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▶ An overview of the career of Leon “Chu” Berry, a 2007 inductee in the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame- YouTube

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-xsDI8EuSc

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For Your Viewing Pleasure: Bobby Hackett Sextet – Swing That Music – YouTube

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Bobby Hackett (c), Urbie Green (tb), Bob Wilber (cl), Dave McKenna (p), Nabil Totah (b), Morey Feld (d). NYC, January 1962.

From the Goodyear Jazz Series

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269 State Route 94 South
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For Your Viewing Pleasure: Bobby Hackett Sextet – Swing That Music – YouTube

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK89aZnzvQo

Bobby Hackett (c), Urbie Green (tb), Bob Wilber (cl), Dave McKenna (p), Nabil Totah (b), Morey Feld (d). NYC, January 1962.

From the Goodyear Jazz Series

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Houston jazz musician Joe Sample passes away | News – Home

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http://www.click2houston.com/news/houston-jazz-musician-joe-sample-passes-away/28047790

** Houston jazz musician Joe Sample passes away
————————————————————

Houston jazz musician Joe Sample died Friday night at the MD Anderson Cancer Center after a bout with lung cancer. He was 75
Sample studied piano at Texas Southern University before starting his group The Jazz Crusaders in the early ’70s. The Jazz Crusaders changed their name to just The Crusaders in 1971.
During his career Sample worked with musicians such as Anita Baker, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King and many others.
The following statement was posted on Sample’s Facebook page:
“At 9:50 p.m. (Houston,TX time), September 12, 2014, Joe Sample passed. His wife Yolanda and his son Nicklas would like to thank all of you, his fans and friends, for your prayers and support during this trying time.”

Copyright 2014 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Caption: Joe Sample
Joe Sample

** Celebrating the Music of Joe Sample (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample)
————————————————————

From: KCUR (http://www.prx.org/station_accounts/212-kcur) http://www.prx.org/messages/new?back_to_url=%2Fpieces%2F114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample&message%5Bsubject%5D=Private+comment+on+piece%2C+%27Celebrating+the+Music+of+Joe+Sample%27&object_id=212&object_type=StationAccount&recipient_group=contact+piece+licensor
Series: 12th Street Jump (http://www.prx.org/series/31558-12th-street-jump)
Length: 59:00
Share on facebook (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#) Share on twitter (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#) Share on email (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#) More Sharing Services (http://addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250)

(Air Dates April 1 – 7) This week on 12th Street Jump we celebrate the music of Joe Sample with our special guest, the man himself, Joe Sample. We find out what gives Joe the blues and the gang learns a whole lot more with a game of “So, What’s Your Question”. Read the full description. (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#description)

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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

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Houston jazz musician Joe Sample passes away | News – Home

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.click2houston.com/news/houston-jazz-musician-joe-sample-passes-away/28047790

** Houston jazz musician Joe Sample passes away
————————————————————

Houston jazz musician Joe Sample died Friday night at the MD Anderson Cancer Center after a bout with lung cancer. He was 75
Sample studied piano at Texas Southern University before starting his group The Jazz Crusaders in the early ’70s. The Jazz Crusaders changed their name to just The Crusaders in 1971.
During his career Sample worked with musicians such as Anita Baker, Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker, Marvin Gaye, B.B. King and many others.
The following statement was posted on Sample’s Facebook page:
“At 9:50 p.m. (Houston,TX time), September 12, 2014, Joe Sample passed. His wife Yolanda and his son Nicklas would like to thank all of you, his fans and friends, for your prayers and support during this trying time.”

Copyright 2014 by Click2Houston.com. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Caption: Joe Sample
Joe Sample

** Celebrating the Music of Joe Sample (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample)
————————————————————

From: KCUR (http://www.prx.org/station_accounts/212-kcur) http://www.prx.org/messages/new?back_to_url=%2Fpieces%2F114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample&message%5Bsubject%5D=Private+comment+on+piece%2C+%27Celebrating+the+Music+of+Joe+Sample%27&object_id=212&object_type=StationAccount&recipient_group=contact+piece+licensor
Series: 12th Street Jump (http://www.prx.org/series/31558-12th-street-jump)
Length: 59:00
Share on facebook (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#) Share on twitter (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#) Share on email (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#) More Sharing Services (http://addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250)

(Air Dates April 1 – 7) This week on 12th Street Jump we celebrate the music of Joe Sample with our special guest, the man himself, Joe Sample. We find out what gives Joe the blues and the gang learns a whole lot more with a game of “So, What’s Your Question”. Read the full description. (http://www.prx.org/pieces/114963-celebrating-the-music-of-joe-sample#description)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a0bafa0f44) | 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=a0bafa0f44&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

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Panel Discussion Blue Note at 75 Library of Congress – YouTube

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

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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

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Panel Discussion Blue Note at 75 Library of Congress – YouTube

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

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

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Arturo O’Farrill: (Don’t) Take Five – NYTimes.com

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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/nyregion/arturo-ofarrill-dont-take-five.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/nyregion/arturo-ofarrill-dont-take-five.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y)

** Arturo O’Farrill: (Don’t) Take Five
————————————————————

Photo
Arturo O’Farrill is a Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Arturo O’Farrill, the Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer (http://www.arturoofarrill.com/) , spends his Sundays in a frenzy of improvisation. By day he directs a youth orchestra, the Fat Afro Latin Jazz Cats (http://www.afrolatinjazz.org/fat_afro_latin_jazz_cats.html) . By night he takes the stage himself with his own group, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, at Birdland. On Sept. 20, the two groups will play together at Pueblo Harlem (http://www.chipboaz.com/blog/2014/08/08/2nd-annual-pueblo-harlem-hispanic-heritage-month-celebration-with-arturo-ofarrill-the-afro-latin-jazz-orchestra/) , a cultural festival. Mr. O’Farrill, 54, lives in Park Slope with his wife, Alison Deane, 62, a classical pianist. “I made one rule for myself, and I really try to live it: Play music you love, with people you love, for people you love,” Mr. O’Farrill said. “If I can’t be that kind of musician, I’ll drive a cab. Creating music based on art and giving away from your spirit is more important
than making a living.”

SWIM GYM My alarm is usually set for 5:40 a.m. The pool at the Prospect Park Y opens at 7. I get to the gym at 6 and immediately hit the treadmill. I do 40 minutes on the treadmill. I do an abdominal machine and an arm thing for 90 minutes. I’ve developed a bit of a rotator cuff problem because of conducting. I won’t give up swimming, even if it kills me. I love the rhythm of it. I do 20 laps, go in the steam room, and I do yoga stretches.
Photo

Working out in Brooklyn. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

PROTEIN HIT After that, I will probably have an egg. Alison will make it for me. Sometimes I go from the gym to the office, in which case I’ll pick up a bagel from the Bagel Hole (http://www.bagelhole.net/) .

SIT IN THE PEWS It’s now 9 or 9:30 and I head to All Saints Episcopal Church (http://www.allsaintsparkslope.com/) on Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street. I used to be the choir director, the organ master, years ago. I try to keep a low profile.

TWEEN/TEEN DRILLS Usually, next I rush over to Fat Cat. Last year, the demand was so great, we had to make two big bands and I gave them lucha libre names. I called Band A Los Gatos Gordos, the fat cats — that’s the older band. The second band, the younger band, I called Los Perros Flacos, the skinny dogs.
Photo

Attending a Sunday service. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

EARLY CRESCENDO For me, learning music and playing music and learning your instrument has incredible parallels for our day-to-day existence as human beings. All the ideas of discipline, and having a sense of yourself and translating that to music, that’s all part of life’s journey. When I’m able to see the lights click on in their eyes, that’s completely energizing to me. By the end of that three hours, I’ve hit the peak of my day. But it’s nowhere near over.

QUIET TIME At that point, I usually go home and have either brunch or order something. And then I attempt to sit and relax for a period of two hours. Sometimes I’ll go to my studio — Eighth Avenue and 17th Street. It’s my sanctuary. Or I nap. Sometimes I can’t get myself to sleep because I’m such a mess. If I am able to, I’ll sleep from 5 to 6:30 or 5:30 to 7, at which point I get ready for Birdland (http://www.birdlandjazz.com/) .

GOING SOLO My wife? No, she comes to Rareland, birdly. [He giggles.] Birdland, rarely! She’s an incredible pianist. Alison has that gift of a really unaffected, simple, lean, natural talent. She’s seen me play a lot over the years; we’ve been married 22 years.
Photo

Performing with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra at Birdland. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

GET WITH THE PROGRAM I drive to Birdland. I’m tired, I don’t want to get on the train. I’ll get there an hour before the show, go backstage and pick out the repertoire for the evening, and it’s always different. My A.D.D.-ness extends to my programming. I’m bored so easily. My bandmates think I’m nuts because we try to play a different program all the time. I make them rehearse once a month. I’m always trying to mix up Peruvian music with hip-hop, Colombian music with Mexican mariachi.

EXTENDED PLAY Shows are supposed to be 60 minutes. I usually stretch them to 70 to 75 minutes. In between, I go out and meet fans, sign autographs and take pictures. It’s insane. The gig ends at about 12:15, 12:30.

DRINKS AFTER WORK At the end of any gig, I am so worked up. I put out so much energy. When I finish a set, or a concert, I’m drenched. I have to take three shirts to Birdland. For the first set, the second set and for afterward. I wear a white cotton shirt. Usually with one of my oldest friends in the world, Jim Seeley, an incredible trumpet player, we pack up and go to the Monro Pub (http://www.monropub.com/) in Park Slope.

CODA I get home at 2:30, 3. At that point, I fall asleep in probably about two seconds.

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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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

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Arturo O’Farrill: (Don’t) Take Five – NYTimes.com

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/nyregion/arturo-ofarrill-dont-take-five.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/nyregion/arturo-ofarrill-dont-take-five.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y)

** Arturo O’Farrill: (Don’t) Take Five
————————————————————

Photo
Arturo O’Farrill is a Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

Arturo O’Farrill, the Grammy Award-winning pianist and composer (http://www.arturoofarrill.com/) , spends his Sundays in a frenzy of improvisation. By day he directs a youth orchestra, the Fat Afro Latin Jazz Cats (http://www.afrolatinjazz.org/fat_afro_latin_jazz_cats.html) . By night he takes the stage himself with his own group, the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, at Birdland. On Sept. 20, the two groups will play together at Pueblo Harlem (http://www.chipboaz.com/blog/2014/08/08/2nd-annual-pueblo-harlem-hispanic-heritage-month-celebration-with-arturo-ofarrill-the-afro-latin-jazz-orchestra/) , a cultural festival. Mr. O’Farrill, 54, lives in Park Slope with his wife, Alison Deane, 62, a classical pianist. “I made one rule for myself, and I really try to live it: Play music you love, with people you love, for people you love,” Mr. O’Farrill said. “If I can’t be that kind of musician, I’ll drive a cab. Creating music based on art and giving away from your spirit is more important
than making a living.”

SWIM GYM My alarm is usually set for 5:40 a.m. The pool at the Prospect Park Y opens at 7. I get to the gym at 6 and immediately hit the treadmill. I do 40 minutes on the treadmill. I do an abdominal machine and an arm thing for 90 minutes. I’ve developed a bit of a rotator cuff problem because of conducting. I won’t give up swimming, even if it kills me. I love the rhythm of it. I do 20 laps, go in the steam room, and I do yoga stretches.
Photo

Working out in Brooklyn. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

PROTEIN HIT After that, I will probably have an egg. Alison will make it for me. Sometimes I go from the gym to the office, in which case I’ll pick up a bagel from the Bagel Hole (http://www.bagelhole.net/) .

SIT IN THE PEWS It’s now 9 or 9:30 and I head to All Saints Episcopal Church (http://www.allsaintsparkslope.com/) on Seventh Avenue and Seventh Street. I used to be the choir director, the organ master, years ago. I try to keep a low profile.

TWEEN/TEEN DRILLS Usually, next I rush over to Fat Cat. Last year, the demand was so great, we had to make two big bands and I gave them lucha libre names. I called Band A Los Gatos Gordos, the fat cats — that’s the older band. The second band, the younger band, I called Los Perros Flacos, the skinny dogs.
Photo

Attending a Sunday service. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

EARLY CRESCENDO For me, learning music and playing music and learning your instrument has incredible parallels for our day-to-day existence as human beings. All the ideas of discipline, and having a sense of yourself and translating that to music, that’s all part of life’s journey. When I’m able to see the lights click on in their eyes, that’s completely energizing to me. By the end of that three hours, I’ve hit the peak of my day. But it’s nowhere near over.

QUIET TIME At that point, I usually go home and have either brunch or order something. And then I attempt to sit and relax for a period of two hours. Sometimes I’ll go to my studio — Eighth Avenue and 17th Street. It’s my sanctuary. Or I nap. Sometimes I can’t get myself to sleep because I’m such a mess. If I am able to, I’ll sleep from 5 to 6:30 or 5:30 to 7, at which point I get ready for Birdland (http://www.birdlandjazz.com/) .

GOING SOLO My wife? No, she comes to Rareland, birdly. [He giggles.] Birdland, rarely! She’s an incredible pianist. Alison has that gift of a really unaffected, simple, lean, natural talent. She’s seen me play a lot over the years; we’ve been married 22 years.
Photo

Performing with the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra at Birdland. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times

GET WITH THE PROGRAM I drive to Birdland. I’m tired, I don’t want to get on the train. I’ll get there an hour before the show, go backstage and pick out the repertoire for the evening, and it’s always different. My A.D.D.-ness extends to my programming. I’m bored so easily. My bandmates think I’m nuts because we try to play a different program all the time. I make them rehearse once a month. I’m always trying to mix up Peruvian music with hip-hop, Colombian music with Mexican mariachi.

EXTENDED PLAY Shows are supposed to be 60 minutes. I usually stretch them to 70 to 75 minutes. In between, I go out and meet fans, sign autographs and take pictures. It’s insane. The gig ends at about 12:15, 12:30.

DRINKS AFTER WORK At the end of any gig, I am so worked up. I put out so much energy. When I finish a set, or a concert, I’m drenched. I have to take three shirts to Birdland. For the first set, the second set and for afterward. I wear a white cotton shirt. Usually with one of my oldest friends in the world, Jim Seeley, an incredible trumpet player, we pack up and go to the Monro Pub (http://www.monropub.com/) in Park Slope.

CODA I get home at 2:30, 3. At that point, I fall asleep in probably about two seconds.

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Don Cheadle Is Star and Director of the Biopic ‘Miles Ahead’ – NYTimes.com

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/movies/don-cheadle-is-star-and-director-of-the-biopic-miles-ahead.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/movies/don-cheadle-is-star-and-director-of-the-biopic-miles-ahead.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y)

** Don Cheadle Is Star and Director of the Biopic ‘Miles Ahead’
————————————————————

Photo
“There was just a lot of intrigue to me, a lot of mystery,” Don Cheadle said of Miles Davis’s musical hiatus in the late 1970s, enough to build a film around. CreditWilliams + Hirakawa for The New York Times

CINCINNATI — The elevator opens on the 20th floor of Carew Tower, a landmark 1930 office building overlooking the Ohio River here. On this overcast July morning, though, the space is not a bank or an insurance company, but the headquarters of Columbia Records circa 1980.

The “Walking Eye” (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/ColumbiaRecords) logo, familiar from the red label of so many LPs, hangs behind the receptionist’s desk, and album covers from Columbia artists of the time — James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello — adorn the walls. Looming to one side, in signature long curly wig and oversize wraparound sunglasses, wearing a blue smoking jacket with an elaborate print, is the unmistakable presence of the trumpet genius Miles Davis (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0525.html) , as played by Don Cheadle.

It’s the midpoint of a six-week shoot for “Miles Ahead,” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/305954/Miles-Ahead-Movie-/overview) an unconventional biopic that is to be the directorial debut of Mr. Cheadle, the Emmy-nominated star of Showtime’s “House of Lies.” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/95752/House-of-Lies-Movie-/overview) In today’s scene, Davis, accompanied by an off-the-leash Rolling Stone reporter (Ewan McGregor), bursts into the Manhattan office of George Butler, the head of Columbia’s jazz division, and accuses the company of teasing the news media with hints of a comeback from his self-imposed hiatus before he’s ready to come back.
Photo

Mr. Cheadle in costume as Davis, but in the role of director. Credit Brian Douglas

“Y’all can’t wait to saddle me back up again,” a coolly belligerent Davis rasps. “There is no Columbia without me.” When an oily executive replies that legally the label can do whatever it wants with Davis’s music, he responds by drawing a pistol from his jacket and shooting out a lamp.

No such confrontation over recordings ever took place. In his 1989 autobiography, “Miles (http://books.google.com/books/about/Miles.html?id=xgAVXHhuNYgC) ,” Davis claimed that he never even picked up a trumpet from 1975 to 1980, the years he didn’t release any new music or perform in public. “It just went out of my mind because I was involved in doing other things,” he wrote, “other things which mostly weren’t good for me.” Davis was exaggerating the extent of his break from making music, though. Over a hurried lunch between takes, Mr. Cheadle (wig still on, jacket off) said that he had heard some recordings Davis made during this period. “There’s a hook, a snippet, and then there’s nothing,” he said. “It’s baby steps. You can hear the engines just starting to turn.”

Fascinated by this difficult period in Davis’s life, Mr. Cheadle, 49, made it the unlikely focus of “Miles Ahead,” developing a story about the theft of an unreleased tape and jumping from there to examine Davis’s history and especially his marriage to the dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi,who replaced (http://www.bet.com/news/celebrities/2014/06/25/middle-of-nowhere-star-to-replace-zoe-saldana-in-miles-davis-biopic.html) Zoe Saldana in the role).

“For me, when someone has been prolific for that long, and then they go quiet for five years, that’s when I go, ‘What’s that about?’ ” he said. “That he had done this recording during that time that was never released and no one ever heard. There was just a lot of intrigue to me, a lot of mystery. It felt like an opportunity.”

Miles Davis (http://movies.nytimes.com/person/720031/Miles-Davis?inline=nyt-per) was a towering figure in jazz for more than five decades, steering it into new styles from cool jazz to hard bop to jazz-rock fusion while leading a glamorous, sometimes scandalous life. The idea of a Davis movie had kicked around a long time. For a while, Wesley Snipes was attached. Films about musicians have a mixed track record, though, and if any original recordings were to be included, the filmmakers needed to get approval from the Davis estate.
Continue reading the main story

But when Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/arts/music/13mile.html) in 2006, his nephew Vincent Wilburn Jr. (who had played drums in his uncle’s band during the comeback period) announced at a news conference that the family was moving forward with a film about Davis, and that Mr. Cheadle was going to play the role.

“I’m a big fan of his, back to ‘Devil in a Blue Dress,’ ” Mr. Wilburn said in a telephone conversation, referring to the 1995 detective film starring Denzel Washington, “and he had certain facial expressions that reminded me of Uncle Miles.”

No one, however, had approached Mr. Cheadle about the idea. But the actor — a music fan who played saxophone as a teenager and had seen Davis in concert in 1981 — sent word that he was interested. He began meeting with Davis’s youngest son, Erin. Over time, the idea of concentrating on the musician’s silent years, rather than his triumphs, began to emerge.

“I was initially a little puzzled by the idea,” Erin Davis said. “But we were also trying to think in terms of what Miles would have liked, something he would want to see or be a part of. He didn’t like ‘Bird’ ” — Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker biopic (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/17/movies/clint-eastwood-s-riff-on-charlie-bird-parker.html) — “so we might as well try an original concept instead of doing it the same kind of way.”
Photo

Mr. Cheadle as an earlier version of Davis. Credit Brian Douglas

Mr. Wilburn said that Mr. Cheadle did not want to do “a cradle-to-grave movie” like “Ray” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/287477/Ray-Movie-/overview) or “Walk the Line,” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/306598/Walk-the-Line-Movie-/overview) “trying to fit the life of a man who changed the course of music four times into two hours or less.” (Instead, there are plans for a documentary companion to “Miles Ahead.”)

While there’s no shortage of outrageous tales about Miles Davis, who died in 1991 (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/29/nyregion/miles-davis-trumpeter-dies-jazz-genius-65-defined-cool.html) , the “Miles Ahead” story takes some narrative liberties, including car chases and gunplay. “There’s a lot of factual things in our script,” Mr. Cheadle said, “but we wanted to do something that was more chock-full of truths than chock-full of facts.” The approach raised some concerns for the Davis family.

“I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t all cars, women and drugs,” said the musician’s daughter, Cheryl Davis. “We know that Father wasn’t all good, and nobody is trying to sugarcoat that. But I don’t remember my father as a gun-toting man. I remember him as arrogant, proud and very aware of what his pursuit was in life.”

Once the vision and the script, written by Mr. Cheadle and Steven Baigelman, were on track, and the family was on board, the project went through different iterations (the filmmakers considered doing it for cable), locations and budgets, finally settling on a number that one of the producers, Lenore Zerman, put at “a good deal under $10 million, for a movie spanning multiple time periods.”

Cincinnati was chosen, after Ohio gave the production a significant tax incentive; the exteriors in the Over the Rhine neighborhood approximate the look of Manhattan in decades gone by. And as the shoot drew near, “Miles Ahead” started a crowdfunding campaign (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/join-miles-ahead-a-don-cheadle-film) on the website Indiegogo, clearing a goal of $325,000.
Continue reading the main story

“The money was essential, because the script had been broken down and streamlined so much that every penny counts,” said another producer, Pamela Hirsch. “But it was also important to Don to have the fans be part of this journey and watch it grow.”

So add street-level marketing to Mr. Cheadle’s responsibilities, which, in addition to writing, directing and starring, also included learning to play the trumpet (for the film, he used an instrument lent to him by Wynton Marsalis), consulting with the onetime Davis band member Herbie Hancock and working on the score with the acclaimed young jazz pianist Robert Glasper. By the time he returned home after the Cincinnati shoot, Mr. Cheadle had about a month to begin editing before production started for the new season of “House of Lies.”

“I don’t know what I imagined,” he said by phone after the 30-day shoot had wrapped. “But even knowing going in that it was going to be crazy pants, it was crazier and harder than that. The wave doesn’t stop coming.”

He said that he even took some lessons in management from his subject’s famously hands-off approach to rehearsal. “Sometimes, I had to be like Miles and say, ‘I can’t tell you how to play the saxophone,’ and trust people to bring their own creative thing to it.”

If making “Miles Ahead” has been daunting — and this is all before preparing the final film for the festival circuit, finding a distributor and getting it out into the world — Mr. Cheadle was able to find inspiration in one of music’s most restless, visionary and fearless figures.

“I know that people may be like, ‘That’s not what this movie is supposed to be,’ ” he said. “But Miles was a searcher, an innovator. If he was alive today, he’d be working with Kendrick Lamar or DJ Skrillex or Kanye. So that’s the highest hope for this — to move it forward.”

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0ee9cea2c2) | 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=0ee9cea2c2&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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Warwick, Ny 10990
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Don Cheadle Is Star and Director of the Biopic ‘Miles Ahead’ – NYTimes.com

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/movies/don-cheadle-is-star-and-director-of-the-biopic-miles-ahead.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/14/movies/don-cheadle-is-star-and-director-of-the-biopic-miles-ahead.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y)

** Don Cheadle Is Star and Director of the Biopic ‘Miles Ahead’
————————————————————

Photo
“There was just a lot of intrigue to me, a lot of mystery,” Don Cheadle said of Miles Davis’s musical hiatus in the late 1970s, enough to build a film around. CreditWilliams + Hirakawa for The New York Times

CINCINNATI — The elevator opens on the 20th floor of Carew Tower, a landmark 1930 office building overlooking the Ohio River here. On this overcast July morning, though, the space is not a bank or an insurance company, but the headquarters of Columbia Records circa 1980.

The “Walking Eye” (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/ColumbiaRecords) logo, familiar from the red label of so many LPs, hangs behind the receptionist’s desk, and album covers from Columbia artists of the time — James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Elvis Costello — adorn the walls. Looming to one side, in signature long curly wig and oversize wraparound sunglasses, wearing a blue smoking jacket with an elaborate print, is the unmistakable presence of the trumpet genius Miles Davis (http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0525.html) , as played by Don Cheadle.

It’s the midpoint of a six-week shoot for “Miles Ahead,” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/305954/Miles-Ahead-Movie-/overview) an unconventional biopic that is to be the directorial debut of Mr. Cheadle, the Emmy-nominated star of Showtime’s “House of Lies.” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/95752/House-of-Lies-Movie-/overview) In today’s scene, Davis, accompanied by an off-the-leash Rolling Stone reporter (Ewan McGregor), bursts into the Manhattan office of George Butler, the head of Columbia’s jazz division, and accuses the company of teasing the news media with hints of a comeback from his self-imposed hiatus before he’s ready to come back.
Photo

Mr. Cheadle in costume as Davis, but in the role of director. Credit Brian Douglas

“Y’all can’t wait to saddle me back up again,” a coolly belligerent Davis rasps. “There is no Columbia without me.” When an oily executive replies that legally the label can do whatever it wants with Davis’s music, he responds by drawing a pistol from his jacket and shooting out a lamp.

No such confrontation over recordings ever took place. In his 1989 autobiography, “Miles (http://books.google.com/books/about/Miles.html?id=xgAVXHhuNYgC) ,” Davis claimed that he never even picked up a trumpet from 1975 to 1980, the years he didn’t release any new music or perform in public. “It just went out of my mind because I was involved in doing other things,” he wrote, “other things which mostly weren’t good for me.” Davis was exaggerating the extent of his break from making music, though. Over a hurried lunch between takes, Mr. Cheadle (wig still on, jacket off) said that he had heard some recordings Davis made during this period. “There’s a hook, a snippet, and then there’s nothing,” he said. “It’s baby steps. You can hear the engines just starting to turn.”

Fascinated by this difficult period in Davis’s life, Mr. Cheadle, 49, made it the unlikely focus of “Miles Ahead,” developing a story about the theft of an unreleased tape and jumping from there to examine Davis’s history and especially his marriage to the dancer Frances Taylor (Emayatzy Corinealdi,who replaced (http://www.bet.com/news/celebrities/2014/06/25/middle-of-nowhere-star-to-replace-zoe-saldana-in-miles-davis-biopic.html) Zoe Saldana in the role).

“For me, when someone has been prolific for that long, and then they go quiet for five years, that’s when I go, ‘What’s that about?’ ” he said. “That he had done this recording during that time that was never released and no one ever heard. There was just a lot of intrigue to me, a lot of mystery. It felt like an opportunity.”

Miles Davis (http://movies.nytimes.com/person/720031/Miles-Davis?inline=nyt-per) was a towering figure in jazz for more than five decades, steering it into new styles from cool jazz to hard bop to jazz-rock fusion while leading a glamorous, sometimes scandalous life. The idea of a Davis movie had kicked around a long time. For a while, Wesley Snipes was attached. Films about musicians have a mixed track record, though, and if any original recordings were to be included, the filmmakers needed to get approval from the Davis estate.
Continue reading the main story

But when Davis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/13/arts/music/13mile.html) in 2006, his nephew Vincent Wilburn Jr. (who had played drums in his uncle’s band during the comeback period) announced at a news conference that the family was moving forward with a film about Davis, and that Mr. Cheadle was going to play the role.

“I’m a big fan of his, back to ‘Devil in a Blue Dress,’ ” Mr. Wilburn said in a telephone conversation, referring to the 1995 detective film starring Denzel Washington, “and he had certain facial expressions that reminded me of Uncle Miles.”

No one, however, had approached Mr. Cheadle about the idea. But the actor — a music fan who played saxophone as a teenager and had seen Davis in concert in 1981 — sent word that he was interested. He began meeting with Davis’s youngest son, Erin. Over time, the idea of concentrating on the musician’s silent years, rather than his triumphs, began to emerge.

“I was initially a little puzzled by the idea,” Erin Davis said. “But we were also trying to think in terms of what Miles would have liked, something he would want to see or be a part of. He didn’t like ‘Bird’ ” — Clint Eastwood’s 1988 Charlie Parker biopic (http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/17/movies/clint-eastwood-s-riff-on-charlie-bird-parker.html) — “so we might as well try an original concept instead of doing it the same kind of way.”
Photo

Mr. Cheadle as an earlier version of Davis. Credit Brian Douglas

Mr. Wilburn said that Mr. Cheadle did not want to do “a cradle-to-grave movie” like “Ray” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/287477/Ray-Movie-/overview) or “Walk the Line,” (http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/306598/Walk-the-Line-Movie-/overview) “trying to fit the life of a man who changed the course of music four times into two hours or less.” (Instead, there are plans for a documentary companion to “Miles Ahead.”)

While there’s no shortage of outrageous tales about Miles Davis, who died in 1991 (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/29/nyregion/miles-davis-trumpeter-dies-jazz-genius-65-defined-cool.html) , the “Miles Ahead” story takes some narrative liberties, including car chases and gunplay. “There’s a lot of factual things in our script,” Mr. Cheadle said, “but we wanted to do something that was more chock-full of truths than chock-full of facts.” The approach raised some concerns for the Davis family.

“I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t all cars, women and drugs,” said the musician’s daughter, Cheryl Davis. “We know that Father wasn’t all good, and nobody is trying to sugarcoat that. But I don’t remember my father as a gun-toting man. I remember him as arrogant, proud and very aware of what his pursuit was in life.”

Once the vision and the script, written by Mr. Cheadle and Steven Baigelman, were on track, and the family was on board, the project went through different iterations (the filmmakers considered doing it for cable), locations and budgets, finally settling on a number that one of the producers, Lenore Zerman, put at “a good deal under $10 million, for a movie spanning multiple time periods.”

Cincinnati was chosen, after Ohio gave the production a significant tax incentive; the exteriors in the Over the Rhine neighborhood approximate the look of Manhattan in decades gone by. And as the shoot drew near, “Miles Ahead” started a crowdfunding campaign (https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/join-miles-ahead-a-don-cheadle-film) on the website Indiegogo, clearing a goal of $325,000.
Continue reading the main story

“The money was essential, because the script had been broken down and streamlined so much that every penny counts,” said another producer, Pamela Hirsch. “But it was also important to Don to have the fans be part of this journey and watch it grow.”

So add street-level marketing to Mr. Cheadle’s responsibilities, which, in addition to writing, directing and starring, also included learning to play the trumpet (for the film, he used an instrument lent to him by Wynton Marsalis), consulting with the onetime Davis band member Herbie Hancock and working on the score with the acclaimed young jazz pianist Robert Glasper. By the time he returned home after the Cincinnati shoot, Mr. Cheadle had about a month to begin editing before production started for the new season of “House of Lies.”

“I don’t know what I imagined,” he said by phone after the 30-day shoot had wrapped. “But even knowing going in that it was going to be crazy pants, it was crazier and harder than that. The wave doesn’t stop coming.”

He said that he even took some lessons in management from his subject’s famously hands-off approach to rehearsal. “Sometimes, I had to be like Miles and say, ‘I can’t tell you how to play the saxophone,’ and trust people to bring their own creative thing to it.”

If making “Miles Ahead” has been daunting — and this is all before preparing the final film for the festival circuit, finding a distributor and getting it out into the world — Mr. Cheadle was able to find inspiration in one of music’s most restless, visionary and fearless figures.

“I know that people may be like, ‘That’s not what this movie is supposed to be,’ ” he said. “But Miles was a searcher, an innovator. If he was alive today, he’d be working with Kendrick Lamar or DJ Skrillex or Kanye. So that’s the highest hope for this — to move it forward.”

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0ee9cea2c2) | 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=0ee9cea2c2&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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

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Jeff Goldblum’s Orchestra Debuts at Café Carlyle – NYTimes.com

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/arts/music/jeff-goldblums-orchestra-debuts-at-cafe-carlyle.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/arts/music/jeff-goldblums-orchestra-debuts-at-cafe-carlyle.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y)

** Jeff Goldblum’s Orchestra Debuts at Café Carlyle
————————————————————

Photo
Jeff Goldblum at the Café Carlyle, where his jazz band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, will play beginning on Tuesday night. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Jeff Goldblum (http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/talking-talent-jeff-goldblum-star-of-the-off-broadway-play-domesticated/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A7%22%7D) slipped behind the piano in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel one afternoon this week, to tinkle away at “Stella by Starlight” and to practice for the shows that he and his jazz band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOtkpqBBPV4) , will begin playing at the Café Carlyle (http://www.rosewoodhotels.com/en/the-carlyle-new-york/location/things-to-do/events-at-the-carlyle) on Tuesday night, in the group’s first New York engagement.

But, as Mr. Goldblum, the idiosyncratic star of films like “The Big Chill,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9FJiDFVoOo) “The Fly” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkXp-vSANcg) and “Jurassic Park,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-mpifTiPV4) impishly recounted the tale on Thursday morning, his impromptu rehearsal did not last long: He was asked to stop playing by two aggrieved hotel patrons sitting outside the bar in the lobby.

“I was crestfallen, mortified, stricken,” said Mr. Goldblum, 61, who naturally talks as if he were reading from a thesaurus. “I said: ‘So, so sorry. I was just playing a little piano.’ They said: ‘We love piano music. But that was discordant, whatever you were doing there.’ ”

Mr. Goldblum, whose professional trajectory has been as been as felicitous and haphazard as the sentences he enunciates, has sung and played piano for several years with his jazz quintet. (The other members are the guitarist John Storie, the bassist Tim Emmons, the tenor saxophonist Zane Musa and the drummer Kenny Elliott.)
Photo

Mr. Goldblum has sung and played piano for several years with his jazz quintet. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Before a series of five Café Carlyle shows, he explained how this side project has played a central role in his artistic evolution and perfectly suits a life without too much premeditation. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q. Can you explain how your band owes its creation to both Woody Allen,your director (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPh59jOoiEs) on “Annie Hall,” and Peter Weller, your co-star (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHK_EKhOnA) in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”?

A. Here’s what happened. Peter plays trumpet. So he would come over to my house, and the two of us would play a little bit. And then he did a Woody Allen movie [“Mighty Aphrodite”] and got to talking to Woody about us playing. Woody says: “You should do what I do, have a weekly gig, and you’ll get better. And it’ll be fun.” When Peter came back to L.A., we started to play out and about. And we got other musicians. In the years since, Peter’s living all over the world, but I’ve maintained this group. It’s Woody Allen’s fault, in a way.

Q. When were you introduced to the piano?

A. I’m from Pittsburgh and was one of four kids, so our parents got us music lessons, very wisely and nicely and life-changing-ly. I had a facility for it. But I didn’t yet know the joys of discipline. I’d be ill prepared for the lesson, and he [my teacher] wouldn’t be so happy. But then after a couple years, he gave me a piece to learn that was kind of jazzy. “Alley Cat,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fFf0ClVLao) and then “Stairway to the Stars,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1RidtQKnE) maybe “Deep Purple,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d9OZaJcifU) with some interesting harmonies, chords, that were not in the exercises that I’d been doing. And that did something to my innards. That’s when I got better, because I wanted to learn that thing.

Q. How did you get your earliest professional gigs?
Continue reading the main story

A. I’d shut the door, sneakily, and take the Yellow Pages and look up cocktail lounges around Pittsburgh. I thought I was a scam artist of some kind — I said, “Hey, I hear you need a pianist there.” Many places would say, “We don’t even have a piano.” Some places would say, “Well, come over and play, and we’ll see.” And I got a couple of jobs that way. Now I’m 15, 16. These are ripe years for the idea of getting involved with show folk and girl singers, too.

Q. What has it been like to do this as an adult, and as an established actor?

A. When I first did it, I was like, “Gee, I’m playing out in public and with good musicians.” But it became, “Gee, I can do this, and it really is fun.” I like offering it to people. It’s different than practicing on your own. Even with acting, even early in rehearsal, I like to have another person there who’s watching, so you’re using the muscle that tells the story. I like this idea of sharing the thing. Music is meant to be like that.

Q. Is it possible, if events had turned out differently, that you’d now be making your living as a musician rather than as an actor?

A. One could imagine without too much difficulty. I’m not careerist about it. Acting was always a mission of passion, and the chips fell nicely for me. But in a different way, I was not out to accomplish anything or get anywhere with music. As I’m still not. We purposely did it under the radar and didn’t advertise, until the Playboy Jazz Festival somehow had us do it several years ago. They said, “We’re going to put you in the program.” And so I said, “Well, we don’t have a name.” I thought of this funny name.

Q. So there was a real-life Mildred Snitzer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W67Is7NZOFY) ?

A. She was a friend of my mom’s and my family, and she lived to be over 100.

Q. How do you choose the songs you play in your shows?

A. I like the technology of surprise built into it. I’m never doing anything that feels like a recital. It’s really more like a public rehearsal or a hangout. Somebody figures out, besides me, what we’re going to play. But they don’t tell me. I do a little unplanned extemporizing. And the band starts playing whatever they’re playing, and I mosey back over to the piano and I go, “Oh, I’ve never played that,” or “What’s that? That’s kind of interesting.” It’s nothing I’ve been clued-in about. That’s the show.

Q. Does it ever feel like a novelty act, that it’s keeping you from doing more substantial work?

A. First of all, my work of substance, so-called, it feels like I have enough. There’s something that could be low-class, lowbrow, and frivolous about it, and wasteful. But I like it. My sister is a wise person and has devoted her life to the arts, and I recently said to her: “Have I just become a song-and-dance man? Am I trying to work my way down the rungs of sophistication and substance?” She says, “Music, beyond language, comes from someplace deep in yourself and can be offered to somebody in a place that’s impactful.” That was encouraging.

Q. Are you someone who prefers not to have your life mapped out too far ahead of schedule?

A. At its best, life is surprising. Maybe because that’s my appetite, the frontier is uncharted. But it suits me fine. I’ve gotten used to that. Some people couldn’t bear it, but I like that life.

Q. You got engaged over the summer, to the actress Emilie Livingston. Will you play with your band at your own wedding?

A. Our band, and a piano, is going to be there. It’s going to be very small, but I’m going to play. I think. If I feel like it. And the musicians are going to be there, and they’re going to be playing. Isn’t that nice? I’m a nontraditionalist.

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Jeff Goldblum’s Orchestra Debuts at Café Carlyle – NYTimes.com

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/arts/music/jeff-goldblums-orchestra-debuts-at-cafe-carlyle.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/arts/music/jeff-goldblums-orchestra-debuts-at-cafe-carlyle.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140912&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y)

** Jeff Goldblum’s Orchestra Debuts at Café Carlyle
————————————————————

Photo
Jeff Goldblum at the Café Carlyle, where his jazz band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, will play beginning on Tuesday night. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Jeff Goldblum (http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/18/talking-talent-jeff-goldblum-star-of-the-off-broadway-play-domesticated/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A7%22%7D) slipped behind the piano in Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle Hotel one afternoon this week, to tinkle away at “Stella by Starlight” and to practice for the shows that he and his jazz band, the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOtkpqBBPV4) , will begin playing at the Café Carlyle (http://www.rosewoodhotels.com/en/the-carlyle-new-york/location/things-to-do/events-at-the-carlyle) on Tuesday night, in the group’s first New York engagement.

But, as Mr. Goldblum, the idiosyncratic star of films like “The Big Chill,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9FJiDFVoOo) “The Fly” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkXp-vSANcg) and “Jurassic Park,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-mpifTiPV4) impishly recounted the tale on Thursday morning, his impromptu rehearsal did not last long: He was asked to stop playing by two aggrieved hotel patrons sitting outside the bar in the lobby.

“I was crestfallen, mortified, stricken,” said Mr. Goldblum, 61, who naturally talks as if he were reading from a thesaurus. “I said: ‘So, so sorry. I was just playing a little piano.’ They said: ‘We love piano music. But that was discordant, whatever you were doing there.’ ”

Mr. Goldblum, whose professional trajectory has been as been as felicitous and haphazard as the sentences he enunciates, has sung and played piano for several years with his jazz quintet. (The other members are the guitarist John Storie, the bassist Tim Emmons, the tenor saxophonist Zane Musa and the drummer Kenny Elliott.)
Photo

Mr. Goldblum has sung and played piano for several years with his jazz quintet. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Before a series of five Café Carlyle shows, he explained how this side project has played a central role in his artistic evolution and perfectly suits a life without too much premeditation. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.

Q. Can you explain how your band owes its creation to both Woody Allen,your director (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPh59jOoiEs) on “Annie Hall,” and Peter Weller, your co-star (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHK_EKhOnA) in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension”?

A. Here’s what happened. Peter plays trumpet. So he would come over to my house, and the two of us would play a little bit. And then he did a Woody Allen movie [“Mighty Aphrodite”] and got to talking to Woody about us playing. Woody says: “You should do what I do, have a weekly gig, and you’ll get better. And it’ll be fun.” When Peter came back to L.A., we started to play out and about. And we got other musicians. In the years since, Peter’s living all over the world, but I’ve maintained this group. It’s Woody Allen’s fault, in a way.

Q. When were you introduced to the piano?

A. I’m from Pittsburgh and was one of four kids, so our parents got us music lessons, very wisely and nicely and life-changing-ly. I had a facility for it. But I didn’t yet know the joys of discipline. I’d be ill prepared for the lesson, and he [my teacher] wouldn’t be so happy. But then after a couple years, he gave me a piece to learn that was kind of jazzy. “Alley Cat,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fFf0ClVLao) and then “Stairway to the Stars,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r1RidtQKnE) maybe “Deep Purple,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d9OZaJcifU) with some interesting harmonies, chords, that were not in the exercises that I’d been doing. And that did something to my innards. That’s when I got better, because I wanted to learn that thing.

Q. How did you get your earliest professional gigs?
Continue reading the main story

A. I’d shut the door, sneakily, and take the Yellow Pages and look up cocktail lounges around Pittsburgh. I thought I was a scam artist of some kind — I said, “Hey, I hear you need a pianist there.” Many places would say, “We don’t even have a piano.” Some places would say, “Well, come over and play, and we’ll see.” And I got a couple of jobs that way. Now I’m 15, 16. These are ripe years for the idea of getting involved with show folk and girl singers, too.

Q. What has it been like to do this as an adult, and as an established actor?

A. When I first did it, I was like, “Gee, I’m playing out in public and with good musicians.” But it became, “Gee, I can do this, and it really is fun.” I like offering it to people. It’s different than practicing on your own. Even with acting, even early in rehearsal, I like to have another person there who’s watching, so you’re using the muscle that tells the story. I like this idea of sharing the thing. Music is meant to be like that.

Q. Is it possible, if events had turned out differently, that you’d now be making your living as a musician rather than as an actor?

A. One could imagine without too much difficulty. I’m not careerist about it. Acting was always a mission of passion, and the chips fell nicely for me. But in a different way, I was not out to accomplish anything or get anywhere with music. As I’m still not. We purposely did it under the radar and didn’t advertise, until the Playboy Jazz Festival somehow had us do it several years ago. They said, “We’re going to put you in the program.” And so I said, “Well, we don’t have a name.” I thought of this funny name.

Q. So there was a real-life Mildred Snitzer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W67Is7NZOFY) ?

A. She was a friend of my mom’s and my family, and she lived to be over 100.

Q. How do you choose the songs you play in your shows?

A. I like the technology of surprise built into it. I’m never doing anything that feels like a recital. It’s really more like a public rehearsal or a hangout. Somebody figures out, besides me, what we’re going to play. But they don’t tell me. I do a little unplanned extemporizing. And the band starts playing whatever they’re playing, and I mosey back over to the piano and I go, “Oh, I’ve never played that,” or “What’s that? That’s kind of interesting.” It’s nothing I’ve been clued-in about. That’s the show.

Q. Does it ever feel like a novelty act, that it’s keeping you from doing more substantial work?

A. First of all, my work of substance, so-called, it feels like I have enough. There’s something that could be low-class, lowbrow, and frivolous about it, and wasteful. But I like it. My sister is a wise person and has devoted her life to the arts, and I recently said to her: “Have I just become a song-and-dance man? Am I trying to work my way down the rungs of sophistication and substance?” She says, “Music, beyond language, comes from someplace deep in yourself and can be offered to somebody in a place that’s impactful.” That was encouraging.

Q. Are you someone who prefers not to have your life mapped out too far ahead of schedule?

A. At its best, life is surprising. Maybe because that’s my appetite, the frontier is uncharted. But it suits me fine. I’ve gotten used to that. Some people couldn’t bear it, but I like that life.

Q. You got engaged over the summer, to the actress Emilie Livingston. Will you play with your band at your own wedding?

A. Our band, and a piano, is going to be there. It’s going to be very small, but I’m going to play. I think. If I feel like it. And the musicians are going to be there, and they’re going to be playing. Isn’t that nice? I’m a nontraditionalist.

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▶ Βen Webster 1964 – BBC Jazz 625 London Marquee club – Full Show – YouTube

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▶ Βen Webster 1964 – BBC Jazz 625 London Marquee club – Full Show – YouTube

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▶ Nutin’ But The Blues Baby! King Curtis & Champion Jack Dupree 1971 “Poor Boy Blues” – YouTube

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Who’s that sittin’ next to Aretha with the mic in her hand?

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▶ Nutin’ But The Blues Baby! King Curtis & Champion Jack Dupree 1971 “Poor Boy Blues” – YouTube

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Who’s that sittin’ next to Aretha with the mic in her hand?

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For Your Viewing Pleasure: Blue and Sentimental-Buddy Tate 1961.mov – YouTube

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Buddy Tate, tenor sax Charles Thompson, piano Gene Ramey, bass Oliver Jackson, drums

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For Your Viewing Pleasure: Blue and Sentimental-Buddy Tate 1961.mov – YouTube

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Buddy Tate, tenor sax Charles Thompson, piano Gene Ramey, bass Oliver Jackson, drums

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USA Today: Legendary ‘New Orleans Sound’ maker Cosimo Matassa dies

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/music/2014/09/11/cosimo-matassa-new-orleans-obit/15478893/

** Legendary ‘New Orleans Sound’ maker Cosimo Matassa dies
————————————————————

NEW ORLEANS, La. — Cosimo Matassa, the legendary recording engineer and studio owner (http://www.wwltv.com/story/entertainment/arts/2014/09/11/cosimo-matassa-dies-t-88/15466137/) who helped introduce and shape New Orleans’ early rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll sound and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and recognized with a Grammy for his efforts, died Thursday. He was 88.

Matassa was sidelined by a stroke in recent years and his health had declined over the past few months, according to his family.

Matassa’s face, or even his name, may not have been known to some, but the sound he helped create defined a generation. From the 1940s through the 1970s, his recording studios, including the well-known J&M Studios, recorded Fats Domino, Little Richard, Professor Longhair, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Lloyd Price, Smiley Lewis,Dr. John, Sam Cooke and many others.

As an engineer, Matassa worked closely with producers and arrangers Dave Bartholomew, Allen Toussaint and others to shape what became known as “the New Orleans Sound” of the 1950s and 1960s.

Matassa engineered Domino’s very first recording session in 1949, with Bartholomew directing the band and producing the session. Recording eight songs that day, including The Fat Man, it was the moment that launched their hit-making musical careers. For the next decade, Domino and Bartholomew used J&M and Matassa’s other studios to record their string of chart-topping hits.

The list of other songs recorded by Matassa at his studio is another testament to his importance in music history. In addition to dozens of Domino’s hits, the seminal recordings Lawdy Miss Clawdy, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Tipitina, I Hear You Knocking and Long Tall Sally were all recorded by Matassa. Three recordings identified by some as the first rock ‘n’ roll records were also his work: Domino’s The Fat Man, Roy Brown’s Good Rockin’ Tonight and Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti.

Other local and national R&B hits recorded by Matassa included Aaron Neville’s Tell It Like It Is, Frankie Ford’s Sea Cruise, K-Doe’s Mother-In-Law and Robert Parker’s Barefootin’ as well as Art Neville and the Hawketts’ Mardi Gras Mambo, Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s Ain’t Got No Home, Al Johnson’s Carnival Time, Shirley and Lee’s Let the Good Times Roll and many other landmark 1960s recordings by Irma Thomas, Lee Dorsey, Benny Spellman and Chris Kenner.

“I always tried to capture the dynamics of a live performance,” Matassa said in an interview to mark his 2012 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “These guys were doing these songs on their gigs and that was the sound that I was trying to get. We didn’t have any gimmicks – no overdubbing, no reverb – nothing. Those guys played with a lot of excitement; and I felt if I couldn’t put it in the groove, people weren’t going to move.”

According to an online profile by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Matassa’s on-the-job training developed his technique over time. Musicians who recorded there said he had a knack for microphone placement and, according to Dr. John, he rarely changed input levels once they were set for a session.

“He would set the knobs for the session and rarely moved anything,” Rebennack said in John Broven’s book, Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans. “He developed what is known as the ‘Cosimo Sound,’ which was strong drums, heavy bass, light piano, heavy guitar and light horn sound with a strong vocal lead. That was the start of what eventually became known as the ‘New Orleans Sound.'”

An Italian-American and New Orleans native, Matassa’s father John emigrated from Sicily in 1910. In 1924, Matassa opened a small grocery store at the corner of Dauphine and St. Philip Streets, which remains a fixture in the French Quarter. Young Cosimo grew up working in the grocery store and after graduating from McDonogh 15 and Warren Easton High School, he enrolled in Tulane University’s chemistry program, but dropped out after about two years.
Cosimo Matassa in the recording studio with local artists.

“When I finally realized what a chemist was, I decided not to be one,” he once said, according to the LEH profile. Since he was ineligible to be drafted into the military for physical reasons, his father gave him a choice: go back to school or start working.

He started working, but not in the grocery business. In addition to the market, John Matassa and his partner also ran J&M Amusement Services, placing jukeboxes in bars and restaurants. Cosimo began selling used records from the jukeboxes, and after noting the interest from customers in buying records, in 1945, he bought recording equipment and converted a room in the back of the family’s J&M Appliance Store & Record Shop into a “studio.”

The room was only 15-by-16 feet in size, with a control room “as big as my four fingers,” joked Matassa in a story to mark his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the early years, Matassa recorded direct to disc until he could afford a tape-recording system. At first the equipment was used by amateurs to make personal recordings or demos. Soon, the dearth of recording studios in town led professional musicians and record producers to J&M. Matassa moved the studio several times.

Matassa also started his own record label and music distribution business, as well as opening a pressing plant and managing singer Jimmy Clanton. Matassa endured the ups and downs of the music business, including dealing with unsympathetic banks who were reluctant to lend money to someone in his line of work. He retired from the music business in the 1980s to help run the family grocery, Matassa’s Market, which is now run by his sons and granddaughter.

Though always humble about his contributions to the music world, Matassa was fortunate enough to enjoy the honors bestowed upon him and J&M in recent years. In December 1999, the former Rampart Street studio was designated as a local historic landmark, with a plaque placed on the exterior of the building, which now houses a laundromat. In 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named the site a historic landmark, one of just 11 across the country.

“People expect me to have some sense of history, as though I’d hear a record and know this was going to be something we’d be talking about 30 years later. Not a chance,” he said in the 2007 WWL-TV interview with Paulsen. “We were all busy making a living. We had a hell of a good time and it was a great way to make a living, but no, there was no sense of history. Certainly not with me.”

Matassa was slowed down in recent years by health issues, but was able to attend several events honoring him and the music he helped create. He was honored with a special Grammy Trustees Award in 2007 and Loyola University New Orleans awarded him an honorary degree in 2011.

He was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honors in 2012. He joined a list of inductees that year which included the Beastie Boys, Guns ‘n’ Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Matassa and his wife, Jennie, were married for 65 years before her death in 2009.

Survivors include his three sons: John, Michael and Louis Matassa; seven grandchildren: Cindy Matassa Diffenbaugh, Mia Matassa, Sophia Matassa Campo, Chris Matassa, John Matassa Jr., and Mamie Matassa. He is also survived by eight great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements have not been finalized Thursday evening.

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USA Today: Legendary ‘New Orleans Sound’ maker Cosimo Matassa dies

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** Legendary ‘New Orleans Sound’ maker Cosimo Matassa dies
————————————————————

NEW ORLEANS, La. — Cosimo Matassa, the legendary recording engineer and studio owner (http://www.wwltv.com/story/entertainment/arts/2014/09/11/cosimo-matassa-dies-t-88/15466137/) who helped introduce and shape New Orleans’ early rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll sound and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and recognized with a Grammy for his efforts, died Thursday. He was 88.

Matassa was sidelined by a stroke in recent years and his health had declined over the past few months, according to his family.

Matassa’s face, or even his name, may not have been known to some, but the sound he helped create defined a generation. From the 1940s through the 1970s, his recording studios, including the well-known J&M Studios, recorded Fats Domino, Little Richard, Professor Longhair, Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Charles, Lee Dorsey, Ernie K-Doe, Lloyd Price, Smiley Lewis,Dr. John, Sam Cooke and many others.

As an engineer, Matassa worked closely with producers and arrangers Dave Bartholomew, Allen Toussaint and others to shape what became known as “the New Orleans Sound” of the 1950s and 1960s.

Matassa engineered Domino’s very first recording session in 1949, with Bartholomew directing the band and producing the session. Recording eight songs that day, including The Fat Man, it was the moment that launched their hit-making musical careers. For the next decade, Domino and Bartholomew used J&M and Matassa’s other studios to record their string of chart-topping hits.

The list of other songs recorded by Matassa at his studio is another testament to his importance in music history. In addition to dozens of Domino’s hits, the seminal recordings Lawdy Miss Clawdy, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Tipitina, I Hear You Knocking and Long Tall Sally were all recorded by Matassa. Three recordings identified by some as the first rock ‘n’ roll records were also his work: Domino’s The Fat Man, Roy Brown’s Good Rockin’ Tonight and Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti.

Other local and national R&B hits recorded by Matassa included Aaron Neville’s Tell It Like It Is, Frankie Ford’s Sea Cruise, K-Doe’s Mother-In-Law and Robert Parker’s Barefootin’ as well as Art Neville and the Hawketts’ Mardi Gras Mambo, Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s Ain’t Got No Home, Al Johnson’s Carnival Time, Shirley and Lee’s Let the Good Times Roll and many other landmark 1960s recordings by Irma Thomas, Lee Dorsey, Benny Spellman and Chris Kenner.

“I always tried to capture the dynamics of a live performance,” Matassa said in an interview to mark his 2012 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “These guys were doing these songs on their gigs and that was the sound that I was trying to get. We didn’t have any gimmicks – no overdubbing, no reverb – nothing. Those guys played with a lot of excitement; and I felt if I couldn’t put it in the groove, people weren’t going to move.”

According to an online profile by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, Matassa’s on-the-job training developed his technique over time. Musicians who recorded there said he had a knack for microphone placement and, according to Dr. John, he rarely changed input levels once they were set for a session.

“He would set the knobs for the session and rarely moved anything,” Rebennack said in John Broven’s book, Rhythm and Blues in New Orleans. “He developed what is known as the ‘Cosimo Sound,’ which was strong drums, heavy bass, light piano, heavy guitar and light horn sound with a strong vocal lead. That was the start of what eventually became known as the ‘New Orleans Sound.'”

An Italian-American and New Orleans native, Matassa’s father John emigrated from Sicily in 1910. In 1924, Matassa opened a small grocery store at the corner of Dauphine and St. Philip Streets, which remains a fixture in the French Quarter. Young Cosimo grew up working in the grocery store and after graduating from McDonogh 15 and Warren Easton High School, he enrolled in Tulane University’s chemistry program, but dropped out after about two years.
Cosimo Matassa in the recording studio with local artists.

“When I finally realized what a chemist was, I decided not to be one,” he once said, according to the LEH profile. Since he was ineligible to be drafted into the military for physical reasons, his father gave him a choice: go back to school or start working.

He started working, but not in the grocery business. In addition to the market, John Matassa and his partner also ran J&M Amusement Services, placing jukeboxes in bars and restaurants. Cosimo began selling used records from the jukeboxes, and after noting the interest from customers in buying records, in 1945, he bought recording equipment and converted a room in the back of the family’s J&M Appliance Store & Record Shop into a “studio.”

The room was only 15-by-16 feet in size, with a control room “as big as my four fingers,” joked Matassa in a story to mark his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the early years, Matassa recorded direct to disc until he could afford a tape-recording system. At first the equipment was used by amateurs to make personal recordings or demos. Soon, the dearth of recording studios in town led professional musicians and record producers to J&M. Matassa moved the studio several times.

Matassa also started his own record label and music distribution business, as well as opening a pressing plant and managing singer Jimmy Clanton. Matassa endured the ups and downs of the music business, including dealing with unsympathetic banks who were reluctant to lend money to someone in his line of work. He retired from the music business in the 1980s to help run the family grocery, Matassa’s Market, which is now run by his sons and granddaughter.

Though always humble about his contributions to the music world, Matassa was fortunate enough to enjoy the honors bestowed upon him and J&M in recent years. In December 1999, the former Rampart Street studio was designated as a local historic landmark, with a plaque placed on the exterior of the building, which now houses a laundromat. In 2010, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named the site a historic landmark, one of just 11 across the country.

“People expect me to have some sense of history, as though I’d hear a record and know this was going to be something we’d be talking about 30 years later. Not a chance,” he said in the 2007 WWL-TV interview with Paulsen. “We were all busy making a living. We had a hell of a good time and it was a great way to make a living, but no, there was no sense of history. Certainly not with me.”

Matassa was slowed down in recent years by health issues, but was able to attend several events honoring him and the music he helped create. He was honored with a special Grammy Trustees Award in 2007 and Loyola University New Orleans awarded him an honorary degree in 2011.

He was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame and selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honors in 2012. He joined a list of inductees that year which included the Beastie Boys, Guns ‘n’ Roses and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Matassa and his wife, Jennie, were married for 65 years before her death in 2009.

Survivors include his three sons: John, Michael and Louis Matassa; seven grandchildren: Cindy Matassa Diffenbaugh, Mia Matassa, Sophia Matassa Campo, Chris Matassa, John Matassa Jr., and Mamie Matassa. He is also survived by eight great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements have not been finalized Thursday evening.

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Cosimo Matassa, New Orleans recording studio owner, engineer and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, has died | NOLA.com

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http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/09/cosimo_matassa_new_orleans_rec.html#incart_river

** Cosimo Matassa, New Orleans recording studio owner, engineer and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, has died
————————————————————

Cosimo Matassa, the New Orleans studio owner and recording engineer who helped craft timeless recordings by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Irma Thomas, Professor Longhair, Lee Dorsey, Lloyd Price, Aaron Neville, Dr. John and many others, died Thursday (Sept. 11) at Ochsner Medical Center. He was 88.

The sound created by Domino, producer Dave Bartholomew and Mr. Matassa at J&M Recording on North Rampart Street staked New Orleans’ claim as the birthplace not just of jazz, but of rock ‘n’ roll as well.

“Cosimo was the doorway and window to the world for us musicians in New Orleans,” Allen Toussaint said Thursday. “An expert, with a lot of heart and soul. When the Beatles heard Fats Domino, they heard him via Cosimo Matassa. He touched the whole world.”

In recent years, Mr. Matassa received national recognition for his contributions to the development of rock ‘n’ roll and recording techniques. The Recording Academy honored him with its prestigious Trustees Award in 2007. In 2012, he was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer (http://rockhall.com/inductees/cosimo-matassa/bio/) .

“He played an essential role in the birth of rock and roll,” said Dr. Lauren Onkey, the vice president of education and public programs for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. “The songs he recorded revolutionized our music and our culture. He was a generous soul who had an incredible impact.”

Mr. Matassa initially set out to earn a chemistry degree from Tulane University, but soon decided he wasn’t cut out to be a chemist. In 1945, he opened his first studio, J&M Recording, in the back of his family’s record and appliance store at the corner of North Rampart and Dumaine streets in the French Quarter.

It hardly seemed like the setting for a musical revolution. Upstairs, bookies ran a horse-betting operation. In the alley outside, a shoeshine man plied his trade. But Mr. Matassa engineered sessions featuring some of the biggest stars of the day, maximizing the sonic potential of relatively primitive recording gear.

J&M became the New Orleans equivalent of the historic Sun Studios in Memphis, Tenn. In 1947, singer Roy Brown recorded the influential “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” the song credited with popularizing the term “rockin,'” at J&M. Two years later, Domino, then an unknown 21-year-old rhythm & blues pianist, and Dave Bartholomew, an established jazz bandleader and aspiring record producer, first communed there.

On Dec. 10, 1949 in J&M’s tiny back room, Domino cut eight songs, including his first commercially released single, “The Fat Man,” under the watchful eyes and ears of Bartholomew and Mr. Matassa.

“We felt good about it,” Bartholomew said decades after that session. “Cosimo had gotten a pretty good sound out of what he had.”

Domino would record most of his classic hits in studios owned by Mr. Matassa. A 16-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis took the bus from his home in Ferriday to make his first demo recording at J&M. Little Richard recorded his smash “Tutti Frutti” there with a band of New Orleanians backing him.

Professor Longhair recorded “Tipitina” and “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” in the same room. Shirley and Lee, Smiley Lewis, Ray Charles, Bobby Charles, The Spiders, Big Joe Turner and many others also worked at the original J&M location. Ray Charles recorded there while based in New Orleans in the 1950s. Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is,” Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise,” Al Johnson’s “Carnival Time,” Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home” — all were made with Mr. Matassa.

At age 15, Toussaint and guitarist Snooks Eaglin showed up at J&M to audition a song for Bartholomew. The audition was unsuccessful, but Toussaint was thrilled to meet Bartholomew at J&M. “For me to see Dave Bartholomew, and to be in that studio, it didn’t get better than that,” Toussaint said. “It took me days to get over the shock.”

When the studio wasn’t busy, Mr. Matassa would allow the young Toussaint to play J&M’s grand piano. “That was the first grand piano that I touched,” Toussaint said. “That was a whole other ball game.”

Toussaint grew up to become one of New Orleans’ most successful and prolific songwriters and producers – and one of Mr. Matassa’s best customers. After Mr. Matassa relocated his studio to Gov. Nicholls Street in 1955, Toussaint produced scores of classic recordings there, including Ernie K-Doe’s classic “Mother-in-Law” and most of Irma Thomas’ Minit Records output, including “It’s Raining.” Toussaint also recorded his own “Wild Sounds of New Orleans” album there.

Practical concerns partially accounted for the popularity of Mr. Matassa’s studio. “His prices were reasonable,” said Thomas, who had recorded at Mr. Matassa’s original J&M Music as a 13-year-old with her McDonough 41 classmates. “And at that time, Cosimo’s was one of the few studios that was up to date with equipment.”

Gear and pricing aside, Mr. Matassa facilitated recording sessions in such a way as to put singers and musicians at ease.

“He didn’t make you feel like he knew it all,” Thomas said. “He was open to trying new things. He was easy to work with. He made you feel comfortable.

“And for someone who didn’t play an instrument, he had a keen ear. He knew when it didn’t sound right.”

In 2012, Mr. Matassa explained his recording philosophy to the Huffington Post. “I wanted to be a just conduit of what that performance was – a performance frozen in time, if you will. So if you didn’t know I was there, I did my job.”

When Mr. Matassa moved his studio to Camp Street, Toussaint followed, recording “Freedom for the Stallion” and other Lee Dorsey hits there.

After Mr. Matassa closed the Camp Street facility and got out of the recording business, Toussaint and his business partner Marshall Sehorn built their own Sea-Saint Studio in Gentilly. “If Cosimo had not closed his studio, we would not have built Sea-Saint,” Toussaint said. “We would have followed him (to another studio). We were satisfied and happy to be about Cosimo.”

The site of that original studio at 838 N. Rampart St. is now the home of Hula Mae’s Tropic Wash laundry. The maroon and beige tile on the threshold still reads “J&M Music Shop,” as it did in 1949. The recording studio was in the southwest corner of the building, an area now occupied by clothes dryers.

In 1999, on the 50^th anniversary of Domino’s first recording, the city declared the building an historic landmark. In 2010, the building was designated a Rock and Roll Landmark. When rock ‘n’ Roll was in its infancy, “the baby got rocked right here in this building,” Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum president Terry Stewart said at the dedication.

“All the great musicians made me look good,” Mr. Matassa said in 2012. “I couldn’t have done any of those records if the guys sitting in the chairs didn’t do them. So first and foremost, credit to them. I tried my damnedest to make them sound good.”

After he got out of the recording business, Mr. Matassa was a fixture at Matassa’s Market, the French Quarter grocery and delicatessen owned by two of his sons. He handled the books, but also held court for a steady stream of friends and admirers. His wife of more than six decades, Jennie, died in 2009.

He was in and out of the hospital in recent months as his health declined. Dave Bartholomew and his son Don, a producer and rapper, visited Mr. Matassa in the hospital on Sept. 10. Friends for more than 60 years, the elder Bartholomew and Mr. Matassa were able to share some final moments together.

“He was one of the greatest friends I had, and one of the best in the music industry in New Orleans,” Dave Bartholomew said Thursday. “He was always there for me. I always had him in my corner.

“You always could depend on him, and not just music. He was one of the greatest people to recognize the talent in New Orleans, and make the world know it.”

Survivors include three sons, John, Michael and Louis Matassa; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete. Lake Lawn Metairie is in charge of arrangements.

Staff writers Alison Fensterstock and John Pope contributed to this story.

Keith Spera can be reached at kspera@nola.com (mailto:kspera@nola.com) or 504.826.3470.

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Cosimo Matassa, New Orleans recording studio owner, engineer and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, has died | NOLA.com

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** Cosimo Matassa, New Orleans recording studio owner, engineer and rock ‘n’ roll pioneer, has died
————————————————————

Cosimo Matassa, the New Orleans studio owner and recording engineer who helped craft timeless recordings by Fats Domino, Little Richard, Irma Thomas, Professor Longhair, Lee Dorsey, Lloyd Price, Aaron Neville, Dr. John and many others, died Thursday (Sept. 11) at Ochsner Medical Center. He was 88.

The sound created by Domino, producer Dave Bartholomew and Mr. Matassa at J&M Recording on North Rampart Street staked New Orleans’ claim as the birthplace not just of jazz, but of rock ‘n’ roll as well.

“Cosimo was the doorway and window to the world for us musicians in New Orleans,” Allen Toussaint said Thursday. “An expert, with a lot of heart and soul. When the Beatles heard Fats Domino, they heard him via Cosimo Matassa. He touched the whole world.”

In recent years, Mr. Matassa received national recognition for his contributions to the development of rock ‘n’ roll and recording techniques. The Recording Academy honored him with its prestigious Trustees Award in 2007. In 2012, he was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer (http://rockhall.com/inductees/cosimo-matassa/bio/) .

“He played an essential role in the birth of rock and roll,” said Dr. Lauren Onkey, the vice president of education and public programs for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. “The songs he recorded revolutionized our music and our culture. He was a generous soul who had an incredible impact.”

Mr. Matassa initially set out to earn a chemistry degree from Tulane University, but soon decided he wasn’t cut out to be a chemist. In 1945, he opened his first studio, J&M Recording, in the back of his family’s record and appliance store at the corner of North Rampart and Dumaine streets in the French Quarter.

It hardly seemed like the setting for a musical revolution. Upstairs, bookies ran a horse-betting operation. In the alley outside, a shoeshine man plied his trade. But Mr. Matassa engineered sessions featuring some of the biggest stars of the day, maximizing the sonic potential of relatively primitive recording gear.

J&M became the New Orleans equivalent of the historic Sun Studios in Memphis, Tenn. In 1947, singer Roy Brown recorded the influential “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” the song credited with popularizing the term “rockin,'” at J&M. Two years later, Domino, then an unknown 21-year-old rhythm & blues pianist, and Dave Bartholomew, an established jazz bandleader and aspiring record producer, first communed there.

On Dec. 10, 1949 in J&M’s tiny back room, Domino cut eight songs, including his first commercially released single, “The Fat Man,” under the watchful eyes and ears of Bartholomew and Mr. Matassa.

“We felt good about it,” Bartholomew said decades after that session. “Cosimo had gotten a pretty good sound out of what he had.”

Domino would record most of his classic hits in studios owned by Mr. Matassa. A 16-year-old Jerry Lee Lewis took the bus from his home in Ferriday to make his first demo recording at J&M. Little Richard recorded his smash “Tutti Frutti” there with a band of New Orleanians backing him.

Professor Longhair recorded “Tipitina” and “Mardi Gras in New Orleans” in the same room. Shirley and Lee, Smiley Lewis, Ray Charles, Bobby Charles, The Spiders, Big Joe Turner and many others also worked at the original J&M location. Ray Charles recorded there while based in New Orleans in the 1950s. Aaron Neville’s “Tell It Like It Is,” Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise,” Al Johnson’s “Carnival Time,” Clarence “Frogman” Henry’s “Ain’t Got No Home” — all were made with Mr. Matassa.

At age 15, Toussaint and guitarist Snooks Eaglin showed up at J&M to audition a song for Bartholomew. The audition was unsuccessful, but Toussaint was thrilled to meet Bartholomew at J&M. “For me to see Dave Bartholomew, and to be in that studio, it didn’t get better than that,” Toussaint said. “It took me days to get over the shock.”

When the studio wasn’t busy, Mr. Matassa would allow the young Toussaint to play J&M’s grand piano. “That was the first grand piano that I touched,” Toussaint said. “That was a whole other ball game.”

Toussaint grew up to become one of New Orleans’ most successful and prolific songwriters and producers – and one of Mr. Matassa’s best customers. After Mr. Matassa relocated his studio to Gov. Nicholls Street in 1955, Toussaint produced scores of classic recordings there, including Ernie K-Doe’s classic “Mother-in-Law” and most of Irma Thomas’ Minit Records output, including “It’s Raining.” Toussaint also recorded his own “Wild Sounds of New Orleans” album there.

Practical concerns partially accounted for the popularity of Mr. Matassa’s studio. “His prices were reasonable,” said Thomas, who had recorded at Mr. Matassa’s original J&M Music as a 13-year-old with her McDonough 41 classmates. “And at that time, Cosimo’s was one of the few studios that was up to date with equipment.”

Gear and pricing aside, Mr. Matassa facilitated recording sessions in such a way as to put singers and musicians at ease.

“He didn’t make you feel like he knew it all,” Thomas said. “He was open to trying new things. He was easy to work with. He made you feel comfortable.

“And for someone who didn’t play an instrument, he had a keen ear. He knew when it didn’t sound right.”

In 2012, Mr. Matassa explained his recording philosophy to the Huffington Post. “I wanted to be a just conduit of what that performance was – a performance frozen in time, if you will. So if you didn’t know I was there, I did my job.”

When Mr. Matassa moved his studio to Camp Street, Toussaint followed, recording “Freedom for the Stallion” and other Lee Dorsey hits there.

After Mr. Matassa closed the Camp Street facility and got out of the recording business, Toussaint and his business partner Marshall Sehorn built their own Sea-Saint Studio in Gentilly. “If Cosimo had not closed his studio, we would not have built Sea-Saint,” Toussaint said. “We would have followed him (to another studio). We were satisfied and happy to be about Cosimo.”

The site of that original studio at 838 N. Rampart St. is now the home of Hula Mae’s Tropic Wash laundry. The maroon and beige tile on the threshold still reads “J&M Music Shop,” as it did in 1949. The recording studio was in the southwest corner of the building, an area now occupied by clothes dryers.

In 1999, on the 50^th anniversary of Domino’s first recording, the city declared the building an historic landmark. In 2010, the building was designated a Rock and Roll Landmark. When rock ‘n’ Roll was in its infancy, “the baby got rocked right here in this building,” Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum president Terry Stewart said at the dedication.

“All the great musicians made me look good,” Mr. Matassa said in 2012. “I couldn’t have done any of those records if the guys sitting in the chairs didn’t do them. So first and foremost, credit to them. I tried my damnedest to make them sound good.”

After he got out of the recording business, Mr. Matassa was a fixture at Matassa’s Market, the French Quarter grocery and delicatessen owned by two of his sons. He handled the books, but also held court for a steady stream of friends and admirers. His wife of more than six decades, Jennie, died in 2009.

He was in and out of the hospital in recent months as his health declined. Dave Bartholomew and his son Don, a producer and rapper, visited Mr. Matassa in the hospital on Sept. 10. Friends for more than 60 years, the elder Bartholomew and Mr. Matassa were able to share some final moments together.

“He was one of the greatest friends I had, and one of the best in the music industry in New Orleans,” Dave Bartholomew said Thursday. “He was always there for me. I always had him in my corner.

“You always could depend on him, and not just music. He was one of the greatest people to recognize the talent in New Orleans, and make the world know it.”

Survivors include three sons, John, Michael and Louis Matassa; seven grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete. Lake Lawn Metairie is in charge of arrangements.

Staff writers Alison Fensterstock and John Pope contributed to this story.

Keith Spera can be reached at kspera@nola.com (mailto:kspera@nola.com) or 504.826.3470.

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Gerald Wilson, Versatile Jazz Arranger, Is Dead at 96 – NYTimes.com

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/arts/music/gerald-wilson-versatile-jazz-arranger-is-dead-at-96.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140909&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y&_r=0 (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/arts/music/gerald-wilson-versatile-jazz-arranger-is-dead-at-96.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140909&nlid=16833052&tntemail0=y&_r=0)

** Gerald Wilson, Versatile Jazz Arranger, Is Dead at 96
————————————————————

Photo
Gerald Wilson performing in Monterey, Calif., in about 1982. Credit Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

Gerald Wilson, whose eight-decade career as a jazz composer, arranger, big-band leader and trumpeter spanned generations, styles and geography, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 96.

His son, Anthony, a jazz guitarist, confirmed the death.

Mr. Wilson was not yet 21 when he joined the Jimmie Lunceford band in 1939 as a trumpeter, replacing Sy Oliver, and he was believed to have been the last surviving member of its prewar incarnation. He went on to write and arrange rich and imaginative music for Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and many other major names in jazz. He brought robust harmonies and a wide spectrum of colors to his orchestrations, but he may have been best known for his versatility and his enduring freshness.

“Even if you were chronologically decades or maybe generations younger than Gerald, you always felt like he was the youngest person in the room,” Loren Schoenberg, a saxophonist and composer who is the artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had none of that feeling that you were hanging out with a guy from the 1930s or 1940s.”

Mr. Wilson was often a behind-the-scenes influence; even if you had never heard of him, you were often hearing him. Usually he was given credit. Sometimes his work was brazenly borrowed.

The memorable melody from “Yard Dog Mazurka,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wAkFnZnphk) the stomping hit he wrote for Lunceford (and among Mr. Wilson’s favorites of his own compositions), resurfaced as “Intermission Riff,” a hit for the Stan Kenton band for which Ray Wetzel was credited as the composer. Mr. Wilson considered suing but decided against it. Years later, he wrote for Mr. Kenton — and received credit.

Settled in California by the 1950s, Mr. Wilson showed little regard for stylistic boundaries, working with pop musicians, film composers and his own eclectic and admired big band, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, whose members over the years included the guitarist Joe Pass and the trumpeter Snooky Young. Clean-cut early on, he dropped the neckties, opened his collar and let his hair grow into a mane that became silver with age. He recorded a string of well-received albums on the Pacific Jazz label in the 1960s that included variations on Mexican music and pop and often felt little like the jazz that had come before.

The title song of his 1968 album, “California Soul,” was written by the rhythm-and-blues duo Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. The album also included a version of the Doors’ hit “Light My Fire.”

When Mr. Wilson came to New York in 1988 to take part in an American Jazz Orchestra retrospective of his music, it was his first appearance in the city in 25 years. In an interview with The New York Times that year, he gave a glimpse of his varied career and why he pursued it.

“When I worked for Mercury and Capitol records in the ’50s and ’60s, I did a lot of pop dates, from Bobby Darin to Nancy Wilson,” he told The Times. “I knew how to do it, and using it all made sense as well as money. I worked in commercial music in Hollywood, writing for the Platters, working with Maxwell Davis backing B. B. King. I did Nancy Wilson’s rock-styled stuff. I worked on the country-western albums for Ray Charles. Then I recorded ‘Light My Fire.’ None of it was hard to do, because all of these trends came from jazz people to begin with.”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

Gerald Stanley Wilson was born on Sept. 4, 1918, in Shelby, Miss. He began playing piano at 4, learning from his mother, who taught music and other subjects in Shelby’s segregated black schools.

His family later moved to Memphis, where he first saw the Lunceford band perform. By 16 he was living in Detroit, attending Cass Technical High School.

In addition to his son, Mr. Wilson’s survivors include his wife, Josefina Villaseñor; two daughters, Geraldine LeDuff and Nancy Jo Wilson; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Mr. Wilson left the Lunceford band to serve in the Navy during World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) . After his military service, he formed a big band that performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and in 1949 he toured the South with Billie Holiday.

Six decades later, he was still at it. Among his most recent albums was “Monterey Moods” (2007), a suite he composed in honor of the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he first played in 1963.

He was nominated for six Grammy Awards (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) during his career and in 1990 was named a Jazz Master (http://arts.gov/honors/jazz/gerald-wilson) by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Dealing with four- or five-part harmony, the sound can only get that big,” Mr. Wilson, gesturing with his fingers, told The Times in 1988. Then he opened his arms wide. “But with 10 voices, it’s like that.

“With a few voices, the sound of the band can’t ever get any bigger. No matter how loud you play it, it won’t get larger. But I love to orchestrate, because if you know what you are doing, there are no boundaries.”

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Gerald Wilson, Versatile Jazz Arranger, Is Dead at 96 – NYTimes.com

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** Gerald Wilson, Versatile Jazz Arranger, Is Dead at 96
————————————————————

Photo
Gerald Wilson performing in Monterey, Calif., in about 1982. Credit Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

Gerald Wilson, whose eight-decade career as a jazz composer, arranger, big-band leader and trumpeter spanned generations, styles and geography, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 96.

His son, Anthony, a jazz guitarist, confirmed the death.

Mr. Wilson was not yet 21 when he joined the Jimmie Lunceford band in 1939 as a trumpeter, replacing Sy Oliver, and he was believed to have been the last surviving member of its prewar incarnation. He went on to write and arrange rich and imaginative music for Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and many other major names in jazz. He brought robust harmonies and a wide spectrum of colors to his orchestrations, but he may have been best known for his versatility and his enduring freshness.

“Even if you were chronologically decades or maybe generations younger than Gerald, you always felt like he was the youngest person in the room,” Loren Schoenberg, a saxophonist and composer who is the artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had none of that feeling that you were hanging out with a guy from the 1930s or 1940s.”

Mr. Wilson was often a behind-the-scenes influence; even if you had never heard of him, you were often hearing him. Usually he was given credit. Sometimes his work was brazenly borrowed.

The memorable melody from “Yard Dog Mazurka,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wAkFnZnphk) the stomping hit he wrote for Lunceford (and among Mr. Wilson’s favorites of his own compositions), resurfaced as “Intermission Riff,” a hit for the Stan Kenton band for which Ray Wetzel was credited as the composer. Mr. Wilson considered suing but decided against it. Years later, he wrote for Mr. Kenton — and received credit.

Settled in California by the 1950s, Mr. Wilson showed little regard for stylistic boundaries, working with pop musicians, film composers and his own eclectic and admired big band, the Gerald Wilson Orchestra, whose members over the years included the guitarist Joe Pass and the trumpeter Snooky Young. Clean-cut early on, he dropped the neckties, opened his collar and let his hair grow into a mane that became silver with age. He recorded a string of well-received albums on the Pacific Jazz label in the 1960s that included variations on Mexican music and pop and often felt little like the jazz that had come before.

The title song of his 1968 album, “California Soul,” was written by the rhythm-and-blues duo Nickolas Ashford and Valerie Simpson. The album also included a version of the Doors’ hit “Light My Fire.”

When Mr. Wilson came to New York in 1988 to take part in an American Jazz Orchestra retrospective of his music, it was his first appearance in the city in 25 years. In an interview with The New York Times that year, he gave a glimpse of his varied career and why he pursued it.

“When I worked for Mercury and Capitol records in the ’50s and ’60s, I did a lot of pop dates, from Bobby Darin to Nancy Wilson,” he told The Times. “I knew how to do it, and using it all made sense as well as money. I worked in commercial music in Hollywood, writing for the Platters, working with Maxwell Davis backing B. B. King. I did Nancy Wilson’s rock-styled stuff. I worked on the country-western albums for Ray Charles. Then I recorded ‘Light My Fire.’ None of it was hard to do, because all of these trends came from jazz people to begin with.”
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story

Gerald Stanley Wilson was born on Sept. 4, 1918, in Shelby, Miss. He began playing piano at 4, learning from his mother, who taught music and other subjects in Shelby’s segregated black schools.

His family later moved to Memphis, where he first saw the Lunceford band perform. By 16 he was living in Detroit, attending Cass Technical High School.

In addition to his son, Mr. Wilson’s survivors include his wife, Josefina Villaseñor; two daughters, Geraldine LeDuff and Nancy Jo Wilson; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

Mr. Wilson left the Lunceford band to serve in the Navy during World War II (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/world_war_ii_/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) . After his military service, he formed a big band that performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and in 1949 he toured the South with Billie Holiday.

Six decades later, he was still at it. Among his most recent albums was “Monterey Moods” (2007), a suite he composed in honor of the Monterey Jazz Festival, where he first played in 1963.

He was nominated for six Grammy Awards (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/grammy_awards/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) during his career and in 1990 was named a Jazz Master (http://arts.gov/honors/jazz/gerald-wilson) by the National Endowment for the Arts.

“Dealing with four- or five-part harmony, the sound can only get that big,” Mr. Wilson, gesturing with his fingers, told The Times in 1988. Then he opened his arms wide. “But with 10 voices, it’s like that.

“With a few voices, the sound of the band can’t ever get any bigger. No matter how loud you play it, it won’t get larger. But I love to orchestrate, because if you know what you are doing, there are no boundaries.”

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=5d4c3ac119) | 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=5d4c3ac119&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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USA

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Local jazz legend, BAG founding member Floyd LeFlore, Jr. passes at 74 – St. Louis American: Living It

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** ocal jazz legend, BAG founding member Floyd LeFlore, Jr. passes at 74
————————————————————
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** Floyd LeFlore
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Posted: Tuesday, September 9, 2014 4:27 pm | Updated: 5:22 pm, Tue Sep 9, 2014.

Jazz trumpeter and St. Louis Native, Floyd A. LeFlore, Jr., passed away Saturday, September 6, 2014. He was the son of Minnie Jarmon LeFlore and Floyd LeFlore, Sr. LeFlore, a confirmed Catholic, attended Catholic and public schools in St. Louis, and was a graduate of Sumner High School, and attended St. Louis School of Music. In 1968, He, along with a group of local musicans, that included saxophonists Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill, (poet) Ajule Rutlin, (actor) Robert “Malinke” Elliott. Shortly after, trumpeter, Bakida Caroll, saxaphonist, J.D. Parran, drummer, Charles “Bobo” Shaw, bassist Carl “Arzinia” Richardson, (actor) Vincent Terrell, (poet) Shirley Bradley Price LeFlore, (dancer) Barbara Richardson, (painter) Emilio Cruz would join. LeFlore and the BAG musicians, including a young trumbonist, Joeseph Bowie, spent more than a year in Europe touring, and recorded their debut album Black Artist Group – In Paris, Aries 1973.

LeFlore was also instrumental in the “free jazz” movement performing extensively from the 60s to the late 90s with fellow musicians that included, BAG alums, George Samms, Jerome “Scrooge” Harris, Ptah Williams, Freddie Washington, Daryl Mixon, John Norment, Robert “Happy Tooth” Edwards, Gary Sykes, Maurice Carnes, Blake Travis, and David Parker, to name a few. He was a local icon and mentor to various young musicians growing up in St. Louis during the late 60s and 70s that included The Bosman Twins, Bruce Purse, and Joseph Bowie.

He also performed gigs with the likes of legendary blues guitarist, Albert King, and legendary pianist and bandleader, Sun Ra and his Arkestra. LeFlore was a board member of the New Music Circle, and in 1998 recorded his debut CD-EP “City Sidewalk Street Song Suite.

LeFlore is survived by wife, renown poet and performing artist, Shirley Bradley Price LeFlore, daughters Lyah Beth LeFlore, Jacie Price, and Hope Price Lindsay; four grandchildren, Noelle Lindsay, Jordan Lindsay, Jullian Price Baez, and Bella Grace LeFlore Ituen; and one sister, Cynthia A. LeFlore. Memorial services to be held Saturday, September 13, 2014 at McClendon Mortuary, 12140 New Halls Ferry Road, St. Louis MO 63033. Floyd will be missed by family and friends and the global jazz music community

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Local jazz legend, BAG founding member Floyd LeFlore, Jr. passes at 74 – St. Louis American: Living It

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** ocal jazz legend, BAG founding member Floyd LeFlore, Jr. passes at 74
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** Floyd LeFlore
————————————————————
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Posted: Tuesday, September 9, 2014 4:27 pm | Updated: 5:22 pm, Tue Sep 9, 2014.

Jazz trumpeter and St. Louis Native, Floyd A. LeFlore, Jr., passed away Saturday, September 6, 2014. He was the son of Minnie Jarmon LeFlore and Floyd LeFlore, Sr. LeFlore, a confirmed Catholic, attended Catholic and public schools in St. Louis, and was a graduate of Sumner High School, and attended St. Louis School of Music. In 1968, He, along with a group of local musicans, that included saxophonists Oliver Lake and Julius Hemphill, (poet) Ajule Rutlin, (actor) Robert “Malinke” Elliott. Shortly after, trumpeter, Bakida Caroll, saxaphonist, J.D. Parran, drummer, Charles “Bobo” Shaw, bassist Carl “Arzinia” Richardson, (actor) Vincent Terrell, (poet) Shirley Bradley Price LeFlore, (dancer) Barbara Richardson, (painter) Emilio Cruz would join. LeFlore and the BAG musicians, including a young trumbonist, Joeseph Bowie, spent more than a year in Europe touring, and recorded their debut album Black Artist Group – In Paris, Aries 1973.

LeFlore was also instrumental in the “free jazz” movement performing extensively from the 60s to the late 90s with fellow musicians that included, BAG alums, George Samms, Jerome “Scrooge” Harris, Ptah Williams, Freddie Washington, Daryl Mixon, John Norment, Robert “Happy Tooth” Edwards, Gary Sykes, Maurice Carnes, Blake Travis, and David Parker, to name a few. He was a local icon and mentor to various young musicians growing up in St. Louis during the late 60s and 70s that included The Bosman Twins, Bruce Purse, and Joseph Bowie.

He also performed gigs with the likes of legendary blues guitarist, Albert King, and legendary pianist and bandleader, Sun Ra and his Arkestra. LeFlore was a board member of the New Music Circle, and in 1998 recorded his debut CD-EP “City Sidewalk Street Song Suite.

LeFlore is survived by wife, renown poet and performing artist, Shirley Bradley Price LeFlore, daughters Lyah Beth LeFlore, Jacie Price, and Hope Price Lindsay; four grandchildren, Noelle Lindsay, Jordan Lindsay, Jullian Price Baez, and Bella Grace LeFlore Ituen; and one sister, Cynthia A. LeFlore. Memorial services to be held Saturday, September 13, 2014 at McClendon Mortuary, 12140 New Halls Ferry Road, St. Louis MO 63033. Floyd will be missed by family and friends and the global jazz music community

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Gerald Wilson dies at 96; multifaceted jazz musician – LA Times

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** Gerald Wilson dies at 96; multifaceted jazz musician
————————————————————

Gerald Wilson, a bandleader, trumpeter, composer, arranger and educator whose multifaceted career reached from the swing era of the 1930s to the diverse jazz sounds of the 21st century, has died. He was 96.

Wilson, who had been in declining health, died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, two weeks after contracting pneumonia, said his son, jazz guitarist Anthony Wilson.

In a lifetime that spanned a substantial portion of the history of jazz, Wilson’s combination of articulate composition skills with a far-reaching creative vision carried him successfully through each of the music’s successive new evolutions.

He led his own Gerald Wilson Orchestras — initially for a few years in the mid-1940s, then intermittently in every succeeding decade — recording with stellar assemblages of players, continuing to perform live, well after big jazz bands had been largely eclipsed by small jazz groups and the ascendancy of rock music.
Gerald Wilson

Seeing and hearing Wilson lead his ensembles — especially in his later years — was a memorable experience for jazz fans. Garbed in well tailored suits, his long white hair flowing, Wilson shaped the music with dynamic movements and the elegant grace of a modern dancer.

Asked about his unique style of conducting by Terry Gross on the NPR show “Fresh Air” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php%3FstoryId=5768733) in 2006, he replied: It’s “different from any style you’ve ever seen before. I move. I choreograph the music as I conduct. You see, I point it out, everything you’re to listen to.”

That approach to conducting, combined with the dynamic quality of his music, had a significant impact on the players in his ensembles.

“There’s no way you can sit in Gerald’s band and sit on the back of your chair,” bandleader/arranger John Clayton told the Detroit Free Press. “He handles the orchestra in a very wise and experienced craftsman sort of way. The combination of the heart and the craft is in perfect balance.”

Wilson’s mastery of the rich potential in big jazz band instrumentation was evident from the beginning. Although he was not pleased with his first arrangement — a version of the standard “Sometimes I’m Happy” written in 1939, when he was playing trumpet in the Jimmie Lunceford band — he was encouraged by Lunceford and his fellow players to write more. “Hi Spook,” his first original composition for big band, followed and was quickly added to the Lunceford repertoire. Soon after, Wilson wrote a brightly swinging number titled “Yard Dog Mazurka” — a popular piece that eventually became the inspiration for the Stan Kenton hit “Intermission Riff.” It was the beginning of an imaginative flow of music that would continue well into the 21st century.

Always an adventurous composer, Wilson’s big band music often had a personal touch, aimed at displaying the talents of a specific player, or inspired by many of his family members. After marrying his Mexican American wife, Josefina Villasenor Wilson, he was drawn to music possessing Spanish/Mexican qualities. His “Viva Tirado,” dedicated to bullfighter Jose Ramon Tirado, became a hit for the Latin rock group El Chicano and was one of several compositions celebrating the achievements of stars of the bullring.

“His pieces are all extended, with long solos and long backgrounds,” musician/jazz historian Loren Schoenberg told the New York Times in 1988. “They’re almost hypnotic. Most are seven to 10 minutes long. Only a master can keep the interest going that long, and he does.”
cComments
1

In addition to his compositions, Wilson was an arranger with the ability to craft songs to the styles of individual performers, as well as the musical characteristics of other orchestras. It was a skill that kept him busy during the periods when he was not concentrating on leading his own groups.

“I may have done more numbers and orchestrations than any other black jazz artist in the world,” he told the Los Angeles Sentinel. “I did 60-something for Ray Charles. I did his first and second country-western album. I wrote a lot of music for Count Basie, eight numbers for his first Carnegie Hall concert,” he said.

He also provided arrangements and compositions for such major jazz artists as Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Nancy Wilson and others, as well as — from various genres — Bobby Darin, Harry Belafonte, B.B. King and Les McCann.

Wilson’s longstanding desire to compose for symphony orchestra came to fruition with “Debut: 5/21/72,” commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1972 by the Philharmonic’s musical director, Zubin Mehta. His “Theme for Monterey,” composed as a commission by the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1997, received two Grammy nominations. In 2009, on his 91st birthday, he conducted the premiere of his six-movement work, “Detroit Suite,” a tribute to the city in which his music career began, commissioned by the Detroit International Jazz Festival.

Gerald Stanley Wilson was born Sept. 4, 1918, in Shelby, Miss. He began to take piano lessons with his mother, a schoolteacher, when he was 6. After purchasing an instrument from the Sears Roebuck catalog for $9.95, he took up the trumpet at age 11. The absence of a high school for African Americans in segregated Shelby made it necessary for him to begin his secondary school studies in Memphis. But a trip with his mother to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 stimulated a desire to move north, and he was sent to live with friends in Detroit, where he attended and graduated from the highly regarded Cass Technical High School.

An adept trumpeter while still in his teens, Wilson played at Detroit’s Plantation Club before joining the Chic Carter Band touring band. In 1939 he replaced trumpeter-arranger Sy Oliver in the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra, then one of the nation’s most prominent swing bands.

Wilson served in the U.S. Navy at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during World War II, then moved to Los Angeles, forming his own big band in 1944. Despite the band’s almost immediate success, with nearly 50 recorded pieces and a string of national bookings in its first years of existence, Wilson was not satisfied with his own personal level of craftsmanship. He disbanded the ensemble to spend a few years filling in what he believed were gaps in his music education. He also went on the road with the Count Basie Band and Dizzy Gillespie’s group.

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Wilson was an established participant in L.A.’s busy music scene, arranging, composing for jazz and pop singers, big bands, films and television, while continuing to be active with his own orchestra. Eager to pass on his knowledge and experience, he taught jazz courses at what is now Cal State Northridge, Cal State L.A. and UCLA, and had a radio program on KBCA-FM (105.1) from 1969 to 1976.

He had worked hard, he told the Boston Globe, so that in his later years he would no longer “have to go hustling any jobs. I have written for the symphony. I have written for the movies, and I have written for television. I arrange anything. I wanted to do all these things. I’ve done that. Now I’m doing exactly what I want, musically, and I do it when I please. I’m a musician, but first and foremost, a jazz musician.”

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Gerald Wilson dies at 96; multifaceted jazz musician – LA Times

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http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-gerald-wilson-20140909-story.html#page=1

** Gerald Wilson dies at 96; multifaceted jazz musician
————————————————————

Gerald Wilson, a bandleader, trumpeter, composer, arranger and educator whose multifaceted career reached from the swing era of the 1930s to the diverse jazz sounds of the 21st century, has died. He was 96.

Wilson, who had been in declining health, died Monday at his home in Los Angeles, two weeks after contracting pneumonia, said his son, jazz guitarist Anthony Wilson.

In a lifetime that spanned a substantial portion of the history of jazz, Wilson’s combination of articulate composition skills with a far-reaching creative vision carried him successfully through each of the music’s successive new evolutions.

He led his own Gerald Wilson Orchestras — initially for a few years in the mid-1940s, then intermittently in every succeeding decade — recording with stellar assemblages of players, continuing to perform live, well after big jazz bands had been largely eclipsed by small jazz groups and the ascendancy of rock music.
Gerald Wilson

Seeing and hearing Wilson lead his ensembles — especially in his later years — was a memorable experience for jazz fans. Garbed in well tailored suits, his long white hair flowing, Wilson shaped the music with dynamic movements and the elegant grace of a modern dancer.

Asked about his unique style of conducting by Terry Gross on the NPR show “Fresh Air” (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php%3FstoryId=5768733) in 2006, he replied: It’s “different from any style you’ve ever seen before. I move. I choreograph the music as I conduct. You see, I point it out, everything you’re to listen to.”

That approach to conducting, combined with the dynamic quality of his music, had a significant impact on the players in his ensembles.

“There’s no way you can sit in Gerald’s band and sit on the back of your chair,” bandleader/arranger John Clayton told the Detroit Free Press. “He handles the orchestra in a very wise and experienced craftsman sort of way. The combination of the heart and the craft is in perfect balance.”

Wilson’s mastery of the rich potential in big jazz band instrumentation was evident from the beginning. Although he was not pleased with his first arrangement — a version of the standard “Sometimes I’m Happy” written in 1939, when he was playing trumpet in the Jimmie Lunceford band — he was encouraged by Lunceford and his fellow players to write more. “Hi Spook,” his first original composition for big band, followed and was quickly added to the Lunceford repertoire. Soon after, Wilson wrote a brightly swinging number titled “Yard Dog Mazurka” — a popular piece that eventually became the inspiration for the Stan Kenton hit “Intermission Riff.” It was the beginning of an imaginative flow of music that would continue well into the 21st century.

Always an adventurous composer, Wilson’s big band music often had a personal touch, aimed at displaying the talents of a specific player, or inspired by many of his family members. After marrying his Mexican American wife, Josefina Villasenor Wilson, he was drawn to music possessing Spanish/Mexican qualities. His “Viva Tirado,” dedicated to bullfighter Jose Ramon Tirado, became a hit for the Latin rock group El Chicano and was one of several compositions celebrating the achievements of stars of the bullring.

“His pieces are all extended, with long solos and long backgrounds,” musician/jazz historian Loren Schoenberg told the New York Times in 1988. “They’re almost hypnotic. Most are seven to 10 minutes long. Only a master can keep the interest going that long, and he does.”
cComments
1

In addition to his compositions, Wilson was an arranger with the ability to craft songs to the styles of individual performers, as well as the musical characteristics of other orchestras. It was a skill that kept him busy during the periods when he was not concentrating on leading his own groups.

“I may have done more numbers and orchestrations than any other black jazz artist in the world,” he told the Los Angeles Sentinel. “I did 60-something for Ray Charles. I did his first and second country-western album. I wrote a lot of music for Count Basie, eight numbers for his first Carnegie Hall concert,” he said.

He also provided arrangements and compositions for such major jazz artists as Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Ella Fitzgerald, Nancy Wilson and others, as well as — from various genres — Bobby Darin, Harry Belafonte, B.B. King and Les McCann.

Wilson’s longstanding desire to compose for symphony orchestra came to fruition with “Debut: 5/21/72,” commissioned for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1972 by the Philharmonic’s musical director, Zubin Mehta. His “Theme for Monterey,” composed as a commission by the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1997, received two Grammy nominations. In 2009, on his 91st birthday, he conducted the premiere of his six-movement work, “Detroit Suite,” a tribute to the city in which his music career began, commissioned by the Detroit International Jazz Festival.

Gerald Stanley Wilson was born Sept. 4, 1918, in Shelby, Miss. He began to take piano lessons with his mother, a schoolteacher, when he was 6. After purchasing an instrument from the Sears Roebuck catalog for $9.95, he took up the trumpet at age 11. The absence of a high school for African Americans in segregated Shelby made it necessary for him to begin his secondary school studies in Memphis. But a trip with his mother to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 stimulated a desire to move north, and he was sent to live with friends in Detroit, where he attended and graduated from the highly regarded Cass Technical High School.

An adept trumpeter while still in his teens, Wilson played at Detroit’s Plantation Club before joining the Chic Carter Band touring band. In 1939 he replaced trumpeter-arranger Sy Oliver in the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra, then one of the nation’s most prominent swing bands.

Wilson served in the U.S. Navy at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center during World War II, then moved to Los Angeles, forming his own big band in 1944. Despite the band’s almost immediate success, with nearly 50 recorded pieces and a string of national bookings in its first years of existence, Wilson was not satisfied with his own personal level of craftsmanship. He disbanded the ensemble to spend a few years filling in what he believed were gaps in his music education. He also went on the road with the Count Basie Band and Dizzy Gillespie’s group.

Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, Wilson was an established participant in L.A.’s busy music scene, arranging, composing for jazz and pop singers, big bands, films and television, while continuing to be active with his own orchestra. Eager to pass on his knowledge and experience, he taught jazz courses at what is now Cal State Northridge, Cal State L.A. and UCLA, and had a radio program on KBCA-FM (105.1) from 1969 to 1976.

He had worked hard, he told the Boston Globe, so that in his later years he would no longer “have to go hustling any jobs. I have written for the symphony. I have written for the movies, and I have written for television. I arrange anything. I wanted to do all these things. I’ve done that. Now I’m doing exactly what I want, musically, and I do it when I please. I’m a musician, but first and foremost, a jazz musician.”

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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USA

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Sunday Is Sonny’s Birthday – JazzWax

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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/09/sunday-is-sonnys-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Jazzwax+%28JazzWax%29 (http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/09/sunday-is-sonnys-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Jazzwax+%28JazzWax%29)

** Sunday Is Sonny’s Birthday
————————————————————

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d062da50970c-popup
Sunday is Sonny Rollins’ 84th birthday. Rather than wait, I thought I’d share some of Sonny with you in an early celebration of the man, the artist and jazz’s greatest treasure. Happy pre-birthday Sonny! [Photo of Sonny Rollins above in 2005, by Jimmy & Dena Katz (https://www.1stdibs.com/art/photography/jimmy-dena-katz-sonny-rollins-williamsburg-bridge-nyc/id-a_43742/) ]

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervM_YIibnA) Capitolizing, the A-side of Sonny’s first recording, made on January 20, 1949, with the Babs Gonzales Orchestra: Bennie Green and J.J. Johnson (tb); Julius Watkins (fhr); Jordan Fordin (as); Sonny Rollins (ts); Linton Garner (p); Arthur Phipps (b); Jack Parker (d) and Babs Gonzales (vcl)…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQYkVcrAxkA) the B-side, Professor Bop…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5O3Xs-4cAI) Sonny in 1959 playing Paul’s Pal with Henry Grimes (b) and Joe Harris (d) in Sweden…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iPMqJuGQes&list=PLy3ywEWVjzR2bhM–Ut7Lm5q_ckPYkufp) Sonny in 1962 playing If Ever I Would Leave You with Jim Hall (g) Bob Cranshaw (b) and Ben Riley (d) on Ralph J. Gleason’s TV showJazz Casual…

And here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iBtRP_JxFQ) Sonny in 1965 [I belive in Copenhagen, with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen (b) and Alan Dawson (d)] playing There Will Never Be Another You…

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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

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Sunday Is Sonny’s Birthday – JazzWax

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/09/sunday-is-sonnys-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Jazzwax+%28JazzWax%29 (http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/09/sunday-is-sonnys-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Jazzwax+%28JazzWax%29)

** Sunday Is Sonny’s Birthday
————————————————————

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d062da50970c-popup
Sunday is Sonny Rollins’ 84th birthday. Rather than wait, I thought I’d share some of Sonny with you in an early celebration of the man, the artist and jazz’s greatest treasure. Happy pre-birthday Sonny! [Photo of Sonny Rollins above in 2005, by Jimmy & Dena Katz (https://www.1stdibs.com/art/photography/jimmy-dena-katz-sonny-rollins-williamsburg-bridge-nyc/id-a_43742/) ]

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervM_YIibnA) Capitolizing, the A-side of Sonny’s first recording, made on January 20, 1949, with the Babs Gonzales Orchestra: Bennie Green and J.J. Johnson (tb); Julius Watkins (fhr); Jordan Fordin (as); Sonny Rollins (ts); Linton Garner (p); Arthur Phipps (b); Jack Parker (d) and Babs Gonzales (vcl)…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQYkVcrAxkA) the B-side, Professor Bop…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5O3Xs-4cAI) Sonny in 1959 playing Paul’s Pal with Henry Grimes (b) and Joe Harris (d) in Sweden…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iPMqJuGQes&list=PLy3ywEWVjzR2bhM–Ut7Lm5q_ckPYkufp) Sonny in 1962 playing If Ever I Would Leave You with Jim Hall (g) Bob Cranshaw (b) and Ben Riley (d) on Ralph J. Gleason’s TV showJazz Casual…

And here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iBtRP_JxFQ) Sonny in 1965 [I belive in Copenhagen, with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen (b) and Alan Dawson (d)] playing There Will Never Be Another You…

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d5a1c65fca) | 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=d5a1c65fca&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!

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Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

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Sunday Is Sonny’s Birthday – JazzWax

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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/09/sunday-is-sonnys-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Jazzwax+%28JazzWax%29 (http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/09/sunday-is-sonnys-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Jazzwax+%28JazzWax%29)

** Sunday Is Sonny’s Birthday
————————————————————

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d062da50970c-popup
Sunday is Sonny Rollins’ 84th birthday. Rather than wait, I thought I’d share some of Sonny with you in an early celebration of the man, the artist and jazz’s greatest treasure. Happy pre-birthday Sonny! [Photo of Sonny Rollins above in 2005, by Jimmy & Dena Katz (https://www.1stdibs.com/art/photography/jimmy-dena-katz-sonny-rollins-williamsburg-bridge-nyc/id-a_43742/) ]

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ervM_YIibnA) Capitolizing, the A-side of Sonny’s first recording, made on January 20, 1949, with the Babs Gonzales Orchestra: Bennie Green and J.J. Johnson (tb); Julius Watkins (fhr); Jordan Fordin (as); Sonny Rollins (ts); Linton Garner (p); Arthur Phipps (b); Jack Parker (d) and Babs Gonzales (vcl)…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQYkVcrAxkA) the B-side, Professor Bop…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5O3Xs-4cAI) Sonny in 1959 playing Paul’s Pal with Henry Grimes (b) and Joe Harris (d) in Sweden…

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iPMqJuGQes&list=PLy3ywEWVjzR2bhM–Ut7Lm5q_ckPYkufp) Sonny in 1962 playing If Ever I Would Leave You with Jim Hall (g) Bob Cranshaw (b) and Ben Riley (d) on Ralph J. Gleason’s TV showJazz Casual…

And here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iBtRP_JxFQ) Sonny in 1965 [I belive in Copenhagen, with Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen (b) and Alan Dawson (d)] playing There Will Never Be Another You…

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d5a1c65fca) | 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=d5a1c65fca&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

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One Nation Underground Bernard Stollman and ESP-Disk Records: Chronogram Sept 2014

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One Nation Underground Bernard Stollman and ESP=-Disk Records: Chronogram Sept 2014 (http://issuu.com/chronogram/docs/chronogram_0914/1)

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Warwick, Ny 10990
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One Nation Underground Bernard Stollman and ESP-Disk Records: Chronogram Sept 2014

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One Nation Underground Bernard Stollman and ESP=-Disk Records: Chronogram Sept 2014 (http://issuu.com/chronogram/docs/chronogram_0914/1)

http://issuu.com/chronogram/docs/chronogram_0914/1

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
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One Nation Underground Bernard Stollman and ESP-Disk Records: Chronogram Sept 2014

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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
One Nation Underground Bernard Stollman and ESP=-Disk Records: Chronogram Sept 2014 (http://issuu.com/chronogram/docs/chronogram_0914/1)

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Hudson Valley Jazz in Spotlight for Fifth Annual Festival: DownBeat Magazine

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https://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2512 (https://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2512)

Members of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra perform at the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival on Aug. 16. (Photo: Hannah Maxwell)

** DownBeat Magazine
————————————————————

Hudson Valley Jazz in Spotlight for Fifth Annual Festival
Posted 9/3/2014

It was a sprawling, wraparound room full of diners in a rustic setting. Off a busy highway, the 236-year-old Landmark Inn in Warwick, New York, was playing host to the opening-night set of this year’s Hudson Valley Jazz Festival. On tap and playing with a backdrop of wall-to-wall picture windows that revealed seemingly endless fields of flora and fauna, the quartet of saxophonist Joel Frahm, organist Pete Levin, guitarist Jeff Ciampa and drummer Karl Latham somehow managed to make what they cooked up more interesting than the delicacies being dished from the kitchen.

Everything was floating as Levin’s gliding, soulful organ-grinder swing became the glue to flights of fancy from both Frahm and Ciampa, in a room that offered great acoustics and a homey atmosphere. Opening with a blues, Frahm coaxed some bluster and as Ciampa soared, the combination of sax and highly sheened guitar provided a spritely contrast for something that went “Up In Smoke.”

Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” was played as an uptempo, floating funk tune, and the addition of covers “Alone Together” and “Road Song” firmly established the fact that—despite Frahm and Ciampa’s nifty upfront soloing—this was definitely an organ band.

It was a quintessential example of the Hudson Valley festival’s goal of bringing great local talent together with more recognizable jazz names.

By way of surreal contrast, the Steve Frieder Trio at the otherwordly and totally modern Seligmann Center in nearby Chester, New York, suggested to concertgoers that the festival is anything but uniform.

The setting—on spacious park grounds, away from the swirl of traffic and nighttime tumult—was just right. The 23-year-old Frieder, alternating between tenor and alto saxophones, put an emphasis on composition, even though the music itself relied heavily on improvisation.

With keyboardist Neil Alexander and Kostas Galanopoulos on drums, the music was organized yet very fluid, melodic but loose-limbed, at times very swinging. Frieder’s lyrical tenor was the center, but gave full sway to his cohorts time and again.

Among the other memorable shows were a first-ever “Women of Jazz in the Hudson Valley” showcase, with singers Judi Silvano, Gabriele Tranchina and Kaitlyn Fay (with assured, sympathetic support from pianist Joe Vincent Tranchina, bassist John Arbo and Barbara Merjan on drums); saxophonist Eric Person with his Mehta-4 group; and the duo of guitarist Julian Lage and pianist Michael Eldridge.

Saxophonist Ohad Talmor and returning artists drummer Adam Nussbaum and bassist Steve Swallow played new music from their latest release, Singular Curves (Auand). The standards-driven, violin-led quartet Gabe Valle Ensemble, out of William Paterson College, performed at the Love Life Tattoo Parlor. A lovely Sunday-night closing concert on the green in downtown Warwick featured the big band New York Swing Exchange, yet another example of local talent billed alongside more recognizable names.

But the crown jewel of this year’s fifth annual Hudson Valley Jazz Festival emerged the night before, with the first-ever visit from the legendary Vanguard Jazz Orchestra to the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center.

Playing to a packed auditorium of 250, this incredibly well-oiled, 16-piece machine roared and soared to a selection of four Thad Jones and two Bob Brookmeyer charts that had you thinking they’d been written yesterday.

The group featured trumpeter Joe Magnarelli and tenor saxophonist Ralph LaLama on the robust swinging opener “Mean What You Say,” while “The Waltz You Swang For Me” highlighted the mesmerizing sounds of Billy Drewes on a very expressive, emotionally appealing soprano saxophone, along with the hearty Rock Ciccarone on trombone.

It was the perfect blend of swing with samba on the closing “My Centennial,” a red-hot Gary Smulyan tearing up the stage on baritone.

You could get away with saying the VJO was playing like it was a Kennedy Center event, the dignitaries in this case being the enraptured patrons gazing at the stage. Heady solos were wrapped inside ensemble passages, played like an extension of the horn that was leading the charge, driven from behind by the estimable, riveting John Riley on drums.

From song to song, and with no drop in intensity or feel for mood, the greatness of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra this night could be summarized by its never-flagging embrace of the solo voice by a uniquely and time-tested ensemble voice, the whole bunch of them swinging their collective asses off.

—John Ephland

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Hudson Valley Jazz in Spotlight for Fifth Annual Festival: DownBeat Magazine

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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2512 (https://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2512)

Members of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra perform at the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival on Aug. 16. (Photo: Hannah Maxwell)

** DownBeat Magazine
————————————————————

Hudson Valley Jazz in Spotlight for Fifth Annual Festival
Posted 9/3/2014

It was a sprawling, wraparound room full of diners in a rustic setting. Off a busy highway, the 236-year-old Landmark Inn in Warwick, New York, was playing host to the opening-night set of this year’s Hudson Valley Jazz Festival. On tap and playing with a backdrop of wall-to-wall picture windows that revealed seemingly endless fields of flora and fauna, the quartet of saxophonist Joel Frahm, organist Pete Levin, guitarist Jeff Ciampa and drummer Karl Latham somehow managed to make what they cooked up more interesting than the delicacies being dished from the kitchen.

Everything was floating as Levin’s gliding, soulful organ-grinder swing became the glue to flights of fancy from both Frahm and Ciampa, in a room that offered great acoustics and a homey atmosphere. Opening with a blues, Frahm coaxed some bluster and as Ciampa soared, the combination of sax and highly sheened guitar provided a spritely contrast for something that went “Up In Smoke.”

Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” was played as an uptempo, floating funk tune, and the addition of covers “Alone Together” and “Road Song” firmly established the fact that—despite Frahm and Ciampa’s nifty upfront soloing—this was definitely an organ band.

It was a quintessential example of the Hudson Valley festival’s goal of bringing great local talent together with more recognizable jazz names.

By way of surreal contrast, the Steve Frieder Trio at the otherwordly and totally modern Seligmann Center in nearby Chester, New York, suggested to concertgoers that the festival is anything but uniform.

The setting—on spacious park grounds, away from the swirl of traffic and nighttime tumult—was just right. The 23-year-old Frieder, alternating between tenor and alto saxophones, put an emphasis on composition, even though the music itself relied heavily on improvisation.

With keyboardist Neil Alexander and Kostas Galanopoulos on drums, the music was organized yet very fluid, melodic but loose-limbed, at times very swinging. Frieder’s lyrical tenor was the center, but gave full sway to his cohorts time and again.

Among the other memorable shows were a first-ever “Women of Jazz in the Hudson Valley” showcase, with singers Judi Silvano, Gabriele Tranchina and Kaitlyn Fay (with assured, sympathetic support from pianist Joe Vincent Tranchina, bassist John Arbo and Barbara Merjan on drums); saxophonist Eric Person with his Mehta-4 group; and the duo of guitarist Julian Lage and pianist Michael Eldridge.

Saxophonist Ohad Talmor and returning artists drummer Adam Nussbaum and bassist Steve Swallow played new music from their latest release, Singular Curves (Auand). The standards-driven, violin-led quartet Gabe Valle Ensemble, out of William Paterson College, performed at the Love Life Tattoo Parlor. A lovely Sunday-night closing concert on the green in downtown Warwick featured the big band New York Swing Exchange, yet another example of local talent billed alongside more recognizable names.

But the crown jewel of this year’s fifth annual Hudson Valley Jazz Festival emerged the night before, with the first-ever visit from the legendary Vanguard Jazz Orchestra to the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center.

Playing to a packed auditorium of 250, this incredibly well-oiled, 16-piece machine roared and soared to a selection of four Thad Jones and two Bob Brookmeyer charts that had you thinking they’d been written yesterday.

The group featured trumpeter Joe Magnarelli and tenor saxophonist Ralph LaLama on the robust swinging opener “Mean What You Say,” while “The Waltz You Swang For Me” highlighted the mesmerizing sounds of Billy Drewes on a very expressive, emotionally appealing soprano saxophone, along with the hearty Rock Ciccarone on trombone.

It was the perfect blend of swing with samba on the closing “My Centennial,” a red-hot Gary Smulyan tearing up the stage on baritone.

You could get away with saying the VJO was playing like it was a Kennedy Center event, the dignitaries in this case being the enraptured patrons gazing at the stage. Heady solos were wrapped inside ensemble passages, played like an extension of the horn that was leading the charge, driven from behind by the estimable, riveting John Riley on drums.

From song to song, and with no drop in intensity or feel for mood, the greatness of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra this night could be summarized by its never-flagging embrace of the solo voice by a uniquely and time-tested ensemble voice, the whole bunch of them swinging their collective asses off.

—John Ephland

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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Hudson Valley Jazz in Spotlight for Fifth Annual Festival: DownBeat Magazine

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http://twitter.com/#!/jazzpromo https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jazz-Promo-Services/216022288429676
https://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2512 (https://www.downbeat.com/default.asp?sect=news&subsect=news_detail&nid=2512)

Members of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra perform at the Hudson Valley Jazz Festival on Aug. 16. (Photo: Hannah Maxwell)

** DownBeat Magazine
————————————————————

Hudson Valley Jazz in Spotlight for Fifth Annual Festival
Posted 9/3/2014

It was a sprawling, wraparound room full of diners in a rustic setting. Off a busy highway, the 236-year-old Landmark Inn in Warwick, New York, was playing host to the opening-night set of this year’s Hudson Valley Jazz Festival. On tap and playing with a backdrop of wall-to-wall picture windows that revealed seemingly endless fields of flora and fauna, the quartet of saxophonist Joel Frahm, organist Pete Levin, guitarist Jeff Ciampa and drummer Karl Latham somehow managed to make what they cooked up more interesting than the delicacies being dished from the kitchen.

Everything was floating as Levin’s gliding, soulful organ-grinder swing became the glue to flights of fancy from both Frahm and Ciampa, in a room that offered great acoustics and a homey atmosphere. Opening with a blues, Frahm coaxed some bluster and as Ciampa soared, the combination of sax and highly sheened guitar provided a spritely contrast for something that went “Up In Smoke.”

Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” was played as an uptempo, floating funk tune, and the addition of covers “Alone Together” and “Road Song” firmly established the fact that—despite Frahm and Ciampa’s nifty upfront soloing—this was definitely an organ band.

It was a quintessential example of the Hudson Valley festival’s goal of bringing great local talent together with more recognizable jazz names.

By way of surreal contrast, the Steve Frieder Trio at the otherwordly and totally modern Seligmann Center in nearby Chester, New York, suggested to concertgoers that the festival is anything but uniform.

The setting—on spacious park grounds, away from the swirl of traffic and nighttime tumult—was just right. The 23-year-old Frieder, alternating between tenor and alto saxophones, put an emphasis on composition, even though the music itself relied heavily on improvisation.

With keyboardist Neil Alexander and Kostas Galanopoulos on drums, the music was organized yet very fluid, melodic but loose-limbed, at times very swinging. Frieder’s lyrical tenor was the center, but gave full sway to his cohorts time and again.

Among the other memorable shows were a first-ever “Women of Jazz in the Hudson Valley” showcase, with singers Judi Silvano, Gabriele Tranchina and Kaitlyn Fay (with assured, sympathetic support from pianist Joe Vincent Tranchina, bassist John Arbo and Barbara Merjan on drums); saxophonist Eric Person with his Mehta-4 group; and the duo of guitarist Julian Lage and pianist Michael Eldridge.

Saxophonist Ohad Talmor and returning artists drummer Adam Nussbaum and bassist Steve Swallow played new music from their latest release, Singular Curves (Auand). The standards-driven, violin-led quartet Gabe Valle Ensemble, out of William Paterson College, performed at the Love Life Tattoo Parlor. A lovely Sunday-night closing concert on the green in downtown Warwick featured the big band New York Swing Exchange, yet another example of local talent billed alongside more recognizable names.

But the crown jewel of this year’s fifth annual Hudson Valley Jazz Festival emerged the night before, with the first-ever visit from the legendary Vanguard Jazz Orchestra to the Sugar Loaf Performing Arts Center.

Playing to a packed auditorium of 250, this incredibly well-oiled, 16-piece machine roared and soared to a selection of four Thad Jones and two Bob Brookmeyer charts that had you thinking they’d been written yesterday.

The group featured trumpeter Joe Magnarelli and tenor saxophonist Ralph LaLama on the robust swinging opener “Mean What You Say,” while “The Waltz You Swang For Me” highlighted the mesmerizing sounds of Billy Drewes on a very expressive, emotionally appealing soprano saxophone, along with the hearty Rock Ciccarone on trombone.

It was the perfect blend of swing with samba on the closing “My Centennial,” a red-hot Gary Smulyan tearing up the stage on baritone.

You could get away with saying the VJO was playing like it was a Kennedy Center event, the dignitaries in this case being the enraptured patrons gazing at the stage. Heady solos were wrapped inside ensemble passages, played like an extension of the horn that was leading the charge, driven from behind by the estimable, riveting John Riley on drums.

From song to song, and with no drop in intensity or feel for mood, the greatness of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra this night could be summarized by its never-flagging embrace of the solo voice by a uniquely and time-tested ensemble voice, the whole bunch of them swinging their collective asses off.

—John Ephland

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=a407983281) | 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=a407983281&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2014 All rights reserved.

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Willie Ruff, Jazz Eminence and Master Storyteller, Tells All at Yale Art Gallery | WNPR News

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** Willie Ruff, Jazz Eminence and Master Storyteller, Tells All at Yale Art Gallery
————————————————————

Willie Ruff, the celebrated French horn player and double bassist (http://willieruff.com/) , venerable Yale School of Music professor, founder/director of Yale’s prestigious Duke Ellington Fellowship Program, award-winning author, documentarian, historian, linguist, ethnomusicologist, and voracious autodidact, is a man of so many intricate, smoothly running, coolly calibrated cerebral parts that he is, indeed, one of the jazz world’s true Renaissance figures.
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnpr/files/201409/A_Call_to_Assembly.jpg

One of the greatest gifts of this soft-spoken, unflappably cool gentleman and scholar, who’s originally from Sheffield, Alabama, is his natural-born talent for storytelling. His 1992 memoir, A Call to Assembly, which won the coveted Deems Taylor Award for excellence, is aptly subtitled, The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller.

Ruff’s smooth storytelling skills enliven any topic of his choosing, whether it be profound social issues or the meaning of the blues. His story lines flow like a fluent, lyrical Lester Young solo. Especially when he’s recounting his picaresque life story, a narrative rooted in his dramatic transformation from dirt-poor, ninth-grade dropout to renowned, globe-trotting jazz missionary, educator and performer.

As a hip jazz intellectual, Ruff’s constantly surprising bag of tours de forcehas included multilingual lectures at conservatories, delivered in Russian in Moscow, and most famously in Mandarin in Shanghai. Hiscommentaries were a prelude to concert performances by the universally acclaimed Mitchell/Ruff Duo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEuO1Eris0E) , a more than a half-century alliance with his close friend and longtime musical partner, the virtuoso pianist Dwike Mitchell, who died last April at 83.

At Shanghai Conservatory, Ruff, the consummately charming, cosmopolitan master storyteller and lecturer, even dared to try out a joke in Mandarin on the native, Mandarin-speaking audience. Happily, the erudite Yale professor’s quip drew appreciative laughter. Maybe it was because his listeners were so enthralled by this engaging African American academic/musician explaining to them the African roots of American jazz, expressed in fluent Mandarin, no less.
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnpr/files/201409/Willie_Ruff_and_Dwike_Mitchell.jpg
What propels Ruff, aside from his insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, is the sheer joy of doing what he loves to do.

Ruff, who speaks eight languages, will stick to his native tongue and his first linguistic love, English, as he delivers a multimedia talk at 5:30 pm on Thursday, September 4, in the lecture hall at the Yale University Art Gallery at 1111 Chapel Street in New Haven. Illustrated with historic film clips and vintage recorded material, the lecture, which is free, is titled, “A Cinematic Excursion through the American Jazz Century.” It’s part of the gallery’s exhibition, “Jazz Lives: The Photographs of Lee Friedlander and Milt Hinton,” (http://wnpr.org/post/yale-photo-show-offers-intimate-insights-jazz-world) which closes Sunday, September 7.

A jazz and photography connoisseur’s delight, the Yale photo show features fresh ways to view jazz and its practitioners through its evocative black-and-white images by Friedlander, a highly original, iconic American photographer, and Hinton, a legendary bassist whose open access to jazz greats brings a candid, intimate ambiance to his photo portraits.
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnpr/files/201404/YaleUnivArtGallery_06_Friedlander_PreservationHall.png

What initially sparked the gallery talk was Ruff’s close relationship with Hinton. It goes back many years when Ruff, who was then a young undergrad at Yale, traveled with a woodwind quintet from the New Haven campus to New York City to make a recording accompanied by a jazz trio for Epic Records. “We had worked on the woodwind quintet material on our campus,” he said, “and a record deal was made. We had no idea who was going to be in the jazz rhythm section until we arrived at the recording studio. We were elated to discover that it was Milt Hinton on bass, Jo Jones on drums, and Billy Taylor on piano. Later on, I did a lot of recording with Milt as a session player in New York.”

To illustrate his recollections of Hinton, Ruff unearthed footage of the great bass player on YouTube, including clips chronicling his famous stint with the Cab Calloway Orchestra, one of the most famous ensembles of the Big Band Era.

Another major theme of the gallery talk, which may include autobiographical elements from Ruff’s hardscrabble youth in Alabama on through his worldwide triumphs with the Mitchell/Ruff Duo, focuses on the centennial of the publication of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” a powerfully influential classic in American popular music.

Ruff grew up not far from Handy’s birthplace in rural Alabama. He recalls quite vividly the day that the great American composer, powerhouse publisher, and Harlem Renaissance grandee visited the small, segregated schoolhouse he attended in the 1930s. “Handy came to our school when I was in second grade,” Ruff said, “and talked to us, and played his trumpet as we sang. …He told us how difficult his life had been, particularly after he let it be known to his family that he wanted to be a musician.”

To illustrate his reflections on Handy, Ruff tracked down a fascinating radio recording on which the songwriter, known as “The Father of the Blues,” recounted a life-shaping incident from his own early, small-town school days when he was warned against the evils of pursuing a musical career. “You can hear Handy on this tape speaking in his own distinctive voice,” Ruff said. Altering his voice to sound like Handy’s, he recited the words heard on the ancient recording:

I couldn’t tell the story of the St. Louis Blues without including the moment when our school teacher down in Florence, Alabama, called the class to order, and instead of beginning our reading lessons, asked each of us what we wanted to be in life.

Some said doctors, lawyers, merchants, and several other trades. When he came to me, I said, “I want to be a musician.” He read me a lecture, and told me that music would lead me to the gutter; that musicians are idlers and dissipated characters; and wrote my father a note, which, when my father — who was a preacher — read it, said to me, “Sonny, I would rather follow you to your grave than to see you be a musician.”

Reverting to his own speaking voice, Ruff said, “Now, that’s the coldest advice I ever heard!”

During Handy’s visit to Ruff’s schoolhouse more than seven decades ago, the awestruck youngster not only hung on to the old sage’s every word, but, best of all, even got to shake the godlike figure’s hand before he departed. “All of us who were identified as musically inclined,” Ruff said of this early brush with greatness, “were permitted to line up, and shake the hand that wrote the St. Louis Blues. I was never the same boy again. It ruined my life, but I forgive him.”

For his gallery talk, Ruff could riff on the enlightening, liberating impact that both his military service (he enlisted at 14, lying about his age) and his education at Yale (where he went on the GI Bill) had on him. Or he could shift gears and discuss his vital connections with the Ellington Fellows he’s brought to Yale since 1972, a legion of jazz and cultural superheroes ranging from Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington to Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.

Ruff could chat about running his own jazz club, called The Playback, in New Haven. A fabled piece of the Elm City’s distinguished jazz history, The Playback had a glorious three-year run on Winchester Avenue, bringing in a continuous stream of jazz greats including Stan Getz, Marian McPartland, Slam Stewart, Roy Eldridge (a frequent guest), and a then-young, brilliant pianist named Horace Silver, who Ruff said was also a soulfully-swinging tenor saxophonist.

In retrospect, one of the great historic moments for The Playback occurred when Ruff presented a young, unknown singer named Aretha Franklin. Ruff was asked to give Franklin the gig, as a favor, by the legendary producer John Hammond, a Columbia Records potentate, and discoverer of talents ranging from Count Basie and Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen.

Drawn from Ruff’s personal experiences, his anecdotes and reflections on the famous and the obscure spring to life thanks to his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, irrepressible sense of humor, and novelist’s eye for the telling detail. Plus, there’s the polymath’s ability to put everything in context as when, for example, he explains why he’s so mad about the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, Gregorian Chants, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, and the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo.

Ruff’s narrations and explications are presented clearly and gracefully. It doesn’t matter whether he’s explaining what makes a Duke Ellington composition work aesthetically, or on a deeply personal level, discussing the profoundly inspirational influence that the heroic Tuskegee Airmen had on him as a poor, motherless child growing up in the racist Old South of the 1940s, earning a pittance by plowing farmland behind a mule.

One of eight children, Ruff was born on Labor Day, 1931 (an appropriate birth date for a lifelong striver) into crushing poverty in a modest four-room house with no electricity. Not long after Ruff was born, his father skipped out, heading north to Chicago to get a job, leaving Willie’s mother behind to raise the family on the $5.00 a week she earned as a maid. As if this weren’t already too much to bear, Ruff’s mother died when he was only 12.

Despite this Dickensian-like, worst-of-times childhood, it always seems to be the best of times for the upbeat, high-energy Ruff, especially when he’s working on his next project, as with his upcoming lecture at Yale, which has his creative juices flowing. With the talk’s multimedia format — a prototype that Ruff plans to expand on, and tailor for a variety of media and venues, including lecture halls, classrooms, radio, and streaming TV — the musical maven can take his act out on the road, using digital age resources to complement his timeless storytelling gifts.

What propels Ruff, aside from his insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, is the sheer joy of doing what he loves to do. It’s a jubilant feeling of deliverance that he experienced even as young man just beginning his journey, illustrated by a typical diamond-in-the-Ruff anecdote.

“My very first year at Yale there was a little club on Dixwell Avenue called the Monterey,” Ruff recalled, “where some of the Hartford jazz crowd would also come, musicians like drummer Walt Bolden and bassist Joe Calloway. This one night, who walked into the club to perform but the singer Betty Roche. Everybody had turned out, because they knew Betty’s performance of ‘Take the A-Train’ with Duke Ellington. I thought, here I am, at only 19, just five blocks from the Yale campus, playing bass on the bandstand with the great Betty Roche in New Haven, Connecticut. I said to myself, I believe in miracles.” Information: artgallery.yale.edu (http://artgallery.yale.edu/) and (203) 432-0600.
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnpr/files/201409/Etienne_Charles.jpg

Magical Potions of Creole Soul

Etienne Charles, the red-hot groovemeister of Afro-Caribbean creole soul (http://www.etiennecharles.com/) — cooking with everything from calypso to reggae to Haitian seasonings — leads his searing sextet at 7:30 pm on Saturday, September 6, as the headliner for the Main Stage lineup at the free Northampton Jazz Festival (http://www.northamptonjazzfestival.org/) . A hip alchemist, Charles serves earthy, eclectic potions laced with soulful soupcons of everything marvelous from Motown to Marley tapped from his bubbling cauldron of a CD, Creole Soul.

Starting at 11:00 am on Hampton Avenue behind Thorne’s Market, the festival’s major event also features trombonist Steve Davis at 2:45 pm; pianist/vocalist Champian Fulton at 4:15 pm; and the swaggering saxophonist Seamus Blake at 5:45 pm. Information:northamptonjazzfestival.org (http://northamptonjazzfestival.org/) .

Jazz Fest Touts Tolerance

Joined by such stalwarts as vocalist Antoinette Montague and trumpeter Ricky Alfonso, the noted singer/producer/activist Nicki Mathis presents the admission-free Many Colors of a WOMAN Jazz Festival at 8:00 pm on Saturday, September 6 at Faith Congregational Church in Hartford.

Along with its advocacy of a world free from sexism and racism, the festival is noted for its diverse, quality musical fare which features, among many assets, trombonists Bill Lowe and Deborah Weisz. Information: (860) 547-0820.

Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com (mailto:omac28@gmail.com) . Comments left below are also most welcome.

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Willie Ruff, Jazz Eminence and Master Storyteller, Tells All at Yale Art Gallery | WNPR News

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http://wnpr.org/post/willie-ruff-jazz-eminence-and-master-storyteller-tells-all-yale-art-gallery

** Willie Ruff, Jazz Eminence and Master Storyteller, Tells All at Yale Art Gallery
————————————————————

Willie Ruff, the celebrated French horn player and double bassist (http://willieruff.com/) , venerable Yale School of Music professor, founder/director of Yale’s prestigious Duke Ellington Fellowship Program, award-winning author, documentarian, historian, linguist, ethnomusicologist, and voracious autodidact, is a man of so many intricate, smoothly running, coolly calibrated cerebral parts that he is, indeed, one of the jazz world’s true Renaissance figures.
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One of the greatest gifts of this soft-spoken, unflappably cool gentleman and scholar, who’s originally from Sheffield, Alabama, is his natural-born talent for storytelling. His 1992 memoir, A Call to Assembly, which won the coveted Deems Taylor Award for excellence, is aptly subtitled, The Autobiography of a Musical Storyteller.

Ruff’s smooth storytelling skills enliven any topic of his choosing, whether it be profound social issues or the meaning of the blues. His story lines flow like a fluent, lyrical Lester Young solo. Especially when he’s recounting his picaresque life story, a narrative rooted in his dramatic transformation from dirt-poor, ninth-grade dropout to renowned, globe-trotting jazz missionary, educator and performer.

As a hip jazz intellectual, Ruff’s constantly surprising bag of tours de forcehas included multilingual lectures at conservatories, delivered in Russian in Moscow, and most famously in Mandarin in Shanghai. Hiscommentaries were a prelude to concert performances by the universally acclaimed Mitchell/Ruff Duo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEuO1Eris0E) , a more than a half-century alliance with his close friend and longtime musical partner, the virtuoso pianist Dwike Mitchell, who died last April at 83.

At Shanghai Conservatory, Ruff, the consummately charming, cosmopolitan master storyteller and lecturer, even dared to try out a joke in Mandarin on the native, Mandarin-speaking audience. Happily, the erudite Yale professor’s quip drew appreciative laughter. Maybe it was because his listeners were so enthralled by this engaging African American academic/musician explaining to them the African roots of American jazz, expressed in fluent Mandarin, no less.
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What propels Ruff, aside from his insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, is the sheer joy of doing what he loves to do.

Ruff, who speaks eight languages, will stick to his native tongue and his first linguistic love, English, as he delivers a multimedia talk at 5:30 pm on Thursday, September 4, in the lecture hall at the Yale University Art Gallery at 1111 Chapel Street in New Haven. Illustrated with historic film clips and vintage recorded material, the lecture, which is free, is titled, “A Cinematic Excursion through the American Jazz Century.” It’s part of the gallery’s exhibition, “Jazz Lives: The Photographs of Lee Friedlander and Milt Hinton,” (http://wnpr.org/post/yale-photo-show-offers-intimate-insights-jazz-world) which closes Sunday, September 7.

A jazz and photography connoisseur’s delight, the Yale photo show features fresh ways to view jazz and its practitioners through its evocative black-and-white images by Friedlander, a highly original, iconic American photographer, and Hinton, a legendary bassist whose open access to jazz greats brings a candid, intimate ambiance to his photo portraits.
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What initially sparked the gallery talk was Ruff’s close relationship with Hinton. It goes back many years when Ruff, who was then a young undergrad at Yale, traveled with a woodwind quintet from the New Haven campus to New York City to make a recording accompanied by a jazz trio for Epic Records. “We had worked on the woodwind quintet material on our campus,” he said, “and a record deal was made. We had no idea who was going to be in the jazz rhythm section until we arrived at the recording studio. We were elated to discover that it was Milt Hinton on bass, Jo Jones on drums, and Billy Taylor on piano. Later on, I did a lot of recording with Milt as a session player in New York.”

To illustrate his recollections of Hinton, Ruff unearthed footage of the great bass player on YouTube, including clips chronicling his famous stint with the Cab Calloway Orchestra, one of the most famous ensembles of the Big Band Era.

Another major theme of the gallery talk, which may include autobiographical elements from Ruff’s hardscrabble youth in Alabama on through his worldwide triumphs with the Mitchell/Ruff Duo, focuses on the centennial of the publication of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” a powerfully influential classic in American popular music.

Ruff grew up not far from Handy’s birthplace in rural Alabama. He recalls quite vividly the day that the great American composer, powerhouse publisher, and Harlem Renaissance grandee visited the small, segregated schoolhouse he attended in the 1930s. “Handy came to our school when I was in second grade,” Ruff said, “and talked to us, and played his trumpet as we sang. …He told us how difficult his life had been, particularly after he let it be known to his family that he wanted to be a musician.”

To illustrate his reflections on Handy, Ruff tracked down a fascinating radio recording on which the songwriter, known as “The Father of the Blues,” recounted a life-shaping incident from his own early, small-town school days when he was warned against the evils of pursuing a musical career. “You can hear Handy on this tape speaking in his own distinctive voice,” Ruff said. Altering his voice to sound like Handy’s, he recited the words heard on the ancient recording:

I couldn’t tell the story of the St. Louis Blues without including the moment when our school teacher down in Florence, Alabama, called the class to order, and instead of beginning our reading lessons, asked each of us what we wanted to be in life.

Some said doctors, lawyers, merchants, and several other trades. When he came to me, I said, “I want to be a musician.” He read me a lecture, and told me that music would lead me to the gutter; that musicians are idlers and dissipated characters; and wrote my father a note, which, when my father — who was a preacher — read it, said to me, “Sonny, I would rather follow you to your grave than to see you be a musician.”

Reverting to his own speaking voice, Ruff said, “Now, that’s the coldest advice I ever heard!”

During Handy’s visit to Ruff’s schoolhouse more than seven decades ago, the awestruck youngster not only hung on to the old sage’s every word, but, best of all, even got to shake the godlike figure’s hand before he departed. “All of us who were identified as musically inclined,” Ruff said of this early brush with greatness, “were permitted to line up, and shake the hand that wrote the St. Louis Blues. I was never the same boy again. It ruined my life, but I forgive him.”

For his gallery talk, Ruff could riff on the enlightening, liberating impact that both his military service (he enlisted at 14, lying about his age) and his education at Yale (where he went on the GI Bill) had on him. Or he could shift gears and discuss his vital connections with the Ellington Fellows he’s brought to Yale since 1972, a legion of jazz and cultural superheroes ranging from Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington to Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.

Ruff could chat about running his own jazz club, called The Playback, in New Haven. A fabled piece of the Elm City’s distinguished jazz history, The Playback had a glorious three-year run on Winchester Avenue, bringing in a continuous stream of jazz greats including Stan Getz, Marian McPartland, Slam Stewart, Roy Eldridge (a frequent guest), and a then-young, brilliant pianist named Horace Silver, who Ruff said was also a soulfully-swinging tenor saxophonist.

In retrospect, one of the great historic moments for The Playback occurred when Ruff presented a young, unknown singer named Aretha Franklin. Ruff was asked to give Franklin the gig, as a favor, by the legendary producer John Hammond, a Columbia Records potentate, and discoverer of talents ranging from Count Basie and Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen.

Drawn from Ruff’s personal experiences, his anecdotes and reflections on the famous and the obscure spring to life thanks to his pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, irrepressible sense of humor, and novelist’s eye for the telling detail. Plus, there’s the polymath’s ability to put everything in context as when, for example, he explains why he’s so mad about the 17th-century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, Gregorian Chants, Igor Stravinsky, Charlie Parker, and the Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo.

Ruff’s narrations and explications are presented clearly and gracefully. It doesn’t matter whether he’s explaining what makes a Duke Ellington composition work aesthetically, or on a deeply personal level, discussing the profoundly inspirational influence that the heroic Tuskegee Airmen had on him as a poor, motherless child growing up in the racist Old South of the 1940s, earning a pittance by plowing farmland behind a mule.

One of eight children, Ruff was born on Labor Day, 1931 (an appropriate birth date for a lifelong striver) into crushing poverty in a modest four-room house with no electricity. Not long after Ruff was born, his father skipped out, heading north to Chicago to get a job, leaving Willie’s mother behind to raise the family on the $5.00 a week she earned as a maid. As if this weren’t already too much to bear, Ruff’s mother died when he was only 12.

Despite this Dickensian-like, worst-of-times childhood, it always seems to be the best of times for the upbeat, high-energy Ruff, especially when he’s working on his next project, as with his upcoming lecture at Yale, which has his creative juices flowing. With the talk’s multimedia format — a prototype that Ruff plans to expand on, and tailor for a variety of media and venues, including lecture halls, classrooms, radio, and streaming TV — the musical maven can take his act out on the road, using digital age resources to complement his timeless storytelling gifts.

What propels Ruff, aside from his insatiable curiosity about virtually everything, is the sheer joy of doing what he loves to do. It’s a jubilant feeling of deliverance that he experienced even as young man just beginning his journey, illustrated by a typical diamond-in-the-Ruff anecdote.

“My very first year at Yale there was a little club on Dixwell Avenue called the Monterey,” Ruff recalled, “where some of the Hartford jazz crowd would also come, musicians like drummer Walt Bolden and bassist Joe Calloway. This one night, who walked into the club to perform but the singer Betty Roche. Everybody had turned out, because they knew Betty’s performance of ‘Take the A-Train’ with Duke Ellington. I thought, here I am, at only 19, just five blocks from the Yale campus, playing bass on the bandstand with the great Betty Roche in New Haven, Connecticut. I said to myself, I believe in miracles.” Information: artgallery.yale.edu (http://artgallery.yale.edu/) and (203) 432-0600.
http://mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wnpr/files/201409/Etienne_Charles.jpg

Magical Potions of Creole Soul

Etienne Charles, the red-hot groovemeister of Afro-Caribbean creole soul (http://www.etiennecharles.com/) — cooking with everything from calypso to reggae to Haitian seasonings — leads his searing sextet at 7:30 pm on Saturday, September 6, as the headliner for the Main Stage lineup at the free Northampton Jazz Festival (http://www.northamptonjazzfestival.org/) . A hip alchemist, Charles serves earthy, eclectic potions laced with soulful soupcons of everything marvelous from Motown to Marley tapped from his bubbling cauldron of a CD, Creole Soul.

Starting at 11:00 am on Hampton Avenue behind Thorne’s Market, the festival’s major event also features trombonist Steve Davis at 2:45 pm; pianist/vocalist Champian Fulton at 4:15 pm; and the swaggering saxophonist Seamus Blake at 5:45 pm. Information:northamptonjazzfestival.org (http://northamptonjazzfestival.org/) .

Jazz Fest Touts Tolerance

Joined by such stalwarts as vocalist Antoinette Montague and trumpeter Ricky Alfonso, the noted singer/producer/activist Nicki Mathis presents the admission-free Many Colors of a WOMAN Jazz Festival at 8:00 pm on Saturday, September 6 at Faith Congregational Church in Hartford.

Along with its advocacy of a world free from sexism and racism, the festival is noted for its diverse, quality musical fare which features, among many assets, trombonists Bill Lowe and Deborah Weisz. Information: (860) 547-0820.

Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com (mailto:omac28@gmail.com) . Comments left below are also most welcome.

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d16d7c6014) | 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=d16d7c6014&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

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