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The Death of Alan Freed – JazzWax

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** The Death of Alan Freed
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http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0c3fe3d970c-popup
When we look back at the rise of R&B in the late 1940s and its manifestation as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s, the music and energy were mesmerizing. We see electrifying optimism on the faces of artists and hear a huge beat, horns waiting, flamboyant artists hollering and hyperactive disc jockeys in claustrophobic studios spinning 45s and creating a private world of excitement for teens. The film American Graffiti (1973) caught some of this energy and teen wonderment about the music, albeit in a laundered and cliché sort of way.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0c3fe43970c-popup
Sadly, the truth about the record business back then was much less romantic. Artists were not only chiseled out of payments, their royalties were often seriously and irrevocably compromised by payola practices. To push disc jockeys to play records repeatedly during key times of day, record distributors typically showered disc jockeys with cash, favors, low-interest loans, cases of alcohol, prostitutes, part-ownership of record labels and even full or partial songwriting credits for songs they never thought twice about until the single arrived.

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As I write on today’s Arts & Review page in The Wall Street Journal (go here (http://www.wsj.com/articles/moondogs-final-sign-off-on-alan-reed-1421710119?KEYWORDS=alan+freed) ), Alan Freed was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to what was going on with payola in the 1950s. Despite Congress naming dozens of disc jockeys around the country who were tied to payments during its hearings in late 1959 and early 1960, including Dick Clark, Freed wound up the fall guy. Maybe it was because his name rhymed with “greed” or he was too strident an advocate for rock and black artists or because he didn’t have a better lawyer or he thought he was bigger than the problem. Whatever the reason, Freed became the poster boy for the payola blowout that gave rock ‘n’ roll a bad name. When the dust settled, Freed couldn’t find work and what his reputation didn’t comromise, his drinking did. He died on this day 50 years ago at age 43.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb07de228a970d-popup
Today, when Freed’s name is mentioned, it’s often in connection with payola—with the caveat that he also coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll.” While Freed received his fair share of “consulting” payments as he became the country’s most influential disc jockey, he also deserves a large slice of credit for helping to make many artists household names, for fusing rock with the youth culture, and for helping to change teen views about integration.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0c3fee8970c-popup
None of this excuses having his name added to songwriting credits, including Chuck Berry’s Maybellene, a travesty that only was rectified by having Freed’s name removed in 1986. Rationalizing this royalty by saying his hype and endless airplay resulted in massive visibility and sales isn’t an excuse. But demonizing Freed to the point of extinction also is grossly unfair. To judge, we have to look at the entire landscape, how business was conducted and who else was involved up to their necks in conflicts of interest.

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A couple of ironies also come to mind. First, payola never went away when Congress ended the hearings. It just had to be better masked. As recently as 2006, three major record labels pleaded guilty and paid a multimillion-dollar fine when New York State discovered that their labels had engaged in pay-for-play schemes. And last year, Hannah Karp of the Wall Street Journal wrote a terrific piece (go here (http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-taylor-swift-and-one-direction-play-for-peanuts-1411163476?autologin=y) ) on how top artists who slash their fees to play at radio-sponsored festivals and holiday bashes do so with the expectation that their latest songs will be played on the air, whatever that means these days.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d0c40437970c-popup
The second irony is that while Congress was beating its chest over evil disc jockeys who accepted payments and gifts to play records, the same Representatives expressing outrage over the practice having lunches, accepting trips and perhaps more from lobbyists hoping to win their votes. Alan Freed deserves better in history’s eyes.

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Ervin Drake, Composer of Pop Songs, Dies at 95 – NYTimes.com

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** Ervin Drake, Composer of Pop Songs, Dies at 95
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Photo
Ervin Drake at his home in Great Neck, N.Y., in 2001. He wrote his first big hits in the 1940s, including one for Billie Holiday. Credit Maxine Hicks

Ervin Drake’s “Now That I Have Everything (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4YNDUCyVko) ” debuted the same day he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1983, a fitting coda for a career that was punctuated by hit versions of his songs, like Frank Sinatra’s “It Was a Very Good Year (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydcUaTpiHgQ) ,” Billie Holiday’s “Good Morning Heartache (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3jO-3BoGzM) ” and the inspirational “I Believe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL49DFKjjDg) ,” sung by Frankie Laine.

Mr. Drake, who wrote lyrics and music, produced television programs and was president of the American Guild of Authors and Composers, died on Thursday at 95 at his home in Great Neck, N.Y. The cause was complications of bladder cancer, said his stepson, Jed Berman.

Ervin Maurice Druckman was born in Manhattan on April 3, 1919; graduated from Townsend Harris High School in Manhattan (it is now in Queens) in 1935; and received a bachelor’s degree from City College. He later studied at the Juilliard School of Music.

But before embarking on a songwriting career, he made a brief detour into home-furnishings sales.

“My father said to me that he did not want to aid and abet me on the road to hell, and he insisted I come into his business,” Mr. Drake once recalled. “I was in that business for 14 months, and then some songs I had sold to a publisher suddenly yielded the magnificent sum of $300, and in 1941, $300 was all the money in the world. That was my declaration of independence. I left the furniture business. I had a feeling I never would have been in the furniture man’s hall of fame.”

Writing English lyrics for Spanish melodies, Mr. Drake scored his first big hits in the 1940s with “Tico-Tico” and “The Rickety Rickshaw Man (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRr76GWbagY) ,” which sold more than a million copies.

He later collaborated with Irene Higginbotham on the lyrics for “Good Morning Heartache,” which Miss Holiday recorded in 1946. (She was said to have called it one of her favorite songs.) It was later recorded by a host of singers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Diana Ross and Alicia Keys.

“I Believe” was commissioned by Jane Froman (http://www.janefroman.com/Biography/bio.html) , the singer and actress, as an antidote to angst over the Korean War. Described as the first hit song introduced on television, it was a huge hit for Mr. Laine in 1953 and has been recorded by dozens of others, including Elvis Presley, Perry Como and Patti LaBelle. (Mr. Drake shares songwriting credit with Irvin Graham, Jimmy Shirl and Al Stillman.)

Mr. Drake wrote the words and music for the wistful “It Was a Very Good Year” in 1961 for Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio. Mr. Sinatra heard it on his car radio driving to Palm Springs, Calif., and his recording of it on a comeback album in 1966 hit the Top 10.

The Sinatra version has remained a staple on radio and sometimes on television. As the soundtrack to an extended film montage, it opened the second season of the HBO series “The Sopranos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnT7vLIZYYs) ” in 2000.

A meditation on the stages of a man’s life — at 17, 21, 35 and the “autumn” years (Mr. Sinatra was 50 or so when he recorded it) — the song begins:

When I was 17, it was a very good year
Continue reading the main story

It was a very good year for small-town girls

And soft summer nights

We’d hide from the lights on the village green

When I was 17

A nimble lyricist, Mr. Drake also wrote for television and for Broadway shows (http://www.nytimes.com/theater/venues/broadway.html?inline=nyt-classifier) , including “What Makes Sammy Run?,” and his music endured in film scores, including those of Woody Allen’s “Radio Days” and Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever.”

His other songs include “Across the Wide Missouri,” “A Room Without Windows,” “Castle Rock” and “Father of the Girls.” Among the other stars who recorded his lyrics were the Andrews Sisters, Tony Bennett, Duke Ellington, Barbra Streisand and Sarah Vaughan.

In 1947, Mr. Drake married Ada Sax, who died in 1975. In addition to his stepson, Mr. Berman, he is survived by his wife, the former Edith Bein, known as Edith Bermaine, whom he married in 1981; two stepdaughters, Linda Bovina and Betsy Drake Rodriques; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Correction: January 21, 2015

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Saturday about the songwriter Ervin Drake misstated the name of the high school he attended and misidentified the borough in which it was located. It is Townsend Harris High School, not Townsend Harris Hall, and it was in Manhattan at the time, not in Queens, its current location.

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Ervin Drake, Composer of Pop Songs, Dies at 95 – NYTimes.com

But before embarking on a songwriting career, he made a brief detour into home-furnishings sales.

A meditation on the stages of a man’s life — at 17, 21, 35 and the “autumn” years (Mr. Sinatra was 50 or so when he recorded it) — the song begins:

When I was 17, it was a very good year
Continue reading the main story

It was a very good year for small-town girls

And soft summer nights

We’d hide from the lights on the village green

When I was 17

Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Ervin Drake, Composer of Pop Songs, Dies at 95 – NYTimes.com

But before embarking on a songwriting career, he made a brief detour into home-furnishings sales.

A meditation on the stages of a man’s life — at 17, 21, 35 and the “autumn” years (Mr. Sinatra was 50 or so when he recorded it) — the song begins:

When I was 17, it was a very good year
Continue reading the main story

It was a very good year for small-town girls

And soft summer nights

We’d hide from the lights on the village green

When I was 17

Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

The Hunting of Billie Holiday – Johann Hari – POLITICO Magazine

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**
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298.html#.VL-flcbSjU0

From his first day in office in 1930, Harry Anslinger had a problem, and everybody knew it. He had just been appointed head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—a tiny agency, buried in the gray bowels of the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.—and it seemed to be on the brink of being abolished. This was the old Department of Prohibition, but prohibition had been abolished and his men needed a new role, fast. As he looked over his new staff—just a few years before his pursuit of Billie Holiday began—he saw a sunken army who had spent fourteen years waging war on alcohol only to see alcohol win, and win big. These men were notoriously corrupt and crooked—but now Harry was supposed to whip them into a force capable of wiping drugs from the United States forever.

Harry believed he could. He believed that the response to being dealt a weak hand should always be to dramatically raise the stakes. He pledged to eradicate all drugs, everywhere—and within thirty years, he succeeded in turning this crumbling department with these disheartened men into the headquarters for a global war that would continue for decades. He could do it because he was a bureaucratic genius—but, even more crucially, because there was a deep strain in American culture that was waiting for a man like him, with a sure and certain answer to their questions about chemicals.

***

Jazz was the opposite of everything Harry Anslinger believed in. It is improvised, relaxed, free-form. It follows its own rhythm. Worst of all, it is a mongrel music made up of European, Caribbean and African echoes, all mating on American shores. To Anslinger, this was musical anarchy and evidence of a recurrence of the primitive impulses that lurk in black people, waiting to emerge. “It sounded,” his internal memos said, “like the jungles in the dead of night.” Another memo warned that “unbelievably ancient indecent rites of the East Indies are resurrected” in this black man’s music. The lives of the jazzmen, he said, “reek of filth.”

His agents reported back to him that “many among the jazzmen think they are playing magnificently when under the influence of marihuana but they are actually becoming hopelessly confused and playing horribly.”

The Bureau believed that marijuana slowed down your perception of time dramatically, and this was why jazz music sounded so freakish—the musicians were literally living at a different, inhuman rhythm. “Music hath charms,” their memos say, “but not this music.” Indeed, Anslinger took jazz as yet more proof that marijuana drives people insane. For example, the song “That Funny Reefer Man” contains the line “Any time he gets a notion, he can walk across the ocean.” Anslinger’s agents warned that’s exactly what drug users were like: “He does think that.”

Anslinger looked out over a scene filled with rebels like Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk, and—as the journalist Larry Sloman recorded—he longed to see them all behind bars. He wrote to all the agents he had sent to follow them and instructed: “Please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day.” His advice on drug raids to his men was always simple: “Shoot first.”

He reassured congressmen that his crackdown would affect not “the good musicians, but the jazz type.” But when Harry came for them, the jazz world would have one weapon that saved them: its absolute solidarity. Anslinger’s men could find almost no one among them who was willing to snitch, and whenever one of them was busted, they all chipped in to bail him out.

In the end, the Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time taking on a community that couldn’t be fractured, so he scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on a single target—perhaps the greatest female jazz vocalist there ever was.

He wanted to bring the full thump of the federal government down upon that scourge of modern society, his Public Enemy #1: Billie Holiday.

***

One night, in 1939, Billie Holiday stood on stage in New York City and sang a song that was unlike anything anyone had heard before. ‘Strange Fruit’ was a musical lament against lynching. It imagined black bodies hanging from trees as a dark fruit native to the South. Here was a black woman, before a mixed audience, grieving for the racist murders in the United States. Immediately after, Billie Holiday received her first threat from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.

Harry had heard whispers that she was using heroin, and—after she flatly refused to be silent about racism—he assigned an agent named Jimmy Fletcher to track her every move. Harry hated to hire black agents, but if he sent white guys into Harlem and Baltimore, they stood out straight away. Jimmy Fletcher was the answer. His job was to bust his own people, but Anslinger was insistent that no black man in his Bureau could ever become a white man’s boss. Jimmy was allowed through the door at the Bureau, but never up the stairs. He was and would remain an “archive man”—a street agent whose job was to figure out who was selling, who was supplying and who should be busted. He would carry large amounts of drugs with him, and he was allowed to deal drugs himself so he could gain the confidence of the people he was secretly plotting to arrest.

Many agents in this position would shoot heroin with their clients, to “prove” they weren’t cops. We don’t know whether Jimmy joined in, but we do know he had no pity for addicts: “I never knew a victim,” he said. “You victimize yourself by becoming a junkie.”

He first saw Billie in her brother-in-law’s apartment, where she was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine. The next time he saw her, it was in a brothel in Harlem, doing exactly the same. Billie’s greatest talent, after singing, was swearing—if she called you a “motherfucker,” it was a great compliment. We don’t know the first time Billie called Jimmy a motherfucker, but she soon spotted this man who was hanging around, watching her, and she grew to like him.

When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. Her biographers Julia Blackburn and Donald Clark studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher—now lost by the archives handling it—and they wrote about what he remembered in detail.

Johann Hari is a London and New York-based journalist. He will be talking about his book at lunchtime at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on the 29th of January, at lunchtime at the 92nd Street Y in New York City on the 30th January, and in the evening at Red Emma’s in Baltimore on the 4th February. Follow him @johannhari101 (https://twitter.com/johannhari101) .
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298.html#ixzz3PSZ8RXQR

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

The Hunting of Billie Holiday – Johann Hari – POLITICO Magazine

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**
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298.html#.VL-flcbSjU0

***

He wanted to bring the full thump of the federal government down upon that scourge of modern society, his Public Enemy #1: Billie Holiday.

***

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

The Hunting of Billie Holiday – Johann Hari – POLITICO Magazine

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**
————————————————————
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/drug-war-the-hunting-of-billie-holiday-114298.html#.VL-flcbSjU0

***

He wanted to bring the full thump of the federal government down upon that scourge of modern society, his Public Enemy #1: Billie Holiday.

***

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Jazz Connect & Winter Jazzfest – a New York state of mind | Festival review Posted by Paul de Barros

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** http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/2015/01/15/jazz-connect-winter-jazzfest-a-new-york-state-of-mind-festival-review/
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**
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** Jazz Connect & Winter Jazzfest – a New York state of mind | Festival review
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Posted by Paul de Barros (http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/author/pdebarros/)
Christian McBride keynote 1, Jazz Connect, NYC 1-15

“Lighten up,” said Christian McBride during his keynote address at the Jazz Connect conference in New York. (Jeff Tamarkin / JazzTimes)

When bassist Christian McBride, host of the new National Public Radio show “Jazz Night in America,” (http://www.npr.org/series/347139849/jazz-night-in-america) was 9, his father played him the musically challenging John Coltrane album “Live in Seattle,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=bTz030Fa3Qg#t=8) recorded in 1965 at the Penthouse, a long-gone Pioneer Square jazz club.

“Did I like it?” McBride asked rhetorically during his keynote address at the Jazz Connect conference in New York last week. (https://sites.google.com/site/jazzconnect2014/) “No. But when I was 11, I went back to listen again. By the time I was 14, I was in.”

If jazz lovers want the music to flourish and endure, McBride averred, they need to actively pass it on.

“Take a young person out to hear jazz,” he counseled. “Somebody probably did that for you.”

McBride’s pep talk typified the refreshing optimism of the third annual edition of the two-day conference, presented Jan. 8-9 by JazzTimes magazine and the networking group Jazz Forward Coalition.

Held on the Upper East Side at St. Peter’s Church, which makes jazz a part of its mission (http://saintpeters.org/jazz/programs/) , Jazz Connect attracted 700-plus industry types and musicians. That’s not the kind of gathering we’re used to seeing in Seattle — the one time a big international jazz conference was scheduled here, in 2008, the thing went bankrupt before it started — but it’s still a good idea from time to time to check out what’s going on in the bellybutton of the jazz world, even if you live at its extremities.

One of the most enthusiastically embraced presentations came from NPR executive producer of music programming Anya Grundman, who talked about “Jazz Night in America,” a cooperative venture between NPR, New Jersey jazz station WBGO and Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Now airing on more than 150 stations (likely including Tacoma NPR affiliate KPLU sometime this year, says general manager Joey Cohn) the weekly, hourlong show presents live recordings interspersed with artist interviews. On the Detroit segment, Motor City musicians Regina Carter (violin) and Rodney Whitaker (bass) perform at the Detroit Jazz Festival, but Carter also takes listeners on a tour of her old neighborhood.

“Jazz is all about stories,” said Grundman. “That’s how the heritage is passed on. That’s what (musicians) do in the dressing room. We’re going to the dressing room.”

A multiplatform project, “Jazz Night in America” airs on radio 52 times a year, but also offers 26 webcasts, HD video segments and links to NPR’s news stories. Everything can be accessed online, at npr.org/music (http://www.npr.org/music) .

McBride, a three-time Grammy winner who has played with everyone from Pat Metheny to Diana Krall, is a good choice as host. A warm bear of a man, he has a voice and smile as deep and capacious as his string bass.

He also has a sense of humor, a quality often lacking in the jazz world. At his keynote, he advised fans to “lighten up” about such thorns in their sides as the Twitter feed @jazzistheworst (https://twitter.com/jazzistheworst) . (“If jazz sounds so good,” said one post, “why do we have to spend so much time explaining it?”)

“We can’t get mad, because we know some if it is true,” said the 42-year-old bassist. “So laugh!”

The theme of Jazz Connect was “Strength Through Community,” but the musical eruption that followed at the 11-year-old Winter Jazzfest Jan. 9-10 (http://www.winterjazzfest.com/lineup/) suggested that its real strength is diversity and fearless disrespect for boundaries.

More than 6,500 people swarmed into the little festival, often spilling into the streets in long lines, waiting — in 25 degree weather! — to hear one of 100 acts playing in 10 Greenwich Village venues.

At Judson Church, Northwest favorite Ingrid Jensen, on trumpet, conspired with electric keyboardist Jason Miles to create deep, soulful grooves burbling up from the stew Miles Davis boiled on “Bitches Brew.”

Over at Le Poisson Rouge, the mischievously iconoclastic Dutch Instant Composers Pool (ICP) traversed whimsically improvised art music, a theatrical “conduction” involving cellist Tristan Honsinger “playing” the back of his neck with his bow and a joyously swinging closer on the Kansas City classic “Moten Swing.”

A full mile divided the east perimeter of Jazz Winterfest from the west, where the Greenwich Village Music School hosted the diminutive powder keg of a vocalist Catherine Russell, who drew a through line from ’20s black Broadway to ’60s R&B.

At the Minetta Lane Theatre, precisely passionate drummer Terri Lyne Carrington and rumbling pianist Geri Allen whipped up probing, mysterious grooves with reed man David Murray, followed by Murray’s old compatriot from the World Saxophone Quartet, alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, who turned in a bright-toned, ceremoniously intense set with Trio Three, aided by pianist Vijay Iyer.

As satisfied fans dispersed into the icy Manhattan night, it was clear a lot of them were in their 20s and 30s. Had some uncle taken these “kids” out to hear jazz years ago? Or was it Winter Jazzfest itself, or the inviting new optimism broadcast by the jazz community that had drawn them in?

Hard to say, but McBride would have been pleased.

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Jazz Connect & Winter Jazzfest – a New York state of mind | Festival review Posted by Paul de Barros

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** http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/2015/01/15/jazz-connect-winter-jazzfest-a-new-york-state-of-mind-festival-review/
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**
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“Lighten up,” said Christian McBride during his keynote address at the Jazz Connect conference in New York. (Jeff Tamarkin / JazzTimes)

If jazz lovers want the music to flourish and endure, McBride averred, they need to actively pass it on.

“Take a young person out to hear jazz,” he counseled. “Somebody probably did that for you.”

McBride’s pep talk typified the refreshing optimism of the third annual edition of the two-day conference, presented Jan. 8-9 by JazzTimes magazine and the networking group Jazz Forward Coalition.

“Jazz is all about stories,” said Grundman. “That’s how the heritage is passed on. That’s what (musicians) do in the dressing room. We’re going to the dressing room.”

“We can’t get mad, because we know some if it is true,” said the 42-year-old bassist. “So laugh!”

Hard to say, but McBride would have been pleased.

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Jazz Connect & Winter Jazzfest – a New York state of mind | Festival review Posted by Paul de Barros

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** http://blogs.seattletimes.com/soundposts/2015/01/15/jazz-connect-winter-jazzfest-a-new-york-state-of-mind-festival-review/
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**
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“Lighten up,” said Christian McBride during his keynote address at the Jazz Connect conference in New York. (Jeff Tamarkin / JazzTimes)

If jazz lovers want the music to flourish and endure, McBride averred, they need to actively pass it on.

“Take a young person out to hear jazz,” he counseled. “Somebody probably did that for you.”

McBride’s pep talk typified the refreshing optimism of the third annual edition of the two-day conference, presented Jan. 8-9 by JazzTimes magazine and the networking group Jazz Forward Coalition.

“Jazz is all about stories,” said Grundman. “That’s how the heritage is passed on. That’s what (musicians) do in the dressing room. We’re going to the dressing room.”

“We can’t get mad, because we know some if it is true,” said the 42-year-old bassist. “So laugh!”

Hard to say, but McBride would have been pleased.

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January 21, 2015 / No Comments / More

Alan Freed ‘s Moondog Court Case 1954

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The Moondog Case

Rhythm and blues, marketed as race music until 1949, acquired yet another name, rock and roll, in 1955. It involved Leo Mintz’s protegee, Alan Freed, and a New York court case that focused on the name, Moondog. In Cleveland, Ohio Freed had called himself “The Moondog” while hosting his rhythm and blues radio program which he entitled, “The Moondog House Party.” On radio, Freed often used the language of rhythm and blues songwriters and performers which encouraged audiences to rock and roll. He opened each program by playing a phonograph recording called “Moondog Symphony” and repeated segments of it intermittently throughout the night.

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Alan Freed’s creative genius and success in Cleveland, Ohio attracted the attention of WINS Radio in New York City and a job offer. After arriving in New York with his Moondog concept, Freed encountered a legal problem.

Louis (Moondog) Hardin, already working in New York, took Alan Freed to court and sued Freed for intellectual property rights infringement. Hardin claimed ownership of the performance name, Moondog and enjoined Freed from using the name on radio and any reference to Moondog; and even from playing the Hardin composition, Moondog Symphony. Hardin won the case in late 1954.
The court’s Moondog ruling against Freed forced him to focus on his radio show’s core concept, blues and rhythm music. In relation to the music, Freed’s clarion call to his audience and listeners, “…let’s rock and roll,” was moved to the forefront. It was repositioned into the name of his New York City radio show: “The Alan Freed Rock and Roll Party.” At that point, late 1954, both his radio show and its function, shared the same name. In early 1955, blues and rhythm music continued to explode across America, but under a new name.

Alan Freed lay claim to being the first person to promote the music [rhythm and blues] under the name rock and roll; never having declared rock and roll was anything other than rhythm and blues. He never vacillated or equivocated. He was as clear in Look magazine in 1955 as he was in 1956 on the national television program, “To Tell The Truth.”

Rock and roll enveloped the careers of Bill Haley, Pat Boone, Sam Phillips, and Elvis Presley; destroyed Alan Freed, and led others to declare that rock and roll is separate from rhythm and blues.

An incomplete transcript of the Hardin vs. Freed trial (click on below) is all that remains in the files of the 1954 New York court case. Nothing in the file suggests that Alan Freed attempted to actually change the name of rhythm and blues to rock and roll while in Cleveland, Ohio. On air, Freed referenced the “Moondog Show” or the “Moondog Rock and Roll Party.” His program was a “big ole, blues and rhythm, records party.” The lyrics in the records encouraged listeners to rock and roll and Freed did the same, on air. After Louis Hardin blocked Freed in New York City from using the Moondog name and theme, then, Freed emphasized the lyric phrase, rock and roll, as a name. Freed changed the name of his radio concept not the rhythm and blues music itself.

Abner Greenberg, attorney for Louis T. Hardin, seemed especially interested in questioning and digging into Alan Freed’s business arrangements. Alan Freed was successfully promoting the already hot rhythm and blues culture, that was beginning to seriously challenge entrenched economic positions of ASCAP; allegedly controlled through the New York court system.

Alan Freed’s radio popularity formed a peculiar confluence with that of white musicians who were drawn to rhythm and blues; namely, Bill Haley and His Comets. Parallel to Freed’s 1951 introduction to rhythm and blues on phonographs, Haley, a performing artist, had begun to musically master the negro art form in 1950. Ironically, the phenomenal popularity of Freed and Haley reached the national media craze at approximately the same time, in 1955. Decca Records, Haley’s label, immediately adopted and promoted him; using Freed’s new name for rhythm and blues, rock and roll.

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January 20, 2015 / No Comments / More

Alan Freed ‘s Moondog Court Case 1954

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The Moondog Case

Rock and roll enveloped the careers of Bill Haley, Pat Boone, Sam Phillips, and Elvis Presley; destroyed Alan Freed, and led others to declare that rock and roll is separate from rhythm and blues.

The R&B Moondog Show Court Case (http://www.rhythmandbluesuniversity.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Freed.pdf)

Alan Freed – Official Site (http://www.alanfreed.com/)

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Alan Freed ‘s Moondog Court Case 1954

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The Moondog Case

Rock and roll enveloped the careers of Bill Haley, Pat Boone, Sam Phillips, and Elvis Presley; destroyed Alan Freed, and led others to declare that rock and roll is separate from rhythm and blues.

The R&B Moondog Show Court Case (http://www.rhythmandbluesuniversity.net/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/Freed.pdf)

Alan Freed – Official Site (http://www.alanfreed.com/)

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Moondog’s Final Sign Off: On Alan Freed – WSJ

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** Moondog’s Final Sign Off
————————————————————
American disc jockey and rock ‘n’ roll promoter Alan Freed. ENLARGE

American disc jockey and rock ‘n’ roll promoter Alan Freed. Getty Images
By

Marc Myers
Jan. 19, 2015 6:28 p.m. ET

Last August, Lance Freed walked out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame carrying a brushed brass urn with his father’s ashes. For 12 years, the rectangular receptacle had been on exhibit in a display case at the Cleveland museum as a tribute to Alan Freed, the disc jockey known as Moondog who is credited with coining the term “rock ’n’ roll” in the early 1950s. But last year, the institution decided that displaying human remains wasn’t appropriate for an evolving museum and research center.

The eviction was a final blow to the tarnished legacy of Freed, who played a critical role in launching rock ’n’ roll into commercial orbit and turning it into a multibillion-dollar industry. Since his death 50 years ago on Jan. 20 from alcohol-related ailments at age 43, Freed has become all but synonymous with payola—the illegal favors and payments made to disc jockeys and radio programmers for the repeated airplay of records to boost sales, a problem that still lingers today in the industry.

Freed’s troubles began in late 1959, when his payola activities and those of dozens of other disc jockeys around the country, including Dick Clark, were exposed in a six-month congressional probe. When the hearings were over, Freed, the country’s best-known rock disc jockey, came to represent everything that was wrong with the record business—the greed, grubbiness and outright theft. By contrast, Clark, host of TV’s “American Bandstand,” was exonerated and went on to become what Freed had hoped to be—the eternal face and voice of rock ’n’ roll.

In the decades since his death, Freed’s sizable contributions to rock ’n’ roll and to teenagers’ more tolerant view of integration in the 1950s have been largely overlooked. Freed helped generate hit records for hundreds of black and white artists, many of whom eventually became household names, and his tireless efforts helped create thousands of jobs for studio musicians, engineers, record producers, concert promoters and instrument manufacturers.

From the start, rock’s rise was greatly helped by changes in record formats and government policies. A year after Columbia introduced the LP in 1948, RCA brought out its smaller 45, and within two years the lightweight vinyl disc with the big hole began to replace clunky 78s on the radio and in stores and jukeboxes. While LPs were marketed to adults, the inexpensive 45 single was more suited for teens, many of whom owned portable phonographs and personal radios by the mid-1950s.

At the same time, independent radio stations were springing up throughout the country. The Federal Communications Commission was handing out thousands of new licenses to ensure that radio covered regions that television signals did not. These radio stations needed records, and as production ramped up among the country’s expanding number of record labels, so did the stacks of 45s turning up at stations. Many disc jockeys didn’t have the time or inclination to listen to them all.

Enter the record distributor, whose job included schmoozing DJs. To ensure that specific records would be heard as often as possible, distributors showered DJs with cash, gifts—and even partial ownership in record labels and credit for songs they didn’t write. Once DJs had a vested interest in records, they had an incentive to play them often, and they did.

Freed began his radio career in 1945 at WAKR in Akron, Ohio, and moved to WJW in Cleveland in 1951, where he was among the first white DJs to play records by black artists for a white audience. A hyperactive, hard-driving announcer with the personality of a circus barker, Freed held one of rock ’n’ roll’s earliest integrated concerts—“The Moondog Coronation Ball” in Cleveland in March 1952. More concerts followed, and as Freed’s reputation grew, so did his influence. In 1954 he moved to WINS in New York.

In 1956 and ’57, Freed appeared in four teen jukebox films—“Rock Around the Clock,” “Rock, Rock, Rock,” “Mister Rock and Roll” and “Don’t Knock the Rock.” By 1957, Freed was the most powerful DJ in the country, which meant he could command top payola fees of thousands of dollars per record. Freed had even gone so far as to accept partial songwriting credits on 15 songs, including Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” which he then helped turn into a hit in 1955 (the credit was removed in 1986).

But 1957 also was a turning point for Freed. Four episodes into “The Big Beat,” Freed’s prime-time TV music series on ABC, the show was canceled after black singer Frankie Lymon was seen on TV dancing with a white audience member. Freed was shifted to WABC radio, but when Congress’s payola investigation began in November 1959, ABC asked Freed to sign a statement vowing he had never accepted gifts or money to promote records. Freed refused, despite objections from his attorney, and he was fired. Dick Clark avoided the same fate at ABC by agreeing to divest himself of interests in music publishing, production companies and a talent agency affiliated with the records he played on his show. As a result, he was allowed to continue hosting “American Bandstand.”

In the fall of 1959, Congress had several motives for investigating payola—a practice that dated back to England in the late 1880s, when music publishers paid music-hall singers to introduce their new songs. At the end of the ’50s, music publishers unable to afford steep payola fees began complaining to their lobbyists about the practice, raising eyebrows at the IRS. Parents were voicing unease about the sexually explicit aspects of rock ’n’ roll, while legislators were under mounting pressure from constituents in segregated regions who were angry about the integration of teenagers at concerts and on TV dance shows.

Once the payola hearings ended in June 1960, Congress drafted the Communications Act Amendments to eliminate the practice. The bill passed the House by 208 to 15, but its proposed license suspension and fines were watered down in the Senate, leaving the law virtually toothless.

In 1962, following a series of postponements, Freed pleaded guilty in New York to accepting bribes. Though Freed did not face severe penalties—he was hit with a $300 fine and a six-month suspended prison sentence—his reputation and alcohol problems kept him from finding a radio job that covered his bills. In 1964, months before his death, he was indicted on a charge of tax evasion, owing the IRS more than $35,000 in back taxes.

Despite Congress’s efforts to eradicate payola, the practice never really disappeared. As recently as 2006, three major record companies settled cases with New York and paid the state multimillion-dollar fines for radio payoffs by their labels. The cases stemmed from a state investigation that called the industry practice “pervasive.” Even today, many top artists who are asked to play radio-sponsored music festivals and holiday shows at substantially reduced rates do so with the expectation that their songs will be aired—a worrisome trend some in the business have called “showola.”

Last October, Freed’s family found a new resting place for his ashes—at the Lake View Cemetery on the east side of Cleveland. They are planning a memorial stone with a microphone chiseled into its surface and a likeness of Freed holding records at WAKR. The epitaph will be their father’s radio sign off: “This is not goodbye, it’s just good night.’”

Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music at JazzWax.com.

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Moondog’s Final Sign Off: On Alan Freed – WSJ

** Moondog’s Final Sign Off
————————————————————
American disc jockey and rock ‘n’ roll promoter Alan Freed. ENLARGE

American disc jockey and rock ‘n’ roll promoter Alan Freed. Getty Images
By

Marc Myers
Jan. 19, 2015 6:28 p.m. ET

Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music at JazzWax.com.

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January 20, 2015 / No Comments / More

Moondog’s Final Sign Off: On Alan Freed – WSJ

** Moondog’s Final Sign Off
————————————————————
American disc jockey and rock ‘n’ roll promoter Alan Freed. ENLARGE

American disc jockey and rock ‘n’ roll promoter Alan Freed. Getty Images
By

Marc Myers
Jan. 19, 2015 6:28 p.m. ET

Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music at JazzWax.com.

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Patricia Barber on the air: Welcome to ‘MusicHeads’ – Chicago Tribune

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** Patricia Barber on the air: Welcome to ‘MusicHeads’ – Chicago Tribune
————————————————————

We already knew she could sing, play the piano and write hyperliterate, musically sophisticated songs.

But can Chicagoan Patricia Barber host a radio show? More specifically, can she preside over a program designed not merely to entertain listeners but to lead them deep into the nitty gritty of how jazz is made?

Can Barber, in other words, illuminate the meaning, context and syntax of jazz during a series of one-hour radio shows?

She’s going far out on a limb to find out with “MusicHeads,” an ambitious, meticulously produced program launching 9 p.m. Wednesday on WDCB-FM 90.9. The subsequent installments in the pilot series will air at the same time Jan. 21 and 28, each addressing a particular musical theme.

I listened twice to a near-final cut of the opening program — “What Is Swing?” — and it’s clear that Barber has set a rather high bar for herself. The question she addresses, after all, is so fundamental to the meaning of jazz that one hour couldn’t possibly be enough to answer it. Neither could 100. It’s one of those concepts that aficionados have been attempting to pin down since the dawn of the music, roughly a century ago.

Yet the very challenge of explaining something so ephemeral is what makes such a program possible, for the inquiry gives Barber and friends the opportunity to discuss jazz in depth and, better still, to play it. Just because the question can’t really be answered, in other words, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be asked. Quite the contrary.

What instantly sets “MusicHeads” apart from other jazz shows is the format: Barber converses with fellow musicians before asking them to perform musical examples solo and alongside her. In effect, we in the radio audience are eavesdropping on a dialogue among peers.

So the musicians aren’t really trying to entertain us. Instead, they’re discussing, debating and wrestling with a subject that concerns them profoundly. They’re speaking to each other in their own language, their talk bristling with musical terminology.

That means musically literate listeners will be rewarded by the intellectual rigor of the discourse, while those who couldn’t tell the difference between an arpeggio and an appoggiatura stand to learn a great deal. Granted, nonmusicians aren’t going to be able to catch the meaning of every musical term and historical reference. Nevertheless, the conversation proves easy to follow, like listening to a postgame show in which players and coaches are speaking freely: the passion of the participants and the overall context of the discussion draw you in, even if you don’t catch every reference.

Like Marian McPartland’s “Piano Jazz,” which airs in reruns on WDCB at 7 p.m. Wednesdays, “MusicHeads” features a prominent pianist chatting with peers, but Barber skips the pleasant chit-chat of McPartland’s beloved show to dig more deeply into the intricacies of creating jazz. Like Bill McGlaughlin’s “Exploring Music” on WFMT-FM 98.7, Barber examines the theory and history of her art form, but with live music rather than with recordings. And like Leonard Bernstein’s televised “Young People’s Concerts” of generations ago, Barber is not afraid to deconstruct music, though without Bernstein’s hyper-kinetic manner (no one, of course, could match that).
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Barber signals the seriousness of the endeavor in her opening soliloquy: “A show about swing music would be wonderful, but this is not that,” she says forthrightly in a program recorded at PianoForte Studios on South Michigan Avenue. “What I’d like to investigate tonight is related to that music in both terminology and practice. We are going to be looking for the ineffable in jazz music. The difficult-to-define and difficult-to-realize feel-good transitive verb form of swing. What does it mean when we say music swings? How do musicians make music swing?”

Barber puts herself to the test, offering a solo version of Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz.” That’s a cheeky way to begin an exploration of swing, considering that the piece obviously is in three-quarter time, a meter that does not easily lend itself to standard concepts of swing. But after Barber has played the main theme, she takes flight and, indeed, quickly reaffirms that a waltz can swing.

Then she quizzes three top Chicago musicians individually and in tandem, drawing intriguing responses and exquisite performances from bassist Larry Kohut, drummer Jon Deitemyer and saxophonist Jim Gailloreto.

So what is swing?

“This is actually one of my favorite — I don’t know if it’s true, probably apocryphal — quotes, attributed to Duke Ellington,” bassist Kohut answers. “Somebody asked him ‘what’s swing?’ or ‘what makes something swing?’ And the answer was: ‘It’s when the music feels like it’s speeding up, but it doesn’t.'”

Deitemyer addresses the question best from behind his drum set, turning the calendar back to an early chapter of swing: the New Orleans street beats that bands played in Jelly Roll Morton’s day, at the turn of the previous century. You can hear in Deitemyer’s buoyant playing the ebullient steps of an impromptu parade, but also a rhythmic elasticity that represented a stark departure from European classical music of the era.

“For most drummers, the original kind of jazz drum conception is that New Orleans second-line beat, which informed everything,” says Deitemyer on the program. “So that was where you would play a marching band beat, but start to swing it.”

Saxophonist Gailloreto puts his own spin on the subject, pointing out that swing is something you feel in your gut.

“It’s very physical for me,” he tells Barber. “As a matter of fact, when everything is working beautifully, and you feel fantastic about what’s happening in the group, and the way you’re playing, it almost feels like dancing. You’re dancing through your instrument.”

While the first half of the show serves up a great deal of musical analysis, the second offers more extended performances, the musicians stretching out on Juan Tizol’s classic “Caravan,” Dave Brubeck’s disarming “In Your Own Sweet Way” and Barber’s freshly contemporary “Crash.” Here’s where Barber and her producers might wish to tweak the structure of the show a bit, spreading the performances more evenly throughout the program, so that the first half isn’t so much wordier than the second.

But that’s a minor point that Barber should be able to address easily if the show gets picked up for installments beyond the three original programs. More important, this hour is tightly packed with welcome insights and first-rate music making.

So how does Barber answer the question she posed on the meaning of swing?

“When I started my research for the show, naturally I started with the dictionaries,” she says toward the end of the program. “Interestingly, there is no real definition of swing in even the best dictionaries, including the Oxford and the Grove Dictionary of Music. Gunther Schuller, who wrote wonderful books on early jazz and swing struggles himself to describe swing. He calls it ‘placement of a note within a column of air.’ Hmmm.

“I would guess the definition of swing will remain elusive of the written word, and that’s OK.”

Yes it is, for what words cannot articulate, Barber and colleagues express in pitch, rhythm and, of course, swing.

Patricia Barber’s “MusicHeads” explores “What Is Swing?” at 9 p.m. Wednesday; “The Piano as Percussion” 9 p.m. Jan. 21; and “The Double Bass” 9 p.m. Jan. 28; on WDCB-FM 90.9 and wdcb.org.

Chi-Town Jazz Festival lineup

The sixth annual Chi-Town Jazz Festival, organized by guitarist and Catholic priest John Moulder as a fund-raiser for hunger and relief, will run March 4 through 8 in various Chicago locations.

Among the highlights:

March 4: Tammy McCann and Mike Allemana, SHE and Geof Bradfield Quartet at the Jazz Showcase.

March 5: Justefan Band, Eric Schneider Quartet and Chicago Jazz Orchestra’s Bill Overton, Andy’s Jazz Club.

March 6: Matt Ulery’s Loom, John Moulder Quartet and Chinchano, Green Mill Jazz Club.

March 8: Double Monk, featuring Steve Million and Jeremy Kahn, PianoForte Studios; Jazz Vespers, First Presbyterian Church of Evanston; Glenbrook South Jazz Lab Band, Ian Torres Big Band and Stephanie Browning Quintet, FitzGerald’s.
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In addition, donations for season-ticket drawings during Dianne Reeves’ Jan. 30 concert at Symphony Center and Tigran Hamasyan’s Feb. 13 performance at the University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts will go toward the Chi-Town Jazz Festival’s charitable mission.

For details, visit chitownjazzfestival.org.

hreich@tribpub.com (mailto:hreich@tribpub.com)

Twitter @howardreich

“Portraits in Jazz”: Howard Reich’s e-book collects his exclusive interviews with Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald and others, as well as profiles of early masters such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Get “Portraits in Jazz” at chicagotribune.com/ebooks.
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Patricia Barber on the air: Welcome to ‘MusicHeads’ – Chicago Tribune

** Patricia Barber on the air: Welcome to ‘MusicHeads’ – Chicago Tribune
————————————————————

We already knew she could sing, play the piano and write hyperliterate, musically sophisticated songs.

Can Barber, in other words, illuminate the meaning, context and syntax of jazz during a series of one-hour radio shows?

So what is swing?

Saxophonist Gailloreto puts his own spin on the subject, pointing out that swing is something you feel in your gut.

So how does Barber answer the question she posed on the meaning of swing?

“I would guess the definition of swing will remain elusive of the written word, and that’s OK.”

Yes it is, for what words cannot articulate, Barber and colleagues express in pitch, rhythm and, of course, swing.

Chi-Town Jazz Festival lineup

The sixth annual Chi-Town Jazz Festival, organized by guitarist and Catholic priest John Moulder as a fund-raiser for hunger and relief, will run March 4 through 8 in various Chicago locations.

Among the highlights:

March 4: Tammy McCann and Mike Allemana, SHE and Geof Bradfield Quartet at the Jazz Showcase.

March 5: Justefan Band, Eric Schneider Quartet and Chicago Jazz Orchestra’s Bill Overton, Andy’s Jazz Club.

March 6: Matt Ulery’s Loom, John Moulder Quartet and Chinchano, Green Mill Jazz Club.

For details, visit chitownjazzfestival.org.

hreich@tribpub.com (mailto:hreich@tribpub.com)

Twitter @howardreich

Jazz Promo Services
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January 20, 2015 / No Comments / More

Patricia Barber on the air: Welcome to ‘MusicHeads’ – Chicago Tribune

** Patricia Barber on the air: Welcome to ‘MusicHeads’ – Chicago Tribune
————————————————————

We already knew she could sing, play the piano and write hyperliterate, musically sophisticated songs.

Can Barber, in other words, illuminate the meaning, context and syntax of jazz during a series of one-hour radio shows?

So what is swing?

Saxophonist Gailloreto puts his own spin on the subject, pointing out that swing is something you feel in your gut.

So how does Barber answer the question she posed on the meaning of swing?

“I would guess the definition of swing will remain elusive of the written word, and that’s OK.”

Yes it is, for what words cannot articulate, Barber and colleagues express in pitch, rhythm and, of course, swing.

Chi-Town Jazz Festival lineup

The sixth annual Chi-Town Jazz Festival, organized by guitarist and Catholic priest John Moulder as a fund-raiser for hunger and relief, will run March 4 through 8 in various Chicago locations.

Among the highlights:

March 4: Tammy McCann and Mike Allemana, SHE and Geof Bradfield Quartet at the Jazz Showcase.

March 5: Justefan Band, Eric Schneider Quartet and Chicago Jazz Orchestra’s Bill Overton, Andy’s Jazz Club.

March 6: Matt Ulery’s Loom, John Moulder Quartet and Chinchano, Green Mill Jazz Club.

For details, visit chitownjazzfestival.org.

hreich@tribpub.com (mailto:hreich@tribpub.com)

Twitter @howardreich

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Barbara Carroll Performs at Birdland – NYTimes.com

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** Barbara Carroll Performs at Birdland
————————————————————

The elegant jazz pianist Barbara Carroll opened her show at Birdland on Saturday evening with a lightly swinging performance of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” a song that never loses its relevance as it seesaws between dread and exuberance. From its opening phrase, “There may be trouble ahead,” it addresses the age-old question: How is it possible to live happily in a world that often seems on the verge of collapse? The answer is the same today as it was 1936: Whenever possible, live in the moment.

It led off a show in which Ms. Carroll delicately addressed the recent shootings in Paris with a suite of songs about the City of Light that included “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “If You Leave Paris” and a swinging rendition of “April in Paris” that echoed the famous Count Basie recording.

Ms. Carroll, who is soon to celebrate her 90th birthday with undiminished vitality, has an essentially sunny musical sensibility. But during “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” the harmonies briefly became dissonant, and her musical partner, the great bassist Jay Leonhart, bowing his instrument, inserted an ominous threnody that seemed to acknowledge the threat of jihadism.

Musicians with an unerring taste in great songs, Ms. Carroll and Mr. Leonhart performed a set that maintained the same balance of light and shadow as Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” An instrumental version of “Gee, Officer Krupke” carried playfulness to the brink of comedy. A lush film-noir mood washed through a coupling of David Raksin’s “Laura” and his theme from “The Bad and the Beautiful.”

Ms. Carroll brought her mischievous parlando vocal style, descended from Mabel Mercer, to Cole Porter’s “Looking at You” and the Cy Coleman-Carolyn Leigh standard “You Fascinate Me So,” whose narrator admires “the sweet geography descending from your eyebrow to your toe.”

Both vocally and in her semiclassical arrangements of Stephen Sondheim songs, Ms. Carroll is one of his most insightful interpreters. Her quiet, contemplative rendition of “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” from “Anyone Can Whistle,” expressed an even deeper, more personal response to life’s uncertainty than the Berlin classic and is rooted in a sturdy romantic partnership: “I’m sure of here and now and us together.”

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Barbara Carroll Performs at Birdland – NYTimes.com

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** Barbara Carroll Performs at Birdland
————————————————————

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Barbara Carroll Performs at Birdland – NYTimes.com

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** Barbara Carroll Performs at Birdland
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Pee Wee Ellis Opens Up About His Time Playing with James Brown – ABC News

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** Pee Wee Ellis Opens Up About His Time Playing with James Brown
————————————————————
PHOTO: James Brown performs on stage at the North Sea Jazz Festival held in The Hague, Netherlands, July 9, 1988.

Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis is a music icon.

The 73-year-old saxophonist and composer has been active in the industry for more than five decades, five years of which he played with and led the James Brown (http://abcnews.go.com/topics/entertainment/music/james-brown.htm) Revue alongside the late icon. So he knows the funk legend more than most.

Ellis told ABC News he got the opportunity to lead Brown’s band from 1965 to 1969 after he had previous experience at the helm of an ensemble.

“Later when I was in the James Brown Revue, that experience stood me in good stead when Mr. Brown appointed me band leader after Nat Jones left the band,” he said.

In that time with Brown, who died in 2006 at the age of 73, Ellis learned a few things about the “Get on Up” singer. He also started working with Brown at just 24 years old.

“A friend of mine, Waymon Reed, who played trumpet in the band, called me up, because James Brown needed a saxophone player. James Brown had seen me playing with my own group in Florida (http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/florida.htm) a couple of years before, so he knew of me. The rest is history,” he said. “James Brown was born and went straight to crazy ….Being a jazz head, I really wasn’t that aware of James Brown when I joined the band, but my first night in the wings watching the show (which all new band members had to do) took my breath away…. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
PHOTO: Pee Wee Ellis performs during the Festival Jazz A La Villette 2011 at Grande Halle de La Villette, Sept. 10, 2011, in Paris.

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PHOTO: Pee Wee Ellis performs during the Festival Jazz A La Villette 2011 at Grande Halle de La Villette, Sept. 10, 2011, in Paris.

Brown started to evolve in the late 60’s and Ellis said his “jazz influence melded with [Brown’s R&B] roots and funk was born.” Some of Brown’s first official funk songs included “Cold Sweat” in 1967 [which Ellis co-wrote] and “I Got the Feelin'” the next year.

Even though the two didn’t stay close over the years, Ellis has fond memories of being on tour with the icon, especially when food was involved.

“He loved fried chicken and he would bring a bucket into the studio and onto his private jet,” he said. “At home he would make hot dogs and pork and beans. [Also,] in a crowd he always had the floor and he told a good joke.”

Ellis spoke to ABC as part of his work in Miami with “The Art of the Party” this past Saturday for a show at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. The proceeds from Saturday’s event featuring Ellis, a Florida native, fund the museum’s education program.

When Ellis was very young, he spent much of his time with older jazz musicians who gave him the name “Pee Wee.” He said his stepfather Ezell Ellis “was the guy who would get me out of bed in the middle of the night to play piano at the local dance hall when the piano player was too drunk to,” so music came natural to him growing up.

In last years’ biopic about Brown “Get on Up,” Ellis was portrayed by Tariq Trotter from the Roots (http://abcnews.go.com/topics/entertainment/music/the-roots-tariq-trotter.htm) and said he thought the movie was “fine.”

“But it doesn’t do justice to the band or the truth,” he added. “I didn’t like the way I was portrayed,” he said, adding that he would have liked to have been consulted before filming. “It’s at least courteous to approach someone when you’re going to portray an important part of their life on a movie screen,” he said.

In the years since Ellis toured with Brown, he’s recorded a slew of solo albums like 1992’s “Blues Mission” and “Tenoration” in 2011. He’s also worked with Van Morrison (http://abcnews.go.com/topics/entertainment/music/van-morrison.htm) for more than four decades.

Ellis now lives in the UK and stays busy “playing, writing, arranging, teaching, recording and leading my own band The Pee Wee Ellis Assembly,” he said. “I am writing my autobiography and have a new project in development chronicling the history and impact of funk on popular music and culture. Plus the phone is always ringing with something new for me to do.”

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Pee Wee Ellis Opens Up About His Time Playing with James Brown – ABC News

Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis is a music icon.

Ellis told ABC News he got the opportunity to lead Brown’s band from 1965 to 1969 after he had previous experience at the helm of an ensemble.

“Later when I was in the James Brown Revue, that experience stood me in good stead when Mr. Brown appointed me band leader after Nat Jones left the band,” he said.

In that time with Brown, who died in 2006 at the age of 73, Ellis learned a few things about the “Get on Up” singer. He also started working with Brown at just 24 years old.

Samuel Dietz/Redferns/Getty Images

PHOTO: Pee Wee Ellis performs during the Festival Jazz A La Villette 2011 at Grande Halle de La Villette, Sept. 10, 2011, in Paris.

Even though the two didn’t stay close over the years, Ellis has fond memories of being on tour with the icon, especially when food was involved.

Jazz Promo Services
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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Pee Wee Ellis Opens Up About His Time Playing with James Brown – ABC News

Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis is a music icon.

Ellis told ABC News he got the opportunity to lead Brown’s band from 1965 to 1969 after he had previous experience at the helm of an ensemble.

“Later when I was in the James Brown Revue, that experience stood me in good stead when Mr. Brown appointed me band leader after Nat Jones left the band,” he said.

In that time with Brown, who died in 2006 at the age of 73, Ellis learned a few things about the “Get on Up” singer. He also started working with Brown at just 24 years old.

Samuel Dietz/Redferns/Getty Images

PHOTO: Pee Wee Ellis performs during the Festival Jazz A La Villette 2011 at Grande Halle de La Villette, Sept. 10, 2011, in Paris.

Even though the two didn’t stay close over the years, Ellis has fond memories of being on tour with the icon, especially when food was involved.

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

The 2015 Grammys Get Jazz Mostly Wrong, a Little Right | PopMatters

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By Will Layman (http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/18) 19 January 2015

** The 2015 Grammys Get Jazz Mostly Wrong, a Little Right
————————————————————

With the end of one year and the start of another, we are driven to assess, rank, top-ten, compare, and because you can’t do the other things without doing this, categorize. Movies, plays, music, but everything else too: dunks, catches, news stories, all of it. Then, naturally, we put the results on TV.

Cinema has the Oscars, of course, but it’s such a huge industry that there are also the Golden Globes, the New York Film Critics, and just about every newspaper and website out there picking the best. If you don’t like one measure, there’s probably another you can tune into for some affirmation, verification, or maybe a tip on what to spend your next $15 on.

In music, we just have the Grammys and — let’s all say it together, now — they generally stink. They’re hopelessly out of touch, narrow, and sales-oriented. Except when they’re not. Like members of congress and lawyers, they’re easy to hate, unless they’re on your side.

For jazz, the Grammys are a complicated topic. There have been times when The Recording Academy (the official name of the organization that awards the Grammys, and did you know that Sheila E and Harvey Mason, Jr. are both trustees of the Academy?) has recognized jazz in important ways. A few years ago, Esperanza Spalding won “Best New Artist” over this list: Drake, Mumford and Sons, Florence and the Machine and… Justin Bieber. There’s no way of knowing what that meant, exactly, but it felt less like the victory of good music over Justin Bieber and more like recognition of excellent but accessible jazz in a field of excellent and accessible hip hop, roots music, and indie-pop. A few years earlier, in 2008, Herbie Hancock took home Album of the Year honors over Kanye West, Amy Winehouse, Vince Gill, and The Foo Fighters.

Flawed as they are, the Grammys don’t always get it wrong, and more importantly for folks who care about jazz, they still have a kind of meaning, even if we wish it weren’t so.

So, having already weighed in on 2014’s best jazz, let’s investigate how 2014’s jazz will be Grammy-remembered.

All Mixed Up: Jazz Singing That Isn’t… or Something

Every chance you have to ask “What is jazz, anyway?” should probably be avoided. Jazz musicians themselves can’t agree (or, more often, don’t care), and jazz fans have as many opinions as they have passions. The Academy has no idea either, as the names of the Grammy categories, and the sliced and diced nominations, demonstrate.

For example, the Grammys have a category called “Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album”, which is the home this year to artists such as Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow. Makes sense as a way of allowing that kind of music to get some recognition while not competing with Katy Perry and Ariane Grande. But this year, the category might also be called “Best Jazz Album Recorded by a Pop Star … Maybe with the Help of a Jazz Singer”. Because there you have Annie Lennox and her Blue Note album Nostalgia as well as, natch, Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga going Cheek to Cheek.

It’s not that this is the wrong category for those records, exactly, but Bennett and Gaga certainly spent every second of their endless media tour calling their music “jazz”, and Lennox’s effort takes on “The Nearness of You”, “God Bless the Child”, “Mood Indigo”, and “Strange Fruit” in nontraditional ways.

I haven’t written about Gaga as a jazz singer, but here goes: she’s fine — certainly better than much of the jazz singing that I heard in 2014. She’s bright-voiced and in tune, and her feel on the slower tunes like “But Beautiful” is great, with a nice sound, rich in tone and molding the melody with care. But her rhythmic feel makes clear that she hasn’t sung much jazz. Her approach is very Broadway, lacking the cool pliancy that Tony Bennett is so great at, right next to her on the record. I actually prefer the way she leans into the difficulty of “Lush Life” to the way she glitters up and makes square the up-tempo parts of “Cheek to Cheek”.

Weirder for me is the way Gaga — who grew up in Manhattan but has a telltale background playing lead roles in high school musicals — seems to affect various odd accents on some tunes, sounding kind of British at times, Betty Boopish at others. She makes her jazz singing into a kind of schtick. Is her record with Bennett jazz rather than “traditional pop”? When the strings sweep in, maybe it’s the latter. At other times, it’s hard to figure out what jazz could be if this ain’t it. Is it great jazz, Grammy-nominatable jazz? Gosh, no.

The Lennox record is more honest and more interesting. She’s not trying to fool us into thinking she’s a jazz singer who sounds different than the pop singer we already know. The take on “Mood Indigo” features electric guitar strumming without much jazz nuance. It tacks a straight twelve-bar form onto the Ellington tune, and that’s where it really sounds at home. Rather than faux-jazz, this seems more like rock-roots music that’s wearing a metaphoric jazz fedora for style.

Lennox’s voice is the same as it ever was, utterly not swinging, utterly not that of a jazz singer. Her “Summertime” is really cool, a great piano arrangement that has an ominous groove, but it’s not jazz-like, just like her voice. Is it “traditional pop”? It’s remarkably untraditional (other than the repertoire), and that’s why it’s good. Neither does it sit in the jazz tradition. It is sui generis, it kicks Barry Manilow’s ass by any measure, and it probably belongs in a Grammy category not yet invented.

When you slide over to the actual “Best Jazz Vocal Album” category, things are a little confusing there, too. Tierney Sutton, a terrific singer who pretty much lives in this category, is nominated for the delicate, spare, and accomplished Paris Sessions. Rene Marie gets a nod for her saucy and surprisingly wonderful Eartha Kitt tribute, I Wanna Be Evil. And Gretchen Parlato’s superb Live in NYC is here, showing a glimpse of how jazz singing is moving forward in 2014.

Dianne Reeves — another excellent “jazz” singer — is nominated for similar-isn collaboration with Robert Glasper (who has been a big influence on and collaborator with Parlato) as well as Esperanza Spalding, George Duke (RIP, and also Reeves’ cousin) and others. Beautiful Lifeslides into R&B territory pretty often. Then, there is pianist Billy Childs’ tribute to folk-pop legend Laura Nyro, a pu-pu platter of delight that is clearly modeled on Hancock’s Album of the Year Joni Mitchell record: ten cool and idiosyncratic songs from a golden age of pop-rock, with a different singer on every track. Is it jazz? That’s hard to say, but in a good way.

The Reeves record might not be jazz. It’s very much a Robert Glasper project that falls on the commercial R&B side of his divide: and, yes, he is again nominated for “Best R&B Album” with Black Radio 2, which predecessor won that category in 2013.

(Side note: the Grammys’ attempt to make sense of R&B is a hopeless muddle. It has separate categories for “Best R&B Performance” and “Best Traditional R&B Performance”, mirroring its pop vocal set-up. Glasper’s version of “Jesus Children” on Black Radio 2 in the traditional category, which seems odd given how much hip-hop feel there is in this track, though it’s a Stevie Wonder tune. For “albums”, however, there’s just one R&B category, but there’s a separate “Urban Contemporary Album” category, whatever that means, though it’s not rap or hip-hop, which has its own category. Huh.)

The Childs record is even harder to figure as “jazz”, even though Childs is a jazz pianist by background. His Nyro record is mainly a setting for: Alison Krauss, Ricki Lee Jones, Susan Tedeschi, Renee Fleming, Lisa Fisher, Shawn Colvin, and Ledisi, not one really a “jazz” singer. But what about the tracks featuring Esperanza Spalding, Becca Stevens, and Dianne Reeves, you say? Becca Stevens was actually featured on my favorite “jazz” record of the year by Ambrose Akinmusere, right? Does that make her a “jazz” singer? Does the killer gospel/jazz piano solo that Childs plays on Ledesi’s “Stone Soul Picnic” make it jazz? Does the fact that the song fades out over the solo invalidate that? Ahhhhhhh, who knows. Who cares, right?

In the end, the problem is that these categories make little sense because the music itself isn’t obedient; it doesn’t color within the lines or give even half a hoot about whether we call it “jazz” or “pop” or “R&B”, contemporary, traditional or otherwise. The Grammys knows this, too: “And When I Die” (Alison Krauss’s feature from the Billy Childs record) is also specifically nominated for “Best American Roots Performance”, another label the Academy just made up that means whatever you want it to mean.
Page 2 of 2

** Safe Choices: The Grammys’ Jazz Instrumental Categories
————————————————————

Jazz singers may slide across more boundaries than the average saxophone player; once you pick up an alto and start improvising, you are pretty likely playing jazz. And sure enough, the Grammys’ instrumental categories make a bit more sense.
In a typical year, the Academy sneaks in a big name, maybe in a tribute segment, maybe in one of those uncomfortable numbers where Sting and Herbie Hancock team up with The Foo Fighters to do a Burt Bacharach tune.

First, the Academy has found a home of sorts for so-called “smooth jazz”: “Best Contemporary Instrumental Album” (formerly “Best Pop Instrumental Album” — the Grammys have created a series of what the Academy calls “fields” of music, and “contemporary” is a new one that, you know, kind of means nothing, but there you go). Awarded only since 2001, this award sweeps up nominees like Spyro Gyra, Kenny G, and Boney James (smoothies all) but also: George Winston (presumably a candidate for the “New Age” award), Brian Setzer (a retro-rocker), John Tesh (a purveyor of what used to be called “easy listening” music), Prince (yup, in 2004 for N.E.W.S.) and this year, Chris Thile and Edgar Meyer for their acoustic duets on Nonesuch, which have about as much similarity to smooth jazz as Lebron James has to an Easter Peep.

“Contemporary Instrumental” may be a catch-all, but it has the effect of making the “Jazz Instrumental” category makes some sense. This year’s nominees are all most certainly legitimate and fine jazz records: Landmarks (Blue Note) by Brian Blade & The Fellowship Band, Trilogy(Concord) by the Chick Corea Trio, Floating (Palmetto) by the Fred Hersch Trio, Enjoy the View (Blue Note) by Bobby Hutcherson, David Sanborn, and Joey DeFrancesco featuring Billy Hart, and All Rise: A Joyful Elegy for Fats Waller (Blue Note) by Jason Moran.

Two of those (Blade and Moran) were among my favorites. I didn’t love Corea’s latest, but it’s hard to entirely quibble with a band featuring Brian Blade and Christian McBride. Fred Hersch’s trio is always sharp. And when Bobby Hutcherson is nominated for a Grammy, the world is a better place. But it’s hard not to note that three of the five nominated recordings are from Blue Note, which is the Big Dog of jazz labels (owned by the Universal Music Group). Brian Blade is the drummer on two of the records. And Chick Corea and David Sanborn are maybe the Dustin Hoffman and George Clooney of jazz: known to all and very safe bets. Just one of these records comes from an independent label.

One of the charming quirks of the Grammys’ take on jazz is the category “Best Improvised Jazz Solo”. The award has included the word “improvised” only since 2009, whereas before that the category mirrored the “Best Classical Instrumental Performance” category. It seems almost quaint to imagine voters seriously thinking that they can vote on the “best” improvised solo, as if anyone, even the most ardent jazz critic or fan, has listened to them all and believes they can be evaluated one against another. It would be like the National Book Award people voting on “Best Sentence in a Book”.

Regardless, the results of the voting in the “jazz solo” category over the years tell a tale. From all the myriad soloists who have played on the gajillions of jazz records in recent years, here’s who’s won since 1972: Michael Brecker (six times), Oscar Peterson (four times), Chick Corea (four times), Gary Burton (three times), Wynton Marsalis (three times in a row), Herbie Hancock (three times), Wayne Shorter (three times), and multiple times for Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Terence Blanchard, Joe Henderson, you get the idea. Pretty much, Mr. Grammy only knows a few jazz musicians, and he just gives those guys awards over and over again.

This year, the nominated soloists are Corea (‘f course), Hersch, Kenny Barron, Joe Lovano, and Brad Mehldau: four pianists for some reason. It’s interesting to note that Mehldau is nominated for a Fender Rhodes electric piano solo on a track from his intriguing collaboration with drummer Mark Guiliana — an album that might have been nominated in the “Best Dance/Electronic Album” category, as it’s not exactly a jazz record. It’s also notable that, of all the many nominees in the various jazz categories, barely any are under 50. Mehldau, Blade, and DeFrancesco are in their 40s. Moran and Parlato are in their 30s. Pedrito Martinez, nominated in the Latin Jazz category, may be even younger.

But this is as much about safety as it is about age. In polls of jazz critics, the top albums of 2014 are usually coming from a different and more adventurous place in the scene. The NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll compiled by Francis Davis (full disclosure: I’m a voter there) gives its top spots to Steve Lehman’s edgy septet on Mise en Abime, Wadada Leo Smith’s Great Lakes Suites, Ambrose Akinmusere’s The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint, Sonny Rollins’ Road Shows, Vol. , Mark Turner’s Lathe of Heaven, and Marc Ribot’s Live at the Village Vanguard. Only two of those discs are on major labels, and only Rollins qualifies as part of the perennial jazz establishment.

More importantly, Grammy nominations are still hard to come by if your music flirts with a vocabulary of dissonance that, 50 years ago, was considered part of the jazz avant-garde. Lehman, Smith, Ribot, and the like can get irascible in their playing, and maybe that’s the thing.

Still, hope remains strong. Archie Shepp, a saxophonist who honks and screeches with the best, is nominated this year for “Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album” for Live: I Hear the Sound, a concert recording of his landmark Attica Blues. And Lehman at least appears on the Jason Moran record, as Moran himself is a remarkable and edgy player who just happened to make a very accessible Fats Waller tribute.

Perhaps it makes sense that part of what is new and exciting in jazz today is increasingly Grammy-friendly. The records by Parlato and Reeves both bear the stamp of Robert Glasper’s touch at incorporating modern groove music (that is, a kind of hip hop) into a jazz setting without dumbing down the proceedings. Moran is up to much of the same thing on All Rise. In this area, the Grammy folks may actually be a bit more tolerant and forward-looking than many jazz critics.

Francis Davis, in his commentary on the NPR jazz poll, gets it wrong when he writes that the production on All Rise is “hip-hop-cum-smooth-jazz” and that MeShell N’degeocello’s vocals “help do this [recording] in”. You can fault the Grammys for being too safe, sure, but if a record incorporates elements of pop music in any way, you can be sure that some older jazz critics will oppose it. In fact, jazz needs both more hip-hop and more dissonance, and both Steve Lehman and Jason Moran bring those elements. And there’s room for both.

When In Doubt, Make a Whitman’s Sampler

What we learned from Herbie Hancock’s Album of the Year win with The Joni Letters is, perhaps, that nothing succeeds quite like jazz that brings a little sophistication to pop music, and that incorporates a bevy of pop singers up front. Hancock had Tina Turner, Corrine Bailey Rae, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, and Joni herself fronting his band: pop shining up the jazz and jazz buffing the pop. That’s why we’re going to see the Billy Childs record win for jazz vocals this year — it’s very nearly the same record.

And in the world music category, I’d bet most of the farm that the victory will go to the Academy’s old friend Sergio Mendes (of Brazil ’66, ’77, etc) who also made a Whitman’s Sampler of a record in Magic, a record released on the mostly-jazz imprint Okeh. Featuring American stars like John Legend and Jangle Monae and Brazilian big names such as Milton Nascimento and Carlinhos Brown, Mendes’ latest gives Grammy voters the chance to endorse (or discover that they are familiar with) the work of any one of several big star. Like casting a movie with a series of big-name stars in supporting roles (have you seen Paul Thomas Anderson’s Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice yet? It likely contains one of your favorite actors!), making records this way makes Grammy-rific sense.

Familiarity comforts. It sells. But it’s not the future.

Sell More Records

Of course, the Grammys are not about the future. They are about the past year. They are supposed to be about the music that made the past year great. But in fact, what the Grammys do is impact future record sales and song downloads. A year ago, Grammy wins increased sales for Daft Punk (300 percent), Kacey Musgraves (177 percent), Lorde (86 percent), Imagine Dragons (65 percent), Macklemore & Ryan Lewis (62 percent), and Katy Perry (22 percent). So, when the 2015 Grammys are handed out on 8 February at the Staples Center in L.A., musicians will have crossed fingers, as will their hopeful promoters and managers. The jazz categories may not produce big surges, but in a corner of the music business where times are tough, every little boost counts.

Will any jazz musicians make it onto the telecast? Maybe that exposure means more than a win. In a typical year, the Academy sneaks in a big name, maybe in a tribute segment, maybe in one of those uncomfortable numbers where Sting and Herbie Hancock team up with The Foo Fighters to do a Burt Bacharach tune.

However it shakes out, it hard to imagine that the 2015 Grammys will significantly promote jazz. That work is being done by the art form itself in tiny steps: in the dazzling New York Winter Jazzfest that began on 8 January; in the continued refusal of the new generation of musicians to limit their music to what was prescribed in 1960, 1980, or 2000; and in the open-mindedness of fans will follow Jason Moran from Monk to MeShell N’degeocello or follow Gretchen Parlato from Robert Glasper to Wayne Shorter.

The music remains more expansive than the list of nominees that the Academy is comfortable with, and more elastic than the crazy Grammy categories themselves. Do you know how many Grammys Duke Ellington won? Neither do I.

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

The 2015 Grammys Get Jazz Mostly Wrong, a Little Right | PopMatters

By Will Layman (http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/18) 19 January 2015

** The 2015 Grammys Get Jazz Mostly Wrong, a Little Right
————————————————————

Flawed as they are, the Grammys don’t always get it wrong, and more importantly for folks who care about jazz, they still have a kind of meaning, even if we wish it weren’t so.

So, having already weighed in on 2014’s best jazz, let’s investigate how 2014’s jazz will be Grammy-remembered.

All Mixed Up: Jazz Singing That Isn’t… or Something

** Safe Choices: The Grammys’ Jazz Instrumental Categories
————————————————————

When In Doubt, Make a Whitman’s Sampler

Familiarity comforts. It sells. But it’s not the future.

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

The 2015 Grammys Get Jazz Mostly Wrong, a Little Right | PopMatters

By Will Layman (http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/18) 19 January 2015

** The 2015 Grammys Get Jazz Mostly Wrong, a Little Right
————————————————————

Flawed as they are, the Grammys don’t always get it wrong, and more importantly for folks who care about jazz, they still have a kind of meaning, even if we wish it weren’t so.

So, having already weighed in on 2014’s best jazz, let’s investigate how 2014’s jazz will be Grammy-remembered.

All Mixed Up: Jazz Singing That Isn’t… or Something

** Safe Choices: The Grammys’ Jazz Instrumental Categories
————————————————————

When In Doubt, Make a Whitman’s Sampler

Familiarity comforts. It sells. But it’s not the future.

Sell More Records

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Miles Davis – Around The Midnight (1967) – YouTube

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The second great Quintet in 1967 with Miles Davis joined by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFLYz0SdKg

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Miles Davis – Around The Midnight (1967) – YouTube

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Anybody know where this where this concert was filmed?

The second great Quintet in 1967 with Miles Davis joined by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFLYz0SdKg

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Miles Davis – Around The Midnight (1967) – YouTube

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Anybody know where this where this concert was filmed?

The second great Quintet in 1967 with Miles Davis joined by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVFLYz0SdKg

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Danilo Pérez Builds a Magnet for Musicians in Panama – NYTimes.com

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** Danilo Pérez Builds a Magnet for Musicians in Panama
————————————————————
Continue reading the main story Slide Show

** In Panama, a Burgeoning Jazz Hotbed
————————————————————

CreditTito Herrera for The New York Times

PANAMA — In the wee hours of Friday morning, Danilo Pérez climbed onstage at his jazz club here to play a set. Mr. Pérez, the Panama-born pianist and composer who has for more than a decade been a member of Wayne Shorter’s acclaimed quartet, had already headlined shows for the Panama Jazz Festival (http://www.panamajazzfestival.com/) , which he founded 12 years ago. There he had performed alongside the Puerto Rican saxophonist Miguel Zenón (http://www.miguelzenon.com/) and his fellow Panamanian, the salsa singer Rubén Blades, and in the festival’s gala concert at the 106-year-old National Theater.

And here he was, at 1:30 a.m. Friday, sitting behind the grand piano in the intimate Danilo’s Jazz Club (http://www.acehotel.com/) , the city’s only performance space dedicated exclusively to jazz, now packed with friends and visitors. He was joined by John Patitucci, the Shorter quartet bassist, and a host of international musicians and students, eager to improvise alongside the masters. Nêgah Santos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzAZEcib9Nc) , 24, a Brazilian powerhouse in denim shorts, gave her congas a workout; Samuel Batista, 24, a Panamanian in his third year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, drew full-throated cheers with his saxophone. The jam lasted until closing time, and afterward Mr. Pérez gathered his young charges at a cocktail table to dispense encouragement and wisdom. “This kind of thing wakes you up, right?” he said, grinning.

Even in jazz, which has a long tradition of mentorship, Mr. Pérez (http://www.daniloperez.com/) , 49, has emerged as a singular figure. Nearly 30 years after he left his native Panama to study jazz composition at Berklee, he has made promoting musicianship in Panama — using music as a springboard, cultural unifier and teaching tool — his life’s work. In 2005, a year after he started the jazz festival with his family, he created the Danilo Pérez Foundation, a nonprofit center for music education and outreach; the festival, which draws as many as 30,000 people over its six-day run each January, provides money for the foundation. The club, which opened last February at the new American Trade Hotel, a luxe outpost of the Ace Hotel chain, is, in his view, the last piece of the puzzle.

“Having a club really helps to focus the work,” Mr. Pérez said, “to provide a space to connect with all these people who are eager to hear more music.” For musicians, a year-round place to perform is “a double blessing,” he added. He had Mr. Shorter’s sound engineer develop the acoustics with the aim of recording there, à la the Village Vanguard. “We hope that with the club, Panama becomes the capital of jazz in Latin America,” Mr. Pérez said.

Already, he has changed the lives of students, especially those from poor backgrounds, like Mr. Batista, handing them a horn and heaping on support, helping some study at Berklee or the New England Conservatory of Music, which hold auditions here during the festival week. (Mr. Pérez leads the Berklee Global Jazz Institute (http://www.berklee.edu/focused/global-jazz) , splitting his time between Boston and Panama.) The conservatories send their own students, too, making for a musical cross-pollination with rising Latin artists. The festival has also been a model for other programming in Panama and South America, where jazz festivals are not as numerous as they are in Europe and the United States. A Chilean delegation visited to study this year’s edition.
Continue reading the main story

“He has proven that you can be successful at it,” said Mariana Núñez Haugland, the director general of Panama’s National Institute of Culture, which sends students to the daily classes that are part of the festival. Mr. Pérez’s efforts, she added, have convinced sponsors and governments that music helps young people “be better citizens.”

Jason Olaine, director of programming and touring at Jazz at Lincoln Center, who has often booked Mr. Pérez as a performer, said his infectious energy may be well suited to link institutions with the musical street culture of Latin America. “He’s just an incredible talent and visionary,” Mr. Olaine said.

For Mr. Pérez, the connection between music and community was taught early, by his father, Danilo Sr., a bandleader and educator, he said during a tour of the foundation on Friday. It is in the former music conservatory where the young Mr. Pérez took his first piano lessons; by 12 he was a working musician. “My happiest days, I passed them here,” he said.

Run on a tight budget, the foundation took donations of instruments from colleagues like Mr. Patitucci and the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés (http://www.valdeschucho.com/) . Similarly, the festival is staffed by hundreds of volunteers, said Patricia Zarate, its executive director, a saxophonist (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvvlOsux-fk) and Mr. Pérez’s wife. A festival of this scope would likely cost $1 million to $3 million to produce, she said, “and we do it with less than $500,000.” The musicians are paid on a sliding scale, and backing comes from the Panamian government and sponsors like Copa Airlines.

For Mr. Batista, who picked up the saxophone as a teenager, studying at the foundation “changed everything,” he said. He earned a full scholarship (http://www.berklee.edu/news/video-student-saxophonist-samuel-batista) to Berklee, one of only two international slots for that program annually. He double-majors in music performance and music therapy, teaches at the foundation in summer and runs auditions at the festival. “The way that they open the doors makes you feel that you need to do the same,” he said.

Though he’s comfortable with Mr. Pérez — known to many here simply as Maestro — improvising onstage with him at the club “was terrifying,” Mr. Batista said afterward. “I’m still in shock.”

It was the good kind of shock, he added. Watching him invent harmonies with Mr. Patitucci, “you realize the work never ends,” Mr. Batista said.

Chale Icaza, 37, a local professional drummer who was mentored by Mr. Pérez, sees the club as a new artistic challenge, and a responsibility. “You can’t just go into that place and play all right,” Mr. Icaza said.

The idea for the club first came up about five years ago, Mr. Pérez said, in conversations with K. C. Hardin, the developer who owns the foundation’s building. When Mr. Hardin, an American transplant here, connected with Ace Hotel, the Portland, Ore., chain known for injecting a dose of studied cool into unlikely places, the notion finally came to fruition. At American Trade (https://www.acehotel.com/panama) , a grand 50-room hotel in what was once a derelict gang stronghold in Casco Viejo, the historic colonial district here, Danilo’s Jazz Club sits next to the hotel lobby. Mr. Pérez’s foundation is just across the street.
Continue reading the main story

Ace’s management took the collaboration seriously, even hiring a researcher to delve into Panama’s roots in Afro-Cuban jazz. It was also Ace’s idea to invite WWOZ, a New Orleans jazz radio station, to live-stream (http://www.wwoz.org/programs/wwoz-ustream-live-video-stream) the festival, which Mr. Pérez welcomed as a way to broaden the music’s following.

To worries that the hotel — among the city’s most expensive — has contributed to gentrification (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/23/t-magazine/panama-city-mission-viejo.html?_r=0) in Casco Viejo, Mr. Pérez said he hoped a well-heeled audience could help support the club. With an eye toward accessibility, tickets to some shows are $5.

The festival’s populist mission was clear at the daily clinics, which host about 2,000 students of all ages. On Friday, the virtuoso Cuban percussionist Pedrito Martínez (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/08/arts/music/pedrito-martinez-takes-next-step-in-debut-cd-with-band.html?pagewanted=all) held court in a sweaty classroom, below a diagram of Bach’s chorales, pounding out polyrhythms and inspiring a singalong. Then he answered questions about religion, folklore and history for a rapt audience, many of them grade-schoolers.

The closing concert on Saturday, free to the public, also drew thousands, even on a rainy day. People picnicked and danced to salsa, samba, son and jazz. Alongside his students, Mr. Pérez played piano and keyboards in an all-star jam at the end, upstaged only slightly by three kids whose horns were half their body size. When the stage show ended, another percussion jam started up on the wet grass, and people lingered into the night, not wanting the music to end.

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Danilo Pérez Builds a Magnet for Musicians in Panama – NYTimes.com

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** Danilo Pérez Builds a Magnet for Musicians in Panama
————————————————————
Continue reading the main story Slide Show

** In Panama, a Burgeoning Jazz Hotbed
————————————————————

CreditTito Herrera for The New York Times

It was the good kind of shock, he added. Watching him invent harmonies with Mr. Patitucci, “you realize the work never ends,” Mr. Batista said.

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Danilo Pérez Builds a Magnet for Musicians in Panama – NYTimes.com

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** Danilo Pérez Builds a Magnet for Musicians in Panama
————————————————————
Continue reading the main story Slide Show

** In Panama, a Burgeoning Jazz Hotbed
————————————————————

CreditTito Herrera for The New York Times

It was the good kind of shock, he added. Watching him invent harmonies with Mr. Patitucci, “you realize the work never ends,” Mr. Batista said.

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January 19, 2015 / No Comments / More

Already a Hub for the Arts, New Brunswick Enters Its Jazz Age – NYTimes.com

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** Already a Hub for the Arts, New Brunswick Enters Its Jazz Age
————————————————————
Photo
Thursday nights at Hotoke are a part of a resurgence of the New Brunswick jazz scene. Instrumentalists performing there have included the drummer Rudy Royston and his quartet.Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

This month’s cold snap did not deter the drummer Rudy Royston (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljMnINm9sS0&list=PL487ap7pX5kF9ns5te75ZKaTXxbRxV_UQ&index=8) , a fixture on the New York jazz scene, from making his way to New Brunswick, where on a particularly frigid Thursday night, he could be found burning up the bandstand at Hotoke (http://www.hotokerestaurant.com/) , a restaurant and lounge on George Street.

Mr. Royston had a hole in his schedule to fill, and fill it he did, his drumming a polyrhythmic whirlwind propelling a quartet through war horses like “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Autumn Leaves.” Mr. Royston said he relished getting back to basics out of the glare of Manhattan.

“These gigs are foundation gigs,” he said, before launching into his set. “We play tunes, play the room, deal with management. They are at the root of jazz.”

But the larger significance of the set was that it was happening at all. The George Street of old, hollowed out by postwar suburbanization, was a dark and lonely place after 5 p.m., save for the odd prostitute prowling the stretch leading to Albany Street. The mere existence of a jazz room was something of a miracle.
Photo

At Hotoke. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

After fits and starts, however, New Brunswick has now become a destination for jazz. The coming months will see established instrumentalists on Thursdays at Hotoke; singers on Wednesdays at the Hyatt Regency Hotel (http://newbrunswick.hyatt.com/en/hotel/home.html) on Albany Street; aspiring artists on Tuesdays at Tumulty’s Pub (http://www.tumultys.com/) , a holdover from George Street’s bad old days; and a funk-fusion band on the first Friday of the month at Destination Dogs (http://www.destinationdogs.com/) , on Paterson Street. Festivals and one-off concerts at museums, art galleries and the like will fill out the schedule as the year unfolds.

Historically, New Brunswick’s native sons have contributed to jazz, from the stride pianist James P. Johnson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ0QCdF59Tk) , a Jazz Age innovator, to the avant-garde bassist Mark Helias (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AM6f6ERi9lo) , who came out of Rutgers University’s groundbreaking jazz studies program in the 1970s.

But jazz as a commercial enterprise didn’t gain a toehold in New Brunswick until Johnson & Johnson built its new headquarters there. Opening in 1983, it spawned redevelopment, like the Hyatt lounge and other cultural hot spots catering to a new, wealthier crowd.

By the 1990s, those spots included theaters, like the George Street Playhouse (http://www.georgestreetplayhouse.org/) and Crossroads Theater Company (http://www.crossroadstheatrecompany.org/) , and music spaces, like the Raritan River Club on Church Street, where the influential pianist Kenny Barron (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vofXNZPn4ow) , then a Rutgers professor, offered full sets of solo playing rarely heard when he performed in Manhattan clubs. Another establishment with new owners, Steakhouse 85, now operates at the River Club’s former address.

Despite the general improvement in New Brunswick’s fortunes, the city’s night life suffered during the 2008 recession, according to Virginia DeBerry (http://www.deberryandgrant.com/) , a writer and local jazz enthusiast.

“Everybody’s pocket was strained,” she said. “Jazz just wasn’t happening in town.”
Photo

Outside Hotoke. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

But the downturn had an upside. It spurred Ms. DeBerry, along with fellow enthusiasts Michael Tublin, a New Brunswick city employee, and Jim Lenihan, an engineer, to form the New Brunswick Jazz Project (http://www.nbjp.org/) . In the spring of 2010, the three started knocking on doors, brokering deals with local businesses interested in hosting jazz. This year, the project, which once booked two shows a month, will book three or four a week.
Continue reading the main story

Special events have at times proved problematic. A driving rain put a damper on the New Brunswick component of last September’s Central Jersey Jazz Festival (http://www.centraljerseyjazzfestival.com/) , an open-air show at Monument Square on Livingston Avenue, though 350 hardy souls bundled up to hear the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUQlOEXTWYQ) . Financing for the festival required the cajoling of corporate executives. “We really had to go out and twist arms,” Mr. Lenihan said.

In the future, however, financing could prove easier. The Jazz Project was recently approved as a nonprofit institution.

And new bookings keep rolling in. In the coming weeks, Mark Gross (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3K3tYvZB6gg) , a saxophonist, and Winard Harper (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCzCfk5FzVA) , a drummer, are scheduled to perform at Hotoke. The singers Lainie Cooke (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyG98d6EG28) and Taeko (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJcqAQEcreg) have been booked at the Hyatt, and on Jan. 28, a special event there will feature the veteran guitarist Dave Stryker (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAsrH2OL_n8) .

Even as the Jazz Project corrals such veterans, it features up-and-comers. The singer Vanessa Perea (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nvAa-JG9xA) enjoyed early exposure at the Hyatt before landing engagements at Manhattan clubs, including five nights of late sets last August at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.

Watching a clutch of fans laughing and drinking after braving the cold to hear Mr. Royston, Daljit Bais, a co-owner of Hotoke, smiled and said he hoped the music would be playing at his spot for a long time. Mr. Tublin echoed the sentiment, noting the music’s bonding effect.

“Everybody becomes family,” he said.

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January 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Already a Hub for the Arts, New Brunswick Enters Its Jazz Age – NYTimes.com

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“These gigs are foundation gigs,” he said, before launching into his set. “We play tunes, play the room, deal with management. They are at the root of jazz.”

At Hotoke. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

“Everybody’s pocket was strained,” she said. “Jazz just wasn’t happening in town.”
Photo

Outside Hotoke. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

In the future, however, financing could prove easier. The Jazz Project was recently approved as a nonprofit institution.

“Everybody becomes family,” he said.

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January 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

Already a Hub for the Arts, New Brunswick Enters Its Jazz Age – NYTimes.com

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“These gigs are foundation gigs,” he said, before launching into his set. “We play tunes, play the room, deal with management. They are at the root of jazz.”

At Hotoke. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

“Everybody’s pocket was strained,” she said. “Jazz just wasn’t happening in town.”
Photo

Outside Hotoke. Credit Ben Solomon for The New York Times

In the future, however, financing could prove easier. The Jazz Project was recently approved as a nonprofit institution.

“Everybody becomes family,” he said.

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January 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

The Mad Magazine TV Special 1974 – YouTube

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This was a pilot that never aired. Network executives deemed the humor too crude and adult to air on television

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5YqaYtM3QQ

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* Format Entertainment, Inc.
* Cartoon Characters: Alfred E. Neuman.
* Voice Actors: Allen Swift, Pat Bright, Herbert Duncan, Bryan Raeburn, Heddy Galen, Len Maxwell, Gene Klorrian.
* Directed By Chris Ishii, Gordon Bellamy, Jimmy Murakami.
* Produced By Dave Wedeck, Don Harris, Marshall Karp.
* Animated By Bob Bachman, Gerard Baldwin, Carole Beers, Vinnie Bell, David Brain, Joe Bruno, Dale Case, Tony Creazzo, Retta Davidson, Gerry Dvorak, Frank Endres, John Gentilella, Lance Gershenoff; more Animators .. (http://www.bcdb.com/cartoon-characters/70201-MAD-Magazine-TV-Special#animators) .
* Written By Larry Siegel, Stan Hart, Tom Koch, Earle Doud, Don Edwing, Nick Meglin.
* Music: Sascha Burland.
* Editor: Staten Film Service.
* No Release Date Announced.
* Running Time: 23 minutes.
* Color

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

January 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

The Mad Magazine TV Special 1974 – YouTube

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5YqaYtM3QQ

This was a pilot that never aired. Network executives deemed the humor too crude and adult to air on television

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5YqaYtM3QQ

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

January 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

The Mad Magazine TV Special 1974 – YouTube

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5YqaYtM3QQ

This was a pilot that never aired. Network executives deemed the humor too crude and adult to air on television

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5YqaYtM3QQ

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

January 18, 2015 / No Comments / More

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Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed

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The Mad Magazine TV Special 1974 – YouTube

The Mad Magazine TV Special 1974 – YouTube

The Mad Magazine TV Special 1974 – YouTube

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