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N.O. drummer, Hall of Famer Paul Ferrara dies at 76
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** N.O. drummer, Hall of Famer Paul Ferrara dies at 76
————————————————————
Dominic Massa / WWL-TV3:16 p.m. CST December 3, 2014
** Was inducted into Louisiana Music Hall of Fame after 65-year career
————————————————————
Paul Ferrara
(Photo: Family photo)
CONNECT 18TWEET (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A//www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/&text=N.O.%20drummer%2C%20Hall%20of%20Famer%20Paul%20Ferrara%20dies%20at%2076&via=wwltv) LINKEDIN (http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=http%3A//www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/&mini=true) COMMENTEMAILMORE
Paul Ferrara, a drummer who played with Louis Prima, Frank Sinatra, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt and other greats during a 65-year career, died Wednesday at his home in Kenner. He was 76.
Ferrara had been battling cancer for the past year, according to his family. Despite his illness, Ferrara continued to perform, even making an appearance at this year’s Gretna Heritage Festival.
Born in the French Quarter to Sicilian immigrant parents, Ferrara began playing drums at the age of 11, according to a video posted for his induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Ferrara was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, one of only two “side men” to receive such honor.
As a teenager, he also played with George Girard, the Assunto brothers, Earl Williams, and Sam Butera, who later became Prima’s saxophonist.
Like Prima and Butera, Ferrara’s music career later took him to Las Vegas, where he was a regular performer from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Ferrara’s distinctive drum sound can be heard on two versions of classic Prima recordings: “Sing Sing Sing” and “Old Black Magic.”
In a 2010 interview with WYES-TV for “Steppin’ Out,” Ferrara recalled the familiar drumbeat introduction to “Old Black Magic,” which he helped create on the spur of the moment.
“Louis said ‘Hey, boys,’ let’s see what we can do with this tune,'” Ferrara recalled. “Everybody contributed something and then I said, ‘Why don’t we start with like a jazz mambo beat?’ Then Louis said, ‘Hey, that’s good boy! Let’s keep that in!'”
In all, Ferrara would record some 30 songs with Prima.
Among the other music greats he performed with over the years are Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holliday. Later in his career, Ferrara also performed for four U.S. presidents at the White House. He also played frequently at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
As an Italian-American musician, he was part of the last generation of New Orleans jazz musicians who not only played with 1920s legends such as Santo Pecora and Sharkey Bonano, but was also part of the jazz revival of the 1960s and early 1970s.
His distinct drumming style, which included the mastery of the left handed shuffle, can be heard on hundreds of recordings, and could be seen in television appearances on such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dinah Shore Show.
Survivors include his wife of 54 years, and 5 daughters.
Funeral services will be held on Saturday with visitation from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, 1908 Short Street, Kenner. A funeral Mass will follow at 12:30 p.m. Burial will be at St. Joseph Abbey Cemetery in Covington.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
N.O. drummer, Hall of Famer Paul Ferrara dies at 76
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/
** N.O. drummer, Hall of Famer Paul Ferrara dies at 76
————————————————————
Dominic Massa / WWL-TV3:16 p.m. CST December 3, 2014
** Was inducted into Louisiana Music Hall of Fame after 65-year career
————————————————————
Paul Ferrara
(Photo: Family photo)
CONNECT 18TWEET (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A//www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/&text=N.O.%20drummer%2C%20Hall%20of%20Famer%20Paul%20Ferrara%20dies%20at%2076&via=wwltv) LINKEDIN (http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=http%3A//www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/&mini=true) COMMENTEMAILMORE
Paul Ferrara, a drummer who played with Louis Prima, Frank Sinatra, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt and other greats during a 65-year career, died Wednesday at his home in Kenner. He was 76.
Ferrara had been battling cancer for the past year, according to his family. Despite his illness, Ferrara continued to perform, even making an appearance at this year’s Gretna Heritage Festival.
Born in the French Quarter to Sicilian immigrant parents, Ferrara began playing drums at the age of 11, according to a video posted for his induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Ferrara was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, one of only two “side men” to receive such honor.
As a teenager, he also played with George Girard, the Assunto brothers, Earl Williams, and Sam Butera, who later became Prima’s saxophonist.
Like Prima and Butera, Ferrara’s music career later took him to Las Vegas, where he was a regular performer from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Ferrara’s distinctive drum sound can be heard on two versions of classic Prima recordings: “Sing Sing Sing” and “Old Black Magic.”
In a 2010 interview with WYES-TV for “Steppin’ Out,” Ferrara recalled the familiar drumbeat introduction to “Old Black Magic,” which he helped create on the spur of the moment.
“Louis said ‘Hey, boys,’ let’s see what we can do with this tune,'” Ferrara recalled. “Everybody contributed something and then I said, ‘Why don’t we start with like a jazz mambo beat?’ Then Louis said, ‘Hey, that’s good boy! Let’s keep that in!'”
In all, Ferrara would record some 30 songs with Prima.
Among the other music greats he performed with over the years are Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holliday. Later in his career, Ferrara also performed for four U.S. presidents at the White House. He also played frequently at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
As an Italian-American musician, he was part of the last generation of New Orleans jazz musicians who not only played with 1920s legends such as Santo Pecora and Sharkey Bonano, but was also part of the jazz revival of the 1960s and early 1970s.
His distinct drumming style, which included the mastery of the left handed shuffle, can be heard on hundreds of recordings, and could be seen in television appearances on such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dinah Shore Show.
Survivors include his wife of 54 years, and 5 daughters.
Funeral services will be held on Saturday with visitation from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, 1908 Short Street, Kenner. A funeral Mass will follow at 12:30 p.m. Burial will be at St. Joseph Abbey Cemetery in Covington.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
N.O. drummer, Hall of Famer Paul Ferrara dies at 76
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/
** N.O. drummer, Hall of Famer Paul Ferrara dies at 76
————————————————————
Dominic Massa / WWL-TV3:16 p.m. CST December 3, 2014
** Was inducted into Louisiana Music Hall of Fame after 65-year career
————————————————————
Paul Ferrara
(Photo: Family photo)
CONNECT 18TWEET (https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=http%3A//www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/&text=N.O.%20drummer%2C%20Hall%20of%20Famer%20Paul%20Ferrara%20dies%20at%2076&via=wwltv) LINKEDIN (http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?url=http%3A//www.wwltv.com/story/news/local/2014/12/03/no-drummer-paul-ferrara-who-played-with-sinatra-prima–other-music-greats-dies-at-76/19840461/&mini=true) COMMENTEMAILMORE
Paul Ferrara, a drummer who played with Louis Prima, Frank Sinatra, Pete Fountain, Al Hirt and other greats during a 65-year career, died Wednesday at his home in Kenner. He was 76.
Ferrara had been battling cancer for the past year, according to his family. Despite his illness, Ferrara continued to perform, even making an appearance at this year’s Gretna Heritage Festival.
Born in the French Quarter to Sicilian immigrant parents, Ferrara began playing drums at the age of 11, according to a video posted for his induction into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.
Ferrara was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, one of only two “side men” to receive such honor.
As a teenager, he also played with George Girard, the Assunto brothers, Earl Williams, and Sam Butera, who later became Prima’s saxophonist.
Like Prima and Butera, Ferrara’s music career later took him to Las Vegas, where he was a regular performer from the 1950s through the 1970s.
Ferrara’s distinctive drum sound can be heard on two versions of classic Prima recordings: “Sing Sing Sing” and “Old Black Magic.”
In a 2010 interview with WYES-TV for “Steppin’ Out,” Ferrara recalled the familiar drumbeat introduction to “Old Black Magic,” which he helped create on the spur of the moment.
“Louis said ‘Hey, boys,’ let’s see what we can do with this tune,'” Ferrara recalled. “Everybody contributed something and then I said, ‘Why don’t we start with like a jazz mambo beat?’ Then Louis said, ‘Hey, that’s good boy! Let’s keep that in!'”
In all, Ferrara would record some 30 songs with Prima.
Among the other music greats he performed with over the years are Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holliday. Later in his career, Ferrara also performed for four U.S. presidents at the White House. He also played frequently at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
As an Italian-American musician, he was part of the last generation of New Orleans jazz musicians who not only played with 1920s legends such as Santo Pecora and Sharkey Bonano, but was also part of the jazz revival of the 1960s and early 1970s.
His distinct drumming style, which included the mastery of the left handed shuffle, can be heard on hundreds of recordings, and could be seen in television appearances on such programs as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Dinah Shore Show.
Survivors include his wife of 54 years, and 5 daughters.
Funeral services will be held on Saturday with visitation from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, 1908 Short Street, Kenner. A funeral Mass will follow at 12:30 p.m. Burial will be at St. Joseph Abbey Cemetery in Covington.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Harpo Marx on The SpikeJones Show (Jan 9, 1954) – YouTube
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Harpo Marx on The SpikeJones Show (Jan 9, 1954) – YouTube
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Harpo Marx on The SpikeJones Show (Jan 9, 1954) – YouTube
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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THE CLARA WARD SINGERS 1963 – YouTube
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Rare piece of film – three songs by the legendary gospel group, The Clara Ward Singers 1963 on MRFD.
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
THE CLARA WARD SINGERS 1963 – YouTube
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Rare piece of film – three songs by the legendary gospel group, The Clara Ward Singers 1963 on MRFD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWZX3If9gs
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Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
THE CLARA WARD SINGERS 1963 – YouTube
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Rare piece of film – three songs by the legendary gospel group, The Clara Ward Singers 1963 on MRFD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWZX3If9gs
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Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett Perform Cheek To Cheek on ‘The Colbert Report’ – YouTube
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Correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe the back up band is:
Mike Renzi-piano, Gray Sargent-guitar, Harold Jones-drums and Marshall Wood-bass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3BfgthBBl4
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett Perform Cheek To Cheek on ‘The Colbert Report’ – YouTube
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Correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe the back up band is:
Mike Renzi-piano, Gray Sargent-guitar, Harold Jones-drums and Marshall Wood-bass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3BfgthBBl4
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett Perform Cheek To Cheek on ‘The Colbert Report’ – YouTube
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
Correct me if I’m wrong.
I believe the back up band is:
Mike Renzi-piano, Gray Sargent-guitar, Harold Jones-drums and Marshall Wood-bass
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3BfgthBBl4
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d1ef007072) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d1ef007072&e=[UNIQID])
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
At 86, A ‘Jazz Child’ Looks Back On A Life Of Sunshine, Sorrow : NPR
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/30/366792416/at-86-a-jazz-child-looks-back-on-a-life-of-sunshine-sorrow
** At 86, A ‘Jazz Child’ Looks Back On A Life Of Sunshine, Sorrow
————————————————————
Jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan doesn’t mind that, despite her critical acclaim, she’s not a household name. “The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know?” she says. “I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. ”
Jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan doesn’t mind that, despite her critical acclaim, she’s not a household name. “The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know?” she says. “I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. ”
Richard Laird/Courtesy of the artist
Many fans first encountered one of the great voices in jazz as a whisper: Sheila Jordan made a quiet but lasting impression as a guest singer on pianist George Russell’s 1962 arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine.”
Since then, Jordan’s career has taken her all over the world, and in 2012, she received one of the highest honors in jazz: she became an National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. Her music has soared, but her story starts with pain.
“I was very unhappy as a little kid,” she tells NPR’s Eric Westervelt. “The way I got rid of that was to sing, so I was constantly singing.”
safari-reader://www.npr.org/books/titles/366793960/jazz-child-a-portrait-of-sheila-jordan
A recent biography called Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, by Ellen Johnson, describes Jordan’s life, starting with her days growing up dirt poor in Pennsylvania coal country, raised by alcoholic grandparents.
Jordan, now 86, tells Westervelt about that time in her life, as well as falling in love with the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker, struggling to feel confident about her work and experiencing violent racism at the hands of other white people because she hung out with black musicians and artists.
To hear the full conversation, click on the audio link above.
————————————————————
** Interview Highlights
————————————————————
On the night in Detroit when, at the age of 14, she tried to get into a club to hear Charlie Parker’s Reboppers
You had to be 21 years old to get in there and I said, “Oh, I’ve got to hear my hero!” And I forged my mother’s birth certificate and I dyed my hair blonde and I wore a hat with a veil and high-heeled shoes and I was smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette, unfiltered, and I was sure I was going to get in the door smoking my cigarette and going through the whole trip.
And I got to the door and the man said, “No no no, you can’t come in here. Hey, you better go home and do your homework, little white girl.” And I was so disappointed. And then I went around in the alley and sat on the garbage cans. Now, Bird was by the door so he heard all of this. He went to the back door of that club and he stood there at one point and played. The door was open and I sat on the garbage cans and Charlie Parker played for me. And it was incredible.
On the racism she faced as a white woman hanging out with a predominantly black crowd
I came to New York thinking it would be so much different here. And I remember I was going out with these two painters, two guys, and they were black, and we went to get something to eat. And on our way back, four white guys on the corner and on the bar, just before we got to the front of my building, jumped us. And three of ’em held my two friends and the other one threw me down on the street, was kicking my face, knocked out my tooth.
And all of the sudden, I looked up and here I see a guy coming with a gun pointed, I thought, at me. I said, “You know what, I’m going to die over this. But it’s OK — I know I’m right. I know this is wrong.” [The] guy was a plainclothes [police]man; he saved my life.
On the 12-year gap in her career after her critically acclaimed debut album
Why I never did anything after that, I don’t know. I wait for people to call me. I’m kind of shy and I just could not call up and ask them, “Could I do another recording?” I couldn’t do it. … I don’t know, I was kind of surprised [by the praise for her first album]. Why did they think it’s so wonderful? I don’t! … I don’t like to listen to my own music and I don’t like to record.
On why she performs with just a bass as accompaniment
I don’t know, I just love the sound of the bass. It just touched a certain part of me. I loved all that, you know, space.
I remember I was visiting family in Toledo, and my half-sister, I said, “Hey, do you want to go hear some music? Charlie Mingus is playing at this club,” and she said, “Yeah, let’s go.”
So we sat at a table and Mingus saw me and he was shocked. He said, “Wow, what are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m visiting family.” So then he was like, “OK, come on up and sing something with me!” I said, “What?” He said, “Come on up and sing.”
… And my sister said, “Yeah, go sing, go sing!” So I’d never sung out with the bass and voice before and I did, and I sang “Yesterdays.”
On being an icon in the jazz community, without being a household name
The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know? I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. And in your 80s, to be able to still perform this music, and get on an airplane and go all over the world, which I’ve done in the last couple of months — I was on a tour in Norway and I just got off of a tour of Germany — so I’m doing OK.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=8d0b19a000) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=8d0b19a000&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
At 86, A ‘Jazz Child’ Looks Back On A Life Of Sunshine, Sorrow : NPR
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/30/366792416/at-86-a-jazz-child-looks-back-on-a-life-of-sunshine-sorrow
** At 86, A ‘Jazz Child’ Looks Back On A Life Of Sunshine, Sorrow
————————————————————
Jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan doesn’t mind that, despite her critical acclaim, she’s not a household name. “The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know?” she says. “I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. ”
Jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan doesn’t mind that, despite her critical acclaim, she’s not a household name. “The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know?” she says. “I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. ”
Richard Laird/Courtesy of the artist
Many fans first encountered one of the great voices in jazz as a whisper: Sheila Jordan made a quiet but lasting impression as a guest singer on pianist George Russell’s 1962 arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine.”
Since then, Jordan’s career has taken her all over the world, and in 2012, she received one of the highest honors in jazz: she became an National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. Her music has soared, but her story starts with pain.
“I was very unhappy as a little kid,” she tells NPR’s Eric Westervelt. “The way I got rid of that was to sing, so I was constantly singing.”
safari-reader://www.npr.org/books/titles/366793960/jazz-child-a-portrait-of-sheila-jordan
A recent biography called Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, by Ellen Johnson, describes Jordan’s life, starting with her days growing up dirt poor in Pennsylvania coal country, raised by alcoholic grandparents.
Jordan, now 86, tells Westervelt about that time in her life, as well as falling in love with the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker, struggling to feel confident about her work and experiencing violent racism at the hands of other white people because she hung out with black musicians and artists.
To hear the full conversation, click on the audio link above.
————————————————————
** Interview Highlights
————————————————————
On the night in Detroit when, at the age of 14, she tried to get into a club to hear Charlie Parker’s Reboppers
You had to be 21 years old to get in there and I said, “Oh, I’ve got to hear my hero!” And I forged my mother’s birth certificate and I dyed my hair blonde and I wore a hat with a veil and high-heeled shoes and I was smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette, unfiltered, and I was sure I was going to get in the door smoking my cigarette and going through the whole trip.
And I got to the door and the man said, “No no no, you can’t come in here. Hey, you better go home and do your homework, little white girl.” And I was so disappointed. And then I went around in the alley and sat on the garbage cans. Now, Bird was by the door so he heard all of this. He went to the back door of that club and he stood there at one point and played. The door was open and I sat on the garbage cans and Charlie Parker played for me. And it was incredible.
On the racism she faced as a white woman hanging out with a predominantly black crowd
I came to New York thinking it would be so much different here. And I remember I was going out with these two painters, two guys, and they were black, and we went to get something to eat. And on our way back, four white guys on the corner and on the bar, just before we got to the front of my building, jumped us. And three of ’em held my two friends and the other one threw me down on the street, was kicking my face, knocked out my tooth.
And all of the sudden, I looked up and here I see a guy coming with a gun pointed, I thought, at me. I said, “You know what, I’m going to die over this. But it’s OK — I know I’m right. I know this is wrong.” [The] guy was a plainclothes [police]man; he saved my life.
On the 12-year gap in her career after her critically acclaimed debut album
Why I never did anything after that, I don’t know. I wait for people to call me. I’m kind of shy and I just could not call up and ask them, “Could I do another recording?” I couldn’t do it. … I don’t know, I was kind of surprised [by the praise for her first album]. Why did they think it’s so wonderful? I don’t! … I don’t like to listen to my own music and I don’t like to record.
On why she performs with just a bass as accompaniment
I don’t know, I just love the sound of the bass. It just touched a certain part of me. I loved all that, you know, space.
I remember I was visiting family in Toledo, and my half-sister, I said, “Hey, do you want to go hear some music? Charlie Mingus is playing at this club,” and she said, “Yeah, let’s go.”
So we sat at a table and Mingus saw me and he was shocked. He said, “Wow, what are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m visiting family.” So then he was like, “OK, come on up and sing something with me!” I said, “What?” He said, “Come on up and sing.”
… And my sister said, “Yeah, go sing, go sing!” So I’d never sung out with the bass and voice before and I did, and I sang “Yesterdays.”
On being an icon in the jazz community, without being a household name
The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know? I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. And in your 80s, to be able to still perform this music, and get on an airplane and go all over the world, which I’ve done in the last couple of months — I was on a tour in Norway and I just got off of a tour of Germany — so I’m doing OK.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=8d0b19a000) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=8d0b19a000&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
At 86, A ‘Jazz Child’ Looks Back On A Life Of Sunshine, Sorrow : NPR
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.npr.org/2014/11/30/366792416/at-86-a-jazz-child-looks-back-on-a-life-of-sunshine-sorrow
** At 86, A ‘Jazz Child’ Looks Back On A Life Of Sunshine, Sorrow
————————————————————
Jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan doesn’t mind that, despite her critical acclaim, she’s not a household name. “The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know?” she says. “I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. ”
Jazz vocalist Sheila Jordan doesn’t mind that, despite her critical acclaim, she’s not a household name. “The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know?” she says. “I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. ”
Richard Laird/Courtesy of the artist
Many fans first encountered one of the great voices in jazz as a whisper: Sheila Jordan made a quiet but lasting impression as a guest singer on pianist George Russell’s 1962 arrangement of “You Are My Sunshine.”
Since then, Jordan’s career has taken her all over the world, and in 2012, she received one of the highest honors in jazz: she became an National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master. Her music has soared, but her story starts with pain.
“I was very unhappy as a little kid,” she tells NPR’s Eric Westervelt. “The way I got rid of that was to sing, so I was constantly singing.”
safari-reader://www.npr.org/books/titles/366793960/jazz-child-a-portrait-of-sheila-jordan
A recent biography called Jazz Child: A Portrait of Sheila Jordan, by Ellen Johnson, describes Jordan’s life, starting with her days growing up dirt poor in Pennsylvania coal country, raised by alcoholic grandparents.
Jordan, now 86, tells Westervelt about that time in her life, as well as falling in love with the music of Charlie “Bird” Parker, struggling to feel confident about her work and experiencing violent racism at the hands of other white people because she hung out with black musicians and artists.
To hear the full conversation, click on the audio link above.
————————————————————
** Interview Highlights
————————————————————
On the night in Detroit when, at the age of 14, she tried to get into a club to hear Charlie Parker’s Reboppers
You had to be 21 years old to get in there and I said, “Oh, I’ve got to hear my hero!” And I forged my mother’s birth certificate and I dyed my hair blonde and I wore a hat with a veil and high-heeled shoes and I was smoking a Lucky Strike cigarette, unfiltered, and I was sure I was going to get in the door smoking my cigarette and going through the whole trip.
And I got to the door and the man said, “No no no, you can’t come in here. Hey, you better go home and do your homework, little white girl.” And I was so disappointed. And then I went around in the alley and sat on the garbage cans. Now, Bird was by the door so he heard all of this. He went to the back door of that club and he stood there at one point and played. The door was open and I sat on the garbage cans and Charlie Parker played for me. And it was incredible.
On the racism she faced as a white woman hanging out with a predominantly black crowd
I came to New York thinking it would be so much different here. And I remember I was going out with these two painters, two guys, and they were black, and we went to get something to eat. And on our way back, four white guys on the corner and on the bar, just before we got to the front of my building, jumped us. And three of ’em held my two friends and the other one threw me down on the street, was kicking my face, knocked out my tooth.
And all of the sudden, I looked up and here I see a guy coming with a gun pointed, I thought, at me. I said, “You know what, I’m going to die over this. But it’s OK — I know I’m right. I know this is wrong.” [The] guy was a plainclothes [police]man; he saved my life.
On the 12-year gap in her career after her critically acclaimed debut album
Why I never did anything after that, I don’t know. I wait for people to call me. I’m kind of shy and I just could not call up and ask them, “Could I do another recording?” I couldn’t do it. … I don’t know, I was kind of surprised [by the praise for her first album]. Why did they think it’s so wonderful? I don’t! … I don’t like to listen to my own music and I don’t like to record.
On why she performs with just a bass as accompaniment
I don’t know, I just love the sound of the bass. It just touched a certain part of me. I loved all that, you know, space.
I remember I was visiting family in Toledo, and my half-sister, I said, “Hey, do you want to go hear some music? Charlie Mingus is playing at this club,” and she said, “Yeah, let’s go.”
So we sat at a table and Mingus saw me and he was shocked. He said, “Wow, what are you doing here?” I said, “Well, I’m visiting family.” So then he was like, “OK, come on up and sing something with me!” I said, “What?” He said, “Come on up and sing.”
… And my sister said, “Yeah, go sing, go sing!” So I’d never sung out with the bass and voice before and I did, and I sang “Yesterdays.”
On being an icon in the jazz community, without being a household name
The people that respect what I do and hire me, that’s all I need, you know? I just need to keep doing this music as long as I live. And in your 80s, to be able to still perform this music, and get on an airplane and go all over the world, which I’ve done in the last couple of months — I was on a tour in Norway and I just got off of a tour of Germany — so I’m doing OK.
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=8d0b19a000) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=8d0b19a000&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Reminder: Richard Wyands Free Concert at Rutgers Featuring Richard Wyands
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
The Institute of Jazz Studies is presenting our second concert in our 2014-15 concert series called: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents. The concert is free and takes place from 2-4 PM in the Dana Room on the fourth floor of the John Cotton Dana Library on the Rutgers-Newark campus. So please join us for the following:
Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 2-4 pm
Richard Wyands
Richard Wyands is one of jazz’s most tasteful pianists. He is a true musician’s musician, who is prized for his ability to accompany others as well for his abilities as a soloist in any setting. He began playing in his teens in San Francisco, but later moved to New York City. He worked with guitarist Kenny Burrell in the 1960s and also played in Gigi Gryce’s quintet. He moved to New York in 1958, where he played with Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus, and spent time as accompanist for singers Carmen McRae and Ella Fitzgerald. Wyands has also headed his own trios, but has only had a handful of sessions as a leader thus far including a 1978 date for Storyville (Then, Here And Now), a 1992 date for DIW (The Arrival), a 1995 date for Criss Cross (Reunited), as well as sessions for Steeplechase (Get Out of Town), Venus (Lady of the Lavender Mist), and Savant (As Long As There’s Music). Mr. Wyands will be joined by a bassist in this concert, which is the second of four in the Institute of
Jazz Studies’s concert series: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents.
For directions to Rutgers:
—
Vincent Pelote
Interim Director
Institute of Jazz Studies
Rutgers University
Dana Library
185 University Avenue
Newark, NJ 07102
phone: 973-353-5595
email: pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu (mailto:pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f305e6ea2d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=f305e6ea2d&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Reminder: Richard Wyands Free Concert at Rutgers Featuring Richard Wyands
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
The Institute of Jazz Studies is presenting our second concert in our 2014-15 concert series called: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents. The concert is free and takes place from 2-4 PM in the Dana Room on the fourth floor of the John Cotton Dana Library on the Rutgers-Newark campus. So please join us for the following:
Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 2-4 pm
Richard Wyands
Richard Wyands is one of jazz’s most tasteful pianists. He is a true musician’s musician, who is prized for his ability to accompany others as well for his abilities as a soloist in any setting. He began playing in his teens in San Francisco, but later moved to New York City. He worked with guitarist Kenny Burrell in the 1960s and also played in Gigi Gryce’s quintet. He moved to New York in 1958, where he played with Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus, and spent time as accompanist for singers Carmen McRae and Ella Fitzgerald. Wyands has also headed his own trios, but has only had a handful of sessions as a leader thus far including a 1978 date for Storyville (Then, Here And Now), a 1992 date for DIW (The Arrival), a 1995 date for Criss Cross (Reunited), as well as sessions for Steeplechase (Get Out of Town), Venus (Lady of the Lavender Mist), and Savant (As Long As There’s Music). Mr. Wyands will be joined by a bassist in this concert, which is the second of four in the Institute of
Jazz Studies’s concert series: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents.
For directions to Rutgers:
—
Vincent Pelote
Interim Director
Institute of Jazz Studies
Rutgers University
Dana Library
185 University Avenue
Newark, NJ 07102
phone: 973-353-5595
email: pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu (mailto:pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f305e6ea2d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=f305e6ea2d&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Reminder: Richard Wyands Free Concert at Rutgers Featuring Richard Wyands
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
The Institute of Jazz Studies is presenting our second concert in our 2014-15 concert series called: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents. The concert is free and takes place from 2-4 PM in the Dana Room on the fourth floor of the John Cotton Dana Library on the Rutgers-Newark campus. So please join us for the following:
Wednesday, December 3, 2014, 2-4 pm
Richard Wyands
Richard Wyands is one of jazz’s most tasteful pianists. He is a true musician’s musician, who is prized for his ability to accompany others as well for his abilities as a soloist in any setting. He began playing in his teens in San Francisco, but later moved to New York City. He worked with guitarist Kenny Burrell in the 1960s and also played in Gigi Gryce’s quintet. He moved to New York in 1958, where he played with Roy Haynes, Charles Mingus, and spent time as accompanist for singers Carmen McRae and Ella Fitzgerald. Wyands has also headed his own trios, but has only had a handful of sessions as a leader thus far including a 1978 date for Storyville (Then, Here And Now), a 1992 date for DIW (The Arrival), a 1995 date for Criss Cross (Reunited), as well as sessions for Steeplechase (Get Out of Town), Venus (Lady of the Lavender Mist), and Savant (As Long As There’s Music). Mr. Wyands will be joined by a bassist in this concert, which is the second of four in the Institute of
Jazz Studies’s concert series: Jazz Piano: Contemporary Currents.
For directions to Rutgers:
—
Vincent Pelote
Interim Director
Institute of Jazz Studies
Rutgers University
Dana Library
185 University Avenue
Newark, NJ 07102
phone: 973-353-5595
email: pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu (mailto:pelote@rulmail.rutgers.edu)
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=f305e6ea2d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=f305e6ea2d&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Bunny Briggs, Tap Dancing Virtuoso, Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/arts/dance/bunny-briggs-tap-dancing-virtuoso-dies-at-92-.html?_r=1
** Bunny Briggs, Tap Dancing Virtuoso, Dies at 92
————————————————————
Photo
Bunny Briggs in “No Maps on My Taps: The Art of Jazz Tap Dancing,” a film from 1979. Credit GTN Productions
Bunny Briggs, the elegant and versatile tap virtuoso whose career bridged dance eras, from Bill (Bojangles) Robinson’s to Savion Glover’s, died on Nov. 15 in Las Vegas. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by Sandra Seaton, a playwright and librettist who was related to Mr. Briggs by marriage.
In the world of tap, which especially prizes the passing of traditions from generation to generation, Mr. Briggs was a prodigy early on and a mentor in his later years. He danced on the streets of Harlem as a small boy, and on Broadway, “The Ed Sullivan Show” and at the Newport Jazz Festival as an adult.
Known for the speed of his feet, the breadth of his repertoire and his smooth, unflappable stage demeanor, he was both a showman and a musician. He was a star performer who could hold the audience alone at center stage, as he did in the 1989 Broadway musical revue “Black and Blue,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e4HxWjolGg) and a jazz percussionist with the likes of Count Basie, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington, who once described Mr. Briggs as “the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist.”
Mr. Briggs was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in “Black and Blue,” which originated in Paris. A highlight was his tour de force solo to Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”
More than two decades earlier, at Ellington’s celebrated 1965 concert of sacred music at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Mr. Briggs was featured as a dancer in the composition “David Danced Before the Lord With All His Might,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbb6KVGjpcU) a performance that Constance Valis Hill, a tap historian, wrote in her book “Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History,” “broke new ground for modern tap dancing on the concert stage.”
Ms. Hill continued: “It was not only the way Briggs shimmers across the floor — splaying 16th notes, rattling, clicking and stomping wild offbeat steps that jar everything around him — and the skimming fluidity of his rhythmic lines, and dynamics of phrasing, but the manner in which he played his feet as an accompanying musician within the orchestra.”
Along with Jimmy Slyde, Honi Coles, George Hillman, Steve Condos and others, Mr. Briggs was a busy performer in the heyday of tap, from the 1930s to the 1950s, when jazz was popular and tap masters were headliners in the swankiest nightclubs and on Broadway.
But in the 1960s, with rock ’n’ roll in ascendance and the civil rights movement gaining momentum, tap went into decline, suffering in part from a perception by some that it represented an era of black subservience in entertainment. Still, unlike some of his contemporaries, Mr. Briggs endured through those lean years, partly through his association with Hampton, with whom he performed at the Rainbow Grill in New York and elsewhere, and especially with Ellington; because of their close association, Mr. Briggs became widely known as “Duke’s dancer.”
Photo
Mr. Briggs, left, and Savion Glover in 1989 at the LeTang Studios on West 27th Street. CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
“I can’t really define my style,” he once said. “Dancers were dancing fast when I came up. I just wanted to make people feel relaxed. To just say, ‘Ahhh.’ ”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Tap began to re-emerge as a popular form in the 1980s with stage shows like “The Tap Dance Kid,” “Black and Blue” and, a bit later, “Jelly’s Last Jam,” along with the 1989 movie “Tap,” which featured several generations of tappers, including Mr. Briggs, Sammy Davis Jr., Gregory Hines and Mr. Glover, then a teenager. All helped emphasize the legitimacy of tap as an authentic, vernacular American art form and illustrated its torch-passing tradition.
Mr. Glover, who met Mr. Briggs when he was a boy and also appeared with him in “Black and Blue,” went on to usher tap into the era of hip-hop by, among other things, creating the Tony-winning choreography for the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk,” in which he starred.
“Bunny was the last of the hoofers, just about the last of the cats who mentored me,” Mr. Glover said in an interview on Tuesday. “But he was different in that, as far as dance style, he had more of an eccentric approach that made him stand out amongst the other cats.
“He’d act out his dance, like he’d have a scene going on his mind. In the middle of the dance, he’d strike these poses. I mean, our objective is always to tell a story, but he was such a sophisticated, lyrical cat.”
Information about Mr. Briggs’s early life is a bit hazy, but public records indicate that he was born Bernard Briggs in Harlem on Feb. 26, 1922. (The origin of the nickname Bunny is obscure. Asked once by the television journalist Bryant Gumbel where the name came from, Mr. Briggs said, “Well, I’m fast.”)
He was brought up by his mother, Alma Briggs, who liked to dance the Charleston. Her sister, Gladys, was a chorus girl, and the often-repeated story is that young Bunny’s mother took him, at age 3 (or 4 or maybe 5), to his aunt’s show, where he saw Bill Robinson perform.
“She danced,” Mr. Briggs recalled in a 1989 interview with The New York Times. “I started hollering. Then out walked Bill Robinson, and I knew immediately what I wanted to do. He was so calm. Everything he did was beautiful.”
One of his mother’s brothers taught him a step or two, he said, but “I never took a lesson.” He took to dancing on the streets of the neighborhood, particularly outside a record shop on Lenox Avenue and 137th Street.
“All the people came around to hear ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’ on the radio,” Mr. Briggs said. “They’d stand around in the street and listen. Then the man who owned the shop would put on a record and I’d dance. People would throw money, and I’d take it home to my mother.”
From then on he never wanted to do anything else, though he acknowledged that at one time he thought about becoming a priest — until his priest told him that God clearly wanted him to be a dancer. As a child, he performed in New York City ballrooms as part of a children’s dance group called Porkchops, Navy, Rice and Beans.
He was discovered by the pianist Luckey Roberts and danced with his orchestra on a high-society circuit of parties in the homes of Astors, Vanderbilts and others. His first movie appearance, in 1932, was in the film “Slow Poke,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0YRb9Midsg) with Stepin Fetchit. In the 1940s he toured with big bands, tapping to swing, and, inspired by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, adapted his style to the more complex sounds of bebop. His versatility kept him employed.
“Even when tap was in its declining days, someone would call me,” he said in 1989. “Little clubs, big clubs. Boston. Philadelphia.”
Mr. Briggs, who has no immediate survivors, married Olivette Miller, a jazz harpist, in 1982. She died in 2003.
“When it came time for him to get dressed, Bunny would have a beer or a glass of wine, and the wardrobe people would leave,” Mr. Glover recalled about the backstage scene at “Black and Blue.” “And Olivette would come in and undo everything the wardrobe person had done and dress him the way she wanted him to look. And he would just sit there, like, ‘Yeah, baby, do with me as you please.’ ”
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Bunny Briggs, Tap Dancing Virtuoso, Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com
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** Bunny Briggs, Tap Dancing Virtuoso, Dies at 92
————————————————————
Photo
Bunny Briggs in “No Maps on My Taps: The Art of Jazz Tap Dancing,” a film from 1979. Credit GTN Productions
Bunny Briggs, the elegant and versatile tap virtuoso whose career bridged dance eras, from Bill (Bojangles) Robinson’s to Savion Glover’s, died on Nov. 15 in Las Vegas. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by Sandra Seaton, a playwright and librettist who was related to Mr. Briggs by marriage.
In the world of tap, which especially prizes the passing of traditions from generation to generation, Mr. Briggs was a prodigy early on and a mentor in his later years. He danced on the streets of Harlem as a small boy, and on Broadway, “The Ed Sullivan Show” and at the Newport Jazz Festival as an adult.
Known for the speed of his feet, the breadth of his repertoire and his smooth, unflappable stage demeanor, he was both a showman and a musician. He was a star performer who could hold the audience alone at center stage, as he did in the 1989 Broadway musical revue “Black and Blue,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e4HxWjolGg) and a jazz percussionist with the likes of Count Basie, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington, who once described Mr. Briggs as “the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist.”
Mr. Briggs was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in “Black and Blue,” which originated in Paris. A highlight was his tour de force solo to Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”
More than two decades earlier, at Ellington’s celebrated 1965 concert of sacred music at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Mr. Briggs was featured as a dancer in the composition “David Danced Before the Lord With All His Might,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbb6KVGjpcU) a performance that Constance Valis Hill, a tap historian, wrote in her book “Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History,” “broke new ground for modern tap dancing on the concert stage.”
Ms. Hill continued: “It was not only the way Briggs shimmers across the floor — splaying 16th notes, rattling, clicking and stomping wild offbeat steps that jar everything around him — and the skimming fluidity of his rhythmic lines, and dynamics of phrasing, but the manner in which he played his feet as an accompanying musician within the orchestra.”
Along with Jimmy Slyde, Honi Coles, George Hillman, Steve Condos and others, Mr. Briggs was a busy performer in the heyday of tap, from the 1930s to the 1950s, when jazz was popular and tap masters were headliners in the swankiest nightclubs and on Broadway.
But in the 1960s, with rock ’n’ roll in ascendance and the civil rights movement gaining momentum, tap went into decline, suffering in part from a perception by some that it represented an era of black subservience in entertainment. Still, unlike some of his contemporaries, Mr. Briggs endured through those lean years, partly through his association with Hampton, with whom he performed at the Rainbow Grill in New York and elsewhere, and especially with Ellington; because of their close association, Mr. Briggs became widely known as “Duke’s dancer.”
Photo
Mr. Briggs, left, and Savion Glover in 1989 at the LeTang Studios on West 27th Street. CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
“I can’t really define my style,” he once said. “Dancers were dancing fast when I came up. I just wanted to make people feel relaxed. To just say, ‘Ahhh.’ ”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Tap began to re-emerge as a popular form in the 1980s with stage shows like “The Tap Dance Kid,” “Black and Blue” and, a bit later, “Jelly’s Last Jam,” along with the 1989 movie “Tap,” which featured several generations of tappers, including Mr. Briggs, Sammy Davis Jr., Gregory Hines and Mr. Glover, then a teenager. All helped emphasize the legitimacy of tap as an authentic, vernacular American art form and illustrated its torch-passing tradition.
Mr. Glover, who met Mr. Briggs when he was a boy and also appeared with him in “Black and Blue,” went on to usher tap into the era of hip-hop by, among other things, creating the Tony-winning choreography for the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk,” in which he starred.
“Bunny was the last of the hoofers, just about the last of the cats who mentored me,” Mr. Glover said in an interview on Tuesday. “But he was different in that, as far as dance style, he had more of an eccentric approach that made him stand out amongst the other cats.
“He’d act out his dance, like he’d have a scene going on his mind. In the middle of the dance, he’d strike these poses. I mean, our objective is always to tell a story, but he was such a sophisticated, lyrical cat.”
Information about Mr. Briggs’s early life is a bit hazy, but public records indicate that he was born Bernard Briggs in Harlem on Feb. 26, 1922. (The origin of the nickname Bunny is obscure. Asked once by the television journalist Bryant Gumbel where the name came from, Mr. Briggs said, “Well, I’m fast.”)
He was brought up by his mother, Alma Briggs, who liked to dance the Charleston. Her sister, Gladys, was a chorus girl, and the often-repeated story is that young Bunny’s mother took him, at age 3 (or 4 or maybe 5), to his aunt’s show, where he saw Bill Robinson perform.
“She danced,” Mr. Briggs recalled in a 1989 interview with The New York Times. “I started hollering. Then out walked Bill Robinson, and I knew immediately what I wanted to do. He was so calm. Everything he did was beautiful.”
One of his mother’s brothers taught him a step or two, he said, but “I never took a lesson.” He took to dancing on the streets of the neighborhood, particularly outside a record shop on Lenox Avenue and 137th Street.
“All the people came around to hear ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’ on the radio,” Mr. Briggs said. “They’d stand around in the street and listen. Then the man who owned the shop would put on a record and I’d dance. People would throw money, and I’d take it home to my mother.”
From then on he never wanted to do anything else, though he acknowledged that at one time he thought about becoming a priest — until his priest told him that God clearly wanted him to be a dancer. As a child, he performed in New York City ballrooms as part of a children’s dance group called Porkchops, Navy, Rice and Beans.
He was discovered by the pianist Luckey Roberts and danced with his orchestra on a high-society circuit of parties in the homes of Astors, Vanderbilts and others. His first movie appearance, in 1932, was in the film “Slow Poke,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0YRb9Midsg) with Stepin Fetchit. In the 1940s he toured with big bands, tapping to swing, and, inspired by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, adapted his style to the more complex sounds of bebop. His versatility kept him employed.
“Even when tap was in its declining days, someone would call me,” he said in 1989. “Little clubs, big clubs. Boston. Philadelphia.”
Mr. Briggs, who has no immediate survivors, married Olivette Miller, a jazz harpist, in 1982. She died in 2003.
“When it came time for him to get dressed, Bunny would have a beer or a glass of wine, and the wardrobe people would leave,” Mr. Glover recalled about the backstage scene at “Black and Blue.” “And Olivette would come in and undo everything the wardrobe person had done and dress him the way she wanted him to look. And he would just sit there, like, ‘Yeah, baby, do with me as you please.’ ”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=73a7d8325f) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=73a7d8325f&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
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USA
Bunny Briggs, Tap Dancing Virtuoso, Dies at 92 – NYTimes.com
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/arts/dance/bunny-briggs-tap-dancing-virtuoso-dies-at-92-.html?_r=1
** Bunny Briggs, Tap Dancing Virtuoso, Dies at 92
————————————————————
Photo
Bunny Briggs in “No Maps on My Taps: The Art of Jazz Tap Dancing,” a film from 1979. Credit GTN Productions
Bunny Briggs, the elegant and versatile tap virtuoso whose career bridged dance eras, from Bill (Bojangles) Robinson’s to Savion Glover’s, died on Nov. 15 in Las Vegas. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by Sandra Seaton, a playwright and librettist who was related to Mr. Briggs by marriage.
In the world of tap, which especially prizes the passing of traditions from generation to generation, Mr. Briggs was a prodigy early on and a mentor in his later years. He danced on the streets of Harlem as a small boy, and on Broadway, “The Ed Sullivan Show” and at the Newport Jazz Festival as an adult.
Known for the speed of his feet, the breadth of his repertoire and his smooth, unflappable stage demeanor, he was both a showman and a musician. He was a star performer who could hold the audience alone at center stage, as he did in the 1989 Broadway musical revue “Black and Blue,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e4HxWjolGg) and a jazz percussionist with the likes of Count Basie, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Lionel Hampton and Duke Ellington, who once described Mr. Briggs as “the most superleviathonic, rhythmaturgically syncopated tapsthamaticianisamist.”
Mr. Briggs was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in “Black and Blue,” which originated in Paris. A highlight was his tour de force solo to Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.”
More than two decades earlier, at Ellington’s celebrated 1965 concert of sacred music at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, Mr. Briggs was featured as a dancer in the composition “David Danced Before the Lord With All His Might,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbb6KVGjpcU) a performance that Constance Valis Hill, a tap historian, wrote in her book “Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History,” “broke new ground for modern tap dancing on the concert stage.”
Ms. Hill continued: “It was not only the way Briggs shimmers across the floor — splaying 16th notes, rattling, clicking and stomping wild offbeat steps that jar everything around him — and the skimming fluidity of his rhythmic lines, and dynamics of phrasing, but the manner in which he played his feet as an accompanying musician within the orchestra.”
Along with Jimmy Slyde, Honi Coles, George Hillman, Steve Condos and others, Mr. Briggs was a busy performer in the heyday of tap, from the 1930s to the 1950s, when jazz was popular and tap masters were headliners in the swankiest nightclubs and on Broadway.
But in the 1960s, with rock ’n’ roll in ascendance and the civil rights movement gaining momentum, tap went into decline, suffering in part from a perception by some that it represented an era of black subservience in entertainment. Still, unlike some of his contemporaries, Mr. Briggs endured through those lean years, partly through his association with Hampton, with whom he performed at the Rainbow Grill in New York and elsewhere, and especially with Ellington; because of their close association, Mr. Briggs became widely known as “Duke’s dancer.”
Photo
Mr. Briggs, left, and Savion Glover in 1989 at the LeTang Studios on West 27th Street. CreditWilliam E. Sauro/The New York Times
“I can’t really define my style,” he once said. “Dancers were dancing fast when I came up. I just wanted to make people feel relaxed. To just say, ‘Ahhh.’ ”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Tap began to re-emerge as a popular form in the 1980s with stage shows like “The Tap Dance Kid,” “Black and Blue” and, a bit later, “Jelly’s Last Jam,” along with the 1989 movie “Tap,” which featured several generations of tappers, including Mr. Briggs, Sammy Davis Jr., Gregory Hines and Mr. Glover, then a teenager. All helped emphasize the legitimacy of tap as an authentic, vernacular American art form and illustrated its torch-passing tradition.
Mr. Glover, who met Mr. Briggs when he was a boy and also appeared with him in “Black and Blue,” went on to usher tap into the era of hip-hop by, among other things, creating the Tony-winning choreography for the 1996 Broadway musical “Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk,” in which he starred.
“Bunny was the last of the hoofers, just about the last of the cats who mentored me,” Mr. Glover said in an interview on Tuesday. “But he was different in that, as far as dance style, he had more of an eccentric approach that made him stand out amongst the other cats.
“He’d act out his dance, like he’d have a scene going on his mind. In the middle of the dance, he’d strike these poses. I mean, our objective is always to tell a story, but he was such a sophisticated, lyrical cat.”
Information about Mr. Briggs’s early life is a bit hazy, but public records indicate that he was born Bernard Briggs in Harlem on Feb. 26, 1922. (The origin of the nickname Bunny is obscure. Asked once by the television journalist Bryant Gumbel where the name came from, Mr. Briggs said, “Well, I’m fast.”)
He was brought up by his mother, Alma Briggs, who liked to dance the Charleston. Her sister, Gladys, was a chorus girl, and the often-repeated story is that young Bunny’s mother took him, at age 3 (or 4 or maybe 5), to his aunt’s show, where he saw Bill Robinson perform.
“She danced,” Mr. Briggs recalled in a 1989 interview with The New York Times. “I started hollering. Then out walked Bill Robinson, and I knew immediately what I wanted to do. He was so calm. Everything he did was beautiful.”
One of his mother’s brothers taught him a step or two, he said, but “I never took a lesson.” He took to dancing on the streets of the neighborhood, particularly outside a record shop on Lenox Avenue and 137th Street.
“All the people came around to hear ‘Amos ’n’ Andy’ on the radio,” Mr. Briggs said. “They’d stand around in the street and listen. Then the man who owned the shop would put on a record and I’d dance. People would throw money, and I’d take it home to my mother.”
From then on he never wanted to do anything else, though he acknowledged that at one time he thought about becoming a priest — until his priest told him that God clearly wanted him to be a dancer. As a child, he performed in New York City ballrooms as part of a children’s dance group called Porkchops, Navy, Rice and Beans.
He was discovered by the pianist Luckey Roberts and danced with his orchestra on a high-society circuit of parties in the homes of Astors, Vanderbilts and others. His first movie appearance, in 1932, was in the film “Slow Poke,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0YRb9Midsg) with Stepin Fetchit. In the 1940s he toured with big bands, tapping to swing, and, inspired by Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, adapted his style to the more complex sounds of bebop. His versatility kept him employed.
“Even when tap was in its declining days, someone would call me,” he said in 1989. “Little clubs, big clubs. Boston. Philadelphia.”
Mr. Briggs, who has no immediate survivors, married Olivette Miller, a jazz harpist, in 1982. She died in 2003.
“When it came time for him to get dressed, Bunny would have a beer or a glass of wine, and the wardrobe people would leave,” Mr. Glover recalled about the backstage scene at “Black and Blue.” “And Olivette would come in and undo everything the wardrobe person had done and dress him the way she wanted him to look. And he would just sit there, like, ‘Yeah, baby, do with me as you please.’ ”
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Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94 – The Arty Semite – Forward.com
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** Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94
————————————————————
November 26, 2014, 10:30am
** By Michael Kaminer (safari-reader://blogs.forward.com/authors/michael-kaminer/)
————————————————————
Claire Barry, with her sister, Merna, on the cover of their 1961 album ‘Side by Side.’
Claire Barry, who crossed over from the world of Yiddish entertainment to global pop stardom as half of The Barry Sisters, died Monday in Aventura, Florida. She was 94.
At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s, Claire and her sister Merna conquered television as regulars on the Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar shows.
Claire Barry’s last performance for an audience was in 2009. “I was there,” Corey Breier, a close friend of Barry’s and the longtime president of the Yiddish Artists and Friends Actors Club, (http://forward.com/articles/11844/battle-forming-over-jewel-of-yiddish-stage-/) told the Forward from his home in Aventura. “She was being honored by the Footlighters’ Club, which is Florida’s version of Friar’s club. She sang ‘My Yiddishe Mama.’ There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was the last time she sang publicly.”
Born in the Bronx to Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Kiev, Clara and Minnie Bagelman first performed as the Bagelman Sisters on a New York children’s Yiddish radio program in the 1930s.
“People told us that we had perfect harmony,” Claire Barry told the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, (http://idelsohnsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/barry_sisters_our_way_Liner_notes.pdf) which reissued The Barry Sisters’ last album, 1974’s “Our Way,” in 2008. “But to be honest, we didn’t know what harmony meant! We had no training, no schooling in this type of thing. There is a Yiddish word beshert, which means ‘meant to be.’ I always say, it was beshert that we would sing like that.”
According to the Idelsohn Society, the sisters made their first records in the late 1930s for RCA Victor, harmonizing over a stellar quintet that featured the John Coltrane and Miles Davis of pre-WWII Jewish music: klezmer clarinet king Dave Tarras and composer/arranger Abe Ellstein. They followed it up with a collaboration with tenor great Seymour Rechtzeit, the ubiquitous and celebrated king of Yiddish radio.
By the 1940s, the Bagelmans — now the Barry Sisters — had become sensations through New York radio programs like “Yiddish Melodies in Swing,” where they would sing jazz recordings in Yiddish. Their first full-length album, “Sing,” appeared in 1954; it included Yiddish standards like “My Yiddishe Mamme” and “Romania.” Their Yiddishized versions of popular tunes like “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” — “Trop’ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop” — became huge crossover hits.
The Barry Sisters “didn’t look like the typical Yiddish theater stars or singers of that era,” said Breier. “They looked glamorous. And they spared no expense for their orchestrations — they always had the best orchestrations possible.”
In 1959, the sisters — by then international stars — toured with Ed Sullivan on a groundbreaking visit to the Soviet Union, where visits by Western performers were rare. They earned a fiercely loyal following among Russian Jews.
“In communist countries, at that time, Yiddish was banned, but their recordings were snuck in,” Breier said. “There wasn’t one community in the world where Yiddish was spoken where Barry Sisters’ records were not played.” And in 1973, they also performed for grateful Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur war.
Stateside, the sisters played to packed houses, including concerts at Catskills resorts where Jews summered. “I saw them for the first time at the Nemerson resort in South Fallsburg, NY in 1968,” Breier told the Forward. “I was in awe. They were major stars.” As late as 1975, Claire and Merna Barry would continue selling out Catskills venues. “It was at the Concord hotel. There were 3,000 people there — a full house. They were unbelievable.”
Did Claire Barry know what her music meant to the world?
“I hope she did,” said Breier, who told the Forward he and Barry considered each other family. “I accompanied her for the last 20 years to almost every event. And I would see the love. People would come with tears in their eyes.”
A new generation is indeed appreciating Claire and Merna Barry’s contributions to American pop culture. As the Idelsohn Society’s 2008 liner notes put it:
If adapting Jewish music to the rhythms and contours of the American pop landscape can be considered one of the dominant aesthetics of early twentieth century popular music, then the Barry Sisters ought to be considered crucial bi-cultural pioneers, part of the same treasured artistic genealogy that usually starts and stops with the Tin Pan Alley likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. They didn’t turn America Jewish, they made Jewish sound more American.
Merna Barry died in 1976. Claire Barry is survived by a daughter, Joy Pargman.
** Top Stories
————————————————————
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Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94 – The Arty Semite – Forward.com
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** Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94
————————————————————
November 26, 2014, 10:30am
** By Michael Kaminer (safari-reader://blogs.forward.com/authors/michael-kaminer/)
————————————————————
Claire Barry, with her sister, Merna, on the cover of their 1961 album ‘Side by Side.’
Claire Barry, who crossed over from the world of Yiddish entertainment to global pop stardom as half of The Barry Sisters, died Monday in Aventura, Florida. She was 94.
At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s, Claire and her sister Merna conquered television as regulars on the Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar shows.
Claire Barry’s last performance for an audience was in 2009. “I was there,” Corey Breier, a close friend of Barry’s and the longtime president of the Yiddish Artists and Friends Actors Club, (http://forward.com/articles/11844/battle-forming-over-jewel-of-yiddish-stage-/) told the Forward from his home in Aventura. “She was being honored by the Footlighters’ Club, which is Florida’s version of Friar’s club. She sang ‘My Yiddishe Mama.’ There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was the last time she sang publicly.”
Born in the Bronx to Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Kiev, Clara and Minnie Bagelman first performed as the Bagelman Sisters on a New York children’s Yiddish radio program in the 1930s.
“People told us that we had perfect harmony,” Claire Barry told the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, (http://idelsohnsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/barry_sisters_our_way_Liner_notes.pdf) which reissued The Barry Sisters’ last album, 1974’s “Our Way,” in 2008. “But to be honest, we didn’t know what harmony meant! We had no training, no schooling in this type of thing. There is a Yiddish word beshert, which means ‘meant to be.’ I always say, it was beshert that we would sing like that.”
According to the Idelsohn Society, the sisters made their first records in the late 1930s for RCA Victor, harmonizing over a stellar quintet that featured the John Coltrane and Miles Davis of pre-WWII Jewish music: klezmer clarinet king Dave Tarras and composer/arranger Abe Ellstein. They followed it up with a collaboration with tenor great Seymour Rechtzeit, the ubiquitous and celebrated king of Yiddish radio.
By the 1940s, the Bagelmans — now the Barry Sisters — had become sensations through New York radio programs like “Yiddish Melodies in Swing,” where they would sing jazz recordings in Yiddish. Their first full-length album, “Sing,” appeared in 1954; it included Yiddish standards like “My Yiddishe Mamme” and “Romania.” Their Yiddishized versions of popular tunes like “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” — “Trop’ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop” — became huge crossover hits.
The Barry Sisters “didn’t look like the typical Yiddish theater stars or singers of that era,” said Breier. “They looked glamorous. And they spared no expense for their orchestrations — they always had the best orchestrations possible.”
In 1959, the sisters — by then international stars — toured with Ed Sullivan on a groundbreaking visit to the Soviet Union, where visits by Western performers were rare. They earned a fiercely loyal following among Russian Jews.
“In communist countries, at that time, Yiddish was banned, but their recordings were snuck in,” Breier said. “There wasn’t one community in the world where Yiddish was spoken where Barry Sisters’ records were not played.” And in 1973, they also performed for grateful Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur war.
Stateside, the sisters played to packed houses, including concerts at Catskills resorts where Jews summered. “I saw them for the first time at the Nemerson resort in South Fallsburg, NY in 1968,” Breier told the Forward. “I was in awe. They were major stars.” As late as 1975, Claire and Merna Barry would continue selling out Catskills venues. “It was at the Concord hotel. There were 3,000 people there — a full house. They were unbelievable.”
Did Claire Barry know what her music meant to the world?
“I hope she did,” said Breier, who told the Forward he and Barry considered each other family. “I accompanied her for the last 20 years to almost every event. And I would see the love. People would come with tears in their eyes.”
A new generation is indeed appreciating Claire and Merna Barry’s contributions to American pop culture. As the Idelsohn Society’s 2008 liner notes put it:
If adapting Jewish music to the rhythms and contours of the American pop landscape can be considered one of the dominant aesthetics of early twentieth century popular music, then the Barry Sisters ought to be considered crucial bi-cultural pioneers, part of the same treasured artistic genealogy that usually starts and stops with the Tin Pan Alley likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. They didn’t turn America Jewish, they made Jewish sound more American.
Merna Barry died in 1976. Claire Barry is survived by a daughter, Joy Pargman.
** Top Stories
————————————————————
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Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94 – The Arty Semite – Forward.com
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** Yiddish Pop Star Claire Barry Dies at 94
————————————————————
November 26, 2014, 10:30am
** By Michael Kaminer (safari-reader://blogs.forward.com/authors/michael-kaminer/)
————————————————————
Claire Barry, with her sister, Merna, on the cover of their 1961 album ‘Side by Side.’
Claire Barry, who crossed over from the world of Yiddish entertainment to global pop stardom as half of The Barry Sisters, died Monday in Aventura, Florida. She was 94.
At the height of their popularity in the 1950s and ‘60s, Claire and her sister Merna conquered television as regulars on the Ed Sullivan and Jack Paar shows.
Claire Barry’s last performance for an audience was in 2009. “I was there,” Corey Breier, a close friend of Barry’s and the longtime president of the Yiddish Artists and Friends Actors Club, (http://forward.com/articles/11844/battle-forming-over-jewel-of-yiddish-stage-/) told the Forward from his home in Aventura. “She was being honored by the Footlighters’ Club, which is Florida’s version of Friar’s club. She sang ‘My Yiddishe Mama.’ There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was the last time she sang publicly.”
Born in the Bronx to Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Kiev, Clara and Minnie Bagelman first performed as the Bagelman Sisters on a New York children’s Yiddish radio program in the 1930s.
“People told us that we had perfect harmony,” Claire Barry told the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, (http://idelsohnsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/barry_sisters_our_way_Liner_notes.pdf) which reissued The Barry Sisters’ last album, 1974’s “Our Way,” in 2008. “But to be honest, we didn’t know what harmony meant! We had no training, no schooling in this type of thing. There is a Yiddish word beshert, which means ‘meant to be.’ I always say, it was beshert that we would sing like that.”
According to the Idelsohn Society, the sisters made their first records in the late 1930s for RCA Victor, harmonizing over a stellar quintet that featured the John Coltrane and Miles Davis of pre-WWII Jewish music: klezmer clarinet king Dave Tarras and composer/arranger Abe Ellstein. They followed it up with a collaboration with tenor great Seymour Rechtzeit, the ubiquitous and celebrated king of Yiddish radio.
By the 1940s, the Bagelmans — now the Barry Sisters — had become sensations through New York radio programs like “Yiddish Melodies in Swing,” where they would sing jazz recordings in Yiddish. Their first full-length album, “Sing,” appeared in 1954; it included Yiddish standards like “My Yiddishe Mamme” and “Romania.” Their Yiddishized versions of popular tunes like “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” — “Trop’ns Fin Regen Oif Mein Kop” — became huge crossover hits.
The Barry Sisters “didn’t look like the typical Yiddish theater stars or singers of that era,” said Breier. “They looked glamorous. And they spared no expense for their orchestrations — they always had the best orchestrations possible.”
In 1959, the sisters — by then international stars — toured with Ed Sullivan on a groundbreaking visit to the Soviet Union, where visits by Western performers were rare. They earned a fiercely loyal following among Russian Jews.
“In communist countries, at that time, Yiddish was banned, but their recordings were snuck in,” Breier said. “There wasn’t one community in the world where Yiddish was spoken where Barry Sisters’ records were not played.” And in 1973, they also performed for grateful Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur war.
Stateside, the sisters played to packed houses, including concerts at Catskills resorts where Jews summered. “I saw them for the first time at the Nemerson resort in South Fallsburg, NY in 1968,” Breier told the Forward. “I was in awe. They were major stars.” As late as 1975, Claire and Merna Barry would continue selling out Catskills venues. “It was at the Concord hotel. There were 3,000 people there — a full house. They were unbelievable.”
Did Claire Barry know what her music meant to the world?
“I hope she did,” said Breier, who told the Forward he and Barry considered each other family. “I accompanied her for the last 20 years to almost every event. And I would see the love. People would come with tears in their eyes.”
A new generation is indeed appreciating Claire and Merna Barry’s contributions to American pop culture. As the Idelsohn Society’s 2008 liner notes put it:
If adapting Jewish music to the rhythms and contours of the American pop landscape can be considered one of the dominant aesthetics of early twentieth century popular music, then the Barry Sisters ought to be considered crucial bi-cultural pioneers, part of the same treasured artistic genealogy that usually starts and stops with the Tin Pan Alley likes of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Harold Arlen. They didn’t turn America Jewish, they made Jewish sound more American.
Merna Barry died in 1976. Claire Barry is survived by a daughter, Joy Pargman.
** Top Stories
————————————————————
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Why is the average pop song only 3 minutes long?
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http://mashable.com/2014/11/23/pop-song-length/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link
** Why is the average pop song only 3 minutes long?
————————————————————
Taylor
There’s a famous Billy Joel song called “The Entertainer.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozDSk9XUkrc)
In it, the piano man warbles about the perils of the music industry, and having to limit himself to writing radio-friendly tracks.
“It was a beautiful song/But it ran too long/If you’re gonna have a hit/You gotta make it fit/So they cut it down to 3:05.”
It’s a deft set of lyrics that perfectly sums up the music world’s short attention span. In the pop industry, most radio hits typically can’t be longer than three to four minutes. Case in point, the top three songs currently on the Billboard Hot 100 (http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100) . For the week of November 22, the reigning trio was Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” (3:39 minutes), Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass” (3:08 minutes) and Maroon 5’s “Animal” (3:49 minutes).
What makes three the magic number? And will that magic number change with the ever-evolving music business?
As it turns out, average hit song length has more to do with historical limitation than an audience’s focus level. Let’s take a quick trip back in time, to the beginning of the record.
** The origin of the single.
————————————————————
vinyl
In the early 1900s, the most common way to release music was via a 10-inch record. The 10″ usually played at a speed (http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/historyof78rpms.htm) of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm), which measures the frequency of a rotation.
Early 10″ records could only hold three to five minutes per side. Twelve-inch records were also used, but they only held about four to five minutes, according to the Yale Music Catalogue.
“If it went longer than that, the grooves became too close together…the sound quality went down,” explains Thomas Tierney, director of the Sony Music Archives Library, in an interview with Mashable.
Thus, musicians in the first half of the 20th century were artistically bound by technological constraints. The limitation meant pop artists had to create quick tracks that fit the mold if they wanted a song to be released as a single.
A short single could be played on the radio and become a hit song
A short single could be played on the radio and become a hit song, wholly unlike the DIY aesthetic that allows modern artists to get famous via social media, blogs or music sites like Bandcamp (http://mashable.com/category/bandcamp/) or Soundcloud (http://mashable.com/category/soundcloud/) .
“In those days, if you recorded a song that was longer than three minutes and 15 seconds, they just wouldn’t play it,” Tierney says.
Naturally, there were exceptions, but they were reserved for other genres. Duke Ellington could record longer songs, because jazz had different rules.
In the pop world, exceptions were rare — and relied on deception. One example of a song breaking the 3:15-minute rule was the 1964 smash “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by The Righteous Brothers.
The Righteous Brothers – You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (http://vimeo.com/58107420) from A (http://vimeo.com/almaboreal) on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/) .
Produced and co-penned by hitmaker Phil Spector, the song was actually 3:45 minutes, much longer than its contemporaries. Unwilling to cut it down, Spector stamped (http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=429) 3:05 minutes on the single, so DJs would play it without realizing its actual length.
It went on to become the most played song (http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/232893) on American radio and television of the 20th century.
** A folksy sea change
————————————————————
bob dylan
Bob Dylan on tour in 1966.
Modern pop charts show that artists still stick to the three- to four-minute mold, though radio restrictions are no longer as ironclad. For that, musicians can thank Bob Dylan.
Unlike the pop scene, folk artists of the ’60s typically recorded longer songs, Tierney says. They didn’t care for singles, which were more for trying to climb the Top 40. Instead, they focused on “selling LPs in college towns,” Tierney says.
By 1965, Bob Dylan was already a respected artist. He had released now-classic albums like The Times They Are A-Changin’, and “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” cracked the top 40 chart (https://rockhall.com/story-of-rock/timelines/bob-dylan/basic/) at spot 39.
Then he went electric. He released Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the 6:34-minute track “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Despite wanting to make it a single, the Columbia Records sales team nixed (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-quotlike-a-rolling-stonequot) the absurdly long song — well, except for employee Shaun Considine.
Then the coordinator of new releases, Considine sent the track to a popular Manhattan DJ. According to History (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-quotlike-a-rolling-stonequot) , the track spread like wildfire, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard pop charts. It was an unprecedented success and a “watershed moment in pop history,” Tierney says.
** Rock changes, pop remains the same.
————————————————————
robert plant
Robert Plant performs.
Dylan’s success didn’t completely alter pop’s future, but it did shape rock’s trajectory, where singles mattered less and less. Bands like Iron Butterfly would record 17-minute songs like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” then cut them down into radio-friendly snippets, though fans preferred the lengthy tracks.
Led Zeppelin never released “Stairway to Heaven,” which is 8:02 minutes, as a single, but the track still became the stuff of legend.
“The only way you could hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was by buying the album,” Tierney says. “Bands began to have that type of power and say, ‘This is our art. You’re not cutting it down.'”
** So why haven’t songs gotten longer?
————————————————————
drake
Rapper Drake.
If a song can still be successful beyond three or four minutes, why aren’t pop artists exploring that option?
Well, with the onslaught of good music comes the erosion of the public’s attention span. Unlike the heyday of Zeppelin, fans won’t just buy the album — they wait for the single, judge, then move on to the next. Today’s top chart is a little more cutthroat, because some music fans won’t listen beyond what they hear on the radio.
As far as length, some exceptions remain. Hip hop and EDM, arguable today’s most influential genres, get away with longer songs because they’re suited to club culture, which is “more dance oriented…and lasts a little longer,” Tierney says.
For example, the longest songs in the iTunes Top Songs chart as of this week include “Tuesday” by ILOVEMAKONNEN, featuring Drake (5:21 minutes), “Bed of Lies” by Nicki Minaj, featuring Skylar Gray (4:30 minutes) and “I Don’t F**ck Wih You” by Big Sean, featuring E-40 (4:44 minutes).
These are the rarities surrounded by a sea of short tracks. For example, take Taylor Swift. Her first “official” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/08/18/taylor-swift-shakes-off-country-with-first-pop-album-1989/14256849/) pop album, 1989, is largely dominating the charts — but only two tracks (https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/1989/id907242701) are a little over four minutes. Compare that to her previous three albums, where at least half the tracks were well over four minutes.
taylor swift
“Young people will always be pop music’s biggest consumers,” Tierney sums up. “[They] are always going to want their songs to be three minutes, and on to the next one.”
Audiences have already been conditioned to desire short radio hits. It’s a deeply engrained habit of the music and radio industry, despite anomalies and limitless technology. For Tierney, the foreseeable future won’t yield longer radio hits. At this point, it’s almost like “it’s embedded in our DNA.”
Like a wise singer once said: If you want to make a hit, you’ve got to make it fit.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
** BONUS: 5 Taylor Swift Songs That Are Actually About Sandwiches
————————————————————
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Why is the average pop song only 3 minutes long?
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** Why is the average pop song only 3 minutes long?
————————————————————
Taylor
There’s a famous Billy Joel song called “The Entertainer.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozDSk9XUkrc)
In it, the piano man warbles about the perils of the music industry, and having to limit himself to writing radio-friendly tracks.
“It was a beautiful song/But it ran too long/If you’re gonna have a hit/You gotta make it fit/So they cut it down to 3:05.”
It’s a deft set of lyrics that perfectly sums up the music world’s short attention span. In the pop industry, most radio hits typically can’t be longer than three to four minutes. Case in point, the top three songs currently on the Billboard Hot 100 (http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100) . For the week of November 22, the reigning trio was Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” (3:39 minutes), Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass” (3:08 minutes) and Maroon 5’s “Animal” (3:49 minutes).
What makes three the magic number? And will that magic number change with the ever-evolving music business?
As it turns out, average hit song length has more to do with historical limitation than an audience’s focus level. Let’s take a quick trip back in time, to the beginning of the record.
** The origin of the single.
————————————————————
vinyl
In the early 1900s, the most common way to release music was via a 10-inch record. The 10″ usually played at a speed (http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/historyof78rpms.htm) of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm), which measures the frequency of a rotation.
Early 10″ records could only hold three to five minutes per side. Twelve-inch records were also used, but they only held about four to five minutes, according to the Yale Music Catalogue.
“If it went longer than that, the grooves became too close together…the sound quality went down,” explains Thomas Tierney, director of the Sony Music Archives Library, in an interview with Mashable.
Thus, musicians in the first half of the 20th century were artistically bound by technological constraints. The limitation meant pop artists had to create quick tracks that fit the mold if they wanted a song to be released as a single.
A short single could be played on the radio and become a hit song
A short single could be played on the radio and become a hit song, wholly unlike the DIY aesthetic that allows modern artists to get famous via social media, blogs or music sites like Bandcamp (http://mashable.com/category/bandcamp/) or Soundcloud (http://mashable.com/category/soundcloud/) .
“In those days, if you recorded a song that was longer than three minutes and 15 seconds, they just wouldn’t play it,” Tierney says.
Naturally, there were exceptions, but they were reserved for other genres. Duke Ellington could record longer songs, because jazz had different rules.
In the pop world, exceptions were rare — and relied on deception. One example of a song breaking the 3:15-minute rule was the 1964 smash “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by The Righteous Brothers.
The Righteous Brothers – You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (http://vimeo.com/58107420) from A (http://vimeo.com/almaboreal) on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/) .
Produced and co-penned by hitmaker Phil Spector, the song was actually 3:45 minutes, much longer than its contemporaries. Unwilling to cut it down, Spector stamped (http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=429) 3:05 minutes on the single, so DJs would play it without realizing its actual length.
It went on to become the most played song (http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/232893) on American radio and television of the 20th century.
** A folksy sea change
————————————————————
bob dylan
Bob Dylan on tour in 1966.
Modern pop charts show that artists still stick to the three- to four-minute mold, though radio restrictions are no longer as ironclad. For that, musicians can thank Bob Dylan.
Unlike the pop scene, folk artists of the ’60s typically recorded longer songs, Tierney says. They didn’t care for singles, which were more for trying to climb the Top 40. Instead, they focused on “selling LPs in college towns,” Tierney says.
By 1965, Bob Dylan was already a respected artist. He had released now-classic albums like The Times They Are A-Changin’, and “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” cracked the top 40 chart (https://rockhall.com/story-of-rock/timelines/bob-dylan/basic/) at spot 39.
Then he went electric. He released Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the 6:34-minute track “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Despite wanting to make it a single, the Columbia Records sales team nixed (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-quotlike-a-rolling-stonequot) the absurdly long song — well, except for employee Shaun Considine.
Then the coordinator of new releases, Considine sent the track to a popular Manhattan DJ. According to History (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-quotlike-a-rolling-stonequot) , the track spread like wildfire, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard pop charts. It was an unprecedented success and a “watershed moment in pop history,” Tierney says.
** Rock changes, pop remains the same.
————————————————————
robert plant
Robert Plant performs.
Dylan’s success didn’t completely alter pop’s future, but it did shape rock’s trajectory, where singles mattered less and less. Bands like Iron Butterfly would record 17-minute songs like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” then cut them down into radio-friendly snippets, though fans preferred the lengthy tracks.
Led Zeppelin never released “Stairway to Heaven,” which is 8:02 minutes, as a single, but the track still became the stuff of legend.
“The only way you could hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was by buying the album,” Tierney says. “Bands began to have that type of power and say, ‘This is our art. You’re not cutting it down.'”
** So why haven’t songs gotten longer?
————————————————————
drake
Rapper Drake.
If a song can still be successful beyond three or four minutes, why aren’t pop artists exploring that option?
Well, with the onslaught of good music comes the erosion of the public’s attention span. Unlike the heyday of Zeppelin, fans won’t just buy the album — they wait for the single, judge, then move on to the next. Today’s top chart is a little more cutthroat, because some music fans won’t listen beyond what they hear on the radio.
As far as length, some exceptions remain. Hip hop and EDM, arguable today’s most influential genres, get away with longer songs because they’re suited to club culture, which is “more dance oriented…and lasts a little longer,” Tierney says.
For example, the longest songs in the iTunes Top Songs chart as of this week include “Tuesday” by ILOVEMAKONNEN, featuring Drake (5:21 minutes), “Bed of Lies” by Nicki Minaj, featuring Skylar Gray (4:30 minutes) and “I Don’t F**ck Wih You” by Big Sean, featuring E-40 (4:44 minutes).
These are the rarities surrounded by a sea of short tracks. For example, take Taylor Swift. Her first “official” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/08/18/taylor-swift-shakes-off-country-with-first-pop-album-1989/14256849/) pop album, 1989, is largely dominating the charts — but only two tracks (https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/1989/id907242701) are a little over four minutes. Compare that to her previous three albums, where at least half the tracks were well over four minutes.
taylor swift
“Young people will always be pop music’s biggest consumers,” Tierney sums up. “[They] are always going to want their songs to be three minutes, and on to the next one.”
Audiences have already been conditioned to desire short radio hits. It’s a deeply engrained habit of the music and radio industry, despite anomalies and limitless technology. For Tierney, the foreseeable future won’t yield longer radio hits. At this point, it’s almost like “it’s embedded in our DNA.”
Like a wise singer once said: If you want to make a hit, you’ve got to make it fit.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
** BONUS: 5 Taylor Swift Songs That Are Actually About Sandwiches
————————————————————
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=bf97caf36d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=bf97caf36d&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Why is the average pop song only 3 minutes long?
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://mashable.com/2014/11/23/pop-song-length/?utm_cid=mash-com-Tw-main-link
** Why is the average pop song only 3 minutes long?
————————————————————
Taylor
There’s a famous Billy Joel song called “The Entertainer.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozDSk9XUkrc)
In it, the piano man warbles about the perils of the music industry, and having to limit himself to writing radio-friendly tracks.
“It was a beautiful song/But it ran too long/If you’re gonna have a hit/You gotta make it fit/So they cut it down to 3:05.”
It’s a deft set of lyrics that perfectly sums up the music world’s short attention span. In the pop industry, most radio hits typically can’t be longer than three to four minutes. Case in point, the top three songs currently on the Billboard Hot 100 (http://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100) . For the week of November 22, the reigning trio was Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” (3:39 minutes), Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass” (3:08 minutes) and Maroon 5’s “Animal” (3:49 minutes).
What makes three the magic number? And will that magic number change with the ever-evolving music business?
As it turns out, average hit song length has more to do with historical limitation than an audience’s focus level. Let’s take a quick trip back in time, to the beginning of the record.
** The origin of the single.
————————————————————
vinyl
In the early 1900s, the most common way to release music was via a 10-inch record. The 10″ usually played at a speed (http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/historyof78rpms.htm) of 78 revolutions per minute (rpm), which measures the frequency of a rotation.
Early 10″ records could only hold three to five minutes per side. Twelve-inch records were also used, but they only held about four to five minutes, according to the Yale Music Catalogue.
“If it went longer than that, the grooves became too close together…the sound quality went down,” explains Thomas Tierney, director of the Sony Music Archives Library, in an interview with Mashable.
Thus, musicians in the first half of the 20th century were artistically bound by technological constraints. The limitation meant pop artists had to create quick tracks that fit the mold if they wanted a song to be released as a single.
A short single could be played on the radio and become a hit song
A short single could be played on the radio and become a hit song, wholly unlike the DIY aesthetic that allows modern artists to get famous via social media, blogs or music sites like Bandcamp (http://mashable.com/category/bandcamp/) or Soundcloud (http://mashable.com/category/soundcloud/) .
“In those days, if you recorded a song that was longer than three minutes and 15 seconds, they just wouldn’t play it,” Tierney says.
Naturally, there were exceptions, but they were reserved for other genres. Duke Ellington could record longer songs, because jazz had different rules.
In the pop world, exceptions were rare — and relied on deception. One example of a song breaking the 3:15-minute rule was the 1964 smash “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin'” by The Righteous Brothers.
The Righteous Brothers – You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ (http://vimeo.com/58107420) from A (http://vimeo.com/almaboreal) on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/) .
Produced and co-penned by hitmaker Phil Spector, the song was actually 3:45 minutes, much longer than its contemporaries. Unwilling to cut it down, Spector stamped (http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=429) 3:05 minutes on the single, so DJs would play it without realizing its actual length.
It went on to become the most played song (http://www.bmi.com/news/entry/232893) on American radio and television of the 20th century.
** A folksy sea change
————————————————————
bob dylan
Bob Dylan on tour in 1966.
Modern pop charts show that artists still stick to the three- to four-minute mold, though radio restrictions are no longer as ironclad. For that, musicians can thank Bob Dylan.
Unlike the pop scene, folk artists of the ’60s typically recorded longer songs, Tierney says. They didn’t care for singles, which were more for trying to climb the Top 40. Instead, they focused on “selling LPs in college towns,” Tierney says.
By 1965, Bob Dylan was already a respected artist. He had released now-classic albums like The Times They Are A-Changin’, and “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” cracked the top 40 chart (https://rockhall.com/story-of-rock/timelines/bob-dylan/basic/) at spot 39.
Then he went electric. He released Highway 61 Revisited, which contained the 6:34-minute track “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Despite wanting to make it a single, the Columbia Records sales team nixed (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-quotlike-a-rolling-stonequot) the absurdly long song — well, except for employee Shaun Considine.
Then the coordinator of new releases, Considine sent the track to a popular Manhattan DJ. According to History (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bob-dylan-records-quotlike-a-rolling-stonequot) , the track spread like wildfire, peaking at No. 2 on the Billboard pop charts. It was an unprecedented success and a “watershed moment in pop history,” Tierney says.
** Rock changes, pop remains the same.
————————————————————
robert plant
Robert Plant performs.
Dylan’s success didn’t completely alter pop’s future, but it did shape rock’s trajectory, where singles mattered less and less. Bands like Iron Butterfly would record 17-minute songs like “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” then cut them down into radio-friendly snippets, though fans preferred the lengthy tracks.
Led Zeppelin never released “Stairway to Heaven,” which is 8:02 minutes, as a single, but the track still became the stuff of legend.
“The only way you could hear ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was by buying the album,” Tierney says. “Bands began to have that type of power and say, ‘This is our art. You’re not cutting it down.'”
** So why haven’t songs gotten longer?
————————————————————
drake
Rapper Drake.
If a song can still be successful beyond three or four minutes, why aren’t pop artists exploring that option?
Well, with the onslaught of good music comes the erosion of the public’s attention span. Unlike the heyday of Zeppelin, fans won’t just buy the album — they wait for the single, judge, then move on to the next. Today’s top chart is a little more cutthroat, because some music fans won’t listen beyond what they hear on the radio.
As far as length, some exceptions remain. Hip hop and EDM, arguable today’s most influential genres, get away with longer songs because they’re suited to club culture, which is “more dance oriented…and lasts a little longer,” Tierney says.
For example, the longest songs in the iTunes Top Songs chart as of this week include “Tuesday” by ILOVEMAKONNEN, featuring Drake (5:21 minutes), “Bed of Lies” by Nicki Minaj, featuring Skylar Gray (4:30 minutes) and “I Don’t F**ck Wih You” by Big Sean, featuring E-40 (4:44 minutes).
These are the rarities surrounded by a sea of short tracks. For example, take Taylor Swift. Her first “official” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/08/18/taylor-swift-shakes-off-country-with-first-pop-album-1989/14256849/) pop album, 1989, is largely dominating the charts — but only two tracks (https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/1989/id907242701) are a little over four minutes. Compare that to her previous three albums, where at least half the tracks were well over four minutes.
taylor swift
“Young people will always be pop music’s biggest consumers,” Tierney sums up. “[They] are always going to want their songs to be three minutes, and on to the next one.”
Audiences have already been conditioned to desire short radio hits. It’s a deeply engrained habit of the music and radio industry, despite anomalies and limitless technology. For Tierney, the foreseeable future won’t yield longer radio hits. At this point, it’s almost like “it’s embedded in our DNA.”
Like a wise singer once said: If you want to make a hit, you’ve got to make it fit.
Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
** BONUS: 5 Taylor Swift Songs That Are Actually About Sandwiches
————————————————————
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=bf97caf36d) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=bf97caf36d&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Tracing the early years: How Jazz made its way to India – Hindustan Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/music/tracing-the-early-years-how-jazz-came-to-india/article1-1290047.aspx
** Tracing the early years: How Jazz made its way to India
————————————————————
From saxophone legend Sonny Rollins’ visit to Powai to study yoga at the mission run by Swami Chinmayananda to, the first ‘all African’ jazz band in Mumbai to how jazz made an impression in Bollywood and more will be displayed at the Jazz in India exhibition hosted by the India International Centre (IIC) from Nov 26 to Nov 30 at the Main Art Gallery, Kamaldevi Complex.
Using archives of the book Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, authored by acclaimed Mumbai journalist Naresh Fernandes and collection of the iconic Jazz Yatra Festivals held from 1978 to 2003 by Niranjan Jhaveri, impresario and organiser of the Yatras, the exhibition aims to trace the formative years of Jazz in India.
As a part of the music appreciation promotion, the exhibition will also include a presentation by Fernandes- A Short History of How Jazz Became an Indian Music on November 26 at 18:30 pm.
The presentation will use audio clips and photographs to trace the journey of jazz from New Orleans to New Delhi, exploring how an American transplant became a vibrant Indian hybrid in the fertile soil of the subcontinent.
Jazz in the Swing Era will be presented by Rohit Gupta Trio (Kartikeya Srivastava on drums; Abhinav Khokar on upright and electric bass; and Rohit Gupta on piano/keyboard) on November 27 at 18:30 pm.
Inauguration will be done by Shri Soli J Sorabjee, president IIC on Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 18:30 pm.
Source: India International Centre
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1ce5bb855a) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1ce5bb855a&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Tracing the early years: How Jazz made its way to India – Hindustan Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/music/tracing-the-early-years-how-jazz-came-to-india/article1-1290047.aspx
** Tracing the early years: How Jazz made its way to India
————————————————————
From saxophone legend Sonny Rollins’ visit to Powai to study yoga at the mission run by Swami Chinmayananda to, the first ‘all African’ jazz band in Mumbai to how jazz made an impression in Bollywood and more will be displayed at the Jazz in India exhibition hosted by the India International Centre (IIC) from Nov 26 to Nov 30 at the Main Art Gallery, Kamaldevi Complex.
Using archives of the book Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, authored by acclaimed Mumbai journalist Naresh Fernandes and collection of the iconic Jazz Yatra Festivals held from 1978 to 2003 by Niranjan Jhaveri, impresario and organiser of the Yatras, the exhibition aims to trace the formative years of Jazz in India.
As a part of the music appreciation promotion, the exhibition will also include a presentation by Fernandes- A Short History of How Jazz Became an Indian Music on November 26 at 18:30 pm.
The presentation will use audio clips and photographs to trace the journey of jazz from New Orleans to New Delhi, exploring how an American transplant became a vibrant Indian hybrid in the fertile soil of the subcontinent.
Jazz in the Swing Era will be presented by Rohit Gupta Trio (Kartikeya Srivastava on drums; Abhinav Khokar on upright and electric bass; and Rohit Gupta on piano/keyboard) on November 27 at 18:30 pm.
Inauguration will be done by Shri Soli J Sorabjee, president IIC on Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 18:30 pm.
Source: India International Centre
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1ce5bb855a) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1ce5bb855a&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Tracing the early years: How Jazz made its way to India – Hindustan Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.hindustantimes.com/entertainment/music/tracing-the-early-years-how-jazz-came-to-india/article1-1290047.aspx
** Tracing the early years: How Jazz made its way to India
————————————————————
From saxophone legend Sonny Rollins’ visit to Powai to study yoga at the mission run by Swami Chinmayananda to, the first ‘all African’ jazz band in Mumbai to how jazz made an impression in Bollywood and more will be displayed at the Jazz in India exhibition hosted by the India International Centre (IIC) from Nov 26 to Nov 30 at the Main Art Gallery, Kamaldevi Complex.
Using archives of the book Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The story of Bombay’s Jazz Age, authored by acclaimed Mumbai journalist Naresh Fernandes and collection of the iconic Jazz Yatra Festivals held from 1978 to 2003 by Niranjan Jhaveri, impresario and organiser of the Yatras, the exhibition aims to trace the formative years of Jazz in India.
As a part of the music appreciation promotion, the exhibition will also include a presentation by Fernandes- A Short History of How Jazz Became an Indian Music on November 26 at 18:30 pm.
The presentation will use audio clips and photographs to trace the journey of jazz from New Orleans to New Delhi, exploring how an American transplant became a vibrant Indian hybrid in the fertile soil of the subcontinent.
Jazz in the Swing Era will be presented by Rohit Gupta Trio (Kartikeya Srivastava on drums; Abhinav Khokar on upright and electric bass; and Rohit Gupta on piano/keyboard) on November 27 at 18:30 pm.
Inauguration will be done by Shri Soli J Sorabjee, president IIC on Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 18:30 pm.
Source: India International Centre
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1ce5bb855a) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1ce5bb855a&e=[UNIQID])
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Telling the Story of Buddy Bolden, the Man Who ‘Invented Jazz’
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
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http://www.newsweek.com/telling-story-buddy-bolden-man-who-invented-jazz-286289
** Telling the Story of Buddy Bolden, the Man Who ‘Invented Jazz’
————————————————————
BY STUART MILLER (http://www.newsweek.com/user/16250) 11/23/14 AT 3:33 PM
11_28_BuddyBolden_03
The Bolden Band around 1905. (Top: Jimmy Johnson (bass), Bolden (cornet), Willy Cornish (Valve Trombone), Willy Warner (Clarinet) Bottom: Brock Mumford (Guitar), Frank Lewis (Clarinet)). WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
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Filed Under: Culture (http://www.newsweek.com/culture) , Jazz (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/jazz) , Buddy Bolden (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/buddy-bolden) , Daniel Pritzker (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/daniel-pritzker) , New Orleans (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/new-orleans) , Movies (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/movies) , Music (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/music)
Daniel Pritzker strolls the gritty streets of 1901 New Orleans with a light touch and a low-key confidence. A chat with the marching band, a question about continuity and he’s ready for another take on Bolden!, his film about Buddy Bolden, the doomed cornet player credited with inventing jazz. Nine hours later, the temperature has dropped 25 degrees and midnight has long passed, yet Pritzker patiently works through minor glitches derailing a fight scene, seeming for all the world like an experienced director.
In a weird way he is. This is Pritzker’s third film—kind of. This shoot represents his third attempt to make his first movie, this movie, one of the most unusual sagas in obsessive filmmaking since Werner Herzog hauled a ship up a mountain in the Amazon to make Fitzcarraldo. “I’m trying to do something I hope is worthy of the subject,” he says referring to Bolden, New Orleans and jazz.
In 2007, Pritzker began filming Bolden!, starring Anthony Mackie, Wendell Pierce and Jackie Earle Haley. Dissatisfied with the results, he undertook extensive reshoots two years later. Frustrated by conflicts on-set and unable to captured the movie he saw in his head, he put Bolden! aside. But this year, with a fresh approach, a handpicked crew and new leads—Gary Carr, Erik LaRay Harvey and Ian McShane—he returned to start over. “We might be making the first $50 million art house movie,” jokes McShane.
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week (http://www.newsweek.com/subscribe)
Directors who don’t succeed at first don’t typically get to try, try again. But most aren’t billionaires, a scion of the family that founded the Marmon Group (an industrial conglomerate) and the Hyatt Hotel chain, and one of 10 siblings or cousins in the Forbes 400. So Pritzker, 55, answers to no studio or backers watching the bottom line.
Amiable and open, Pritzker does not wear his wealth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt (which goes with his understated jeans, T-shirt and sneakers), but he is aware of his good—and vast—fortune. “I’m in the lucky position to have the opportunity to do this,” he acknowledges in October in a trailer on the set at Atlanta’s Goat Farm Arts Center, where he has re-created the New Orleans that made Bolden a household name in his time.
Bolden was an innovative cornet player; beginning around 1895, he blended gospel, blues, ragtime and improvisation in a unique style that was loud and fearless. It might be a tad hyperbolic to claim Bolden invented jazz, but he was certainly a founder and the man who made the trumpet this new form’s centerpiece. “Jazz doesn’t seem radical now, but imagine what this sound was doing to people at the time,” Pritzker says.
Bolden was a womanizer and heavy drinker, and after an alcohol-induced breakdown in 1907 he was institutionalized with what would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenia, and he deteriorated, largely alone and forgotten, until his death in 1931. Pritzker, who once operated on the credo “the movie will be done when it’s done,” has changed his tune. His new mantra: “I have to get Buddy Bolden to go crazy in this movie before I do.”
11_28_BuddyBolden_01 Director Dan Pritzker, right, is seen on the set with actor Dick Gregory, playing old Buddy Bolden, during the filming of the movie “Bolden” at Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, N.C. on July 23, 2010. GERRY BROOME/AP
Pritzker never planned on directing a film, much less devoting years to an obscure historical figure. In Chicago he had founded a rock-soul-funk band, Sonia Dada, which achieved modest success in the early 1990s with a single, “You Don’t Treat Me No Good.” He veered onto this new path in 1996 after a stray comment backstage between sets. Pritzker asked an acquaintance what he was reading; it was a book about the man who “invented jazz.”
Pritzker was instantly intrigued. “It struck me as ridiculous [to say] that someone invented jazz,” he recalls, “but [it also struck me] as tragic, poetic and quintessentially American that [jazz]— which changed not only music but the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we look at time”—was started by a black musician who had been forgotten.
He dug in, studying Bolden, early jazz and the racial and cultural history of New Orleans after Reconstruction, such as the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Only one photo of Bolden and his band exists, and no music (if any was ever recorded) survives. Much of his story is shrouded in myth, tales told after his death by aging jazz musicians.
When Pritzker began writing his movie, he called Donald M. Marquis, author of the meticulously researched In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, and visited him in New Orleans for a personalized history tour. Marquis showed him Bolden’s now vacant home on First Street and the sites of long-gone spots where Bolden played.
Pritzker approached a friend who was a movie producer, Jon Cornick (State and Main). He had no script—“I didn’t know POV from LSD,” he says—just a raw, lengthy outline. “I didn’t know what Final Draft was,” he says, referring to the computer formatting program many screenwriters use. “Jon looked at me like I was crazy.”
“I thought it was very ambitious to say the least,” Cornick says, laughing. And Pritzker was just getting started. He’d originally intended to hand over his script to a director, “but my wife, Karen, said, ‘You’re a megalomaniac, you’re going to want to be in control of this.’” Suddenly, Pritzker was also a film director.
Cornick brought in Derick and Steven Martini (Lymelife) to help write a shootable screenplay. He also connected Pritzker with New Orleans native and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, who agreed to score the film. By 2007, Pritzker was ready, though he remained shockingly naive—he decided he’d simultaneously make a silent film about a young Louis Armstrong with the same cast and set. “I thought, There are efficiencies here, and I’ll shoot this in the morning and that in the afternoon,” Pritzker says. “I had no idea.”
He was unprepared for the demands of directing: being on his feet, peppered with questions, solving problems for 12-hour stretches. “It really ran me down,” he says. But the biggest surprise was the politics of a movie set. “I figured it’s my show, so I get to do what I want,” he says, but certain crew and cast members saw things differently. “It was an interesting lesson. The conflict really beats the hell out of you.”
Despite these woes, Martini says Pritzker had the makings of a good movie, potentially a Robert Altman–esque period piece (think Kansas City). “But it was not what Dan wanted.”
Pritzker says he wanted something more “ambitious” and “surreal” than what he got from his first two rough cuts, and Cornick knew Pritzker would not settle. “The great thing about this project is that only one person has to like it and that’s Dan,” he says. (He did create his silent film, Louis, from the footage, and Marsalis brought a live orchestra to accompany it at screenings around the country in 2010.)
Beyond his inexperience in figuring out how to achieve his vision, there was one other crucial issue—the leading man. “Dan just wasn’t satisfied with Mackie [Hurt Locker],” says Marquis.
Pritzker prefers a tactful silence (and Mackie would not comment), but he says Mackie’s replacement, Downton Abbey’s Gary Carr, was an eager student. When he was told to learn to fake playing the trumpet, he instead took lessons and can now play the instrument. He also went to New Orleans, researched schizophrenia and peppered Marquis with questions about Bolden.
Pritzker immerses himself in every detail—from making sure the actors in that fight scene don’t seem too polished to discussing how the transverse abdominal muscle looks in the pregnancy prosthetic—but he’s happy to seek advice, especially since it keeps the cast and crew emotionally invested in the movie.
This time he’s more comfortable being the boss. In his band, his leadership style had been fairly loose and informal, which didn’t translate well to the large-scale operation of a film, and he was taken aback by the expectations of an almost military organization on the set. “It’s just not my character,” he says. (His approach includes having his wife and daughter, Cindy—one of five children—helping on the set; Cindy deferred college to work on the film.)
Cornick says this evolution was all part of Pritzker’s “learning curve.” But there was a price to pay for making this movie at his own pace. While Pritzker trumpets the talents of Pierce and Haley and both had been eager to return, his timetable meant both men had other commitments when shooting commenced. (Pierce and Haley would not speak for the story; neither would Marsalis.)
Adding McShane (Deadwood) as the powerful and immoral Judge Perry, was a coup. McShane not only read the script but read up on Pritzker and came away impressed. “He’s a billionaire renaissance man,” McShane says, adding that Pritzker was open to discussions about making his character more than “a one-dimensional evil white guy.”
The film wrapped after six weeks in Atlanta in October, and by mid-November they were in Wilmington, North Carolina, for interior asylum scenes. Everyone will move to New Orleans for a week in late January to film exteriors and club scenes in Preservation Hall, and shooting should wrap, Cornick believes, by early March. He says it is now a question of when, not if, the movie ever sees the dark of theaters.
Just a few days earlier, Pritzker says, after Cornick had praised a completed take of a scene, “I pulled on Jon’s sleeve and said, ‘So does this mean I shouldn’t go home tonight and work on rewriting the scene again?’ And Jon said, ‘No, it’s over.’”
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Telling the Story of Buddy Bolden, the Man Who ‘Invented Jazz’
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** Telling the Story of Buddy Bolden, the Man Who ‘Invented Jazz’
————————————————————
BY STUART MILLER (http://www.newsweek.com/user/16250) 11/23/14 AT 3:33 PM
11_28_BuddyBolden_03
The Bolden Band around 1905. (Top: Jimmy Johnson (bass), Bolden (cornet), Willy Cornish (Valve Trombone), Willy Warner (Clarinet) Bottom: Brock Mumford (Guitar), Frank Lewis (Clarinet)). WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
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*
Filed Under: Culture (http://www.newsweek.com/culture) , Jazz (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/jazz) , Buddy Bolden (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/buddy-bolden) , Daniel Pritzker (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/daniel-pritzker) , New Orleans (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/new-orleans) , Movies (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/movies) , Music (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/music)
Daniel Pritzker strolls the gritty streets of 1901 New Orleans with a light touch and a low-key confidence. A chat with the marching band, a question about continuity and he’s ready for another take on Bolden!, his film about Buddy Bolden, the doomed cornet player credited with inventing jazz. Nine hours later, the temperature has dropped 25 degrees and midnight has long passed, yet Pritzker patiently works through minor glitches derailing a fight scene, seeming for all the world like an experienced director.
In a weird way he is. This is Pritzker’s third film—kind of. This shoot represents his third attempt to make his first movie, this movie, one of the most unusual sagas in obsessive filmmaking since Werner Herzog hauled a ship up a mountain in the Amazon to make Fitzcarraldo. “I’m trying to do something I hope is worthy of the subject,” he says referring to Bolden, New Orleans and jazz.
In 2007, Pritzker began filming Bolden!, starring Anthony Mackie, Wendell Pierce and Jackie Earle Haley. Dissatisfied with the results, he undertook extensive reshoots two years later. Frustrated by conflicts on-set and unable to captured the movie he saw in his head, he put Bolden! aside. But this year, with a fresh approach, a handpicked crew and new leads—Gary Carr, Erik LaRay Harvey and Ian McShane—he returned to start over. “We might be making the first $50 million art house movie,” jokes McShane.
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week (http://www.newsweek.com/subscribe)
Directors who don’t succeed at first don’t typically get to try, try again. But most aren’t billionaires, a scion of the family that founded the Marmon Group (an industrial conglomerate) and the Hyatt Hotel chain, and one of 10 siblings or cousins in the Forbes 400. So Pritzker, 55, answers to no studio or backers watching the bottom line.
Amiable and open, Pritzker does not wear his wealth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt (which goes with his understated jeans, T-shirt and sneakers), but he is aware of his good—and vast—fortune. “I’m in the lucky position to have the opportunity to do this,” he acknowledges in October in a trailer on the set at Atlanta’s Goat Farm Arts Center, where he has re-created the New Orleans that made Bolden a household name in his time.
Bolden was an innovative cornet player; beginning around 1895, he blended gospel, blues, ragtime and improvisation in a unique style that was loud and fearless. It might be a tad hyperbolic to claim Bolden invented jazz, but he was certainly a founder and the man who made the trumpet this new form’s centerpiece. “Jazz doesn’t seem radical now, but imagine what this sound was doing to people at the time,” Pritzker says.
Bolden was a womanizer and heavy drinker, and after an alcohol-induced breakdown in 1907 he was institutionalized with what would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenia, and he deteriorated, largely alone and forgotten, until his death in 1931. Pritzker, who once operated on the credo “the movie will be done when it’s done,” has changed his tune. His new mantra: “I have to get Buddy Bolden to go crazy in this movie before I do.”
11_28_BuddyBolden_01 Director Dan Pritzker, right, is seen on the set with actor Dick Gregory, playing old Buddy Bolden, during the filming of the movie “Bolden” at Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, N.C. on July 23, 2010. GERRY BROOME/AP
Pritzker never planned on directing a film, much less devoting years to an obscure historical figure. In Chicago he had founded a rock-soul-funk band, Sonia Dada, which achieved modest success in the early 1990s with a single, “You Don’t Treat Me No Good.” He veered onto this new path in 1996 after a stray comment backstage between sets. Pritzker asked an acquaintance what he was reading; it was a book about the man who “invented jazz.”
Pritzker was instantly intrigued. “It struck me as ridiculous [to say] that someone invented jazz,” he recalls, “but [it also struck me] as tragic, poetic and quintessentially American that [jazz]— which changed not only music but the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we look at time”—was started by a black musician who had been forgotten.
He dug in, studying Bolden, early jazz and the racial and cultural history of New Orleans after Reconstruction, such as the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Only one photo of Bolden and his band exists, and no music (if any was ever recorded) survives. Much of his story is shrouded in myth, tales told after his death by aging jazz musicians.
When Pritzker began writing his movie, he called Donald M. Marquis, author of the meticulously researched In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, and visited him in New Orleans for a personalized history tour. Marquis showed him Bolden’s now vacant home on First Street and the sites of long-gone spots where Bolden played.
Pritzker approached a friend who was a movie producer, Jon Cornick (State and Main). He had no script—“I didn’t know POV from LSD,” he says—just a raw, lengthy outline. “I didn’t know what Final Draft was,” he says, referring to the computer formatting program many screenwriters use. “Jon looked at me like I was crazy.”
“I thought it was very ambitious to say the least,” Cornick says, laughing. And Pritzker was just getting started. He’d originally intended to hand over his script to a director, “but my wife, Karen, said, ‘You’re a megalomaniac, you’re going to want to be in control of this.’” Suddenly, Pritzker was also a film director.
Cornick brought in Derick and Steven Martini (Lymelife) to help write a shootable screenplay. He also connected Pritzker with New Orleans native and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, who agreed to score the film. By 2007, Pritzker was ready, though he remained shockingly naive—he decided he’d simultaneously make a silent film about a young Louis Armstrong with the same cast and set. “I thought, There are efficiencies here, and I’ll shoot this in the morning and that in the afternoon,” Pritzker says. “I had no idea.”
He was unprepared for the demands of directing: being on his feet, peppered with questions, solving problems for 12-hour stretches. “It really ran me down,” he says. But the biggest surprise was the politics of a movie set. “I figured it’s my show, so I get to do what I want,” he says, but certain crew and cast members saw things differently. “It was an interesting lesson. The conflict really beats the hell out of you.”
Despite these woes, Martini says Pritzker had the makings of a good movie, potentially a Robert Altman–esque period piece (think Kansas City). “But it was not what Dan wanted.”
Pritzker says he wanted something more “ambitious” and “surreal” than what he got from his first two rough cuts, and Cornick knew Pritzker would not settle. “The great thing about this project is that only one person has to like it and that’s Dan,” he says. (He did create his silent film, Louis, from the footage, and Marsalis brought a live orchestra to accompany it at screenings around the country in 2010.)
Beyond his inexperience in figuring out how to achieve his vision, there was one other crucial issue—the leading man. “Dan just wasn’t satisfied with Mackie [Hurt Locker],” says Marquis.
Pritzker prefers a tactful silence (and Mackie would not comment), but he says Mackie’s replacement, Downton Abbey’s Gary Carr, was an eager student. When he was told to learn to fake playing the trumpet, he instead took lessons and can now play the instrument. He also went to New Orleans, researched schizophrenia and peppered Marquis with questions about Bolden.
Pritzker immerses himself in every detail—from making sure the actors in that fight scene don’t seem too polished to discussing how the transverse abdominal muscle looks in the pregnancy prosthetic—but he’s happy to seek advice, especially since it keeps the cast and crew emotionally invested in the movie.
This time he’s more comfortable being the boss. In his band, his leadership style had been fairly loose and informal, which didn’t translate well to the large-scale operation of a film, and he was taken aback by the expectations of an almost military organization on the set. “It’s just not my character,” he says. (His approach includes having his wife and daughter, Cindy—one of five children—helping on the set; Cindy deferred college to work on the film.)
Cornick says this evolution was all part of Pritzker’s “learning curve.” But there was a price to pay for making this movie at his own pace. While Pritzker trumpets the talents of Pierce and Haley and both had been eager to return, his timetable meant both men had other commitments when shooting commenced. (Pierce and Haley would not speak for the story; neither would Marsalis.)
Adding McShane (Deadwood) as the powerful and immoral Judge Perry, was a coup. McShane not only read the script but read up on Pritzker and came away impressed. “He’s a billionaire renaissance man,” McShane says, adding that Pritzker was open to discussions about making his character more than “a one-dimensional evil white guy.”
The film wrapped after six weeks in Atlanta in October, and by mid-November they were in Wilmington, North Carolina, for interior asylum scenes. Everyone will move to New Orleans for a week in late January to film exteriors and club scenes in Preservation Hall, and shooting should wrap, Cornick believes, by early March. He says it is now a question of when, not if, the movie ever sees the dark of theaters.
Just a few days earlier, Pritzker says, after Cornick had praised a completed take of a scene, “I pulled on Jon’s sleeve and said, ‘So does this mean I shouldn’t go home tonight and work on rewriting the scene again?’ And Jon said, ‘No, it’s over.’”
Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=09bb614f08) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=09bb614f08&e=[UNIQID])
PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!
Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Telling the Story of Buddy Bolden, the Man Who ‘Invented Jazz’
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.newsweek.com/telling-story-buddy-bolden-man-who-invented-jazz-286289
** Telling the Story of Buddy Bolden, the Man Who ‘Invented Jazz’
————————————————————
BY STUART MILLER (http://www.newsweek.com/user/16250) 11/23/14 AT 3:33 PM
11_28_BuddyBolden_03
The Bolden Band around 1905. (Top: Jimmy Johnson (bass), Bolden (cornet), Willy Cornish (Valve Trombone), Willy Warner (Clarinet) Bottom: Brock Mumford (Guitar), Frank Lewis (Clarinet)). WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
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*
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*
*
*
Filed Under: Culture (http://www.newsweek.com/culture) , Jazz (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/jazz) , Buddy Bolden (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/buddy-bolden) , Daniel Pritzker (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/daniel-pritzker) , New Orleans (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/new-orleans) , Movies (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/movies) , Music (http://www.newsweek.com/topic/music)
Daniel Pritzker strolls the gritty streets of 1901 New Orleans with a light touch and a low-key confidence. A chat with the marching band, a question about continuity and he’s ready for another take on Bolden!, his film about Buddy Bolden, the doomed cornet player credited with inventing jazz. Nine hours later, the temperature has dropped 25 degrees and midnight has long passed, yet Pritzker patiently works through minor glitches derailing a fight scene, seeming for all the world like an experienced director.
In a weird way he is. This is Pritzker’s third film—kind of. This shoot represents his third attempt to make his first movie, this movie, one of the most unusual sagas in obsessive filmmaking since Werner Herzog hauled a ship up a mountain in the Amazon to make Fitzcarraldo. “I’m trying to do something I hope is worthy of the subject,” he says referring to Bolden, New Orleans and jazz.
In 2007, Pritzker began filming Bolden!, starring Anthony Mackie, Wendell Pierce and Jackie Earle Haley. Dissatisfied with the results, he undertook extensive reshoots two years later. Frustrated by conflicts on-set and unable to captured the movie he saw in his head, he put Bolden! aside. But this year, with a fresh approach, a handpicked crew and new leads—Gary Carr, Erik LaRay Harvey and Ian McShane—he returned to start over. “We might be making the first $50 million art house movie,” jokes McShane.
Try Newsweek for only $1.25 per week (http://www.newsweek.com/subscribe)
Directors who don’t succeed at first don’t typically get to try, try again. But most aren’t billionaires, a scion of the family that founded the Marmon Group (an industrial conglomerate) and the Hyatt Hotel chain, and one of 10 siblings or cousins in the Forbes 400. So Pritzker, 55, answers to no studio or backers watching the bottom line.
Amiable and open, Pritzker does not wear his wealth on the sleeve of his flannel shirt (which goes with his understated jeans, T-shirt and sneakers), but he is aware of his good—and vast—fortune. “I’m in the lucky position to have the opportunity to do this,” he acknowledges in October in a trailer on the set at Atlanta’s Goat Farm Arts Center, where he has re-created the New Orleans that made Bolden a household name in his time.
Bolden was an innovative cornet player; beginning around 1895, he blended gospel, blues, ragtime and improvisation in a unique style that was loud and fearless. It might be a tad hyperbolic to claim Bolden invented jazz, but he was certainly a founder and the man who made the trumpet this new form’s centerpiece. “Jazz doesn’t seem radical now, but imagine what this sound was doing to people at the time,” Pritzker says.
Bolden was a womanizer and heavy drinker, and after an alcohol-induced breakdown in 1907 he was institutionalized with what would probably be diagnosed as schizophrenia, and he deteriorated, largely alone and forgotten, until his death in 1931. Pritzker, who once operated on the credo “the movie will be done when it’s done,” has changed his tune. His new mantra: “I have to get Buddy Bolden to go crazy in this movie before I do.”
11_28_BuddyBolden_01 Director Dan Pritzker, right, is seen on the set with actor Dick Gregory, playing old Buddy Bolden, during the filming of the movie “Bolden” at Screen Gems Studios in Wilmington, N.C. on July 23, 2010. GERRY BROOME/AP
Pritzker never planned on directing a film, much less devoting years to an obscure historical figure. In Chicago he had founded a rock-soul-funk band, Sonia Dada, which achieved modest success in the early 1990s with a single, “You Don’t Treat Me No Good.” He veered onto this new path in 1996 after a stray comment backstage between sets. Pritzker asked an acquaintance what he was reading; it was a book about the man who “invented jazz.”
Pritzker was instantly intrigued. “It struck me as ridiculous [to say] that someone invented jazz,” he recalls, “but [it also struck me] as tragic, poetic and quintessentially American that [jazz]— which changed not only music but the way we walk, the way we talk, the way we look at time”—was started by a black musician who had been forgotten.
He dug in, studying Bolden, early jazz and the racial and cultural history of New Orleans after Reconstruction, such as the Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson. Only one photo of Bolden and his band exists, and no music (if any was ever recorded) survives. Much of his story is shrouded in myth, tales told after his death by aging jazz musicians.
When Pritzker began writing his movie, he called Donald M. Marquis, author of the meticulously researched In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, and visited him in New Orleans for a personalized history tour. Marquis showed him Bolden’s now vacant home on First Street and the sites of long-gone spots where Bolden played.
Pritzker approached a friend who was a movie producer, Jon Cornick (State and Main). He had no script—“I didn’t know POV from LSD,” he says—just a raw, lengthy outline. “I didn’t know what Final Draft was,” he says, referring to the computer formatting program many screenwriters use. “Jon looked at me like I was crazy.”
“I thought it was very ambitious to say the least,” Cornick says, laughing. And Pritzker was just getting started. He’d originally intended to hand over his script to a director, “but my wife, Karen, said, ‘You’re a megalomaniac, you’re going to want to be in control of this.’” Suddenly, Pritzker was also a film director.
Cornick brought in Derick and Steven Martini (Lymelife) to help write a shootable screenplay. He also connected Pritzker with New Orleans native and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, who agreed to score the film. By 2007, Pritzker was ready, though he remained shockingly naive—he decided he’d simultaneously make a silent film about a young Louis Armstrong with the same cast and set. “I thought, There are efficiencies here, and I’ll shoot this in the morning and that in the afternoon,” Pritzker says. “I had no idea.”
He was unprepared for the demands of directing: being on his feet, peppered with questions, solving problems for 12-hour stretches. “It really ran me down,” he says. But the biggest surprise was the politics of a movie set. “I figured it’s my show, so I get to do what I want,” he says, but certain crew and cast members saw things differently. “It was an interesting lesson. The conflict really beats the hell out of you.”
Despite these woes, Martini says Pritzker had the makings of a good movie, potentially a Robert Altman–esque period piece (think Kansas City). “But it was not what Dan wanted.”
Pritzker says he wanted something more “ambitious” and “surreal” than what he got from his first two rough cuts, and Cornick knew Pritzker would not settle. “The great thing about this project is that only one person has to like it and that’s Dan,” he says. (He did create his silent film, Louis, from the footage, and Marsalis brought a live orchestra to accompany it at screenings around the country in 2010.)
Beyond his inexperience in figuring out how to achieve his vision, there was one other crucial issue—the leading man. “Dan just wasn’t satisfied with Mackie [Hurt Locker],” says Marquis.
Pritzker prefers a tactful silence (and Mackie would not comment), but he says Mackie’s replacement, Downton Abbey’s Gary Carr, was an eager student. When he was told to learn to fake playing the trumpet, he instead took lessons and can now play the instrument. He also went to New Orleans, researched schizophrenia and peppered Marquis with questions about Bolden.
Pritzker immerses himself in every detail—from making sure the actors in that fight scene don’t seem too polished to discussing how the transverse abdominal muscle looks in the pregnancy prosthetic—but he’s happy to seek advice, especially since it keeps the cast and crew emotionally invested in the movie.
This time he’s more comfortable being the boss. In his band, his leadership style had been fairly loose and informal, which didn’t translate well to the large-scale operation of a film, and he was taken aback by the expectations of an almost military organization on the set. “It’s just not my character,” he says. (His approach includes having his wife and daughter, Cindy—one of five children—helping on the set; Cindy deferred college to work on the film.)
Cornick says this evolution was all part of Pritzker’s “learning curve.” But there was a price to pay for making this movie at his own pace. While Pritzker trumpets the talents of Pierce and Haley and both had been eager to return, his timetable meant both men had other commitments when shooting commenced. (Pierce and Haley would not speak for the story; neither would Marsalis.)
Adding McShane (Deadwood) as the powerful and immoral Judge Perry, was a coup. McShane not only read the script but read up on Pritzker and came away impressed. “He’s a billionaire renaissance man,” McShane says, adding that Pritzker was open to discussions about making his character more than “a one-dimensional evil white guy.”
The film wrapped after six weeks in Atlanta in October, and by mid-November they were in Wilmington, North Carolina, for interior asylum scenes. Everyone will move to New Orleans for a week in late January to film exteriors and club scenes in Preservation Hall, and shooting should wrap, Cornick believes, by early March. He says it is now a question of when, not if, the movie ever sees the dark of theaters.
Just a few days earlier, Pritzker says, after Cornick had praised a completed take of a scene, “I pulled on Jon’s sleeve and said, ‘So does this mean I shouldn’t go home tonight and work on rewriting the scene again?’ And Jon said, ‘No, it’s over.’”
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Ray Santisi, 81; Berklee pianist performed with and taught jazz stars – Metro – The Boston Globe
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By Bryan Marquard (http://www.bostonglobe.com/staff/marquard) GLOBE STAFF NOVEMBER 23, 2014
Ray Santisi performing at the Top of the Hub restaurant in 1981.
BILL CURTIS/GLOBE STAFF
Ray Santisi performing at the Top of the Hub restaurant in 1981.
As he helped his Berklee College of Music students become better musicians, and in some cases famous performers, Ray Santisi liked to tell the story of when he was their age and had a chance to play with Charlie Parker, the legendary jazz saxophonist.
“Being a young guy, I thought I’d be esoteric and dazzle Bird with chord changes,” Mr. Santisi told the Globe in 1981. “We were playing ‘I’ll Remember April’ at the time and I was kind of taking it out my own way and it wasn’t very good. At the end of the tune, Parker said, ‘You know, I like to be able to stop wherever I happen to be in my solo and be able to play the melody to the song, and whatever you’re playing behind me should fit.’ I got his message: You really have to listen to what the soloist is playing.”
Taking that brief lesson to heart, Mr. Santisi became the pianist whom musicians passing through Boston wanted with them on the bandstand, and his stable of Berklee students included a who’s who of jazz keyboard virtuosity: Diana Krall, Keith Jarrett, Joe Zawinul.
“Ray has become somewhat of a legend over time,” said Stephany Tiernan, who chairs Berklee’s piano department. “He was, pardon the pun, a key player. He was the house pianist who played with all these famous people whom most can only dream about playing with. He really embodied that jazz spirit and lived it.”
Mr. Santisi taught at Berklee for 57 years, working with students until two weeks before he died of complications from heart surgery Oct. 28 in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was 81 and had lived in Boston all his life.
With an elegant, memorable touch, Mr. Santisi coaxed sounds from the piano that no one could match.
“I could always tell it was Ray playing, if I was in a different room and heard him,” Tiernan said. “Ray had a very polished, refined jazz vocabulary and technique.”
Mr. Santisi “had a very distinctive way of making sounds on the piano that was just original,” said Jonathan Feist, editor in chief of Berklee Press.
“I often had the experience with him of hearing him play something, and then hearing one of his very advanced students play the same thing, and it sounded so different. There was a warmth and a roundness and a musicality to his playing. It was very unusual and I don’t know how he did it, and I’m not sure he did, either,” Feist said, laughing as he added: “Maybe he did.”
As he spoke with the Globe in 1981, Mr. Santisi sat at a piano in the Top of the Hub restaurant on the 52d floor of the Prudential Tower. He had played in venues as close as New York City and as distant as Los Angeles, but always returned to the city that stretched out far below the windows that surveyed Boston’s neighborhoods and far beyond.
“Because I have been given the gift of music-making, I can appreciate what it has done for me,” he said that day. “I have been able to communicate my philosophy of life to audiences all over the world.”
Mr. Santisi grew up in Jamaica Plain, the eighth and youngest child of Italian immigrants. During theDepression, “the family would scrounge together the dollar for his weekly lesson,” said his nephew Frank Santisi of Westwood.
A scholarship student, Mr. Santisi attended what was then called Schillinger House. By the time he graduated and started teaching there in 1957, it had been renamed Berklee School of Music, and later became Berklee College of Music.
Along with teaching, he performed regularly and helped run jazz clubs. “He learned from playing. He played every night,” Tiernan said.
Mr. Santisi “developed a way of teaching and he even developed his own language, his own words, his own vocabulary for describing techniques,” she said.
“For example,” Tiernan added, if Mr. Santisi was explaining how to turn a sound or a passage from a saxophone solo into something for the keyboard, “he’d say, ‘This needs to be pianisticized.’ ”
Masako Jasmine Yotsugi, who came to Berklee from Japan and studied with Mr. Santisi, said that “as a teacher, he was very original and very organic.”
“He also said he constantly learned from students,” said Yotsugi, who became his companion for many years. “His teaching was very special. He actually changed my life. I learned not only jazz, I learned life from him.”
Among Mr. Santisi’s best-known students was Diana Krall, the jazz pianist and vocalist who, like some of his other students, went on to be awarded Grammys.
“Diana was always a terrific pianist, she used a great deal of economy in her playing,” Mr. Santisi once told an interviewer for a Berklee faculty profile.
“One day during a lesson, I simply asked her, can you sing something? Apparently she had never or rarely done that,” he recalled. “The minute she started, I said ‘Don’t stop.’ She had a lovely, natural voice, perfect control and a nice vibrato.”
In the office where he taught, Mr. Santisi “had these two beautiful Steinways,” Feist said, “but you couldn’t see them because they were covered with thousands and thousands of pieces of paper” – compositions and technical exercises that spilled off the edges.
On stage, though, there was no tidier player in Boston.
“When he accompanied someone, he had a very sparse, spacious style,” Feist said. “He just beautifully framed what anyone else was doing and he had such a good ear. It was a very special talent that he had, a very unique way of thinking about music.”
“A good piano player can make or break anybody,” said Larry Monroe, a saxophonist and former Berklee vice president for international programs, who had performed with Mr. Santisi.
While soloing at a gig, Monroe said, “when you made your own little variation that should have caught him by surprise, he was right there with you, as if he had heard it all before.”
A funeral Mass was said for Mr. Santisi, who was the last of his siblings. “He was married to two things: He was married to performing and to teaching,” said his nephew Frank. “Those were his two passions, and he was very lucky to be able to live his life being able to do those things right up to his death.”
On stage, or in Berklee’s classrooms and hallways, Mr. Santisi usually wore a white turtleneck and a jacket. “Even his physical style of clothing never changed,” Tiernan said. “He found his style and kept it, physically and musically.”
“He was like the consummate jazz cat,” Feist said.
“Among his peers he was one of the most respected musicians at Berklee,” he added. “Revered, too, is a word that gets bandied about. Everyone had very tremendous, deep respect for Ray as a musician.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com (mailto:bmarquard@globe.com) .
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Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Ray Santisi, 81; Berklee pianist performed with and taught jazz stars – Metro – The Boston Globe
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By Bryan Marquard (http://www.bostonglobe.com/staff/marquard) GLOBE STAFF NOVEMBER 23, 2014
Ray Santisi performing at the Top of the Hub restaurant in 1981.
BILL CURTIS/GLOBE STAFF
Ray Santisi performing at the Top of the Hub restaurant in 1981.
As he helped his Berklee College of Music students become better musicians, and in some cases famous performers, Ray Santisi liked to tell the story of when he was their age and had a chance to play with Charlie Parker, the legendary jazz saxophonist.
“Being a young guy, I thought I’d be esoteric and dazzle Bird with chord changes,” Mr. Santisi told the Globe in 1981. “We were playing ‘I’ll Remember April’ at the time and I was kind of taking it out my own way and it wasn’t very good. At the end of the tune, Parker said, ‘You know, I like to be able to stop wherever I happen to be in my solo and be able to play the melody to the song, and whatever you’re playing behind me should fit.’ I got his message: You really have to listen to what the soloist is playing.”
Taking that brief lesson to heart, Mr. Santisi became the pianist whom musicians passing through Boston wanted with them on the bandstand, and his stable of Berklee students included a who’s who of jazz keyboard virtuosity: Diana Krall, Keith Jarrett, Joe Zawinul.
“Ray has become somewhat of a legend over time,” said Stephany Tiernan, who chairs Berklee’s piano department. “He was, pardon the pun, a key player. He was the house pianist who played with all these famous people whom most can only dream about playing with. He really embodied that jazz spirit and lived it.”
Mr. Santisi taught at Berklee for 57 years, working with students until two weeks before he died of complications from heart surgery Oct. 28 in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was 81 and had lived in Boston all his life.
With an elegant, memorable touch, Mr. Santisi coaxed sounds from the piano that no one could match.
“I could always tell it was Ray playing, if I was in a different room and heard him,” Tiernan said. “Ray had a very polished, refined jazz vocabulary and technique.”
Mr. Santisi “had a very distinctive way of making sounds on the piano that was just original,” said Jonathan Feist, editor in chief of Berklee Press.
“I often had the experience with him of hearing him play something, and then hearing one of his very advanced students play the same thing, and it sounded so different. There was a warmth and a roundness and a musicality to his playing. It was very unusual and I don’t know how he did it, and I’m not sure he did, either,” Feist said, laughing as he added: “Maybe he did.”
As he spoke with the Globe in 1981, Mr. Santisi sat at a piano in the Top of the Hub restaurant on the 52d floor of the Prudential Tower. He had played in venues as close as New York City and as distant as Los Angeles, but always returned to the city that stretched out far below the windows that surveyed Boston’s neighborhoods and far beyond.
“Because I have been given the gift of music-making, I can appreciate what it has done for me,” he said that day. “I have been able to communicate my philosophy of life to audiences all over the world.”
Mr. Santisi grew up in Jamaica Plain, the eighth and youngest child of Italian immigrants. During theDepression, “the family would scrounge together the dollar for his weekly lesson,” said his nephew Frank Santisi of Westwood.
A scholarship student, Mr. Santisi attended what was then called Schillinger House. By the time he graduated and started teaching there in 1957, it had been renamed Berklee School of Music, and later became Berklee College of Music.
Along with teaching, he performed regularly and helped run jazz clubs. “He learned from playing. He played every night,” Tiernan said.
Mr. Santisi “developed a way of teaching and he even developed his own language, his own words, his own vocabulary for describing techniques,” she said.
“For example,” Tiernan added, if Mr. Santisi was explaining how to turn a sound or a passage from a saxophone solo into something for the keyboard, “he’d say, ‘This needs to be pianisticized.’ ”
Masako Jasmine Yotsugi, who came to Berklee from Japan and studied with Mr. Santisi, said that “as a teacher, he was very original and very organic.”
“He also said he constantly learned from students,” said Yotsugi, who became his companion for many years. “His teaching was very special. He actually changed my life. I learned not only jazz, I learned life from him.”
Among Mr. Santisi’s best-known students was Diana Krall, the jazz pianist and vocalist who, like some of his other students, went on to be awarded Grammys.
“Diana was always a terrific pianist, she used a great deal of economy in her playing,” Mr. Santisi once told an interviewer for a Berklee faculty profile.
“One day during a lesson, I simply asked her, can you sing something? Apparently she had never or rarely done that,” he recalled. “The minute she started, I said ‘Don’t stop.’ She had a lovely, natural voice, perfect control and a nice vibrato.”
In the office where he taught, Mr. Santisi “had these two beautiful Steinways,” Feist said, “but you couldn’t see them because they were covered with thousands and thousands of pieces of paper” – compositions and technical exercises that spilled off the edges.
On stage, though, there was no tidier player in Boston.
“When he accompanied someone, he had a very sparse, spacious style,” Feist said. “He just beautifully framed what anyone else was doing and he had such a good ear. It was a very special talent that he had, a very unique way of thinking about music.”
“A good piano player can make or break anybody,” said Larry Monroe, a saxophonist and former Berklee vice president for international programs, who had performed with Mr. Santisi.
While soloing at a gig, Monroe said, “when you made your own little variation that should have caught him by surprise, he was right there with you, as if he had heard it all before.”
A funeral Mass was said for Mr. Santisi, who was the last of his siblings. “He was married to two things: He was married to performing and to teaching,” said his nephew Frank. “Those were his two passions, and he was very lucky to be able to live his life being able to do those things right up to his death.”
On stage, or in Berklee’s classrooms and hallways, Mr. Santisi usually wore a white turtleneck and a jacket. “Even his physical style of clothing never changed,” Tiernan said. “He found his style and kept it, physically and musically.”
“He was like the consummate jazz cat,” Feist said.
“Among his peers he was one of the most respected musicians at Berklee,” he added. “Revered, too, is a word that gets bandied about. Everyone had very tremendous, deep respect for Ray as a musician.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com (mailto:bmarquard@globe.com) .
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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Ray Santisi, 81; Berklee pianist performed with and taught jazz stars – Metro – The Boston Globe
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By Bryan Marquard (http://www.bostonglobe.com/staff/marquard) GLOBE STAFF NOVEMBER 23, 2014
Ray Santisi performing at the Top of the Hub restaurant in 1981.
BILL CURTIS/GLOBE STAFF
Ray Santisi performing at the Top of the Hub restaurant in 1981.
As he helped his Berklee College of Music students become better musicians, and in some cases famous performers, Ray Santisi liked to tell the story of when he was their age and had a chance to play with Charlie Parker, the legendary jazz saxophonist.
“Being a young guy, I thought I’d be esoteric and dazzle Bird with chord changes,” Mr. Santisi told the Globe in 1981. “We were playing ‘I’ll Remember April’ at the time and I was kind of taking it out my own way and it wasn’t very good. At the end of the tune, Parker said, ‘You know, I like to be able to stop wherever I happen to be in my solo and be able to play the melody to the song, and whatever you’re playing behind me should fit.’ I got his message: You really have to listen to what the soloist is playing.”
Taking that brief lesson to heart, Mr. Santisi became the pianist whom musicians passing through Boston wanted with them on the bandstand, and his stable of Berklee students included a who’s who of jazz keyboard virtuosity: Diana Krall, Keith Jarrett, Joe Zawinul.
“Ray has become somewhat of a legend over time,” said Stephany Tiernan, who chairs Berklee’s piano department. “He was, pardon the pun, a key player. He was the house pianist who played with all these famous people whom most can only dream about playing with. He really embodied that jazz spirit and lived it.”
Mr. Santisi taught at Berklee for 57 years, working with students until two weeks before he died of complications from heart surgery Oct. 28 in Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was 81 and had lived in Boston all his life.
With an elegant, memorable touch, Mr. Santisi coaxed sounds from the piano that no one could match.
“I could always tell it was Ray playing, if I was in a different room and heard him,” Tiernan said. “Ray had a very polished, refined jazz vocabulary and technique.”
Mr. Santisi “had a very distinctive way of making sounds on the piano that was just original,” said Jonathan Feist, editor in chief of Berklee Press.
“I often had the experience with him of hearing him play something, and then hearing one of his very advanced students play the same thing, and it sounded so different. There was a warmth and a roundness and a musicality to his playing. It was very unusual and I don’t know how he did it, and I’m not sure he did, either,” Feist said, laughing as he added: “Maybe he did.”
As he spoke with the Globe in 1981, Mr. Santisi sat at a piano in the Top of the Hub restaurant on the 52d floor of the Prudential Tower. He had played in venues as close as New York City and as distant as Los Angeles, but always returned to the city that stretched out far below the windows that surveyed Boston’s neighborhoods and far beyond.
“Because I have been given the gift of music-making, I can appreciate what it has done for me,” he said that day. “I have been able to communicate my philosophy of life to audiences all over the world.”
Mr. Santisi grew up in Jamaica Plain, the eighth and youngest child of Italian immigrants. During theDepression, “the family would scrounge together the dollar for his weekly lesson,” said his nephew Frank Santisi of Westwood.
A scholarship student, Mr. Santisi attended what was then called Schillinger House. By the time he graduated and started teaching there in 1957, it had been renamed Berklee School of Music, and later became Berklee College of Music.
Along with teaching, he performed regularly and helped run jazz clubs. “He learned from playing. He played every night,” Tiernan said.
Mr. Santisi “developed a way of teaching and he even developed his own language, his own words, his own vocabulary for describing techniques,” she said.
“For example,” Tiernan added, if Mr. Santisi was explaining how to turn a sound or a passage from a saxophone solo into something for the keyboard, “he’d say, ‘This needs to be pianisticized.’ ”
Masako Jasmine Yotsugi, who came to Berklee from Japan and studied with Mr. Santisi, said that “as a teacher, he was very original and very organic.”
“He also said he constantly learned from students,” said Yotsugi, who became his companion for many years. “His teaching was very special. He actually changed my life. I learned not only jazz, I learned life from him.”
Among Mr. Santisi’s best-known students was Diana Krall, the jazz pianist and vocalist who, like some of his other students, went on to be awarded Grammys.
“Diana was always a terrific pianist, she used a great deal of economy in her playing,” Mr. Santisi once told an interviewer for a Berklee faculty profile.
“One day during a lesson, I simply asked her, can you sing something? Apparently she had never or rarely done that,” he recalled. “The minute she started, I said ‘Don’t stop.’ She had a lovely, natural voice, perfect control and a nice vibrato.”
In the office where he taught, Mr. Santisi “had these two beautiful Steinways,” Feist said, “but you couldn’t see them because they were covered with thousands and thousands of pieces of paper” – compositions and technical exercises that spilled off the edges.
On stage, though, there was no tidier player in Boston.
“When he accompanied someone, he had a very sparse, spacious style,” Feist said. “He just beautifully framed what anyone else was doing and he had such a good ear. It was a very special talent that he had, a very unique way of thinking about music.”
“A good piano player can make or break anybody,” said Larry Monroe, a saxophonist and former Berklee vice president for international programs, who had performed with Mr. Santisi.
While soloing at a gig, Monroe said, “when you made your own little variation that should have caught him by surprise, he was right there with you, as if he had heard it all before.”
A funeral Mass was said for Mr. Santisi, who was the last of his siblings. “He was married to two things: He was married to performing and to teaching,” said his nephew Frank. “Those were his two passions, and he was very lucky to be able to live his life being able to do those things right up to his death.”
On stage, or in Berklee’s classrooms and hallways, Mr. Santisi usually wore a white turtleneck and a jacket. “Even his physical style of clothing never changed,” Tiernan said. “He found his style and kept it, physically and musically.”
“He was like the consummate jazz cat,” Feist said.
“Among his peers he was one of the most respected musicians at Berklee,” he added. “Revered, too, is a word that gets bandied about. Everyone had very tremendous, deep respect for Ray as a musician.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com (mailto:bmarquard@globe.com) .
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Can We Revive the Black Community’s Interest in Jazz? – Atlanta Blackstar
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** Can We Revive the Black Community’s Interest in Jazz?
————————————————————
http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/22/black-people-still-listening-jazz/john_coltrane_sound_obsession/
John Coltrane
Although jazz (http://atlantablackstar.com/2013/09/04/black-elite-richard-parsons-leads-harlem-jazz-renaissance-mintons/) is widely known as an original creation of African-American people, the numbers are showing a painful lack of attention and regard for this art form from the people who created it.
That’s a well-established fact, but Atlanta Blackstar wondered, How do we rectify the problem? Is there a way to get Black people excited about jazz once again?
According to data from a study conducted by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the audience for jazz is a largely white one. White Americans make up around 80 percent of jazz concert attendees. Blacks account for just 17 percent of those attending concerts and 20 percent of those listening to jazz recordings. Around a third (34 percent) of those who “like jazz best,” identify as Black.
The strongest identifier for participation in jazz (going to concerts, purchasing CDs) is education. The more educated a person is, the more likely that person is to engage in and support jazz and most other arts. In turn, education strongly correlates with income. Support for jazz increasees the higher the income, according to the jazzhouse.org.
Taking into account that Black people in America are generally funneled into worse school systems than their white counterparts, these numbers make a little more sense.
The only way, it seems, to turn this phenomenon around is to not only make jazz more accessible to the very people that invented it, but to do it at a young age.
In an article titled “Jazz in America: Who’s Listening?” by Scott K. DeVeaux, DeVeaux suggests that if African-Americans were more inclined by educational training to attend concerts and more able to afford to do so, they would support jazz in even greater numbers than they now do.
“The data bear this out: nearly half (49 percent) of African-Americans expressed a desire to attend more jazz concerts, as opposed to less than a quarter (22 percent) of whites,” he writes.
“The problem is, it’s not just a decline in jazz, there is a decline in opera and in classical music, period,” said Alexander Smalls (http://atlantablackstar.com/2014/11/17/alexander-smalls/) , owner of the popular New York jazz venue and restaurant Minton’s. “Primarily because we are a society of now. If it’s not happening right in front of people, they have no reference. We have done such a bad job at educating, so there is no celebration of the music. We need to bring jazz out of its classical state and put it in more of a contemporary setting and do a better job in bringing the music and the value of this discipline to the audience that we want.”
The best way to make such a beautiful genre accessible is to bring it to children at a young age, create programs that promote jazz in schools and let children grow up with the art.
“I think that when something becomes a part of your life at the age of four instead of fourteen/ fifteen it just becomes a habit and becomes part of you,” said Ronald Markham, president and CEO of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra. “I play music because I grew up in a small church that had amazing music. So I do think that institutionalizing it as a young age you will have a better chance of it becoming a part of a person’s life.”
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