Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed
Larry David, Brooklyn Boy – The New Yorker
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
Larry David & Jim Eigo both graduated from Sheepshead Bay HS in 1965
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/brooklyn-boy
** Brooklyn Boy
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/150223_r26190rgb-1200-900-12183849.jpg
Larry David, back in New York to headline his first play, recently visited his childhood apartment, in Sheepshead Bay, to see whence his “no hugging, no learning” viewpoint had sprung. Standing in a cement courtyard just off the Belt Parkway, the co-creator of “Seinfeld” and the creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” said, “This was my little world.” Four identical red brick buildings framed the winter sky. “When you wanted your friends to come out, you’d just scream at the windows.”
Wearing a charcoal scarf and striding backward, tour-guide style, David noted, “We used to play skelly here, and I had a fistfight there.” He laughed so joyously, recalling the ancient triumph, that his bat wings of hair bounced. Unlike his crabbed screen persona, David is lithe and friendly, with perfect teeth. But he’s not sentimental. “I’m not really flooded with memories here,” he said, winding up the nostalgia tour in four minutes. “And I’m hungry.”
As his hired S.U.V. sped off, he said that arriving onstage at the age of sixty-seven wasn’t the culmination of a lifelong dream: “I never gave Broadway a thought, growing up—I didn’t really have ambitions. My parents wanted me to be a mailman.” He pondered that missed opportunity. “They did get out of work early, and there was also a rumor—a rumor!—that there were sexual encounters.” He took so many odd jobs after college, he went on, that “my mom sent me to a psychiatrist.” The default to kvetch was set. “In terms of writing, family is the gift that keeps on giving.”
David’s play, “Fish in the Dark,” is a farce about a contentious Jewish family whose secrets erupt in the hospital room of a dying patriarch. “I didn’t want to be in it,” he explained. “Unfortunately, the older-brother character sounded way too much like me. I can’t stop it.”
At the Kouros Bay Diner, David hefted his bound volume of a menu: “This is one of these Greek menus that are extensive. This is crazy! This is the biggest menu I’ve ever seen in my life!”
The waitress came by. “Do you have fresh grapefruit juice?” David inquired. She shook her head. “O.K., I’ll have a Pellegrino.” Her pencil didn’t move. “A sparkling water?”
“Seltzer,” she said.
Cartoon “I just want to apologize beforehand if you miss.”Buy the print ? (http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/New-Yorker-Current-Issue-Prints_c148582_.htm)
“Seltzer! There you go,” he said. “I’ve been away too long.”
A heavily made-up woman passing by cried, “Larry David!,” and plopped her shopping bag on the table. “You’re Larry David! Do you come here often?”
“About once every forty years.”
“Can I take a photo?”
“Um . . . O.K.” She began fussing with her phone, muttering, “I hope I can figure this thing out.” Two minutes later, oblivious of David’s consternation, she began snapping, pausing to delete and reframe. “O.K. All right,” David said. “Got it? O.K.? All right? O.K., great, goodbye, thanks!”
He asked what his companion was having. “I can’t order unless I know what everybody else is getting,” he said. “I don’t want to lose lunch.” Then, the necessary rigmarole concluded, he declared that writing for the stage had proved challenging. “I thought, I can write in as many sets as I want. They told me otherwise. And apparently I have too many scenes and too many characters—eighteen!” The acting was different, too: “I learned I can’t turn and face the person I’m talking to, and that I can’t look at the audience. I said to the director, ‘Suppose a character is acting like a jerk. Can’t I turn and’ ”— He rolled his eyes and tilted his head: This guy! “She said, ‘No! You cannot!’ There’s a fourth wall.”
Still, David said, he was enjoying it all much more than he expected. In fact, he really couldn’t complain. “But I’m done with new fields of endeavor,” he added hastily. “This is it. I never had a bucket list, and, if I had, this wouldn’t have been on it.”
What does he make of setting a Broadway record for advance ticket sales—$13.5 million? David broke into a huge grin: “Maybe I’m popular!” He ate some turkey club. “But in a way it’s not so great. Because it could have been a win-win situation. If the play was really good, it would have sold anyway, and, if it stank, it would close in a week and then you go home. Now if the play stinks it’s win-lose: it keeps going, but . . .” But everyone hates you for making them shell out to see it? “Exactly!” he cried. “It could be the worst outcome possible!” ?
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=5044086c43) | 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=5044086c43&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
Larry David, Brooklyn Boy – The New Yorker
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
Larry David & Jim Eigo both graduated from Sheepshead Bay HS in 1965
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/23/brooklyn-boy
** Brooklyn Boy
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/150223_r26190rgb-1200-900-12183849.jpg
Larry David, back in New York to headline his first play, recently visited his childhood apartment, in Sheepshead Bay, to see whence his “no hugging, no learning” viewpoint had sprung. Standing in a cement courtyard just off the Belt Parkway, the co-creator of “Seinfeld” and the creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” said, “This was my little world.” Four identical red brick buildings framed the winter sky. “When you wanted your friends to come out, you’d just scream at the windows.”
Wearing a charcoal scarf and striding backward, tour-guide style, David noted, “We used to play skelly here, and I had a fistfight there.” He laughed so joyously, recalling the ancient triumph, that his bat wings of hair bounced. Unlike his crabbed screen persona, David is lithe and friendly, with perfect teeth. But he’s not sentimental. “I’m not really flooded with memories here,” he said, winding up the nostalgia tour in four minutes. “And I’m hungry.”
As his hired S.U.V. sped off, he said that arriving onstage at the age of sixty-seven wasn’t the culmination of a lifelong dream: “I never gave Broadway a thought, growing up—I didn’t really have ambitions. My parents wanted me to be a mailman.” He pondered that missed opportunity. “They did get out of work early, and there was also a rumor—a rumor!—that there were sexual encounters.” He took so many odd jobs after college, he went on, that “my mom sent me to a psychiatrist.” The default to kvetch was set. “In terms of writing, family is the gift that keeps on giving.”
David’s play, “Fish in the Dark,” is a farce about a contentious Jewish family whose secrets erupt in the hospital room of a dying patriarch. “I didn’t want to be in it,” he explained. “Unfortunately, the older-brother character sounded way too much like me. I can’t stop it.”
At the Kouros Bay Diner, David hefted his bound volume of a menu: “This is one of these Greek menus that are extensive. This is crazy! This is the biggest menu I’ve ever seen in my life!”
The waitress came by. “Do you have fresh grapefruit juice?” David inquired. She shook her head. “O.K., I’ll have a Pellegrino.” Her pencil didn’t move. “A sparkling water?”
“Seltzer,” she said.
Cartoon “I just want to apologize beforehand if you miss.”Buy the print ? (http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/New-Yorker-Current-Issue-Prints_c148582_.htm)
“Seltzer! There you go,” he said. “I’ve been away too long.”
A heavily made-up woman passing by cried, “Larry David!,” and plopped her shopping bag on the table. “You’re Larry David! Do you come here often?”
“About once every forty years.”
“Can I take a photo?”
“Um . . . O.K.” She began fussing with her phone, muttering, “I hope I can figure this thing out.” Two minutes later, oblivious of David’s consternation, she began snapping, pausing to delete and reframe. “O.K. All right,” David said. “Got it? O.K.? All right? O.K., great, goodbye, thanks!”
He asked what his companion was having. “I can’t order unless I know what everybody else is getting,” he said. “I don’t want to lose lunch.” Then, the necessary rigmarole concluded, he declared that writing for the stage had proved challenging. “I thought, I can write in as many sets as I want. They told me otherwise. And apparently I have too many scenes and too many characters—eighteen!” The acting was different, too: “I learned I can’t turn and face the person I’m talking to, and that I can’t look at the audience. I said to the director, ‘Suppose a character is acting like a jerk. Can’t I turn and’ ”— He rolled his eyes and tilted his head: This guy! “She said, ‘No! You cannot!’ There’s a fourth wall.”
Still, David said, he was enjoying it all much more than he expected. In fact, he really couldn’t complain. “But I’m done with new fields of endeavor,” he added hastily. “This is it. I never had a bucket list, and, if I had, this wouldn’t have been on it.”
What does he make of setting a Broadway record for advance ticket sales—$13.5 million? David broke into a huge grin: “Maybe I’m popular!” He ate some turkey club. “But in a way it’s not so great. Because it could have been a win-win situation. If the play was really good, it would have sold anyway, and, if it stank, it would close in a week and then you go home. Now if the play stinks it’s win-lose: it keeps going, but . . .” But everyone hates you for making them shell out to see it? “Exactly!” he cried. “It could be the worst outcome possible!” ?
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=5044086c43) | 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=5044086c43&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
Clark Terry (1920-2015): JazzWax
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
** JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/)
————————————————————
————————————————————
Clark Terry (1920-2015) (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Jazzwax/~3/Yh9ih0bgTlk/clark-terry-1920-2015.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 23 Feb 2015 06:31 AM PST
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75275d0970b-popup
Clark Terry, one of the most admired and accomplished jazz trumpeters and flugelhornists of his generation who appeared on an astonishing 928 known jazz recording sessions and played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra throughout the 1950s, died on Feb. 21. He was 94. [Photo of Clark Terry above by Hank O’Neal (http://www.hankonealphoto.com/) ]
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbb9fc970c-popup
Like a tap dancer, Clark liked to work his way nimbly through uptempo solos, frequently using a blowing style style reminiscent of what violinists do when playing with pizzicato. Clark’s sound was unmistakable, with a piercing middle tone and warm, round sides. Clark didn’t linger long on notes during most solos, touching on them as if running his fingers steadily through albums in a bin. Instead, he preferred to release notes in steady volleys, letting their tones fade off in perfectly placed spaces. He told me it was an approach he developed while in Count Basie’s band in the late 1940s. There, he created a tonging technique in his mouthpiece that made notes sound like the patter of an auctioneer.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbba54970c-popup
Clark also is perhaps best known for his distinct slurring of notes, bending them slightly in places. I once asked saxophonist Hal McKusick (above), who was close to Clark, what made his horn unique: “He plays effortlessly with a beautiful sound—always swinging, always thoughtful and always playful. It’s his attack, his ability to tell a story in such a beautiful way.”
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75272dc970b-popup
Clark grew up in a trumpet town—St. Louis. His trumpet influences were Charlie Creath, Dewey Jackson and Shorty Baker. In the Navy during World War II, he was billeted at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago, where he helped assemble and train bands that were then dispatched to other bases worldwide. After his discharge, Clark played with Charlie Barnet, who wrote to Duke Ellington about him. But Clark would first play with Count Basie in the late 1940s before joining Duke on a full-time basis in 1951.
Clark’s first use of the flugelhorn on a recording came on two tracks in 1957. Here’s what he told me:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63e5b970d-popup
JazzWax: When did you first record on the flugelhorn?
Clark Tery: When I was making an album with Billy Taylor [Taylor Made Jazz in 1957]. I had ordered one because I liked the way it sounded. All of the horn players in Jimmie Lunceford’s band had doubled on flugelhorn.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c752730e970b-popup
JW: What happened on the Billy Taylor (above) session?
CT: The horn came in a box to my hotel in Chicago. I was in Duke’s band at the time and we had a day off, so I was recording with Billy. When the package arrived, my roommate thought it was something I wanted right away. So he came down to the place where we were recording and brought it into the studio. When I opened the package, the horn looked great. It was a beautiful, gold-plated instrument. I tried it right there on the spot and loved it so much I decided to use it on the date.”
Among Clark’s most fascinating recordings are his dates with Thelonious Monk, particularly on Clark’s In Orbit (1958). One might assume that Clark and Monk would be like apple pie and bacon, but the pairing worked remarkably well:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63e81970d-popup
JazzWax: You recorded twice with Thelonious Monk, in 1956 and 1958. What was special about him?
Clark Terry: Monk was one of those guys who was set in his ways. You either liked him or you didn’t. There was no middle. I’ve always liked people who were unusual or different. Monk knew what he wanted and knew what he was doing. He was respectful, but we didn’t have much to say to each other.
JW: How did you wind up recording with Monk on your album In Orbit in 1958?
CT: I needed a piano player, and producer Orrin Keepnews asked me if I wanted to use Monk. I said, “Great.” So Orrin called him in. After we recorded a bunch of things, we still hadn’t played anything of his.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbb6b970c-popup
JW: What happened?
CT: I said, “Monk (above), I think it’s about time we recorded one of your tunes.” He didn’t answer, so as I walked away he growled, “Come back here.” He said, “Fine, let’s play this.” He started playing the opening notes to Let’s Cool One. He said, “You’ll hear it and then we’ll record it. Just listen.” So I listened and then we recorded it. I had never heard that tune before, and there wasn’t any music. We just did it [laughs].”
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75275c6970b-popup
Most of all, Clark had a personality that made you feel welcome. He’s easily one of the most jovial jazz masters I’ve had the opportunity to interview. During our phone conversation, Clark loved to laugh and took every opportunity to make me laugh. Clark viewed laughter not as an emotional reaction to something funny but as two soloing horns, each laugh distinct and improvised. In this regard, it was beautiful blowing with Clark. We will all miss him.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63fd3970d-popup
JazzWax notes: JazzWax sends its deepest condolences to Clark’s wife, Gwen (above, with Clark), whose tireless work making Clark comfortable during periods of enormous stress, pain and despair not to mention financial hurdles qualifies her for sainthood. Gwen sustained Clark for years and made Alan Hicks’ recently released documentary, Keep On Keepin’ On, possible. Big hug.
For my JazzWax interview with Clark, go here (http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/10/interview-clark-terry-part-1.html) and here (http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/10/interview-clark-terry-part-2.html) .
JazzWax tracks: Here are seven of my favorite Clark Terry tracks—all you need to fall in love with his sound and spirit:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f6406e970d-popup
Here’s Phlanges on V-Disc, Clark’s very first recording in February 1947, with Clark Terry and His Section Eights, featuring Clark Terry (tp), Willard Parker (ts), Bob Parker (p), Singleton Palmer (b) and Earl Martin (d)…
Phlanges (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/phlanges.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbc71970c-popup
Here’s Tuma, a stunning ballad by Clark in 1955 on the EmArcy album entitled Clark Terry, with Horace Silver on piano…
Tuma (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/07-tuma.mp3)
Here’s the Quincy Jones-arranged Double Play from the same album as the one above…
Double Play (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/02-double-play.mp3)
Here’s one of Clark’s first two recordings on flugelhorn for Billy Taylor’s Taylor Made Jazz in 1957…
Tune for Tex (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/08-tune-for-tex.mp3)
Here’s Clark in 1958 with pianist Thelonious Monk on Monk’s Let’s Cool One from Clark’s In Orbit…
Let’s Cool One (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/04-lets-cool-one-2.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75274dc970b-popup
Here’s Clark on Que Sera, from Spanish Rice, recorded in 1966 with arrangements by Chico O’Farrill…
Que Sera (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/05-que-sera.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbca0970c-popup
Here’s Clark and valve trombonist Bobby Brookmeyer on Morning Mist, from their Gingerbread Man album in 1966…
Morning Mist (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/2-12-morning-mist.mp3)
Clark Terry radio. WKCR-FM in New York is playing Clark around the clock today and on Tuesday until 3 p.m (EDT). To listen from anywhere in the world on your computer, go here (http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/) .
A special thanks to Bret Primack.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/phlanges.mp3)
You are subscribed to email updates from JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/)
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now (https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailunsubscribe?k=ZI-_rSpRX1tZ_Z8sLS_yL0oiIqI) . Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=16854e1714) | 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=16854e1714&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
Clark Terry (1920-2015): JazzWax
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
** JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/)
————————————————————
————————————————————
Clark Terry (1920-2015) (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Jazzwax/~3/Yh9ih0bgTlk/clark-terry-1920-2015.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 23 Feb 2015 06:31 AM PST
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75275d0970b-popup
Clark Terry, one of the most admired and accomplished jazz trumpeters and flugelhornists of his generation who appeared on an astonishing 928 known jazz recording sessions and played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra throughout the 1950s, died on Feb. 21. He was 94. [Photo of Clark Terry above by Hank O’Neal (http://www.hankonealphoto.com/) ]
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbb9fc970c-popup
Like a tap dancer, Clark liked to work his way nimbly through uptempo solos, frequently using a blowing style style reminiscent of what violinists do when playing with pizzicato. Clark’s sound was unmistakable, with a piercing middle tone and warm, round sides. Clark didn’t linger long on notes during most solos, touching on them as if running his fingers steadily through albums in a bin. Instead, he preferred to release notes in steady volleys, letting their tones fade off in perfectly placed spaces. He told me it was an approach he developed while in Count Basie’s band in the late 1940s. There, he created a tonging technique in his mouthpiece that made notes sound like the patter of an auctioneer.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbba54970c-popup
Clark also is perhaps best known for his distinct slurring of notes, bending them slightly in places. I once asked saxophonist Hal McKusick (above), who was close to Clark, what made his horn unique: “He plays effortlessly with a beautiful sound—always swinging, always thoughtful and always playful. It’s his attack, his ability to tell a story in such a beautiful way.”
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75272dc970b-popup
Clark grew up in a trumpet town—St. Louis. His trumpet influences were Charlie Creath, Dewey Jackson and Shorty Baker. In the Navy during World War II, he was billeted at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago, where he helped assemble and train bands that were then dispatched to other bases worldwide. After his discharge, Clark played with Charlie Barnet, who wrote to Duke Ellington about him. But Clark would first play with Count Basie in the late 1940s before joining Duke on a full-time basis in 1951.
Clark’s first use of the flugelhorn on a recording came on two tracks in 1957. Here’s what he told me:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63e5b970d-popup
JazzWax: When did you first record on the flugelhorn?
Clark Tery: When I was making an album with Billy Taylor [Taylor Made Jazz in 1957]. I had ordered one because I liked the way it sounded. All of the horn players in Jimmie Lunceford’s band had doubled on flugelhorn.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c752730e970b-popup
JW: What happened on the Billy Taylor (above) session?
CT: The horn came in a box to my hotel in Chicago. I was in Duke’s band at the time and we had a day off, so I was recording with Billy. When the package arrived, my roommate thought it was something I wanted right away. So he came down to the place where we were recording and brought it into the studio. When I opened the package, the horn looked great. It was a beautiful, gold-plated instrument. I tried it right there on the spot and loved it so much I decided to use it on the date.”
Among Clark’s most fascinating recordings are his dates with Thelonious Monk, particularly on Clark’s In Orbit (1958). One might assume that Clark and Monk would be like apple pie and bacon, but the pairing worked remarkably well:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63e81970d-popup
JazzWax: You recorded twice with Thelonious Monk, in 1956 and 1958. What was special about him?
Clark Terry: Monk was one of those guys who was set in his ways. You either liked him or you didn’t. There was no middle. I’ve always liked people who were unusual or different. Monk knew what he wanted and knew what he was doing. He was respectful, but we didn’t have much to say to each other.
JW: How did you wind up recording with Monk on your album In Orbit in 1958?
CT: I needed a piano player, and producer Orrin Keepnews asked me if I wanted to use Monk. I said, “Great.” So Orrin called him in. After we recorded a bunch of things, we still hadn’t played anything of his.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbb6b970c-popup
JW: What happened?
CT: I said, “Monk (above), I think it’s about time we recorded one of your tunes.” He didn’t answer, so as I walked away he growled, “Come back here.” He said, “Fine, let’s play this.” He started playing the opening notes to Let’s Cool One. He said, “You’ll hear it and then we’ll record it. Just listen.” So I listened and then we recorded it. I had never heard that tune before, and there wasn’t any music. We just did it [laughs].”
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75275c6970b-popup
Most of all, Clark had a personality that made you feel welcome. He’s easily one of the most jovial jazz masters I’ve had the opportunity to interview. During our phone conversation, Clark loved to laugh and took every opportunity to make me laugh. Clark viewed laughter not as an emotional reaction to something funny but as two soloing horns, each laugh distinct and improvised. In this regard, it was beautiful blowing with Clark. We will all miss him.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63fd3970d-popup
JazzWax notes: JazzWax sends its deepest condolences to Clark’s wife, Gwen (above, with Clark), whose tireless work making Clark comfortable during periods of enormous stress, pain and despair not to mention financial hurdles qualifies her for sainthood. Gwen sustained Clark for years and made Alan Hicks’ recently released documentary, Keep On Keepin’ On, possible. Big hug.
For my JazzWax interview with Clark, go here (http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/10/interview-clark-terry-part-1.html) and here (http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/10/interview-clark-terry-part-2.html) .
JazzWax tracks: Here are seven of my favorite Clark Terry tracks—all you need to fall in love with his sound and spirit:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f6406e970d-popup
Here’s Phlanges on V-Disc, Clark’s very first recording in February 1947, with Clark Terry and His Section Eights, featuring Clark Terry (tp), Willard Parker (ts), Bob Parker (p), Singleton Palmer (b) and Earl Martin (d)…
Phlanges (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/phlanges.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbc71970c-popup
Here’s Tuma, a stunning ballad by Clark in 1955 on the EmArcy album entitled Clark Terry, with Horace Silver on piano…
Tuma (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/07-tuma.mp3)
Here’s the Quincy Jones-arranged Double Play from the same album as the one above…
Double Play (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/02-double-play.mp3)
Here’s one of Clark’s first two recordings on flugelhorn for Billy Taylor’s Taylor Made Jazz in 1957…
Tune for Tex (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/08-tune-for-tex.mp3)
Here’s Clark in 1958 with pianist Thelonious Monk on Monk’s Let’s Cool One from Clark’s In Orbit…
Let’s Cool One (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/04-lets-cool-one-2.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75274dc970b-popup
Here’s Clark on Que Sera, from Spanish Rice, recorded in 1966 with arrangements by Chico O’Farrill…
Que Sera (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/05-que-sera.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbca0970c-popup
Here’s Clark and valve trombonist Bobby Brookmeyer on Morning Mist, from their Gingerbread Man album in 1966…
Morning Mist (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/2-12-morning-mist.mp3)
Clark Terry radio. WKCR-FM in New York is playing Clark around the clock today and on Tuesday until 3 p.m (EDT). To listen from anywhere in the world on your computer, go here (http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/) .
A special thanks to Bret Primack.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/phlanges.mp3)
You are subscribed to email updates from JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/)
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now (https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailunsubscribe?k=ZI-_rSpRX1tZ_Z8sLS_yL0oiIqI) . Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=16854e1714) | 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=16854e1714&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
Clark Terry (1920-2015): JazzWax
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
** JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/)
————————————————————
————————————————————
Clark Terry (1920-2015) (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Jazzwax/~3/Yh9ih0bgTlk/clark-terry-1920-2015.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 23 Feb 2015 06:31 AM PST
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75275d0970b-popup
Clark Terry, one of the most admired and accomplished jazz trumpeters and flugelhornists of his generation who appeared on an astonishing 928 known jazz recording sessions and played in the Duke Ellington Orchestra throughout the 1950s, died on Feb. 21. He was 94. [Photo of Clark Terry above by Hank O’Neal (http://www.hankonealphoto.com/) ]
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbb9fc970c-popup
Like a tap dancer, Clark liked to work his way nimbly through uptempo solos, frequently using a blowing style style reminiscent of what violinists do when playing with pizzicato. Clark’s sound was unmistakable, with a piercing middle tone and warm, round sides. Clark didn’t linger long on notes during most solos, touching on them as if running his fingers steadily through albums in a bin. Instead, he preferred to release notes in steady volleys, letting their tones fade off in perfectly placed spaces. He told me it was an approach he developed while in Count Basie’s band in the late 1940s. There, he created a tonging technique in his mouthpiece that made notes sound like the patter of an auctioneer.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbba54970c-popup
Clark also is perhaps best known for his distinct slurring of notes, bending them slightly in places. I once asked saxophonist Hal McKusick (above), who was close to Clark, what made his horn unique: “He plays effortlessly with a beautiful sound—always swinging, always thoughtful and always playful. It’s his attack, his ability to tell a story in such a beautiful way.”
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75272dc970b-popup
Clark grew up in a trumpet town—St. Louis. His trumpet influences were Charlie Creath, Dewey Jackson and Shorty Baker. In the Navy during World War II, he was billeted at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station near Chicago, where he helped assemble and train bands that were then dispatched to other bases worldwide. After his discharge, Clark played with Charlie Barnet, who wrote to Duke Ellington about him. But Clark would first play with Count Basie in the late 1940s before joining Duke on a full-time basis in 1951.
Clark’s first use of the flugelhorn on a recording came on two tracks in 1957. Here’s what he told me:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63e5b970d-popup
JazzWax: When did you first record on the flugelhorn?
Clark Tery: When I was making an album with Billy Taylor [Taylor Made Jazz in 1957]. I had ordered one because I liked the way it sounded. All of the horn players in Jimmie Lunceford’s band had doubled on flugelhorn.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c752730e970b-popup
JW: What happened on the Billy Taylor (above) session?
CT: The horn came in a box to my hotel in Chicago. I was in Duke’s band at the time and we had a day off, so I was recording with Billy. When the package arrived, my roommate thought it was something I wanted right away. So he came down to the place where we were recording and brought it into the studio. When I opened the package, the horn looked great. It was a beautiful, gold-plated instrument. I tried it right there on the spot and loved it so much I decided to use it on the date.”
Among Clark’s most fascinating recordings are his dates with Thelonious Monk, particularly on Clark’s In Orbit (1958). One might assume that Clark and Monk would be like apple pie and bacon, but the pairing worked remarkably well:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63e81970d-popup
JazzWax: You recorded twice with Thelonious Monk, in 1956 and 1958. What was special about him?
Clark Terry: Monk was one of those guys who was set in his ways. You either liked him or you didn’t. There was no middle. I’ve always liked people who were unusual or different. Monk knew what he wanted and knew what he was doing. He was respectful, but we didn’t have much to say to each other.
JW: How did you wind up recording with Monk on your album In Orbit in 1958?
CT: I needed a piano player, and producer Orrin Keepnews asked me if I wanted to use Monk. I said, “Great.” So Orrin called him in. After we recorded a bunch of things, we still hadn’t played anything of his.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbb6b970c-popup
JW: What happened?
CT: I said, “Monk (above), I think it’s about time we recorded one of your tunes.” He didn’t answer, so as I walked away he growled, “Come back here.” He said, “Fine, let’s play this.” He started playing the opening notes to Let’s Cool One. He said, “You’ll hear it and then we’ll record it. Just listen.” So I listened and then we recorded it. I had never heard that tune before, and there wasn’t any music. We just did it [laughs].”
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75275c6970b-popup
Most of all, Clark had a personality that made you feel welcome. He’s easily one of the most jovial jazz masters I’ve had the opportunity to interview. During our phone conversation, Clark loved to laugh and took every opportunity to make me laugh. Clark viewed laughter not as an emotional reaction to something funny but as two soloing horns, each laugh distinct and improvised. In this regard, it was beautiful blowing with Clark. We will all miss him.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f63fd3970d-popup
JazzWax notes: JazzWax sends its deepest condolences to Clark’s wife, Gwen (above, with Clark), whose tireless work making Clark comfortable during periods of enormous stress, pain and despair not to mention financial hurdles qualifies her for sainthood. Gwen sustained Clark for years and made Alan Hicks’ recently released documentary, Keep On Keepin’ On, possible. Big hug.
For my JazzWax interview with Clark, go here (http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/10/interview-clark-terry-part-1.html) and here (http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/10/interview-clark-terry-part-2.html) .
JazzWax tracks: Here are seven of my favorite Clark Terry tracks—all you need to fall in love with his sound and spirit:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07f6406e970d-popup
Here’s Phlanges on V-Disc, Clark’s very first recording in February 1947, with Clark Terry and His Section Eights, featuring Clark Terry (tp), Willard Parker (ts), Bob Parker (p), Singleton Palmer (b) and Earl Martin (d)…
Phlanges (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/phlanges.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbc71970c-popup
Here’s Tuma, a stunning ballad by Clark in 1955 on the EmArcy album entitled Clark Terry, with Horace Silver on piano…
Tuma (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/07-tuma.mp3)
Here’s the Quincy Jones-arranged Double Play from the same album as the one above…
Double Play (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/02-double-play.mp3)
Here’s one of Clark’s first two recordings on flugelhorn for Billy Taylor’s Taylor Made Jazz in 1957…
Tune for Tex (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/08-tune-for-tex.mp3)
Here’s Clark in 1958 with pianist Thelonious Monk on Monk’s Let’s Cool One from Clark’s In Orbit…
Let’s Cool One (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/04-lets-cool-one-2.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c75274dc970b-popup
Here’s Clark on Que Sera, from Spanish Rice, recorded in 1966 with arrangements by Chico O’Farrill…
Que Sera (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/05-que-sera.mp3)
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0dbbca0970c-popup
Here’s Clark and valve trombonist Bobby Brookmeyer on Morning Mist, from their Gingerbread Man album in 1966…
Morning Mist (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/2-12-morning-mist.mp3)
Clark Terry radio. WKCR-FM in New York is playing Clark around the clock today and on Tuesday until 3 p.m (EDT). To listen from anywhere in the world on your computer, go here (http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/wkcr/) .
A special thanks to Bret Primack.
This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now (http://marcmyers.typepad.com/files/phlanges.mp3)
You are subscribed to email updates from JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/)
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now (https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailunsubscribe?k=ZI-_rSpRX1tZ_Z8sLS_yL0oiIqI) . Email delivery powered by Google
Google Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=16854e1714) | 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=16854e1714&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 Great Clark Terry Dead at 94 | Rolling Stone
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jazz-great-clark-terry-dead-at-94-20150222
** Jazz Great Clark Terry Dead at 94
————————————————————
Terry
Clark Terry plays trumpet and flluegelhorn during a performance at the Jack Kleinsinger’s Highlights in Jazz ‘Salute to Jimmy Cobb’ concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York, New York, March 10, 2005. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Trumpeter Clark Terry, a jazz legend who in his seven decades as a musician and bandleader collaborated with artists ranging from Quincy Jones and Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus and Count Basie, passed away Saturday following complications from a long battle with diabetes. He was 94. For his contributions to jazz music, Terry was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
“Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends,” Terry’s wife Gwen wrote on the musician’s official Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/clarkterryjazz/photos/a.280470578644380.71884.276645389026899/923678477656917/) . “Clark has known and played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.” Earlier this year, Terry was placed in hospice care.
The St. Louis-born Terry started his career as a sideman for jazz greats like Count Basie and Duke Ellington before beginning his own stint as bandleader in 1955. As one of the most in-demand musicians in his field, Terry is listed in the credits of over a hundred jazz recordings with styles ranging from scat and swing to bebop and big band. Terry’s collaborations range from playing flugelhorn alongside Thelonious Monk’s piano on 1958’s In Orbit (Terry also featured on Monk’s landmark Brilliant Cornersthe previous year) to Quincy Jones’ Big Band Bossa Nova in 1960 to the duo he formed with Oscar Peterson in the Seventies.
Non-jazz fans might recognize Terry from his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show as he parlayed his talents into a decade-long gig as a member of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show band. On the program, Terry would perform a handful of his own tracks that featured vocals, including “Mumbles” and his rendition of the jazz standard “Squeeze Me.”
Terry’s contributions to music education were as important as his many recordings and collaborations, as the trumpeter spent years teaching the art of jazz. Most recently, Terry starred in the 2014 documentary Keep On Keepin’ On (http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/lists/alt-fall-movie-preview-20140918/keep-on-keepin-on-oct-3-20140918) , which chronicled the then-93-year-old trumpeter mentoring a blind pianist/jazz prodigy named Justin Kaulflin. The film was produced by another of Terry’s pupils, Quincy Jones, and placed on the shortlist for the Best Documentary Academy Award.
In addition to three Grammy nominations and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, Terry was also named an NEA Jazz Master and inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame among countless honors.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a20c122840) | 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=a20c122840&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 Great Clark Terry Dead at 94 | Rolling Stone
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jazz-great-clark-terry-dead-at-94-20150222
** Jazz Great Clark Terry Dead at 94
————————————————————
Terry
Clark Terry plays trumpet and flluegelhorn during a performance at the Jack Kleinsinger’s Highlights in Jazz ‘Salute to Jimmy Cobb’ concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York, New York, March 10, 2005. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Trumpeter Clark Terry, a jazz legend who in his seven decades as a musician and bandleader collaborated with artists ranging from Quincy Jones and Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus and Count Basie, passed away Saturday following complications from a long battle with diabetes. He was 94. For his contributions to jazz music, Terry was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
“Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends,” Terry’s wife Gwen wrote on the musician’s official Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/clarkterryjazz/photos/a.280470578644380.71884.276645389026899/923678477656917/) . “Clark has known and played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.” Earlier this year, Terry was placed in hospice care.
The St. Louis-born Terry started his career as a sideman for jazz greats like Count Basie and Duke Ellington before beginning his own stint as bandleader in 1955. As one of the most in-demand musicians in his field, Terry is listed in the credits of over a hundred jazz recordings with styles ranging from scat and swing to bebop and big band. Terry’s collaborations range from playing flugelhorn alongside Thelonious Monk’s piano on 1958’s In Orbit (Terry also featured on Monk’s landmark Brilliant Cornersthe previous year) to Quincy Jones’ Big Band Bossa Nova in 1960 to the duo he formed with Oscar Peterson in the Seventies.
Non-jazz fans might recognize Terry from his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show as he parlayed his talents into a decade-long gig as a member of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show band. On the program, Terry would perform a handful of his own tracks that featured vocals, including “Mumbles” and his rendition of the jazz standard “Squeeze Me.”
Terry’s contributions to music education were as important as his many recordings and collaborations, as the trumpeter spent years teaching the art of jazz. Most recently, Terry starred in the 2014 documentary Keep On Keepin’ On (http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/lists/alt-fall-movie-preview-20140918/keep-on-keepin-on-oct-3-20140918) , which chronicled the then-93-year-old trumpeter mentoring a blind pianist/jazz prodigy named Justin Kaulflin. The film was produced by another of Terry’s pupils, Quincy Jones, and placed on the shortlist for the Best Documentary Academy Award.
In addition to three Grammy nominations and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, Terry was also named an NEA Jazz Master and inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame among countless honors.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a20c122840) | 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=a20c122840&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 Great Clark Terry Dead at 94 | Rolling Stone
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jazz-great-clark-terry-dead-at-94-20150222
** Jazz Great Clark Terry Dead at 94
————————————————————
Terry
Clark Terry plays trumpet and flluegelhorn during a performance at the Jack Kleinsinger’s Highlights in Jazz ‘Salute to Jimmy Cobb’ concert at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center, New York, New York, March 10, 2005. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Trumpeter Clark Terry, a jazz legend who in his seven decades as a musician and bandleader collaborated with artists ranging from Quincy Jones and Duke Ellington to Charles Mingus and Count Basie, passed away Saturday following complications from a long battle with diabetes. He was 94. For his contributions to jazz music, Terry was given the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010.
“Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends,” Terry’s wife Gwen wrote on the musician’s official Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/clarkterryjazz/photos/a.280470578644380.71884.276645389026899/923678477656917/) . “Clark has known and played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.” Earlier this year, Terry was placed in hospice care.
The St. Louis-born Terry started his career as a sideman for jazz greats like Count Basie and Duke Ellington before beginning his own stint as bandleader in 1955. As one of the most in-demand musicians in his field, Terry is listed in the credits of over a hundred jazz recordings with styles ranging from scat and swing to bebop and big band. Terry’s collaborations range from playing flugelhorn alongside Thelonious Monk’s piano on 1958’s In Orbit (Terry also featured on Monk’s landmark Brilliant Cornersthe previous year) to Quincy Jones’ Big Band Bossa Nova in 1960 to the duo he formed with Oscar Peterson in the Seventies.
Non-jazz fans might recognize Terry from his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show as he parlayed his talents into a decade-long gig as a member of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show band. On the program, Terry would perform a handful of his own tracks that featured vocals, including “Mumbles” and his rendition of the jazz standard “Squeeze Me.”
Terry’s contributions to music education were as important as his many recordings and collaborations, as the trumpeter spent years teaching the art of jazz. Most recently, Terry starred in the 2014 documentary Keep On Keepin’ On (http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/lists/alt-fall-movie-preview-20140918/keep-on-keepin-on-oct-3-20140918) , which chronicled the then-93-year-old trumpeter mentoring a blind pianist/jazz prodigy named Justin Kaulflin. The film was produced by another of Terry’s pupils, Quincy Jones, and placed on the shortlist for the Best Documentary Academy Award.
In addition to three Grammy nominations and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement award, Terry was also named an NEA Jazz Master and inducted into the Downbeat Hall of Fame among countless honors.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a20c122840) | 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=a20c122840&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
Cephas Bowles RIP
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of recently retired President and CEO of Newark Public Radio- Cephas Bowles. Cephas had been diagnosed with a form of Leukemia approximately 2 years ago and had undergone a bone marrow transplant in November of 2013 in hopes of altering the course of the disease.
Cephas was born in Newark, NJ and we could have had no better champion for this city and the music that was born of its culture- especially its tradition of organ music. When he was tapped to return to Newark to assume the leadership role at WBGO after working at public media station KUAT in Tucson, he joined the board of trustees of NPR and was very vocal in his campaign for diversity within the public radio system.
Cephas was a very private man but certain elements of his life he wouldn’t mind sharing-his commitment to Newark, yes. This music, most definitely. But also his other main passions- public radio and all that it stands for, his connection to Syracuse University where he got his start in radio and his family, most importantly his beloved wife Linda.
We can find no better way to honor Cephas than to steadfastly champion his mission to keep WBGO thriving. He would want nothing more than to know that the work that he began at WBGO more than 20 years ago has a strong future and lives on through the next generation. Over the next few days, you will hear dedications of music in his memory on our air, and our hope is that we are all able to take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we all are to have been touched by his great spirit. On behalf of the Board of Trustees and staff of Newark Public Radio, we send our deepest condolences to his family.
Amy Niles
—
Amy Niles |
President & CEO
WBGO | Jazz 88.3 FM
Ph. 973.624.8880 X 256| Fax 973.824.8888
Email aniles@wbgo.org (mailto:aniles@wbgo.org)
54 Park Place | Newark, NJ 07102
www.wbgo.org (http://www.wbgo.org/)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c578ef4316) | 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=c578ef4316&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
Cephas Bowles RIP
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of recently retired President and CEO of Newark Public Radio- Cephas Bowles. Cephas had been diagnosed with a form of Leukemia approximately 2 years ago and had undergone a bone marrow transplant in November of 2013 in hopes of altering the course of the disease.
Cephas was born in Newark, NJ and we could have had no better champion for this city and the music that was born of its culture- especially its tradition of organ music. When he was tapped to return to Newark to assume the leadership role at WBGO after working at public media station KUAT in Tucson, he joined the board of trustees of NPR and was very vocal in his campaign for diversity within the public radio system.
Cephas was a very private man but certain elements of his life he wouldn’t mind sharing-his commitment to Newark, yes. This music, most definitely. But also his other main passions- public radio and all that it stands for, his connection to Syracuse University where he got his start in radio and his family, most importantly his beloved wife Linda.
We can find no better way to honor Cephas than to steadfastly champion his mission to keep WBGO thriving. He would want nothing more than to know that the work that he began at WBGO more than 20 years ago has a strong future and lives on through the next generation. Over the next few days, you will hear dedications of music in his memory on our air, and our hope is that we are all able to take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we all are to have been touched by his great spirit. On behalf of the Board of Trustees and staff of Newark Public Radio, we send our deepest condolences to his family.
Amy Niles
—
Amy Niles |
President & CEO
WBGO | Jazz 88.3 FM
Ph. 973.624.8880 X 256| Fax 973.824.8888
Email aniles@wbgo.org (mailto:aniles@wbgo.org)
54 Park Place | Newark, NJ 07102
www.wbgo.org (http://www.wbgo.org/)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c578ef4316) | 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=c578ef4316&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
Cephas Bowles RIP
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of recently retired President and CEO of Newark Public Radio- Cephas Bowles. Cephas had been diagnosed with a form of Leukemia approximately 2 years ago and had undergone a bone marrow transplant in November of 2013 in hopes of altering the course of the disease.
Cephas was born in Newark, NJ and we could have had no better champion for this city and the music that was born of its culture- especially its tradition of organ music. When he was tapped to return to Newark to assume the leadership role at WBGO after working at public media station KUAT in Tucson, he joined the board of trustees of NPR and was very vocal in his campaign for diversity within the public radio system.
Cephas was a very private man but certain elements of his life he wouldn’t mind sharing-his commitment to Newark, yes. This music, most definitely. But also his other main passions- public radio and all that it stands for, his connection to Syracuse University where he got his start in radio and his family, most importantly his beloved wife Linda.
We can find no better way to honor Cephas than to steadfastly champion his mission to keep WBGO thriving. He would want nothing more than to know that the work that he began at WBGO more than 20 years ago has a strong future and lives on through the next generation. Over the next few days, you will hear dedications of music in his memory on our air, and our hope is that we are all able to take a moment to reflect on how fortunate we all are to have been touched by his great spirit. On behalf of the Board of Trustees and staff of Newark Public Radio, we send our deepest condolences to his family.
Amy Niles
—
Amy Niles |
President & CEO
WBGO | Jazz 88.3 FM
Ph. 973.624.8880 X 256| Fax 973.824.8888
Email aniles@wbgo.org (mailto:aniles@wbgo.org)
54 Park Place | Newark, NJ 07102
www.wbgo.org (http://www.wbgo.org/)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c578ef4316) | 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=c578ef4316&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
Clark Terry, Influential Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 94 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150222
** Clark Terry, Influential Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 94
————————————————————
Clark Terry (http://clarkterry.com/) , one of the most popular and influential jazz trumpeters of his generation and an enthusiastic advocate of jazz education, has died. He was 94.
His death was announced late Saturday by his wife, Gwen. She did not say where he died or provide any other details.
Mr. Terry was acclaimed for his impeccable musicianship, loved for his playful spirit and respected for his adaptability. Although his sound on both trumpet and the rounder-toned flugelhorn (which he helped popularize as a jazz instrument) was highly personal and easily identifiable, he managed to fit it snugly into a wide range of musical contexts.
He was one of the few musicians to have worked with the orchestras of both Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He was for many years a constant presence in New York’s recording studios — accompanying singers, sitting in big-band trumpet sections, providing music for radio and television commercials. He recorded with Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and other leading jazz artists as well as his own groups.
Photo
Clark Terry in 2003. Credit Todd Feeback/Associated Press
He was also one of the first black musicians to hold a staff position at a television network and for many years a mainstay of the “Tonight Show” band, as well as one of the most high-profile proponents of teaching jazz at the college level.
His fellow musicians respected him as an inventive improviser with a graceful and ebullient style, traces of which can be heard in the playing of Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis and others. But many listeners knew him best for the vocal numbers with which he peppered his performances, a distinctively joyous brand of scat singing in which noises as well as nonsense syllables took the place of words. It was an off-the-cuff recording of one such song, released in 1964 under the name “Mumbles,” that became his signature song.
The high spirits of “Mumbles” were characteristic of Mr. Terry’s approach: More than most jazz musicians of his generation, he was unafraid to fool around. His sense of humor manifested itself in his onstage demeanor as well as in his penchant for growls, slurs and speechlike effects.
Musicians and critics saw beyond the clowning and recognized Mr. Terry’s seriousness of purpose. Stanley Crouch wrote in The Village Voice in 1983 that Mr. Terry “stands as tall in the evolution of his horn as anyone who has emerged since 1940.”
The seventh of 11 children, Clark Terry was born into a poor St. Louis family on Dec. 14, 1920. His mother, the former Mary Scott, died when he was 6, and within a few years he was working odd jobs to help support his family. He became interested in music when he heard the husband of one of his sisters play tuba, and when he was 10 he built himself a makeshift trumpet by attaching a funnel to a garden hose. Neighbors later pitched in to buy him a trumpet from a pawn shop.
His father, Clark Virgil Terry, discouraged his interest in music, fearing that there was no future in it, but he persisted. He played valve trombone and trumpet in his high school orchestra and secured his first professional engagement, which paid 75 cents a night, with the help of his tuba-playing brother-in-law.
Continue reading the main story
His career got off to a bumpy start. After working with local bands like Dollar Bill and His Small Change, he joined a traveling carnival and found himself stranded in Hattiesburg, Miss., when it ran out of money.
In 1942 he joined the Navy and was assigned to the band at the Great Lakes Training Station near Chicago. When the war ended, he returned to St. Louis and joined a big band led by George Hudson.
“George put the full weight of the band on me,” he told the jazz historian Stanley Dance in 1961. “I played all the lead and all the trumpet solos, rehearsed the band, suggested numbers, routines and everything.”
The regimen paid off: When the Hudson band played at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Mr. Terry’s work was heard by some of the most important people in jazz, and he soon had offers. He worked briefly with the bands of the saxophonist Charlie Barnet and the blues singer and saxophonist Eddie Vinson, among others, before joining Count Basie in 1948. Times were getting tough for big bands in the postwar years, and Basie reduced his group from 18 pieces to a septet in 1950, but he retained Mr. Terry (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzuwUHjM7ys) . The next year, Duke Ellington (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgDKyo7iCyA) called.
It was the opportunity he had been waiting for. Working with Basie, he would say many times, was a valuable experience, but it was like going to prep school; his ultimate goal was to enroll in “the University of Ellingtonia.”
Nonetheless, after close to a decade with the Ellington band, he decided it was time to move on. “I wanted to be more of a soloist,” he said, “but it was a seniority thing. There were about 10 guys ahead of me.”
In late 1959 he joined a big band being formed by Quincy Jones, who not that many years earlier, as a youngster, had taken a few trumpet lessons from him. The original plan was for the band to appear in a stage musical called “Free and Easy,” with music by Harold Arlen. But the show folded during a tryout in Paris, and Mr. Terry accepted an offer to join NBC-TV’s in-house corps of musicians.
The first black musician to land such a job at NBC, he soon became familiar to late-night viewers as a member of the band on “The Tonight Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AvImcsbt1U) ,” led for most of his time there by Doc Severinsen. He also led a popular quintet with the valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and worked as a sideman with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and others.
When Johnny Carson began his popular “Stump the Band” feature on “The Tonight Show,” in which members of the studio audience tried to come up with song titles that no one in the band recognized, Mr. Terry would often claim to know the song in question and then bluff his way through a bluesy half-sung, half-mumbled number of his own spontaneous invention.
He recorded one such joking vocal in 1964, as part of an album he cut with the pianist Oscar Peterson’s trio. As he recalled it, the song, released as “Mumbles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJuFDvH8wGs) ,” was recorded only because the session had gone so smoothly that the musicians had extra studio time on their hands. Much to his surprise he found himself with a hit.
Continue reading the main story
When “The Tonight Show” moved to the West Coast in 1972, Mr. Terry stayed in New York. Jazz was at something of a low ebb commercially, but he managed to stay busy both in and out of the studios and even found work for a 17-piece band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XtoV9Lv7g) he had formed in 1967. Between 1978 and 1981 he took the band to Asia, Africa, South America and Europe under the auspices of the State Department. Most of his concert and nightclub work, though, was as the leader of a quartet or quintet.
Mr. Terry also became active in jazz education, appearing at high school and college clinics, writing jazz instruction books and running a summer jazz camp. He was an adviser to the International Association of Jazz Educators and chairman of the academic council of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. For many years he was also an adjunct professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., to which he donated his archive of instruments, sheet music, correspondence and memorabilia in 2004.
Information on survivors in addition to his wife was not immediately available.
Mr. Terry was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1991 and was given a lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy in 2010. Diabetes and other health problems forced him to cut down on touring in the 1990s, but he remained active into the new century. He appeared in New York nightclubs as recently as 2008, doing more singing than playing but with his spirit intact.
And Mr. Terry, who in recent years had been living in Pine Bluff, Ark., continued to be a mentor to young musicians after his performing days were over. An acclaimed 2014 documentary, “Keep On Keepin’ On (http://keeponkeepinon.com/) ,” directed by Alan Hicks, told the story of his relationship with a promising young pianist, Justin Kauflin, whom Mr. Terry first taught at William Paterson, and with whom he continued to work even after being hospitalized.
“The only way I knew how to keep going,” Mr. Terry wrote in his autobiography, “Clark,” published in 2011, “was to keep going.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d1603815db) | 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=d1603815db&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
Clark Terry, Influential Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 94 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150222
** Clark Terry, Influential Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 94
————————————————————
Clark Terry (http://clarkterry.com/) , one of the most popular and influential jazz trumpeters of his generation and an enthusiastic advocate of jazz education, has died. He was 94.
His death was announced late Saturday by his wife, Gwen. She did not say where he died or provide any other details.
Mr. Terry was acclaimed for his impeccable musicianship, loved for his playful spirit and respected for his adaptability. Although his sound on both trumpet and the rounder-toned flugelhorn (which he helped popularize as a jazz instrument) was highly personal and easily identifiable, he managed to fit it snugly into a wide range of musical contexts.
He was one of the few musicians to have worked with the orchestras of both Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He was for many years a constant presence in New York’s recording studios — accompanying singers, sitting in big-band trumpet sections, providing music for radio and television commercials. He recorded with Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and other leading jazz artists as well as his own groups.
Photo
Clark Terry in 2003. Credit Todd Feeback/Associated Press
He was also one of the first black musicians to hold a staff position at a television network and for many years a mainstay of the “Tonight Show” band, as well as one of the most high-profile proponents of teaching jazz at the college level.
His fellow musicians respected him as an inventive improviser with a graceful and ebullient style, traces of which can be heard in the playing of Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis and others. But many listeners knew him best for the vocal numbers with which he peppered his performances, a distinctively joyous brand of scat singing in which noises as well as nonsense syllables took the place of words. It was an off-the-cuff recording of one such song, released in 1964 under the name “Mumbles,” that became his signature song.
The high spirits of “Mumbles” were characteristic of Mr. Terry’s approach: More than most jazz musicians of his generation, he was unafraid to fool around. His sense of humor manifested itself in his onstage demeanor as well as in his penchant for growls, slurs and speechlike effects.
Musicians and critics saw beyond the clowning and recognized Mr. Terry’s seriousness of purpose. Stanley Crouch wrote in The Village Voice in 1983 that Mr. Terry “stands as tall in the evolution of his horn as anyone who has emerged since 1940.”
The seventh of 11 children, Clark Terry was born into a poor St. Louis family on Dec. 14, 1920. His mother, the former Mary Scott, died when he was 6, and within a few years he was working odd jobs to help support his family. He became interested in music when he heard the husband of one of his sisters play tuba, and when he was 10 he built himself a makeshift trumpet by attaching a funnel to a garden hose. Neighbors later pitched in to buy him a trumpet from a pawn shop.
His father, Clark Virgil Terry, discouraged his interest in music, fearing that there was no future in it, but he persisted. He played valve trombone and trumpet in his high school orchestra and secured his first professional engagement, which paid 75 cents a night, with the help of his tuba-playing brother-in-law.
Continue reading the main story
His career got off to a bumpy start. After working with local bands like Dollar Bill and His Small Change, he joined a traveling carnival and found himself stranded in Hattiesburg, Miss., when it ran out of money.
In 1942 he joined the Navy and was assigned to the band at the Great Lakes Training Station near Chicago. When the war ended, he returned to St. Louis and joined a big band led by George Hudson.
“George put the full weight of the band on me,” he told the jazz historian Stanley Dance in 1961. “I played all the lead and all the trumpet solos, rehearsed the band, suggested numbers, routines and everything.”
The regimen paid off: When the Hudson band played at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Mr. Terry’s work was heard by some of the most important people in jazz, and he soon had offers. He worked briefly with the bands of the saxophonist Charlie Barnet and the blues singer and saxophonist Eddie Vinson, among others, before joining Count Basie in 1948. Times were getting tough for big bands in the postwar years, and Basie reduced his group from 18 pieces to a septet in 1950, but he retained Mr. Terry (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzuwUHjM7ys) . The next year, Duke Ellington (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgDKyo7iCyA) called.
It was the opportunity he had been waiting for. Working with Basie, he would say many times, was a valuable experience, but it was like going to prep school; his ultimate goal was to enroll in “the University of Ellingtonia.”
Nonetheless, after close to a decade with the Ellington band, he decided it was time to move on. “I wanted to be more of a soloist,” he said, “but it was a seniority thing. There were about 10 guys ahead of me.”
In late 1959 he joined a big band being formed by Quincy Jones, who not that many years earlier, as a youngster, had taken a few trumpet lessons from him. The original plan was for the band to appear in a stage musical called “Free and Easy,” with music by Harold Arlen. But the show folded during a tryout in Paris, and Mr. Terry accepted an offer to join NBC-TV’s in-house corps of musicians.
The first black musician to land such a job at NBC, he soon became familiar to late-night viewers as a member of the band on “The Tonight Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AvImcsbt1U) ,” led for most of his time there by Doc Severinsen. He also led a popular quintet with the valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and worked as a sideman with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and others.
When Johnny Carson began his popular “Stump the Band” feature on “The Tonight Show,” in which members of the studio audience tried to come up with song titles that no one in the band recognized, Mr. Terry would often claim to know the song in question and then bluff his way through a bluesy half-sung, half-mumbled number of his own spontaneous invention.
He recorded one such joking vocal in 1964, as part of an album he cut with the pianist Oscar Peterson’s trio. As he recalled it, the song, released as “Mumbles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJuFDvH8wGs) ,” was recorded only because the session had gone so smoothly that the musicians had extra studio time on their hands. Much to his surprise he found himself with a hit.
Continue reading the main story
When “The Tonight Show” moved to the West Coast in 1972, Mr. Terry stayed in New York. Jazz was at something of a low ebb commercially, but he managed to stay busy both in and out of the studios and even found work for a 17-piece band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XtoV9Lv7g) he had formed in 1967. Between 1978 and 1981 he took the band to Asia, Africa, South America and Europe under the auspices of the State Department. Most of his concert and nightclub work, though, was as the leader of a quartet or quintet.
Mr. Terry also became active in jazz education, appearing at high school and college clinics, writing jazz instruction books and running a summer jazz camp. He was an adviser to the International Association of Jazz Educators and chairman of the academic council of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. For many years he was also an adjunct professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., to which he donated his archive of instruments, sheet music, correspondence and memorabilia in 2004.
Information on survivors in addition to his wife was not immediately available.
Mr. Terry was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1991 and was given a lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy in 2010. Diabetes and other health problems forced him to cut down on touring in the 1990s, but he remained active into the new century. He appeared in New York nightclubs as recently as 2008, doing more singing than playing but with his spirit intact.
And Mr. Terry, who in recent years had been living in Pine Bluff, Ark., continued to be a mentor to young musicians after his performing days were over. An acclaimed 2014 documentary, “Keep On Keepin’ On (http://keeponkeepinon.com/) ,” directed by Alan Hicks, told the story of his relationship with a promising young pianist, Justin Kauflin, whom Mr. Terry first taught at William Paterson, and with whom he continued to work even after being hospitalized.
“The only way I knew how to keep going,” Mr. Terry wrote in his autobiography, “Clark,” published in 2011, “was to keep going.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d1603815db) | 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=d1603815db&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
Clark Terry, Influential Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 94 – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150222
** Clark Terry, Influential Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 94
————————————————————
Clark Terry (http://clarkterry.com/) , one of the most popular and influential jazz trumpeters of his generation and an enthusiastic advocate of jazz education, has died. He was 94.
His death was announced late Saturday by his wife, Gwen. She did not say where he died or provide any other details.
Mr. Terry was acclaimed for his impeccable musicianship, loved for his playful spirit and respected for his adaptability. Although his sound on both trumpet and the rounder-toned flugelhorn (which he helped popularize as a jazz instrument) was highly personal and easily identifiable, he managed to fit it snugly into a wide range of musical contexts.
He was one of the few musicians to have worked with the orchestras of both Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He was for many years a constant presence in New York’s recording studios — accompanying singers, sitting in big-band trumpet sections, providing music for radio and television commercials. He recorded with Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and other leading jazz artists as well as his own groups.
Photo
Clark Terry in 2003. Credit Todd Feeback/Associated Press
He was also one of the first black musicians to hold a staff position at a television network and for many years a mainstay of the “Tonight Show” band, as well as one of the most high-profile proponents of teaching jazz at the college level.
His fellow musicians respected him as an inventive improviser with a graceful and ebullient style, traces of which can be heard in the playing of Miles Davis, Wynton Marsalis and others. But many listeners knew him best for the vocal numbers with which he peppered his performances, a distinctively joyous brand of scat singing in which noises as well as nonsense syllables took the place of words. It was an off-the-cuff recording of one such song, released in 1964 under the name “Mumbles,” that became his signature song.
The high spirits of “Mumbles” were characteristic of Mr. Terry’s approach: More than most jazz musicians of his generation, he was unafraid to fool around. His sense of humor manifested itself in his onstage demeanor as well as in his penchant for growls, slurs and speechlike effects.
Musicians and critics saw beyond the clowning and recognized Mr. Terry’s seriousness of purpose. Stanley Crouch wrote in The Village Voice in 1983 that Mr. Terry “stands as tall in the evolution of his horn as anyone who has emerged since 1940.”
The seventh of 11 children, Clark Terry was born into a poor St. Louis family on Dec. 14, 1920. His mother, the former Mary Scott, died when he was 6, and within a few years he was working odd jobs to help support his family. He became interested in music when he heard the husband of one of his sisters play tuba, and when he was 10 he built himself a makeshift trumpet by attaching a funnel to a garden hose. Neighbors later pitched in to buy him a trumpet from a pawn shop.
His father, Clark Virgil Terry, discouraged his interest in music, fearing that there was no future in it, but he persisted. He played valve trombone and trumpet in his high school orchestra and secured his first professional engagement, which paid 75 cents a night, with the help of his tuba-playing brother-in-law.
Continue reading the main story
His career got off to a bumpy start. After working with local bands like Dollar Bill and His Small Change, he joined a traveling carnival and found himself stranded in Hattiesburg, Miss., when it ran out of money.
In 1942 he joined the Navy and was assigned to the band at the Great Lakes Training Station near Chicago. When the war ended, he returned to St. Louis and joined a big band led by George Hudson.
“George put the full weight of the band on me,” he told the jazz historian Stanley Dance in 1961. “I played all the lead and all the trumpet solos, rehearsed the band, suggested numbers, routines and everything.”
The regimen paid off: When the Hudson band played at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Mr. Terry’s work was heard by some of the most important people in jazz, and he soon had offers. He worked briefly with the bands of the saxophonist Charlie Barnet and the blues singer and saxophonist Eddie Vinson, among others, before joining Count Basie in 1948. Times were getting tough for big bands in the postwar years, and Basie reduced his group from 18 pieces to a septet in 1950, but he retained Mr. Terry (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzuwUHjM7ys) . The next year, Duke Ellington (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgDKyo7iCyA) called.
It was the opportunity he had been waiting for. Working with Basie, he would say many times, was a valuable experience, but it was like going to prep school; his ultimate goal was to enroll in “the University of Ellingtonia.”
Nonetheless, after close to a decade with the Ellington band, he decided it was time to move on. “I wanted to be more of a soloist,” he said, “but it was a seniority thing. There were about 10 guys ahead of me.”
In late 1959 he joined a big band being formed by Quincy Jones, who not that many years earlier, as a youngster, had taken a few trumpet lessons from him. The original plan was for the band to appear in a stage musical called “Free and Easy,” with music by Harold Arlen. But the show folded during a tryout in Paris, and Mr. Terry accepted an offer to join NBC-TV’s in-house corps of musicians.
The first black musician to land such a job at NBC, he soon became familiar to late-night viewers as a member of the band on “The Tonight Show (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AvImcsbt1U) ,” led for most of his time there by Doc Severinsen. He also led a popular quintet with the valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and worked as a sideman with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and others.
When Johnny Carson began his popular “Stump the Band” feature on “The Tonight Show,” in which members of the studio audience tried to come up with song titles that no one in the band recognized, Mr. Terry would often claim to know the song in question and then bluff his way through a bluesy half-sung, half-mumbled number of his own spontaneous invention.
He recorded one such joking vocal in 1964, as part of an album he cut with the pianist Oscar Peterson’s trio. As he recalled it, the song, released as “Mumbles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJuFDvH8wGs) ,” was recorded only because the session had gone so smoothly that the musicians had extra studio time on their hands. Much to his surprise he found himself with a hit.
Continue reading the main story
When “The Tonight Show” moved to the West Coast in 1972, Mr. Terry stayed in New York. Jazz was at something of a low ebb commercially, but he managed to stay busy both in and out of the studios and even found work for a 17-piece band (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7XtoV9Lv7g) he had formed in 1967. Between 1978 and 1981 he took the band to Asia, Africa, South America and Europe under the auspices of the State Department. Most of his concert and nightclub work, though, was as the leader of a quartet or quintet.
Mr. Terry also became active in jazz education, appearing at high school and college clinics, writing jazz instruction books and running a summer jazz camp. He was an adviser to the International Association of Jazz Educators and chairman of the academic council of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. For many years he was also an adjunct professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J., to which he donated his archive of instruments, sheet music, correspondence and memorabilia in 2004.
Information on survivors in addition to his wife was not immediately available.
Mr. Terry was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 1991 and was given a lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy in 2010. Diabetes and other health problems forced him to cut down on touring in the 1990s, but he remained active into the new century. He appeared in New York nightclubs as recently as 2008, doing more singing than playing but with his spirit intact.
And Mr. Terry, who in recent years had been living in Pine Bluff, Ark., continued to be a mentor to young musicians after his performing days were over. An acclaimed 2014 documentary, “Keep On Keepin’ On (http://keeponkeepinon.com/) ,” directed by Alan Hicks, told the story of his relationship with a promising young pianist, Justin Kauflin, whom Mr. Terry first taught at William Paterson, and with whom he continued to work even after being hospitalized.
“The only way I knew how to keep going,” Mr. Terry wrote in his autobiography, “Clark,” published in 2011, “was to keep going.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d1603815db) | 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=d1603815db&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
Clark Terry Dead, Played in Tonight Show Band | Variety
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://variety.com/2015/music/news/trumpeter-clark-terry-who-played-in-tonight-show-band-dies-at-94-1201438814/
Statement from Clark’s wife Gwen
Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll
be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully,
surrounded by his family, students and friends. Clark has known and
played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy
in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his
students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live
on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the
world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.
With all my love, Gwen Terry
** Trumpeter Clark Terry, Who Played in ‘Tonight Show’ Band, Dies at 94
————————————————————
Clark Terry Dead, Played in Tonight
Trumpeter Clark Terry (http://variety.com/t/clark-terry/) , who excelled as a leader and sideman in big bands and small combos during his seven-decade career in jazz, has died at 94.
Terry, a 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, entered hospice care on Feb. 13, suffering from the effects of advanced diabetes.
“He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends,” his wife Gwen wrote on his Facebook page Saturday.
Among the most prolific and widely admired instrumentalists in jazz, Terry led or co-led more than 80 recording dates and played on more than 900 sessions by the time of his last session in 2004.
Also proficient on flugelhorn, Terry was best known to the general public as a longtime featured soloist in the house band of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” In 1960, he became the first African-American staff musician with the network.
Born in St. Louis, Terry began playing in high school, and he played in the U.S. Navy band during World War II. After the war, he began his recording career with R&B saxophonist-singer Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s combo and saxophonist Charlie Barnet’s big band (alongside trumpeter Doc Severinsen, later the leader of the “Tonight Show” band).
During the late ’40s and through the ’50s, he held back-to-back gigs with the two most prestigious big bands in jazz: the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras. (In 1959, he was part of the group that performed Ellington’s score for director Otto Preminger’s feature “Anatomy of a Murder.”)
Comfortable in both swing and bebop formats, he also worked during this period as a sideman with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges, Gerald Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell and Ray Charles. He also worked in the big band of leader-composer-arranger Quincy Jones, for whom he served as an early mentor (as he did with another celebrated trumpeter, Miles Davis).
During the ’60s, he continued to record as a leader while doing sideman duty with Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Johnny Griffin, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Yusef Lateef, Dizzy Gillespie, Oliver Nelson, Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Cannonball Adderley, among many others. He appeared on several albums toplined by “Tonight Show” bandleaders Severinsen and Skitch Henderson. He began a fruitful collaboration with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer’s big band in 1961.
In 1964, Terry – known for his sly humor and his trumpet-and-vocal conversations on the bandstand – actually scored something like a pop hit, when he scatted on his composition “Mumbles,” featured on “The Oscar Peterson Trio Plus One” (with Terry the titular “plus one”). The novel collaboration with Canadian pianist Peterson’s group propelled the album to No. 81 on the U.S. album chart.
From the ’70s onward, Terry continued to record but increasingly concentrated on touring, with Peterson and his own Big B-A-D Band. He began mounting his own branded jazz festivals in 2000.
He focused his energy on musical education in later years. A Harlem youth band he founded ultimately helped germinate New York’s celebrated “Jazz Mobile” program for youngsters. He also taught and lectured at a number of high schools, colleges and music camps.
A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, he – like Louis Armstrong and others before him – served as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department, touring the Middle East and Africa.
Terry published his autobiography “Clark” in 2011. He was featured in the 2014 documentary “Keep on Keepin’ On,” about his relationship with a blind 23-year-old pianist.
Survivors include his wife.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=3bdfce8af5) | 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=3bdfce8af5&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
Clark Terry Dead, Played in Tonight Show Band | Variety
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://variety.com/2015/music/news/trumpeter-clark-terry-who-played-in-tonight-show-band-dies-at-94-1201438814/
Statement from Clark’s wife Gwen
Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll
be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully,
surrounded by his family, students and friends. Clark has known and
played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy
in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his
students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live
on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the
world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.
With all my love, Gwen Terry
** Trumpeter Clark Terry, Who Played in ‘Tonight Show’ Band, Dies at 94
————————————————————
Clark Terry Dead, Played in Tonight
Trumpeter Clark Terry (http://variety.com/t/clark-terry/) , who excelled as a leader and sideman in big bands and small combos during his seven-decade career in jazz, has died at 94.
Terry, a 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, entered hospice care on Feb. 13, suffering from the effects of advanced diabetes.
“He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends,” his wife Gwen wrote on his Facebook page Saturday.
Among the most prolific and widely admired instrumentalists in jazz, Terry led or co-led more than 80 recording dates and played on more than 900 sessions by the time of his last session in 2004.
Also proficient on flugelhorn, Terry was best known to the general public as a longtime featured soloist in the house band of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” In 1960, he became the first African-American staff musician with the network.
Born in St. Louis, Terry began playing in high school, and he played in the U.S. Navy band during World War II. After the war, he began his recording career with R&B saxophonist-singer Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s combo and saxophonist Charlie Barnet’s big band (alongside trumpeter Doc Severinsen, later the leader of the “Tonight Show” band).
During the late ’40s and through the ’50s, he held back-to-back gigs with the two most prestigious big bands in jazz: the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras. (In 1959, he was part of the group that performed Ellington’s score for director Otto Preminger’s feature “Anatomy of a Murder.”)
Comfortable in both swing and bebop formats, he also worked during this period as a sideman with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges, Gerald Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell and Ray Charles. He also worked in the big band of leader-composer-arranger Quincy Jones, for whom he served as an early mentor (as he did with another celebrated trumpeter, Miles Davis).
During the ’60s, he continued to record as a leader while doing sideman duty with Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Johnny Griffin, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Yusef Lateef, Dizzy Gillespie, Oliver Nelson, Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Cannonball Adderley, among many others. He appeared on several albums toplined by “Tonight Show” bandleaders Severinsen and Skitch Henderson. He began a fruitful collaboration with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer’s big band in 1961.
In 1964, Terry – known for his sly humor and his trumpet-and-vocal conversations on the bandstand – actually scored something like a pop hit, when he scatted on his composition “Mumbles,” featured on “The Oscar Peterson Trio Plus One” (with Terry the titular “plus one”). The novel collaboration with Canadian pianist Peterson’s group propelled the album to No. 81 on the U.S. album chart.
From the ’70s onward, Terry continued to record but increasingly concentrated on touring, with Peterson and his own Big B-A-D Band. He began mounting his own branded jazz festivals in 2000.
He focused his energy on musical education in later years. A Harlem youth band he founded ultimately helped germinate New York’s celebrated “Jazz Mobile” program for youngsters. He also taught and lectured at a number of high schools, colleges and music camps.
A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, he – like Louis Armstrong and others before him – served as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department, touring the Middle East and Africa.
Terry published his autobiography “Clark” in 2011. He was featured in the 2014 documentary “Keep on Keepin’ On,” about his relationship with a blind 23-year-old pianist.
Survivors include his wife.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=3bdfce8af5) | 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=3bdfce8af5&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
Clark Terry Dead, Played in Tonight Show Band | Variety
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://variety.com/2015/music/news/trumpeter-clark-terry-who-played-in-tonight-show-band-dies-at-94-1201438814/
Statement from Clark’s wife Gwen
Our beloved Clark Terry has joined the big band in heaven where he’ll
be singing and playing with the angels. He left us peacefully,
surrounded by his family, students and friends. Clark has known and
played with so many amazing people in his life. He has found great joy
in his friendships and his greatest passion was spending time with his
students. We will miss him every minute of every day, but he will live
on through the beautiful music and positivity that he gave to the
world. Clark will live in our hearts forever.
With all my love, Gwen Terry
** Trumpeter Clark Terry, Who Played in ‘Tonight Show’ Band, Dies at 94
————————————————————
Clark Terry Dead, Played in Tonight
Trumpeter Clark Terry (http://variety.com/t/clark-terry/) , who excelled as a leader and sideman in big bands and small combos during his seven-decade career in jazz, has died at 94.
Terry, a 2010 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, entered hospice care on Feb. 13, suffering from the effects of advanced diabetes.
“He left us peacefully, surrounded by his family, students and friends,” his wife Gwen wrote on his Facebook page Saturday.
Among the most prolific and widely admired instrumentalists in jazz, Terry led or co-led more than 80 recording dates and played on more than 900 sessions by the time of his last session in 2004.
Also proficient on flugelhorn, Terry was best known to the general public as a longtime featured soloist in the house band of NBC’s “The Tonight Show.” In 1960, he became the first African-American staff musician with the network.
Born in St. Louis, Terry began playing in high school, and he played in the U.S. Navy band during World War II. After the war, he began his recording career with R&B saxophonist-singer Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson’s combo and saxophonist Charlie Barnet’s big band (alongside trumpeter Doc Severinsen, later the leader of the “Tonight Show” band).
During the late ’40s and through the ’50s, he held back-to-back gigs with the two most prestigious big bands in jazz: the Count Basie and Duke Ellington orchestras. (In 1959, he was part of the group that performed Ellington’s score for director Otto Preminger’s feature “Anatomy of a Murder.”)
Comfortable in both swing and bebop formats, he also worked during this period as a sideman with Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, Stan Getz, Johnny Hodges, Gerald Wilson, Thelonious Monk, Billy Strayhorn, Sonny Rollins, Bud Powell and Ray Charles. He also worked in the big band of leader-composer-arranger Quincy Jones, for whom he served as an early mentor (as he did with another celebrated trumpeter, Miles Davis).
During the ’60s, he continued to record as a leader while doing sideman duty with Louis Armstrong, Charles Mingus, Johnny Griffin, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Yusef Lateef, Dizzy Gillespie, Oliver Nelson, Wes Montgomery, J.J. Johnson, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Cannonball Adderley, among many others. He appeared on several albums toplined by “Tonight Show” bandleaders Severinsen and Skitch Henderson. He began a fruitful collaboration with trombonist Bob Brookmeyer’s big band in 1961.
In 1964, Terry – known for his sly humor and his trumpet-and-vocal conversations on the bandstand – actually scored something like a pop hit, when he scatted on his composition “Mumbles,” featured on “The Oscar Peterson Trio Plus One” (with Terry the titular “plus one”). The novel collaboration with Canadian pianist Peterson’s group propelled the album to No. 81 on the U.S. album chart.
From the ’70s onward, Terry continued to record but increasingly concentrated on touring, with Peterson and his own Big B-A-D Band. He began mounting his own branded jazz festivals in 2000.
He focused his energy on musical education in later years. A Harlem youth band he founded ultimately helped germinate New York’s celebrated “Jazz Mobile” program for youngsters. He also taught and lectured at a number of high schools, colleges and music camps.
A National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, he – like Louis Armstrong and others before him – served as a Jazz Ambassador for the U.S. State Department, touring the Middle East and Africa.
Terry published his autobiography “Clark” in 2011. He was featured in the 2014 documentary “Keep on Keepin’ On,” about his relationship with a blind 23-year-old pianist.
Survivors include his wife.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=3bdfce8af5) | 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=3bdfce8af5&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
Betty Carter/Elvin Jones/Lee Morgan Vintage Jazz Poster Aug. 29, 1970
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
Thanks to drummer Adam Nussbaum for sharing this.
Be great to step into a time machine & dig this!
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f262cf99e7) | 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=f262cf99e7&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
Betty Carter/Elvin Jones/Lee Morgan Vintage Jazz Poster Aug. 29, 1970
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
Thanks to drummer Adam Nussbaum for sharing this.
Be great to step into a time machine & dig this!
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f262cf99e7) | 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=f262cf99e7&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
Betty Carter/Elvin Jones/Lee Morgan Vintage Jazz Poster Aug. 29, 1970
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
Thanks to drummer Adam Nussbaum for sharing this.
Be great to step into a time machine & dig this!
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f262cf99e7) | 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=f262cf99e7&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
Village Vanguard Celebrates 80 Years, Not All Jazzy – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/arts/music/village-vanguard-celebrates-80-years-not-all-jazzy.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150220
** Village Vanguard Celebrates 80 Years, Not All Jazzy
————————————————————
Photo
Jason Moran, left, outside the Village Vanguard with the drummer Nasheet Waits, where he has devised a program for its 80th birthday that includes the comedian David Alan Grier. Credit John Rogers
The Village Vanguard, the greatest jazz club in New York and possibly anywhere, opened 80 years ago, in 1935, at 178 Seventh Avenue South. It didn’t book jazz at first. One of the best chapters in “Live at the Village Vanguard,” the 1980 memoir written by Max Gordon, the club’s original proprietor, is about poetry readings.
In the 1930s, the Vanguard had them regularly, led by a poet named Eli Siegel. These were raucous nights. “You came to the Vanguard to hear the poets, watch the characters, get loaded and heckle Eli,” Mr. Gordon wrote.
Lorraine Gordon, his widow, has been running the Vanguard since 1989, when Mr. Gordon died (http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/12/obituaries/max-gordon-86-jazz-promoter-and-founder-of-vanguard-dies.html) . She wrote her own book, “Alive at the Village Vanguard,” with more information about its bookings: folk and calypso singers, the comedians Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce. It wasn’t till the late 1950s that the Vanguard switched over to a more or less jazz-only policy.
Ms. Gordon trusts originals; she persuaded Max to book Thelonious Monk there for the first time in 1948. To program a celebration of the Vanguard’s 80th birthday, Ms. Gordon gave the reins over to the pianist Jason Moran, one of the club’s current mainstays and a musician particularly gifted at making new uses for old materials.
Photo
David Alan Grier Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
“It was pretty open,” Mr. Moran said. “They said, ‘Maybe you can think of something that can reflect the long history the club has had.’ ” He thought of jazz, of course. But he also thought about poetry and comedy. “I thought of whatever I could afford,” he confessed. “What favors I could get from people.”
His program (http://www.villagevanguard.com/) (running March 10-15; details at villagevanguard.com (http://villagevanguard.com/) ) is a dream of what the club used to do and a proposal for what it could yet do. There will be a night of solo piano performances by Stanley Cowell, Kenny Barron, Ethan Iverson, Fred Hersch and Mr. Moran; a night with Mr. Moran’s band, the Bandwagon, and the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Yusef Komunyakaa; a night with the Bandwagon plus the comedians David Alan Grier, Marina Franklin and Keith Robinson; a night when the Bandwagon plays only Monk’s music; a redo of a collaboration with the guitarist Bill Frisell, playing music inspired by the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, Ala.; and a night with a quartet led by Charles Lloyd, who hasn’t played at the Vanguard since the early 1970s.
Mr. Moran, 40, first encountered the Vanguard in 1992, while visiting New York with his father. They saw David Murray’s group with Don Pullen on organ — a warm and elastic band that sounded particularly good in that room.
“It’s a place I call home now,” Mr. Moran said. “It’s the go-to for pure intimacy for listening to a band.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=04c16806e4) | 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=04c16806e4&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
Village Vanguard Celebrates 80 Years, Not All Jazzy – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/arts/music/village-vanguard-celebrates-80-years-not-all-jazzy.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150220
** Village Vanguard Celebrates 80 Years, Not All Jazzy
————————————————————
Photo
Jason Moran, left, outside the Village Vanguard with the drummer Nasheet Waits, where he has devised a program for its 80th birthday that includes the comedian David Alan Grier. Credit John Rogers
The Village Vanguard, the greatest jazz club in New York and possibly anywhere, opened 80 years ago, in 1935, at 178 Seventh Avenue South. It didn’t book jazz at first. One of the best chapters in “Live at the Village Vanguard,” the 1980 memoir written by Max Gordon, the club’s original proprietor, is about poetry readings.
In the 1930s, the Vanguard had them regularly, led by a poet named Eli Siegel. These were raucous nights. “You came to the Vanguard to hear the poets, watch the characters, get loaded and heckle Eli,” Mr. Gordon wrote.
Lorraine Gordon, his widow, has been running the Vanguard since 1989, when Mr. Gordon died (http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/12/obituaries/max-gordon-86-jazz-promoter-and-founder-of-vanguard-dies.html) . She wrote her own book, “Alive at the Village Vanguard,” with more information about its bookings: folk and calypso singers, the comedians Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce. It wasn’t till the late 1950s that the Vanguard switched over to a more or less jazz-only policy.
Ms. Gordon trusts originals; she persuaded Max to book Thelonious Monk there for the first time in 1948. To program a celebration of the Vanguard’s 80th birthday, Ms. Gordon gave the reins over to the pianist Jason Moran, one of the club’s current mainstays and a musician particularly gifted at making new uses for old materials.
Photo
David Alan Grier Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
“It was pretty open,” Mr. Moran said. “They said, ‘Maybe you can think of something that can reflect the long history the club has had.’ ” He thought of jazz, of course. But he also thought about poetry and comedy. “I thought of whatever I could afford,” he confessed. “What favors I could get from people.”
His program (http://www.villagevanguard.com/) (running March 10-15; details at villagevanguard.com (http://villagevanguard.com/) ) is a dream of what the club used to do and a proposal for what it could yet do. There will be a night of solo piano performances by Stanley Cowell, Kenny Barron, Ethan Iverson, Fred Hersch and Mr. Moran; a night with Mr. Moran’s band, the Bandwagon, and the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Yusef Komunyakaa; a night with the Bandwagon plus the comedians David Alan Grier, Marina Franklin and Keith Robinson; a night when the Bandwagon plays only Monk’s music; a redo of a collaboration with the guitarist Bill Frisell, playing music inspired by the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, Ala.; and a night with a quartet led by Charles Lloyd, who hasn’t played at the Vanguard since the early 1970s.
Mr. Moran, 40, first encountered the Vanguard in 1992, while visiting New York with his father. They saw David Murray’s group with Don Pullen on organ — a warm and elastic band that sounded particularly good in that room.
“It’s a place I call home now,” Mr. Moran said. “It’s the go-to for pure intimacy for listening to a band.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=04c16806e4) | 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=04c16806e4&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
Village Vanguard Celebrates 80 Years, Not All Jazzy – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/arts/music/village-vanguard-celebrates-80-years-not-all-jazzy.html?emc=edit_tnt_20150220
** Village Vanguard Celebrates 80 Years, Not All Jazzy
————————————————————
Photo
Jason Moran, left, outside the Village Vanguard with the drummer Nasheet Waits, where he has devised a program for its 80th birthday that includes the comedian David Alan Grier. Credit John Rogers
The Village Vanguard, the greatest jazz club in New York and possibly anywhere, opened 80 years ago, in 1935, at 178 Seventh Avenue South. It didn’t book jazz at first. One of the best chapters in “Live at the Village Vanguard,” the 1980 memoir written by Max Gordon, the club’s original proprietor, is about poetry readings.
In the 1930s, the Vanguard had them regularly, led by a poet named Eli Siegel. These were raucous nights. “You came to the Vanguard to hear the poets, watch the characters, get loaded and heckle Eli,” Mr. Gordon wrote.
Lorraine Gordon, his widow, has been running the Vanguard since 1989, when Mr. Gordon died (http://www.nytimes.com/1989/05/12/obituaries/max-gordon-86-jazz-promoter-and-founder-of-vanguard-dies.html) . She wrote her own book, “Alive at the Village Vanguard,” with more information about its bookings: folk and calypso singers, the comedians Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce. It wasn’t till the late 1950s that the Vanguard switched over to a more or less jazz-only policy.
Ms. Gordon trusts originals; she persuaded Max to book Thelonious Monk there for the first time in 1948. To program a celebration of the Vanguard’s 80th birthday, Ms. Gordon gave the reins over to the pianist Jason Moran, one of the club’s current mainstays and a musician particularly gifted at making new uses for old materials.
Photo
David Alan Grier Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times
“It was pretty open,” Mr. Moran said. “They said, ‘Maybe you can think of something that can reflect the long history the club has had.’ ” He thought of jazz, of course. But he also thought about poetry and comedy. “I thought of whatever I could afford,” he confessed. “What favors I could get from people.”
His program (http://www.villagevanguard.com/) (running March 10-15; details at villagevanguard.com (http://villagevanguard.com/) ) is a dream of what the club used to do and a proposal for what it could yet do. There will be a night of solo piano performances by Stanley Cowell, Kenny Barron, Ethan Iverson, Fred Hersch and Mr. Moran; a night with Mr. Moran’s band, the Bandwagon, and the poets Elizabeth Alexander and Yusef Komunyakaa; a night with the Bandwagon plus the comedians David Alan Grier, Marina Franklin and Keith Robinson; a night when the Bandwagon plays only Monk’s music; a redo of a collaboration with the guitarist Bill Frisell, playing music inspired by the quilt makers of Gee’s Bend, Ala.; and a night with a quartet led by Charles Lloyd, who hasn’t played at the Vanguard since the early 1970s.
Mr. Moran, 40, first encountered the Vanguard in 1992, while visiting New York with his father. They saw David Murray’s group with Don Pullen on organ — a warm and elastic band that sounded particularly good in that room.
“It’s a place I call home now,” Mr. Moran said. “It’s the go-to for pure intimacy for listening to a band.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=04c16806e4) | 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=04c16806e4&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
David Maxwell, 71, of Concord; virtuoso blues pianist shared a Grammy Award – Obituaries – The Boston Globe
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/02/20/david-maxwell-concord-virtuoso-blues-pianist-shared-grammy-award/0HYyoUreAXk7RoExLTXGwN/story.html?s_campaign=email_BG_TodaysHeadline
** David Maxwell, 71, of Concord; virtuoso blues pianist shared a Grammy Award – Obituaries – The Boston Globe
————————————————————
Mr. Maxwell played or toured with Eric Clapton, Otis Rush, Peter Wolf, and James Cotton.
When Bonnie Raitt lived in Cambridge in the early 1970s, her first keyboard player was David Maxwell, whose virtuoso skills (http://www.davidmaxwell.com/bio) in blues music would take him to global stages and a Grammy Award.
“David added tremendously to my band. I was blessed that David was in Boston. We were kindred spirits,” Raitt said, adding that “nobody I ever heard could play like him in style, scope, ability, and soul. He was a tall, lanky guy who had a big reach on the piano. And he had real soul.”
A pillar of the Boston blues community for half a century, Mr. Maxwell played on James Cotton’s “Deep in the Blues” album, which was awarded the 1997 Grammy for best traditional blues album, and he contributed a track to the Mississippi Fred McDowell tribute “Preachin’ the Blues” that was nominated for a 2003 Grammy in the same category.
“There’s just something about the overall sound of the blues,” Mr. Maxwell told the Globe in 1995. “It’s emotional in a way that’s very immediate, and playing it can be a real catharsis. But there’s also an incredible richness and complexity to the music as well.”
Mr. Maxwell (http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=174161409) , who lived in Concord, had been ill with prostate cancer for several years, but “he preferred to keep it private,” said his younger sister, Tania of Cambridge. He was 71 when he died last Friday in Massachusetts General Hospital.
Just two months ago he married Martha Coughlan. They met at Scullers jazz club in Allston three years ago and the spark was instant. “We knew it wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship, but I didn’t care. I was headlong into it,” she said. “And days before he died, I told him I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
His friend Bob Margolin, a guitarist and alumnus of the Muddy Waters band, suggested that in the tradition of blues players Mr. Maxwell admired, he elected to keep his illness quiet so as not to jeopardize gigs.
Mr. Maxwell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGlF5ucQObs) won two Blues Music Awards for best acoustic album: in 2010 (http://blues.about.com/od/bluesawards/a/BluesMusic2010.htm) for “You Got to Move,” a collaboration with Louisiana Red, and in 2012 (http://blues.about.com/od/bluesawards/a/Blues-Music-Awards-2012.htm) for “Conversations in Blue.” The awards, presented by the nonprofit Blues Foundation, formerly were called the WC Handy Awards. Mr. Maxwell also was nominated for this year’s Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year and in the past won two Boston Music Awards for best blues act.
A dedicated student of Chicago blues, Mr. Maxwell idolized Otis Spann, the late pianist for the Muddy Waters band.
“David was a pleasure to the blues, a world-class musician,” Cotton wrote in an e-mail. “He played piano in my band for many years. I could always depend on him to bring the style of his piano mentor, Otis Spann, to every song. When needed he could improvise with ease and help us all compose a new song. He deserved every music award he won.”
Over the years, Mr. Maxwell performed or toured with a blues who’s who that along with Cotton included Freddie King, Otis Rush, Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Hubert Sumlin. He also was in the house band at Nightstage in Cambridge during the 1980s, coordinated shows at the House of Blues in Harvard Square, and performed with musicians who visited the area. He also backed up Keith Richards and Eric Clapton on “About Them Shoes,” a 2005 tribute CD to Sumlin.
Renowned for his facility with styles ranging from boogie-woogie to jazz and world music, Mr. Maxwell said in the 1995 Globe interview that “the idea of being tied down to one band never really appealed to me. I guess I just get tired of doing the same old stuff, and that doesn’t happen as much if you’re always going out on the road with different people.”
Ron Levy, a Boston blues piano luminary who toured with B.B. King, said Mr. Maxwell “always sounded like he had three giant hands ripping and running up and down the keys on every song in every key.” Levy added that as rivals, they challenged “each other for almost 50 years. I will sorely miss him.”
A Waltham native, Mr. Maxwell attended Lexington High School. He was the son of Emanuel Maxwell, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the former Lee Katkow.
Mr. Maxwell was a childhood friend with Alan Wilson of Arlington, who later played with Canned Heat at Woodstock and sang on their hit “Going Up the Country.” He and Mr. Maxwell combed record stores in Cambridge looking for obscure blues and jazz albums.
“Alan turned him on to Muddy’s records,” said Mr. Maxwell’s other sister, Judy of New York City.
Mr. Maxwell attended Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York and spent his junior year in Paris, where he first heard Spann with the Muddy Waters band in 1963.
“I was sitting way up in the second balcony, but was completely overwhelmed by what I saw and heard,” he wrote in liner notes to his album “Conversations in Blue.”
“Otis Spann’s style of piano playing — his rapid, right-hand flurries and his completely bluesy, soulful, right-in-the-gut playing — was something I’d never heard before,” he wrote.
In 1966, he saw the band again at Club 47 in Cambridge and became friends with Spann. They began to jam together in an MIT student lounge, joined sometimes by singer Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band. Mr. Maxwell had worked on some J. Geils demo tapes.
“Otis would bring some gin and we’d go all night,” Wolf said. “I remember David and Otis sitting at the piano going over their left-hand playing and working out runs.”
Wolf said he and Mr. Maxwell were “blues fanatics” who would also hang out in John Lee Hooker’s hotel room and bring him food.
“David was the quintessential stride blues player,” Wolf said. “And he became the go-to guy around town for blues playing.”
Insatiably curious, Mr. Maxwell read deeply about philosophy and history. “We’d be touring in Portugal,” said blues singer and harmonica player Darrell Nulisch, “and David would suddenly give me a history lesson on the country.”
Richard Rosenblatt, who put out two of Mr. Maxwell’s records on his local labels Tone-Cool and VizzTone, said the pianist was a generous spirit who over the years performed at many benefit concerts and assisted younger musicians.
“Someone also needs to say something about his headwear,” added guitarist Ricky “King” Russell, who performed with Mr. Maxwell. “He always had the wildest hats. He would go to South America to pick some of them up.”
A spring memorial celebration is being planned for Mr. Maxwell, whose last album, “Blues in Other Colors,” was an adventurous blend of blues and world music, much like his playing.
“I think the thing that makes my style different is the way I hit the keys and bunch different notes together,” he said in the 1995 Globe interview. “It produces a vocal effect that’s almost like singing.”
Steve Morse can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com (mailto:spmorse@gmail.com) .
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a2517f90f2) | 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=a2517f90f2&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
David Maxwell, 71, of Concord; virtuoso blues pianist shared a Grammy Award – Obituaries – The Boston Globe
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/02/20/david-maxwell-concord-virtuoso-blues-pianist-shared-grammy-award/0HYyoUreAXk7RoExLTXGwN/story.html?s_campaign=email_BG_TodaysHeadline
** David Maxwell, 71, of Concord; virtuoso blues pianist shared a Grammy Award – Obituaries – The Boston Globe
————————————————————
Mr. Maxwell played or toured with Eric Clapton, Otis Rush, Peter Wolf, and James Cotton.
When Bonnie Raitt lived in Cambridge in the early 1970s, her first keyboard player was David Maxwell, whose virtuoso skills (http://www.davidmaxwell.com/bio) in blues music would take him to global stages and a Grammy Award.
“David added tremendously to my band. I was blessed that David was in Boston. We were kindred spirits,” Raitt said, adding that “nobody I ever heard could play like him in style, scope, ability, and soul. He was a tall, lanky guy who had a big reach on the piano. And he had real soul.”
A pillar of the Boston blues community for half a century, Mr. Maxwell played on James Cotton’s “Deep in the Blues” album, which was awarded the 1997 Grammy for best traditional blues album, and he contributed a track to the Mississippi Fred McDowell tribute “Preachin’ the Blues” that was nominated for a 2003 Grammy in the same category.
“There’s just something about the overall sound of the blues,” Mr. Maxwell told the Globe in 1995. “It’s emotional in a way that’s very immediate, and playing it can be a real catharsis. But there’s also an incredible richness and complexity to the music as well.”
Mr. Maxwell (http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=174161409) , who lived in Concord, had been ill with prostate cancer for several years, but “he preferred to keep it private,” said his younger sister, Tania of Cambridge. He was 71 when he died last Friday in Massachusetts General Hospital.
Just two months ago he married Martha Coughlan. They met at Scullers jazz club in Allston three years ago and the spark was instant. “We knew it wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship, but I didn’t care. I was headlong into it,” she said. “And days before he died, I told him I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
His friend Bob Margolin, a guitarist and alumnus of the Muddy Waters band, suggested that in the tradition of blues players Mr. Maxwell admired, he elected to keep his illness quiet so as not to jeopardize gigs.
Mr. Maxwell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGlF5ucQObs) won two Blues Music Awards for best acoustic album: in 2010 (http://blues.about.com/od/bluesawards/a/BluesMusic2010.htm) for “You Got to Move,” a collaboration with Louisiana Red, and in 2012 (http://blues.about.com/od/bluesawards/a/Blues-Music-Awards-2012.htm) for “Conversations in Blue.” The awards, presented by the nonprofit Blues Foundation, formerly were called the WC Handy Awards. Mr. Maxwell also was nominated for this year’s Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year and in the past won two Boston Music Awards for best blues act.
A dedicated student of Chicago blues, Mr. Maxwell idolized Otis Spann, the late pianist for the Muddy Waters band.
“David was a pleasure to the blues, a world-class musician,” Cotton wrote in an e-mail. “He played piano in my band for many years. I could always depend on him to bring the style of his piano mentor, Otis Spann, to every song. When needed he could improvise with ease and help us all compose a new song. He deserved every music award he won.”
Over the years, Mr. Maxwell performed or toured with a blues who’s who that along with Cotton included Freddie King, Otis Rush, Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Hubert Sumlin. He also was in the house band at Nightstage in Cambridge during the 1980s, coordinated shows at the House of Blues in Harvard Square, and performed with musicians who visited the area. He also backed up Keith Richards and Eric Clapton on “About Them Shoes,” a 2005 tribute CD to Sumlin.
Renowned for his facility with styles ranging from boogie-woogie to jazz and world music, Mr. Maxwell said in the 1995 Globe interview that “the idea of being tied down to one band never really appealed to me. I guess I just get tired of doing the same old stuff, and that doesn’t happen as much if you’re always going out on the road with different people.”
Ron Levy, a Boston blues piano luminary who toured with B.B. King, said Mr. Maxwell “always sounded like he had three giant hands ripping and running up and down the keys on every song in every key.” Levy added that as rivals, they challenged “each other for almost 50 years. I will sorely miss him.”
A Waltham native, Mr. Maxwell attended Lexington High School. He was the son of Emanuel Maxwell, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the former Lee Katkow.
Mr. Maxwell was a childhood friend with Alan Wilson of Arlington, who later played with Canned Heat at Woodstock and sang on their hit “Going Up the Country.” He and Mr. Maxwell combed record stores in Cambridge looking for obscure blues and jazz albums.
“Alan turned him on to Muddy’s records,” said Mr. Maxwell’s other sister, Judy of New York City.
Mr. Maxwell attended Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York and spent his junior year in Paris, where he first heard Spann with the Muddy Waters band in 1963.
“I was sitting way up in the second balcony, but was completely overwhelmed by what I saw and heard,” he wrote in liner notes to his album “Conversations in Blue.”
“Otis Spann’s style of piano playing — his rapid, right-hand flurries and his completely bluesy, soulful, right-in-the-gut playing — was something I’d never heard before,” he wrote.
In 1966, he saw the band again at Club 47 in Cambridge and became friends with Spann. They began to jam together in an MIT student lounge, joined sometimes by singer Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band. Mr. Maxwell had worked on some J. Geils demo tapes.
“Otis would bring some gin and we’d go all night,” Wolf said. “I remember David and Otis sitting at the piano going over their left-hand playing and working out runs.”
Wolf said he and Mr. Maxwell were “blues fanatics” who would also hang out in John Lee Hooker’s hotel room and bring him food.
“David was the quintessential stride blues player,” Wolf said. “And he became the go-to guy around town for blues playing.”
Insatiably curious, Mr. Maxwell read deeply about philosophy and history. “We’d be touring in Portugal,” said blues singer and harmonica player Darrell Nulisch, “and David would suddenly give me a history lesson on the country.”
Richard Rosenblatt, who put out two of Mr. Maxwell’s records on his local labels Tone-Cool and VizzTone, said the pianist was a generous spirit who over the years performed at many benefit concerts and assisted younger musicians.
“Someone also needs to say something about his headwear,” added guitarist Ricky “King” Russell, who performed with Mr. Maxwell. “He always had the wildest hats. He would go to South America to pick some of them up.”
A spring memorial celebration is being planned for Mr. Maxwell, whose last album, “Blues in Other Colors,” was an adventurous blend of blues and world music, much like his playing.
“I think the thing that makes my style different is the way I hit the keys and bunch different notes together,” he said in the 1995 Globe interview. “It produces a vocal effect that’s almost like singing.”
Steve Morse can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com (mailto:spmorse@gmail.com) .
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a2517f90f2) | 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=a2517f90f2&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
David Maxwell, 71, of Concord; virtuoso blues pianist shared a Grammy Award – Obituaries – The Boston Globe
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2015/02/20/david-maxwell-concord-virtuoso-blues-pianist-shared-grammy-award/0HYyoUreAXk7RoExLTXGwN/story.html?s_campaign=email_BG_TodaysHeadline
** David Maxwell, 71, of Concord; virtuoso blues pianist shared a Grammy Award – Obituaries – The Boston Globe
————————————————————
Mr. Maxwell played or toured with Eric Clapton, Otis Rush, Peter Wolf, and James Cotton.
When Bonnie Raitt lived in Cambridge in the early 1970s, her first keyboard player was David Maxwell, whose virtuoso skills (http://www.davidmaxwell.com/bio) in blues music would take him to global stages and a Grammy Award.
“David added tremendously to my band. I was blessed that David was in Boston. We were kindred spirits,” Raitt said, adding that “nobody I ever heard could play like him in style, scope, ability, and soul. He was a tall, lanky guy who had a big reach on the piano. And he had real soul.”
A pillar of the Boston blues community for half a century, Mr. Maxwell played on James Cotton’s “Deep in the Blues” album, which was awarded the 1997 Grammy for best traditional blues album, and he contributed a track to the Mississippi Fred McDowell tribute “Preachin’ the Blues” that was nominated for a 2003 Grammy in the same category.
“There’s just something about the overall sound of the blues,” Mr. Maxwell told the Globe in 1995. “It’s emotional in a way that’s very immediate, and playing it can be a real catharsis. But there’s also an incredible richness and complexity to the music as well.”
Mr. Maxwell (http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=174161409) , who lived in Concord, had been ill with prostate cancer for several years, but “he preferred to keep it private,” said his younger sister, Tania of Cambridge. He was 71 when he died last Friday in Massachusetts General Hospital.
Just two months ago he married Martha Coughlan. They met at Scullers jazz club in Allston three years ago and the spark was instant. “We knew it wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship, but I didn’t care. I was headlong into it,” she said. “And days before he died, I told him I wouldn’t have done anything differently.”
His friend Bob Margolin, a guitarist and alumnus of the Muddy Waters band, suggested that in the tradition of blues players Mr. Maxwell admired, he elected to keep his illness quiet so as not to jeopardize gigs.
Mr. Maxwell (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGlF5ucQObs) won two Blues Music Awards for best acoustic album: in 2010 (http://blues.about.com/od/bluesawards/a/BluesMusic2010.htm) for “You Got to Move,” a collaboration with Louisiana Red, and in 2012 (http://blues.about.com/od/bluesawards/a/Blues-Music-Awards-2012.htm) for “Conversations in Blue.” The awards, presented by the nonprofit Blues Foundation, formerly were called the WC Handy Awards. Mr. Maxwell also was nominated for this year’s Pinetop Perkins Piano Player of the Year and in the past won two Boston Music Awards for best blues act.
A dedicated student of Chicago blues, Mr. Maxwell idolized Otis Spann, the late pianist for the Muddy Waters band.
“David was a pleasure to the blues, a world-class musician,” Cotton wrote in an e-mail. “He played piano in my band for many years. I could always depend on him to bring the style of his piano mentor, Otis Spann, to every song. When needed he could improvise with ease and help us all compose a new song. He deserved every music award he won.”
Over the years, Mr. Maxwell performed or toured with a blues who’s who that along with Cotton included Freddie King, Otis Rush, Ronnie Earl & the Broadcasters, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, and Hubert Sumlin. He also was in the house band at Nightstage in Cambridge during the 1980s, coordinated shows at the House of Blues in Harvard Square, and performed with musicians who visited the area. He also backed up Keith Richards and Eric Clapton on “About Them Shoes,” a 2005 tribute CD to Sumlin.
Renowned for his facility with styles ranging from boogie-woogie to jazz and world music, Mr. Maxwell said in the 1995 Globe interview that “the idea of being tied down to one band never really appealed to me. I guess I just get tired of doing the same old stuff, and that doesn’t happen as much if you’re always going out on the road with different people.”
Ron Levy, a Boston blues piano luminary who toured with B.B. King, said Mr. Maxwell “always sounded like he had three giant hands ripping and running up and down the keys on every song in every key.” Levy added that as rivals, they challenged “each other for almost 50 years. I will sorely miss him.”
A Waltham native, Mr. Maxwell attended Lexington High School. He was the son of Emanuel Maxwell, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the former Lee Katkow.
Mr. Maxwell was a childhood friend with Alan Wilson of Arlington, who later played with Canned Heat at Woodstock and sang on their hit “Going Up the Country.” He and Mr. Maxwell combed record stores in Cambridge looking for obscure blues and jazz albums.
“Alan turned him on to Muddy’s records,” said Mr. Maxwell’s other sister, Judy of New York City.
Mr. Maxwell attended Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester in New York and spent his junior year in Paris, where he first heard Spann with the Muddy Waters band in 1963.
“I was sitting way up in the second balcony, but was completely overwhelmed by what I saw and heard,” he wrote in liner notes to his album “Conversations in Blue.”
“Otis Spann’s style of piano playing — his rapid, right-hand flurries and his completely bluesy, soulful, right-in-the-gut playing — was something I’d never heard before,” he wrote.
In 1966, he saw the band again at Club 47 in Cambridge and became friends with Spann. They began to jam together in an MIT student lounge, joined sometimes by singer Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band. Mr. Maxwell had worked on some J. Geils demo tapes.
“Otis would bring some gin and we’d go all night,” Wolf said. “I remember David and Otis sitting at the piano going over their left-hand playing and working out runs.”
Wolf said he and Mr. Maxwell were “blues fanatics” who would also hang out in John Lee Hooker’s hotel room and bring him food.
“David was the quintessential stride blues player,” Wolf said. “And he became the go-to guy around town for blues playing.”
Insatiably curious, Mr. Maxwell read deeply about philosophy and history. “We’d be touring in Portugal,” said blues singer and harmonica player Darrell Nulisch, “and David would suddenly give me a history lesson on the country.”
Richard Rosenblatt, who put out two of Mr. Maxwell’s records on his local labels Tone-Cool and VizzTone, said the pianist was a generous spirit who over the years performed at many benefit concerts and assisted younger musicians.
“Someone also needs to say something about his headwear,” added guitarist Ricky “King” Russell, who performed with Mr. Maxwell. “He always had the wildest hats. He would go to South America to pick some of them up.”
A spring memorial celebration is being planned for Mr. Maxwell, whose last album, “Blues in Other Colors,” was an adventurous blend of blues and world music, much like his playing.
“I think the thing that makes my style different is the way I hit the keys and bunch different notes together,” he said in the 1995 Globe interview. “It produces a vocal effect that’s almost like singing.”
Steve Morse can be reached at spmorse@gmail.com (mailto:spmorse@gmail.com) .
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a2517f90f2) | 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=a2517f90f2&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
Owner of the Colts Pays Six Figures for a Les Paul Six-String – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/nyregion/a-les-paul-six-string-brings-in-six-figures-at-auction.html?_r=0
** Owner of the Colts Pays Six Figures for a Les Paul Six-String
————————————————————
Photo
Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid $335,500 to buy this Les Paul “Black Beauty” electric guitar on Thursday. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters
The owner and chief executive of the Indianapolis Colts — who has a collection of guitars that were played by the likes of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Elvis Presley — added another on Thursday night, a 60-year-old electric guitar that some musicians say occupies an important place in guitar history.
The guitar sold for $335,500, far below some estimates (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/nyregion/guitar-hero-les-pauls-groundbreaking-model-to-be-auctioned.html) , in an auction in Manhattan. The winning bid was placed by Christopher McKinney, who serves as guitar curator (http://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/music/2013/12/04/life-by-the-strings/3872185/) for Jim Irsay, the Colts’ owner. The auction was held by Guernsey’s (http://www.guernseys.com/) at the Arader Galleries on Madison Avenue, near 78th Street.
The guitar, known as Black Beauty, originally belonged to Les Paul (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/les_paul/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a guitarist, inventor and inveterate tinkerer. He had experimented with electronic amplification in the 1930s and by 1941 had built a forerunner of Black Beauty. But not until the mid-1950s did he hit on a solid-body instrument for mass production that he was pleased with, and he understood how different it was.
“You’re changing from an apologetic instrument that could hardly be heard into a giant, where you could be the leader of the band,” he said in 2008.
Photo
The guitarist and inventor Les Paul, left, with Paul McCartney in New York in 1988, roughly 21 years before Mr. Paul’s death. Credit Associated Press
The guitar gained quickly on competitors, becoming a favorite over time of stars like Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana and Bob Marley (who was buried with his), as well as George Harrison and Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
“I asked Paul McCartney, I says, ‘Did I influence the Beatles?’ ” Mr. Paul recalled in 2008. “He says, ‘You made the Beatles the Beatles.’ ”
The guitar that was sold on Thursday was actually the second prototype that was made for Mr. Paul, according to the seller, Thomas Doyle, who worked with Mr. Paul as a luthier for more than 30 years. Mr. Paul had rejected the first one.
Mr. Paul’s godson, Steve Miller, wrote in the auction catalog that “without this very guitar, no other Les Paul guitars could exist in the form that we have come to know and love.”
Black Beauty, Mr. Doyle said, was the product of a collaboration between Mr. Paul and Ted McCarty, the former president and chief executive of the guitar maker Gibson. Mr. Paul played more than 150 shows with Black Beauty from 1954 to 1976.
“We know the importance of the guitar historically,” said Mr. McKinney, who has looked after Mr. Irsay’s guitar collection for 17 years. “This guitar was used by Les in recordings, in television. It was his main guitar for innovations. It shows his thinking and progress as an inventor. A lot of the things that were done to this guitar went on to become industry standard.”
Several other items in the auction that had belonged to Mr. Paul did not sell, among them the vinyl-cushioned stool he sat on during appearances at the nightclub Fat Tuesday’s in the 1980s. A sign that said “Les Paul Appears Every Monday Night” also did not sell. Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s, said he was disappointed that the guitar did not attract a higher price.
Mr. McKinney said he had been prepared to bid as much as $625,000 for Black Beauty.
“Had this guitar been tied to an Eric Clapton or a Jimmy Page or a contemporary figure,” he said, “it would have brought more. Les is an artist from a different era. The people who are Les Paul fans are guitar people.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c88a9a8670) | 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=c88a9a8670&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
Owner of the Colts Pays Six Figures for a Les Paul Six-String – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/nyregion/a-les-paul-six-string-brings-in-six-figures-at-auction.html?_r=0
** Owner of the Colts Pays Six Figures for a Les Paul Six-String
————————————————————
Photo
Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid $335,500 to buy this Les Paul “Black Beauty” electric guitar on Thursday. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters
The owner and chief executive of the Indianapolis Colts — who has a collection of guitars that were played by the likes of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Elvis Presley — added another on Thursday night, a 60-year-old electric guitar that some musicians say occupies an important place in guitar history.
The guitar sold for $335,500, far below some estimates (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/nyregion/guitar-hero-les-pauls-groundbreaking-model-to-be-auctioned.html) , in an auction in Manhattan. The winning bid was placed by Christopher McKinney, who serves as guitar curator (http://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/music/2013/12/04/life-by-the-strings/3872185/) for Jim Irsay, the Colts’ owner. The auction was held by Guernsey’s (http://www.guernseys.com/) at the Arader Galleries on Madison Avenue, near 78th Street.
The guitar, known as Black Beauty, originally belonged to Les Paul (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/les_paul/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a guitarist, inventor and inveterate tinkerer. He had experimented with electronic amplification in the 1930s and by 1941 had built a forerunner of Black Beauty. But not until the mid-1950s did he hit on a solid-body instrument for mass production that he was pleased with, and he understood how different it was.
“You’re changing from an apologetic instrument that could hardly be heard into a giant, where you could be the leader of the band,” he said in 2008.
Photo
The guitarist and inventor Les Paul, left, with Paul McCartney in New York in 1988, roughly 21 years before Mr. Paul’s death. Credit Associated Press
The guitar gained quickly on competitors, becoming a favorite over time of stars like Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana and Bob Marley (who was buried with his), as well as George Harrison and Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
“I asked Paul McCartney, I says, ‘Did I influence the Beatles?’ ” Mr. Paul recalled in 2008. “He says, ‘You made the Beatles the Beatles.’ ”
The guitar that was sold on Thursday was actually the second prototype that was made for Mr. Paul, according to the seller, Thomas Doyle, who worked with Mr. Paul as a luthier for more than 30 years. Mr. Paul had rejected the first one.
Mr. Paul’s godson, Steve Miller, wrote in the auction catalog that “without this very guitar, no other Les Paul guitars could exist in the form that we have come to know and love.”
Black Beauty, Mr. Doyle said, was the product of a collaboration between Mr. Paul and Ted McCarty, the former president and chief executive of the guitar maker Gibson. Mr. Paul played more than 150 shows with Black Beauty from 1954 to 1976.
“We know the importance of the guitar historically,” said Mr. McKinney, who has looked after Mr. Irsay’s guitar collection for 17 years. “This guitar was used by Les in recordings, in television. It was his main guitar for innovations. It shows his thinking and progress as an inventor. A lot of the things that were done to this guitar went on to become industry standard.”
Several other items in the auction that had belonged to Mr. Paul did not sell, among them the vinyl-cushioned stool he sat on during appearances at the nightclub Fat Tuesday’s in the 1980s. A sign that said “Les Paul Appears Every Monday Night” also did not sell. Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s, said he was disappointed that the guitar did not attract a higher price.
Mr. McKinney said he had been prepared to bid as much as $625,000 for Black Beauty.
“Had this guitar been tied to an Eric Clapton or a Jimmy Page or a contemporary figure,” he said, “it would have brought more. Les is an artist from a different era. The people who are Les Paul fans are guitar people.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c88a9a8670) | 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=c88a9a8670&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
Owner of the Colts Pays Six Figures for a Les Paul Six-String – NYTimes.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/20/nyregion/a-les-paul-six-string-brings-in-six-figures-at-auction.html?_r=0
** Owner of the Colts Pays Six Figures for a Les Paul Six-String
————————————————————
Photo
Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts, paid $335,500 to buy this Les Paul “Black Beauty” electric guitar on Thursday. Credit Mike Segar/Reuters
The owner and chief executive of the Indianapolis Colts — who has a collection of guitars that were played by the likes of Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Elvis Presley — added another on Thursday night, a 60-year-old electric guitar that some musicians say occupies an important place in guitar history.
The guitar sold for $335,500, far below some estimates (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/nyregion/guitar-hero-les-pauls-groundbreaking-model-to-be-auctioned.html) , in an auction in Manhattan. The winning bid was placed by Christopher McKinney, who serves as guitar curator (http://www.indystar.com/story/entertainment/music/2013/12/04/life-by-the-strings/3872185/) for Jim Irsay, the Colts’ owner. The auction was held by Guernsey’s (http://www.guernseys.com/) at the Arader Galleries on Madison Avenue, near 78th Street.
The guitar, known as Black Beauty, originally belonged to Les Paul (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/les_paul/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a guitarist, inventor and inveterate tinkerer. He had experimented with electronic amplification in the 1930s and by 1941 had built a forerunner of Black Beauty. But not until the mid-1950s did he hit on a solid-body instrument for mass production that he was pleased with, and he understood how different it was.
“You’re changing from an apologetic instrument that could hardly be heard into a giant, where you could be the leader of the band,” he said in 2008.
Photo
The guitarist and inventor Les Paul, left, with Paul McCartney in New York in 1988, roughly 21 years before Mr. Paul’s death. Credit Associated Press
The guitar gained quickly on competitors, becoming a favorite over time of stars like Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana and Bob Marley (who was buried with his), as well as George Harrison and Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
“I asked Paul McCartney, I says, ‘Did I influence the Beatles?’ ” Mr. Paul recalled in 2008. “He says, ‘You made the Beatles the Beatles.’ ”
The guitar that was sold on Thursday was actually the second prototype that was made for Mr. Paul, according to the seller, Thomas Doyle, who worked with Mr. Paul as a luthier for more than 30 years. Mr. Paul had rejected the first one.
Mr. Paul’s godson, Steve Miller, wrote in the auction catalog that “without this very guitar, no other Les Paul guitars could exist in the form that we have come to know and love.”
Black Beauty, Mr. Doyle said, was the product of a collaboration between Mr. Paul and Ted McCarty, the former president and chief executive of the guitar maker Gibson. Mr. Paul played more than 150 shows with Black Beauty from 1954 to 1976.
“We know the importance of the guitar historically,” said Mr. McKinney, who has looked after Mr. Irsay’s guitar collection for 17 years. “This guitar was used by Les in recordings, in television. It was his main guitar for innovations. It shows his thinking and progress as an inventor. A lot of the things that were done to this guitar went on to become industry standard.”
Several other items in the auction that had belonged to Mr. Paul did not sell, among them the vinyl-cushioned stool he sat on during appearances at the nightclub Fat Tuesday’s in the 1980s. A sign that said “Les Paul Appears Every Monday Night” also did not sell. Arlan Ettinger, the president of Guernsey’s, said he was disappointed that the guitar did not attract a higher price.
Mr. McKinney said he had been prepared to bid as much as $625,000 for Black Beauty.
“Had this guitar been tied to an Eric Clapton or a Jimmy Page or a contemporary figure,” he said, “it would have brought more. Les is an artist from a different era. The people who are Les Paul fans are guitar people.”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c88a9a8670) | 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=c88a9a8670&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
David Maxwell, R.I.P.
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://nepr.net/music/2015/02/18/david-maxwell-r-i-p/
** David Maxwell, R.I.P.
————————————————————
Peter Wolf is a driven verbalist. The former frontman of the J. Geils Band and WBCN deejay of “Woofer Goofer” legend had a memorable way of describing the easy access that he and his peers enjoyed with the great bluesmen who began playing clubs and coffeehouses around Boston in the mid-60s. In his recollection of Muddy Waters’s appearance at the alcohol-free Club 47 for the 1979 publication, Baby Let Me Follow You Down: An Illustrated History of the Cambridge Folk Years, Wolf recalled, “Between shows, I walked into the men’s room of the 47, and there was [James] Cotton, [Otis] Spann, and S.P. Leary all gathered around a pint. They’re all passing it around. They are my idols, so I picked up my cue real good and ran out and scored a couple of pints, and after the next show they were all over me.”
David Maxwell
David Maxwell
In that mix of peers was David Maxwell, the Waltham native who died on February 13 at the age of 71. For nearly a half century, Maxwell embodied the piano blues and boogie-woogie tradition that was centered in Chicago in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. David’s link to that lineage was Otis Spann, whom he first heard in 1963. At the time, Maxwell was in Paris, spending his junior year abroad studying at the National School of Music of Paris. He’d begun taking classical piano lessons in Washington, D.C., when he was nine, continued through his teenage years after his family moved to Lexington, and then at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.
Maxwell had begun to immerse himself in a wide variety of music when he was in his teens, partly through the influence of his friend Alan Wilson, the Arlington native who would go on to found Canned Heat. Wilson’s interests were wonderfully varied, including the music of India and the Near East. Maxwell recalled in the essay he wrote for his 2011 release, Conversations in Blue, “We would go into record stores in Cambridge and Boston that had listening booths, grab a handful of records, and listen. We listened to everything: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Cecil Taylor, Lambert, Hendrix & Ross, Monk, Bird, Bill Evans and all kinds of diverse sounds from the world of jazz, ethnic, and contemporary classical music.”
Blues wasn’t prominent in the Maxwell mix during high school. When he expressed an interest in the blues tonality he heard in Andre Previn’s 1959 recording, “Like Young,” his teacher chided him, “Don’t waste your time on that stuff.” But Previn and all those listening booths prepared David for something different, and when Wilson sent him a copy of The Best of Muddy Waters at college three years later, he remembered playing “that record over and over again. I was completely consumed with the way Otis Spann played the piano and how he was such an integral part of Muddy’s band.”
The following year in Paris, Maxwell attended an American Folk Blues Festival concert at the Olympia Theater. Muddy and Spann were on the bill, and even from a nosebleed seat in the second balcony, he “was completely overwhelmed” by what he saw and heard. “Spann’s rapid, right-hand flurries, his completely bluesy, soulful, right-in-the-gut playing” set him up for a different musical course. Maxwell’s blues mastery developed over the next few years, and eventually brought him into the company of Spann, whom Peter Wolf recalled becoming “sort of a superhero. He got friendly [with us] and we’d pick him up after the Club 47 shows and he’d play and jam. David Maxwell would organize jams over at MIT, and all the piano players would come around to listen to Otis and play with him.”
“Spann and I started a friendship,” Maxwell said. “In those days, acts were booked for a week at a time. In the afternoons, these guys were looking for something to do. So us young fans would hang out with them, walk around town, have a few drinks, socialize and play music. Spann never taught me a piano lesson. I would just watch and maybe show him something and ask for advice.”
Muddy soon took note of David’s developing skill and invited him to sit in at the Jazz Workshop in Boston on a fall night in 1967. Maxwell saw it as a “turning point. I was then 24 and had begun to explore playing blues here and there…Wow, what a feeling!” Two years later, when he spelled the ailing Spann for a night at the Workshop, he asked Muddy what he thought of his playing. “Yeah, you’re okay. You don’t need to jump around so much. Just stay more in one place.” Maxwell knew in an instant “that that’s what gave Muddy’s band its character.”
Spann’s illness was liver cancer and it claimed his life on April 24, 1970. By then, Maxwell had played around the Boston area with the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band and the J. Geils Blues Band (before Peter Wolf transformed them from a blues to r&b band), and with some of the other great bluesmen coming through town. John Lee Hooker took David on a tour in 1969 that included an appearance on a pilot for the Dick Cavett Show. In a 2010 interview with the Boston Blues Society, Maxwell said, “Hooker was great any time he came to town. He stayed at the Lenox Hotel in Copley Square and used to hold court in his hotel room. The talk and action between us was mostly about women, one old dog to one aspiring young dog.” Maxwell’s 1997 recording Maximum Blues Piano included this tribute from John Lee. “I don’t think anyone could be tighter playing the blues on the piano than David Maxwell. He plays the blues like it should be played. He plays low down dirty funky blues. You hear the
piano ring.”
Maxwell went on to play and tour with Freddie King, Bonnie Raitt, Louisiana Red, Luther “Guitar Jr” Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, James Cotton, and many others. When he wasn’t on the road, he was a fixture on the Boston scene, playing with and encouraging players ten or more years younger than himself, among them Bob Margolin, Babe Pino, Ron Levy, Ronnie Earl, John Nicholas, Michael “Mudcat” Ward, Anthony Geraci, Mike Welch, and Troy Gonyea. Here he is with King in 1973 playing “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” a slow blues showpiece for the guitarist that featured Maxwell during his time on the road with The Texas Cannonball.
Of the many occasions on which I heard David, among the most memorable were nights when he sat in with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Archie Shepp. I used to pester Kim Wilson of the T-Birds with requests for Jimmy Rogers’s Money, Marbles, and Chalk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbShdj7JiEU%20) . The T-Birds usually obliged, never more memorably than on a summer night in 1979 at Sandy’s in Beverley, MA, when they asked Maxwell to join them on the Chess blues classic that originally featured pianist Eddie Ware. The following year, when I played a part in an Archie Shepp booking at Harvard, I persuaded David, who’d come by to hear the tenor saxophonist, to sit in. He and Shepp played a blues so moving that it got special mention in the following week’s Boston Phoenix.
A couple of weeks ago in this blog (http://nepr.net/music/2015/01/15/luther-johnson/) , I recalled my youthful experiences of seeing Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson, a former Muddy Waters sideman, at the Highland Tap in Roxbury. Johnson fronted a heavy band, but it may have been Maxwell who impressed me the most. I’d never seen Spann in person, but only a year after his death I encountered for the first time the player who more than any other kept his sound alive for the next 44 years. Like Spann, Maxwell’s attack featured a continuous flow of melodies, thunderous rolling basses, and a jackhammer right hand.
Like his old friend Alan Wilson, Maxwell was a thoughtful seeker, an intellectual who remained fascinated by Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor as well as the contemporary classical composers Ligetti, Morton Feldman, and Stockhausen. He traveled to Nepal in the 1970’s, and maintained an interest in world music ranging from Balinese Gamilan to Japanese Gagaku to Iranian classical. He said he could hear the blues in all of it.
But it was the downhome blues and boogie woogie of Spann, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, Big Maceo, Professor Longhair, and Pinetop Perkins, Spann’s successor with Muddy Waters, that remained his passion. His essay about Spann for Conversations in Blue captures as clearly and beautifully as any I’ve ever read what it was that drove that passion not only for Maxwell but for the audience of whites that discovered the blues in the 1960s. “Everything in Spann’s playing seemed to have a purpose and everything was laid out in such a way as to draw the listener into Spann’s own world. And he was inviting you in. Spann revealed a blues style that seemed to tap into a universal truth: a world that was soulful and sophisticated at the same time, both in his playing and in his vocal delivery.”
“That world was just so complete and so masterful to me. He wasn’t trying to emulate anybody because he was simply who he was…I think his music addressed some kind of alienation and pain that many of us feel in our lives, particularly when we are young. And when this blues feeling came along in Spann’s music, it was accessible…His music satisfied a deep emotional need…It showed me a way that I could express myself– my feelings, universal feelings– to audiences that are receptive to those feelings.”
Here’s Maxwell with Irma Thomas, Ronnie Earl, Mudcat Ward, and Levon Helm with a medley inspired by Bobby Bland and Ray Charles.
Click here (safari-reader://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=david-maxwell&pid=174161409) to read the obituary of David Maxwell (1943-2015) published in The Boston Globe on February 16.
Print this Article (http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnepr.net%2Fmusic%2F2015%2F02%2F18%2Fdavid-maxwell-r-i-p%2F)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=875d248730) | 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=875d248730&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
David Maxwell, R.I.P.
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://nepr.net/music/2015/02/18/david-maxwell-r-i-p/
** David Maxwell, R.I.P.
————————————————————
Peter Wolf is a driven verbalist. The former frontman of the J. Geils Band and WBCN deejay of “Woofer Goofer” legend had a memorable way of describing the easy access that he and his peers enjoyed with the great bluesmen who began playing clubs and coffeehouses around Boston in the mid-60s. In his recollection of Muddy Waters’s appearance at the alcohol-free Club 47 for the 1979 publication, Baby Let Me Follow You Down: An Illustrated History of the Cambridge Folk Years, Wolf recalled, “Between shows, I walked into the men’s room of the 47, and there was [James] Cotton, [Otis] Spann, and S.P. Leary all gathered around a pint. They’re all passing it around. They are my idols, so I picked up my cue real good and ran out and scored a couple of pints, and after the next show they were all over me.”
David Maxwell
David Maxwell
In that mix of peers was David Maxwell, the Waltham native who died on February 13 at the age of 71. For nearly a half century, Maxwell embodied the piano blues and boogie-woogie tradition that was centered in Chicago in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. David’s link to that lineage was Otis Spann, whom he first heard in 1963. At the time, Maxwell was in Paris, spending his junior year abroad studying at the National School of Music of Paris. He’d begun taking classical piano lessons in Washington, D.C., when he was nine, continued through his teenage years after his family moved to Lexington, and then at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.
Maxwell had begun to immerse himself in a wide variety of music when he was in his teens, partly through the influence of his friend Alan Wilson, the Arlington native who would go on to found Canned Heat. Wilson’s interests were wonderfully varied, including the music of India and the Near East. Maxwell recalled in the essay he wrote for his 2011 release, Conversations in Blue, “We would go into record stores in Cambridge and Boston that had listening booths, grab a handful of records, and listen. We listened to everything: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Cecil Taylor, Lambert, Hendrix & Ross, Monk, Bird, Bill Evans and all kinds of diverse sounds from the world of jazz, ethnic, and contemporary classical music.”
Blues wasn’t prominent in the Maxwell mix during high school. When he expressed an interest in the blues tonality he heard in Andre Previn’s 1959 recording, “Like Young,” his teacher chided him, “Don’t waste your time on that stuff.” But Previn and all those listening booths prepared David for something different, and when Wilson sent him a copy of The Best of Muddy Waters at college three years later, he remembered playing “that record over and over again. I was completely consumed with the way Otis Spann played the piano and how he was such an integral part of Muddy’s band.”
The following year in Paris, Maxwell attended an American Folk Blues Festival concert at the Olympia Theater. Muddy and Spann were on the bill, and even from a nosebleed seat in the second balcony, he “was completely overwhelmed” by what he saw and heard. “Spann’s rapid, right-hand flurries, his completely bluesy, soulful, right-in-the-gut playing” set him up for a different musical course. Maxwell’s blues mastery developed over the next few years, and eventually brought him into the company of Spann, whom Peter Wolf recalled becoming “sort of a superhero. He got friendly [with us] and we’d pick him up after the Club 47 shows and he’d play and jam. David Maxwell would organize jams over at MIT, and all the piano players would come around to listen to Otis and play with him.”
“Spann and I started a friendship,” Maxwell said. “In those days, acts were booked for a week at a time. In the afternoons, these guys were looking for something to do. So us young fans would hang out with them, walk around town, have a few drinks, socialize and play music. Spann never taught me a piano lesson. I would just watch and maybe show him something and ask for advice.”
Muddy soon took note of David’s developing skill and invited him to sit in at the Jazz Workshop in Boston on a fall night in 1967. Maxwell saw it as a “turning point. I was then 24 and had begun to explore playing blues here and there…Wow, what a feeling!” Two years later, when he spelled the ailing Spann for a night at the Workshop, he asked Muddy what he thought of his playing. “Yeah, you’re okay. You don’t need to jump around so much. Just stay more in one place.” Maxwell knew in an instant “that that’s what gave Muddy’s band its character.”
Spann’s illness was liver cancer and it claimed his life on April 24, 1970. By then, Maxwell had played around the Boston area with the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band and the J. Geils Blues Band (before Peter Wolf transformed them from a blues to r&b band), and with some of the other great bluesmen coming through town. John Lee Hooker took David on a tour in 1969 that included an appearance on a pilot for the Dick Cavett Show. In a 2010 interview with the Boston Blues Society, Maxwell said, “Hooker was great any time he came to town. He stayed at the Lenox Hotel in Copley Square and used to hold court in his hotel room. The talk and action between us was mostly about women, one old dog to one aspiring young dog.” Maxwell’s 1997 recording Maximum Blues Piano included this tribute from John Lee. “I don’t think anyone could be tighter playing the blues on the piano than David Maxwell. He plays the blues like it should be played. He plays low down dirty funky blues. You hear the
piano ring.”
Maxwell went on to play and tour with Freddie King, Bonnie Raitt, Louisiana Red, Luther “Guitar Jr” Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, James Cotton, and many others. When he wasn’t on the road, he was a fixture on the Boston scene, playing with and encouraging players ten or more years younger than himself, among them Bob Margolin, Babe Pino, Ron Levy, Ronnie Earl, John Nicholas, Michael “Mudcat” Ward, Anthony Geraci, Mike Welch, and Troy Gonyea. Here he is with King in 1973 playing “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” a slow blues showpiece for the guitarist that featured Maxwell during his time on the road with The Texas Cannonball.
Of the many occasions on which I heard David, among the most memorable were nights when he sat in with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Archie Shepp. I used to pester Kim Wilson of the T-Birds with requests for Jimmy Rogers’s Money, Marbles, and Chalk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbShdj7JiEU%20) . The T-Birds usually obliged, never more memorably than on a summer night in 1979 at Sandy’s in Beverley, MA, when they asked Maxwell to join them on the Chess blues classic that originally featured pianist Eddie Ware. The following year, when I played a part in an Archie Shepp booking at Harvard, I persuaded David, who’d come by to hear the tenor saxophonist, to sit in. He and Shepp played a blues so moving that it got special mention in the following week’s Boston Phoenix.
A couple of weeks ago in this blog (http://nepr.net/music/2015/01/15/luther-johnson/) , I recalled my youthful experiences of seeing Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson, a former Muddy Waters sideman, at the Highland Tap in Roxbury. Johnson fronted a heavy band, but it may have been Maxwell who impressed me the most. I’d never seen Spann in person, but only a year after his death I encountered for the first time the player who more than any other kept his sound alive for the next 44 years. Like Spann, Maxwell’s attack featured a continuous flow of melodies, thunderous rolling basses, and a jackhammer right hand.
Like his old friend Alan Wilson, Maxwell was a thoughtful seeker, an intellectual who remained fascinated by Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor as well as the contemporary classical composers Ligetti, Morton Feldman, and Stockhausen. He traveled to Nepal in the 1970’s, and maintained an interest in world music ranging from Balinese Gamilan to Japanese Gagaku to Iranian classical. He said he could hear the blues in all of it.
But it was the downhome blues and boogie woogie of Spann, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, Big Maceo, Professor Longhair, and Pinetop Perkins, Spann’s successor with Muddy Waters, that remained his passion. His essay about Spann for Conversations in Blue captures as clearly and beautifully as any I’ve ever read what it was that drove that passion not only for Maxwell but for the audience of whites that discovered the blues in the 1960s. “Everything in Spann’s playing seemed to have a purpose and everything was laid out in such a way as to draw the listener into Spann’s own world. And he was inviting you in. Spann revealed a blues style that seemed to tap into a universal truth: a world that was soulful and sophisticated at the same time, both in his playing and in his vocal delivery.”
“That world was just so complete and so masterful to me. He wasn’t trying to emulate anybody because he was simply who he was…I think his music addressed some kind of alienation and pain that many of us feel in our lives, particularly when we are young. And when this blues feeling came along in Spann’s music, it was accessible…His music satisfied a deep emotional need…It showed me a way that I could express myself– my feelings, universal feelings– to audiences that are receptive to those feelings.”
Here’s Maxwell with Irma Thomas, Ronnie Earl, Mudcat Ward, and Levon Helm with a medley inspired by Bobby Bland and Ray Charles.
Click here (safari-reader://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=david-maxwell&pid=174161409) to read the obituary of David Maxwell (1943-2015) published in The Boston Globe on February 16.
Print this Article (http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnepr.net%2Fmusic%2F2015%2F02%2F18%2Fdavid-maxwell-r-i-p%2F)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=875d248730) | 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=875d248730&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
David Maxwell, R.I.P.
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://nepr.net/music/2015/02/18/david-maxwell-r-i-p/
** David Maxwell, R.I.P.
————————————————————
Peter Wolf is a driven verbalist. The former frontman of the J. Geils Band and WBCN deejay of “Woofer Goofer” legend had a memorable way of describing the easy access that he and his peers enjoyed with the great bluesmen who began playing clubs and coffeehouses around Boston in the mid-60s. In his recollection of Muddy Waters’s appearance at the alcohol-free Club 47 for the 1979 publication, Baby Let Me Follow You Down: An Illustrated History of the Cambridge Folk Years, Wolf recalled, “Between shows, I walked into the men’s room of the 47, and there was [James] Cotton, [Otis] Spann, and S.P. Leary all gathered around a pint. They’re all passing it around. They are my idols, so I picked up my cue real good and ran out and scored a couple of pints, and after the next show they were all over me.”
David Maxwell
David Maxwell
In that mix of peers was David Maxwell, the Waltham native who died on February 13 at the age of 71. For nearly a half century, Maxwell embodied the piano blues and boogie-woogie tradition that was centered in Chicago in the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. David’s link to that lineage was Otis Spann, whom he first heard in 1963. At the time, Maxwell was in Paris, spending his junior year abroad studying at the National School of Music of Paris. He’d begun taking classical piano lessons in Washington, D.C., when he was nine, continued through his teenage years after his family moved to Lexington, and then at the University of Rochester’s Eastman School of Music.
Maxwell had begun to immerse himself in a wide variety of music when he was in his teens, partly through the influence of his friend Alan Wilson, the Arlington native who would go on to found Canned Heat. Wilson’s interests were wonderfully varied, including the music of India and the Near East. Maxwell recalled in the essay he wrote for his 2011 release, Conversations in Blue, “We would go into record stores in Cambridge and Boston that had listening booths, grab a handful of records, and listen. We listened to everything: Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, Cecil Taylor, Lambert, Hendrix & Ross, Monk, Bird, Bill Evans and all kinds of diverse sounds from the world of jazz, ethnic, and contemporary classical music.”
Blues wasn’t prominent in the Maxwell mix during high school. When he expressed an interest in the blues tonality he heard in Andre Previn’s 1959 recording, “Like Young,” his teacher chided him, “Don’t waste your time on that stuff.” But Previn and all those listening booths prepared David for something different, and when Wilson sent him a copy of The Best of Muddy Waters at college three years later, he remembered playing “that record over and over again. I was completely consumed with the way Otis Spann played the piano and how he was such an integral part of Muddy’s band.”
The following year in Paris, Maxwell attended an American Folk Blues Festival concert at the Olympia Theater. Muddy and Spann were on the bill, and even from a nosebleed seat in the second balcony, he “was completely overwhelmed” by what he saw and heard. “Spann’s rapid, right-hand flurries, his completely bluesy, soulful, right-in-the-gut playing” set him up for a different musical course. Maxwell’s blues mastery developed over the next few years, and eventually brought him into the company of Spann, whom Peter Wolf recalled becoming “sort of a superhero. He got friendly [with us] and we’d pick him up after the Club 47 shows and he’d play and jam. David Maxwell would organize jams over at MIT, and all the piano players would come around to listen to Otis and play with him.”
“Spann and I started a friendship,” Maxwell said. “In those days, acts were booked for a week at a time. In the afternoons, these guys were looking for something to do. So us young fans would hang out with them, walk around town, have a few drinks, socialize and play music. Spann never taught me a piano lesson. I would just watch and maybe show him something and ask for advice.”
Muddy soon took note of David’s developing skill and invited him to sit in at the Jazz Workshop in Boston on a fall night in 1967. Maxwell saw it as a “turning point. I was then 24 and had begun to explore playing blues here and there…Wow, what a feeling!” Two years later, when he spelled the ailing Spann for a night at the Workshop, he asked Muddy what he thought of his playing. “Yeah, you’re okay. You don’t need to jump around so much. Just stay more in one place.” Maxwell knew in an instant “that that’s what gave Muddy’s band its character.”
Spann’s illness was liver cancer and it claimed his life on April 24, 1970. By then, Maxwell had played around the Boston area with the Colwell-Winfield Blues Band and the J. Geils Blues Band (before Peter Wolf transformed them from a blues to r&b band), and with some of the other great bluesmen coming through town. John Lee Hooker took David on a tour in 1969 that included an appearance on a pilot for the Dick Cavett Show. In a 2010 interview with the Boston Blues Society, Maxwell said, “Hooker was great any time he came to town. He stayed at the Lenox Hotel in Copley Square and used to hold court in his hotel room. The talk and action between us was mostly about women, one old dog to one aspiring young dog.” Maxwell’s 1997 recording Maximum Blues Piano included this tribute from John Lee. “I don’t think anyone could be tighter playing the blues on the piano than David Maxwell. He plays the blues like it should be played. He plays low down dirty funky blues. You hear the
piano ring.”
Maxwell went on to play and tour with Freddie King, Bonnie Raitt, Louisiana Red, Luther “Guitar Jr” Johnson, Hubert Sumlin, James Cotton, and many others. When he wasn’t on the road, he was a fixture on the Boston scene, playing with and encouraging players ten or more years younger than himself, among them Bob Margolin, Babe Pino, Ron Levy, Ronnie Earl, John Nicholas, Michael “Mudcat” Ward, Anthony Geraci, Mike Welch, and Troy Gonyea. Here he is with King in 1973 playing “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” a slow blues showpiece for the guitarist that featured Maxwell during his time on the road with The Texas Cannonball.
Of the many occasions on which I heard David, among the most memorable were nights when he sat in with the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Archie Shepp. I used to pester Kim Wilson of the T-Birds with requests for Jimmy Rogers’s Money, Marbles, and Chalk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbShdj7JiEU%20) . The T-Birds usually obliged, never more memorably than on a summer night in 1979 at Sandy’s in Beverley, MA, when they asked Maxwell to join them on the Chess blues classic that originally featured pianist Eddie Ware. The following year, when I played a part in an Archie Shepp booking at Harvard, I persuaded David, who’d come by to hear the tenor saxophonist, to sit in. He and Shepp played a blues so moving that it got special mention in the following week’s Boston Phoenix.
A couple of weeks ago in this blog (http://nepr.net/music/2015/01/15/luther-johnson/) , I recalled my youthful experiences of seeing Luther “Georgia Boy” Johnson, a former Muddy Waters sideman, at the Highland Tap in Roxbury. Johnson fronted a heavy band, but it may have been Maxwell who impressed me the most. I’d never seen Spann in person, but only a year after his death I encountered for the first time the player who more than any other kept his sound alive for the next 44 years. Like Spann, Maxwell’s attack featured a continuous flow of melodies, thunderous rolling basses, and a jackhammer right hand.
Like his old friend Alan Wilson, Maxwell was a thoughtful seeker, an intellectual who remained fascinated by Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor as well as the contemporary classical composers Ligetti, Morton Feldman, and Stockhausen. He traveled to Nepal in the 1970’s, and maintained an interest in world music ranging from Balinese Gamilan to Japanese Gagaku to Iranian classical. He said he could hear the blues in all of it.
But it was the downhome blues and boogie woogie of Spann, Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson, Big Maceo, Professor Longhair, and Pinetop Perkins, Spann’s successor with Muddy Waters, that remained his passion. His essay about Spann for Conversations in Blue captures as clearly and beautifully as any I’ve ever read what it was that drove that passion not only for Maxwell but for the audience of whites that discovered the blues in the 1960s. “Everything in Spann’s playing seemed to have a purpose and everything was laid out in such a way as to draw the listener into Spann’s own world. And he was inviting you in. Spann revealed a blues style that seemed to tap into a universal truth: a world that was soulful and sophisticated at the same time, both in his playing and in his vocal delivery.”
“That world was just so complete and so masterful to me. He wasn’t trying to emulate anybody because he was simply who he was…I think his music addressed some kind of alienation and pain that many of us feel in our lives, particularly when we are young. And when this blues feeling came along in Spann’s music, it was accessible…His music satisfied a deep emotional need…It showed me a way that I could express myself– my feelings, universal feelings– to audiences that are receptive to those feelings.”
Here’s Maxwell with Irma Thomas, Ronnie Earl, Mudcat Ward, and Levon Helm with a medley inspired by Bobby Bland and Ray Charles.
Click here (safari-reader://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?n=david-maxwell&pid=174161409) to read the obituary of David Maxwell (1943-2015) published in The Boston Globe on February 16.
Print this Article (http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnepr.net%2Fmusic%2F2015%2F02%2F18%2Fdavid-maxwell-r-i-p%2F)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=875d248730) | 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=875d248730&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
Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris | Music | The Guardian
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback
** Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris
————————————————————
On an industrial estate in Röbel, 90 miles north of Berlin, the vinyl presses at the Optimal factory were grinding and pumping away. They made a percussive racket – regular clunks, wheezes, and hisses, underlain by a droning hum – and created a distinct aroma, sharp and metallic, suggestive of steam engines and old cars: not instantly recognisable to a British visitor like me, perhaps, but the singular smell of things being made. My guide to the Optimal plant was its operations director, Peter Runge. Together, we watched copies of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Live From KCRW (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/01/cave-seeds-kcrw-goat-ballroom-review) tumble from one of the machines. Across a narrow aisle, a press dedicated to seven-inch records was spitting out copies of The Boy From New York City (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svztw0okXKY&noredirect=1) , a 1964 single by the Ad Libs, a soul group from Bayonne, New Jersey. A few yards away sat fresh stock
of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/30/rumours-fleetwood-mac) . Next to those was a growing pile of the album Clandestine by the Swedish death metal band Entombed (http://www.metalreviews.com/reviews/album/1310) , being pressed on purple vinyl. Beside each machine, bins were collecting surplus plastic shorn off the edges of each disc, to be fed back into the production process.
“Instant recycling!” said Runge, who stared at the factory’s operations through rimless glasses. He grew up, he told me, in Rostock, in the old German Democratic Republic. When he was 19, he applied for an ausreiseantrag – an East German exit visa, the same day as the East German premier Erich Honecker visited West Berlin. This modest act of subversion led to an appointment with the Stasi, and he was barred from going to university. So he got a job in the university’s workshop, helping to build electronic prototypes, where he gained a practical understanding of engineering. When the Berlin Wall fell (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/-sp-fall-berlin-wall-what-it-meant-to-be-there) , two years later, he belatedly became an undergraduate at the same institution, and eventually earned a PhD in industrial maintenance. He joined Optimal Media in 1997, was put in charge of “process optimisation and re-engineering” and given the job of setting up a production planning
system. Now 46, he oversees the manufacture of DVDs, CDs and books, but the task in which he takes the most pleasure is supervising the production of vinyl records, in what he and his colleagues claim is Europe’s biggest pressing plant. Their clients are split between the major record companies – who have trusted Optimal with the work of such titans as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie – and the independent companies who kept the vinyl format alive through the 1990s and early 2000s while the rest of a terrified music industry embraced digital technology. Optimal’s machines run 24 hours day, for most of the year, and production capacity has to be booked up to a year in advance. And every hiss and wheeze of the company’s machines attests to a story that, 20 or so years ago, would have seemed unthinkable: the renaissance of the vinyl record.
In the first half of 2014, officially registered sales of vinyl in the US stood at around 4m, confirming an increase of more than 40% compared to the same period in 2013. In the UK, this year’s accredited sales will come in at around 1.2m, more than 50% up on last year. That may represent a tiny fraction of the industry’s estimated sales of recorded music, but still, a means of listening to music essentially invented in the 19th century and long since presumed to be dead is growing at speed, and the presses at Optimal – along with similar facilities smattered across the UK, mainland Europe, the US and beyond – are set to grind and pump on, into the future.
“Isn’t it strange?” Runge mused. “I’m an automation engineer. I never thought I’d be dealing with vinyl. It’s unexpected. But it’s also unexpectable.” He shouted this over the din of the machinery. Each press sat in a space not much more than four metres square. Two circular paper labels were mechanically plucked from one end, while tiny vinyl pellets were sucked into a steam-driven heating process. The result was a hunk of plastic with the circumference of a beer mat, heated to 130C, to which the labels were attached, while 50 tonnes of hydraulic pressure squashed and spread it into a disc. Metal stampers pressed against either side, and it was quickly cooled to 40C. With another clunk, the finished product was dropped on to a spindle, ready to be inserted in its sleeve. The whole cycle had taken 27 seconds. Each day, the factory makes somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 records.
In the first half of 2014, UK sales of vinyl are expected to be 1.2m, more than 50% up on the same period last year
Hanging over everything Runge showed me was an awkward question. While demand for records is increasing year by year, Optimal’s stock of machinery is old, and getting older. New presses are unaffordable, unless the big companies were to invest, but vinyl is still too small a sector of the market for them to be convinced. The kind of painstaking maintenance and technical ingenuity one might think of as the Cadillacs-in-Cuba model keep the industry going. But for how long?
** * * *
————————————————————
When former music journalist Michael Haentjes started the independent German label Edel in 1986, he relied on other companies to press his records. “They usually didn’t get him the best delivery times,” Runge said. “They put him to the end of the queue. So by the 90s he said, ‘No – I’m sick of it. I’ll build my own plant.’” Thanks to economic policies aimed at assisting reunification, Haentjes, who was from Hamburg, decided to locate his new factory on an industrial estate in Röbel, an unremarkable East German town in the Mecklenburg Lake District (20 minutes’ drive away is Waren, a spa resort where Soviet nuclear missiles were located as recently as 1988).
At that point, it looked as though vinyl would soon become obsolete. Records had first been superseded by cassettes, which were portable (they had become indispensable with the introduction of the personal stereo) but chronically unreliable. With the arrival of the compact disc in 1983 – introduced to consumers with the lure of cleaner sound and the entirely specious promise of indestructibility – old-style records looked to be finished. At a music industry conference held in Athens in 1981, executives had responded to a demonstration of the CD by chanting “The truth is in the groove!” But just over 10 years later, 70.5m CDs were bought in the UK, compared with a miserable 6.2m records.
In that context, Haentjes’s decision to begin pressing records looked ludicrously sentimental. The company bought and installed its first vinyl presses in 1995, to service demand from independent companies producing dance music. DJs still specialised in the art of playing and mixing 12-inch records. Moreover, if a dance single was to be a hit, its progress towards success would often start with its circulation as a limited-edition “white label” record, usually pressed up in the mere hundreds.
These records often sat at the cutting edge of musical fashion, but at the same time, Optimal’s vinyl production lines were redolent of a world that had recently disappeared from view. Then as now, many of its staff – from those who pressed and packed the records to its senior management – were former East German nationals, with vivid memories of life under communism. For them, the advent of the CD had coincided with the last phase of the cold war, so that those little silver discs became a byword for western aspiration, and the kind of technological progress the eastern bloc could not get near (in the GDR, Peter Runge told me, the authorities had approved the release of just three CDs, all of which were produced in the former Czechoslovakia).
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-2
Peter Runge, operations director of the Optimal vinyl pressing factory in Germany. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt
Most of the pressing machines Optimal acquired had come from decommissioned factories, in the decade-long fire sale that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. “When you buy a press, it’s usually inoperative,” said Runge, as we passed giant piles of freshly printed sleeve art for Kraftwerk albums. “A lot of machines won’t work any more, because something is broken, the electronics are missing, or something like that. And then you have to find all the spare parts, or make spare parts – because the company who made the presses no longer exists. Then you have to strip the machine down, and redo all the hydraulics and the electronics.” Engineers from the old East Germany (http://www.theguardian.com/world/germany) , he told me, tend to be very good at this. “They always know how to improvise.”
In the late 1990s, six machines were used for production, while the rest were kept in storage, for spares. But at this point, after years of steady decline, the international market for new vinyl was plummeting. By 2001, the dance music world was increasingly embracing CDs, laptops and MP3s – the latter could instantly be circulated around the world, bypassing the old ritual of white-label pressings altogether. Now, Runge began discussions with Optimal’s senior staff about whether they should leave records behind. “There were a lot of meetings,” he remembered. “We asked ourselves: how long will we make records? Should we continue to manufacture vinyl? But then we decided that it had to be part of our service.”
In 2007, Optimal was presented with the chance to buy 15 more Swedish presses from Audio Services Limited (ASL), a company based in a backstreet in east London that was facing liquidation. “We had to decide whether to get the machines and continue doing this on a larger scale, or leave the business small, like it was.” At the very least, they thought, some of the new machines could be used for the ASL business that would come as part of the deal, while others would be a much-needed source of spares. “So we decided, ‘Get the machines,’” said Runge. He cracked an understated smile. “And that was a good decision, I think.”
Runge made regular trips to the plant at Orsman Road, N1, where he inspected what was on offer – not just presses, but an archive of the metallic master copies of stampers used to make thousands of different records, by artists including Simon & Garfunkel and the Manic Street Preachers, all of which could conceivably be put back into production. And he immersed himself in negotiations with the factory’s owners.
“We bought everything,” he told me. “We emptied the building.” The presses were loaded on to two trucks, with the whole of ASL’s archive on hundreds of pallets, and ferried across the North Sea to Röbel.
The gamble was worth taking. During the 2000s, buyers had increasingly expressed a desire to hear music rendered as perfectly as possible. New vinyl-only labels had started to produce albums intended to capitalise on this interest, and on rock music’s inbuilt nostalgia. A new format had been created – 180g records as opposed to the standard weight of 120g – and to counter the digital streaming culture, these were records you’d want to own, presented in luxuriant box sets, complete with hardback books and exact-replica artwork. In 2008, vinyl had been given its own annual celebration: Record Store Day, on the third Saturday in April, when record companies would create thousands of limited-edition records coveted by collectors. Meanwhile, astute independent companies such as Rough Trade, Domino and Bella Union had begun accompanying their records with exclusive download cards, so that anyone buying them could also access digital versions of the music – and thus, if they wished,
not just put their new music on phones and iPods, but keep their records pristine.
“The majors hopped on the wagon,” said Julia Völkel, 32, Optimal’s senior sales manager, another former East German, who joined the company in 2000. “And they were very interested in doing box sets. They found out that catalogue releases sold very well as gifts …”
“… And nowadays,” said Runge, “we’re 100% full. We’re running, always, on the brink of maximum capacity.”
In a meeting room near the factory, Runge projected a graph showing average monthly output between 1999 and 2014. When the line got to 2011, it suddenly shot upwards: in only three years, production more than doubled, and the risk Optimal had taken in 2007 paid off. By 2013, the company had 27 active presses, manufacturing records around the clock. This year (2015), with the addition of two machines that have been brought out of storage, the company says it will press 18m records.
** * * *
————————————————————
In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment.
A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company.
The London event was organised by an American named Colleen Murphy, who listened to the whole of Abbey Road lying on the floor. It was reviewed by the music magazine the Word, in which Kate Mossman described 40 minutes when “eyes are focused in the middle distance, unseeing, as though every sense is shutting down in service of the ears”, and a picture captured the attendees lost in music, stroking their chins, covering their eyes, or horizontal. In early 2012, Classic Album Sundays was the subject of an item on the BBC Breakfast TV programme. Ever since, most of Murphy’s events have been sell-outs, and there are now offshoots in Glasgow, New York, Oslo and Portland, Maine.
Murphy has lived in Britain since 1999. She DJs as under the name Cosmo, produces and remixes music, and runs a vinyl‑only label called Bitches Brew. At New York University, she became the programme director of the renowned college radio station WNYU – and in the early 1990s, she began an enduring friendship with David Mancuso, who pioneered parties in Manhattan known as the Loft, where he played music through ambitious audio set-ups, only ever on vinyl.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-3
Colleen Murphy keeps about 10,000 records at her home in east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
When Murphy first visited one of Mancuso’s events, she told me: “I couldn’t believe how some of the records that I knew sounded so different.” She decided to try the Loft idea in London.
** ***
————————————————————
Early in December, I visited Murphy at her home in Hackney, east London. One downstairs room was lined with somewhere in the region of 10,000 records, arranged alphabetically, by artist. In the lounge, a flatscreen TV was obscured by audio kit including two Klipsch speakers, encased in wooden stands, which sell at around £6,000 for a pair and have the same dimensions as a large fridge; and an Ace Spacedeck turntable (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/07/vinyl-turntables-tested-by-fort-romeau) manufactured by Nottingham Analogue Systems (£1,500).
After making tea, she jumped up to put on Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye, from his only completed album, Grace, released in 1994. The song – built around swirling guitar lines, and Buckley’s dizzying vocal – was transformed. The kick-drum, which drives the song along but too often sounds buried in the mix, was suddenly at the heart of what I was hearing. The Guardian’s photographer delightedly pointed out an element of the music he had never heard before, rattled out on the bell of a cymbal. Buckley’s singing was so vivid as to evoke his physical presence.
For those who grew up in the 90s, this experience is new. “Some of the Classic Album Sundays regulars are hearing an album they might not know anything about, and they’re sharing it with friends, on an amazing system,” Murphy said. “They never did this before. Most people in their 20s grew up ripping stuff from online, and listening with earbuds. They didn’t say, ‘Hey come over – I’ve got the new Beatles album, let’s listen to it.’
“Things sound different. They take on a life of their own; they come at you. Vinyl (http://www.theguardian.com/music/vinyl) brings something else to it. It has a total warmth to it. Everyone talks about that, but it’s true. People often say, ‘I know that album but I’ve never heard it like that before.’ When you listen to CDs after you’ve been listening to vinyl for a long time, it sounds a bit … synthetic.”
The science behind this distinction is the subject of passionate discussion. In a newly published book Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (http://www.roughtrade.com/albums/89595) , by Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward, Berlin-based mastering engineer Andreas Lubich traces vinyl’s supposed warmth to “the flaws of the analogue in comparison with the digital … It’s about distortion, and in the best case, harmonic distortion.” Another explanation centres on the fact that analogue technology captures a greater range of sound than most comparatively crude digital equipment, a point made down the years by Neil Young – who once damned the music industry’s approach to recorded sound as follows: “We don’t really need to see the sky in all its detail – just paint that in blue … No one will know.” If there is any certainty on this subject, it probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two theories.
“The other thing with vinyl is, you have to interact with it. You have to engage,” Murphy continued. “You’ve got to flip it. A CD, you can stick in, and walk away, and it turns itself off. But you have to be with a record, sitting in the room. You can’t, like, make dinner. It forces you to listen.”
One of Murphy’s Classic Albums runs took place in a 19th-century church on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset, where she had invited me to introduce Radiohead’s OK Computer (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/jun/15/tenyearsofokcomputerandw) . Scores of people sat in the pews and listened to Thom Yorke’s keening vocals, Nick Drake (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/05/nick-drake-requiem-for-a-solitary-man) ’s Five Leaves Left and Neil Young (http://www.theguardian.com/music/neilyoung) ’s Harvest, while candles flickered. The turntable had been set up next to the altar. “At one point, I did say, ‘We worship our music,’” Murphy recalled, with a laugh. “And anyway, the acoustics in old churches are great.”
She bounced up and pulled two vinyl copies of the Beach Boys (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/24/brian-wilson-interview) ’ Pet Sounds from her shelves, and played God Only Knows from each one. The first, on a “remastered” version from 1999, sounded underwhelming: compressed, light on bass, palpably small. But the second, on an early 70s pressing which had been packaged up with a largely awful album titled Carl And The Passions – So Tough, was expansive, packed with nuance. The most stunning element was the vocal performance of the late Carl Wilson: so fresh and intimate that it seized my attention as though we were having a conversation.
So not all new vinyl sounds perfect. Indeed, Murphy reckoned, as big labels stampeded to get involved, and inexperienced startups joined them, there was a danger of vinyl’s magic being debased. “Some of what’s coming out is great,” she said. “Because in some ways, the public demand for quality is increasing, and people are making an effort.” She mentioned the ongoing reissues of Led Zeppelin albums, which are manufactured at Optimal. “Jimmy Page was in charge, they’re mastering them from the original tapes – that’s really good. But then there’s other records, and other labels …”
She mentioned an operation based in California. By coincidence, I had just bought one of their supposedly remastered vinyl albums and been so repelled by the sound – thin, full of pops and crackles and excessive sibilance – that I had taken apart my turntable, in search of a fault that was actually in the grooves. “Fucking terrible,” Murphy agreed. “I have a feeling they might even master from MP3. They definitely aren’t mastering from the analogue tape; the sound is too thin. They go on that whole, ‘We do 180g vinyl!’ thing. But I’d rather have something good on lighter vinyl, than a 180g frisbee.”
That evening, Classic Album Sundays hosted a launch for a new Bruce Springsteen box set, spanning seven albums, from 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ to 1984’s Born in the USA. It was held at the Blues Kitchen in Shoreditch: one of those faux-American restaurant-bars that attempts to evoke the Deep South, but ends up offering an atmosphere akin to a crowded film set. In a basement room, the event had pulled an audience of around 70, evenly split between the sexes, and spread across the age range.
To begin, Murphy talked about Springsteen with the Manchester singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough), who chose a song from each album, and rhapsodised about his formative experience of listening to knock-down vinyl editions of Springsteen labelled as “Nice Price”, bought from a shop in his native Bolton. “Till I was 20,” he said, “I probably listened to nothing else. He made me feel like life was an endless Saturday night.”
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-4
Colleen Murphy and Badly Drawn Boy talk about Bruce Springsteen at a Classic Album Sundays event in Shoreditch, east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
During a break, I fell into conversation with three members of the congregation. Gareth Ragg, 29, from Norwich, recalled: “At school, all the cool kids had records. It was a badge of honour.”
“Vinyl is tangible,” said his friend Nicky Smiles, 29. “And it’s the medium the records we listen to were actually made in.” She had bought her first record at the age of 25: Gram Parsons’ first solo album GP, originally released in 1973, buffed up and given the 180g treatment in 2007.
“There’s a commitment there,” added 28-year-old Liam Hart. “You bought it,” he said, with an implied wonderment. “You own it.”
At 9 o’clock, Murphy cued up the first track from 1975’s Born To Run, which was to be played in its entirety. Many of the women reclined, and kept their eyes closed. Some of the men conducted with sweeping hand gestures; others sat stock-still, with straight backs and expressions of deep concentration, as if to underline the significance of what they were hearing. The record – manufactured, I later discovered, at a plant in Averton, in north-western France, and played on a Rega P9 turntable (£1,600 on eBay) with a Dynavector 17D3 cartridge (£650) – foregrounded parts of the music that in other formats might be submerged: not least, the glockenspiel parts played by Roy Bittan and the late Danny Federici, which heighten the songs’ sense of sweeping romance and damaged innocence.
At the end of each track, the audience broke into delighted applause.
** * * *
————————————————————
The sound that can trigger such an awed reaction is founded on a production process essentially unchanged in 70 years. First, the original music – in the form of master tapes, or digital files – is cut into a lacquer of malleable plastic with a texture like that of nail varnish. This is the delicate stage of mastering, which Optimal carries out in a converted Catholic church in downtown Röbel. When Peter Runge showed me around, three cutting lathes were carving the grooves for the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s live album Sun Bear concerts, the American indie-rock band Warpaint’s first album The Fool, and a record by the San Francisco psychedelicists Quicksilver Messenger Service, which droned away in a corner. Each mastering machine was connected to an old East German Robotron microcomputer: the communist version of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. One had been attached to the first cutting lathe that Optimal had acquired. It worked perfectly well, said Runge, so the same set-up had
been replicated on two more machines.
At this stage, what vinyl production requires can collide with the expectations of people used to the simplicities of digital sound. “You sometimes have to educate people,” said Völkel. “Like, ‘Don’t send us a CD master of the loudest techno music and expect that to be cuttable on a lacquer.’ (The high and low frequencies associated with this type of music can overheat the cutting lathe and cause the mastering machinery to shut down; pushing the process to its limits is the origin of some records being called “hot cuts”.) It can come down to things like that if you deal with product managers who are 23.”
After mastering, the acetate disc is sprayed with atomised silver and dipped in chemicals, creating a metallic cast of the original disc known as the father. Another metal disc, called the mother, is cast from this one. The mother is then used to create several mirror-image “sons”, or “stampers”, which are taken to the presses to imprint the grooves on heated vinyl. Every stage of the process, up to the point at which the records are tucked into their sleeves, is closely monitored. Optimal’s payroll includes a handful of people who listen closely to music all day, but this job is the reverse of what happens at Classic Album Sundays: the task of these listeners is to blank out the content, remain twitchily alert and check for any audible faults.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-5The Optimal vinyl pressing factory is the biggest in Europe, according to its staff. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt
In the US, where there are only around a dozen pressing plants, the average waiting time between music arriving at a factory and finished records emerging used to be about four weeks. Now, it runs to three months – which, in a world where musicians are used to snap-releasing their material online, can create complications. At Optimal, record companies must block book production as much as a year in advance, often before they know the details of what they will be releasing.
If the demand for vinyl continues to increase, what will happen when the orders begin to outstrip capacity? And what of the inevitable prospect of old presses reaching the limits of reconditioning and simply dying of old age? As far as anyone knows, the last new machines were created in the early 1980s. Presses now change hands for around £20,000, double what they cost 10 years ago. But sooner or later, companies such as Optimal will surely have to start thinking about fresh machinery.
“We have heard about new machines, but we have not seen any,” said Runge. “There are rumours. People claim they have a new one. But then you hear from other people, ‘No – that’s not a new one. That’s an old one with a new control system.’ Which is exactly what we have here.
“A new press would cost between 10 and 20 times as much as an old one. And it has to pay off. If that took 30 years, no one would lend you the money. And that’s the reason nobody’s doing it right now. But if another 10 or 20 of our machines break down, and are unrepairable, then we’ll have no choice.”
Runge is always quietly hunting for new machines. “We regularly get inquiries about selling presses,” he said. “But we never say yes.” At one point, he half-joked about taking a working holiday in Cuba, where there might be old presses bought from the Soviet Union. Lately, he had looked even further afield. “We tried to get presses from Zimbabwe. I had a contact there, and we put in a bid. But I never got an answer.”
We got in his company Audi A4 and drove to Berlin. Just behind the gear stick was his smartphone: he had one or two MP3s on it that had been taken from CDs, but he never bought music from iTunes, or streamed stuff on Spotify. The way that one’s listening habits are monitored and then turned into recommendations jangled his East German nerves.
“I don’t want someone else monitoring what I’m listening to,” he said. “Some time soon they will categorise your taste – what music you like, what movies you see – and say, ‘You’re dangerous!’”
He was not a fan of Facebook, or Twitter. “The internet would have been the wet dream of the Stasi,” he said.
After an hour’s drive, we pulled into a darkening Berlin, and he dropped me at my hotel on Kastanienallee, the somewhat gentrified bohemian street that runs through the heart of Prenzlauer Berg. Across the road was one of the city’s scores of record shops: Musik Department. On its walls were the kitsch-looking sleeves of old compilation albums put together in tribute to the city: Das Ist Berlin, Berlin Bei Nacht.
I don’t want someone else monitoring what I’m listening to … The internet would have been the wet dream of the Stasi
Peter Runge
The shop was empty and about to close; the sole member of staff on duty was 41-year-old Falko Teichmann, a Berliner who splits his working life between being a DJ and putting in a couple of evenings a week behind the counter. He had heard of the plant at Röbel. “People have pointed it out to me from the highway,” he said. “Everyone who’s involved with vinyl knows that a lot of pressing plants closed down, so it’s almost like a monument.”
At the front of a nearby rack was a copy of Led Zeppelin II, part of the new reissue series manufactured at Optimal, that Colleen Murphy had enthused about. Teichmann, though, looked troubled. “This is an aspect of the whole vinyl renaissance or whatever you want to call it that’s a bit worrying,” he said. “It gets quite absurd. Twenty years ago, people gave their vinyl records away. Then they bought the CDs. Then they probably bought box sets because of the bonus tracks. Now, they’re buying the vinyl represses all over again. It’s just old wine in new bottles.”
For all his doubts, he loved vinyl and wouldn’t play music on any other format. “Something happens to me more and more frequently,” he said. “When I DJ, I go on after someone younger, and usually they’ve been using laptops. A lot of them just play MP3s. And I swear to God: on a couple of occasions, they’ve played their last track, I’ve cued up mine, and I play the first vinyl record, and it’s almost like the music starts to breathe again.” Recently he had heard two French kids playing digital files of 1950s rockabilly singles. “I was like, are you serious? It sounded horrible: the bass was hardly there. The treble was painful to the ear. It was awful.”
Enough young people bought records from the shop to reassure him that vinyl would endure, but he agreed that the industry would struggle to survive as its machinery grows old. Teichmann had lately heard a rumour from a friend of a friend. “They said someone had told them that some big companies were getting together to make new presses,” he told me. But he had heard nothing more.
We talked about the process of making records; I gushed blearily about the impressive workmanship I had seen that day at the plant.
“It’s all worth it,” Teichmann said simply. “It just sounds better, doesn’t it?”
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread (https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e27994d3d3) | 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=e27994d3d3&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
Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris | Music | The Guardian
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback
** Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris
————————————————————
On an industrial estate in Röbel, 90 miles north of Berlin, the vinyl presses at the Optimal factory were grinding and pumping away. They made a percussive racket – regular clunks, wheezes, and hisses, underlain by a droning hum – and created a distinct aroma, sharp and metallic, suggestive of steam engines and old cars: not instantly recognisable to a British visitor like me, perhaps, but the singular smell of things being made. My guide to the Optimal plant was its operations director, Peter Runge. Together, we watched copies of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Live From KCRW (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/01/cave-seeds-kcrw-goat-ballroom-review) tumble from one of the machines. Across a narrow aisle, a press dedicated to seven-inch records was spitting out copies of The Boy From New York City (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svztw0okXKY&noredirect=1) , a 1964 single by the Ad Libs, a soul group from Bayonne, New Jersey. A few yards away sat fresh stock
of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/30/rumours-fleetwood-mac) . Next to those was a growing pile of the album Clandestine by the Swedish death metal band Entombed (http://www.metalreviews.com/reviews/album/1310) , being pressed on purple vinyl. Beside each machine, bins were collecting surplus plastic shorn off the edges of each disc, to be fed back into the production process.
“Instant recycling!” said Runge, who stared at the factory’s operations through rimless glasses. He grew up, he told me, in Rostock, in the old German Democratic Republic. When he was 19, he applied for an ausreiseantrag – an East German exit visa, the same day as the East German premier Erich Honecker visited West Berlin. This modest act of subversion led to an appointment with the Stasi, and he was barred from going to university. So he got a job in the university’s workshop, helping to build electronic prototypes, where he gained a practical understanding of engineering. When the Berlin Wall fell (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/-sp-fall-berlin-wall-what-it-meant-to-be-there) , two years later, he belatedly became an undergraduate at the same institution, and eventually earned a PhD in industrial maintenance. He joined Optimal Media in 1997, was put in charge of “process optimisation and re-engineering” and given the job of setting up a production planning
system. Now 46, he oversees the manufacture of DVDs, CDs and books, but the task in which he takes the most pleasure is supervising the production of vinyl records, in what he and his colleagues claim is Europe’s biggest pressing plant. Their clients are split between the major record companies – who have trusted Optimal with the work of such titans as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie – and the independent companies who kept the vinyl format alive through the 1990s and early 2000s while the rest of a terrified music industry embraced digital technology. Optimal’s machines run 24 hours day, for most of the year, and production capacity has to be booked up to a year in advance. And every hiss and wheeze of the company’s machines attests to a story that, 20 or so years ago, would have seemed unthinkable: the renaissance of the vinyl record.
In the first half of 2014, officially registered sales of vinyl in the US stood at around 4m, confirming an increase of more than 40% compared to the same period in 2013. In the UK, this year’s accredited sales will come in at around 1.2m, more than 50% up on last year. That may represent a tiny fraction of the industry’s estimated sales of recorded music, but still, a means of listening to music essentially invented in the 19th century and long since presumed to be dead is growing at speed, and the presses at Optimal – along with similar facilities smattered across the UK, mainland Europe, the US and beyond – are set to grind and pump on, into the future.
“Isn’t it strange?” Runge mused. “I’m an automation engineer. I never thought I’d be dealing with vinyl. It’s unexpected. But it’s also unexpectable.” He shouted this over the din of the machinery. Each press sat in a space not much more than four metres square. Two circular paper labels were mechanically plucked from one end, while tiny vinyl pellets were sucked into a steam-driven heating process. The result was a hunk of plastic with the circumference of a beer mat, heated to 130C, to which the labels were attached, while 50 tonnes of hydraulic pressure squashed and spread it into a disc. Metal stampers pressed against either side, and it was quickly cooled to 40C. With another clunk, the finished product was dropped on to a spindle, ready to be inserted in its sleeve. The whole cycle had taken 27 seconds. Each day, the factory makes somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 records.
In the first half of 2014, UK sales of vinyl are expected to be 1.2m, more than 50% up on the same period last year
Hanging over everything Runge showed me was an awkward question. While demand for records is increasing year by year, Optimal’s stock of machinery is old, and getting older. New presses are unaffordable, unless the big companies were to invest, but vinyl is still too small a sector of the market for them to be convinced. The kind of painstaking maintenance and technical ingenuity one might think of as the Cadillacs-in-Cuba model keep the industry going. But for how long?
** * * *
————————————————————
When former music journalist Michael Haentjes started the independent German label Edel in 1986, he relied on other companies to press his records. “They usually didn’t get him the best delivery times,” Runge said. “They put him to the end of the queue. So by the 90s he said, ‘No – I’m sick of it. I’ll build my own plant.’” Thanks to economic policies aimed at assisting reunification, Haentjes, who was from Hamburg, decided to locate his new factory on an industrial estate in Röbel, an unremarkable East German town in the Mecklenburg Lake District (20 minutes’ drive away is Waren, a spa resort where Soviet nuclear missiles were located as recently as 1988).
At that point, it looked as though vinyl would soon become obsolete. Records had first been superseded by cassettes, which were portable (they had become indispensable with the introduction of the personal stereo) but chronically unreliable. With the arrival of the compact disc in 1983 – introduced to consumers with the lure of cleaner sound and the entirely specious promise of indestructibility – old-style records looked to be finished. At a music industry conference held in Athens in 1981, executives had responded to a demonstration of the CD by chanting “The truth is in the groove!” But just over 10 years later, 70.5m CDs were bought in the UK, compared with a miserable 6.2m records.
In that context, Haentjes’s decision to begin pressing records looked ludicrously sentimental. The company bought and installed its first vinyl presses in 1995, to service demand from independent companies producing dance music. DJs still specialised in the art of playing and mixing 12-inch records. Moreover, if a dance single was to be a hit, its progress towards success would often start with its circulation as a limited-edition “white label” record, usually pressed up in the mere hundreds.
These records often sat at the cutting edge of musical fashion, but at the same time, Optimal’s vinyl production lines were redolent of a world that had recently disappeared from view. Then as now, many of its staff – from those who pressed and packed the records to its senior management – were former East German nationals, with vivid memories of life under communism. For them, the advent of the CD had coincided with the last phase of the cold war, so that those little silver discs became a byword for western aspiration, and the kind of technological progress the eastern bloc could not get near (in the GDR, Peter Runge told me, the authorities had approved the release of just three CDs, all of which were produced in the former Czechoslovakia).
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-2
Peter Runge, operations director of the Optimal vinyl pressing factory in Germany. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt
Most of the pressing machines Optimal acquired had come from decommissioned factories, in the decade-long fire sale that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. “When you buy a press, it’s usually inoperative,” said Runge, as we passed giant piles of freshly printed sleeve art for Kraftwerk albums. “A lot of machines won’t work any more, because something is broken, the electronics are missing, or something like that. And then you have to find all the spare parts, or make spare parts – because the company who made the presses no longer exists. Then you have to strip the machine down, and redo all the hydraulics and the electronics.” Engineers from the old East Germany (http://www.theguardian.com/world/germany) , he told me, tend to be very good at this. “They always know how to improvise.”
In the late 1990s, six machines were used for production, while the rest were kept in storage, for spares. But at this point, after years of steady decline, the international market for new vinyl was plummeting. By 2001, the dance music world was increasingly embracing CDs, laptops and MP3s – the latter could instantly be circulated around the world, bypassing the old ritual of white-label pressings altogether. Now, Runge began discussions with Optimal’s senior staff about whether they should leave records behind. “There were a lot of meetings,” he remembered. “We asked ourselves: how long will we make records? Should we continue to manufacture vinyl? But then we decided that it had to be part of our service.”
In 2007, Optimal was presented with the chance to buy 15 more Swedish presses from Audio Services Limited (ASL), a company based in a backstreet in east London that was facing liquidation. “We had to decide whether to get the machines and continue doing this on a larger scale, or leave the business small, like it was.” At the very least, they thought, some of the new machines could be used for the ASL business that would come as part of the deal, while others would be a much-needed source of spares. “So we decided, ‘Get the machines,’” said Runge. He cracked an understated smile. “And that was a good decision, I think.”
Runge made regular trips to the plant at Orsman Road, N1, where he inspected what was on offer – not just presses, but an archive of the metallic master copies of stampers used to make thousands of different records, by artists including Simon & Garfunkel and the Manic Street Preachers, all of which could conceivably be put back into production. And he immersed himself in negotiations with the factory’s owners.
“We bought everything,” he told me. “We emptied the building.” The presses were loaded on to two trucks, with the whole of ASL’s archive on hundreds of pallets, and ferried across the North Sea to Röbel.
The gamble was worth taking. During the 2000s, buyers had increasingly expressed a desire to hear music rendered as perfectly as possible. New vinyl-only labels had started to produce albums intended to capitalise on this interest, and on rock music’s inbuilt nostalgia. A new format had been created – 180g records as opposed to the standard weight of 120g – and to counter the digital streaming culture, these were records you’d want to own, presented in luxuriant box sets, complete with hardback books and exact-replica artwork. In 2008, vinyl had been given its own annual celebration: Record Store Day, on the third Saturday in April, when record companies would create thousands of limited-edition records coveted by collectors. Meanwhile, astute independent companies such as Rough Trade, Domino and Bella Union had begun accompanying their records with exclusive download cards, so that anyone buying them could also access digital versions of the music – and thus, if they wished,
not just put their new music on phones and iPods, but keep their records pristine.
“The majors hopped on the wagon,” said Julia Völkel, 32, Optimal’s senior sales manager, another former East German, who joined the company in 2000. “And they were very interested in doing box sets. They found out that catalogue releases sold very well as gifts …”
“… And nowadays,” said Runge, “we’re 100% full. We’re running, always, on the brink of maximum capacity.”
In a meeting room near the factory, Runge projected a graph showing average monthly output between 1999 and 2014. When the line got to 2011, it suddenly shot upwards: in only three years, production more than doubled, and the risk Optimal had taken in 2007 paid off. By 2013, the company had 27 active presses, manufacturing records around the clock. This year (2015), with the addition of two machines that have been brought out of storage, the company says it will press 18m records.
** * * *
————————————————————
In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment.
A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company.
The London event was organised by an American named Colleen Murphy, who listened to the whole of Abbey Road lying on the floor. It was reviewed by the music magazine the Word, in which Kate Mossman described 40 minutes when “eyes are focused in the middle distance, unseeing, as though every sense is shutting down in service of the ears”, and a picture captured the attendees lost in music, stroking their chins, covering their eyes, or horizontal. In early 2012, Classic Album Sundays was the subject of an item on the BBC Breakfast TV programme. Ever since, most of Murphy’s events have been sell-outs, and there are now offshoots in Glasgow, New York, Oslo and Portland, Maine.
Murphy has lived in Britain since 1999. She DJs as under the name Cosmo, produces and remixes music, and runs a vinyl‑only label called Bitches Brew. At New York University, she became the programme director of the renowned college radio station WNYU – and in the early 1990s, she began an enduring friendship with David Mancuso, who pioneered parties in Manhattan known as the Loft, where he played music through ambitious audio set-ups, only ever on vinyl.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-3
Colleen Murphy keeps about 10,000 records at her home in east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
When Murphy first visited one of Mancuso’s events, she told me: “I couldn’t believe how some of the records that I knew sounded so different.” She decided to try the Loft idea in London.
** ***
————————————————————
Early in December, I visited Murphy at her home in Hackney, east London. One downstairs room was lined with somewhere in the region of 10,000 records, arranged alphabetically, by artist. In the lounge, a flatscreen TV was obscured by audio kit including two Klipsch speakers, encased in wooden stands, which sell at around £6,000 for a pair and have the same dimensions as a large fridge; and an Ace Spacedeck turntable (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/07/vinyl-turntables-tested-by-fort-romeau) manufactured by Nottingham Analogue Systems (£1,500).
After making tea, she jumped up to put on Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye, from his only completed album, Grace, released in 1994. The song – built around swirling guitar lines, and Buckley’s dizzying vocal – was transformed. The kick-drum, which drives the song along but too often sounds buried in the mix, was suddenly at the heart of what I was hearing. The Guardian’s photographer delightedly pointed out an element of the music he had never heard before, rattled out on the bell of a cymbal. Buckley’s singing was so vivid as to evoke his physical presence.
For those who grew up in the 90s, this experience is new. “Some of the Classic Album Sundays regulars are hearing an album they might not know anything about, and they’re sharing it with friends, on an amazing system,” Murphy said. “They never did this before. Most people in their 20s grew up ripping stuff from online, and listening with earbuds. They didn’t say, ‘Hey come over – I’ve got the new Beatles album, let’s listen to it.’
“Things sound different. They take on a life of their own; they come at you. Vinyl (http://www.theguardian.com/music/vinyl) brings something else to it. It has a total warmth to it. Everyone talks about that, but it’s true. People often say, ‘I know that album but I’ve never heard it like that before.’ When you listen to CDs after you’ve been listening to vinyl for a long time, it sounds a bit … synthetic.”
The science behind this distinction is the subject of passionate discussion. In a newly published book Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (http://www.roughtrade.com/albums/89595) , by Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward, Berlin-based mastering engineer Andreas Lubich traces vinyl’s supposed warmth to “the flaws of the analogue in comparison with the digital … It’s about distortion, and in the best case, harmonic distortion.” Another explanation centres on the fact that analogue technology captures a greater range of sound than most comparatively crude digital equipment, a point made down the years by Neil Young – who once damned the music industry’s approach to recorded sound as follows: “We don’t really need to see the sky in all its detail – just paint that in blue … No one will know.” If there is any certainty on this subject, it probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two theories.
“The other thing with vinyl is, you have to interact with it. You have to engage,” Murphy continued. “You’ve got to flip it. A CD, you can stick in, and walk away, and it turns itself off. But you have to be with a record, sitting in the room. You can’t, like, make dinner. It forces you to listen.”
One of Murphy’s Classic Albums runs took place in a 19th-century church on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset, where she had invited me to introduce Radiohead’s OK Computer (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/jun/15/tenyearsofokcomputerandw) . Scores of people sat in the pews and listened to Thom Yorke’s keening vocals, Nick Drake (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/05/nick-drake-requiem-for-a-solitary-man) ’s Five Leaves Left and Neil Young (http://www.theguardian.com/music/neilyoung) ’s Harvest, while candles flickered. The turntable had been set up next to the altar. “At one point, I did say, ‘We worship our music,’” Murphy recalled, with a laugh. “And anyway, the acoustics in old churches are great.”
She bounced up and pulled two vinyl copies of the Beach Boys (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/24/brian-wilson-interview) ’ Pet Sounds from her shelves, and played God Only Knows from each one. The first, on a “remastered” version from 1999, sounded underwhelming: compressed, light on bass, palpably small. But the second, on an early 70s pressing which had been packaged up with a largely awful album titled Carl And The Passions – So Tough, was expansive, packed with nuance. The most stunning element was the vocal performance of the late Carl Wilson: so fresh and intimate that it seized my attention as though we were having a conversation.
So not all new vinyl sounds perfect. Indeed, Murphy reckoned, as big labels stampeded to get involved, and inexperienced startups joined them, there was a danger of vinyl’s magic being debased. “Some of what’s coming out is great,” she said. “Because in some ways, the public demand for quality is increasing, and people are making an effort.” She mentioned the ongoing reissues of Led Zeppelin albums, which are manufactured at Optimal. “Jimmy Page was in charge, they’re mastering them from the original tapes – that’s really good. But then there’s other records, and other labels …”
She mentioned an operation based in California. By coincidence, I had just bought one of their supposedly remastered vinyl albums and been so repelled by the sound – thin, full of pops and crackles and excessive sibilance – that I had taken apart my turntable, in search of a fault that was actually in the grooves. “Fucking terrible,” Murphy agreed. “I have a feeling they might even master from MP3. They definitely aren’t mastering from the analogue tape; the sound is too thin. They go on that whole, ‘We do 180g vinyl!’ thing. But I’d rather have something good on lighter vinyl, than a 180g frisbee.”
That evening, Classic Album Sundays hosted a launch for a new Bruce Springsteen box set, spanning seven albums, from 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ to 1984’s Born in the USA. It was held at the Blues Kitchen in Shoreditch: one of those faux-American restaurant-bars that attempts to evoke the Deep South, but ends up offering an atmosphere akin to a crowded film set. In a basement room, the event had pulled an audience of around 70, evenly split between the sexes, and spread across the age range.
To begin, Murphy talked about Springsteen with the Manchester singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough), who chose a song from each album, and rhapsodised about his formative experience of listening to knock-down vinyl editions of Springsteen labelled as “Nice Price”, bought from a shop in his native Bolton. “Till I was 20,” he said, “I probably listened to nothing else. He made me feel like life was an endless Saturday night.”
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-4
Colleen Murphy and Badly Drawn Boy talk about Bruce Springsteen at a Classic Album Sundays event in Shoreditch, east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
During a break, I fell into conversation with three members of the congregation. Gareth Ragg, 29, from Norwich, recalled: “At school, all the cool kids had records. It was a badge of honour.”
“Vinyl is tangible,” said his friend Nicky Smiles, 29. “And it’s the medium the records we listen to were actually made in.” She had bought her first record at the age of 25: Gram Parsons’ first solo album GP, originally released in 1973, buffed up and given the 180g treatment in 2007.
“There’s a commitment there,” added 28-year-old Liam Hart. “You bought it,” he said, with an implied wonderment. “You own it.”
At 9 o’clock, Murphy cued up the first track from 1975’s Born To Run, which was to be played in its entirety. Many of the women reclined, and kept their eyes closed. Some of the men conducted with sweeping hand gestures; others sat stock-still, with straight backs and expressions of deep concentration, as if to underline the significance of what they were hearing. The record – manufactured, I later discovered, at a plant in Averton, in north-western France, and played on a Rega P9 turntable (£1,600 on eBay) with a Dynavector 17D3 cartridge (£650) – foregrounded parts of the music that in other formats might be submerged: not least, the glockenspiel parts played by Roy Bittan and the late Danny Federici, which heighten the songs’ sense of sweeping romance and damaged innocence.
At the end of each track, the audience broke into delighted applause.
** * * *
————————————————————
The sound that can trigger such an awed reaction is founded on a production process essentially unchanged in 70 years. First, the original music – in the form of master tapes, or digital files – is cut into a lacquer of malleable plastic with a texture like that of nail varnish. This is the delicate stage of mastering, which Optimal carries out in a converted Catholic church in downtown Röbel. When Peter Runge showed me around, three cutting lathes were carving the grooves for the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s live album Sun Bear concerts, the American indie-rock band Warpaint’s first album The Fool, and a record by the San Francisco psychedelicists Quicksilver Messenger Service, which droned away in a corner. Each mastering machine was connected to an old East German Robotron microcomputer: the communist version of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. One had been attached to the first cutting lathe that Optimal had acquired. It worked perfectly well, said Runge, so the same set-up had
been replicated on two more machines.
At this stage, what vinyl production requires can collide with the expectations of people used to the simplicities of digital sound. “You sometimes have to educate people,” said Völkel. “Like, ‘Don’t send us a CD master of the loudest techno music and expect that to be cuttable on a lacquer.’ (The high and low frequencies associated with this type of music can overheat the cutting lathe and cause the mastering machinery to shut down; pushing the process to its limits is the origin of some records being called “hot cuts”.) It can come down to things like that if you deal with product managers who are 23.”
After mastering, the acetate disc is sprayed with atomised silver and dipped in chemicals, creating a metallic cast of the original disc known as the father. Another metal disc, called the mother, is cast from this one. The mother is then used to create several mirror-image “sons”, or “stampers”, which are taken to the presses to imprint the grooves on heated vinyl. Every stage of the process, up to the point at which the records are tucked into their sleeves, is closely monitored. Optimal’s payroll includes a handful of people who listen closely to music all day, but this job is the reverse of what happens at Classic Album Sundays: the task of these listeners is to blank out the content, remain twitchily alert and check for any audible faults.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-5The Optimal vinyl pressing factory is the biggest in Europe, according to its staff. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt
In the US, where there are only around a dozen pressing plants, the average waiting time between music arriving at a factory and finished records emerging used to be about four weeks. Now, it runs to three months – which, in a world where musicians are used to snap-releasing their material online, can create complications. At Optimal, record companies must block book production as much as a year in advance, often before they know the details of what they will be releasing.
If the demand for vinyl continues to increase, what will happen when the orders begin to outstrip capacity? And what of the inevitable prospect of old presses reaching the limits of reconditioning and simply dying of old age? As far as anyone knows, the last new machines were created in the early 1980s. Presses now change hands for around £20,000, double what they cost 10 years ago. But sooner or later, companies such as Optimal will surely have to start thinking about fresh machinery.
“We have heard about new machines, but we have not seen any,” said Runge. “There are rumours. People claim they have a new one. But then you hear from other people, ‘No – that’s not a new one. That’s an old one with a new control system.’ Which is exactly what we have here.
“A new press would cost between 10 and 20 times as much as an old one. And it has to pay off. If that took 30 years, no one would lend you the money. And that’s the reason nobody’s doing it right now. But if another 10 or 20 of our machines break down, and are unrepairable, then we’ll have no choice.”
Runge is always quietly hunting for new machines. “We regularly get inquiries about selling presses,” he said. “But we never say yes.” At one point, he half-joked about taking a working holiday in Cuba, where there might be old presses bought from the Soviet Union. Lately, he had looked even further afield. “We tried to get presses from Zimbabwe. I had a contact there, and we put in a bid. But I never got an answer.”
We got in his company Audi A4 and drove to Berlin. Just behind the gear stick was his smartphone: he had one or two MP3s on it that had been taken from CDs, but he never bought music from iTunes, or streamed stuff on Spotify. The way that one’s listening habits are monitored and then turned into recommendations jangled his East German nerves.
“I don’t want someone else monitoring what I’m listening to,” he said. “Some time soon they will categorise your taste – what music you like, what movies you see – and say, ‘You’re dangerous!’”
He was not a fan of Facebook, or Twitter. “The internet would have been the wet dream of the Stasi,” he said.
After an hour’s drive, we pulled into a darkening Berlin, and he dropped me at my hotel on Kastanienallee, the somewhat gentrified bohemian street that runs through the heart of Prenzlauer Berg. Across the road was one of the city’s scores of record shops: Musik Department. On its walls were the kitsch-looking sleeves of old compilation albums put together in tribute to the city: Das Ist Berlin, Berlin Bei Nacht.
I don’t want someone else monitoring what I’m listening to … The internet would have been the wet dream of the Stasi
Peter Runge
The shop was empty and about to close; the sole member of staff on duty was 41-year-old Falko Teichmann, a Berliner who splits his working life between being a DJ and putting in a couple of evenings a week behind the counter. He had heard of the plant at Röbel. “People have pointed it out to me from the highway,” he said. “Everyone who’s involved with vinyl knows that a lot of pressing plants closed down, so it’s almost like a monument.”
At the front of a nearby rack was a copy of Led Zeppelin II, part of the new reissue series manufactured at Optimal, that Colleen Murphy had enthused about. Teichmann, though, looked troubled. “This is an aspect of the whole vinyl renaissance or whatever you want to call it that’s a bit worrying,” he said. “It gets quite absurd. Twenty years ago, people gave their vinyl records away. Then they bought the CDs. Then they probably bought box sets because of the bonus tracks. Now, they’re buying the vinyl represses all over again. It’s just old wine in new bottles.”
For all his doubts, he loved vinyl and wouldn’t play music on any other format. “Something happens to me more and more frequently,” he said. “When I DJ, I go on after someone younger, and usually they’ve been using laptops. A lot of them just play MP3s. And I swear to God: on a couple of occasions, they’ve played their last track, I’ve cued up mine, and I play the first vinyl record, and it’s almost like the music starts to breathe again.” Recently he had heard two French kids playing digital files of 1950s rockabilly singles. “I was like, are you serious? It sounded horrible: the bass was hardly there. The treble was painful to the ear. It was awful.”
Enough young people bought records from the shop to reassure him that vinyl would endure, but he agreed that the industry would struggle to survive as its machinery grows old. Teichmann had lately heard a rumour from a friend of a friend. “They said someone had told them that some big companies were getting together to make new presses,” he told me. But he had heard nothing more.
We talked about the process of making records; I gushed blearily about the impressive workmanship I had seen that day at the plant.
“It’s all worth it,” Teichmann said simply. “It just sounds better, doesn’t it?”
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread (https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e27994d3d3) | 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=e27994d3d3&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
Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris | Music | The Guardian
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback
** Vinyl’s difficult comeback | John Harris
————————————————————
On an industrial estate in Röbel, 90 miles north of Berlin, the vinyl presses at the Optimal factory were grinding and pumping away. They made a percussive racket – regular clunks, wheezes, and hisses, underlain by a droning hum – and created a distinct aroma, sharp and metallic, suggestive of steam engines and old cars: not instantly recognisable to a British visitor like me, perhaps, but the singular smell of things being made. My guide to the Optimal plant was its operations director, Peter Runge. Together, we watched copies of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Live From KCRW (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/01/cave-seeds-kcrw-goat-ballroom-review) tumble from one of the machines. Across a narrow aisle, a press dedicated to seven-inch records was spitting out copies of The Boy From New York City (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svztw0okXKY&noredirect=1) , a 1964 single by the Ad Libs, a soul group from Bayonne, New Jersey. A few yards away sat fresh stock
of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/30/rumours-fleetwood-mac) . Next to those was a growing pile of the album Clandestine by the Swedish death metal band Entombed (http://www.metalreviews.com/reviews/album/1310) , being pressed on purple vinyl. Beside each machine, bins were collecting surplus plastic shorn off the edges of each disc, to be fed back into the production process.
“Instant recycling!” said Runge, who stared at the factory’s operations through rimless glasses. He grew up, he told me, in Rostock, in the old German Democratic Republic. When he was 19, he applied for an ausreiseantrag – an East German exit visa, the same day as the East German premier Erich Honecker visited West Berlin. This modest act of subversion led to an appointment with the Stasi, and he was barred from going to university. So he got a job in the university’s workshop, helping to build electronic prototypes, where he gained a practical understanding of engineering. When the Berlin Wall fell (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/06/-sp-fall-berlin-wall-what-it-meant-to-be-there) , two years later, he belatedly became an undergraduate at the same institution, and eventually earned a PhD in industrial maintenance. He joined Optimal Media in 1997, was put in charge of “process optimisation and re-engineering” and given the job of setting up a production planning
system. Now 46, he oversees the manufacture of DVDs, CDs and books, but the task in which he takes the most pleasure is supervising the production of vinyl records, in what he and his colleagues claim is Europe’s biggest pressing plant. Their clients are split between the major record companies – who have trusted Optimal with the work of such titans as the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and David Bowie – and the independent companies who kept the vinyl format alive through the 1990s and early 2000s while the rest of a terrified music industry embraced digital technology. Optimal’s machines run 24 hours day, for most of the year, and production capacity has to be booked up to a year in advance. And every hiss and wheeze of the company’s machines attests to a story that, 20 or so years ago, would have seemed unthinkable: the renaissance of the vinyl record.
In the first half of 2014, officially registered sales of vinyl in the US stood at around 4m, confirming an increase of more than 40% compared to the same period in 2013. In the UK, this year’s accredited sales will come in at around 1.2m, more than 50% up on last year. That may represent a tiny fraction of the industry’s estimated sales of recorded music, but still, a means of listening to music essentially invented in the 19th century and long since presumed to be dead is growing at speed, and the presses at Optimal – along with similar facilities smattered across the UK, mainland Europe, the US and beyond – are set to grind and pump on, into the future.
“Isn’t it strange?” Runge mused. “I’m an automation engineer. I never thought I’d be dealing with vinyl. It’s unexpected. But it’s also unexpectable.” He shouted this over the din of the machinery. Each press sat in a space not much more than four metres square. Two circular paper labels were mechanically plucked from one end, while tiny vinyl pellets were sucked into a steam-driven heating process. The result was a hunk of plastic with the circumference of a beer mat, heated to 130C, to which the labels were attached, while 50 tonnes of hydraulic pressure squashed and spread it into a disc. Metal stampers pressed against either side, and it was quickly cooled to 40C. With another clunk, the finished product was dropped on to a spindle, ready to be inserted in its sleeve. The whole cycle had taken 27 seconds. Each day, the factory makes somewhere between 50,000 and 55,000 records.
In the first half of 2014, UK sales of vinyl are expected to be 1.2m, more than 50% up on the same period last year
Hanging over everything Runge showed me was an awkward question. While demand for records is increasing year by year, Optimal’s stock of machinery is old, and getting older. New presses are unaffordable, unless the big companies were to invest, but vinyl is still too small a sector of the market for them to be convinced. The kind of painstaking maintenance and technical ingenuity one might think of as the Cadillacs-in-Cuba model keep the industry going. But for how long?
** * * *
————————————————————
When former music journalist Michael Haentjes started the independent German label Edel in 1986, he relied on other companies to press his records. “They usually didn’t get him the best delivery times,” Runge said. “They put him to the end of the queue. So by the 90s he said, ‘No – I’m sick of it. I’ll build my own plant.’” Thanks to economic policies aimed at assisting reunification, Haentjes, who was from Hamburg, decided to locate his new factory on an industrial estate in Röbel, an unremarkable East German town in the Mecklenburg Lake District (20 minutes’ drive away is Waren, a spa resort where Soviet nuclear missiles were located as recently as 1988).
At that point, it looked as though vinyl would soon become obsolete. Records had first been superseded by cassettes, which were portable (they had become indispensable with the introduction of the personal stereo) but chronically unreliable. With the arrival of the compact disc in 1983 – introduced to consumers with the lure of cleaner sound and the entirely specious promise of indestructibility – old-style records looked to be finished. At a music industry conference held in Athens in 1981, executives had responded to a demonstration of the CD by chanting “The truth is in the groove!” But just over 10 years later, 70.5m CDs were bought in the UK, compared with a miserable 6.2m records.
In that context, Haentjes’s decision to begin pressing records looked ludicrously sentimental. The company bought and installed its first vinyl presses in 1995, to service demand from independent companies producing dance music. DJs still specialised in the art of playing and mixing 12-inch records. Moreover, if a dance single was to be a hit, its progress towards success would often start with its circulation as a limited-edition “white label” record, usually pressed up in the mere hundreds.
These records often sat at the cutting edge of musical fashion, but at the same time, Optimal’s vinyl production lines were redolent of a world that had recently disappeared from view. Then as now, many of its staff – from those who pressed and packed the records to its senior management – were former East German nationals, with vivid memories of life under communism. For them, the advent of the CD had coincided with the last phase of the cold war, so that those little silver discs became a byword for western aspiration, and the kind of technological progress the eastern bloc could not get near (in the GDR, Peter Runge told me, the authorities had approved the release of just three CDs, all of which were produced in the former Czechoslovakia).
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-2
Peter Runge, operations director of the Optimal vinyl pressing factory in Germany. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt
Most of the pressing machines Optimal acquired had come from decommissioned factories, in the decade-long fire sale that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. “When you buy a press, it’s usually inoperative,” said Runge, as we passed giant piles of freshly printed sleeve art for Kraftwerk albums. “A lot of machines won’t work any more, because something is broken, the electronics are missing, or something like that. And then you have to find all the spare parts, or make spare parts – because the company who made the presses no longer exists. Then you have to strip the machine down, and redo all the hydraulics and the electronics.” Engineers from the old East Germany (http://www.theguardian.com/world/germany) , he told me, tend to be very good at this. “They always know how to improvise.”
In the late 1990s, six machines were used for production, while the rest were kept in storage, for spares. But at this point, after years of steady decline, the international market for new vinyl was plummeting. By 2001, the dance music world was increasingly embracing CDs, laptops and MP3s – the latter could instantly be circulated around the world, bypassing the old ritual of white-label pressings altogether. Now, Runge began discussions with Optimal’s senior staff about whether they should leave records behind. “There were a lot of meetings,” he remembered. “We asked ourselves: how long will we make records? Should we continue to manufacture vinyl? But then we decided that it had to be part of our service.”
In 2007, Optimal was presented with the chance to buy 15 more Swedish presses from Audio Services Limited (ASL), a company based in a backstreet in east London that was facing liquidation. “We had to decide whether to get the machines and continue doing this on a larger scale, or leave the business small, like it was.” At the very least, they thought, some of the new machines could be used for the ASL business that would come as part of the deal, while others would be a much-needed source of spares. “So we decided, ‘Get the machines,’” said Runge. He cracked an understated smile. “And that was a good decision, I think.”
Runge made regular trips to the plant at Orsman Road, N1, where he inspected what was on offer – not just presses, but an archive of the metallic master copies of stampers used to make thousands of different records, by artists including Simon & Garfunkel and the Manic Street Preachers, all of which could conceivably be put back into production. And he immersed himself in negotiations with the factory’s owners.
“We bought everything,” he told me. “We emptied the building.” The presses were loaded on to two trucks, with the whole of ASL’s archive on hundreds of pallets, and ferried across the North Sea to Röbel.
The gamble was worth taking. During the 2000s, buyers had increasingly expressed a desire to hear music rendered as perfectly as possible. New vinyl-only labels had started to produce albums intended to capitalise on this interest, and on rock music’s inbuilt nostalgia. A new format had been created – 180g records as opposed to the standard weight of 120g – and to counter the digital streaming culture, these were records you’d want to own, presented in luxuriant box sets, complete with hardback books and exact-replica artwork. In 2008, vinyl had been given its own annual celebration: Record Store Day, on the third Saturday in April, when record companies would create thousands of limited-edition records coveted by collectors. Meanwhile, astute independent companies such as Rough Trade, Domino and Bella Union had begun accompanying their records with exclusive download cards, so that anyone buying them could also access digital versions of the music – and thus, if they wished,
not just put their new music on phones and iPods, but keep their records pristine.
“The majors hopped on the wagon,” said Julia Völkel, 32, Optimal’s senior sales manager, another former East German, who joined the company in 2000. “And they were very interested in doing box sets. They found out that catalogue releases sold very well as gifts …”
“… And nowadays,” said Runge, “we’re 100% full. We’re running, always, on the brink of maximum capacity.”
In a meeting room near the factory, Runge projected a graph showing average monthly output between 1999 and 2014. When the line got to 2011, it suddenly shot upwards: in only three years, production more than doubled, and the risk Optimal had taken in 2007 paid off. By 2013, the company had 27 active presses, manufacturing records around the clock. This year (2015), with the addition of two machines that have been brought out of storage, the company says it will press 18m records.
** * * *
————————————————————
In October 2010, on a Sunday evening, 14 people gathered in the wood-panelled upstairs room of the Hanbury Arms, on Linton Street in Islington, north London. Two of those present paid an entrance fee of £5; the rest were invited guests. They had come to listen to a vinyl copy of Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last album. The event was the first of a series called Classic Album Sundays, and the idea was simple enough: a small crowd would come together to spend a couple of hours eating, drinking and talking, before they took their seats, snapped into silence, and listened to both sides of an album played on hair-raisingly expensive equipment.
A similar concept had already been tried in Liverpool, under the title Living To Music, where, in August, a DJ and producer called Greg Wilson had gathered people to listen to a vinyl copy of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon. He invited other people to do the same thing at the same time – 9pm on a Sunday – and then share their experience online. The idea reflected a key factor in vinyl’s revival: Spotify and iTunes propagated a mode of listening whereby people could flick between tracks on a whim and, for the most part, shut out others with the aid of headphones; vinyl represented the option of really listening to a whole record – often in company.
The London event was organised by an American named Colleen Murphy, who listened to the whole of Abbey Road lying on the floor. It was reviewed by the music magazine the Word, in which Kate Mossman described 40 minutes when “eyes are focused in the middle distance, unseeing, as though every sense is shutting down in service of the ears”, and a picture captured the attendees lost in music, stroking their chins, covering their eyes, or horizontal. In early 2012, Classic Album Sundays was the subject of an item on the BBC Breakfast TV programme. Ever since, most of Murphy’s events have been sell-outs, and there are now offshoots in Glasgow, New York, Oslo and Portland, Maine.
Murphy has lived in Britain since 1999. She DJs as under the name Cosmo, produces and remixes music, and runs a vinyl‑only label called Bitches Brew. At New York University, she became the programme director of the renowned college radio station WNYU – and in the early 1990s, she began an enduring friendship with David Mancuso, who pioneered parties in Manhattan known as the Loft, where he played music through ambitious audio set-ups, only ever on vinyl.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-3
Colleen Murphy keeps about 10,000 records at her home in east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
When Murphy first visited one of Mancuso’s events, she told me: “I couldn’t believe how some of the records that I knew sounded so different.” She decided to try the Loft idea in London.
** ***
————————————————————
Early in December, I visited Murphy at her home in Hackney, east London. One downstairs room was lined with somewhere in the region of 10,000 records, arranged alphabetically, by artist. In the lounge, a flatscreen TV was obscured by audio kit including two Klipsch speakers, encased in wooden stands, which sell at around £6,000 for a pair and have the same dimensions as a large fridge; and an Ace Spacedeck turntable (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/07/vinyl-turntables-tested-by-fort-romeau) manufactured by Nottingham Analogue Systems (£1,500).
After making tea, she jumped up to put on Jeff Buckley’s Last Goodbye, from his only completed album, Grace, released in 1994. The song – built around swirling guitar lines, and Buckley’s dizzying vocal – was transformed. The kick-drum, which drives the song along but too often sounds buried in the mix, was suddenly at the heart of what I was hearing. The Guardian’s photographer delightedly pointed out an element of the music he had never heard before, rattled out on the bell of a cymbal. Buckley’s singing was so vivid as to evoke his physical presence.
For those who grew up in the 90s, this experience is new. “Some of the Classic Album Sundays regulars are hearing an album they might not know anything about, and they’re sharing it with friends, on an amazing system,” Murphy said. “They never did this before. Most people in their 20s grew up ripping stuff from online, and listening with earbuds. They didn’t say, ‘Hey come over – I’ve got the new Beatles album, let’s listen to it.’
“Things sound different. They take on a life of their own; they come at you. Vinyl (http://www.theguardian.com/music/vinyl) brings something else to it. It has a total warmth to it. Everyone talks about that, but it’s true. People often say, ‘I know that album but I’ve never heard it like that before.’ When you listen to CDs after you’ve been listening to vinyl for a long time, it sounds a bit … synthetic.”
The science behind this distinction is the subject of passionate discussion. In a newly published book Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (http://www.roughtrade.com/albums/89595) , by Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward, Berlin-based mastering engineer Andreas Lubich traces vinyl’s supposed warmth to “the flaws of the analogue in comparison with the digital … It’s about distortion, and in the best case, harmonic distortion.” Another explanation centres on the fact that analogue technology captures a greater range of sound than most comparatively crude digital equipment, a point made down the years by Neil Young – who once damned the music industry’s approach to recorded sound as follows: “We don’t really need to see the sky in all its detail – just paint that in blue … No one will know.” If there is any certainty on this subject, it probably lies somewhere in the middle of these two theories.
“The other thing with vinyl is, you have to interact with it. You have to engage,” Murphy continued. “You’ve got to flip it. A CD, you can stick in, and walk away, and it turns itself off. But you have to be with a record, sitting in the room. You can’t, like, make dinner. It forces you to listen.”
One of Murphy’s Classic Albums runs took place in a 19th-century church on the Lulworth Estate in Dorset, where she had invited me to introduce Radiohead’s OK Computer (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2007/jun/15/tenyearsofokcomputerandw) . Scores of people sat in the pews and listened to Thom Yorke’s keening vocals, Nick Drake (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/nov/05/nick-drake-requiem-for-a-solitary-man) ’s Five Leaves Left and Neil Young (http://www.theguardian.com/music/neilyoung) ’s Harvest, while candles flickered. The turntable had been set up next to the altar. “At one point, I did say, ‘We worship our music,’” Murphy recalled, with a laugh. “And anyway, the acoustics in old churches are great.”
She bounced up and pulled two vinyl copies of the Beach Boys (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jun/24/brian-wilson-interview) ’ Pet Sounds from her shelves, and played God Only Knows from each one. The first, on a “remastered” version from 1999, sounded underwhelming: compressed, light on bass, palpably small. But the second, on an early 70s pressing which had been packaged up with a largely awful album titled Carl And The Passions – So Tough, was expansive, packed with nuance. The most stunning element was the vocal performance of the late Carl Wilson: so fresh and intimate that it seized my attention as though we were having a conversation.
So not all new vinyl sounds perfect. Indeed, Murphy reckoned, as big labels stampeded to get involved, and inexperienced startups joined them, there was a danger of vinyl’s magic being debased. “Some of what’s coming out is great,” she said. “Because in some ways, the public demand for quality is increasing, and people are making an effort.” She mentioned the ongoing reissues of Led Zeppelin albums, which are manufactured at Optimal. “Jimmy Page was in charge, they’re mastering them from the original tapes – that’s really good. But then there’s other records, and other labels …”
She mentioned an operation based in California. By coincidence, I had just bought one of their supposedly remastered vinyl albums and been so repelled by the sound – thin, full of pops and crackles and excessive sibilance – that I had taken apart my turntable, in search of a fault that was actually in the grooves. “Fucking terrible,” Murphy agreed. “I have a feeling they might even master from MP3. They definitely aren’t mastering from the analogue tape; the sound is too thin. They go on that whole, ‘We do 180g vinyl!’ thing. But I’d rather have something good on lighter vinyl, than a 180g frisbee.”
That evening, Classic Album Sundays hosted a launch for a new Bruce Springsteen box set, spanning seven albums, from 1973’s Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ to 1984’s Born in the USA. It was held at the Blues Kitchen in Shoreditch: one of those faux-American restaurant-bars that attempts to evoke the Deep South, but ends up offering an atmosphere akin to a crowded film set. In a basement room, the event had pulled an audience of around 70, evenly split between the sexes, and spread across the age range.
To begin, Murphy talked about Springsteen with the Manchester singer-songwriter Badly Drawn Boy (aka Damon Gough), who chose a song from each album, and rhapsodised about his formative experience of listening to knock-down vinyl editions of Springsteen labelled as “Nice Price”, bought from a shop in his native Bolton. “Till I was 20,” he said, “I probably listened to nothing else. He made me feel like life was an endless Saturday night.”
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-4
Colleen Murphy and Badly Drawn Boy talk about Bruce Springsteen at a Classic Album Sundays event in Shoreditch, east London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
During a break, I fell into conversation with three members of the congregation. Gareth Ragg, 29, from Norwich, recalled: “At school, all the cool kids had records. It was a badge of honour.”
“Vinyl is tangible,” said his friend Nicky Smiles, 29. “And it’s the medium the records we listen to were actually made in.” She had bought her first record at the age of 25: Gram Parsons’ first solo album GP, originally released in 1973, buffed up and given the 180g treatment in 2007.
“There’s a commitment there,” added 28-year-old Liam Hart. “You bought it,” he said, with an implied wonderment. “You own it.”
At 9 o’clock, Murphy cued up the first track from 1975’s Born To Run, which was to be played in its entirety. Many of the women reclined, and kept their eyes closed. Some of the men conducted with sweeping hand gestures; others sat stock-still, with straight backs and expressions of deep concentration, as if to underline the significance of what they were hearing. The record – manufactured, I later discovered, at a plant in Averton, in north-western France, and played on a Rega P9 turntable (£1,600 on eBay) with a Dynavector 17D3 cartridge (£650) – foregrounded parts of the music that in other formats might be submerged: not least, the glockenspiel parts played by Roy Bittan and the late Danny Federici, which heighten the songs’ sense of sweeping romance and damaged innocence.
At the end of each track, the audience broke into delighted applause.
** * * *
————————————————————
The sound that can trigger such an awed reaction is founded on a production process essentially unchanged in 70 years. First, the original music – in the form of master tapes, or digital files – is cut into a lacquer of malleable plastic with a texture like that of nail varnish. This is the delicate stage of mastering, which Optimal carries out in a converted Catholic church in downtown Röbel. When Peter Runge showed me around, three cutting lathes were carving the grooves for the jazz pianist Keith Jarrett’s live album Sun Bear concerts, the American indie-rock band Warpaint’s first album The Fool, and a record by the San Francisco psychedelicists Quicksilver Messenger Service, which droned away in a corner. Each mastering machine was connected to an old East German Robotron microcomputer: the communist version of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. One had been attached to the first cutting lathe that Optimal had acquired. It worked perfectly well, said Runge, so the same set-up had
been replicated on two more machines.
At this stage, what vinyl production requires can collide with the expectations of people used to the simplicities of digital sound. “You sometimes have to educate people,” said Völkel. “Like, ‘Don’t send us a CD master of the loudest techno music and expect that to be cuttable on a lacquer.’ (The high and low frequencies associated with this type of music can overheat the cutting lathe and cause the mastering machinery to shut down; pushing the process to its limits is the origin of some records being called “hot cuts”.) It can come down to things like that if you deal with product managers who are 23.”
After mastering, the acetate disc is sprayed with atomised silver and dipped in chemicals, creating a metallic cast of the original disc known as the father. Another metal disc, called the mother, is cast from this one. The mother is then used to create several mirror-image “sons”, or “stampers”, which are taken to the presses to imprint the grooves on heated vinyl. Every stage of the process, up to the point at which the records are tucked into their sleeves, is closely monitored. Optimal’s payroll includes a handful of people who listen closely to music all day, but this job is the reverse of what happens at Classic Album Sundays: the task of these listeners is to blank out the content, remain twitchily alert and check for any audible faults.
safari-reader://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jan/07/-sp-vinyls-difficult-comeback#img-5The Optimal vinyl pressing factory is the biggest in Europe, according to its staff. Photograph: Christian Jungeblodt
In the US, where there are only around a dozen pressing plants, the average waiting time between music arriving at a factory and finished records emerging used to be about four weeks. Now, it runs to three months – which, in a world where musicians are used to snap-releasing their material online, can create complications. At Optimal, record companies must block book production as much as a year in advance, often before they know the details of what they will be releasing.
If the demand for vinyl continues to increase, what will happen when the orders begin to outstrip capacity? And what of the inevitable prospect of old presses reaching the limits of reconditioning and simply dying of old age? As far as anyone knows, the last new machines were created in the early 1980s. Presses now change hands for around £20,000, double what they cost 10 years ago. But sooner or later, companies such as Optimal will surely have to start thinking about fresh machinery.
“We have heard about new machines, but we have not seen any,” said Runge. “There are rumours. People claim they have a new one. But then you hear from other people, ‘No – that’s not a new one. That’s an old one with a new control system.’ Which is exactly what we have here.
“A new press would cost between 10 and 20 times as much as an old one. And it has to pay off. If that took 30 years, no one would lend you the money. And that’s the reason nobody’s doing it right now. But if another 10 or 20 of our machines break down, and are unrepairable, then we’ll have no choice.”
Runge is always quietly hunting for new machines. “We regularly get inquiries about selling presses,” he said. “But we never say yes.” At one point, he half-joked about taking a working holiday in Cuba, where there might be old presses bought from the Soviet Union. Lately, he had looked even further afield. “We tried to get presses from Zimbabwe. I had a contact there, and we put in a bid. But I never got an answer.”
We got in his company Audi A4 and drove to Berlin. Just behind the gear stick was his smartphone: he had one or two MP3s on it that had been taken from CDs, but he never bought music from iTunes, or streamed stuff on Spotify. The way that one’s listening habits are monitored and then turned into recommendations jangled his East German nerves.
“I don’t want someone else monitoring what I’m listening to,” he said. “Some time soon they will categorise your taste – what music you like, what movies you see – and say, ‘You’re dangerous!’”
He was not a fan of Facebook, or Twitter. “The internet would have been the wet dream of the Stasi,” he said.
After an hour’s drive, we pulled into a darkening Berlin, and he dropped me at my hotel on Kastanienallee, the somewhat gentrified bohemian street that runs through the heart of Prenzlauer Berg. Across the road was one of the city’s scores of record shops: Musik Department. On its walls were the kitsch-looking sleeves of old compilation albums put together in tribute to the city: Das Ist Berlin, Berlin Bei Nacht.
I don’t want someone else monitoring what I’m listening to … The internet would have been the wet dream of the Stasi
Peter Runge
The shop was empty and about to close; the sole member of staff on duty was 41-year-old Falko Teichmann, a Berliner who splits his working life between being a DJ and putting in a couple of evenings a week behind the counter. He had heard of the plant at Röbel. “People have pointed it out to me from the highway,” he said. “Everyone who’s involved with vinyl knows that a lot of pressing plants closed down, so it’s almost like a monument.”
At the front of a nearby rack was a copy of Led Zeppelin II, part of the new reissue series manufactured at Optimal, that Colleen Murphy had enthused about. Teichmann, though, looked troubled. “This is an aspect of the whole vinyl renaissance or whatever you want to call it that’s a bit worrying,” he said. “It gets quite absurd. Twenty years ago, people gave their vinyl records away. Then they bought the CDs. Then they probably bought box sets because of the bonus tracks. Now, they’re buying the vinyl represses all over again. It’s just old wine in new bottles.”
For all his doubts, he loved vinyl and wouldn’t play music on any other format. “Something happens to me more and more frequently,” he said. “When I DJ, I go on after someone younger, and usually they’ve been using laptops. A lot of them just play MP3s. And I swear to God: on a couple of occasions, they’ve played their last track, I’ve cued up mine, and I play the first vinyl record, and it’s almost like the music starts to breathe again.” Recently he had heard two French kids playing digital files of 1950s rockabilly singles. “I was like, are you serious? It sounded horrible: the bass was hardly there. The treble was painful to the ear. It was awful.”
Enough young people bought records from the shop to reassure him that vinyl would endure, but he agreed that the industry would struggle to survive as its machinery grows old. Teichmann had lately heard a rumour from a friend of a friend. “They said someone had told them that some big companies were getting together to make new presses,” he told me. But he had heard nothing more.
We talked about the process of making records; I gushed blearily about the impressive workmanship I had seen that day at the plant.
“It’s all worth it,” Teichmann said simply. “It just sounds better, doesn’t it?”
• Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread (https://twitter.com/@gdnlongread)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e27994d3d3) | 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=e27994d3d3&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
RIP Martha Glaser December 3, 2014
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://errollgarner.com/
https://errollgarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martha-glaser-memorial-statement.pdfWe deeply regret to announce the death of Martha Glaser on December 3, 2014. Martha Glaser was Erroll Garner’s longtime manager and thanks to her diligence and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings are now being archived, digitized and assessed. Please read the full statement (https://errollgarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martha-glaser-memorial-statement.pdf) .
Martha Glaser 1921-2014
Pioneering Jazz music manager and civil rights advocate, Martha Glaser, was born February 15, 1921 in
Duquesne, Pennsylvania, daughter of Samuel and Pearl Farkas, Hungarian immigrants, and sister to Bella Rosenberg. Martha Glaser (nee Farkas) attended Southwestern High School in Detroit and earned her Bachelor’s degree in Government with three minors in Economics, Sociology and History from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1942.
Following graduation, she worked as Publicity Director, for the Metropolitan Detroit Youth Council, and in the publicity department for the Greater Detroit and Wayne County Industrial Union Council, where she aided programs to maintain food subsidies, and mobilized community leaders and labor and non-labor groups. She additionally worked as Compliance Officer for the War Manpower Commission. In an effort to support labor organizations and workers’ education, she studied radio writing in Detroit to “master the preparation of colorful documentary material in either narrative or dramatic form.”
Ms. Glaser planned to pursue a career in public affairs and journalism, but following the Detroit riots of 1943 she became increasingly active in supporting human rights, taking a central role in the formation of the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee to combat race hatred. Calling to “ensure the right of all people to live in our nation without discrimination,” Ms. Glaser advocated, “a coordinated approach to unleash the optimum weight of the entertainment industry in the offensive against race hate.”
Ms. Glaser was the first Jewish American woman to be hired by the city of Chicago to work for the Human Rights commission to oppose discrimination. As part of that effort, she organized Jazz concerts working first with Norman Granz, promoter of “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” (himself an advocate for the growing civil rights movement) and subsequently with agent/impresario Joe Glaser. She then went to work for the Disc Corporation of America as a publicist and organized the Jazz for justice tours throughout the late 1940’s.
In 1948 she created her own music management company and settled permanently in New York City, where the Jazz scene was in full flower on 52nd Street. It was in that milieu that Ms. Glaser met pianist Erroll Garner, and the course of her life was set. Mr. Garner was a self- taught prodigy who astounded the music world with his seemingly limitless ability to
page1image20968
improvise on the keyboard, despite a lack of any formal music training. While Garner was an artist, not a businessman, Ms. Glaser found that by combining her love for Jazz, her civil rights advocacy, and her innate business acumen, she was able, after signing an exclusive contract with Mr. Garner, to advance his career onto a level of prestige hitherto unavailable to Jazz artists.
Garner’s 1955 composition “Misty”, quickly became a classic, and was the twelfth most played ASCAP song of the 20th Century, due in no small part to Ms. Glaser’s untiring efforts to promote and maintain Mr. Garner’s image as a world-class composer. Her success in that effort is evidenced in his long list of laurels, including a triumphant appearance at Carnegie Hall, winning the French Prix du Disque, and securing the only Jazz music booking contract with classical music agent Sol Hurok. Mr. Garner shared that roster with Andres Segovia, Isaac Stern, and the Bolshoi Ballet.
Ms. Glaser’s vision encompassed recording as well, and she was a pioneer in producing Mr. Garner’s discs in the then-nascent Long-Playing format. In a singular instance, she instinctively secured a simple tape recording of one of Mr. Garner’s trio shows, in Carmel California, and when it was released as “Concert by the Sea” on Columbia, it became one of the largest selling Jazz releases of all time.
Throughout this unbroken record of success, Ms. Glaser never lost sight of her early devotion to equal rights; She inserted a clause into Mr. Garner’s contracts prohibiting segregation of his audiences, a decade before the Civil Rights Act declared the practice illegal. Mr. Garner’s worldwide fame notwithstanding, Ms. Glaser shunned publicity herself, although her record of success in the music business, which was dominated in the 1950’s by males in executive positions, is testimony to her tenacious hold on a position of equality among her colleagues.
Ms. Glaser was also a pioneer in the concept of musical artists owning the copyrights to their own work, an unusual concept at the time, and one of great benefit to Mr. Garner, who reciprocated with twenty seven years of loyalty to Ms. Glaser and their co-owned publishing and production company, Octave Music. After Mr. Garner’s career was cut short by his untimely death in 1977, Ms. Glaser maintained her tireless effort to keep his music in it’s premiere position, securing hundreds of licensed usages and overseeing a continual stream of LP and CD releases drawn for her trove of studio productions of the pianist’s work.
This stream of releases continues. Thanks to Martha’s diligence and perseverance and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings, including many newly discovered unreleased treasures as well as his first known recording in 1937 and his final concert, are now in the process of being archived, digitized and assessed. These recordings, photographs, video, symphonic scores, memorabilia, legal and civil rights documentation span the tandem careers of two unique individuals, one an original jazz improviser, and the other a true innovator in the areas of human rights, the arts, and business.
Ms.Glaser is survived by her niece, Susan Rosenberg, Susan’s partner Dawn, and their daughter Molly.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=39883b27fd) | 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=39883b27fd&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
RIP Martha Glaser December 3, 2014
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://errollgarner.com/
https://errollgarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martha-glaser-memorial-statement.pdfWe deeply regret to announce the death of Martha Glaser on December 3, 2014. Martha Glaser was Erroll Garner’s longtime manager and thanks to her diligence and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings are now being archived, digitized and assessed. Please read the full statement (https://errollgarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martha-glaser-memorial-statement.pdf) .
Martha Glaser 1921-2014
Pioneering Jazz music manager and civil rights advocate, Martha Glaser, was born February 15, 1921 in
Duquesne, Pennsylvania, daughter of Samuel and Pearl Farkas, Hungarian immigrants, and sister to Bella Rosenberg. Martha Glaser (nee Farkas) attended Southwestern High School in Detroit and earned her Bachelor’s degree in Government with three minors in Economics, Sociology and History from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1942.
Following graduation, she worked as Publicity Director, for the Metropolitan Detroit Youth Council, and in the publicity department for the Greater Detroit and Wayne County Industrial Union Council, where she aided programs to maintain food subsidies, and mobilized community leaders and labor and non-labor groups. She additionally worked as Compliance Officer for the War Manpower Commission. In an effort to support labor organizations and workers’ education, she studied radio writing in Detroit to “master the preparation of colorful documentary material in either narrative or dramatic form.”
Ms. Glaser planned to pursue a career in public affairs and journalism, but following the Detroit riots of 1943 she became increasingly active in supporting human rights, taking a central role in the formation of the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee to combat race hatred. Calling to “ensure the right of all people to live in our nation without discrimination,” Ms. Glaser advocated, “a coordinated approach to unleash the optimum weight of the entertainment industry in the offensive against race hate.”
Ms. Glaser was the first Jewish American woman to be hired by the city of Chicago to work for the Human Rights commission to oppose discrimination. As part of that effort, she organized Jazz concerts working first with Norman Granz, promoter of “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” (himself an advocate for the growing civil rights movement) and subsequently with agent/impresario Joe Glaser. She then went to work for the Disc Corporation of America as a publicist and organized the Jazz for justice tours throughout the late 1940’s.
In 1948 she created her own music management company and settled permanently in New York City, where the Jazz scene was in full flower on 52nd Street. It was in that milieu that Ms. Glaser met pianist Erroll Garner, and the course of her life was set. Mr. Garner was a self- taught prodigy who astounded the music world with his seemingly limitless ability to
page1image20968
improvise on the keyboard, despite a lack of any formal music training. While Garner was an artist, not a businessman, Ms. Glaser found that by combining her love for Jazz, her civil rights advocacy, and her innate business acumen, she was able, after signing an exclusive contract with Mr. Garner, to advance his career onto a level of prestige hitherto unavailable to Jazz artists.
Garner’s 1955 composition “Misty”, quickly became a classic, and was the twelfth most played ASCAP song of the 20th Century, due in no small part to Ms. Glaser’s untiring efforts to promote and maintain Mr. Garner’s image as a world-class composer. Her success in that effort is evidenced in his long list of laurels, including a triumphant appearance at Carnegie Hall, winning the French Prix du Disque, and securing the only Jazz music booking contract with classical music agent Sol Hurok. Mr. Garner shared that roster with Andres Segovia, Isaac Stern, and the Bolshoi Ballet.
Ms. Glaser’s vision encompassed recording as well, and she was a pioneer in producing Mr. Garner’s discs in the then-nascent Long-Playing format. In a singular instance, she instinctively secured a simple tape recording of one of Mr. Garner’s trio shows, in Carmel California, and when it was released as “Concert by the Sea” on Columbia, it became one of the largest selling Jazz releases of all time.
Throughout this unbroken record of success, Ms. Glaser never lost sight of her early devotion to equal rights; She inserted a clause into Mr. Garner’s contracts prohibiting segregation of his audiences, a decade before the Civil Rights Act declared the practice illegal. Mr. Garner’s worldwide fame notwithstanding, Ms. Glaser shunned publicity herself, although her record of success in the music business, which was dominated in the 1950’s by males in executive positions, is testimony to her tenacious hold on a position of equality among her colleagues.
Ms. Glaser was also a pioneer in the concept of musical artists owning the copyrights to their own work, an unusual concept at the time, and one of great benefit to Mr. Garner, who reciprocated with twenty seven years of loyalty to Ms. Glaser and their co-owned publishing and production company, Octave Music. After Mr. Garner’s career was cut short by his untimely death in 1977, Ms. Glaser maintained her tireless effort to keep his music in it’s premiere position, securing hundreds of licensed usages and overseeing a continual stream of LP and CD releases drawn for her trove of studio productions of the pianist’s work.
This stream of releases continues. Thanks to Martha’s diligence and perseverance and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings, including many newly discovered unreleased treasures as well as his first known recording in 1937 and his final concert, are now in the process of being archived, digitized and assessed. These recordings, photographs, video, symphonic scores, memorabilia, legal and civil rights documentation span the tandem careers of two unique individuals, one an original jazz improviser, and the other a true innovator in the areas of human rights, the arts, and business.
Ms.Glaser is survived by her niece, Susan Rosenberg, Susan’s partner Dawn, and their daughter Molly.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=39883b27fd) | 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=39883b27fd&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
RIP Martha Glaser December 3, 2014
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://errollgarner.com/
https://errollgarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martha-glaser-memorial-statement.pdfWe deeply regret to announce the death of Martha Glaser on December 3, 2014. Martha Glaser was Erroll Garner’s longtime manager and thanks to her diligence and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings are now being archived, digitized and assessed. Please read the full statement (https://errollgarner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martha-glaser-memorial-statement.pdf) .
Martha Glaser 1921-2014
Pioneering Jazz music manager and civil rights advocate, Martha Glaser, was born February 15, 1921 in
Duquesne, Pennsylvania, daughter of Samuel and Pearl Farkas, Hungarian immigrants, and sister to Bella Rosenberg. Martha Glaser (nee Farkas) attended Southwestern High School in Detroit and earned her Bachelor’s degree in Government with three minors in Economics, Sociology and History from Wayne State University in Detroit in 1942.
Following graduation, she worked as Publicity Director, for the Metropolitan Detroit Youth Council, and in the publicity department for the Greater Detroit and Wayne County Industrial Union Council, where she aided programs to maintain food subsidies, and mobilized community leaders and labor and non-labor groups. She additionally worked as Compliance Officer for the War Manpower Commission. In an effort to support labor organizations and workers’ education, she studied radio writing in Detroit to “master the preparation of colorful documentary material in either narrative or dramatic form.”
Ms. Glaser planned to pursue a career in public affairs and journalism, but following the Detroit riots of 1943 she became increasingly active in supporting human rights, taking a central role in the formation of the Entertainment Industry Emergency Committee to combat race hatred. Calling to “ensure the right of all people to live in our nation without discrimination,” Ms. Glaser advocated, “a coordinated approach to unleash the optimum weight of the entertainment industry in the offensive against race hate.”
Ms. Glaser was the first Jewish American woman to be hired by the city of Chicago to work for the Human Rights commission to oppose discrimination. As part of that effort, she organized Jazz concerts working first with Norman Granz, promoter of “Jazz at the Philharmonic,” (himself an advocate for the growing civil rights movement) and subsequently with agent/impresario Joe Glaser. She then went to work for the Disc Corporation of America as a publicist and organized the Jazz for justice tours throughout the late 1940’s.
In 1948 she created her own music management company and settled permanently in New York City, where the Jazz scene was in full flower on 52nd Street. It was in that milieu that Ms. Glaser met pianist Erroll Garner, and the course of her life was set. Mr. Garner was a self- taught prodigy who astounded the music world with his seemingly limitless ability to
page1image20968
improvise on the keyboard, despite a lack of any formal music training. While Garner was an artist, not a businessman, Ms. Glaser found that by combining her love for Jazz, her civil rights advocacy, and her innate business acumen, she was able, after signing an exclusive contract with Mr. Garner, to advance his career onto a level of prestige hitherto unavailable to Jazz artists.
Garner’s 1955 composition “Misty”, quickly became a classic, and was the twelfth most played ASCAP song of the 20th Century, due in no small part to Ms. Glaser’s untiring efforts to promote and maintain Mr. Garner’s image as a world-class composer. Her success in that effort is evidenced in his long list of laurels, including a triumphant appearance at Carnegie Hall, winning the French Prix du Disque, and securing the only Jazz music booking contract with classical music agent Sol Hurok. Mr. Garner shared that roster with Andres Segovia, Isaac Stern, and the Bolshoi Ballet.
Ms. Glaser’s vision encompassed recording as well, and she was a pioneer in producing Mr. Garner’s discs in the then-nascent Long-Playing format. In a singular instance, she instinctively secured a simple tape recording of one of Mr. Garner’s trio shows, in Carmel California, and when it was released as “Concert by the Sea” on Columbia, it became one of the largest selling Jazz releases of all time.
Throughout this unbroken record of success, Ms. Glaser never lost sight of her early devotion to equal rights; She inserted a clause into Mr. Garner’s contracts prohibiting segregation of his audiences, a decade before the Civil Rights Act declared the practice illegal. Mr. Garner’s worldwide fame notwithstanding, Ms. Glaser shunned publicity herself, although her record of success in the music business, which was dominated in the 1950’s by males in executive positions, is testimony to her tenacious hold on a position of equality among her colleagues.
Ms. Glaser was also a pioneer in the concept of musical artists owning the copyrights to their own work, an unusual concept at the time, and one of great benefit to Mr. Garner, who reciprocated with twenty seven years of loyalty to Ms. Glaser and their co-owned publishing and production company, Octave Music. After Mr. Garner’s career was cut short by his untimely death in 1977, Ms. Glaser maintained her tireless effort to keep his music in it’s premiere position, securing hundreds of licensed usages and overseeing a continual stream of LP and CD releases drawn for her trove of studio productions of the pianist’s work.
This stream of releases continues. Thanks to Martha’s diligence and perseverance and in keeping with her wishes, the full scope of Garner’s recordings, including many newly discovered unreleased treasures as well as his first known recording in 1937 and his final concert, are now in the process of being archived, digitized and assessed. These recordings, photographs, video, symphonic scores, memorabilia, legal and civil rights documentation span the tandem careers of two unique individuals, one an original jazz improviser, and the other a true innovator in the areas of human rights, the arts, and business.
Ms.Glaser is survived by her niece, Susan Rosenberg, Susan’s partner Dawn, and their daughter Molly.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=39883b27fd) | 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=39883b27fd&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
Book claims Natchez as center of American music | Mississippi’s Best Community Newspaper
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/2015/02/15/book-claims-natchez-as-center-of-american-music/
** Book claims Natchez as center of American music
————————————————————
James L. Dickerson, above, wrote “Mojo Triangle: Birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock ’n’Roll.”
If Natchez had developed recording studios, it may have been given the reputation of a music city like Nashville or Memphis.
That’s the argument made by James L. Dickerson in his most recent book, “Mojo Triangle: Birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock’n’Roll,” which claims that Natchez is at the center of what became American music.
The Mississippi River and The Natchez Trace, Dickerson said, put the area at the center of American music.
The river and the Trace allowed the music to travel from Natchez to other parts of the United States.
In fact, one of the first published American songs came from Natchez, Dickerson said. The song was originally titled “Natchez Under-the-Hill” but has undergone some changes and is now known as “Old Zip Coon” or “Turkey in the Straw.”
“It has been played many times in the Grand Ole Opry and (on) ‘Hee Haw’ over the years,” Dickerson said.
“Hee Haw” was an American television show in the ’70s that featured country music.
The birth of American music began when slaves came in contact with Native American music, Dickerson said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Chanting and background beats characterized African music. Through exposure to Native American music, African Americans learned to harmonize.
The combination of African and Native American music creates the blues, Dickerson said.
Traditional Irish and Scottish music played by white settlers also impacted the development of American music, Dickerson said.
Irish and Scottish music had three and four chord progressions that, when blended with African American music creates the blues.
The blues then aided in the creation of country music, Dickerson said.
“The African music blending with the Native American music helped to create the blues first,” Dickerson said. “And then you sort of detour from the Trace to Meridian and you have Jimmy Rogers, the Father of Country Music. He took Irish music and added the blues to it and also listened to Indian music.”
Music claimed by Nashville and Memphis also came from Natchez, Dickerson said.
W.C. Handy, who is known as the Father of the Blues, added chord progressions to music coming from Natchez and much of the music that came out of Nashville traveled to the city from the Natchez Trace. Even New Orleans jazz was adapted from music heard in Natchez, Dickerson said.
Dickerson said Natchez is not credited as the center of American music today because the city did not develop recording studios.
“Unfortunately, Natchez didn’t develop recording studios like Nashville and Memphis. If (they) had done this to record the center of traffic no one would have questioned where the center of American music was,” Dickerson said.
Dickerson hopes that his findings will prompt the City of Natchez to develop an entertainment district.
“It would be great if Natchez would designate an American music street like Beale Street (in Memphis, Tenn.) You could have blues and country and jazz and rock’n’roll. You could have a wonderful music experience there.”
Dickerson’s thinks genetic imprinting is the reason so many talented musicians come from the area.
“One reason why so many big music stars have come from this triangle is that it becomes genetic after a couple hundred years. I think it really does get in our blood. I fully expect the next Elvis will come from Mississippi,” Dickerson said.
“Mojo Triangle: Birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock’n’Roll” won best non-fiction book in the South from the Independent Publishers Association.
Dickerson will be at Bookland in the Natchez Mall from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, to sign copies of his book
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=483c899abe) | 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=483c899abe&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
Book claims Natchez as center of American music | Mississippi’s Best Community Newspaper
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/2015/02/15/book-claims-natchez-as-center-of-american-music/
** Book claims Natchez as center of American music
————————————————————
James L. Dickerson, above, wrote “Mojo Triangle: Birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock ’n’Roll.”
If Natchez had developed recording studios, it may have been given the reputation of a music city like Nashville or Memphis.
That’s the argument made by James L. Dickerson in his most recent book, “Mojo Triangle: Birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock’n’Roll,” which claims that Natchez is at the center of what became American music.
The Mississippi River and The Natchez Trace, Dickerson said, put the area at the center of American music.
The river and the Trace allowed the music to travel from Natchez to other parts of the United States.
In fact, one of the first published American songs came from Natchez, Dickerson said. The song was originally titled “Natchez Under-the-Hill” but has undergone some changes and is now known as “Old Zip Coon” or “Turkey in the Straw.”
“It has been played many times in the Grand Ole Opry and (on) ‘Hee Haw’ over the years,” Dickerson said.
“Hee Haw” was an American television show in the ’70s that featured country music.
The birth of American music began when slaves came in contact with Native American music, Dickerson said.
ADVERTISEMENT
Chanting and background beats characterized African music. Through exposure to Native American music, African Americans learned to harmonize.
The combination of African and Native American music creates the blues, Dickerson said.
Traditional Irish and Scottish music played by white settlers also impacted the development of American music, Dickerson said.
Irish and Scottish music had three and four chord progressions that, when blended with African American music creates the blues.
The blues then aided in the creation of country music, Dickerson said.
“The African music blending with the Native American music helped to create the blues first,” Dickerson said. “And then you sort of detour from the Trace to Meridian and you have Jimmy Rogers, the Father of Country Music. He took Irish music and added the blues to it and also listened to Indian music.”
Music claimed by Nashville and Memphis also came from Natchez, Dickerson said.
W.C. Handy, who is known as the Father of the Blues, added chord progressions to music coming from Natchez and much of the music that came out of Nashville traveled to the city from the Natchez Trace. Even New Orleans jazz was adapted from music heard in Natchez, Dickerson said.
Dickerson said Natchez is not credited as the center of American music today because the city did not develop recording studios.
“Unfortunately, Natchez didn’t develop recording studios like Nashville and Memphis. If (they) had done this to record the center of traffic no one would have questioned where the center of American music was,” Dickerson said.
Dickerson hopes that his findings will prompt the City of Natchez to develop an entertainment district.
“It would be great if Natchez would designate an American music street like Beale Street (in Memphis, Tenn.) You could have blues and country and jazz and rock’n’roll. You could have a wonderful music experience there.”
Dickerson’s thinks genetic imprinting is the reason so many talented musicians come from the area.
“One reason why so many big music stars have come from this triangle is that it becomes genetic after a couple hundred years. I think it really does get in our blood. I fully expect the next Elvis will come from Mississippi,” Dickerson said.
“Mojo Triangle: Birthplace of Country, Blues, Jazz and Rock’n’Roll” won best non-fiction book in the South from the Independent Publishers Association.
Dickerson will be at Bookland in the Natchez Mall from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 21, to sign copies of his book
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=483c899abe) | 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=483c899abe&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