
village? You could find these contraptions all over the place, and a few roubles would buy you the chance to record a short two-minute message and cut a brightly-colored audio “postcard” in minutes. When he got home to Saint Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), Philo set up his machine in the corner of his new photography store, and charged tourists and relatives a few bob to do just that.
Soon after he set up shop, business was booming—not because of the portraits he was selling during daytime hours, of course, but thanks to the illicit bootlegging operation he ran after dark. That little duplication machine was pressed into service to record low-quality dubs of coveted jazz, boogie woogie, and rock’n’roll songs on whatever he had lying around, mostly coated paper. They didn’t last long, sounded terrible, and were easily worn down by steel gramophone needles, but they were cheap, and they were available. What the printing press was to the samizdatpublishers, this little hunk of metal became to a burgeoning scene of jazz fiends. It wasn’t long before a small community of music lovers began haunting his shop, snapping up record after record and lining Philo’s pockets with dirty money. Two fans in particular, Ruslan Bogoslowski and Boris Taigin, (http://vulcanostatale.it/2014/06/rock-on-the-bones/) were there nearly every day, and the reason became clear when
the two men convened at Bogoslowski’s family dacha one night.
Recording ingenuity from Aleks Kolkowski’s collection / Photo by the author
Bogoslowski had been studying Philo’s record duplicator, taking careful notes on its measurements and mechanisms, and using his engineer father’s tools, was able to build his own replica. Not only did it work, it worked better than Philo’s rickety old machine, and the quality of his and Taigin’s records was higher, too, thanks to the inventive new material they used. Somehow, Bogoslowski got the bright idea to cut records onto discarded X-ray fluorography sheets bought and pilfered from workers at the local hospital, who were required to regularly dispose of vast quantities of the highly-flammable files. By carefully cutting the X-rays into circles and burning a hole in the middle (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/27/314961287/how-soviet-kitchens-became-hotbeds-of-dissent-and-culture) with a cigarette, the duo—who dubbed themselves The Golden Dog Gang after the British His Master’s Voice label—cranked out countless bootlegged songs from Louis Armstrong, Ella
Fitzgerald, and The Beatles. They flooded the black market with these cheap precursors to modern flexi discs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc) , all adorned with living—and dead—Soviet skulls, hipbones, femurs, and guts. Shattered kneecaps held the strains of “Birdland.” Elvis Presley (http://dangerousminds.net/comments/vintage_x-ray_vinyl_from_russia) warbled out from a broken ribcage. A cracked skull grinned through an anonymous rendition of W. C. Hardy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Ghostly scapulas embraced boogie woogie jams. The dead sang along with the living.
The morbid presentation of these records earned them a variety of colorful code names—“ribs,” “jazz on bones,” (http://English musician Stephen Coates of the band The Real Tuesday Weld launched the ‘The X-Ray Audio Project”) “my grandma’s skeleton,” and the more recognized roentgenizdat. Unfortunately for the Golden Dogs, it also eventually earned them the attention of the authorities, who caught them distributing forbidden music in 1950 and sentenced (http://www.jurablogs.com/go/prison-song-project-musik-knochen) both of them to five years hard labor in Siberia. In a stroke of luck for him (and millions of other Russians), Stalin’s death in 1953 brought relief; thousands of prisoners were granted amnesty, and he headed back home armed with even grander plans.
During those long, cold years in prison, Bogoslowski had figured out a method to separate the two layers of the X-rays themselves, and to transfer designs onto the transparent film. He and Taigin got back to work, this time churning out records with both beautiful folk art and ripped-off Western labels—you’d see albums with Columbia Records insignia written in Russian with a Made in Great Britain stamp. All went well for awhile, until they got arrested and chucked into the gulag again.
When Bogoslowski was released several years later, he had one last big idea—he was going to press his own vinyl records. He figured out a way to soften the wax on existing albums, and in the relative privacy of his shed, he pressed real, black vinyl albums that proved immensely popular. How did he get his hands on the proper material? At that time, record stores stocked scores of vinyl records containing patriotic speeches from Lenin and Stalin, priced dirt cheap to encourage citizens to buy them. Bogoslowski bought up a ton of them, which is ultimately what led to this third and final arrest; no one ever really bought those, speeches, so seeing someone swoop in and hustle out with armloads of them clearly looked suspicious to some whistle-blowing clerk. So, back to the gulag he went for three more years of forced labor… all because he wanted to listen to some jazz.
Fancy bones at the Morbid Anatomy Museum / Photo by the author
By the time Bogoslowski won his freedom, he was returning to a different world. The reel-to-reel tape recorder had arrived, felling the black market bone business for good and signaling the beginning of the government’s gradual thaw towards the West. There was no need for him to continue bootlegging, so he retired into obscurity (and hopefully stayed out of jail). All in all, the reign of bones over Soviet music only lasted about fifteen years, and their original disposable nature means that there are few surviving copies left. The X-ray audio story has captivated people for decades—even Jack White (http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/jack-white-is-pressing-his-next-record-project-on-old-medical-x-rays) got in on the action, releasing a pseudo-roentgenizdat of his own in 2013—but Bogoslowski’s story survived only as a historical footnote until recently, when British musician Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld (http://tuesdayweld.com/) began The X-Ray Audio Project.
(http://x-rayaudio.com/)
Last weekend, Coates spoke at an event at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/x-ray-audio-guest-post-by-stephen.html) , spinning the yarn told above while X-Ray Audio collaborator, sound artist, and early sound recording expert Aleks Kolkowski (http://www.phonographies.org/about/aleks-kolkowski/) treated the audience to a few songs from the duo’s collection of “ribs” and recorded a brand-new X-ray flexi on his own machine right before our eyes. Coates first became intrigued by roentgenizdat when he stumbled across one at a flea market (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/x-ray-audio-guest-post-by-stephen.html) while he was on tour in Russia; since then, he’s gone back multiple times to interview old bootleggers and gather the definitive story of jazz on bones. Look for his upcoming book, on the subject, and dive deeper into the world of audio skeletons at the X-Ray Audio Project (http://x-rayaudio.com/) website. He’s a
brilliant storyteller, so try to catch him at an event (http://x-rayaudio.com/) if you can!
Kim Kelly is feverishly trying to find a roentgenizdat of her very own—help her out on Twitter: @grimkim (http://twitter.com/grimkim)
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0fa950547d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0fa950547d&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Carlos Lyra, a Pioneer of Bossa Nova, Reintroduces Himself -By JAMES GAVIN NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/arts/music/carlos-lyra-a-pioneer-of-bossa-nova-reintroduces-himself.html
** Carlos Lyra, a Pioneer of Bossa Nova, Reintroduces Himself
————————————————————
By JAMES GAVINMAY 15, 2015
Carlos Lyran on April 28 at a friend’s apartment in Rio de Janeiro. From May 26 to 30, Mr. Lyra, 82, is to perform in the United States for the first time in 50 years. Credit Andre Vieira for The New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO — Nearly 60 years has passed since the bossa nova sprang out of this city. For most of the world, that cool, minimalist sound, with its insinuating pulse, still defines Brazil. Inside the country, though, the music is a respected but quaint form of nostalgia. Tourists who seek it out tend to leave disappointed.
But to Carlos Lyra, who wrote and sang many of its most famous songs, bossa remains a zenith of elegance and finesse, symbolic, he feels, of a time when those things mattered in Brazil. Now 82, Mr. Lyra still lives here, as do bossa’s two other surviving pioneers, the guitarist and singer João Gilberto and the songwriter Roberto Menescal. Mr. Lyra’s lilting tunes, including “Primavera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnyTG_Pp3S4) “ (Spring) and “Você e Eu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFJaNNQje10) “ (You and I), inspired bossa’s most famous composer, Antônio Carlos Jobim, to once call him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.”
But unlike Jobim, whose “The Girl From Ipanema (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJkxFhFRFDA) “ brought him and bossa worldwide fame in 1964, Mr. Lyra had no comparable breakthrough. It’s been 50 years since his last appearances in the United States, on tour with Stan Getz, the saxophonist who helped turn “The Girl From Ipanema” into an American smash.
Photo
Carlos Lyra, one of Brazil’s pioneers of bossa nova, in New York in 1964. CreditEu E a Bossa: Uma Historia Da Bossa Nova
Now Mr. Lyra is finally coming back. From May 26 to 30, the producers Pat Philips and Ettore Stratta will showcase him in “Bossabrasil (http://www.birdlandjazz.com/event/101293/) ,” their ongoing series at the Manhattan jazz club Birdland. Joined by a second-generation bossa star, Marcos Valle, Mr. Lyra will sing his classics and share insider stories about bossa’s creators, like the lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, the hard-drinking, much-married poet, diplomat and die-hard romantic. “He was in favor of pain,” said Mr. Lyra. “He said in many of his lyrics that if you don’t suffer you don’t know anything about love.”
Not even de Moraes at his saddest could sink the breezy sophistication of bossa, a music made by the middle class for the middle class. But Mr. Lyra was a socialist, which made him a contradictory figure in his set. As he noted recently with a smile: “I consider myself politically proletariat. I consider myself economically bourgeois. And artistically I consider myself an aristocrat.”
Manners and restraint, he added, are “very important for me in everything.” But that doesn’t stop him from gleefully dishing on his old cronies and critiquing even close friends. He speaks passionately in near-perfect English, and his candid opinions about politics, art and culture hold the confidence of a man who feels he has earned the last word.
Mr. Lyra and his second wife, Magda Botafogo, live in a simple apartment in Ipanema, to him the only part of Rio that truly counts. With the Birdland engagement just weeks away, the composer had taken a nasty fall at home and dislocated a shoulder. Arm in a sling, he feared he might not be able to play his guitar in New York; just singing with the band might have to do. His life in general has slowed to a tranquil pace; he composes and performs when he feels the urge.
He looks back on his youth as an oasis, reigned over by Juscelino Kubitschek, a democratic president who fostered culture. “Everything was beautiful,” he said. “There was no suffering, only suffering for love. We had the best movies, the best theater, the best literature, music.” Like bossa’s other originators, he was born of privilege. His family included amateur classical musicians and a poet; his father was a naval officer. Ensconced in Rio’s fashionable Zona Sul (South Zone), Mr. Lyra studied classical guitar and enjoyed Debussy, Ravel, Villa-Lobos and American film.
His friends were a like-minded group of budding musicians and songwriters who wanted to break from the past, particularly from the hammy emoting of the Brazilian radio singers and the blunt rhythms of samba. Mr. Lyra’s circle much preferred the white jazz of the American West Coast, with its aloof hipness. Gilberto was devising ways to streamline samba into a syncopated, featherweight beat. Mr. Lyra, the handsome lady-killer of his set, contributed his melodic gift and a classically derived sense of form. He had a real baritone voice but kept his delivery casual, like conversation.
Photo
From front left, Vinicius de Moraes, Diogo Pacheco, Paulo Autran, Cyro Monteiro and Carlos Lyra on Dec. 10, 1965, in São Paulo, Brazil. Credit Agencia Estado, via Associated Press
In 1958, bossa was born. Most of its songs dealt with the Carioca good life, carefree romance and the sweetness of despair. Mr. Lyra’s did, too, but they also explored more serious issues, like the hardships of life in the slums and the indomitability of Brazilian womanhood. On Nov. 21, 1962, he joined a sprawling summit (http://www.carnegiehall.org/BlogPost.aspx?id=4294987346) of bossa’s founders at Carnegie Hall. That now-fabled concert launched the music as Brazil’s proudest homegrown export. Mr. Lyra’s songs, starting with his first hit, “Maria Ninguém (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdQjlagPzE0) ” (Maria No One), showed up on countless albums, including his own. A budding great of the next generation, the singer Elis Regina (who died in 1982), was paying attention. “Elis told me that she considered Carlos Lyra the best melody-maker in Brazil,” said Zuza Homem de Mello, one of the country’s most respected musical authorities. “To me, his melodies are absolutely on a par
with Jobim’s.”
Politically, however, Mr. Lyra was treading on dangerous ground. He had joined the Communist party — a risky move, for Brazil now had a socialist president, João Goulart, whose suspected Communist ties had sparked deep political tension. “Lenin and Stalin were never important to me,” explained Mr. Lyra. “I was with the socialists, who wanted everybody to have education and culture.” According to him, most of the privileged middle class — including his bossa colleagues — clung to the right. ”Menescal is a right-winger to this day,” he said. “Jobim was right-wing. He didn’t have any political problems. He was selling records; he was famous all over the world.”
As musical director of the Centro Popular de Cultura, a socially conscious arts center in Rio, Mr. Lyra sought to take samba from the slums to the city, thus forming a bridge between the rich and the poor. Under his direction, Nara Leão (http://www.naraleao.com.br/) , the Ipanema girl who had become bossa’s singing muse, famously recorded the work of black samba composers. But on the political scene, chill winds were blowing. “The CPC was known as a Communist center,” Mr. Lyra said, and one day a guerrilla group burst in firing warning shots. On March 31, 1964, a military coup overthrew Goulart and launched a dictatorship. Mr. Lyra was among the first artists to flee.
He moved to New York with unexpectedly good timing: Getz wanted another Brazilian to replace his departed singer Astrud Gilberto, and he chose Mr. Lyra. In 1966 their touring took them to Mexico, where a lot of Mr. Lyra’s Brazilian peers now lived. He stayed for five years. “Bossa nova was very popular there,” he said. “And they would pay me for it. But I was missing Brazil terribly.”
By the time he moved back with the American wife he had met in Mexico, Katherine Riddell (a TV actress known in Brazil as Kate Lyra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq5yk7BWl0) ), a new wave of edgy pop rebels had swept bossa aside. Mr. Lyra still had much to say politically, but censorship had a stranglehold on the arts. When he released an album of coded protest songs, called “Heroí do Medo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us07WYqfvB4) “ (Hero of Fear), a censor had it yanked.
Disgusted with Brazil in the mid-70s, Mr. Lyra took his wife and their daughter, Kay (now a New York-based bossa singer), to live in Los Angeles, where he joined a program of primal scream therapy. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were among the members, he recalled. “You screamed, cried, just vomited everything out,” he said, “until you were tired of screaming and crying.”
After a couple of years, he was back in Brazil. The dictatorship ceased in 1985, but for Mr. Lyra, the damage was done. ”Brazil never rose again,” he said. “It’s been down, down, down. Culture now is so without depth. The other day they were playing my songs in an elevator. In today’s musical scene, I’d rather hear music in elevators than on the radio.”
Unlike the more experimental Jobim, Mr. Lyra stayed wedded to bossa; for him it still represents a dreamlike ideal. In 2008 he published a memoir whose title, in English, reads: “Me and Bossa: A Story of the Bossa Nova.” Happily for him, that music has never lost its glow in the United States. The Birdland engagement “seems like more of a debut than a comeback,” he said. “After 50 years, the public and my friends from that era are practically gone. I’m going to celebrate this jubilee with the hope of pleasing the audience as if they were hearing my music for the first time.”
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Carlos Lyra, a Pioneer of Bossa Nova, Reintroduces Himself -By JAMES GAVIN NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/arts/music/carlos-lyra-a-pioneer-of-bossa-nova-reintroduces-himself.html
** Carlos Lyra, a Pioneer of Bossa Nova, Reintroduces Himself
————————————————————
By JAMES GAVINMAY 15, 2015
Carlos Lyran on April 28 at a friend’s apartment in Rio de Janeiro. From May 26 to 30, Mr. Lyra, 82, is to perform in the United States for the first time in 50 years. Credit Andre Vieira for The New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO — Nearly 60 years has passed since the bossa nova sprang out of this city. For most of the world, that cool, minimalist sound, with its insinuating pulse, still defines Brazil. Inside the country, though, the music is a respected but quaint form of nostalgia. Tourists who seek it out tend to leave disappointed.
But to Carlos Lyra, who wrote and sang many of its most famous songs, bossa remains a zenith of elegance and finesse, symbolic, he feels, of a time when those things mattered in Brazil. Now 82, Mr. Lyra still lives here, as do bossa’s two other surviving pioneers, the guitarist and singer João Gilberto and the songwriter Roberto Menescal. Mr. Lyra’s lilting tunes, including “Primavera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnyTG_Pp3S4) “ (Spring) and “Você e Eu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFJaNNQje10) “ (You and I), inspired bossa’s most famous composer, Antônio Carlos Jobim, to once call him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.”
But unlike Jobim, whose “The Girl From Ipanema (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJkxFhFRFDA) “ brought him and bossa worldwide fame in 1964, Mr. Lyra had no comparable breakthrough. It’s been 50 years since his last appearances in the United States, on tour with Stan Getz, the saxophonist who helped turn “The Girl From Ipanema” into an American smash.
Photo
Carlos Lyra, one of Brazil’s pioneers of bossa nova, in New York in 1964. CreditEu E a Bossa: Uma Historia Da Bossa Nova
Now Mr. Lyra is finally coming back. From May 26 to 30, the producers Pat Philips and Ettore Stratta will showcase him in “Bossabrasil (http://www.birdlandjazz.com/event/101293/) ,” their ongoing series at the Manhattan jazz club Birdland. Joined by a second-generation bossa star, Marcos Valle, Mr. Lyra will sing his classics and share insider stories about bossa’s creators, like the lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, the hard-drinking, much-married poet, diplomat and die-hard romantic. “He was in favor of pain,” said Mr. Lyra. “He said in many of his lyrics that if you don’t suffer you don’t know anything about love.”
Not even de Moraes at his saddest could sink the breezy sophistication of bossa, a music made by the middle class for the middle class. But Mr. Lyra was a socialist, which made him a contradictory figure in his set. As he noted recently with a smile: “I consider myself politically proletariat. I consider myself economically bourgeois. And artistically I consider myself an aristocrat.”
Manners and restraint, he added, are “very important for me in everything.” But that doesn’t stop him from gleefully dishing on his old cronies and critiquing even close friends. He speaks passionately in near-perfect English, and his candid opinions about politics, art and culture hold the confidence of a man who feels he has earned the last word.
Mr. Lyra and his second wife, Magda Botafogo, live in a simple apartment in Ipanema, to him the only part of Rio that truly counts. With the Birdland engagement just weeks away, the composer had taken a nasty fall at home and dislocated a shoulder. Arm in a sling, he feared he might not be able to play his guitar in New York; just singing with the band might have to do. His life in general has slowed to a tranquil pace; he composes and performs when he feels the urge.
He looks back on his youth as an oasis, reigned over by Juscelino Kubitschek, a democratic president who fostered culture. “Everything was beautiful,” he said. “There was no suffering, only suffering for love. We had the best movies, the best theater, the best literature, music.” Like bossa’s other originators, he was born of privilege. His family included amateur classical musicians and a poet; his father was a naval officer. Ensconced in Rio’s fashionable Zona Sul (South Zone), Mr. Lyra studied classical guitar and enjoyed Debussy, Ravel, Villa-Lobos and American film.
His friends were a like-minded group of budding musicians and songwriters who wanted to break from the past, particularly from the hammy emoting of the Brazilian radio singers and the blunt rhythms of samba. Mr. Lyra’s circle much preferred the white jazz of the American West Coast, with its aloof hipness. Gilberto was devising ways to streamline samba into a syncopated, featherweight beat. Mr. Lyra, the handsome lady-killer of his set, contributed his melodic gift and a classically derived sense of form. He had a real baritone voice but kept his delivery casual, like conversation.
Photo
From front left, Vinicius de Moraes, Diogo Pacheco, Paulo Autran, Cyro Monteiro and Carlos Lyra on Dec. 10, 1965, in São Paulo, Brazil. Credit Agencia Estado, via Associated Press
In 1958, bossa was born. Most of its songs dealt with the Carioca good life, carefree romance and the sweetness of despair. Mr. Lyra’s did, too, but they also explored more serious issues, like the hardships of life in the slums and the indomitability of Brazilian womanhood. On Nov. 21, 1962, he joined a sprawling summit (http://www.carnegiehall.org/BlogPost.aspx?id=4294987346) of bossa’s founders at Carnegie Hall. That now-fabled concert launched the music as Brazil’s proudest homegrown export. Mr. Lyra’s songs, starting with his first hit, “Maria Ninguém (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdQjlagPzE0) ” (Maria No One), showed up on countless albums, including his own. A budding great of the next generation, the singer Elis Regina (who died in 1982), was paying attention. “Elis told me that she considered Carlos Lyra the best melody-maker in Brazil,” said Zuza Homem de Mello, one of the country’s most respected musical authorities. “To me, his melodies are absolutely on a par
with Jobim’s.”
Politically, however, Mr. Lyra was treading on dangerous ground. He had joined the Communist party — a risky move, for Brazil now had a socialist president, João Goulart, whose suspected Communist ties had sparked deep political tension. “Lenin and Stalin were never important to me,” explained Mr. Lyra. “I was with the socialists, who wanted everybody to have education and culture.” According to him, most of the privileged middle class — including his bossa colleagues — clung to the right. ”Menescal is a right-winger to this day,” he said. “Jobim was right-wing. He didn’t have any political problems. He was selling records; he was famous all over the world.”
As musical director of the Centro Popular de Cultura, a socially conscious arts center in Rio, Mr. Lyra sought to take samba from the slums to the city, thus forming a bridge between the rich and the poor. Under his direction, Nara Leão (http://www.naraleao.com.br/) , the Ipanema girl who had become bossa’s singing muse, famously recorded the work of black samba composers. But on the political scene, chill winds were blowing. “The CPC was known as a Communist center,” Mr. Lyra said, and one day a guerrilla group burst in firing warning shots. On March 31, 1964, a military coup overthrew Goulart and launched a dictatorship. Mr. Lyra was among the first artists to flee.
He moved to New York with unexpectedly good timing: Getz wanted another Brazilian to replace his departed singer Astrud Gilberto, and he chose Mr. Lyra. In 1966 their touring took them to Mexico, where a lot of Mr. Lyra’s Brazilian peers now lived. He stayed for five years. “Bossa nova was very popular there,” he said. “And they would pay me for it. But I was missing Brazil terribly.”
By the time he moved back with the American wife he had met in Mexico, Katherine Riddell (a TV actress known in Brazil as Kate Lyra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq5yk7BWl0) ), a new wave of edgy pop rebels had swept bossa aside. Mr. Lyra still had much to say politically, but censorship had a stranglehold on the arts. When he released an album of coded protest songs, called “Heroí do Medo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us07WYqfvB4) “ (Hero of Fear), a censor had it yanked.
Disgusted with Brazil in the mid-70s, Mr. Lyra took his wife and their daughter, Kay (now a New York-based bossa singer), to live in Los Angeles, where he joined a program of primal scream therapy. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were among the members, he recalled. “You screamed, cried, just vomited everything out,” he said, “until you were tired of screaming and crying.”
After a couple of years, he was back in Brazil. The dictatorship ceased in 1985, but for Mr. Lyra, the damage was done. ”Brazil never rose again,” he said. “It’s been down, down, down. Culture now is so without depth. The other day they were playing my songs in an elevator. In today’s musical scene, I’d rather hear music in elevators than on the radio.”
Unlike the more experimental Jobim, Mr. Lyra stayed wedded to bossa; for him it still represents a dreamlike ideal. In 2008 he published a memoir whose title, in English, reads: “Me and Bossa: A Story of the Bossa Nova.” Happily for him, that music has never lost its glow in the United States. The Birdland engagement “seems like more of a debut than a comeback,” he said. “After 50 years, the public and my friends from that era are practically gone. I’m going to celebrate this jubilee with the hope of pleasing the audience as if they were hearing my music for the first time.”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Carlos Lyra, a Pioneer of Bossa Nova, Reintroduces Himself -By JAMES GAVIN NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/17/arts/music/carlos-lyra-a-pioneer-of-bossa-nova-reintroduces-himself.html
** Carlos Lyra, a Pioneer of Bossa Nova, Reintroduces Himself
————————————————————
By JAMES GAVINMAY 15, 2015
Carlos Lyran on April 28 at a friend’s apartment in Rio de Janeiro. From May 26 to 30, Mr. Lyra, 82, is to perform in the United States for the first time in 50 years. Credit Andre Vieira for The New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO — Nearly 60 years has passed since the bossa nova sprang out of this city. For most of the world, that cool, minimalist sound, with its insinuating pulse, still defines Brazil. Inside the country, though, the music is a respected but quaint form of nostalgia. Tourists who seek it out tend to leave disappointed.
But to Carlos Lyra, who wrote and sang many of its most famous songs, bossa remains a zenith of elegance and finesse, symbolic, he feels, of a time when those things mattered in Brazil. Now 82, Mr. Lyra still lives here, as do bossa’s two other surviving pioneers, the guitarist and singer João Gilberto and the songwriter Roberto Menescal. Mr. Lyra’s lilting tunes, including “Primavera (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnyTG_Pp3S4) “ (Spring) and “Você e Eu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFJaNNQje10) “ (You and I), inspired bossa’s most famous composer, Antônio Carlos Jobim, to once call him “a great melodist, harmonist, king of rhythm, of syncopation, of swing” and “singular, without equal.”
But unlike Jobim, whose “The Girl From Ipanema (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJkxFhFRFDA) “ brought him and bossa worldwide fame in 1964, Mr. Lyra had no comparable breakthrough. It’s been 50 years since his last appearances in the United States, on tour with Stan Getz, the saxophonist who helped turn “The Girl From Ipanema” into an American smash.
Photo
Carlos Lyra, one of Brazil’s pioneers of bossa nova, in New York in 1964. CreditEu E a Bossa: Uma Historia Da Bossa Nova
Now Mr. Lyra is finally coming back. From May 26 to 30, the producers Pat Philips and Ettore Stratta will showcase him in “Bossabrasil (http://www.birdlandjazz.com/event/101293/) ,” their ongoing series at the Manhattan jazz club Birdland. Joined by a second-generation bossa star, Marcos Valle, Mr. Lyra will sing his classics and share insider stories about bossa’s creators, like the lyricist Vinicius de Moraes, the hard-drinking, much-married poet, diplomat and die-hard romantic. “He was in favor of pain,” said Mr. Lyra. “He said in many of his lyrics that if you don’t suffer you don’t know anything about love.”
Not even de Moraes at his saddest could sink the breezy sophistication of bossa, a music made by the middle class for the middle class. But Mr. Lyra was a socialist, which made him a contradictory figure in his set. As he noted recently with a smile: “I consider myself politically proletariat. I consider myself economically bourgeois. And artistically I consider myself an aristocrat.”
Manners and restraint, he added, are “very important for me in everything.” But that doesn’t stop him from gleefully dishing on his old cronies and critiquing even close friends. He speaks passionately in near-perfect English, and his candid opinions about politics, art and culture hold the confidence of a man who feels he has earned the last word.
Mr. Lyra and his second wife, Magda Botafogo, live in a simple apartment in Ipanema, to him the only part of Rio that truly counts. With the Birdland engagement just weeks away, the composer had taken a nasty fall at home and dislocated a shoulder. Arm in a sling, he feared he might not be able to play his guitar in New York; just singing with the band might have to do. His life in general has slowed to a tranquil pace; he composes and performs when he feels the urge.
He looks back on his youth as an oasis, reigned over by Juscelino Kubitschek, a democratic president who fostered culture. “Everything was beautiful,” he said. “There was no suffering, only suffering for love. We had the best movies, the best theater, the best literature, music.” Like bossa’s other originators, he was born of privilege. His family included amateur classical musicians and a poet; his father was a naval officer. Ensconced in Rio’s fashionable Zona Sul (South Zone), Mr. Lyra studied classical guitar and enjoyed Debussy, Ravel, Villa-Lobos and American film.
His friends were a like-minded group of budding musicians and songwriters who wanted to break from the past, particularly from the hammy emoting of the Brazilian radio singers and the blunt rhythms of samba. Mr. Lyra’s circle much preferred the white jazz of the American West Coast, with its aloof hipness. Gilberto was devising ways to streamline samba into a syncopated, featherweight beat. Mr. Lyra, the handsome lady-killer of his set, contributed his melodic gift and a classically derived sense of form. He had a real baritone voice but kept his delivery casual, like conversation.
Photo
From front left, Vinicius de Moraes, Diogo Pacheco, Paulo Autran, Cyro Monteiro and Carlos Lyra on Dec. 10, 1965, in São Paulo, Brazil. Credit Agencia Estado, via Associated Press
In 1958, bossa was born. Most of its songs dealt with the Carioca good life, carefree romance and the sweetness of despair. Mr. Lyra’s did, too, but they also explored more serious issues, like the hardships of life in the slums and the indomitability of Brazilian womanhood. On Nov. 21, 1962, he joined a sprawling summit (http://www.carnegiehall.org/BlogPost.aspx?id=4294987346) of bossa’s founders at Carnegie Hall. That now-fabled concert launched the music as Brazil’s proudest homegrown export. Mr. Lyra’s songs, starting with his first hit, “Maria Ninguém (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdQjlagPzE0) ” (Maria No One), showed up on countless albums, including his own. A budding great of the next generation, the singer Elis Regina (who died in 1982), was paying attention. “Elis told me that she considered Carlos Lyra the best melody-maker in Brazil,” said Zuza Homem de Mello, one of the country’s most respected musical authorities. “To me, his melodies are absolutely on a par
with Jobim’s.”
Politically, however, Mr. Lyra was treading on dangerous ground. He had joined the Communist party — a risky move, for Brazil now had a socialist president, João Goulart, whose suspected Communist ties had sparked deep political tension. “Lenin and Stalin were never important to me,” explained Mr. Lyra. “I was with the socialists, who wanted everybody to have education and culture.” According to him, most of the privileged middle class — including his bossa colleagues — clung to the right. ”Menescal is a right-winger to this day,” he said. “Jobim was right-wing. He didn’t have any political problems. He was selling records; he was famous all over the world.”
As musical director of the Centro Popular de Cultura, a socially conscious arts center in Rio, Mr. Lyra sought to take samba from the slums to the city, thus forming a bridge between the rich and the poor. Under his direction, Nara Leão (http://www.naraleao.com.br/) , the Ipanema girl who had become bossa’s singing muse, famously recorded the work of black samba composers. But on the political scene, chill winds were blowing. “The CPC was known as a Communist center,” Mr. Lyra said, and one day a guerrilla group burst in firing warning shots. On March 31, 1964, a military coup overthrew Goulart and launched a dictatorship. Mr. Lyra was among the first artists to flee.
He moved to New York with unexpectedly good timing: Getz wanted another Brazilian to replace his departed singer Astrud Gilberto, and he chose Mr. Lyra. In 1966 their touring took them to Mexico, where a lot of Mr. Lyra’s Brazilian peers now lived. He stayed for five years. “Bossa nova was very popular there,” he said. “And they would pay me for it. But I was missing Brazil terribly.”
By the time he moved back with the American wife he had met in Mexico, Katherine Riddell (a TV actress known in Brazil as Kate Lyra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq5yk7BWl0) ), a new wave of edgy pop rebels had swept bossa aside. Mr. Lyra still had much to say politically, but censorship had a stranglehold on the arts. When he released an album of coded protest songs, called “Heroí do Medo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us07WYqfvB4) “ (Hero of Fear), a censor had it yanked.
Disgusted with Brazil in the mid-70s, Mr. Lyra took his wife and their daughter, Kay (now a New York-based bossa singer), to live in Los Angeles, where he joined a program of primal scream therapy. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were among the members, he recalled. “You screamed, cried, just vomited everything out,” he said, “until you were tired of screaming and crying.”
After a couple of years, he was back in Brazil. The dictatorship ceased in 1985, but for Mr. Lyra, the damage was done. ”Brazil never rose again,” he said. “It’s been down, down, down. Culture now is so without depth. The other day they were playing my songs in an elevator. In today’s musical scene, I’d rather hear music in elevators than on the radio.”
Unlike the more experimental Jobim, Mr. Lyra stayed wedded to bossa; for him it still represents a dreamlike ideal. In 2008 he published a memoir whose title, in English, reads: “Me and Bossa: A Story of the Bossa Nova.” Happily for him, that music has never lost its glow in the United States. The Birdland engagement “seems like more of a debut than a comeback,” he said. “After 50 years, the public and my friends from that era are practically gone. I’m going to celebrate this jubilee with the hope of pleasing the audience as if they were hearing my music for the first time.”
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From The Archive: A Penniless Heir Fears For His Record Collection + Collection of Records Is Frozen Asset
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
Two articles on record collector Clarence Brown with thanks to Lloyd Raush.
“People say that records are brittle, but they don’t. They are inanimate until you put a phonograph needle on them, and then they come alive.” – Clarence Brown
A Penniless Heir Fears For His Record Collection
New York Times Feb 1, 1978
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9B0DE1DD1730E632A25752C0A9649C946990D6CF
Clarence Brown + Record Collection a Frozen Asset by Angela Robinson
Newsday February 12, 1978
Collection of Records Is Frozen Asset
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From The Archive: A Penniless Heir Fears For His Record Collection + Collection of Records Is Frozen Asset
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
Two articles on record collector Clarence Brown with thanks to Lloyd Raush.
“People say that records are brittle, but they don’t. They are inanimate until you put a phonograph needle on them, and then they come alive.” – Clarence Brown
A Penniless Heir Fears For His Record Collection
New York Times Feb 1, 1978
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9B0DE1DD1730E632A25752C0A9649C946990D6CF
Clarence Brown + Record Collection a Frozen Asset by Angela Robinson
Newsday February 12, 1978
Collection of Records Is Frozen Asset
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
From The Archive: A Penniless Heir Fears For His Record Collection + Collection of Records Is Frozen Asset
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
Two articles on record collector Clarence Brown with thanks to Lloyd Raush.
“People say that records are brittle, but they don’t. They are inanimate until you put a phonograph needle on them, and then they come alive.” – Clarence Brown
A Penniless Heir Fears For His Record Collection
New York Times Feb 1, 1978
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=9B0DE1DD1730E632A25752C0A9649C946990D6CF
Clarence Brown + Record Collection a Frozen Asset by Angela Robinson
Newsday February 12, 1978
Collection of Records Is Frozen Asset
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B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89 – NYTimes.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/music/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.html?hp
** B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
————————————————————
Continue reading the main story Slide Show
** Blues Guitarist B.B. King Dies at 89
————————————————————
CreditAssociated Press
B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
His death was reported early Friday by The Associated Press, citing his lawyer, Brent Bryson, and by CNN, citing his daughter, Patty King.
Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.
In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.
The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”
B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.
Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.
He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.
Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.
When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”
“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”
By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedoes and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.
Through it all he remained with the great love of his life, his guitar. He told the tale a thousand times: He was playing a dance hall in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s when two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove. Mr. King fled the blaze — and then remembered his $30 guitar. He ran into the burning building to rescue it.
He learned thereafter that the fight had been about a woman named Lucille. For the rest of his life, Mr. King addressed his guitars — big Gibsons, curved like a woman’s hips — as Lucille.
He married twice, unsuccessfully, and was legally single from 1966 onward; by his own account he fathered 15 children with 15 women. But a Lucille was always at his side.
Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.
By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”
In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.
The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.
Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.
Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.
He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”
Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.
On the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy. That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.
He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.
There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.
“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”
Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.
The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”
Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.
In addition to winning more than a dozen Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.
“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.
“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.
“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”
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B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/music/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.html?hp
** B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
————————————————————
Continue reading the main story Slide Show
** Blues Guitarist B.B. King Dies at 89
————————————————————
CreditAssociated Press
B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
His death was reported early Friday by The Associated Press, citing his lawyer, Brent Bryson, and by CNN, citing his daughter, Patty King.
Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.
In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.
The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”
B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.
Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.
He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.
Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.
When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”
“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”
By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedoes and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.
Through it all he remained with the great love of his life, his guitar. He told the tale a thousand times: He was playing a dance hall in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s when two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove. Mr. King fled the blaze — and then remembered his $30 guitar. He ran into the burning building to rescue it.
He learned thereafter that the fight had been about a woman named Lucille. For the rest of his life, Mr. King addressed his guitars — big Gibsons, curved like a woman’s hips — as Lucille.
He married twice, unsuccessfully, and was legally single from 1966 onward; by his own account he fathered 15 children with 15 women. But a Lucille was always at his side.
Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.
By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”
In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.
The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.
Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.
Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.
He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”
Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.
On the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy. That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.
He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.
There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.
“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”
Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.
The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”
Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.
In addition to winning more than a dozen Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.
“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.
“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.
“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”
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B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89 – NYTimes.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/music/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.html?hp
** B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
————————————————————
Continue reading the main story Slide Show
** Blues Guitarist B.B. King Dies at 89
————————————————————
CreditAssociated Press
B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
His death was reported early Friday by The Associated Press, citing his lawyer, Brent Bryson, and by CNN, citing his daughter, Patty King.
Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.
In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.
The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”
B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.
Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.
He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.
Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.
When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”
“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”
By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedoes and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.
Through it all he remained with the great love of his life, his guitar. He told the tale a thousand times: He was playing a dance hall in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s when two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove. Mr. King fled the blaze — and then remembered his $30 guitar. He ran into the burning building to rescue it.
He learned thereafter that the fight had been about a woman named Lucille. For the rest of his life, Mr. King addressed his guitars — big Gibsons, curved like a woman’s hips — as Lucille.
He married twice, unsuccessfully, and was legally single from 1966 onward; by his own account he fathered 15 children with 15 women. But a Lucille was always at his side.
Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.
By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”
In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.
The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.
Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.
Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.
He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”
Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.
On the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy. That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.
He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.
There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.
“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”
Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.
The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”
Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.
In addition to winning more than a dozen Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.
“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.
“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.
“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”
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Jerome Cooper, a Multitextured Jazz Percussionist, Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/arts/music/jerome-cooper-a-multitextured-jazz-percussionist-dies-at-68.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150513
** Jerome Cooper, a Multitextured Jazz Percussionist, Dies at 68
————————————————————
Photo
Jerome Cooper, a jazz percussionist and member of the Revolutionary Ensemble, performing at the Vision Festival in New York in 2000. Credit Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Jerome Cooper, a percussionist who played an important role in the post-1960s jazz avant-garde, especially as a member of the influential trio the Revolutionary Ensemble, died on May 6 in Brooklyn. He was 68.
The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, said his daughter, Levanah Cummins-Cooper.
Mr. Cooper worked with a number of major figures in experimental jazz, including the pianist Cecil Taylor, the reed player Anthony Braxton (http://tricentricfoundation.org/bio-history) , the trumpeter Lester Bowie and the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. And he made a handful of his own albums, starting in 1978 with “Root Assumptions (https://youtu.be/1c3HksZnPCQ) ,” a solo percussion performance that evoked both tribal music and minimalism.
He was an alert, rigorously precise drummer who drew from a wide palette of textures: not just drums and cymbals but also the balafon, a West African precursor to the marimba; the chirimia, a Latin American oboe; and even bugle and musical saw. He called his orchestral approach “multidimensional drumming” and explained that it emphasized “layers of sounds and rhythms” rather than linear momentum.
With the Revolutionary Ensemble, whose other members were the violinist Leroy Jenkins and the bassist Norris Jones, known as Sirone, Mr. Cooper refined a taut, chamberlike rapport, distinct from the more blustery side of free jazz. His percussive stirrings, often including stretches of silence, were an indispensable factor in the group’s sound, as heard on a small but prized body of work, notably “The People’s Republic (https://youtu.be/m0RudEQRziA) ,” released in 1975 on Horizon Records, a subsidiary of A&M.
Jerome Douglas Cooper was born in Chicago on Dec. 14, 1946. He was a baby when his father, Chauncey, contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium. His mother, Ruth, worked as a domestic.
In addition to Ms. Cummins-Cooper, he is survived by his wife, Beth Cummins; two brothers, Marc and Dennis; and a sister, Joan Cooper.
After the Revolutionary Ensemble disbanded in 1977, its reputation lived on despite a slim and often hard-to-find body of recordings. In 2004, the group reunited at the Vision Festival in New York and released a new album, “And Now… ,” (http://pirecordings.com/album/pi13) on the Pi label. The album’s centerpiece was “911-544,” a suite by Mr. Cooper inspired by his experience of watching the World Trade Center attack from the roof of his apartment building.
The reunited Revolutionary Ensemble lasted just a year; two of its final concerts, in 2005, were recorded and later released on the Mutable label as “Beyond the Boundary of Time” and “Counterparts.” Mr. Jenkins died in 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/arts/music/26jenkins.html) , and Sirone in 2009.
Mr. Cooper’s most recent album, “A Magical Approach” (Mutable), featured an hourlong solo performance recorded in 2007. On it he plays balafon, synthesizer and drums — often at the same time, as on “My Birds (https://youtu.be/oovdLySK7Wc) ,” offered in collegial tribute to his former band mates.
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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Jerome Cooper, a Multitextured Jazz Percussionist, Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/arts/music/jerome-cooper-a-multitextured-jazz-percussionist-dies-at-68.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150513
** Jerome Cooper, a Multitextured Jazz Percussionist, Dies at 68
————————————————————
Photo
Jerome Cooper, a jazz percussionist and member of the Revolutionary Ensemble, performing at the Vision Festival in New York in 2000. Credit Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Jerome Cooper, a percussionist who played an important role in the post-1960s jazz avant-garde, especially as a member of the influential trio the Revolutionary Ensemble, died on May 6 in Brooklyn. He was 68.
The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, said his daughter, Levanah Cummins-Cooper.
Mr. Cooper worked with a number of major figures in experimental jazz, including the pianist Cecil Taylor, the reed player Anthony Braxton (http://tricentricfoundation.org/bio-history) , the trumpeter Lester Bowie and the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. And he made a handful of his own albums, starting in 1978 with “Root Assumptions (https://youtu.be/1c3HksZnPCQ) ,” a solo percussion performance that evoked both tribal music and minimalism.
He was an alert, rigorously precise drummer who drew from a wide palette of textures: not just drums and cymbals but also the balafon, a West African precursor to the marimba; the chirimia, a Latin American oboe; and even bugle and musical saw. He called his orchestral approach “multidimensional drumming” and explained that it emphasized “layers of sounds and rhythms” rather than linear momentum.
With the Revolutionary Ensemble, whose other members were the violinist Leroy Jenkins and the bassist Norris Jones, known as Sirone, Mr. Cooper refined a taut, chamberlike rapport, distinct from the more blustery side of free jazz. His percussive stirrings, often including stretches of silence, were an indispensable factor in the group’s sound, as heard on a small but prized body of work, notably “The People’s Republic (https://youtu.be/m0RudEQRziA) ,” released in 1975 on Horizon Records, a subsidiary of A&M.
Jerome Douglas Cooper was born in Chicago on Dec. 14, 1946. He was a baby when his father, Chauncey, contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium. His mother, Ruth, worked as a domestic.
In addition to Ms. Cummins-Cooper, he is survived by his wife, Beth Cummins; two brothers, Marc and Dennis; and a sister, Joan Cooper.
After the Revolutionary Ensemble disbanded in 1977, its reputation lived on despite a slim and often hard-to-find body of recordings. In 2004, the group reunited at the Vision Festival in New York and released a new album, “And Now… ,” (http://pirecordings.com/album/pi13) on the Pi label. The album’s centerpiece was “911-544,” a suite by Mr. Cooper inspired by his experience of watching the World Trade Center attack from the roof of his apartment building.
The reunited Revolutionary Ensemble lasted just a year; two of its final concerts, in 2005, were recorded and later released on the Mutable label as “Beyond the Boundary of Time” and “Counterparts.” Mr. Jenkins died in 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/arts/music/26jenkins.html) , and Sirone in 2009.
Mr. Cooper’s most recent album, “A Magical Approach” (Mutable), featured an hourlong solo performance recorded in 2007. On it he plays balafon, synthesizer and drums — often at the same time, as on “My Birds (https://youtu.be/oovdLySK7Wc) ,” offered in collegial tribute to his former band mates.
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c05a229aac) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=c05a229aac&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jerome Cooper, a Multitextured Jazz Percussionist, Dies at 68 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/14/arts/music/jerome-cooper-a-multitextured-jazz-percussionist-dies-at-68.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150513
** Jerome Cooper, a Multitextured Jazz Percussionist, Dies at 68
————————————————————
Photo
Jerome Cooper, a jazz percussionist and member of the Revolutionary Ensemble, performing at the Vision Festival in New York in 2000. Credit Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Jerome Cooper, a percussionist who played an important role in the post-1960s jazz avant-garde, especially as a member of the influential trio the Revolutionary Ensemble, died on May 6 in Brooklyn. He was 68.
The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, said his daughter, Levanah Cummins-Cooper.
Mr. Cooper worked with a number of major figures in experimental jazz, including the pianist Cecil Taylor, the reed player Anthony Braxton (http://tricentricfoundation.org/bio-history) , the trumpeter Lester Bowie and the saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk. And he made a handful of his own albums, starting in 1978 with “Root Assumptions (https://youtu.be/1c3HksZnPCQ) ,” a solo percussion performance that evoked both tribal music and minimalism.
He was an alert, rigorously precise drummer who drew from a wide palette of textures: not just drums and cymbals but also the balafon, a West African precursor to the marimba; the chirimia, a Latin American oboe; and even bugle and musical saw. He called his orchestral approach “multidimensional drumming” and explained that it emphasized “layers of sounds and rhythms” rather than linear momentum.
With the Revolutionary Ensemble, whose other members were the violinist Leroy Jenkins and the bassist Norris Jones, known as Sirone, Mr. Cooper refined a taut, chamberlike rapport, distinct from the more blustery side of free jazz. His percussive stirrings, often including stretches of silence, were an indispensable factor in the group’s sound, as heard on a small but prized body of work, notably “The People’s Republic (https://youtu.be/m0RudEQRziA) ,” released in 1975 on Horizon Records, a subsidiary of A&M.
Jerome Douglas Cooper was born in Chicago on Dec. 14, 1946. He was a baby when his father, Chauncey, contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium. His mother, Ruth, worked as a domestic.
In addition to Ms. Cummins-Cooper, he is survived by his wife, Beth Cummins; two brothers, Marc and Dennis; and a sister, Joan Cooper.
After the Revolutionary Ensemble disbanded in 1977, its reputation lived on despite a slim and often hard-to-find body of recordings. In 2004, the group reunited at the Vision Festival in New York and released a new album, “And Now… ,” (http://pirecordings.com/album/pi13) on the Pi label. The album’s centerpiece was “911-544,” a suite by Mr. Cooper inspired by his experience of watching the World Trade Center attack from the roof of his apartment building.
The reunited Revolutionary Ensemble lasted just a year; two of its final concerts, in 2005, were recorded and later released on the Mutable label as “Beyond the Boundary of Time” and “Counterparts.” Mr. Jenkins died in 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/26/arts/music/26jenkins.html) , and Sirone in 2009.
Mr. Cooper’s most recent album, “A Magical Approach” (Mutable), featured an hourlong solo performance recorded in 2007. On it he plays balafon, synthesizer and drums — often at the same time, as on “My Birds (https://youtu.be/oovdLySK7Wc) ,” offered in collegial tribute to his former band mates.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
He once said that his book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz” (1984), a well-received portrait of the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, was his personal favorite. He also said that getting paid to play jazz piano might have been his proudest achievement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-dies-at-92.html?_r=0
** William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ Dies at 92
————————————————————
Photo
William Zinsser in 2013. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
William Zinsser, a writer, editor and teacher whose book “On Writing Well” sold more than 1.5 million copies by employing his own literary craftsmanship to urge clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
His wife of almost 60 years, Caroline Fraser Zinsser, confirmed the death.
Mr. Zinsser wrote 19 books, taught at Yale and elsewhere, was drama editor and movie critic for The New York Herald Tribune and executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
But it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply. “On Writing Well,” first published by Harper & Row in 1976, has gone through repeated editions, at least four of which were substantially revised to include subjects like new technologies (the word processor) and new demographic trends (more writers from other cultural traditions).
It became a book that editors and teachers encouraged writers to reread annually in the manner of another classic on the craft of writing, “The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
Photo
Mr. Zinsser in 1968. His book “On Writing Well,” first published in 1976, sold more than 1.5 million copies and is considered a classic on the craft of writing. Credit Walter Daran/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images
Mr. Zinsser went beyond that earlier book’s admonitions on writerly dos and don’ts; he used his professional experience to immerse readers in the tribulations of authorship, even subconscious ones.
“Ultimately, the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is,” Mr. Zinsser wrote in “On Writing Well.” He added: “I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me — some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.”
In an autobiography, “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past” (2004), Mr. Zinsser said he did not find his writer’s voice until he was in his 50s, when he wrote “On Writing Well.” He had hoped to be perceived as “the urbane essayist or columnist or humorist,” he said, but realized that his most basic desire was to be a helpful instructor, “to pass along what I knew.”
“Now, whatever I write about, I make myself available,” he wrote. “No hiding.”
His advice was straightforward: Write clearly. Guard the message with your life. Avoid jargon and big words. Use active verbs. Make the reader think you enjoyed writing the piece.
He conveyed that himself with lively turns of phrase:
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough,” he wrote in “On Writing Well.”
“Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence,” he wrote in “Writing to Learn: How to Write — and Think — Clearly About Any Subject at All” (1988).
It added up to more fun than some readers might have expected. “You actually enjoy reading it, rather than feeling like you’re eating your spinach,” Ronald Kovach wrote in The Writer magazine in 2002 of a Zinsser book.
William Knowlton Zinsser was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1922. He escaped the urgings of his father to join the family’s shellac business (http://www.zinsser.com/default.asp) but could not escape his mother’s counsel that being cheerful was a Christian obligation.
“It is because of her that I am cursed with optimism,” he said in his autobiography.
He attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he said he was “intoxicated” by the scent of printer’s ink as editor of the school paper. His Princeton education was interrupted by World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , during which he served in the Army in North Africa and Italy.
After the fighting ended, he was able to take art history courses at a college the Army had set up in Florence. On his return to Princeton, he persuaded the dean that his firsthand experience visiting Italy’s art treasures deserved Princeton credit.
“I’ve always thought he waived one or two credits to make my total come out right,” Mr. Zinsser said of the dean, Robert K. Root, in his autobiography. “In the middle of the interview he stopped counting; numbers weren’t as important to him as learning.”
In a manner typical of his writing, Mr. Zinsser used this episode to make a philosophical point about America’s obsession with winning and losing. “Don’t be afraid to fail,” he declared.
He described his own life as a chain of disruptions. He lost his beloved first job at The Herald Tribune when the paper closed in 1966. He left New York for New Haven to teach at Yale, something completely new. He left Yale for the Book-of-the-Month Club, another uprooting. He was nervous, he said, but things worked out.
“Be wary of security as a goal,” Mr. Zinsser advised graduates of Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1988. “It may often look like life’s best prize. Usually it’s not.”
He worked for 13 years at The Herald Tribune as feature writer, drama editor and movie critic, glorying in Broadway opening nights and junkets to Hollywood. Then came 11 years as a freelance writer, churning out magazine articles as well as many books. One, “Pop Goes America” (1966), analyzed what was meant by the word “pop” (an enjoyment of the superficial, he explained).
Mr. Zinsser wrote that the loneliness of the freelance writer’s life helped persuade him to turn to teaching. When he arrived at Yale in 1970, 170 students applied to take his course, “Nonfiction Workshop,” which had room for 20.
The new teacher guessed that the course’s popularity stemmed in part from a desperation to learn the grammar and syntax that permissive English teachers had ignored. Yale quickly hired more journalists to teach writing fundamentals, and the Yale English department added writing instruction to its curriculum.
Mr. Zinsser also edited Yale Alumni Magazine and was master of Branford College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential colleges.
“On Writing Well” grew out of his teaching at Yale. Writing it was his wife’s idea, he said (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/visions-and-revisions/A) . They had married in October 1955.
Mark Singer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, took Mr. Zinsser’s course at Yale and has reread his book several times.
“The first lesson he taught was what to leave out,” Mr. Singer said. “He was a demon about clutter.”
Mr. Singer praised Mr. Zinsser for guiding aspiring writers on the arduous path of finding their own voice. “He certainly helped people avoid the pitfalls of trying to sound like something they’re not,” he said.
Christopher Buckley, the political satirist, said in an interview that he sensed Mr. Zinsser perched on his shoulder like a parrot when he sat down to write. The parrot always says to look for needless verbiage.
“It might not be an exaggeration to say that millions of words have been cut,” Mr. Buckley said. “Doubtless, Bill would say, ‘I think you missed a few.’ ”
Mr. Zinsser frequently received letters from less famous writers, including the night manager at a resort campground in Orlando, Fla., who had recently become editor of the camp newsletter.
“Because of my moaning and groaning about what to write and how to write it, my boyfriend gave me a copy of ‘On Writing Well,’ ” the woman wrote. “Now I am having a real blast!”
Mr. Zinsser worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club for eight years. He later taught writing at the New School in New York. In his late ’80s he wrote a blog (https://theamericanscholar.org/the-complete-zinsser-on-friday/#.VVIiBxcYFv0) on popular culture, the craft of writing and the arts for the website of The American Scholar that won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary.
He published books steadily, more than confirming his self-definition: “a writer who does some teaching,” not vice versa. Besides writing about writing (he published books on writing memoirs, political novels, children’s books, religious books and travel books), he followed his own advice and wrote about what interested him, including baseball, songwriters and resonant American places, like Yellowstone National Park and Pearl Harbor.
He once said that his book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz” (1984), a well-received portrait of the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, was his personal favorite. He also said that getting paid to play jazz piano might have been his proudest achievement.
Besides his wife, with whom he shared another home, in Niantic, Conn., Mr. Zinsser is survived by their son, John; their daughter, Amy; and four grandchildren.
In 2012, Mr. Zinsser sent a written invitation to friends and former students “to attend the next stage of my life.” He said glaucoma had caused “further rapid decline in my already hazy vision,” forcing him to end his 70-year career as a writer.
But he announced his availability “for help with writing problems and stalled editorial projects and memoirs and family history; for singalongs and piano lessons and vocal coaching; for readings and salons and whatever pastimes you may devise that will keep both of us interested and amused.”
“I’m eager to hear from you,” he wrote. “No project too weird.”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=7618a26724) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=7618a26724&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
He once said that his book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz” (1984), a well-received portrait of the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, was his personal favorite. He also said that getting paid to play jazz piano might have been his proudest achievement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-dies-at-92.html?_r=0
** William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ Dies at 92
————————————————————
Photo
William Zinsser in 2013. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
William Zinsser, a writer, editor and teacher whose book “On Writing Well” sold more than 1.5 million copies by employing his own literary craftsmanship to urge clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
His wife of almost 60 years, Caroline Fraser Zinsser, confirmed the death.
Mr. Zinsser wrote 19 books, taught at Yale and elsewhere, was drama editor and movie critic for The New York Herald Tribune and executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
But it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply. “On Writing Well,” first published by Harper & Row in 1976, has gone through repeated editions, at least four of which were substantially revised to include subjects like new technologies (the word processor) and new demographic trends (more writers from other cultural traditions).
It became a book that editors and teachers encouraged writers to reread annually in the manner of another classic on the craft of writing, “The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
Photo
Mr. Zinsser in 1968. His book “On Writing Well,” first published in 1976, sold more than 1.5 million copies and is considered a classic on the craft of writing. Credit Walter Daran/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images
Mr. Zinsser went beyond that earlier book’s admonitions on writerly dos and don’ts; he used his professional experience to immerse readers in the tribulations of authorship, even subconscious ones.
“Ultimately, the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is,” Mr. Zinsser wrote in “On Writing Well.” He added: “I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me — some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.”
In an autobiography, “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past” (2004), Mr. Zinsser said he did not find his writer’s voice until he was in his 50s, when he wrote “On Writing Well.” He had hoped to be perceived as “the urbane essayist or columnist or humorist,” he said, but realized that his most basic desire was to be a helpful instructor, “to pass along what I knew.”
“Now, whatever I write about, I make myself available,” he wrote. “No hiding.”
His advice was straightforward: Write clearly. Guard the message with your life. Avoid jargon and big words. Use active verbs. Make the reader think you enjoyed writing the piece.
He conveyed that himself with lively turns of phrase:
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough,” he wrote in “On Writing Well.”
“Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence,” he wrote in “Writing to Learn: How to Write — and Think — Clearly About Any Subject at All” (1988).
It added up to more fun than some readers might have expected. “You actually enjoy reading it, rather than feeling like you’re eating your spinach,” Ronald Kovach wrote in The Writer magazine in 2002 of a Zinsser book.
William Knowlton Zinsser was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1922. He escaped the urgings of his father to join the family’s shellac business (http://www.zinsser.com/default.asp) but could not escape his mother’s counsel that being cheerful was a Christian obligation.
“It is because of her that I am cursed with optimism,” he said in his autobiography.
He attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he said he was “intoxicated” by the scent of printer’s ink as editor of the school paper. His Princeton education was interrupted by World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , during which he served in the Army in North Africa and Italy.
After the fighting ended, he was able to take art history courses at a college the Army had set up in Florence. On his return to Princeton, he persuaded the dean that his firsthand experience visiting Italy’s art treasures deserved Princeton credit.
“I’ve always thought he waived one or two credits to make my total come out right,” Mr. Zinsser said of the dean, Robert K. Root, in his autobiography. “In the middle of the interview he stopped counting; numbers weren’t as important to him as learning.”
In a manner typical of his writing, Mr. Zinsser used this episode to make a philosophical point about America’s obsession with winning and losing. “Don’t be afraid to fail,” he declared.
He described his own life as a chain of disruptions. He lost his beloved first job at The Herald Tribune when the paper closed in 1966. He left New York for New Haven to teach at Yale, something completely new. He left Yale for the Book-of-the-Month Club, another uprooting. He was nervous, he said, but things worked out.
“Be wary of security as a goal,” Mr. Zinsser advised graduates of Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1988. “It may often look like life’s best prize. Usually it’s not.”
He worked for 13 years at The Herald Tribune as feature writer, drama editor and movie critic, glorying in Broadway opening nights and junkets to Hollywood. Then came 11 years as a freelance writer, churning out magazine articles as well as many books. One, “Pop Goes America” (1966), analyzed what was meant by the word “pop” (an enjoyment of the superficial, he explained).
Mr. Zinsser wrote that the loneliness of the freelance writer’s life helped persuade him to turn to teaching. When he arrived at Yale in 1970, 170 students applied to take his course, “Nonfiction Workshop,” which had room for 20.
The new teacher guessed that the course’s popularity stemmed in part from a desperation to learn the grammar and syntax that permissive English teachers had ignored. Yale quickly hired more journalists to teach writing fundamentals, and the Yale English department added writing instruction to its curriculum.
Mr. Zinsser also edited Yale Alumni Magazine and was master of Branford College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential colleges.
“On Writing Well” grew out of his teaching at Yale. Writing it was his wife’s idea, he said (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/visions-and-revisions/A) . They had married in October 1955.
Mark Singer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, took Mr. Zinsser’s course at Yale and has reread his book several times.
“The first lesson he taught was what to leave out,” Mr. Singer said. “He was a demon about clutter.”
Mr. Singer praised Mr. Zinsser for guiding aspiring writers on the arduous path of finding their own voice. “He certainly helped people avoid the pitfalls of trying to sound like something they’re not,” he said.
Christopher Buckley, the political satirist, said in an interview that he sensed Mr. Zinsser perched on his shoulder like a parrot when he sat down to write. The parrot always says to look for needless verbiage.
“It might not be an exaggeration to say that millions of words have been cut,” Mr. Buckley said. “Doubtless, Bill would say, ‘I think you missed a few.’ ”
Mr. Zinsser frequently received letters from less famous writers, including the night manager at a resort campground in Orlando, Fla., who had recently become editor of the camp newsletter.
“Because of my moaning and groaning about what to write and how to write it, my boyfriend gave me a copy of ‘On Writing Well,’ ” the woman wrote. “Now I am having a real blast!”
Mr. Zinsser worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club for eight years. He later taught writing at the New School in New York. In his late ’80s he wrote a blog (https://theamericanscholar.org/the-complete-zinsser-on-friday/#.VVIiBxcYFv0) on popular culture, the craft of writing and the arts for the website of The American Scholar that won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary.
He published books steadily, more than confirming his self-definition: “a writer who does some teaching,” not vice versa. Besides writing about writing (he published books on writing memoirs, political novels, children’s books, religious books and travel books), he followed his own advice and wrote about what interested him, including baseball, songwriters and resonant American places, like Yellowstone National Park and Pearl Harbor.
He once said that his book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz” (1984), a well-received portrait of the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, was his personal favorite. He also said that getting paid to play jazz piano might have been his proudest achievement.
Besides his wife, with whom he shared another home, in Niantic, Conn., Mr. Zinsser is survived by their son, John; their daughter, Amy; and four grandchildren.
In 2012, Mr. Zinsser sent a written invitation to friends and former students “to attend the next stage of my life.” He said glaucoma had caused “further rapid decline in my already hazy vision,” forcing him to end his 70-year career as a writer.
But he announced his availability “for help with writing problems and stalled editorial projects and memoirs and family history; for singalongs and piano lessons and vocal coaching; for readings and salons and whatever pastimes you may devise that will keep both of us interested and amused.”
“I’m eager to hear from you,” he wrote. “No project too weird.”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=7618a26724) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=7618a26724&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
He once said that his book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz” (1984), a well-received portrait of the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, was his personal favorite. He also said that getting paid to play jazz piano might have been his proudest achievement.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/william-zinsser-author-of-on-writing-well-dies-at-92.html?_r=0
** William Zinsser, Author of ‘On Writing Well,’ Dies at 92
————————————————————
Photo
William Zinsser in 2013. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
William Zinsser, a writer, editor and teacher whose book “On Writing Well” sold more than 1.5 million copies by employing his own literary craftsmanship to urge clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
His wife of almost 60 years, Caroline Fraser Zinsser, confirmed the death.
Mr. Zinsser wrote 19 books, taught at Yale and elsewhere, was drama editor and movie critic for The New York Herald Tribune and executive editor of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
But it was his role as an arbiter of good writing that resonated widely and deeply. “On Writing Well,” first published by Harper & Row in 1976, has gone through repeated editions, at least four of which were substantially revised to include subjects like new technologies (the word processor) and new demographic trends (more writers from other cultural traditions).
It became a book that editors and teachers encouraged writers to reread annually in the manner of another classic on the craft of writing, “The Elements of Style,” by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White.
Photo
Mr. Zinsser in 1968. His book “On Writing Well,” first published in 1976, sold more than 1.5 million copies and is considered a classic on the craft of writing. Credit Walter Daran/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images
Mr. Zinsser went beyond that earlier book’s admonitions on writerly dos and don’ts; he used his professional experience to immerse readers in the tribulations of authorship, even subconscious ones.
“Ultimately, the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is,” Mr. Zinsser wrote in “On Writing Well.” He added: “I often find myself reading with interest about a topic I never thought would interest me — some scientific quest, perhaps. What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field.”
In an autobiography, “Writing About Your Life: A Journey Into the Past” (2004), Mr. Zinsser said he did not find his writer’s voice until he was in his 50s, when he wrote “On Writing Well.” He had hoped to be perceived as “the urbane essayist or columnist or humorist,” he said, but realized that his most basic desire was to be a helpful instructor, “to pass along what I knew.”
“Now, whatever I write about, I make myself available,” he wrote. “No hiding.”
His advice was straightforward: Write clearly. Guard the message with your life. Avoid jargon and big words. Use active verbs. Make the reader think you enjoyed writing the piece.
He conveyed that himself with lively turns of phrase:
“There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough,” he wrote in “On Writing Well.”
“Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill rode to glory on the back of the strong declarative sentence,” he wrote in “Writing to Learn: How to Write — and Think — Clearly About Any Subject at All” (1988).
It added up to more fun than some readers might have expected. “You actually enjoy reading it, rather than feeling like you’re eating your spinach,” Ronald Kovach wrote in The Writer magazine in 2002 of a Zinsser book.
William Knowlton Zinsser was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1922. He escaped the urgings of his father to join the family’s shellac business (http://www.zinsser.com/default.asp) but could not escape his mother’s counsel that being cheerful was a Christian obligation.
“It is because of her that I am cursed with optimism,” he said in his autobiography.
He attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he said he was “intoxicated” by the scent of printer’s ink as editor of the school paper. His Princeton education was interrupted by World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , during which he served in the Army in North Africa and Italy.
After the fighting ended, he was able to take art history courses at a college the Army had set up in Florence. On his return to Princeton, he persuaded the dean that his firsthand experience visiting Italy’s art treasures deserved Princeton credit.
“I’ve always thought he waived one or two credits to make my total come out right,” Mr. Zinsser said of the dean, Robert K. Root, in his autobiography. “In the middle of the interview he stopped counting; numbers weren’t as important to him as learning.”
In a manner typical of his writing, Mr. Zinsser used this episode to make a philosophical point about America’s obsession with winning and losing. “Don’t be afraid to fail,” he declared.
He described his own life as a chain of disruptions. He lost his beloved first job at The Herald Tribune when the paper closed in 1966. He left New York for New Haven to teach at Yale, something completely new. He left Yale for the Book-of-the-Month Club, another uprooting. He was nervous, he said, but things worked out.
“Be wary of security as a goal,” Mr. Zinsser advised graduates of Wesleyan University in Connecticut in 1988. “It may often look like life’s best prize. Usually it’s not.”
He worked for 13 years at The Herald Tribune as feature writer, drama editor and movie critic, glorying in Broadway opening nights and junkets to Hollywood. Then came 11 years as a freelance writer, churning out magazine articles as well as many books. One, “Pop Goes America” (1966), analyzed what was meant by the word “pop” (an enjoyment of the superficial, he explained).
Mr. Zinsser wrote that the loneliness of the freelance writer’s life helped persuade him to turn to teaching. When he arrived at Yale in 1970, 170 students applied to take his course, “Nonfiction Workshop,” which had room for 20.
The new teacher guessed that the course’s popularity stemmed in part from a desperation to learn the grammar and syntax that permissive English teachers had ignored. Yale quickly hired more journalists to teach writing fundamentals, and the Yale English department added writing instruction to its curriculum.
Mr. Zinsser also edited Yale Alumni Magazine and was master of Branford College, one of Yale’s 12 undergraduate residential colleges.
“On Writing Well” grew out of his teaching at Yale. Writing it was his wife’s idea, he said (http://www.theamericanscholar.org/visions-and-revisions/A) . They had married in October 1955.
Mark Singer, a staff writer for The New Yorker, took Mr. Zinsser’s course at Yale and has reread his book several times.
“The first lesson he taught was what to leave out,” Mr. Singer said. “He was a demon about clutter.”
Mr. Singer praised Mr. Zinsser for guiding aspiring writers on the arduous path of finding their own voice. “He certainly helped people avoid the pitfalls of trying to sound like something they’re not,” he said.
Christopher Buckley, the political satirist, said in an interview that he sensed Mr. Zinsser perched on his shoulder like a parrot when he sat down to write. The parrot always says to look for needless verbiage.
“It might not be an exaggeration to say that millions of words have been cut,” Mr. Buckley said. “Doubtless, Bill would say, ‘I think you missed a few.’ ”
Mr. Zinsser frequently received letters from less famous writers, including the night manager at a resort campground in Orlando, Fla., who had recently become editor of the camp newsletter.
“Because of my moaning and groaning about what to write and how to write it, my boyfriend gave me a copy of ‘On Writing Well,’ ” the woman wrote. “Now I am having a real blast!”
Mr. Zinsser worked for the Book-of-the-Month Club for eight years. He later taught writing at the New School in New York. In his late ’80s he wrote a blog (https://theamericanscholar.org/the-complete-zinsser-on-friday/#.VVIiBxcYFv0) on popular culture, the craft of writing and the arts for the website of The American Scholar that won a National Magazine Award for digital commentary.
He published books steadily, more than confirming his self-definition: “a writer who does some teaching,” not vice versa. Besides writing about writing (he published books on writing memoirs, political novels, children’s books, religious books and travel books), he followed his own advice and wrote about what interested him, including baseball, songwriters and resonant American places, like Yellowstone National Park and Pearl Harbor.
He once said that his book “Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz” (1984), a well-received portrait of the jazz musicians Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff, was his personal favorite. He also said that getting paid to play jazz piano might have been his proudest achievement.
Besides his wife, with whom he shared another home, in Niantic, Conn., Mr. Zinsser is survived by their son, John; their daughter, Amy; and four grandchildren.
In 2012, Mr. Zinsser sent a written invitation to friends and former students “to attend the next stage of my life.” He said glaucoma had caused “further rapid decline in my already hazy vision,” forcing him to end his 70-year career as a writer.
But he announced his availability “for help with writing problems and stalled editorial projects and memoirs and family history; for singalongs and piano lessons and vocal coaching; for readings and salons and whatever pastimes you may devise that will keep both of us interested and amused.”
“I’m eager to hear from you,” he wrote. “No project too weird.”
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Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation, Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/music/joey-alexander-an-11-year-old-jazz-sensation-who-hardly-clears-the-pianos-sightlines.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150512
** Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation, Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines
————————————————————
Continue reading the main storyJoey Alexander, an 11-year-old jazz musician. Video by YouTube Help
The cheers rang loud and long for Joey Alexander after he had played his last delicate piano chord in a recent sold-out set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan.
Beaming at his standing ovation, he stood between his bassist and his drummer, intent on taking a group bow. The scene was sweetly comical: The top of his head barely grazed their chests.
Which only made sense, given that Joey, jazz’s latest media star, is 11 years old.
This was far from his first turn in the spotlight. He became an overnight sensation (http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/05/07/10-year-old-piano-prodigy-from-indonesia-takes-new-york-by-storm/) — not too strong a term — with his guest performance a year ago at a Jazz at Lincoln Center gala, which won him rave reviews. His debut album, “My Favorite Things” (Motéma), is out this week, and he is booked for a series of notable appearances in the coming months, including one at the Newport Jazz Festival in August.
Discovered in Jakarta, Indonesia, about three years ago, Joey moved with his parents to New York last year, with the help of jazz luminaries like the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who called him “my hero” on Facebook and with whom he now shares a manager.
It’s all part of the improbable life of a child prodigy. Joey may be the most talked-about one that jazz has seen in a while, though he is hardly alone. There’s José André Montaño, a 10-year-old blind pianist from Bolivia; Kojo Roney (https://youtu.be/gzB1PK5AMKg) , a 10-year-old drummer who had a concert residency last month in Brooklyn; and Grace Kelly, 22, an alto saxophonist who made her first album at 12. The list goes on, with some prodigies developing major careers and others falling short of their early promise.
It is natural to harbor mixed feelings about this phenomenon, and for a critic it’s all but imperative. The acclamation given to musical prodigies usually involves some mix of circus-act astonishment and commodity futures trading. All the attention lavished on them can distort the ecology of an art form, even while bringing encouraging news about its survival. And, as with any celebrated young talent, there is a question of intention: Who benefits most from the renown these performers receive? Is there a way to marvel at mind-blowing precocity without stunting an artist’s development?
Joey looked like a cherub several years ago when his reputation began to build in jazz circles: small in stature, with a thick mop of black hair over a face that still showed traces of baby fat. He is taller now, though the sight of him at a grand piano can still be disconcerting, especially when you hear what he plays.
In person he comes across like any polite, intelligent middle-school boy with highly focused interests. He showed up for a stroll in Central Park last week in jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt. “Um, I don’t know the band so much,” he admitted, “but I like the shirt.”
He clearly loves and respects his art form. “Jazz is a hard music,” he said in response to a question about heightened expectations, “and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that’s the most important thing.”
Jazz prodigies rarely have full command of their artistry. They tend to exhibit a superabundance of technique and core knowledge but a more deficient supply of the intangibles — what jazz partisans mean when they praise with the word “maturity.” And even the most virtuoso interpretation of composed material is of limited use in jazz, at least when it comes to a solo career.
For a jazz pianist, the mastery entails a staggering breadth of knowledge about harmony, rhythm and orchestration, all converging in an eloquent synthesis.
Joey Alexander has a handle on a good deal of that. “My Favorite Things,” produced by Jason Olaine, the director of programming and touring for Jazz at Lincoln Center, shows him to be a thoughtful musician as well as a natural one, with a sophisticated harmonic palette and a dynamic sensitivity.
On the album, Joey worked with top-tier players like the bassist Larry Grenadier. “I was wary,” Mr. Grenadier said of the invitation to record. “What I typically find with kid prodigies is that they come from this clinical, Western European way of accumulating knowledge. What I found with Joey is that he’s coming from a more intuitive, communal way of playing music, which is so beautiful to see.”
By and large the album is characterized by disarming self-possession, especially in light of its back story, which is hard to ignore. Joey, whose full name is Josiah Alexander Sila, was born in Bali, many miles from the nearest major jazz hub. His earliest encounters with jazz were through the CDs that his father, Denny Sila, had brought home in the 1990s, after earning a degree in finance at Pace University in Manhattan.
Photo
Joey Alexander at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
He and Joey’s mother, Fara, ran a tourism business. They are soft-spoken, friendly and unassuming: seemingly the farthest thing from stage parents, although they take clear pride in Joey’s talent. As for his career, “We’re flowing with it,” Mr. Sila said over lunch in Central Park. “We never expected anything.”
Joey began playing piano at 6, picking out a Thelonious Monk tune by ear, which led Mr. Sila, an amateur pianist, to teach him some fundamentals. Beyond that, Joey recalled, “I heard records, and also YouTube, of course.”
He played at jam sessions in Bali and then in Jakarta, when his family moved there. At 8, he played for the pianist Herbie Hancock, who was in Jakarta as a Unesco good-will ambassador. (“You told me that you believed in me,” Joey recalled last fall, addressing Mr. Hancock at a gala for the Jazz Foundation of America (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/arts/a-great-night-in-harlem-salutes-herbie-hancock.html) , “and that was the day I decided to dedicate my childhood to jazz.”) He was 9 when he entered the first Master-Jam Fest, an all-ages jazz competition in Ukraine. He won its grand prize.
Soon one of his YouTube videos caught the notice of Mr. Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to appear at the organization’s 2014 gala. Joey played a solo version of the Monk ballad “‘Round Midnight” as the finale, earning a standing ovation, glowing reviews (http://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2374) and some influential supporters.
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the photographer and widow of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, invited Joey to perform at the Arthur Ashe Learning Center gala, for a crowd including former President Bill Clinton. She later introduced Joey and his family to Gordon Uehling III, founder of the CourtSense Tennis Training Center; he has put them up at his estate in Alpine, N.J., where Novak Djokovic often stays during the U.S. Open. (Joey has access to a Steinway there, which he plays when he isn’t catching up on school online.)
Jazz at Lincoln Center sees not only a prodigy, but also an ambassador. “We are really interested in incorporating Joey into our educational outreach,” Mr. Olaine said, “to get him out into middle schools and play in front of kids his own age. He could inspire young people to listen to and enjoy jazz music.”
Still, the salient question with a musician as young and good as this is whether it’s premature to pursue a solo career. Normally, a prodigy learns at the side of the masters, Mr. Olaine said. “But Joey is such an extraordinary case that I don’t think any of us have ever seen before. He’s not a fully formed musician yet; we don’t know who he’s going to turn out to be. But right now, he’s ready to be a leader.”
That may be true. But there was room for growth in Joey’s recent trio set. Working with the drummer Sammy Miller and the bassist Russell Hall, who appear on his album, he delved into ballads, blues and standards — including “Giant Steps,” the John Coltrane étude whose harmonic intricacies have long been a proving ground for improvisers. (It’s the opening track on Joey’s album.)
The tune reached an impressive fever pitch, eliciting hollers, but during the buildup, Joey wasn’t always on the surest rhythmic footing. An original, “Ma Blues,” was cute but derivative. And while he fashioned a beautifully restive intro to “Monk’s Mood,” his solo didn’t address the song’s internal architecture, occasionally settling for a rote blues lick.
There’s a reason even the most dazzling jazz prodigies serve apprenticeships. This has been true for Gadi Lehavi, from Israel, and Beka Gochiashvili, from Georgia — pianists accustomed to adulation (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/arts/music/beka-gochiashvili-and-gadi-lehavi-at-the-allen-room.html) since childhood, both now 19, with heavy sideman credits. It was true for Julian Lage, a guitarist who received national attention as early as 8, yet prefaced his solo career with years of mentoring by the vibraphonist Gary Burton, a former prodigy himself.
For all his exceptional talent, Joey is a prime candidate for similar counsel.Asked at one point to recall treasured advice from a jazz elder, he was momentarily at a loss for words. “You know,” he said finally, his eyes lighting up, “one thing people always say to me: ‘Keep playing.’”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
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CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation, Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/music/joey-alexander-an-11-year-old-jazz-sensation-who-hardly-clears-the-pianos-sightlines.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150512
** Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation, Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines
————————————————————
Continue reading the main storyJoey Alexander, an 11-year-old jazz musician. Video by YouTube Help
The cheers rang loud and long for Joey Alexander after he had played his last delicate piano chord in a recent sold-out set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan.
Beaming at his standing ovation, he stood between his bassist and his drummer, intent on taking a group bow. The scene was sweetly comical: The top of his head barely grazed their chests.
Which only made sense, given that Joey, jazz’s latest media star, is 11 years old.
This was far from his first turn in the spotlight. He became an overnight sensation (http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/05/07/10-year-old-piano-prodigy-from-indonesia-takes-new-york-by-storm/) — not too strong a term — with his guest performance a year ago at a Jazz at Lincoln Center gala, which won him rave reviews. His debut album, “My Favorite Things” (Motéma), is out this week, and he is booked for a series of notable appearances in the coming months, including one at the Newport Jazz Festival in August.
Discovered in Jakarta, Indonesia, about three years ago, Joey moved with his parents to New York last year, with the help of jazz luminaries like the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who called him “my hero” on Facebook and with whom he now shares a manager.
It’s all part of the improbable life of a child prodigy. Joey may be the most talked-about one that jazz has seen in a while, though he is hardly alone. There’s José André Montaño, a 10-year-old blind pianist from Bolivia; Kojo Roney (https://youtu.be/gzB1PK5AMKg) , a 10-year-old drummer who had a concert residency last month in Brooklyn; and Grace Kelly, 22, an alto saxophonist who made her first album at 12. The list goes on, with some prodigies developing major careers and others falling short of their early promise.
It is natural to harbor mixed feelings about this phenomenon, and for a critic it’s all but imperative. The acclamation given to musical prodigies usually involves some mix of circus-act astonishment and commodity futures trading. All the attention lavished on them can distort the ecology of an art form, even while bringing encouraging news about its survival. And, as with any celebrated young talent, there is a question of intention: Who benefits most from the renown these performers receive? Is there a way to marvel at mind-blowing precocity without stunting an artist’s development?
Joey looked like a cherub several years ago when his reputation began to build in jazz circles: small in stature, with a thick mop of black hair over a face that still showed traces of baby fat. He is taller now, though the sight of him at a grand piano can still be disconcerting, especially when you hear what he plays.
In person he comes across like any polite, intelligent middle-school boy with highly focused interests. He showed up for a stroll in Central Park last week in jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt. “Um, I don’t know the band so much,” he admitted, “but I like the shirt.”
He clearly loves and respects his art form. “Jazz is a hard music,” he said in response to a question about heightened expectations, “and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that’s the most important thing.”
Jazz prodigies rarely have full command of their artistry. They tend to exhibit a superabundance of technique and core knowledge but a more deficient supply of the intangibles — what jazz partisans mean when they praise with the word “maturity.” And even the most virtuoso interpretation of composed material is of limited use in jazz, at least when it comes to a solo career.
For a jazz pianist, the mastery entails a staggering breadth of knowledge about harmony, rhythm and orchestration, all converging in an eloquent synthesis.
Joey Alexander has a handle on a good deal of that. “My Favorite Things,” produced by Jason Olaine, the director of programming and touring for Jazz at Lincoln Center, shows him to be a thoughtful musician as well as a natural one, with a sophisticated harmonic palette and a dynamic sensitivity.
On the album, Joey worked with top-tier players like the bassist Larry Grenadier. “I was wary,” Mr. Grenadier said of the invitation to record. “What I typically find with kid prodigies is that they come from this clinical, Western European way of accumulating knowledge. What I found with Joey is that he’s coming from a more intuitive, communal way of playing music, which is so beautiful to see.”
By and large the album is characterized by disarming self-possession, especially in light of its back story, which is hard to ignore. Joey, whose full name is Josiah Alexander Sila, was born in Bali, many miles from the nearest major jazz hub. His earliest encounters with jazz were through the CDs that his father, Denny Sila, had brought home in the 1990s, after earning a degree in finance at Pace University in Manhattan.
Photo
Joey Alexander at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
He and Joey’s mother, Fara, ran a tourism business. They are soft-spoken, friendly and unassuming: seemingly the farthest thing from stage parents, although they take clear pride in Joey’s talent. As for his career, “We’re flowing with it,” Mr. Sila said over lunch in Central Park. “We never expected anything.”
Joey began playing piano at 6, picking out a Thelonious Monk tune by ear, which led Mr. Sila, an amateur pianist, to teach him some fundamentals. Beyond that, Joey recalled, “I heard records, and also YouTube, of course.”
He played at jam sessions in Bali and then in Jakarta, when his family moved there. At 8, he played for the pianist Herbie Hancock, who was in Jakarta as a Unesco good-will ambassador. (“You told me that you believed in me,” Joey recalled last fall, addressing Mr. Hancock at a gala for the Jazz Foundation of America (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/arts/a-great-night-in-harlem-salutes-herbie-hancock.html) , “and that was the day I decided to dedicate my childhood to jazz.”) He was 9 when he entered the first Master-Jam Fest, an all-ages jazz competition in Ukraine. He won its grand prize.
Soon one of his YouTube videos caught the notice of Mr. Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to appear at the organization’s 2014 gala. Joey played a solo version of the Monk ballad “‘Round Midnight” as the finale, earning a standing ovation, glowing reviews (http://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2374) and some influential supporters.
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the photographer and widow of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, invited Joey to perform at the Arthur Ashe Learning Center gala, for a crowd including former President Bill Clinton. She later introduced Joey and his family to Gordon Uehling III, founder of the CourtSense Tennis Training Center; he has put them up at his estate in Alpine, N.J., where Novak Djokovic often stays during the U.S. Open. (Joey has access to a Steinway there, which he plays when he isn’t catching up on school online.)
Jazz at Lincoln Center sees not only a prodigy, but also an ambassador. “We are really interested in incorporating Joey into our educational outreach,” Mr. Olaine said, “to get him out into middle schools and play in front of kids his own age. He could inspire young people to listen to and enjoy jazz music.”
Still, the salient question with a musician as young and good as this is whether it’s premature to pursue a solo career. Normally, a prodigy learns at the side of the masters, Mr. Olaine said. “But Joey is such an extraordinary case that I don’t think any of us have ever seen before. He’s not a fully formed musician yet; we don’t know who he’s going to turn out to be. But right now, he’s ready to be a leader.”
That may be true. But there was room for growth in Joey’s recent trio set. Working with the drummer Sammy Miller and the bassist Russell Hall, who appear on his album, he delved into ballads, blues and standards — including “Giant Steps,” the John Coltrane étude whose harmonic intricacies have long been a proving ground for improvisers. (It’s the opening track on Joey’s album.)
The tune reached an impressive fever pitch, eliciting hollers, but during the buildup, Joey wasn’t always on the surest rhythmic footing. An original, “Ma Blues,” was cute but derivative. And while he fashioned a beautifully restive intro to “Monk’s Mood,” his solo didn’t address the song’s internal architecture, occasionally settling for a rote blues lick.
There’s a reason even the most dazzling jazz prodigies serve apprenticeships. This has been true for Gadi Lehavi, from Israel, and Beka Gochiashvili, from Georgia — pianists accustomed to adulation (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/arts/music/beka-gochiashvili-and-gadi-lehavi-at-the-allen-room.html) since childhood, both now 19, with heavy sideman credits. It was true for Julian Lage, a guitarist who received national attention as early as 8, yet prefaced his solo career with years of mentoring by the vibraphonist Gary Burton, a former prodigy himself.
For all his exceptional talent, Joey is a prime candidate for similar counsel.Asked at one point to recall treasured advice from a jazz elder, he was momentarily at a loss for words. “You know,” he said finally, his eyes lighting up, “one thing people always say to me: ‘Keep playing.’”
This E Mail Is Being Sent by:
Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.
CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU) HERE (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU&feature=player_embedded)
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Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation, Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/13/arts/music/joey-alexander-an-11-year-old-jazz-sensation-who-hardly-clears-the-pianos-sightlines.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150512
** Joey Alexander, an 11-Year-Old Jazz Sensation, Who Hardly Clears the Piano’s Sightlines
————————————————————
Continue reading the main storyJoey Alexander, an 11-year-old jazz musician. Video by YouTube Help
The cheers rang loud and long for Joey Alexander after he had played his last delicate piano chord in a recent sold-out set at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in Manhattan.
Beaming at his standing ovation, he stood between his bassist and his drummer, intent on taking a group bow. The scene was sweetly comical: The top of his head barely grazed their chests.
Which only made sense, given that Joey, jazz’s latest media star, is 11 years old.
This was far from his first turn in the spotlight. He became an overnight sensation (http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/05/07/10-year-old-piano-prodigy-from-indonesia-takes-new-york-by-storm/) — not too strong a term — with his guest performance a year ago at a Jazz at Lincoln Center gala, which won him rave reviews. His debut album, “My Favorite Things” (Motéma), is out this week, and he is booked for a series of notable appearances in the coming months, including one at the Newport Jazz Festival in August.
Discovered in Jakarta, Indonesia, about three years ago, Joey moved with his parents to New York last year, with the help of jazz luminaries like the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who called him “my hero” on Facebook and with whom he now shares a manager.
It’s all part of the improbable life of a child prodigy. Joey may be the most talked-about one that jazz has seen in a while, though he is hardly alone. There’s José André Montaño, a 10-year-old blind pianist from Bolivia; Kojo Roney (https://youtu.be/gzB1PK5AMKg) , a 10-year-old drummer who had a concert residency last month in Brooklyn; and Grace Kelly, 22, an alto saxophonist who made her first album at 12. The list goes on, with some prodigies developing major careers and others falling short of their early promise.
It is natural to harbor mixed feelings about this phenomenon, and for a critic it’s all but imperative. The acclamation given to musical prodigies usually involves some mix of circus-act astonishment and commodity futures trading. All the attention lavished on them can distort the ecology of an art form, even while bringing encouraging news about its survival. And, as with any celebrated young talent, there is a question of intention: Who benefits most from the renown these performers receive? Is there a way to marvel at mind-blowing precocity without stunting an artist’s development?
Joey looked like a cherub several years ago when his reputation began to build in jazz circles: small in stature, with a thick mop of black hair over a face that still showed traces of baby fat. He is taller now, though the sight of him at a grand piano can still be disconcerting, especially when you hear what he plays.
In person he comes across like any polite, intelligent middle-school boy with highly focused interests. He showed up for a stroll in Central Park last week in jeans and a Joy Division T-shirt. “Um, I don’t know the band so much,” he admitted, “but I like the shirt.”
He clearly loves and respects his art form. “Jazz is a hard music,” he said in response to a question about heightened expectations, “and you have to really work hard and also have fun performing; that’s the most important thing.”
Jazz prodigies rarely have full command of their artistry. They tend to exhibit a superabundance of technique and core knowledge but a more deficient supply of the intangibles — what jazz partisans mean when they praise with the word “maturity.” And even the most virtuoso interpretation of composed material is of limited use in jazz, at least when it comes to a solo career.
For a jazz pianist, the mastery entails a staggering breadth of knowledge about harmony, rhythm and orchestration, all converging in an eloquent synthesis.
Joey Alexander has a handle on a good deal of that. “My Favorite Things,” produced by Jason Olaine, the director of programming and touring for Jazz at Lincoln Center, shows him to be a thoughtful musician as well as a natural one, with a sophisticated harmonic palette and a dynamic sensitivity.
On the album, Joey worked with top-tier players like the bassist Larry Grenadier. “I was wary,” Mr. Grenadier said of the invitation to record. “What I typically find with kid prodigies is that they come from this clinical, Western European way of accumulating knowledge. What I found with Joey is that he’s coming from a more intuitive, communal way of playing music, which is so beautiful to see.”
By and large the album is characterized by disarming self-possession, especially in light of its back story, which is hard to ignore. Joey, whose full name is Josiah Alexander Sila, was born in Bali, many miles from the nearest major jazz hub. His earliest encounters with jazz were through the CDs that his father, Denny Sila, had brought home in the 1990s, after earning a degree in finance at Pace University in Manhattan.
Photo
Joey Alexander at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
He and Joey’s mother, Fara, ran a tourism business. They are soft-spoken, friendly and unassuming: seemingly the farthest thing from stage parents, although they take clear pride in Joey’s talent. As for his career, “We’re flowing with it,” Mr. Sila said over lunch in Central Park. “We never expected anything.”
Joey began playing piano at 6, picking out a Thelonious Monk tune by ear, which led Mr. Sila, an amateur pianist, to teach him some fundamentals. Beyond that, Joey recalled, “I heard records, and also YouTube, of course.”
He played at jam sessions in Bali and then in Jakarta, when his family moved there. At 8, he played for the pianist Herbie Hancock, who was in Jakarta as a Unesco good-will ambassador. (“You told me that you believed in me,” Joey recalled last fall, addressing Mr. Hancock at a gala for the Jazz Foundation of America (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/arts/a-great-night-in-harlem-salutes-herbie-hancock.html) , “and that was the day I decided to dedicate my childhood to jazz.”) He was 9 when he entered the first Master-Jam Fest, an all-ages jazz competition in Ukraine. He won its grand prize.
Soon one of his YouTube videos caught the notice of Mr. Marsalis, artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, who invited him to appear at the organization’s 2014 gala. Joey played a solo version of the Monk ballad “‘Round Midnight” as the finale, earning a standing ovation, glowing reviews (http://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2374) and some influential supporters.
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the photographer and widow of the tennis star Arthur Ashe, invited Joey to perform at the Arthur Ashe Learning Center gala, for a crowd including former President Bill Clinton. She later introduced Joey and his family to Gordon Uehling III, founder of the CourtSense Tennis Training Center; he has put them up at his estate in Alpine, N.J., where Novak Djokovic often stays during the U.S. Open. (Joey has access to a Steinway there, which he plays when he isn’t catching up on school online.)
Jazz at Lincoln Center sees not only a prodigy, but also an ambassador. “We are really interested in incorporating Joey into our educational outreach,” Mr. Olaine said, “to get him out into middle schools and play in front of kids his own age. He could inspire young people to listen to and enjoy jazz music.”
Still, the salient question with a musician as young and good as this is whether it’s premature to pursue a solo career. Normally, a prodigy learns at the side of the masters, Mr. Olaine said. “But Joey is such an extraordinary case that I don’t think any of us have ever seen before. He’s not a fully formed musician yet; we don’t know who he’s going to turn out to be. But right now, he’s ready to be a leader.”
That may be true. But there was room for growth in Joey’s recent trio set. Working with the drummer Sammy Miller and the bassist Russell Hall, who appear on his album, he delved into ballads, blues and standards — including “Giant Steps,” the John Coltrane étude whose harmonic intricacies have long been a proving ground for improvisers. (It’s the opening track on Joey’s album.)
The tune reached an impressive fever pitch, eliciting hollers, but during the buildup, Joey wasn’t always on the surest rhythmic footing. An original, “Ma Blues,” was cute but derivative. And while he fashioned a beautifully restive intro to “Monk’s Mood,” his solo didn’t address the song’s internal architecture, occasionally settling for a rote blues lick.
There’s a reason even the most dazzling jazz prodigies serve apprenticeships. This has been true for Gadi Lehavi, from Israel, and Beka Gochiashvili, from Georgia — pianists accustomed to adulation (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/arts/music/beka-gochiashvili-and-gadi-lehavi-at-the-allen-room.html) since childhood, both now 19, with heavy sideman credits. It was true for Julian Lage, a guitarist who received national attention as early as 8, yet prefaced his solo career with years of mentoring by the vibraphonist Gary Burton, a former prodigy himself.
For all his exceptional talent, Joey is a prime candidate for similar counsel.Asked at one point to recall treasured advice from a jazz elder, he was momentarily at a loss for words. “You know,” he said finally, his eyes lighting up, “one thing people always say to me: ‘Keep playing.’”
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New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money | Blu Notes | BLOUIN ARTINFO Blogs
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http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2015/05/new-orleans-the-ballad-of-the-trumpeter-the-library-the-market-and-the-money/
** New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money
————————————————————
http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/files/2015/05/20150508_IM.jpgBy Larry Blumenfeld
Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans recently for the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, I was handed a copy of “New Orleans Jazz Playhouse,” a coffee-table book full of reflections and ruminations, photos and memorabilia from trumpeter and bandleader Irvin Mayfield. It contained seven accompanying CDs of music featuring, among many fine musicians, Mayfield on every track.
The book draws its title from the name of the nightclub Mayfield founded in 2009 in partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which has hosted worthy gigs in a smart and swanky atmosphere on a storied French Quarter street that hasn’t seen much real jazz in decades. Its three guest essays—from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mayfield’s clearest mentor, and celebrated authors Walter Isaacson and Ernest Gaines—reflect the ease with which Mayfield—who was named to the National Council of the Arts by presidential appointment—negotiates a world of movers, shakers and big ideas.
Most of the book’s pages are devoted to cultural things, iconic and less well known, that Mayfield thinks define his hometown and, by extension, have shaped him. Page 103 is something of a paean to “three great institutions”: The University of New Orleans, where Mayfield once studied (he dropped out), and where he is now a professor teaching “New Orleans as Discourse”; WWOZ-FM, the listener-supported radio station that introduced him as a boy to quintessential New Orleans musicians like James Booker, and which helped build the audience for his own Grammy-winning music during the past 20 years; and the New Orleans Public Library System, which in Mayfield’s childhood offered him a free source of jazz LPs for pleasure and study, and for which he has, since Hurricane Katrina, leveraged his star power to help raise substantial sums from leading national foundations.
That book is big and bold and anything but humble. Yet the boldest manifestation of Mayfield’s outsized ambitions to date is The People’s Health Jazz Market, a new $9.6 million venue established by the nonprofit organization that supports Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO). The Jazz Market occupies the space of a long-abandoned department store at the corner of boulevards named for two 1960s civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Oretha Castle Haley, in New Orleans’ central city neighborhood.
With its inaugural public concert in late April, during Jazz Fest’s opening weekend, Mayfield’s Jazz Market joined Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and San Francisco’s SFJazz in the ranks of urban arts center buildings dedicated to jazz. The architecture is similar to SFJazz in appearance, right down to the lettering on its nameplate; as home for the orchestra Mayfield founded in 2002, the project draws obvious comparisons to Marsalis’ jazz center.
Opening night didn’t lack for star power. Soledad O’Brien, who serves on NOJO’s board, was in an orchestra-section seat. Up in a balcony box, small white dog on her lap, was Dee Bridgewater, for whom Mayfield named his concert stage; her forthcoming CD is in collaboration with Mayfield’s orchestra.
The Jazz Market provides, like those other centers, a concert hall designed with jazz acoustics in mind. The lobby area, which includes a bar named for Buddy Bolden and will house digital jazz archive, becomes a community center by day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. And despite the formality of his orchestra in suits and ties onstage, Mayfield began his opening concert by inviting audience members to “come hang out here during the day, use the wifi, do your business, have some coffee and hang out.”
By Tuesday, May 5, however, a dark cloud had gathered over Mayfield’s latest achievement, his much-lauded involvement with the city’s library system covered in mud.
The front- and back matter in his book, a mock-stamp from the public library, began to seem like a bad joke.
http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/files/2015/05/photo-18-e1431380690168.jpg
An investigative report (http://www.wwltv.com/longform/news/local/investigations/david-hammer/2015/05/05/mayfield-library/26955063/) by David Hammer for New Orleans’ WWL-TV alleged on Tuesday that Mayfield and Ronald Markham, NOJO’s CEO, had steered nearly $900,000 earmarked for libraries into the Jazz Market project and their own New Orleans Jazz Orchestra organization, while serving on the board of directors of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that supports the city’s library system. As Hammer reported:
Public records show that in 2012, the library’s foundation gave the city’s cash-strapped public library system $116,775, a typical annual gift from the earnings off its $3.5 million endowment. But that same year, the foundation also gave $666,000 to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra for the $10 million New Orleans Jazz Market… And in 2013, the library foundation gave the Jazz Orchestra, or NOJO, $197,000 more.
Mayfield and his friend, Ronald Markham, each make six-figure salaries from NOJO, a nonprofit Mayfield founded. At the same time, they were also two of the five members of the library foundation board when it gave the majority of its grant money that year to the Jazz Market project. In 2012, NOJO reported paying two salaries: $148,050 to Mayfield and $100,000 to Markham. It also paid $109,441 to Mayfield’s publishing company for “concert productions.”
Some background: The library foundation and the city’s library system are not synonymous; the foundation is a private non-profit organization, and the library system is a public entity. From 2007 to 2011, Mayfield served on the city library board and the Public Library Foundation board simultaneously. He served on the five-person library foundation board alongside Markham, who ultimately became board president.
The overlapping layers of conflict of interests seem apparent enough. And yet one remarkable passage in Hammer’s report adds these details:
…the Library Foundation’s stated mission was to raise money “for the benefit of the New Orleans Public Library” and it gave between $500,000 and $900,000 each year to the city library system. But in June 2012, the three other library foundation board members – Gerald Duhon Jr., Dan Forman and Scott Cunningham – joined Mayfield and Markham to unanimously re-write the organization’s articles of incorporation, expanding its mission beyond just supporting the public libraries to helping other “literacy and community organizations.”
They also resolved to grant powers specifically to Mayfield to “sign any and all acts, agreements, contracts, and documents that he deems fit and appropriate, all containing such terms and provisions as he, in his sole and uncontrolled discretion, deems necessary ….”
The outcry was swift.
Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a citizens’ watchdog agency, told Hammer: “Essentially, he is the dictator, he is the emperor that makes any decision and doesn’t require any type of board action.”
Tania Tetlow, a Tulane University law professor and former federal prosecutor who preceded Mayfield as chair of both the library system board said to Hammer: “However good an idea it might be, and I don’t see how it is, your fiduciary duty to the library foundation is such that you don’t vote to send the money somewhere that’s going to personally benefit you.”
Mayfield remained publicly silent, but according to Hammer’s piece, Markham played one of the Miles Davis jazz records the public library system had provided the Jazz Market and showed off the mostly empty area where he plans to install touch-screen computers that he said would connect visitors with the public library’s digital catalogue.
“I can appreciate the story you’re trying to tell,” Markham told Hammer, “but in addition to that story, what we have here is a very forward-thinking and aggressive way to expand the footprint of the actual public library system, at no cost to the public.”
On Friday, the Daily Beast published a piece by Jason Berry (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/09/did-a-jazzman-bilk-big-easy-s-libraries.html) , whose books have examined with seriousness and sensitivity both New Orleans jazz history and the ethical challenges and financial dealings of the Catholic Church. Berry is a native of New Orleans, where a jazz musician’s words can carry the weight of a sacred trust and where public money often travels down dark tunnels.
Berry framed the incident in the light of the prior week, when “voters showed their support for the city’s struggling public library system by approving a tax millage that will bridge a $3 million budget gap and likely provide $4 to $5 million for budget costs in the coming years,” and in the context of his own previous Daily Beast article positioning Mayfield as a civic hero.
He also wisely pointed a finger regarding fiduciary responsibility (and plain-old due diligence) at the boards of both the Library Foundation and NOJO. “Apart from Mayfield, how much did those people know about all that money?” he wrote. “And how will the NOJO board respond to the news?”
Friday brought clear responses from others. Markham—who admitted no wrongdoing, just “outside-the-box” thinking—nonetheless resigned from the New Orleans Public Library Foundation board. Bob Brown, the former managing director of the city’s Business Council, was named president of the Library Foundation board, replacing Markham. (He pledged to look into concerns raised by the WWL-TV investigation, but also stood by the foundation’s investment in the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra’s Jazz Market.)
Later on Friday, WWL-TV reported a statement received from New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, calling for the Library Foundation to go back to solely supporting the city’s public libraries and for NOJO to return any money that was “not spent on Library purposes.”
“I have spoken to the Chairs of the NOJO Board and the Library Foundation Board,” Landrieu wrote. “I fully expect the following to occur as soon as possible:
– A complete separation between NOJO and the Library Foundation;
– A complete rewriting of the Library Foundation’s bylaws to require that Foundation funds are spent solely on the Library;
– A full auditing and accounting of the Foundation funds;
– A full refund of all Foundation dollars that were allocated to NOJO and not spent on Library purposes; and,
– A complete reorganization of the Foundation Board in keeping with the best practices of transparency and accountability.”
Through the years, Mayfield’s confidence has brimmed easily into an egotism that has seemed to some off-putting, especially in his hometown. (Still, no crime in that.) His ambitions and achievements have required the sort of fundraising and politicking that has brought backlash to Marsalis in some quarters.
I first interviewed Mayfield for an essay in Salon (http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/10/12/jazz/index.html) , in the Fall of 2005, after a Jazz at Lincoln Center benefit concert for New Orleans hosted by Marsalis. Mayfield had played the hymn “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” in dedication to his father, who, he said, “is still missing down there.” (His father’s remains were found a few weeks later.)
“I’ll tell you, in terms of the response to this hurricane, the local government gets a big F,” Mayfield told me then. “The federal government gets an F. The country gets a big fat F. When the levee was breached the culture was breached, and not that many people seemed to care.” He had resolved himself to making people care.
I last interviewed Mayfield a few months ago, in his New Orleans home. I was reminded of how smoothly he has negotiated corridors, the politics at hand notwithstanding. On one wall hung a photo of him alongside Pres. George W. Bush, who nominated him to the National Council of the Arts. On another wall, he was pictured with a similar smile, alongside Pres. Barack Obama, who subsequently appointed him to that post.
I asked Mayfield about his days as a young man in search of direction, living temporarily in Marsalis’ Manhattan home as Marsalis built his institution at Lincoln Center. He’d drawn inspiration, even taken notes, he’d said.
“But I had a different philosophy in one important respect,” he explained. “Jazz occupies rarified air in New Orleans. It occupies a ceremonial place, too. A trumpeter can move things in a different way in New Orleans. A trumpet player can call the mayor… That could be leveraged.”
Irvin Mayfield didn’t end up mayor of New Orleans, though he’d publicly toyed with running in 2010. He could, and did, call a mayor. Mayor Ray Nagin appointed Mayfield, then still in his twenties, as the city’s “cultural ambassador,” and it was Nagin who first appointed Mayfield to the city library board.
Then again, Nagin now sits in a federal penitentiary, serving ten years for bribery and corruption.
Mayfield would be wise to call the current mayor, Landrieu, who understands well the value to his city of not just the library system but also of NOJO and of the Jazz Market.
As do I, Landrieu probably buys the idea of a fundamental synergy between a nonprofit jazz organization and a nonprofit library foundation—especially in New Orleans, where one could reasonably argue that the language of jazz is fundamental to some sense of basic literacy. Other trumpeters born and raised in New Orleans, from Louis Armstrong to Terence Blanchard to Kermit Ruffins, have sincerely and successfully sold the world that notion with sincerity. Yet not for nearly a million bucks, nor under a cloud of impropriety.
It’s up to the boards of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation and NOJO to determine how to clean up this mess, and to do it in sync with the Landrieu administration, who have much to gain or lose in the handling of both the public libraries and the Jazz Market. Both are important civic resources funded by both private and public money: New Orleans residents deserve the fruits of these efforts. And since so much of real culture in this country now requires a public-private partnership, it’s important to keep such arrangements clean.
There’s also a larger point that’s important in a New Orleans that is quickly developing, and in which musicians and other culture-bearers are fighting for seats (http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2014/08/marking-time-and-making-time-for-smart-cultural-policy-in-new-orleans/) at the policy and planning tables. It’s a point that’s important well beyond New Orleans. It’s the idea that jazz musicians hold knowledge and power and community ties that command much more than just applause and kind words—that inspire trust, that deserve resources and that form the infrastructure required in a smart, compassionate, and multicultural city. Such is true in any city where jazz has roots and reach, like my hometown, New York. It can be sensed clearly in, say, Chicago, which this year celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM (http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2015/04/at-50-the-aacm-keeps-collecting-individuals/) ), an organization
that started with a bunch of jazz musicians sitting around a kitchen table and grew into a movement of aesthetic and political empowerment.
It is perhaps truest in New Orleans for reasons that should be clear through any reading of the history of this country and its culture, via deep listening to the music born in New Orleans, and from any sense of meaning conveyed by the simple statement on the last page of Mayfield’s “Jazz Playhouse” book: “Jazz is a way of being.”
What will Mayfield do? How will he be? Only he can tell us, whenever he chooses. He has the power to live up to his stated ideals. What will NOJO do? Its board is set to meet today.
One hopes that in the end, after the dust settles, once funds are directed where they must go, the Jazz Market continues to host live music and becomes a community-gathering place, even perhaps a digital outpost of the library system. That building is standing, so let’s have it serve its city. And, once the clouds have cleared, let’s have it stand for something.
Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
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New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money | Blu Notes | BLOUIN ARTINFO Blogs
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2015/05/new-orleans-the-ballad-of-the-trumpeter-the-library-the-market-and-the-money/
** New Orleans: Ballad Of The Trumpeter, The Library, The Market And The Money
————————————————————
http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/files/2015/05/20150508_IM.jpgBy Larry Blumenfeld
Shortly after I arrived in New Orleans recently for the annual Jazz & Heritage Festival, I was handed a copy of “New Orleans Jazz Playhouse,” a coffee-table book full of reflections and ruminations, photos and memorabilia from trumpeter and bandleader Irvin Mayfield. It contained seven accompanying CDs of music featuring, among many fine musicians, Mayfield on every track.
The book draws its title from the name of the nightclub Mayfield founded in 2009 in partnership with the Royal Sonesta Hotel, which has hosted worthy gigs in a smart and swanky atmosphere on a storied French Quarter street that hasn’t seen much real jazz in decades. Its three guest essays—from trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, Mayfield’s clearest mentor, and celebrated authors Walter Isaacson and Ernest Gaines—reflect the ease with which Mayfield—who was named to the National Council of the Arts by presidential appointment—negotiates a world of movers, shakers and big ideas.
Most of the book’s pages are devoted to cultural things, iconic and less well known, that Mayfield thinks define his hometown and, by extension, have shaped him. Page 103 is something of a paean to “three great institutions”: The University of New Orleans, where Mayfield once studied (he dropped out), and where he is now a professor teaching “New Orleans as Discourse”; WWOZ-FM, the listener-supported radio station that introduced him as a boy to quintessential New Orleans musicians like James Booker, and which helped build the audience for his own Grammy-winning music during the past 20 years; and the New Orleans Public Library System, which in Mayfield’s childhood offered him a free source of jazz LPs for pleasure and study, and for which he has, since Hurricane Katrina, leveraged his star power to help raise substantial sums from leading national foundations.
That book is big and bold and anything but humble. Yet the boldest manifestation of Mayfield’s outsized ambitions to date is The People’s Health Jazz Market, a new $9.6 million venue established by the nonprofit organization that supports Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO). The Jazz Market occupies the space of a long-abandoned department store at the corner of boulevards named for two 1960s civil rights leaders, Martin Luther King Jr. and Oretha Castle Haley, in New Orleans’ central city neighborhood.
With its inaugural public concert in late April, during Jazz Fest’s opening weekend, Mayfield’s Jazz Market joined Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and San Francisco’s SFJazz in the ranks of urban arts center buildings dedicated to jazz. The architecture is similar to SFJazz in appearance, right down to the lettering on its nameplate; as home for the orchestra Mayfield founded in 2002, the project draws obvious comparisons to Marsalis’ jazz center.
Opening night didn’t lack for star power. Soledad O’Brien, who serves on NOJO’s board, was in an orchestra-section seat. Up in a balcony box, small white dog on her lap, was Dee Bridgewater, for whom Mayfield named his concert stage; her forthcoming CD is in collaboration with Mayfield’s orchestra.
The Jazz Market provides, like those other centers, a concert hall designed with jazz acoustics in mind. The lobby area, which includes a bar named for Buddy Bolden and will house digital jazz archive, becomes a community center by day, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. And despite the formality of his orchestra in suits and ties onstage, Mayfield began his opening concert by inviting audience members to “come hang out here during the day, use the wifi, do your business, have some coffee and hang out.”
By Tuesday, May 5, however, a dark cloud had gathered over Mayfield’s latest achievement, his much-lauded involvement with the city’s library system covered in mud.
The front- and back matter in his book, a mock-stamp from the public library, began to seem like a bad joke.
http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/files/2015/05/photo-18-e1431380690168.jpg
An investigative report (http://www.wwltv.com/longform/news/local/investigations/david-hammer/2015/05/05/mayfield-library/26955063/) by David Hammer for New Orleans’ WWL-TV alleged on Tuesday that Mayfield and Ronald Markham, NOJO’s CEO, had steered nearly $900,000 earmarked for libraries into the Jazz Market project and their own New Orleans Jazz Orchestra organization, while serving on the board of directors of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation, a private nonprofit organization that supports the city’s library system. As Hammer reported:
Public records show that in 2012, the library’s foundation gave the city’s cash-strapped public library system $116,775, a typical annual gift from the earnings off its $3.5 million endowment. But that same year, the foundation also gave $666,000 to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra for the $10 million New Orleans Jazz Market… And in 2013, the library foundation gave the Jazz Orchestra, or NOJO, $197,000 more.
Mayfield and his friend, Ronald Markham, each make six-figure salaries from NOJO, a nonprofit Mayfield founded. At the same time, they were also two of the five members of the library foundation board when it gave the majority of its grant money that year to the Jazz Market project. In 2012, NOJO reported paying two salaries: $148,050 to Mayfield and $100,000 to Markham. It also paid $109,441 to Mayfield’s publishing company for “concert productions.”
Some background: The library foundation and the city’s library system are not synonymous; the foundation is a private non-profit organization, and the library system is a public entity. From 2007 to 2011, Mayfield served on the city library board and the Public Library Foundation board simultaneously. He served on the five-person library foundation board alongside Markham, who ultimately became board president.
The overlapping layers of conflict of interests seem apparent enough. And yet one remarkable passage in Hammer’s report adds these details:
…the Library Foundation’s stated mission was to raise money “for the benefit of the New Orleans Public Library” and it gave between $500,000 and $900,000 each year to the city library system. But in June 2012, the three other library foundation board members – Gerald Duhon Jr., Dan Forman and Scott Cunningham – joined Mayfield and Markham to unanimously re-write the organization’s articles of incorporation, expanding its mission beyond just supporting the public libraries to helping other “literacy and community organizations.”
They also resolved to grant powers specifically to Mayfield to “sign any and all acts, agreements, contracts, and documents that he deems fit and appropriate, all containing such terms and provisions as he, in his sole and uncontrolled discretion, deems necessary ….”
The outcry was swift.
Rafael Goyeneche, president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a citizens’ watchdog agency, told Hammer: “Essentially, he is the dictator, he is the emperor that makes any decision and doesn’t require any type of board action.”
Tania Tetlow, a Tulane University law professor and former federal prosecutor who preceded Mayfield as chair of both the library system board said to Hammer: “However good an idea it might be, and I don’t see how it is, your fiduciary duty to the library foundation is such that you don’t vote to send the money somewhere that’s going to personally benefit you.”
Mayfield remained publicly silent, but according to Hammer’s piece, Markham played one of the Miles Davis jazz records the public library system had provided the Jazz Market and showed off the mostly empty area where he plans to install touch-screen computers that he said would connect visitors with the public library’s digital catalogue.
“I can appreciate the story you’re trying to tell,” Markham told Hammer, “but in addition to that story, what we have here is a very forward-thinking and aggressive way to expand the footprint of the actual public library system, at no cost to the public.”
On Friday, the Daily Beast published a piece by Jason Berry (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/09/did-a-jazzman-bilk-big-easy-s-libraries.html) , whose books have examined with seriousness and sensitivity both New Orleans jazz history and the ethical challenges and financial dealings of the Catholic Church. Berry is a native of New Orleans, where a jazz musician’s words can carry the weight of a sacred trust and where public money often travels down dark tunnels.
Berry framed the incident in the light of the prior week, when “voters showed their support for the city’s struggling public library system by approving a tax millage that will bridge a $3 million budget gap and likely provide $4 to $5 million for budget costs in the coming years,” and in the context of his own previous Daily Beast article positioning Mayfield as a civic hero.
He also wisely pointed a finger regarding fiduciary responsibility (and plain-old due diligence) at the boards of both the Library Foundation and NOJO. “Apart from Mayfield, how much did those people know about all that money?” he wrote. “And how will the NOJO board respond to the news?”
Friday brought clear responses from others. Markham—who admitted no wrongdoing, just “outside-the-box” thinking—nonetheless resigned from the New Orleans Public Library Foundation board. Bob Brown, the former managing director of the city’s Business Council, was named president of the Library Foundation board, replacing Markham. (He pledged to look into concerns raised by the WWL-TV investigation, but also stood by the foundation’s investment in the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra’s Jazz Market.)
Later on Friday, WWL-TV reported a statement received from New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu, calling for the Library Foundation to go back to solely supporting the city’s public libraries and for NOJO to return any money that was “not spent on Library purposes.”
“I have spoken to the Chairs of the NOJO Board and the Library Foundation Board,” Landrieu wrote. “I fully expect the following to occur as soon as possible:
– A complete separation between NOJO and the Library Foundation;
– A complete rewriting of the Library Foundation’s bylaws to require that Foundation funds are spent solely on the Library;
– A full auditing and accounting of the Foundation funds;
– A full refund of all Foundation dollars that were allocated to NOJO and not spent on Library purposes; and,
– A complete reorganization of the Foundation Board in keeping with the best practices of transparency and accountability.”
Through the years, Mayfield’s confidence has brimmed easily into an egotism that has seemed to some off-putting, especially in his hometown. (Still, no crime in that.) His ambitions and achievements have required the sort of fundraising and politicking that has brought backlash to Marsalis in some quarters.
I first interviewed Mayfield for an essay in Salon (http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2005/10/12/jazz/index.html) , in the Fall of 2005, after a Jazz at Lincoln Center benefit concert for New Orleans hosted by Marsalis. Mayfield had played the hymn “Just a Closer Walk With Thee” in dedication to his father, who, he said, “is still missing down there.” (His father’s remains were found a few weeks later.)
“I’ll tell you, in terms of the response to this hurricane, the local government gets a big F,” Mayfield told me then. “The federal government gets an F. The country gets a big fat F. When the levee was breached the culture was breached, and not that many people seemed to care.” He had resolved himself to making people care.
I last interviewed Mayfield a few months ago, in his New Orleans home. I was reminded of how smoothly he has negotiated corridors, the politics at hand notwithstanding. On one wall hung a photo of him alongside Pres. George W. Bush, who nominated him to the National Council of the Arts. On another wall, he was pictured with a similar smile, alongside Pres. Barack Obama, who subsequently appointed him to that post.
I asked Mayfield about his days as a young man in search of direction, living temporarily in Marsalis’ Manhattan home as Marsalis built his institution at Lincoln Center. He’d drawn inspiration, even taken notes, he’d said.
“But I had a different philosophy in one important respect,” he explained. “Jazz occupies rarified air in New Orleans. It occupies a ceremonial place, too. A trumpeter can move things in a different way in New Orleans. A trumpet player can call the mayor… That could be leveraged.”
Irvin Mayfield didn’t end up mayor of New Orleans, though he’d publicly toyed with running in 2010. He could, and did, call a mayor. Mayor Ray Nagin appointed Mayfield, then still in his twenties, as the city’s “cultural ambassador,” and it was Nagin who first appointed Mayfield to the city library board.
Then again, Nagin now sits in a federal penitentiary, serving ten years for bribery and corruption.
Mayfield would be wise to call the current mayor, Landrieu, who understands well the value to his city of not just the library system but also of NOJO and of the Jazz Market.
As do I, Landrieu probably buys the idea of a fundamental synergy between a nonprofit jazz organization and a nonprofit library foundation—especially in New Orleans, where one could reasonably argue that the language of jazz is fundamental to some sense of basic literacy. Other trumpeters born and raised in New Orleans, from Louis Armstrong to Terence Blanchard to Kermit Ruffins, have sincerely and successfully sold the world that notion with sincerity. Yet not for nearly a million bucks, nor under a cloud of impropriety.
It’s up to the boards of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation and NOJO to determine how to clean up this mess, and to do it in sync with the Landrieu administration, who have much to gain or lose in the handling of both the public libraries and the Jazz Market. Both are important civic resources funded by both private and public money: New Orleans residents deserve the fruits of these efforts. And since so much of real culture in this country now requires a public-private partnership, it’s important to keep such arrangements clean.
There’s also a larger point that’s important in a New Orleans that is quickly developing, and in which musicians and other culture-bearers are fighting for seats (http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2014/08/marking-time-and-making-time-for-smart-cultural-policy-in-new-orleans/) at the policy and planning tables. It’s a point that’s important well beyond New Orleans. It’s the idea that jazz musicians hold knowledge and power and community ties that command much more than just applause and kind words—that inspire trust, that deserve resources and that form the infrastructure required in a smart, compassionate, and multicultural city. Such is true in any city where jazz has roots and reach, like my hometown, New York. It can be sensed clearly in, say, Chicago, which this year celebrates the 50^th anniversary of the Association of the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM (http://blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes/2015/04/at-50-the-aacm-keeps-collecting-individuals/) ), an organization
that started with a bunch of jazz musicians sitting around a kitchen table and grew into a movement of aesthetic and political empowerment.
It is perhaps truest in New Orleans for reasons that should be clear through any reading of the history of this country and its culture, via deep listening to the music born in New Orleans, and from any sense of meaning conveyed by the simple statement on the last page of Mayfield’s “Jazz Playhouse” book: “Jazz is a way of being.”
What will Mayfield do? How will he be? Only he can tell us, whenever he chooses. He has the power to live up to his stated ideals. What will NOJO do? Its board is set to meet today.
One hopes that in the end, after the dust settles, once funds are directed where they must go, the Jazz Market continues to host live music and becomes a community-gathering place, even perhaps a digital outpost of the library system. That building is standing, so let’s have it serve its city. And, once the clouds have cleared, let’s have it stand for something.
Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
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