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Full Concerts From The Newport Jazz Festival

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** Jon Batiste And Stay Human: Newport Jazz 2014 (http://click.et.npr.org/?qs=833baca234fd19306bc52b0257977b1a6a6b9bba7173e976093ece0ea4b707597a3d015f49f3802a)
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Following a high-energy main stage set â•‰ filled with turbocharged versions of standards, rags and his own party anthems â•‰ the young pianist and singer brought his band out into the audience.
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A BLOG SUPREME

** Newport Jazz 2014 In Photos (http://click.et.npr.org/?qs=833baca234fd1930c9aafa58ce9829292fe60af9df97bdb48ed4eae8c1a72b227fd66846c298415e)
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The 60th anniversary of the festival saw more than 45 bands perform overlooking the water in New England. Our photographer captured nearly every 2014 act, through abundant sunshine and driving rain.

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NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL

** Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society: Newport Jazz 2014 (http://click.et.npr.org/?qs=833baca234fd1930a09bb3f401db08aa3af38808b034d2b5594910e396b349f4ae4f3b327ede3a39)
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With a sly salute to fellow composer and big-band leader Duke Ellington, Argue presents the U.S. premiere of a new 35-minute work. It joins other unrecorded tunes during Secret Society’s Newport set.

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NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL

** Gregory Porter: Newport Jazz 2014 (http://click.et.npr.org/?qs=833baca234fd1930136d7925a6f6004b27a61a927f38405fb9d3e03819ce1556aa586d93b4ce56c5)
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The commanding singer named two of his three albums Water and Liquid Spirit. Appropriately, in his triumphant return to Newport, Porter projected his booming voice through day-long rain showers.

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NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL

** Berklee Global Jazz Ambassadors With David Sanchez: Newport Jazz 2014 (http://click.et.npr.org/?qs=833baca234fd193081892d74430e659f91bfd511764f01915894e8e413dd86f0e050d8a74d49179c)
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The Puerto Rican tenor saxophonist joins a select international ensemble from one of jazz’s top conservatories in a festival-opening performance of his own compositions.

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August 11, 2014 / No Comments / More

Henry Stone, Fixture on Disco Scene, Dies at 93 | Billboard

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Henry Stone, 1974

Henry Stone, head of Miami disco label TK Records, presents a gold disc to his artist George McCrae for sales of the single ‘Rock Your Baby’ in 1974 in the United States.
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Henry Stone, a fixture on the R&B and disco scene who was instrumental in the careers of Ray Charles, James Brown and KC & the Sunshine Band, has died. He was 93.

Stone, a co-founder of the famed TK Records, died Thursday of natural causes at a Miami-area hospital, the funeral home Riverside Gordon Memorial Chapels confirmed.

Stone opened up a record-distribution business and recording studio in South Florida in 1948 and within a few years recorded his first artist, a pianist-singer from the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind who would later become the legendary Ray Charles.

Stone’s hits were on TK Records, which he co-founded with Steve Alaimo in 1972, and similar labels he founded. They included: “Get Down Tonight,” “That’s the Way (I Like It)”, “Shake, Shake, Shake (Shake Your Booty)”, “I’m Your Boogie Man” for KC & the Sunshine Band and “Ring My Bell” for Anita Ward, The Miami Herald reported.

Stone released Otis Williams and the Charms’ No. 1 R&B hit, “Heart of Stone”, in 1954. He was also instrumental in signing James Brown and the Famous Flames, earning the hit, “Please, Please, Please,” which topped the R&B in 1956.

TK went bankrupt in 1981, but Stone pursued his passion with other production companies, finding an off-beat hit in 1990 with novelty act 2 Live Jews and its album, “As Kosher As They Wanna Be”, a parody of 2 Live Crew that featured Stone’s actor, songwriter-producer son, Joseph Stone.

“One of the biggest lessons he taught me was how to listen better and how to live in this moment,” his son told The Miami Herald (http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/08/08/4279652/founder-of-the-miami-sound-tk.html) . “He had an incredible sense of principle and kindness and understanding.”

Stone’s love for music started as a teen when he played trumpet while growing up in an orphanage in Pleasantville, New York. During World War II, he served in the Army and played trumpet in a racially integrated band and developed an appreciation of what were called “race records.” Three decades later, the biggest payoff of his career came with the racially-integrated KC & the Sunshine Band.

The group’s co-founder, Harry Wayne “KC” Casey, said he started recording bits of music when the studio was free while working part-time at TK Records.

Casey co-wrote “Rock Your Baby” with Richard Finch in 1974 and it became the songwriters’ first No. 1 pop single for TK when singer George McRae recorded the hit version.

Casey said Stone was his “mentor” and “believed in me when no one else did.”

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Idris Muhammad, Drummer Whose Beat Still Echoes, Dies at 74 – NYTimes.com

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** Idris Muhammad, Drummer Whose Beat Still Echoes, Dies at 74
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Photo
Idris Muhammad in 1998, with the Joe Lovano Trio at Iridium, in Manhattan. Mr. Lovano honored him with the tune “Idris.” Credit Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos

Idris Muhammad, a drummer whose deep groove propelled both a broad career in jazz and an array of hits spanning rhythm and blues, funk and soul, died on July 29 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 74.

His death was confirmed by Dan Williams, a friend affiliated with the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. The cause was not specified.

Mr. Muhammad was a proud product of New Orleans, whose strutting parade rhythms always lurked just beneath the surface of his style. A busy sideman as early as his teenage years, he later backed Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, Roberta Flack and the jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and as a key member of the house band laid the rhythmic foundation for the original Broadway production of “Hair.”

But the heart of his work was at the intersection of jazz, R&B and funk, especially as they converged in the 1970s. He made a string of albums now prized by connoisseurs of funk, including “Power of Soul” (1974), “House of the Rising Sun” (1976) (http://www.discogs.com/Idris-Muhammad-House-Of-The-Rising-Sun/release/304879) and “Turn This Mutha Out” (1977) with a supporting cast including players like the trumpeter Randy Brecker and the keyboardist Bob James.

Mr. Muhammad’s in-the-pocket backbeat also bolstered crossover efforts by the guitarists Grant Green and George Benson and the saxophonists Lou Donaldson and Grover Washington Jr. Within the last 20 years he had worked more in an acoustic mode, most prominently with the pianist Ahmad Jamal. Among the others he worked with were the guitarist John Scofield and the saxophonist Joe Lovano, who once honored him with a tune titled “Idris.”

He was born Leo Morris on Nov. 13, 1939, in New Orleans. His father played banjo, and four of his siblings were drummers. Naturally drawn to the sound of Mardi Gras parade bands, he found his calling with no formal training. He was 15 when he played on Art Neville and the Hawketts’ enduring 1954 recording of “Mardi Gras Mambo,” (http://www.45cat.com/record/1591) and not much older when he appeared on Fats Domino’s hit version of “Blueberry Hill.”

In 1966 he married Delores Brooks, lead singer for the Crystals, a girl group with a string of pop hits, including “Da Doo Ron Ron.” The couple converted to Islam, changing their names to Idris and Sakinah Muhammad, and lived in London and Vienna before their marriage ended in divorce in 1999. They had two sons and two daughters; he also had a daughter from a previous marriage, to the former Gracie Lee Edwards.

Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. Muhammad was widely sampled by hip-hop artists, including Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, Lupe Fiasco and Drake. The Beastie Boys album “Paul’s Boutique” opens with a lengthy sample of “Loran’s Dance,” from “The Power of Soul.” Asked in an interview how he felt about other people using his music, he told Wax Poetics magazine, “It don’t really belong to me, man,” adding: “The gift the Creator has given me, I can’t be selfish with. If I keep it in my pocket, it’s not going to go anyplace.”

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90 and still going strong: Trio of elderly musicians plays on | 7online.com

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** 90 AND STILL GOING STRONG: TRIO OF ELDERLY MUSICIANS PLAYS ON
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90 and Going Strong
A trio of performers will take the stage in Manhattan next week, musicians who have decades worth of experience between them.
All three are in their 90’s, and as the title of their show states, they’re still going strong.
The show is called ’90 And Going Strong’, and these legends are absolutely young at heart. I met with them as they get ready for next week’s show.
“I tell the audience these are natural treasures, I’m the baby among them,” said 91-year old actor Fyvush Finkel.
Truth be told, he is two months older than clarinetist Sol Yaged. But they’ve got nothing on pianist Irving Fields.
Finkel belted out a ‘Happy Birthday’ song to Irving, because Monday he turned 90. So it’s pretty impressive that instead of sitting back, these gentlemen are going up on stage for their show.
In fact, the show first debuted in June and it was so successful, they’re bringing it back next week at Baruch College.
“You know why, we didn’t do it correctly the first time,” said Yaged.
Each likes to joke, but the time hasn’t dulled their talent or their motivation.
“When I play their favorite songs, they say thank you with a big smile, and that is my fulfillment, that’s my life, that’s my happiness,” said Fields.
Sol will be playing jazz, turning back time on his clarinet.
“I bought this clarinet when I was 12 years old in 1935. This clarinet cost me $125 then,” he said. (“That was a lot of money then,” we said.)
It was clearly a good investment, and fortunately we get to enjoy these talents even now.
“We got a blessing from the guy upstairs. He told me he don’t want me, not yet. He said I have no vacancy, I got better actors than you up there. I got Olivier, who needs you,” said Finkel.
As you might imagine, we had some laughs. ’90 And Going Strong’ is Monday, August 11th at Baruch College. Tickets are $35. For more information, call 212-352-3101.

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August 11, 2014 / No Comments / More

Tommy Gill, Charleston jazz pianist, dies at 49 – Post and Courier

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** Tommy Gill, Charleston jazz pianist, dies at 49
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Jazz pianist Tommy Gill performed regularly with small and large ensembles in Charleston. He died late Thursday at age 49. Alice Keeney

Tommy Gill, a jazz musician who helped launch the Charleston Jazz Orchestra and played uncountable gigs with other local jazz players over the years, died late Thursday. He was 49, four days shy of his 50th birthday.

Gill’s health has been precarious in the last few years. He had undergone heart surgery and has struggled with other issues, according to friends and colleagues. At the end of June, he was moved into Hospice care because of renal failure.

Tommy Gill with the Charleston Jazz Orchestra a few years ago.
Enlarge Tommy Gill with the Charleston Jazz Orchestra a few years ago. Reese Moore
Gill was an accomplished pianist who perhaps made his biggest splash in 2010 when he performed his own arrangement of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with the Charleston Jazz Orchestra and a group of string players. The concert revealed Gill to be an innovative and ambitious arranger whose musical risk-taking and charisma on stage helped to fuel an extremely enthusiastic response from the audience.

Not long after that performance, Gill retreated from the spotlight into a self-imposed musical retirement.

Thomas Gill Jr. was born in Charleston, studied piano technology at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and worked for some year in New York City for Steinway and Company building pianos.

Gill worked part-time as a piano technician and also gave private lessons. He earned a piano performance degree, studying under Enrique Graf at the College of Charleston, and eventually joined the faculty as an adjunct professor, teaching jazz piano.

Bob Belden, a jazz saxophonist and arranger in New York City, who was born and raised in Goose Creek, knew Gill well. Belden first met Gill when the pianist was 14 and took him to play a gig.

“He had an amazing ability to hear something and figure it out and realize it on piano,” Belden said.

The two men, about 20 years apart, played together often throughout the years.

“Every time I came back to Charleston, we’d do a gig over the holidays,” Belden said. I even played drums in his trio. Danny Leonard played bass. … One of the highlights of our career was when we played with Abe White and the Diplomats at the first-ever NAACP convention in Charleston in the early 1980s.”

Gill was “devoid of any guile,” innocent, always ready to learn, always eager for fellowship, Belden said.

“Musicians were far more integrated than the general society,” he said. Charleston musicians are wide-open people for the most part. Tommy represented that. He covered so many bases.”

But it is the numerous small-ensemble sets Gill played alongside his friends and colleagues – Quentin Baxter, Mark Sterbank, Charlton Singleton, Kevin Hamilton and many others – that will cement his legacy in the minds of Charleston jazz fans.

Gill was a consummate collaborator, and there seemed to be nothing he liked better than filling in the harmonies of a classic tune or trading eights with his brothers in the band.

Bobbie Storm, a Charleston singer who has known Gill for 27 years, said she’ll never forget when she first met the pianist at the Chef and Clef downtown.

“Here comes this beautiful, young, too-handsome man,” she said. “He took my breath away. I loved him from the moment his fingers hit the piano.”

Gill long-time collaboration with Storm was characterized in part by an unusual sensitivity to the singer’s craft, the lyrics, the way the vocal line works, she said.

“He was a singer’s piano player. He embellished every note I sang.”

The last time she performed with Gill was about a month ago, when he was briefly out of hospice care, but he was weak and “traveling in his mind,” Storm said.

Drummer Quentin Baxter called Gill a “soulmate” and one of the first people in Charleston with whom he played jazz, beginning in 1993.

“A lot of my formative years locally, playing jazz music, was with Tommy Gill,” Baxter said. “I learned a lot of tunes playing with Tommy. Specifically, a lot of standards.”

Baxter also recalled his friend’s musicianship at the piano.

“Tommy swung so hard,” he said. “When Tommy plays be-bop or plays real swing, Tommy has the thing.”

The funeral is scheduled for 3 p.m. Thursday at J. Henry Stuhr’s Mount Pleasant Chapel, 1494 Mathis Ferry Road. Condolences may be sent through Jazz Artists of Charleston, P.O. Box 21756, Charleston, S.C. 29413.

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Garrett takes over jazz program at William Paterson – Music – NorthJersey.com

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** Garrett takes over jazz program at William Paterson
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AUGUST 9, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 2014, 1:21 AM
THE RECORD

MUSIC: WPU jazz studies gets new director

Grammy Award-winning saxophonist Kenny Garrett has been named the director of jazz studies at William Paterson University in Wayne. Garrett, who lives in North Jersey, will join the faculty on Sept. 1; his predecessors include trumpeter and composer/arranger Thad Jones and pianists James Williams and Mulgrew Miller, who died in May 2013.

Starting at 18 as a member of the Mercer Ellington Orchestra, Garrett has since played with such legends as Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Freddie Hubbard. He won a Grammy in 2005 for best instrumental jazz album for “Five Peace Band – Live” and was recently nominated for “Pushing the World Away.” For information on Garrett’s new role and his music: wpunj.edu/news or kennygarrett.com.

— Elyse Toribio
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The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records – NYTimes.com

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** The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records
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Photo
Zero Freitas, on the records. Credit Sebastián Liste/Noor, for The New York Times

Paul Mawhinney, a former music-store owner in Pittsburgh, spent more than 40 years amassing a collection of some three million LPs and 45s, many of them bargain-bin rejects that had been thoroughly forgotten. The world’s indifference, he believed, made even the most neglected records precious: music that hadn’t been transferred to digital files would vanish forever unless someone bought his collection and preserved it.

Mawhinney spent about two decades trying to find someone who agreed. He struck a deal for $28.5 million in the late 1990s with the Internet retailer CDNow, he says, but the sale of his collection fell through when the dot-com bubble started to quiver. He contacted the Library of Congress, but negotiations fizzled. In 2008 he auctioned the collection on eBay for $3,002,150, but the winning bidder turned out to be an unsuspecting Irishman who said his account had been hacked.

Then last year, a friend of Mawhinney’s pointed him toward a classified ad in the back of Billboard magazine:

RECORD COLLECTIONS. We BUY any record collection. Any style of music. We pay HIGHER prices than anyone else.

That fall, eight empty semitrailers, each 53 feet long, arrived outside Mawhinney’s warehouse in Pittsburgh. The convoy left, heavy with vinyl. Mawhinney never met the buyer.

“I don’t know a thing about him — nothing,” Mawhinney told me. “I just know all the records were shipped to Brazil.”

Just weeks before, Murray Gershenz, one of the most celebrated collectors on the West Coast and owner of the Music Man Murray record store in Los Angeles, died at 91. For years, he, too, had been shopping his collection around, hoping it might end up in a museum or a public library. “That hasn’t worked out,” The Los Angeles Times reported in 2010, “so his next stop could be the Dumpster.” But in his final months, Gershenz agreed to sell his entire collection to an anonymous buyer. “A man came in with money, enough money,” his son, Irving, told The New York Times. “And it seemed like he was going to give it a good home.”

Those records, too, were shipped to Brazil. So were the inventories of several iconic music stores, including Colony Records, that glorious mess of LP bins and sheet-music racks that was a Times Square landmark for 64 years. The store closed its doors for good in the fall of 2012, but every single record left in the building — about 200,000 in all — ended up with a single collector, a man driven to get his hands on all the records in the world.

In an office near the back of his 25,000-square-foot warehouse in São Paolo, Zero Freitas, 62, slipped into a chair, grabbed one of the LPs stacked on a table and examined its track list. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, khaki shorts and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt; his gray hair was thin on top but curled along his collar in the back. Studying the song list, he appeared vaguely professorial. In truth, Freitas is a wealthy businessman who, since he was a child, has been unable to stop buying records. “I’ve gone to therapy for 40 years to try to explain this to myself,” he said.
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His compulsion to buy records, he says, is tied up in childhood memories: a hi-fi stereo his father bought when Freitas was 5 and the 200 albums the seller threw in as part of the deal. Freitas was an adolescent in December 1964 when he bought his first record, a new release: “Roberto Carlos Sings to the Children,” by a singer who would go on to become one of Brazil’s most popular recording stars. By the time he finished high school, Freitas owned roughly 3,000 records.

After studying music composition in college, he took over the family business, a private bus line that serves the São Paulo suburbs. By age 30, he had about 30,000 records. About 10 years later, his bus company expanded, making him rich. Not long after that, he split up with his wife, and the pace of his buying exploded. “Maybe it’s because I was alone,” Freitas said. “I don’t know.” He soon had a collection in the six figures; his best guess at a current total is several million albums.

Recently, Freitas hired a dozen college interns to help him bring some logic to his obsession. In the warehouse office, seven of them were busy at individual workstations; one reached into a crate of LPs marked “PW #1,425” and fished out a record. She removed the disc from its sleeve and cleaned the vinyl with a soft cloth before handing the album to the young man next to her. He ducked into a black-curtained booth and snapped a picture of the cover. Eventually the record made its way through the assembly line of interns, and its information was logged into a computer database. An intern typed the name of the artist (the Animals), the title (“Animalism”), year of release (1966), record label (MGM) and — referencing the tag on the crate the record was pulled from — noted that it once belonged to Paulette Weiss, a New York music critic whose collection of 4,000 albums Freitas recently purchased.

The interns can collectively catalog about 500 records per day — a Sisyphean rate, as it happens, because Freitas has been burying them with new acquisitions. Between June and November of last year, more than a dozen 40-foot-long shipping containers arrived, each holding more than 100,000 newly purchased records. Though the warehouse was originally the home of his second business — a company that provides sound and lighting systems for rock concerts and other big events — these days the sound boards and light booms are far outnumbered by the vinyl.

Many of the records come from a team of international scouts Freitas employs to negotiate his deals. They’re scattered across the globe — New York, Mexico City, South Africa, Nigeria, Cairo. The brassy jazz the interns were listening to on the office turntable was from his man in Havana, who so far has shipped him about 100,000 Cuban albums — close to everything ever recorded there, Freitas estimated. He and the interns joke that the island is rising in the Caribbean because of all the weight Freitas has hauled away.

Allan Bastos, who for years has served as Freitas’s New York buyer, was visiting São Paulo and joined us that afternoon in the warehouse office. Bastos, a Brazilian who studied business at the University of Michigan, used to collect records himself, often posting them for sale on eBay. In 2006, he noticed that a single buyer — Freitas — was snapping up virtually every record he listed. He has been buying records for him ever since, focusing on U.S. collections. He has purchased stockpiles from aging record executives and retired music critics, as well as from the occasional celebrity (he bought the record collection of Bob Hope from his daughter about 10 years after Hope died). This summer Bastos moved to Paris, where he’ll buy European records for Freitas.
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Bastos looked over the shoulder of an intern, who was entering the information from another album into the computer.

“This will take years and years,” Bastos said of the cataloging effort. “Probably 20 years, I guess.”

Twenty years — if Freitas stops buying records.

Collecting has always been a solitary pursuit for Freitas, and one he keeps to himself. When he bought the remaining stock of the legendary Modern Sound record store in Rio de Janeiro a couple of years ago, a Brazilian newspaper reported that the buyer was a Japanese collector — an identity Bastos invented to protect Freitas’s anonymity. His collection hasn’t been publicized, even within Brazil. Few of his fellow vinyl enthusiasts are aware of the extent of his holdings, partly because Freitas never listed any of his records for sale.

But in 2012, Bob George, a music archivist in New York, traveled with Bastos to São Paulo to prepare for Brazilian World Music Day, a celebration that George organized, and together they visited Freitas’s home and warehouse; the breadth of the collection astonished George. He was reminded of William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate who lusted after seemingly every piece of art on the world market and then kept expanding his private castle to house all of it.

“What’s the good of having it,” George remembers telling Freitas, “if you can’t do something with it or share it?”
Photo

To help him locate records in his personal collection, Freitas uses objects like “Star Wars” cards (Disney LPs) and a Heineken bottle (soccer LPs). Credit Sebastián Liste/Noor, for The New York Times

The question nagged at Freitas. For the truly compulsive hobbyist, there comes a time when a collection gathers weight — metaphysical, existential weight. It becomes as much a source of anxiety as of joy. Freitas in recent years had become increasingly attracted to mystic traditions — Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist. In his house, he and his second wife created a meditation room, and they began taking spiritual vacations to India and Egypt. But the teachings he admired didn’t always jibe with his life as a collector — acquiring, possessing, never letting go. Every new record he bought seemed to whisper in his ear: What, ultimately, do you want to do with all this stuff?

He found a possible model in George, who in 1985 converted his private collection of some 47,000 records into a publicly accessible resource called the ARChive of Contemporary Music. That collection has grown to include roughly 2.2 million tapes, records and compact discs. Musicologists, record companies and filmmakers regularly consult the nonprofit archive seeking hard-to-find songs. In 2009 George entered into a partnership with Columbia University, and his archive has attracted support from many musicians, who donate recordings, money or both. The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has provided funding for the archive’s collection of early blues recordings. David Bowie, Paul Simon, Nile Rodgers, Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme all sit on its board.

Freitas has recently begun preparing his warehouse for his own venture, which he has dubbed Emporium Musical. Last year, he got federal authorization to import used records — an activity that hadn’t been explicitly allowed by Brazilian trade officials until now. Once the archive is registered as a nonprofit, Freitas will shift his collection over to the Emporium. Eventually he envisions it as a sort of library, with listening stations set up among the thousands of shelves. If he has duplicate copies of records, patrons will be able to check out copies to take home.
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Some of those records are highly valuable. In Freitas’s living room, a coffee table was covered with recently acquired rarities. On top of a stack of 45s sat “Barbie,” a 1962 single by Kenny and the Cadets, a short-lived group featuring the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on lead vocals and, as backup singers, Wilson’s brother Carl and their mother, Audree. In the same stack was another single — “Heartache Souvenirs”/”Chicken Shack,” by William Powell — that has fetched as much as $5,000 on eBay. Nearby sat a Cuban album by Ivette Hernandez, a pianist who left Cuba after Fidel Castro took power; Hernandez’s likeness on the cover was emblazoned with a bold black stamp that read, in Spanish, “Traitor to the Cuban Revolution.”

While Freitas thumbed through those records, Bastos was warning of a future in which some music might disappear unnoticed. Most of the American and British records Freitas has collected have already been digitally preserved. But in countries like Brazil, Cuba and Nigeria, Bastos estimated, up to 80 percent of recorded music from the mid-20th century has never been transferred. In many places, he said, vinyl is it, and it’s increasingly hard to find. Freitas slumped, then covered his face with his hands and emitted a low, rumbling groan. “It’s very important to save this,” he said. “Very important.”

Freitas is negotiating a deal to purchase and digitize thousands of Brazilian 78 r.p.m. recordings, many of which date to the early 1900s, and he expects to digitize some of the rarest records in his collection shortly thereafter. But he said he could more effectively save the music by protecting the existing vinyl originals in a secure, fireproof facility. “Vinyl is very durable,” he said. “If you store them vertically, out of the sun, in a temperature-controlled environment, they can pretty much last forever. They aren’t like compact discs, which are actually very fragile.”

In his quest to save obscure music, Bastos told me, Freitas sometimes buys records he doesn’t realize he already owns. This spring he finally acquiesced to Bastos’s pleas to sell some of his duplicate records, which make up as much as 30 percent of his total collection, online.

“I said, ‘Come on, you have 10 copies of the same album — let’s sell four or five!’ ” Bastos said.

Freitas smiled and shrugged. “Yes, but all of those 10 copies are different,” he countered. Then he chuckled, as if recognizing how illogical his position might sound.

In March, he began boxing up 10,000 copies of Brazilian LPs to send to George in an exchange between the emerging public archive and its inspirational model. It was a modest first step, but significant. Freitas had begun to let go.

Earlier this year, Freitas and Bastos stopped into Eric Discos, a used-record store in São Paulo that Freitas frequents. “I put some things aside for you,” the owner, Eric Crauford, told him. The men walked next door, where Crauford lives. Hundreds of records and dozens of CDs teetered in precarious stacks — jazz, heavy metal, pop, easy listening — all for Freitas.
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Sometimes Freitas seems ashamed of his own eclecticism. “A real collector,” he told me, is someone who targets specific records, or sticks to a particular genre. But Freitas hates to filter his purchases. Bastos once stumbled upon an appealing collection that came with 15,000 polka albums. He called Freitas to see if it was a deal breaker. “Zero was asking me about specific polka artists, whether they were in the collection or not,” Bastos remembered. “He has this amazing knowledge of every kind of music.”

That afternoon, Freitas purchased Crauford’s selections without inspecting them, as he always does. He told Crauford he’d send someone later in the week to pick them up and deliver them to his house. Bastos listened to the exchange without comment but noted the destination of the records — Freitas’s residence, not the archive’s warehouse. He was worried that the collector’s compulsions might be getting in the way of the archiving efforts. “Zero isn’t taking too many of the records to his house, is he?” Bastos had asked a woman who helps Freitas manage his cataloging operation.

No, she told him. But almost every time Freitas picked up a record at the archive, he’d tell a whole story about it. Often, she said, he’d become overwhelmed with emotion. “It’s like he almost cries with every record he sees,” she told him.

Freitas’s desire to own all the music in the world is clearly tangled up in something that, even after all these years, remains tender and raw. Maybe it’s the nostalgia triggered by the songs on that first Roberto Carlos album he bought, or perhaps it stretches back to the 200 albums his parents kept when he was small — a microcollection that was damaged in a flood long ago but that, as an adult, he painstakingly recreated, album by album.

After the trip to Eric Discos, I descended into Freitas’s basement, where he keeps a few thousand cherry-picked records, a private stash he doesn’t share with the archive. Aside from a little area reserved for a half-assembled drum kit, a couple of guitars, keyboards and amps, the room was a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling shelving units filled with records.

He walked deep into an aisle in search of the first LP he ever bought, the 1964 Roberto Carlos record. He pulled it from the shelf, turning it slowly in his hands, staring at the cover as if it were an irreplaceable artifact — as if he did not, in fact, own 1,793 additional copies of albums by Roberto Carlos, the artist who always has, and always will, occupy more space in his collection than anyone else.

Nearby sat a box of records he hadn’t shelved yet. They came from the collection of a man named Paulo Santos, a Brazilian jazz critic and D.J. who lived in Washington during the 1950s and who was friendly with some of the giants of jazz and modern classical music. Freitas thumbed through one album after another — Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Leonard Bernstein, Dave Brubeck. The records were signed, and not with simple autographs; the artists had written affectionate messages to Santos, a man they obviously respected.

“These dedications are so personal,” Freitas said, almost whispering.

He held the Ellington record for an extended moment, reading the inscription, then scanning the liner notes. Behind his glasses, his eyes looked slightly red and watery, as if something was irritating them. Dust, maybe. But the record was perfectly clean.
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August 11, 2014 / No Comments / More

The Many Battles of Nina Simone

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** A Raised Voice
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http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/140811_r25323a-690.jpgSimone with James Baldwin in the early sixties. Her intelligence and restless force attracted African-American culture’s finest minds. Credit Courtesy New York Public Library.

“My skin is black,” the first woman’s story begins, “my arms are long.” And, to a slow and steady beat, “my hair is woolly, my back is strong.” Singing in a club in Holland, in 1965, Nina Simone introduced a song she had written about what she called “four Negro women” to a young, homogeneously white, and transfixed crowd. “And one of the women’s hair,” she instructed, brushing her hand lightly across her own woolly Afro, “is like mine.” Every performance of “Four Women” caught on film (as here) or disk is different. Sometimes Simone coolly chants the first three women’s parts—the effect is of resigned weariness—and at other times, as on this particular night, she gives each woman an individual, sharply dramatized voice. All four have names. Aunt Sarah is old, and her strong back has allowed her only “to take the pain inflicted again and again.” Sephronia’s yellow skin and long hair are the result of her rich white father having raped her mother—“Between two wo
rlds I do belong”—and Sweet Thing, a prostitute, has tan skin and a smiling bravado that seduced at least some of the eager Dutch listeners into the mistake of smiling, too. And then Simone hit them with the last and most resolutely up to date of the women, improbably named Peaches. “My skin is brown,” she growled ferociously, “my manner is tough. I’ll kill the first mother I see. ’Cause my life has been rough.” (One has to wonder what the Dutch made of killing that “mother.”) If Simone’s song suggests a history of black women in America, it is also a history of long-suppressed and finally uncontainable anger.

A lot of black women have been openly angry these days over a new movie about Simone’s life, and it hasn’t even been released. The issue is color, and what it meant to Simone to be not only categorically African-American but specifically African in her features and her very dark skin. Is it possible to separate Simone’s physical characteristics, and what they cost her in this country, from the woman she became? Can she be played by an actress with less distinctively African features, or a lighter skin tone? Should she be played by such an actress? The casting of Zoe Saldana, a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along European lines, has caused these questions—rarely phrased as questions—to dog the production of “Nina,” from the moment Saldana’s casting was announced to the completed film’s début, at Cannes, in May, at a screening confined to possible distributors. No reviewers have seen it. The film’s director, Cynthia Mort, has been stalwart in her
defense of Saldana’s rightness for the role, citing not only the obvious relevance of acting skills but Simone’s inclusion of a range of colors among her own “Four Women”—which is a fair point. None of the women in Simone’s most personal and searing song escape the damage and degradation accorded to their race.

Ironically, “Four Women” was charged with being insulting to black women and was banned on a couple of radio stations in New York and Philadelphia soon after the recording was released, in 1966. The ban was lifted, however, when it produced more outrage than the song. Simone’s husband, Andrew Stroud, who was also her manager, worried about the dangers that the controversy might have for her career, although this was hardly a new problem. Simone had been singing out loud and clear about civil rights since 1963—well after the heroic stand of figures like Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr., but still at a time when many black performers felt trapped between the rules of commercial success and the increasing pressure for racial confrontation. At Motown, in the early sixties, the wildly popular performers of a stream of crossover hits became models of black achievement but had virtually no contact with the movement at all.

Simone herself had been hesitant at first. Known for her sophisticated pianism, her imperious attitude, and her velvety rendition of “I Loves You, Porgy” (which, like Billie Holiday before her, she sang without the demeaningly ungrammatical “s” on “loves”), she had arrived in New York in late 1958, establishing her reputation not in Harlem but in the clubs of hip and relatively interracial Greenwich Village. Her repertoire of jazz and folk and show tunes, often played with a classical touch, made her impossible to classify. In these early years, she performed African songs but also Hebrew songs, and wove a Bach fugue through a rapid-fire version of “Love Me or Leave Me.” She tossed off the thirties bauble “My Baby Just Cares for Me” with airy insouciance, and wrung the heart out of the lullaby “Brown Baby”—newly written by Oscar Brown, Jr., about a family’s hopes for a child born into a better racial order—erupting in a hair-raising wail on the word “freedom,” as though regi
stering all the pain over all the years during which it was denied. For a while, “Brown Baby” was as close to a protest song as Simone got. She believed it was enough.

And then her friend Lorraine Hansberry set her straight. It speaks to Simone’s intelligence and restless force that, in her twenties, she attracted some of African-American culture’s finest minds. Both Langston Hughes and James Baldwin elected themselves mentors: Simone, appearing on the scene just as Holiday died, seemed to evoke their most exuberant hopes and most protective instincts. But Hansberry offered her a special bond. A young woman also dealing with a startling early success—Hansberry was twenty-eight when “A Raisin in the Sun” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959—she had a strongly cultivated black pride and a pedagogical bent. “We never talked about men or clothes,” Simone wrote in her memoir, decades later. “It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution—real girls’ talk.” A milestone in Simone’s career was a solo concert at Carnegie Hall—a happy chance to show off her pianism—on April 12, 1963, which happened also to be the day that Martin Luther
King, Jr., was arrested with other protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, and locked up in the local jail. The discrepancy between the events was pointed out by Hansberry, who telephoned Simone after the concert, although not to offer praise.

Two months later, Simone played a benefit for the N.A.A.C.P. In early August, she sang “Brown Baby” before a crowd gathered in the football stadium of a black college outside Birmingham—the first integrated concert ever given in the area—while guards with guns and dogs prowled the field. But Hansberry only started a process that events in America quickly accelerated. Simone watched the March on Washington, later that August, on television, while she was preparing for a club date. She was still rehearsing when, on September 15th, news came of the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young African-American girls who had just got out of Bible class. Simone’s first impulsive act, she recalled, was to try to make a zip gun with tools from her garage. “I had it in my mind to go out and kill someone,” she wrote. “I didn’t yet know who, but someone I could identify as being in the way of my people.”

This urge to violence was not a wholly aberrant impulse but something that had been brewing on a national scale, however tamped down by cooler heads and political pragmatists. At the Washington march, John Lewis, then a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was forced to cut the word “revolution” from his speech and to omit the threat that, absent immediate progress, the marchers would go through the South “the way Sherman did” and “burn Jim Crow to the ground.” James Baldwin, in a televised discussion after the bombing, noted that, throughout American history, “the only time that nonviolence has been admired is when the Negroes practice it.” But the center held. Simone’s husband, a smart businessman, told her to forget the gun and put her rage into her music.

It took her an hour to write “Mississippi Goddam.” A freewheeling cri de coeur based on the place names of oppression, the song has a jaunty tune that makes an ironic contrast with words—“Alabama’s got me so upset, Tennessee made me lose my rest”—that arose from injustices so familiar they hardly needed to be stated: “And everybody knows about Mississippi, goddam!” Still, Simone spelled them out. She mocked stereotypical insults (“Too damn lazy!”), government promises (“Desegregation / Mass participation”), and, above all, the continuing admonition of public leaders to “Go slow,” a line that prompted her backup musicians to call out repeatedly, as punctuation, “Too slow!” It wasn’t “We Shall Overcome” or “Blowin’ in the Wind”: Simone had little feeling for the Biblically inflected uplift that defined the anthems of the era. It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the Ameri
can future: “Oh but this whole country is full of lies,” she sang. “You’re all gonna die and die like flies.”

She introduced the song in a set at the Village Gate a few days later. And she sang it at a very different concert at Carnegie Hall, in March, 1964—brazenly flinging “You’re all gonna die” at a mostly white audience—along with other protest songs she had taken a hand in writing, including the defiantly jazzy ditty “Old Jim Crow.” She also performed a quietly haunting song titled “Images,” about a black woman’s inability to see her own beauty (“She thinks her brown body has no glory”)—a wistful predecessor to “Four Women” that she had composed to words by the Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney. At the time, Simone herself was still wearing her hair in a harshly straightened fifties-style bob—sometimes the small personal freedoms are harder to speak up for than the larger political ones—and, clearly, it wasn’t time yet for such specifically female injuries to take their place in the racial picture. “Mississippi Goddam” was the song of the moment: bold and urgent and ea
sy to sing, it was adopted by embattled protesters in the cursed state itself just months after Simone’s concert, during what they called the Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, and what President Johnson called “the summer of our discontent.”

There was no looking back by the time she performed the song outside Montgomery, Alabama, in March, 1965, when some three thousand marchers were making their way along the fifty-four-mile route from Selma; two weeks earlier, protesters making the same attempt had been driven back by state troopers with clubs, whips, and tear gas. The triumphant concert, on the fourth night of the march, was organized by the indefatigable Belafonte, at the request of King, and took place on a makeshift stage built atop stacks of empty coffins lent by local funeral homes, and in front of an audience that had swelled with twenty-five thousand additional people, drawn either by the cause or by a lineup of stars that ranged from Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to Joan Baez. Simone, accompanied only by her longtime guitarist, Al Schackman, drew cheers on the interpolated line “Selma made me lose my rest.” In the course of events that night, she was introduced to King, and Schackman remembered that
she stuck her hand out and warned him, “I’m not nonviolent!” It was only when King replied, gently, “Not to worry, sister,” that she calmed down.

Simone’s explosiveness was well known. In concert, she was quick to call out anyone she noticed talking, to stop and glare or hurl a few insults or even leave the stage. Yet her performances, richly improvised, were also confidingly intimate—sheneeded the connection with her audience—and often riveting. Even in her best years, Simone never put many records on the charts, but people flocked to her shows. In 1966, the critic for the Philadelphia Tribune, an African-American newspaper, explained that to hear Simone sing “is to be brought into abrasive contact with the black heart and to feel the power and beauty which for centuries have beat there.” She was proclaimed the voice of the movement not by Martin Luther King but by Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, whose Black Power philosophy answered to her own experience and inclinations. As the sixties progressed, the feelings she displayed—pain, lacerating anger, the desire to burn down whole cities in revenge—made her seem at
times emotionally disturbed and at other times simply the most honest black woman in America.
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She recalled that racial anger first arose in her when she was eleven. Born Eunice Waymon, in 1933, she was the sixth of eight children of John and Kate Waymon, who were descendants of slaves and pillars of the small black community of Tryon, North Carolina. Her mother was a Methodist preacher, a severely religious woman who made extra money by cleaning house for a white Tryon family; her father, who had started off as an entertainer, worked at whatever the circumstances required. Even during the Depression, the Waymons made a good home. Simone’s earliest memories were of her mother singing hymns, and both the house and the church were so filled with music that no one noticed little Eunice climbing up to the organ bench until, at the age of two and a half, she played “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” straight through.

Yet as rare as the little girl’s musical gifts is the way that, in that time and place, those gifts were encouraged. She began playing for her mother’s sermons before her feet could reach the pedals, and was soon accompanying the church choir and Sunday services. She especially enjoyed playing for visiting revivalists, because of the raptures she discovered that she could loose in an audience with music. At the other end of the spectrum, she was five years old when the woman for whom her mother cleaned house offered to pay for lessons with a local piano teacher, Muriel Mazzanovich. The British-born Miz Mazzy, as Eunice called her—and also, later on, “my white momma”—inspired her love of Bach and her plans to become a great and famous classical pianist. Giving a recital in the local library, at eleven, Eunice saw her parents being removed from their front-row seats to make room for a white couple. She had been schooled by Miz Mazzy in proper deportment, but she nevertheless
stood up and announced that if people wanted to hear her play they’d better let her parents sit back down in the front row. There were some laughs, but her parents were returned to their seats. The next day, she remembered, she felt “as if I had been flayed, and every slight, real or imagined, cut me raw. But, the skin grew back a little tougher, a little less innocent, and a little more black.”

Her skin was very black, and she was made fully aware of that, along with the fact that her nose was too large. The aesthetics of race—and the loathing and self-loathing inflicted on those who vary from accepted standards of beauty—is one of the most pervasive aspects of racism, yet it is not often discussed. The standards have been enforced by blacks as well as by whites. Even Harry Belafonte wrote, in his memoir, about his mother’s well-intentioned counsel to “marry a woman with good hair,” and he added, in unnecessary clarification, “Good hair meant straight hair.” (Reader, he married her.) But Nina Simone, strong and fierce and proud Nina Simone? “I can’t be white and I’m the kind of colored girl who looks like everything white people despise or have been taught to despise,” she wrote in a note to herself, not during her adolescence but in the years when she was already a successful performer. “If I were a boy, it wouldn’t matter so much, but I’m a girl and in front of
the public all the time wide open for them to jeer and approve of or disapprove of.”

Countering the charge of physical inferiority, in her youth, was the talent that her mother assured her was God-given. Music was her salvation, her identity. Thanks to a fund established by a pair of generous white patrons in Tryon, she was sent to board at a private high school—she practiced piano five hours a day, and graduated valedictorian—and then to a summer program at Juilliard, all with the unwavering aim of getting into the Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia, where admission was terrifically competitive but tuition was free. Her destiny seemed so assured that her parents moved to Philadelphia before she took the Curtis exam. The fact that she was rejected, and believed that this was because of her race, was a source of unending bitterness. It was also a turning point. In the summer of 1954, in need of money, Eunice Waymon took a job playing cocktail piano in an Atlantic City dive—the owner demanded that she also sing—and, hoping to keep the news of this
unholy employment from her mother, turned herself into Nina Simone, feeling every right to the anger that Nina Simone displayed forever after.

At times, it seemed that she could outdistance her feelings. In 1961, after a brief marriage to a white hanger-on at the Atlantic City club, she married Stroud, a tough police detective on the Harlem beat whom she initially sized up as “a light-skinned man,” “well built,” and “very sure of himself.” The following year, she gave birth to a daughter, Lisa Celeste, and Stroud left his job to manage Simone’s career; they lived in a large house in the leafy Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon, complete with a gardener and a maid. Although she complained of working too hard and touring too much—of being desperately exhausted—her life was not the stuff of the blues. And then, before a concert in early 1967, Stroud found her in her dressing room putting makeup in her hair. She didn’t know who he was; she didn’t quite know who she was. She later remembered that she had been trying to get her hair to match her skin: “I had visions of laser beams and heaven, with skin—always
skin—involved in there somewhere.”

The full medical facts of Simone’s mental illness became public only after her death, in 2003, thanks to two British fan-club founders and friends of Simone’s, Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan, whose account of the singer’s career was aptly titled, after one of Simone’s songs, “Nina Simone: Break Down & Let It All Out” (2004). Subsequent biographies—the warmly overdramatizing “Nina Simone,” by David Brun-Lambert (2009), and the coolly meticulous “Princess Noire,” by Nadine Cohodas (2010)—have filled in terrible details of depression and violence and long-sought but uncertain diagnoses: “bipolar disorder” appears to be the best contemporary explanation. Excerpts from Simone’s diaries and letters of the nineteen-sixties, published by Joe Hagan (who got them from Andrew Stroud) inThe Believer, in 2010, added the news that Simone’s personal hell was compounded by regular beatings from Stroud. The marriage dissolved in 1970, but it was many more years before she received any
helpful medication.

All the more remarkable, then, the strength that Simone projected through the sixties. As the decade wore on, she began to favor bright African gowns and toweringly braided African hair styles; she became the High Priestess of Soul, and though the title was no more than a record company’s P.R. gambit—Aretha Franklin was soon crowned the Queen of Soul—she bore it with conviction. It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that her songs were mostly about civil rights. Stroud, with his eye on the bottom line, was always there to keep her from going too far in that direction. In concert, she even pulled back on “Mississippi Goddam,” singing “We’re all gonna die, and die like flies” in place of the gleefully threatening “You’re all gonna die . . .” Although she did record the classic anti-lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” in 1965, and she could give the most unexpected songs an edge of racial protest (listen to her harrowing version of the Brecht-Weill “Pirate Jenny”), she
had a vast and often surprising musical appetite. By the late sixties, she was so afraid of falling behind the times that she expanded her repertory to include Bob Dylan, Leonard Bernstein, and, covering all bases, the Bee Gees. One of her biggest hits of the era was the joyously innocuous “Ain’t Got No—I Got Life,” from the musical “Hair”—which, in her hands, became a classic freedom song.

But womanly strength was in everything she sang: in the cavernous depths of her voice—some people think Simone sounds like a man—in her intensity, her drama, her determination. It’s there in the crazy love song “I Put a Spell on You,” in which she recasts the crippling needs of love (“Because you’re mine! ”) into an undeniable command. It’s there in the ten-minute gospel tour de force “Sinnerman,” when she cries out “Power!” like a Southern preacher and her musicians shout back “Power to the Lord!,” and especially when she takes the disapproving voice of the Lord upon herself: “Where were you, when you oughta been praying?” If you’d never before thought of the Lord as a black woman, you did now.

The civil-rights songs were nevertheless what she called “the important ones.” And the movement is where she gained her strength. It’s also where her private anger took on public dimensions, in the years when patience gave way entirely and the anger in many black communities could no longer be tamped down. Onstage in Detroit, on August 13, 1967—two weeks after a five-day riot had left forty-three people dead, hundreds injured, and the city in ruins—Simone, singing “Just in Time,” added a message to the crowd: “Detroit, you did it. . . . I love you, Detroit—you did it!” She was met with roars of approval, which one Detroit critic said he presumed had come from “the arsonists, looters and snipers in the audience.” Another critic, however, wrote that her show let white people know what they had to learn, and learn fast. Was she the voice of national tragedy or of the next American revolution?

And then King was shot, on April 4, 1968. Sections of Washington, Chicago, Baltimore, and more than a hundred smaller cities went berserk. Despite her rhetoric, Simone was profoundly shaken, and her views of what might be accomplished in this country only grew more bleak. At an outdoor concert in Harlem, the following summer—it’s available on YouTube—she went for broke.

Majestically bedecked à l’africaine, she opened with “Four Women,” singing now before a crowd where an Afro was the norm. After several other stirring, politically focussed songs—“Revolution,” “Backlash Blues”—she closed with something so new that she had not had time to learn it, a poem by David Nelson, who was then part of a group called the Last Poets and is now among the revered begetters of rap. She read the words from a sheet of paper, moving across the stage and repeatedly exhorting the crowd to answer the question “Are you ready, black people? . . . Are you ready to do what is necessary?” The crowd responded to this rather vague injunction with a mild cheer, prompted by the bongos behind her and the demand in her voice. And then: “Are you ready to kill, if necessary?” Now a bigger, if somewhat incongruous, cheer rose from the smiling crowd filled with little kids dancing to the rhythm on a sunny afternoon. It had been five years since the Harlem riot of 1964, the
granddaddy of sixties riots; New York had largely escaped the ruinations of both 1967 and 1968. “Are you ready to smash white things, to burn buildings, are you ready?” she cried. “Are you ready to build black things?”

Despite her best efforts, Simone failed to incite a riot in Harlem that day in 1969. The crowd received the poem as it had received her songs: with noisy affirmation, but merely as part of a performance. People applauded and went on their way. There are many possible reasons: no brutal incident of the kind that frequently set off riots, massive weariness, the knowledge of people elsewhere trapped in riot-devastated cities, maybe even hope. Simone had her unlikeliest hit that year with a simple hymn of promise, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” based on the title of a play that had been put together from Lorraine Hansberry’s uncollected writings. Hansberry, who died in 1965, had used the phrase in a speech to a group of prize-winning black students, and Simone asked a fellow-musician, Weldon Irvine, to come up with lyrics that “will make black children all over the world feel good about themselves forever.” Indeed, it is a children’s song (or it was, until Aretha took it over).
Simone’s most moving performance may have been on “Sesame Street,” where she sat on the set’s tenement steps wearing an African gown and lip-synched her recording to four enchanting if slightly mystified black children, who raised their arms in victory toward the end.

It was not a victory she could believe in or a mood she could sustain. By the end of the sixties, both Simone’s career and her marriage were in serious trouble. Pop-rock did not really suit her, and the jazz and folk markets had radically shrunk; the concert stage still assured her income and her stature. And if the collapse of her marriage was in some ways a liberation she was also now without the person who had managed her finances and her schedule, and who had kept her calm before she went onstage (by forbidding her alcohol, among other means), and got her offstage quickly when the calm failed. She was left to govern herself in a world that suddenly had no rules and, just as frightening, was emptied of its larger, steadying purpose. “Andy was gone and the movement had walked out on me too,” she wrote, “leaving me like a seduced schoolgirl, lost.”
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Looking back on the historic protests and legislative victories of the sixties, one may find it easy to assume a course of inevitable if often halting racial progress, yet this was anything but apparent as the decade closed. When, in 1970, James Baldwin set out to write about “the life and death of what we call the Civil Rights movement,” its failure seemed to him beyond contention. As for the black leaders who had “walked out” on Simone, they were in cemeteries (Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, King, Fred Hampton), in jail (Huey Newton, Bobby Seale), or in Africa (Stokely Carmichael), or else had “run for cover,” as she put it, “in community or academic programmes.” White liberals had diverted their efforts to Vietnam; this was now the war being fought on televisions in living rooms every night. According to Simone, “The days when revolution really had seemed possible were gone forever.”

She left the country in 1974. Travelling to Liberia with her twelve-year-old daughter, she stayed for two years, during which she performed hardly at all. She left Liberia for Switzerland in order to put her daughter in school there. Eventually, she moved to France, alone. It seems to have been only the recurrent need for money that spurred her to perform again in the United States, although she took great pride in an honorary doctorate that she received from Amherst, in 1977, and insisted ever after on being called “Doctor Nina Simone.” Meanwhile, her concerts tended increasingly toward disaster. As she now sang in “Mississippi Goddam,” “the whole damn world’s made me lose my rest.”

The remainder of her life, some twenty-five years, is a tale of escalating misery. At the worst, she was found wandering naked in a hotel corridor brandishing a knife; she set her house in France on fire, and once, also in France, she shot a teen-age boy (in the leg, but that may have been poor aim) in a neighbor’s back yard for making too much noise—and for answering her complaints with what she understood as racial insults. Yet the ups of her life could be almost as vertiginous as the downs. In 1987, just a year after she was sent to a hospital in a straitjacket, her charmingly upbeat 1959 recording of “My Baby Just Cares for Me” was chosen by Chanel for its international television ad campaign. Rereleased, the record went gold in France and platinum in England. In 1991, she sold out the Olympia, in Paris, for almost a week.

She toured widely during her final years. In Seattle, in the summer of 2001, she worked a tirade against George W. Bush into “Mississippi Goddam,” and encouraged the audience to “go and do something about that man.” She was already suffering from breast cancer, but it wasn’t the worst illness she had known. She was seen as a relic of the civil-rights era, and on occasion she even led the audience in a wistful sing-along of “We Shall Overcome,” although she did not believe her country had overcome nearly enough. Once she became too sick to perform, she did not return to what she called “the United Snakes of America.” She died in France, in April, 2003; her ashes were scattered in several African countries. The most indelible image of her near the end is as a stooped old lady reacting to the enthusiastic cheers that greeted her with a raised, closed-fisted Black Power salute.

Thirty-four years after Simone released “Young, Gifted and Black,” Jay Z reused the title for a song that describes the fate of many of those gifted children—“Hear all the screams from the ghetto all the teens ducking metal”—in twenty-first-century America. The rap connection with Simone is hardly surprising, since rap is where black anger now openly resides. Simone disliked the rap she knew, however, in part for displacing so much anger onto women—or, as she put it, for “letting people believe that women are second class, and calling them bitches and stuff like that.” Back in 1996, Lauryn Hill rapped an anything-you-can-do retort to a male counterpart, “So while you imitatin’ Al Capone / I be Nina Simone / And defecatin’ on your microphone,” but no one has really taken up the challenge of Simone’s example. There was a minor uproar last year over Kanye West’s sampling of phrases from Simone’s recording of “Strange Fruit” (with her voice speeded up to an unrecognizable tinn
iness) in “Blood on the Leaves,” in which Simone’s evocation of lynched black bodies is juxtaposed with West’s personal concerns about “second string bitches,” cocaine, and the cost of paying off a baby mama versus a new Mercedes. Some people have seen a social statement here, but one can’t help recalling Simone’s broader reaction to rap: “Hell, Martin and Malcolm would turn in their graves if they heard some of this crazy shit.”

As for jazz, Simone was largely excluded from the history books for decades. Will Friedwald’s seminal “Jazz Singing,” of 1990, mentioned her only in passing, as “off-putting and uncommunicative” and as the center of a cult “that only her faithful understand.” But Simone’s eclecticism has slowly widened the very definition of jazz singing. And, ever since Presidential candidate Obama listed her version of “Sinnerman” as one of his ten favorite songs of all time, in 2008, the cult has gone mainstream. There’s now a burgeoning field of what may be called Simone studies—Ruth Feldstein’s “How It Feels to Be Free” and Richard Elliott’s “Nina Simone” offer two highly intelligent examples—and Friedwald’s even more authoritative volume of 2010, “A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers,” includes a lengthy entry on Simone that pronounces her “more important than anyone” in her influence on twenty-first-century jazz singing.

Last year, two Broadway shows depicted Simone as an inspiration for a couple of unexpected figures: in “A Night with Janis Joplin,” she helped to provide her white soul sister with the gift of fire, and, even stranger, in the crude but enthusiastic “Soul Doctor”—which reopens Off Broadway this winter—she was the force behind the “rock-and-roll rabbi” Shlomo Carlebach. Nutty as it seemed onstage, Simone’s acquaintance with the rabbi appears to have some basis in fact, and helps to explain the Hebrew songs she performed at the Village Gate (where he also performed) in the early sixties. While it may be a show-biz exaggeration to suggest that the rabbi and the jazz singer had an affair—the show featured an Act I curtain clinch that, on the night I saw it, had its largely Orthodox audience literally gasping—the point was the universality of Simone’s message about persecution, the search for justice, and the power of music.

Back in 1979, at a concert in Philadelphia, Simone followed a performance of “Four Women” by scolding the black women in the audience about their changes in style: “You used to be talking about being natural and wearing natural hair styles. Now you’re straightening your hair, rouging your cheeks and dressing out of Vogue.” In 2009, the comedian Chris Rock made a documentary titled “Good Hair” because, he explained, his young daughter had come to him with the question “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” For an African-American child, nothing had changed since Harry Belafonte’s mother’s advice, more than half a century earlier. (According to one contented businessman in Rock’s film, African-Americans—twelve per cent of the population—buy eighty per cent of the hair products in this country.) As for skin tone, the cosmetic companies have been expanding their range ever since Iman established a line of darker foundations, in 1994, although in March, 2014, a former beauty
director of Essence, Aretha Busby, complained to the Times,“The companies tend to stop at Kerry Washington. I’d love to see brands go two or three shades darker.”

The question of skin tone and hair and their meaning for African-American women exploded on the Internet with the announcement of the casting of Saldana in the Hollywood bio-pic about Simone. When the idea for such a film was initially floated, in the early nineties, Simone herself gave the nod to being played by Whoopi Goldberg. When, in 2010, the present film was announced in theHollywood Reporter, Mary J. Blige—the reigning Queen of Hip-Hop Soul—was announced for the lead. Once Blige was replaced with Saldana, however, a woman whose skin tone is more than two or three shades lighter than Simone’s, the cries for boycotting the film on the basis of misrepresentation—on the basis of insult—were instantaneous. Why not cast Viola Davis? Or Jennifer Hudson? Production photographs showing Saldana on the set with an artificially broadened nose, an Afro wig, and—inevitably, but most unfortunately—dark makeup that is all too easily confoundable with blackface rendered any hope of
calm discussion futile. It’s been suggested that the filmmakers might as well have cast Tyler Perry in full “Madea” drag.

Simone’s daughter has come out against the film because its story focusses on an invented love affair as much as for the casting of Saldana, although she is quick to point out how much her mother’s appearance shaped her life. (Lisa once told an interviewer that her mother would sometimes “traumatize” her because she is light-skinned—“and I’d remind her that she had chosen my father, I didn’t.”) The fight over the film ultimately extended to a lawsuit filed by the director, Cynthia Mort, against the British production company, Ealing Studios Enterprises, on the very eve of the screening at Cannes. Since then, though, the suit has been dismissed, so “Nina” may yet show up in a theatre near you. And Saldana may give a compelling performance—may well prove that she can play not only women who are sci-fi blue (as in “Avatar”) or green (as in “Guardians of the Galaxy”) but real-life black. Still, there is no escaping the fact that her casting represents exactly the sort of
prejudice that Simone was always up against. “I was never on the cover ofEbony or Jet,” Simone told an interviewer, in 1980. “They want white-looking women like Diana Ross—light and bright.” Or, as Marc Lamont Hill writes inEbony today, “There is no greater evidence of how tragic things are for dark-skinned women in Hollywood than the fact that they can’t even get hired to play dark-skinned women.” Well beyond Hollywood, these outworn habits of taste reverberate down the generations, infecting all of us.

Simone’s favorite performer in her later years was Michael Jackson. She brought cassettes of his albums with her everywhere, and recalled having met him on a plane when he was a little boy, and telling him, “Don’t let them change you. You’re black and you’re beautiful.” She anguished over his evident failure to believe what she’d said: the facial surgeries, the mysterious lightening of his skin, the fatality of believing, instead, what the culture had told him, and wanting to be white. Simone appeared onstage with him just once, amid a huge cast of performers gathered for Nelson Mandela’s eightieth birthday, in Johannesburg, in the summer of 1998. She was sixty-five years old, and photographs of the event show her standing between Mandela and Jackson, overweight yet glamorously done up, her hair piled in braids and her strapless white blouse a contrast to the African costumes of the chorus all around. But she was also very frail. In one photograph, Jackson—in his glittering
trademark military-style jacket, hat, and shades—holds her left hand in both his hands, in a gesture of affection. But in another shot he has put one steadying arm around her, and she is grasping his hand for support. Few people seem aware of what is happening. The stage remains a swirl of laughter and song, a joyous African celebration. And at its center the two Americans stand with hands clasped tight—one hand notably dark, the other notably fair—as though trying to help each other along a hard and endless road. ♦
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* mailto:?subject=From%20newyorker.com:%20A%20Raised%20Voice&body=%E2%80%9CMy%20skin%20is%20black,%E2%80%9D%20the%20first%20woman%E2%80%99s%20story%20begins,%20%E2%80%9Cmy%20arms%20are%20long.%E2%80%9D%20And,%20to%20a%20slow%20and%20steady%20beat,%20%E2%80%9Cmy%20hair%20is%20woolly,%20my%20back%20is%20strong.%E2%80%9D%20Singing%20in%20a%20club%20in%20Holland,%20in%201965,%20Nina%20Simone%20introduced%20a%20song%20she%20had%20written%20about%20what%20she%20called…%0A%0AContinue%20reading%20at%20http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/raised-voice
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August 8, 2014 / No Comments / More

The New Yorker and Sonny Rollins by Tom Reney

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** The New Yorker And Sonny Rollins
————————————————————
Sonny Rollins in 2012

By now you’ve probably heard about the silly web post (http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words) that The New Yorker ran last week purportedly quoting Sonny Rollins “in his own words” on his career in jazz. I was alerted to it by readers wondering if I knew how Sonny’s health was, and by a couple of friends concerned that the bitter tone of the comments may have been a symptom of early dementia. All agreed that the sardonic remarks bore no resemblance to anything we’d ever heard Rollins profess. The New Yorker later amended the web feature with a caveat that it was “satire;” the author was identified as a staff writer with The Onion. Frankly, I didn’t know what to make of it until I read Howard Mandel’s blog on Sunday. Mandel’s post was followed by a comment from Sonny’s public relations consultant Terri Hinte, who confirmed that Rollins had had nothing to do with the piece; Hinte said it “blindsided” him. (Read Mandel’s screed and over 160 other
comments here (http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2014/08/most-scurrilous-unfunny-new-yorker-humor-re-jazz.html) .)

I posted my own comment on the Mandel blog right away, noting that while Rollins is an odd choice for satire, and that this work was colossally unfunny, the effort nonetheless smacks of the desperate grab established journals are making to attract younger readers to their websites. An effort like this suggests they’re on a fool’s errand. At JazzWax, Marc Myers said it was further proof that we’re “living in a jackass culture, where the people who do inappropriate, outrageous things in public get the most laughs.” In the case of The New Yorker, it also reflects a decline in its coverage of jazz. Besides this bizarre “satire” of Rollins, the most recent writing I recall on the music was Adam Gopnick’s review of Terry Teachout’s biography of Duke Ellington. Somewhat in keeping with the tone of the bio, Gopnick took potshots galore at Ellington, at one point describing him as “just an O.K. pianist,” as though that’s a standard measure of any jazz artist’s worth, and saying his
recordings were “tinny.” (Full disclosure: I queried the magazine a decade ago to propose an article about the literary critic Harold Bloom’s interest in jazz. I got a very respectful rejection letter in reply.)

sonny-rollins-new-yorker

I’ve been a New Yorker reader my whole life. The magazine’s cartoons and bottom of the page oddities (Block That Metaphor; There’ll Always Be an England) elicited guffaws from my parents as they passed the weekly back and forth to each other, and nothing felt more respectful of our budding sophistication than when they passed it to us as kids. New Yorker humor was a generation-bridging element in our household. My father’s land surveying office had blow-ups of Charles Addams and George Price cartoons in the blueprint room, and I attributed the fact that I got every line of Annie Hall to having been a regular reader of the magazine. In addition to the humor, I was a dedicated reader of its lengthy profiles, short fiction, and its coverage of books, movies, and baseball. I read New Yorker-related memoirs by James Thurber and Brendan Gill, and I’ll never forget Robert Coles’s profile of Walker Percy, which I read between pitches of the Red Sox-Yankees playoff game in October
1978. And what made for better beach reading than a New Yorker three-parter?

I came to love the magazine most for Whitney Balliett’s writings on jazz musicians and singers. Balliett’s lyrical prose and incisive portraits of jazz men and women of every stripe made the music come alive on the page like it did on record. I scoured every issue for his name, which under the editorship of William Shawn appeared fairly often. Shawn took obvious pride in publishing the writer whom he praised as a “genius for saying in words how a particular musician or musicians sound.” I continually go back to him, and there’s a lot to choose from; Balliett’s anthologized works occupy nearly two feet of my bookshelf. In addition to the compendium of profiles, American Musicians II, Balliett’s Collected Works, A Journal of Jazz 1954-2000, is the single-most essential chronicle of the music’s second half-century.

Balliett-American musicians

Here’s an excerpt of what he wrote about Rollins in 1991: “His [1956] attack was clipped, even abrupt—more percussive than melodic. He placed his notes just so, between beats, or ahead of the beat. His phrasing suggested a boy crossing a stream on jumping stones…He had become [in 1972] a whirlwind. His runs soared, and there were jarring staccato passages and furious double-time spurts. He seemed to be shouting and gesticulating on his horn, as if he were waving his audience into battle…[In 1990] Rollins played two bars of melody, dropped into a quick inside run, a double-time lunge, and a sotto-voce turnaround, stated the melody for two or three more bars, improvised again, offered more melody, and so forth. This kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t melodic improvisation makes the listener, constantly teased, work twice as hard.”

Shawn hired Balliett in 1951; he stayed on board until 2001. But during the 14-year stretch following Shawn’s retirement in 1987, his successors published fewer and fewer pieces by Balliett. Near the end, his contributions were often little more than glorified captions that went with photos of Barbra Streisand, Barbara Cook, and other singers. Teachout made it plain when he wrote, “He was treated cruelly and shabbily by Shawn’s successors [Tina Brown and David Remnick], who had no understanding of the significance of his work.” Balliett’s widow, the painter Nancy Balliett, told me that he came to feel sadly undervalued by the magazine and spent his last years wondering if his writings would continue to be read at all.

I viewed Balliett’s banishment and the increasing absence of jazz in The New Yorker as evidence of a general devaluation of the music in society at large. It was inevitable that writers in thrall to rock would eventually come to dominate the media landscape, not to mention academia. A hopeful sign like the elevation of jazz to constituent status at Lincoln Center seems to have been driven largely by the charismatic force of Wynton Marsalis, and it remains to be seen how it fares in the long term. The radar blip caused by Ken Burns’s 2001 documentary on jazz did little to support the fact that the music is still a dynamic and captivating art form. Rollins himself was honored with the Presidential Medal of the Arts by Barack Obama, and in 2011 by the Kennedy Center. Otherwise, most of what gets written in the mainstream press about jazz has to do with its supposed shrinking fan base, but the music remains in great shape on the bandstand, nowhere more so than in its traditional
capital of New York.

Nonetheless, The New Yorker’s jazz listings have shrunk considerably in recent years despite the presence of numerous venues in the city. And you’d hardly know from reading its pages that an impressive number of jazz musicians somehow manage to defy the exorbitant cost of living which drives almost everyone but bankers and trust-funders out of New York. (Rollins himself was driven out by the Word Trade Center attacks; he was evacuated from his Tribeca penthouse on 9-11, but not before his respiratory system was affected by the fallout.) Balliett, a Cornell grad, came from a patrician, Upper East Side background, but he displayed a genuine feel for the vicissitudes of the jazz life and conveyed it to readers for nearly 50 years. Since his departure in 2001, I can’t recall much writing about the music save for Gopnick’s 50^th anniversary feature on the Bill Evans Trio’s appearance at the Village Vanguard in 1961; Stanley Crouch’s 2005 profile of Rollins; and Alec Wilkinson’s
profile of Jason Moran last year.
Nat Hentoff in 2009

Nat Hentoff in 2009

It’s been David Remnick who’s presided over this decline in the chronicling of jazz, and in the case of the Rollins matter at least, its decline in standards. (As further example of the latter, I would cite Remnick’s own 2012 profile of Bruce Springsteen, which fairly gushed with awe.) Balliett died in 2007. Gopnick wrote the magazine’s respectful tribute, but failed to mention the unceremonious way he’d been shown the door six years earlier. That was left to Nat Hentoff, the longtime Village Voice columnist and jazz writer who was also a New Yorkercontributor for many years. Hentoff’s eulogy for Balliett (they collaborated on the legendary television production The Sound of Jazz) was written for The Wall Street Journal and for most of its length extolled the “instant clarity” of Balliett’s writing. But he ended with the disclosure that, “puzzled by [Balliett’s] absence…I wrote to David Remnick, asking how he could deprive so many his readers…of Whitney’s further guidance.
There was no answer.”

Hentoff concluded on a note of pure irony, pointing out that it was Remnick who wrote the laudatory obituary of Balliett for Newsday, acknowledging him for “prose as fluid and joyful as the subject he wrote about.” That, sad to say, is no longer the case with how The New Yorker writes about the music Balliett famously described as ”the sound of surprise.” By surprise, Balliett meant the glories experienced through the art of improvisation, not the confusion that Sonny Rollins and his admirers experienced on July 31.

The 83-year-old Rollins addressed the contretemps in this videocast (http://sonnyrollins.com/the-real-sonny-rollins-in-his-own-words/) from his website on Monday. Long live the Saxophone Colossus.

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August 7, 2014 / No Comments / More

Vinyl’s resurrection: Sales at a record high – Videos – CBS News

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August 7, 2014 / No Comments / More

Jazz book profiles Houston’s contributing players – Houston Chronicle

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** Jazz book profiles Houston’s contributing players
————————————————————

By Andrew Dansby (http://www.houstonchronicle.com/author/andrew-dansby/)

August 6, 2014

Image 1 out of 14

Clay Patrick McBride

Jazz pianist Jason Moran will spearhead “The Rauschenberg Project” for Da Camera.

Ever since “jazz” was coined as a slang term in the early 1900s, its musicians have been innovators.

And while writer Rick Mitchell – a former Houston Chronicle music critic – acknowledges the particular period between 1915 and 1975 as its Golden Age, he refuses to liken the end of that era as the death of jazz. Thus the title of his new book, “Jazz in the New Millennium: Live & Well.”

The theme recurs throughout Mitchell’s book: Musicians should resist any rigid definition of what is, and what is not, jazz.

“That’s a point I felt I needed to make, and I needed to weigh in directly in the introduction,” Mitchell says. “That jazz is alive and well.

“So much pop music is about finding the next new thing and then abandoning that thing. I hope to reintroduce the concept of jazz as the hippest music alternative out there. If you want to impress your friends with a piece of music, hand them the headphones and play them John Coltrane’s ‘Live at the Village Vanguard.'”

“Jazz in the New Millennium,” profiles more than 50 musicians who have played in Houston – some of them homegrown talents – from 2000 to the present. They were all brought to town by Da Camera of Houston, an organization that presents jazz and classical music in concert-hall settings. The book was assembled in partnership with Da Camera from the programs Mitchell wrote for many of those shows, which he began doing after he left the Chronicle in 1999 after 10 years on the job.

Da Camera, which was launched in 1987, has enjoyed smart, diverse and forward-thinking programming by Sarah Rothenberg for the past 20 years. During that time, the organization has presented such legendary figures as Wayne Shorter and Roy Haynes. The program also has put a premium on young, rising talent.

“We tend to be always looking ahead to our next jazz series,” Da Camera’s Leo Boucher says. “But Rick’s book has been a chance to look back and realize how comprehensive we’ve been in presenting the mainstream of jazz to Houston audiences.”

Mitchell has been writing about music for more than 40 years. He also has taught high school and college, and spent more than 10 years programming music for the Houston International Festival. He traces his interest in jazz to his mother’s old, three-LP collection of Duke Ellington’s music. “It was full of hisses and pops, but it had these classic songs: ‘East St. Louis Toodle-Oo,’ ‘Black and Tan Fantasy,’ ‘Mood Indigo.’ That was my portal into it.”

He delved deeper into the music after seeing saxophonist Charles Lloyd (who is featured in the book) perform in the late 1960s. He immediately bought Lloyd’s “Forest Flower” album, which Mitchell calls “my desert island disc.” Free-form radio – a once-popular format in which disc jockeys could play any music they wanted – also enabled him to hear progressive jazz acts like Rahsaan Roland Kirk alongside pop artists like songwriter Joni Mitchell.

As Mitchell began his long career writing about music, jazz began to suffer an identity crisis. Its musicians had long put a premium on innovation, which facilitated its evolution from ragtime to big band to bebop to fusion and the avant-garde. But by the 1980s – for the first time in its history – jazz did not have a dominant new direction.

“There wasn’t a new identifiable sub-genre,” Mitchell says, “but there were people saying there was no innovation after 1965, which is total (expletive).”

A boring debate ensued between jazz traditionalists, who were protective of the music’s past, and those committed to the vanguard. “It consumed so much critical energy, and it just ended in a truce,” Mitchell says.

He paraphrases a quote from legendary bassist and composer Dave Holland, who is profiled in the book: “Lots of people have opinions about what jazz should or should not do, but what happens is the music carries on. I don’t see one overriding style, but I do see a lot of wonderful statements being made. … I think we need to rejoice in all the different ways this music can be made.”

The artists featured in “Jazz in the New Millennium” don’t make a collective statement about what jazz is. Taken as a whole they instead ask, “What can’t it be?” The answer isn’t limitless, but it extends beyond the shores of the United States. In additional to traditional players, Da Camera has booked acts that incorporate sounds from Central and South America, eastern Europe, Africa and the Caribbean into an art form that sprang up in the United States from African-American culture.

Houston musicians also have a strong presence in the book and not simply because they performed at Da Camera shows.

Drummer Eric Harland and pianist Jason Moran bridge past and present. Both are Houston natives and graduates of the storied jazz program at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, which has become a feeder for first-call jazz players in New York. Both have not only performed here with Lloyd, but have headlined their own shows.

Moran returns February to premiere “The Rauschenberg Project,” a piece commissioned by Da Camera. Drummer Kendrick Scott, another HSPVA alum, will play in March.

The book also features another graduate of the school, Robert Glasper. The pianist enjoyed crossover success with his album “Black Radio,” which won a Grammy and was a strong seller, fusing jazz with R&B and hip-hop.

“He made the point that even the avant-garde isn’t the avant-garde,” Mitchell says. “The avant-garde is 50 years old. So what he’s doing is more avant-garde than the avant-garde: taking these jazz impulses and putting them with R&B and hip-hop in a way that’s not watered down.”

‘Jazz in the New Milennium’ book signing

Music by Woody Witt and Mike Wheeler

When: 3 p.m. Saturday

Where: Cactus Music, 2110 Portsmouth

Free

Upcoming Da Camera performances at the Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas

Chick Corea

When: 8 p.m. Oct. 10

Cécile McLorin Salvant

When: 8 p.m. Nov. 8

Jason Moran

When: 8 p.m. Feb. 7

Kendrick Scott Oracle

When: 8 p.m. March 7

Branford Marsalis

When: 8 p.m. April 18

Tickets: 713-524-5050, dacamera.com (http://dacamera.com/)

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August 7, 2014 / No Comments / More

Heroes of American Roots: From the Historic Films Archives | Lincoln Center Out of Doors

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Rare footage of musical performances from the archives of collector Joe Lauro, featuring such icons as Bill Monroe, Leadbelly, Elvis Presley, the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and The Staple Singers, among others.
Presented in association with Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Sound + Vision series.
Complimentary tickets will be distributed at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center box office starting one hour prior to each event. Limit: One ticket per person. Please note that while tickets will not be distributed until one hour prior to each event, the line may form in advance of this time.

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August 6, 2014 / No Comments / More

Jazz News No. 26/2014 (31 July – 6 August 2014)

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31 July – 6 August 2014

Ausgabe 26, 2014

We read the morning paper for you!

Dear colleagues and jazz friends,

Jazzinstitut’s JazzNews keeps you up-to-date with news of the jazz world, which we collect, summarize, and issue via e-mail about once a week. This service can also be accessed on our website ( www.jazzinstitut.de (http://www.jazzinstitut.de/) ), where it is updated on a daily basis. You’re invited to post comments on the entries there.

If you need bibliographies of the musicians named in our JazzNews, please click on our website’s Jazz Index page (http://jazzinstitut.de/Jazzindex/jazzindex.htm) . This is a bibliographical reference of jazz-related books, magazines, journals and other sources that you can access without charge. If you don’t find the name(s) you’re looking for, feel free to e-mail us! We will send you Jazz Indexdigests of articles about musicians as they make the news.

Now, have fun reading about the jazz week that was!

We’re sending this newsletter to: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
If you want us to change your e-address, stop sending JazzNews for a specified period, or permanently, please let us know.

31 July 2014

Hal Russell / Sun Ra

Howard Reich remembers the Chicago saxophonist Hal Russell whose NRG Ensemble was a major voice of the avant-garde since the late 1970s ( Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/columnists/reich/ct-jazz-hal-russell-20140730,0,6102947.column) ). Reich quotes from an interview he had with Russell in 1991, one year before his death, about playing drums behind Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and John Coltrane, about overcoming his drug addiction, about musical money jobs which he balanced by playing powerful experimental improvisations on the side. Russell will be celebrated this Thursday in a concert featuring some of his former collaborators, among them Ken Vandermark and Fred Lonberg-Holm. Howard Mandel reports about the event ( Arts Journal (http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2014/08/ferocious-memorial-to-good-humored-avant-gardist.html) ). — Joann Stevens talks to the author and illustrator Chris Raschka who just published a children’s book about
“The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra. The Sound of Joy Is Enlightenment” (Smithsonian Magazine (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/there-once-was-jazz-musician-saturn-180952112/?no-ist) ).

1 August 2014

Jean-Félix Mailloux / Louis Armstrong

Peter Hum talks to the Canadian bassist Jean-Félix Mailloux about his decision to become a jazz musician, about the concept behind his strings-heavy band Cordâme, about the appeal of exotic music, about his relationship with the jazz tradition, about collaborating with the pianist François Bourassa, and about working with his partner, the violinist Marie Neige Lavigne ( Ottawa Citizen (http://ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/local-arts/six-questions-for-jean-felix-mailloux) ). — On the brink of Satchmo Summerfest in New Orleans, Chris Waddington talks to Louis Armstrong specialist Ricky Riccardi about Armstrong’s importance for 20th century popular culture ( New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/satchmofest/index.ssf/2014/07/is_louis_armstrong_new_orleans.html) ). The Summerfest itinerary can be found here ( Satchmo Summerfest (http://fqfi.org/satchmo/schedule/stage) ). On Armstrong’s real birthday, August 4th, Natalie Pompilio writes about “ten things to know
about Louis Armstrong”, including information about his birthday, the pronunciation of his first name, his nicknames, his parents, his status as a trumpeter and singer, his outgoing personality, his firm stand against racism, and his relationship to his hometown New Orleans ( Legacy (http://www.legacy.com/news/legends-and-legacies/ten-things-to-know-about-louis-armstrong/2540/) ).

2 August 2014

Newport Jazz Festival

Will Friedwald reports about the 60th anniversary of the Newport Jazz Festivalhappening this weekend ( Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/articles/music-festival-the-newport-jazz-festival-1406757580) ). He recalls the history of the festival founded in 1954 by George Wein and how Wein’s idea both adapted the example of classical music festivals to the jazz genre and reconnected jazz to its New Orleans roots of “outdoorsy, weekend-afternoon presentation”. Friedwald explains how the Newport Festival grew, begot a folk festival sister, attracted big name pop acts, and claims that Wein “deserves to be credited as the inadvertent father of the entire era of Woodstock and sports-arena rock concerts”. — Charles J. Gans talks to George Wein about his career as a pianist ( Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/wein-to-lead-newport-all-stars-1-more-time/2014/08/01/6f7fe3e4-199e-11e4-88f7-96ed767bb747_story.html) ). He will again perform at the
Newport Jazz Festival, and Wein asks himself whether this might “mark the end of a tradition dating back to the inaugural event 60 years ago: playing with his Newport All-Stars band”. — Andy Smith reports about the festival’s successful program including some rain and a marriage proposal while Ron Carter’s trio was playing “My Funny Valentine” ( Providence Journal (http://www.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/content/20140803-george-wein-says-60th-edition-of-newport-jazz-festival-like-a-love-fest.ece) ).

3 August 2014

Sonny Rollins / Sean Jones

A certain “Django Gold” lets tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins supposedly talk about the sound of the saxophone (“horrible”), the art form of jazz (“the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with”), jamming with Bud Powell and Charlie Parker in his youth (“the worst day in my life”), and the compulsion of music (“I hate music. I wasted my life.”) ( The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words) ). Only the fact that this piece was published in the “Humor / Daily Shouts” section makes the reader realize that this might be a rather unfunny joke. An editor’s note, marking “This article (…) is a work of satire” was only added after many protests, such as by Howard Mandel ( Arts Journal (http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2014/08/most-scurrilous-unfunny-new-yorker-humor-re-jazz.html) ), Marc Myers ( JazzWax (http://www.jazzwax.com/2014/08/sonny-rollins-and-the-new-yorker.html) ), Nicholas Payton (NicholasPayton
(http://nicholaspayton.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/on-the-new-yorker-satirizing-sonny/) ) and others. Last not least, Sonny Rollins himself responds in a video interview with Bret Primack, first stating that he likes humor (we knew that) and is a longtime subscriber of Mad Magazine, then admitting that he felt hurt, not only by the New Yorker “joke” but by sensing that many readers had taken it for real. He emphasizes how much jazz musicians struggled to be creative and continue to develop their art form and that jazz as an art form and a musical statement “isn’t funny” ( Sonny Rollins (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYt8B2RkqrM&feature=youtu.be) ). We are also alerted to some real interviews Sonny Rollins gave to Ishmael Reed six years ago ( CounterPunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/06/13/the-colossus/) ) and to Greg Thomas four years ago ( The Root (http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2010/09/the_root_interview_sonny_rollins.html) ). — Chuck Yarborough reports about
the trumpeter Sean Jones who has been named head of brass at Boston’s Berklee College of Music ( Cleveland Plain Dealer (http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2014/07/sean_jones_director_of_clevela.html) ). Other newspapers report as well ( Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/music/2014/08/01/Sean-Jones-leaving-Pittsburgh-for-Boston/stories/201408010038) ).

4 August 2014

Lee Konitz / T.S. Monk

The pianist Dan Tepfer speaks with the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz about the magic of spontaneity, humor and the discipline needed for making music, about jazz education, about the concept of original players and copyists in jazz, about trying to be oneself in music, about having been lucky to have stayed away from hard drugs in his life, about the need for and his own experiences with the idea of musical challenges and competition, as well as about “playing sharp” on his instrument ( Jazz Speaks (http://www.jazzspeaks.org/guest-post-dan-tepfer-interviews-lee-konitz/) ). — Brennan Williams talks to the drummer T.S. Monk about the upcoming centennial of Thelonious Monk’s birth in 2017, about the involvement of the Thelonious Monk Institute with the International Jazz Day, and about the interest of actors such as Denzel Washington, Bill Duke and Don Cheadle to be part of a Thelonious Monk biopic ( Huffington Post
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/31/ts-monk-thelonious-monk-interview_n_5634974.html?page_version=legacy&view=print&comm_ref=false) ).

5 August 2014

New Orleans / Evan Christopher

Alison Fensterstock reports about a lecture by Hogan Jazz Archive director Bruce Raeburn at Satchmo Summerfest in which he emphasizes that the exodus of musicians after the city of New Orleans’ red light district Storyville was closed in 1917 was mostly a myth ( New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/satchmofest/index.ssf/2014/08/hogan_jazz_archive_director_br.html) ). Many musicians had left the city earlier already, others continued to play there. Most of all, though, “New Orleans jazz was circulating throughout America long before Storyville shut down”. — Chris Waddington talks to the clarinetist Evan Christopher about the Summerfest and the New Orleans jazz group approach which he likes to call “spontaneous orchestration” ( New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/satchmofest/index.ssf/2014/08/evan_christopher_hails_spontan.html) ).

6 August 2014

… what else …

Scott Mervis talks to the pianist and singer Dr. John about the influence of Louis Armstrong, his long career and young musicians in New Orleans ( The Blade (http://www.toledoblade.com/Music-Theater-Dance/2014/08/03/Singer-pianist-Dr-John-still-going-strong-at-73.html) ), while Alison Fensterstock reports that the star had to cancel his Newport Jazz Festival appearance due to a flu virus which had him hospitalized in New York City ( New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/08/dr_john_is_recovering_after_be.html) ). — The German photographer Arne Reimer talks about his current exhibition (and book) “American Jazz Heroes” shown at Berlin’s Prince Charles Club (Wild Heart Recordings (http://www.wildheartrecordings.com/american-jazz-heroes/) ). — David Palmquist has launched a new website listing a chronology of Duke Ellington’s working life and travels ( The Duke – Where and When (http://tdwaw.ca/) ). — The trombonist Troy Andrews aka Trombone
Shorty had his Trombone Shorty Foundation replace the instrument of a 14-year-old boy whose trombone was stolen at gunpoint ( Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trombone-shorty-replaces-boys-stolen-trombone/2014/08/02/f545845c-1aa2-11e4-88f7-96ed767bb747_story.html) ). — Lisa Shresberry talks to the pianist (former trumpeter)Bob Thompson ( San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Jazz-musician-Bob-Thompson-marks-30-years-5665407.php) ). — Hans Hielscher reflects about the fascination of jazz festivals ( Spiegel Online (http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/seejazz-festival-see-more-jazz-jazz-joy-rebekka-bakken-a-983816.html) ). — Ben Ratliff hears the drummer Tyshawn Sorey and the pianist Marilyn Crispell at The Stone, New York ( New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/arts/music/tyshawn-sorey-and-marilyn-crispell-improvise-at-the-stone.html?_r=0) ). — Stefan Michalczik hears the Dutch saxophonist Tineke Postma at the
Palmengarten in Frankfurt, Germany ( Frankfurter Rundschau (http://www.fr-online.de/musik/tineke-postma-jazz-im-palmengarten–weit-mehr-als-gediegen,1473348,28009232.html) ). — Hans-Jürgen Linke reads the autobiography of the German clarinetist and accordionist Rüdiger Carl ( Frankfurter Rundschau (http://www.fr-online.de/literatur/ruediger-carl-oliver-augst–ab-goldap-ueber-koepfe-und-waende,1472266,28009424.html) ; our own review can be found here (http://jazzinstitut.de/books/books_2014.html%20/l%202014carl) )

Obituaries

We learned of the passing of the Italian pianist Giorgio Gaslini at the age of 84 ( La Stampa (http://www.lastampa.it/2014/07/29/cultura/addio-al-musicista-giorgio-gaslini-bAGJa9DHzH4lqPKGYxlzeM/pagina.html) , La Repubblica (http://www.repubblica.it/spettacoli/musica/2014/07/29/news/la_scomparsa_di_giorgio_gaslini-92644559/) ), the drummer Idris Muhammad at the age of 74 ( New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/07/idris_muhammad_legendary_new_o.html) ), the drummer Frankie Dunlop at the age of 85, the pianist Kenny Drew Jr. at the age of 56 ( Jazz Truth (http://jazztruth.blogspot.de/2014/08/rip-kenny-drew-jr.html) ), the painter and founder of Hamburg’s major venue Die Fabrik Horst Dietrich at the age of 79 ( NDR (https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Trauer-um-Fabrik-Gruender-Horst-Dietrich,dietrich126.html) ), and the documentary filmmaker Robert Drew (“On the Road with Duke Ellington”) at the age of 90 ( Contact Music
(http://www.contactmusic.com/story/filmmaker-robert-drew-dies-at-90_4307475) ).

Last Week at the Jazzinstitut

On Friday and Saturday our 23rd Darmstadt Jazz Conceptions (http://jazzinstitut.de/Conceptions/Concept-de.htm) ended with two well-attended concerts. The small ensembles presented new interpretations of jazz standards (Kalle Kalima, Jürgen Wuchner), irregular meters and free improvisation (Norbert Stein), Brazilian music (Felix Astor), as well as own pieces (Uli Partheil, Jürgen Wuchner). A large ensemble led by Hazel Leach combined more than 30 musicians who played some of her compositions, among them “According to Albert” from her recent suite “Songs from the Edge”, which in its combination of voice and big orchestra had quite a special effect on the listeners. The teachers ended the workshop with a concert of their own, playing pieces by each of the six professors. In all of this, the Jazz Conceptions again prove to be more than a mere workshop: Everybody participating agreed that the sounding result was just stunning, and that the week’s intensive work will continue to
inspire everybody…

The Jazz Conceptions literally segued into the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (http://www.internationales-musikinstitut.de/ferienkurse.html) (Holiday Courses for Contemporary Music), a Darmstadt institution known all over the world. We are looking forward to hearing some of the Ferienkurse’s many concerts, lectures and discussions, and we’ll start this Tuesday evening with a multi-media event called “Dead Serious” featuring the Belgian Nadar Ensemble and the Iraqui/US artist Wafaa Bilal in a performance of Michael Maierhof’s piece “Exit F” for four hot air balloons and ensemble.

We support the important work of the Union Deutscher Jazzmusiker (http://www.u-d-j.de/) and its engagement for musicians in Germany. In its newest e-mail-newsletter the UDJ features a short interview with the Jazzinstitut’s Wolfram Knauer ( UDJ Rundbrief (http://eepurl.com/Z64pb) ).

About this mailing:

Older Jazz News issues can be accessed through our Website (www.jazzinstitut.de).
The Jazz News is being mailed in a German language edition as well. If you feel more comfortable with the German version, let us know by sending a mail.The newspaper articles summarized on this page have been archived in our digital archive. If you need the complete article of one of the notes on this page, write us an e-mail. You may also be interested in our Jazz-Index, the world’s largest computer-based bibliography on jazz, which lists books, jazz periodicals, but also essays from daily and weekly newspapers. You can order excerpts from our Jazz-Index on specific musicians for free by sending us a mail with the respective name(s). A short aside about the links on this page: Some of the linked articles cannot be read without prior registration; with many online newspapers older articles can only be accessed for a fee. Please bear in mind that the summaries and translation on this page are our summaries and translations. If you want to quote any of the articles listed here,
you should use the original sources.We send this newsletter to the following e-mail address: jim@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)

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Jazzinstitut Darmstadt is a municipal cultural institute of the city of Darmstadt, Germany.

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August 6, 2014 / No Comments / More

Louis Armstrong on “The Johnny Cash Show” – complete and uncut – YouTube

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August 5, 2014 / No Comments / More

The Real Sonny Rollins – In My Own Words: Sonny Rollins responds to the New Yorker article – YouTube

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Kenny Drew Jr RIP

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August 5, 2014 / No Comments / More

[New post The Well-Tempered Ear] (The Real) Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words — Live Interview, Tonight

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** New post on Between the Grooves with Philip Booth
————————————————————
http://betweenthegrooves.wordpress.com/author/philipb1961/

** (The Real) Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words — Live Interview, Tonight (http://betweenthegrooves.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/the-real-sonny-rollins-in-his-own-words-live-interview-tonight/)
————————————————————
by philipb1961 (http://betweenthegrooves.wordpress.com/author/philipb1961/)

A “satire” piece on Sonny Rollins, recently published in a generally revered national magazine that once devoted much space to great writing on jazz, has justifiably driven a lot of angry responses.

I’d rather not link to it again, but you can access the article (by someone who calls himself “Django Gold”) via my earlier post.

Thankfully, in the brave new world of online communication, it’s easy enough to hear from, and communicate directly with, the genuine article, the genius musician who has made such enormous contributions to jazz.

Bret Primack, AKA the Jazz Video Guy, will discuss the article tonight at 9 pm EST, in an interview that will be streamed live from Sonny’s home in Woodstock, N.Y. Check it out at Sonny’s web site — http://www.sonnyrollins.com (http://www.sonnyrollins.com/) . Primack will pose his own questions, as well as those posted on Twitter, via #rollinstruth.

Should be fun.

philipb1961 (http://betweenthegrooves.wordpress.com/author/philipb1961/) | August 4, 2014 at 10:38 am | Categories: Uncategorized (http://betweenthegrooves.wordpress.com/?cat=1) | URL:http://wp.me/po0pe-Vv

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August 4, 2014 / No Comments / More

New Documentary WBAI: America ReFramed Radio Unnameable

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Village Voice Ad 1965

America ReFramed Radio Unnameable (http://worldchannel.org/programs/episode/america-reframed-radio-unnameable/)

One of the talking heads in this doc is Bob Fass’s volunteer producer Bill Prop. Bill and I were roommates back in the early 70s. Take it from me when I tell you Bill is one whacked-out character. Not only was he a halfway decent saxophone player he once ran the NYC Marathon stoned on acid.

Thanks to Michael Simmons for the Village Voice Ad.

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August 4, 2014 / No Comments / More

JIVIN’ IN BE-BOP. 1946 Dizzy Gillespie Jazz Film. Uncut – YouTube

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August 3, 2014 / No Comments / More

Most scurrilous, unfunny New Yorker “humor” re jazz

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** Most scurrilous, unfunny New Yorker “humor” re jazz
————————————————————

August 2, 2014 by Howard Mandel (http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/author/hmandel) 24 Comments (http://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/2014/08/most-scurrilous-unfunny-new-yorker-humor-re-jazz.html#comments)
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Sonny Rollins, were he not so zen, would not be pleased.

I’m aghast at The New Yorker’s rip-off of Sonny Rollins’ good name and great heart to slag jazz in the guise of “humor.” A Daily Shouts piece, bylined “Django Gold” (surely a pseudonym) purports to be “Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words” and controverts the very essence of the art form this grand hero has embodied for more than half a century – without raising a chuckle (at least from me). See for yourself (http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words) – then write the editor a letter saying “This ain’t funny.” Not that jazz is sacrosanct, but this ain’t funny.

Ok, call me sensitive. I was read “The Talk of the Town” as an infant by my parents trying to put me to sleep. I saved my copy of The New Yorker issue containing S.J. Perelman’s last story, as well as Salinger’s “Hapworth 16, 1924″ and In Cold Blood (http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Blood-Truman-Capote/dp/B0062CU564/?tag=howardmacom-20) . I’ve always wanted to write something that The New Yorker would publish. As a reader and later budding jazz journalist, I admired Whitney Balliett’s interviews and sopped up the front-of-the-book squibs on who was playing where. The magazine’s neglect of jazz since Balliett retired in 1998 has been regrettable, but all too consistent with mainstream media’s treatment of America’s world-renown cultural signifier.

I have often been amused by The New Yorker’s satires and cartoons. But appropriating and subverting the persona and image (photo by David Redfern) of the NEA Jazz Master/National Medal of the Arts honoree in order to scoff at what he and hordes of other performers do (mostly for self-satisfaction: It’s not like even the best-selling jazz musicians make the big bucks flowing to visual arts stars, major film directors and actors, globte-trotting orchestra conductors, etc.) is nothing to laugh at. The “joke” is based on everyone who stumbles on this realizing it’s the opposite of Rollins’ life and purpose, but yet turns on the seed of punkishhttp://www.artsjournal.com/jazzbeyondjazz/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/punk-e1406989417691.jpegresentment sophisticates presumably harbor against the music.

“The saxophone sounds horrible . . . Jazz may be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with . . .I hate music. I wasted my life.” Oh, yeah, Django, those are real corkers!

To know what Rollins really thinks about things, check outMark Jacobson’s 2013 interview (http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/sony-rollins-the-colossus-20130819) or view any of a Bret Primack’s video posts (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4D1134C53AFDEAE7) with the man.

And what’s really wrong about this is that due to the mechanics of search engine optimization, henceforth “Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words” will likely score high in Google searches for Sonny, maybe for jazz, so that unsuspecting readers will be led to think (at least for a moment) that this wonderful, selfless 84-year-old human being actually has come to the conclusion that everything he’s poured his mind, soul, energy into — for decades in the face of society’s bigoted and snooty dismissal, commercial disregard and evidently continuing “intellectual” non-comprehension — has been for nought.

Shame on The New Yorker. What would Balliett, Robert Gottlieb (TNY editor 1987 – 82, editor of Reading Jazz (http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Jazz-Gathering-Autobiography-Reportage-ebook/dp/B00IBYZYOY/?tag=howardmacom-20) ), or such immortal TNY humorists as Robert Benchley, James Thurber, S.J. Perelman 0r Donald Barthelme, author of a genuinely silly New Yorker-published spoof, “The King of Jazz” (http://www.jessamyn.com/barth/kingofjazz.html) say? For shame, for shame. Not that jazz is sacrosanct, but “funny” must be funny.
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August 3, 2014 / No Comments / More

Manny Roth, 94, Impresario of Cafe Wha?, Is Dead – NYTimes.com

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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/nyregion/manny-roth-94-impresario-of-cafe-wha-is-dead.html?emc=eta1&_r=2 (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/nyregion/manny-roth-94-impresario-of-cafe-wha-is-dead.html?emc=eta1&_r=2)

** Manny Roth, 94, Impresario of Cafe Wha?, Is Dead
————————————————————

Photo
The scene outside Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village in 1967. Credit Robert Walker/The New York Times

“Just got here from the West,” the gangly 19-year-old told Manny Roth, owner of the Greenwich Village nightclub “Cafe Wha?” “Name’s Bob Dylan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/bob_dylan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) . I’d like to do a few songs? Can I?”

Sure, Mr. Roth said; on “hootenanny” nights, as he called them, anybody could sing a song or two, and this was a hootenanny night, a bitterly cold one, Jan. 24, 1961. And so Mr. Dylan took out his guitar and sang a handful of Woody Guthrie songs.

The crowd “flipped” in excitement, Mr. Dylan later said.

He had hitchhiked to New York from Minnesota, and after showing up at the Cafe Wha?, he mentioned to Mr. Roth that he had no place to sleep. So Mr. Roth later asked the audience “if anybody has a couch he can crash on” — and somebody did.

It was all standard fare, recounted again and again in many places, for Cafe Wha?, a large, plain basement room at 115 Macdougal Street presided over by Mr. Roth during a lively and fertile period in the Village’s history. He died on July 25 at his home in Ojai, Calif., his daughter, Jodi Roth, said. He was 94. She said he loved being called the “Duke of Macdougal Street.”
Photo
Manny Roth, its owner, in an undated photograph.

It was at the Cafe Wha? that young performers like Jimi Hendrix (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/jimi_hendrix/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , Bruce Springsteen (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/bruce_springsteen/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce,Bill Cosby (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_cosby/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Richard Pryor got early chances to hone their talents. Folk singers, artists, poets, beatniks and anarchists came to the club, and so did far greater numbers of tourists, eager to observe those exotic breeds. (The club’s odd name was a shortening of the word “what,” intended to convey incredulity.)

An advertisement for Cafe Wha? featured a picture of a beatnik in beret and sunglasses and the slogan, “Greenwich Village’s Swingingest Coffee House.” Mary Travers, before she was the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, was a waitress there.

Mr. Roth abandoned the club in the late 1960s, but it was started up again, after an interregnum as a Middle Eastern restaurant in the 1970s and ’80s, under the same name by a new owner, and it continues to operate.

Manuel Lee Roth was born on Nov. 25, 1919, in New Castle, Ind., where his family owned a mom-and-pop grocery. He grew up loving sports and acting. At the University of Miami, he majored in theater and business before dropping out to enlist in the Army in World War II. He became a navigator on bombing missions over Germany and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other medals.

After the war, he helped run a United Service Organization theater in Germany, finished his studies in Miami and studied acting in New York. In the late 1950s, he started a club at 147 Bleecker Street called the Cock and Bull, which featured a Broadway theme. It barely scraped by, and in 1961 it became the Bitter End — another Village landmark — under different ownership.

In 1959, someone told Mr. Roth about a garage that used to be an old horse stable on Macdougal between Bleecker and West Third Streets. You had to go down steep stairs to reach the dark, dank basement, which was bisected by a trough once used as a gutter for horse dung. Mr. Roth immediately recognized it as an excellent site for a coffee house — that legendary genre of cafe where, at least in the haziness of memory, hipsters smoked, sipped espresso and discussed Sartre.
Continue reading the main story

He spent his last $100 on a truckload of broken marble to make the floor, which he personally laid. He sprayed the walls with black paint to create the feeling of a cave. There were castoff chairs and candles in blue glass flickering on every table. Full occupancy was 325.

At first, baskets were passed to pay the performers, who alternated all day long: conga drummers followed by impersonators followed by Appalachian balladeers. Mr. Dylan’s first regular job there was as a backup harmonica player during the day.

Mr. Roth kept a famously tight lid on expenses.

“By the time he got finished with a penny, you could no longer see the Lincoln on it,” the folk singer Dave Van Ronk once said.

In his book “Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades,” Clinton Heylin quoted Mr. Dylan as saying, “You got fed there, which was actually the best thing about the place.” In his autobiographical book “Chronicles: Volume One,” Mr. Dylan recalled a cook named Norbert who let him eat free at Cafe Wha?

“He wore a tomato-stained apron,” Mr. Dylan wrote, “had a fleshy, hard-bitten face, bulging cheeks, scars on his face like the marks of claws — thought of himself as a lady’s man — saving his money so he could go to Verona in Italy to visit the tomb of Romeo and Juliet.”

Mr. Roth’s downtown duchy was rich in entertainment history. On the folk singer Richie Havens’s recommendation, Mr. Roth hired Jimi Hendrix, who in the mid-1960s called himself Jimmy James as the frontman for a group called the Blue Flames. The Flames played five sets a night, sometimes six nights a week, at Cafe Wha? for little more than tips.

For two months in 1967, a then-unknown Bruce Springsteen brought his band the Castiles to the club to play afternoon sets for teenagers. Louis Gossett Jr. sang folk songs there before deciding to pursue acting full-time. Mr. Pryor told jokes there, and Mr. Roth became his first manager.

“I was in the center of the scene there — all you had to do was carry an empty guitar case and girls would follow you,” Mr. Roth was quoted as saying on the website of the rock band Van Halen, of which his nephew David Lee Roth is the frontman.

“I did my share of drugs, I had my long hair,” he continued, adding, “Every day was an adventure.”

There were, to be sure, small problems, like the time in 1961 when the police filed charges against Mr. Roth for allowing an unleashed French poodle to roam the club. (It turned out to belong to a waitress, and the charges were dropped.) Like other Village clubs, Cafe Wha? was occasionally fined for selling food and providing entertainment without a cabaret license. After Mr. Dylan was late for performances three times in a row, Mr. Roth fired him.

Ultimately, revenues from coffee, light food and a cover charge that climbed to $5 — high for those days — could not cover expenses. In 1968, Mr. Roth walked away from Cafe Wha?, essentially penniless, according to his daughter. With his marriage breaking up, he eventually moved to Woodstock, N.Y., where he ran a diner and raised his daughter and son as a single father before later marrying again.

Besides his daughter, he is survived by his son, Brandon, as well as his wife, the former Marlyse Medel; his sister, Jami Roth; and his brother, David.

Mr. Roth later sold real estate in New York City and invested in the West End Gate Cafe at Broadway and 114th Street, a 1990 resurrection of the West End Cafe, a favorite of Jack Kerouac and other beats. He moved to California about 10 years ago.

In 2012, David Lee Roth came back to play Cafe Wha?, which he had loved to visit as a 7-year-old, with Van Halen. It looked pretty much the same as he remembered it.

“This is a temple,” he told the crowd. “This is a very special place, and I am more nervous about this gig than I would ever be at the Garden. There is no hiding up here. There are no fake vocals. There is no fake anything.”

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Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words – The New Yorker

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** Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Sonny-Rollins-320.jpgCredit Photograph by David Redfern/Redferns via Getty

I started playing the saxophone when I was thirteen years old. There were some other kids on my block who had taken it up, and I thought that it might be fun. I later learned that these guys’ parents had forced them into it.

* * *

The saxophone sounds horrible. Like a scared pig. I never learned the names of most of the other instruments, but they all sound awful, too. Drums are O.K., because sometimes they’ll drown out the other stuff, but it’s all pretty bad.

Jazz might be the stupidest thing anyone ever came up with. The band starts a song, but then everything falls apart and the musicians just play whatever they want for as long they can stand it. People take turns noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the audience claps. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

Sometimes we would run through the same song over and over again to see if anybody noticed. If someone did, I don’t care.

* * *

There was this one time, in 1953 or 1954, when a few guys and I had just finished our last set at Club Carousel, and we were about to pack it in when in walked Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. We must have jammed together for five more hours, right through sunrise. That was the worst day of my life.

* * *

We always dressed real sharp: pin-stripe suits, porkpie hats, silk ties. As if to conceal the fact that we were spending all our time playing jazz in some basement.

I remember Dexter Gordon was doing a gig at the 3 Deuces, and at one point he leaned into the microphone and said, “I could sell this suit and this saxophone and get far away from here.” The crowd laughed.

* * *

I really don’t know why I keep doing this. Inertia, I guess. Once you get stuck in a rut, it’s difficult to pull yourself out, even if you hate every minute of it. Maybe I’m just a coward.

If I could do it all over again, I’d probably be an accountant or a process server. They make good money.

* * *

Once I played the Montreux Jazz Festival, in Switzerland, with Miles Davis. I walked in on him smoking cigarettes and staring at his horn for what must have been fifteen minutes, like it was a poisonous snake and he wasn’t sure if it was dead. Finally Miles stood up, turned to his band, and said, “All right, let’s get through this, and then we’ll go to the airport.” He looked like he was about to cry.

* * *

I released fifty-odd albums, wrote hundreds of songs, and played on God knows how many session dates. Some of my recordings are in the Library of Congress. That’s idiotic. They ought to burn that building to the ground. I hate music. I wasted my life.
*
*
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* mailto:?subject=From%20newyorker.com:%20Sonny%20Rollins%3A%20In%20His%20Own%20Words%20&body=I%20started%20playing%20the%20saxophone%20when%20I%20was%20thirteen%20years%20old.%20There%20were%20some%20other%20kids%20on%20my%20block%20who%20had%20taken%20it%20up,%20and%20I%20thought%20that%20it%20might%20be%20fun.%20I%20later%20learned%20that%20these%20guys%E2%80%99%20parents%20had%20forced%20them%20into%20it.*%20*%20*The%20saxophone%20sounds%20horrible….%0A%0AContinue%20reading%20at%20http://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/sonny-rollins-words
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August 2, 2014 / No Comments / More

Documentary filmmaker Robert Drew dead at 90 – Oakland Jazz music | Examiner.com

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** Documentary filmmaker Robert Drew dead at 90
————————————————————

Word has come this morning of the death of Robert Drew. The director-producer was in the vanguard of documentary filmmakers in the 1960s; indeed, he worked with other pioneering giants of the era including Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, Terence Macartney-Filgate, and Albert and David Maysles.Drew is most associated with two films focusing on the politics of those tumultuous times, both of which greatly benefitted from access to the Kennedy brothers.

His best known film is “Primary” (1960), a documentary about the Wisconsin Primary election between Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy. It is considered to be one of the first direct cinema documentaries (safari-reader://www.examiner.com/topic/documentaries) . According to critic Matt Zoller Seitz, “Primary” “had as immense and measurable an impact on nonfiction filmmaking as Birth of a Nation had on fiction filmmaking.”
On June 11, 1963, the Alabama Governor George Wallace blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama to oppose integration. His defiance of court order rapidly became a national issue in the U.S. Drew Associates had a cameraman in the Oval office and recorded the meetings over the crisis. The result played on TV in October 1963.
“Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment” not only fueled discussions over the Civil Rights Movement, it also triggered a profound questioning over the political power of cinema verite or direct cinema. For “Crisis,” Drew convinced President John F. Kennedy to let his crews shoot candidly in the White House, and Drew Associates filmmakers (including Gregory Shuker and Richard Leacock) took cameras into the Oval Office and into the home of Governor Wallace.

Drew also made music documentaries, with an emphasis on jazz (safari-reader://www.examiner.com/topic/jazz) . (They are readily available to purchase or just watch on YouTube.) These include “Jazz: The Intimate Art,” which focused on Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Lloyd; and “On The Road With Duke Ellington (safari-reader://www.examiner.com/topic/duke-ellington) ,” which critics hailed.

Robert Drew produced this 58-minute TV documentary about Duke Ellington on the road in 1967 – the year he picked up honorary degrees at Yale and Morgan State and the year Billy Strayhorn, his principal collaborator, died. (Drew updated the film slightly in 1974.) It’s valuable mainly for the portrait it offers of Ellington as a person, pianist, and composer, in roughly that order, though not so much as a bandleader. Insofar as Ellington’s main instrument was his orchestra, this is a limitation, but “On the Road” is still valuable for giving us aspects of the man neglected elsewhere, and some of the music – mainly Duke on piano – is great.

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August 1, 2014 / No Comments / More

Exclusive: The Lost Legendary Voice of Sam Cooke’s Brother – Esquire

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** EXCLUSIVE: THE LOST LEGENDARY VOICE OF SAM COOKE’S BROTHER
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You may find the voice familiar. As smooth as honey, with just the right bit of grit. Here and there, you might think it sounds like Sam Cooke. And you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s his younger brother, L.C., whose first studio album was delayed fifty years. Today, Cooke, at 81, is finally releasing his debut The Complete SAR Records Recordings (http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Records-Recordings-L-C-Cooke/dp/B00KIX8GPA?tag=esq_autolinks-20) , done in 1964. Still, its passions are so strong, it may make this long hot summer even steamier. You say you like your soul straightforward and heartfelt? Without any of the hokey histrionics those mental patients exhibit onThe Voice? Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to your new favorite singer. One of the most patient men ever to put mouth to microphone.

The album gives you a complex, bittersweet feeling. Not because the music itself is sad. It’s mostly uptempo stuff. From the hand-clapping opening track, “Take Me for What I Am,” to the string-laden, supernally sexy “The Lover.” But listening to it, you may find yourself having a couple of contrasting thoughts. One is This rocks! It’s righteous one minute, salacious the next. The second thought, though, is infinitely more depressing: Had the album been released in 1964, the world would know this Cooke well, too. He’d be more than just the beloved brother of a legend. But this rockin’ little record has its own moral: It’s better to get to the party late, than not at all. Backed by legends like Billy Preston on keys and prolific session drummer Earl Palmer, Complete Recordings is here now, baby.

Listen to “Put Me Down Easy” from L.C. Cooke’s new album:

Born Southerner that he is, L.C. has stories. To put it mildly.

“The first tour Aretha Franklin ever went on, was Sam’s and mine,” says the gentle, sweet-tempered Cooke. “One day in 1961, Aretha called me. She said, ‘L.C., I need you to do me a favor. I asked my father if we could use his new car to go on Sam’s tour.’ Her father [the legendary Reverend C.L. Franklin] had a 1961 Continental, you know, with the suicide doors. Aretha told me she could use it on one condition: only if I drove. So I called Sam. And he said, ‘No, man. I’m trying to make you a star. I don’t want you driving nobody. Not even me! You’re nobody’s chauffeur.'”

After some finagling, Sam relented. L.C. went over to the Reverend’s house. Young Cooke was expected to return the car exactly as it was. The only change allowed would be its mileage.

But the Reverend had something else in mind.

“Later on, I figured out what Reverend Franklin’s motives were,” says Cooke, chuckling. “He wanted me to get with Aretha. He figured Sam would break her heart. I didn’t find that out ’til 1970! That’s when Aretha’s road manager came over to me and said, ‘L.C., Aretha can do a lot of things. But she do not know how to pick a man.'”

L.C. ultimately said a polite no to Aretha’s father. He was already seeing several women and did not need any help in this department.

Regardless, the tour went fine. And as far as this writer could ascertain, both the Continental and Aretha remained intact. In fact, everything seemed to be going beautifully for Sam’s brother and protégée.

Then, three years later, Sam was shot by a female motel owner, in a murky misunderstanding over a woman. L.C.’s career, which was really set to rock, did not. But L.C. didn’t care. He was too distraught over his brother’s death to worry about such a small thing as being a star. But time, seemingly, has healed his spiritual wounds. Cooke seems to feel just fine that he’s both a brand new artistand an octogenarian.

“There’s nothing bad about the record coming out now,” says Cooke. “It takes me back to Sam. Every song on the album, me and Sam wrote it. Back in ’64, when he was killed, I didn’t care about the album or singing or anything. I was just so wrapped up in Sam. We did everything together. When I talked to his wife, she said, in Sam’s book, I was number one. That made me so happy.”

Cooke also seems particularly proud of those sessions from half a century ago, because his brother complimented him on them.

“He told me, ‘L.C., of all my artists [Bobby Womack, Johnny Taylor, and The Soul Stirrers], you’re my favorite. You know why? You come in prepared, you know your stuff, and you’re not in that studio spending all my money,'” L.C. says laughing.

After he began to recover from his brother’s death, Cooke sang for five years with The Upsetters, a little band that, in the ’50s, backed up that wonderful lunatic, Little Richard.

Ultimately, L.C. gave it all up. One infers he has gotten his share of the Cooke family money. So eventually he decided it was time to chill.

“What have I been doing recently? Just resting and dressing. Haven’t been doing nothin’,” says Cooke, the sweet sound of acceptance evident in his voice.

We talk a little more. About how Sam always called Dick Clark by his first name, a revolutionary act back in those early Civil Rights days. How the former Cassius Clay use to act like a little boy around Sam (“He loved him”). How L.C. was onAmerican Bandstand, January 1, 1960. And how he met James Brown, the very day Brown cut “Please, Please, Please.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQdMZ1qrn6k)

Historical vignettes like that. There must be scores of them. Then he pauses. And Mr. L.C. Cooke, who has been everywhere, done everything, and met everyone worth meeting, lets me know he plans to just keep chillin’.

“I don’t think I’ll be doing anything to promote the album,” he says evenly (aside, presumably, this interview). “I’m just glad it’s coming out. I’m 81. I have no regrets. I can still remember everything and everyone. All things considered? I know one thing for certain: I’m a very lucky man.”

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August 1, 2014 / No Comments / More

Louis Prima Jr.: ‘This has been a difficult 12 months personally and professionally’ – Las Vegas Sun News

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** Louis Prima Jr.: ‘This has been a difficult 12 months personally and professionally’
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Image

Denise Truscello/WireImage/DeniseTruscello.net (http://www.denisetruscello.net/)

Louis Prima Jr. and his band in Downtown Las Vegas.

By Louis Prima Jr.

Thursday, July 31, 2014 | 2 p.m.

** Louis Prima Jr. at Fremont Street Experience (safari-reader://www.lasvegassun.com/photos/galleries/2010/dec/08/louis-prima-jr-fremont-street-experience/)
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Louis Prima Jr. and his band at Fremont Street Experience on Dec. 7, 2010. Launch slideshow » (safari-reader://www.lasvegassun.com/photos/galleries/2010/dec/08/louis-prima-jr-fremont-street-experience/embed/)

** Louis Prima Jr. at The Hard Rock Cafe (safari-reader://www.lasvegassun.com/photos/galleries/2010/may/24/louis-prima-jr-hard-rock-cafe/)
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Louis Prima Jr. and The Witnesses featuring Sarah Spiegel perform at the Hard Rock Cafe on The Strip on May 21, 2010. Launch slideshow » (safari-reader://www.lasvegassun.com/photos/galleries/2010/may/24/louis-prima-jr-hard-rock-cafe/embed/)

As Robin Leach winds down his annual summer vacation under the Tuscan sun in Italy — with a visit to Pisa and its Leaning Tower, plus, a stop in fashionable Milan — many of our Strip personalities have again stepped forward in his absence to pen their own words of wisdom. We continue today with Las Vegas big-bandleader Louis Prima Jr., new Riviera resident comedian Matt Kazam (http://www.lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2014/jul/31/emergency-room-las-vegas-comedian-matt-kazam-prove/) and Las Vegas artist Michael Godard. (http://www.lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2014/jul/31/michael-godard-las-vegas-pop-artist-witnesses-mcca/) Here’s Louis.

So here we are, another year older, another year wiser. Robin is on vacation again, and Las Vegas’ forgotten son is filling in for the day. If you will excuse my sarcasm, I promise that there is a worthwhile lesson in the end.

This has been a difficult 12 months personally and professionally. A year that saw my residence burglarized for two weeks, by a group of teens that remains unprosecuted, while I was on tour. It saw extremely difficult but necessary changes to our band. And, most devastatingly, it saw the passing of my mother, Gia Maione Prima.

There are so many memories that will forever stay an important part of my makeup. How many of you Las Vegas old-timers (hey, who you calling old?!) saw your first movie at the Huntridge or the Centerama? Who played at Lorenzi Park and picnicked at Tule Springs? How about ice cream at Thrifty’s or shopping at Wonder World?

Mom, we miss you.

But I am not here to bring you down.

See, I haven’t gotten out much this year. We had a very busy year of touring and bringing Prima Magic to the masses. So I have nothing Las Vegas to champion other than our spirit.

Our spirit to rise above those people or occurrences that beg to bring you down. Our spirit that, despite the difficulties, causes us to rise above the smoke and rebuild, that encourages us to spite them by beating the odds and come out on top.

I look around this neon playground of ours and proudly smile as we thrive as a city with entertainment and goings-on at every corner. For I join in the goings-on, as in this most difficult time, The Witnesses and I have been busy at iconic Capitol Records in Hollywood recording our sophomore album for Warrior Records.

“Blow,” released worldwide June 10, is a collection of original material and a couple surprises, surprises that include a duet with my dad. A poetic send-off to the legacy that my mother so passionately protected, that we so energetically revisited. A send-off of sorts to ourselves as we debuted at #25 on the jazz charts, #1 most-added album to radio playlists and shared the iTunes Top 15 sellers with music greats.

So, yes, I raise a toast to Las Vegas, as you are my inspiration to rise above, to never say quit. The Witnesses and I raise a toast to all of you as we invite you to try a little “Blow” (LouisPrimaJr.com, iTunes, Amazon, major record outlets, Pandora, Spotify).

Whatever your avenue for music, give it a shot. It will make you smile and get up and dance and bring you back to the glorious entertainment for which Las Vegas is known.

We should all raise a toast to the human spirit that lets us rise above it all and smile. You’ll excuse me if I toot my own horn, but our new album will “Blow” you away.

And until we see you onstage back home, we’ll see you on the road.

Be sure to read our other guest columns today from Las Vegas artist Michael Godard (http://www.lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2014/jul/31/michael-godard-las-vegas-pop-artist-witnesses-mcca/) and new Riviera comedian Matt Kazam. (http://www.lasvegassun.com/vegasdeluxe/2014/jul/31/emergency-room-las-vegas-comedian-matt-kazam-prove/) On Sunday, it’s star chef Rick Moonen, museum maverick Tom Zaller and Eric and Jayne Post of “Marriage Can Be Murder.”

Robin Leach has been a journalist for more than 50 years and has spent the past decade giving readers the inside scoop on Las Vegas, the world’s premier platinum playground.

Follow Robin Leach on Twitter at Twitter.com/Robin_Leach (http://twitter.com/robin_leach) .

Follow Vegas DeLuxe on Twitter at Twitter.com/vegasdeluxe (http://twitter.com/vegasdeluxe) .

Follow Sun A&E Senior Editor Don Chareunsy on Twitter atTwitter.com/VDLXEditorDon (http://twitter.com/VDLXEditorDon) .

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August 1, 2014 / No Comments / More

100 Great Records Of The 1920s

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** 100 Great Records Of The 1920s (http://search.aol.com/aol/imageDetails?s_it=imageDetails&q=Jack+Osterman%27s&v_t=keyword_rollover&b=image%3Fquery%3DJack%2BOsterman%2527s%26s_it%3Dkeyword_rollover%26oreq%3Da7651d4eb2b34eaba783400fcd0868ef&img=http%3A%2F%2Faceterrier.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2007%2F12%2Ftedlewis.jpg&host=http%3A%2F%2Faceterrier.com%2F%3Fpage_id%3D551&width=113&height=79&thumbUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fimages-partners-tbn.google.com%2Fimages%3Fq%3Dtbn%3AANd9GcT0cbcRYAbPLgB-MZBS3W9flEou7llaNbiA3aOQixhRc1pjCE383KyWs80&imgWidth=300&imgHeight=210&imgSize=65229&imgTitle=Jack+Osterman%27s)
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July 31, 2014 / No Comments / More

Music Festival: The Newport Jazz Festival – WSJ

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** Who’s Thinking About Retirement?
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From left, Bobby Hackett, Louis Armstrong and George Wein at the festival in 1970Associated Press

This weekend, the Newport Jazz Festival turns 60. Even though Newport inspired thousands of other festivals, both jazz and otherwise, around the world (some produced by Newport’s founder, George Wein), it remains a unique event in the cultural landscape: Newport is at once the grandfather of all large-scale outdoor music festivals and the unchallenged epicenter of the jazz world—the equivalent of South by Southwest, Ted Talks, Sundance and Burning Man all rolled into a single weekend.

Before Mr. Wein produced the first Newport festival 60 years ago, there had been a tradition of classical music in large open-air concert spaces, such as Lewisohn Stadium in New York and the Hollywood Bowl. As far as the Toscaninis and the Stokowskis were concerned, these occasional al fresco presentations were decidedly populist, an attempt to reach the larger audience that didn’t regularly attend concerts at the Metropolitan Opera House or Carnegie Hall. When Mr. Wein made the then-radical decision to do the same thing for jazz, he was coming from the opposite direction, helping the music to reach upward from the lower rungs of American culture to the loftier realms of opera and the symphony.

Newport Jazz Festival

Aug. 1 through Aug. 3

www.newportjazzfest.org

In 1954, jazz was still a curio in the formal concert halls. Only such overwhelming icons as Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong had been invited to play Carnegie, and even then very rarely. In New York, the best that a well-known big band leader or star singer could do was to play the more upscale jazz clubs like Birdland or Basin Street East (jazz was never welcome at the really prestigious night spots like the Persian Room or the Copacabana). For the most part, the major soloists of the swing and bebop era were playing in what could be charitably called “dives”—places you wouldn’t dream of bringing your wife or even the better class of mistress. Back in New Orleans, jazz had been heard in the dance halls, both the comparatively respectable ones and the rough-and-tumble “buckets of blood” of the Storyville red-light district. With the coming of Prohibition, small-group instrumental jazz was largely forced underground into the speakeasies—a move that cemented
its status as a form of vice (you didn’t hear Beethoven in a joint that served bootleg hooch in teacups). That louche reputation still lingered two decades after Prohibition’s end, when Mr. Wein launched Newport.

Yet, in another sense, Mr. Wein was also reconnecting the music to its very beginnings, in that the outdoorsy, weekend-afternoon presentation was also part of jazz’s early history. As the 19th century became the 20th, jazz was as much a product of the parade and picnic grounds, where the brass bands marched, as it was of the sporting house, where pianists like Jelly Roll Morton held forth. Middle-class families of all races would head from church to the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, listening to early rags mixed in with marches by John Philip Sousa as the band played on.

Mr. Wein, with the support of his wealthy Newport patrons Elaine and Louis Lorillard, launched the first major American jazz festival at precisely the right time. Jazz never needed a shot of respectability more than it did in the mid-1950s—when virtually the only time it was mentioned in the mainstream papers was when a major figure like Charlie Parker died of drug-related causes.

And even while strengthening jazz’s ties to its own past, Mr. Wein was laying the groundwork for the future. The establishment of a network of festivals, especially overseas, has been essential to the long-term survival of the music. Up until Newport, summer had generally been a dead season for concert halls and theaters alike—who wanted to sit in a 90-degree concert hall listening to Schubert? (To a vast extent, the spread of the summer festival was technologically empowered by the advent of air conditioning.) Six decades later, the warm months are the busiest time of the year for working jazz musicians, most of whom are continually on the road between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

The implications of Mr. Wein’s festivals spread far beyond jazz: He himself started a parallel festival for folk music in 1959, and at a certain point began including big-name pop acts in the jazz event. Mr. Wein deserves to be credited as the inadvertent father of the entire era of Woodstock and sports-arena rock concerts—but he’d probably demand a blood test if you called him that to his face.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of Mr. Wein’s success is the speed by which Newport became the central event in the jazz world—by the second year, it had a reputation as the nebula where stars were born. Miles Davis owed much of his career to his transcendent showing in 1955, and, for the rest of his life, Duke Ellington consistently said that he had been “born at Newport in 1956,” after his triumphant performance in which tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves played 27 solo choruses on “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” firing up the audience so much that it nearly caused a riot. The appearance also announced to the world the end of Ellington’s comparatively fallow period in the early 1950s and the start of his comeback. In 1960, Mr. Wein was probably the most influential figure in the entire world of jazz; during the CD boom of the ’80s and ’90s, the balance of power shifted to major label gurus like Blue Note’s Bruce Lundvall, but with the record industry currently in a
state of free fall, the upscale presenters like Newport and Jazz at Lincoln Center are once again the dominant figures.

For the past 60 years, no institution has done more to help establish jazz as a legitimate art form than Newport and the notion of the jazz festival that Mr. Wein created. Where jazz once rubbed shoulders with pop stars like Frank Sinatra, it now competes for government and corporate funding with opera and chamber music. Indeed, the biggest issue confronting jazz in its second century is the need to regain the popular following that it once took for granted. If the Newport Jazz Festival were a person, it would be thinking about retirement, but even though jazz itself is by now well over a century old, it’s still young enough, fresh enough and vital enough to be more than ready for challenges precisely like this one.

Mr. Friedwald writes the weekly Jazz Scene column for the Journal.

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July 31, 2014 / No Comments / More

Idris Muhammad, legendary New Orleans drummer, is dead at 74 | NOLA.com

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** Idris Muhammad, legendary New Orleans drummer, is dead at 74
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Idris Muhammad (http://search.nola.com/idris+muhammad/) , whose drumming crossed over several musical styles including funk, jazz, and rhythm and blues, died Tuesday (July 29). He was 74.

Muhammad’s death was confirmed by close friend Dan Williams, who got to know Muhammad through Williams’ Jazz Journey concert series sponsored by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation. Williams learned of Muhammad’s death through family members in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. A converted Muslim, Muhammad was immediately buried in accordance with the traditions of Islam, Williams said.

His cause of death has not yet been confirmed, but Williams and other friends noted that Muhammad had been receiving dialysis treatment in New Orleans — where he had returned from New York City to retire back in 2011.

While he had spent the past two decades working with jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal, Muhammad’s drumming covered almost every genre of contemporary music, including rock ‘n’ roll. He toured or recorded with a who’s who of big names — Roberta Flack, Grover Washington, George Benson, Sonny Stitt and John Scofield, to name a few. Williams said that Muhammad got his first national touring gig with Sam Cooke before moving on to Jerry Butler, Curtis Mayfield and beyond.

“He was eclectic in terms of his playing,” Williams said. “He mixed the New Orleans sound, that sound of the street music, with jazz music and rock ‘n’ roll, and had all that intertwined,” Williams explained. “He tuned his drum to get the sound from the New Orleans street bands, the marching bands, and he’d get that kind of sound that would come from New Orleans. That’s why he was so sought after.

“He had the syncopation of New Orleans.”

The news devastated the WWOZ-FM staff, who had gotten to know Muhammad personally and through his music. After learning of the news, Wednesday’s (July 30) “Morning Set” jazz show featured plenty of Muhammad’s work.
I’d put him on the Mount Rushmore of New Orleans drummers, along with Smokey Johnson, Johnny Vidacovich and Herlin Riley.” — George Ingmire, DJ, WWOZ

“I’d put him on the Mount Rushmore of New Orleans drummers, along with Smokey Johnson, Johnny Vidacovich and Herlin Riley,” said George Ingmire, host of Wednesday’s “New Orleans Music Show” and the nationally syndicated radio show “New Orleans Calling.” As soon as he had set up his Mount Rushmore, of course, Ingmire, who didn’t know Muhammad personally, started thinking of others worth including, such as Zigaboo Modeliste and Ed Blackwell. But Muhammad, he said, was special: “It was his the soulfulness that he brought to the funkiness of the music. He opened it up a little more by drumming in a soulful way. He played with a lot of people, and made their music sound better.”

Maryse Dejean, WWOZ’s volunteer coordinator, had become acquainted with Muhammad along with her husband, Don Paul, and marveled at Muhammad’s contrasting personalities behind and away from the drum kit.

“He was just a humble person,” Dejean said. “He was a genuinely nice guy, but when you listen to that music … Mmm! His drive, the creativity, the sheer masterful strokes.”

Leo Morris was born in New Orleans on Nov. 13, 1939. He was friends with the famed Neville family, and as Keith Spera noted in a 2007 article (http://blog.nola.com/keithspera/2007/01/the_hardest_homecoming_aaron_n.html) , helped Aaron meet his beloved wife, Joel Roux (now deceased), when the boys were “bippity-bopping” down Valence Street one day in 1957. By the time he was 16, he had played the drums for Fats Domino’s 1956 hit, “Blueberry Hill,” and later played with the Hawketts (led by Art Neville) on their iconic anthem, “Mardi Gras Mambo.”

Writing in 2010, Spera said (http://www.nola.com/jazzfest/index.ssf/2010/04/non-stop_jazz_fest_party_conti.html) , “Leo Morris was mesmerized by the chants and rhythms of the Mardi Gras Indians. Years later, he moved to New York and then Europe, changed his name to Idris Muhammad and deployed those rhythms as a prolific drummer for hire. Over five decades, he logged hundreds of recordings and thousands of performances with Sam Cooke, Jerry Butler, Roberta Flack, avant-jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, jazz funk saxophonist Lou Donaldson, guitarist Melvin Sparks, pianist Ahmad Jamal, New York tenor star Joe Lovano and many more. In recent years, Muhammad has returned to his hometown to mask Indian with saxophonist Big Chief Donald Harrison’s tribe.”

In 2012, Muhammad collaborated with fellow drummer Britt Anderson on “Inside the Music: The Life of Idris Muhammad.”

Come back to NOLA.com for additional information and reflection from those who were close to Muhammad, and leave your own reflections in the comment section below.

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July 31, 2014 / No Comments / More

Saving Sam the Record Man’s Giant Spinning Discs – CityLab

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** Saving Sam the Record Man’s Giant Spinning Discs
————————————————————
Image

Surrounded by buildings as tall as they are often uninteresting, few places in downtown Toronto attracted as much attention as the stand-alone record store that once stood at the corner of Yonge and Gould Street.

Since selling its final CD in 2007, Torontonians have been waiting to find out what would happen to the flashing neon discs that used to lure them into Sam the Record Man (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_the_Record_Man) ‘s flagship store for nearly 40 years. The property’s new owners initially agreed to incorporate the storefront into their construction plans. After reneging on that promise, city officials were able to finally secure the storefront’s fate earlier this month—on top of a mid-rise tower one block away.

A nationwide chain, Sam’s was ubiquitous across Canada while it lasted. Founded by Sam Sniderman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Sniderman) (who helped create the Junos, Canada’s music awards), the company started with a single location in Toronto in 1937 before eventually growing to more than 100 stores across Canada by the 1990s.

But like many other music retailers, changing times were unkind to Sam’s. The chain filed for bankruptcy in 2001 while managing to keep the flagship store open until 2007. Sniderman passed away in 2012. Only an independently run franchise store in Belleville, Ontario, still operates today.
A receipt for the installation of Sam’s first neon sign. (Courtesy Save Our Sam/Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/SaveSamSign) )

The Yonge Street location that everyone remembers opened in 1961. In the middle of an active entertainment district filled with lively signage, Sam’s joined the club in 1971 when it commissioned a flashing neon sign that, when illuminated, resembled a spinning vinyl record. As Sam’s popularity grew, it expanded incrementally into surrounding properties. A second spinning neon disc was added next to the original one in 1987. If you grew up in Toronto during those years, there’s a good chance you bought an album or saw a show inside the Sam’s on Yonge street.

When Ryerson University bought the property in 2008, the institution signed an agreement with the City of Toronto saying it would preserve the beloved storefront feature and find a way to incorporate it into the student center they planned to build in its place. If such an effort wasn’t architecturally feasible, they’d be allowed to move it to the Gould Street side of the former record store.

In 2010, the neon signs had been placed in a storage facility (http://youtu.be/SqjFdmOz49k) and the rest of the building was demolished. But when Ryerson unveiled its renderings (http://blog.archpaper.com/wordpress/archives/15333#.U812uoBdVA8) for their new student center, there were no spinning records to be found. The Snøhetta-designed proposal was unquestionably attractive, but it was just as clear that the University had no interest in incorporating the sign as agreed. “They talked about how wonderful their student center was going to be, but they didn’t demonstrate that they made their best efforts [to keep the sign], or any at all,” says Toronto City Councillor Josh Matlow.

Music journalist and Ryerson graduate Nicholas Jennings was bothered by his alma mater’s handling of the situation. He wrote to university president Sheldon Levy, who eventually wrote back, saying that Ryerson was committed to saving the sign but that the cost was prohibitive and the signs were environmentally unfriendly. “I offered to meet with him and bring other people from the music world in to help problem solve,” says Jennings, “but never heard back.”

Jennings reached out to the music world anyway, receiving an impressive list of support from some of Toronto’s most famous artists. Statements from Gordon Lightfoot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Lightfoot) , Geddy Lee (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geddy_Lee) , and Leslie Feist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_(singer)) , among others, came in last fall asking that the signage be saved. “They all felt a debt to Sam [Sniderman] because of his exemplary support of Canadian music,” Jennings tells us.
Letters from Geddy Lee, Gordon Lightfoot, and Leslie Feist in support of preserving Sam’s storefront. (Save Our Sam/Facebook)

Once it had become clear that Ryerson was not going to fulfill its promise, city councillors met in September to come up with a new course of action. Meanwhile, letters from musicians kept coming in, which Jennings would scan and post on the Facebook page for “SOS: Save our Sam the Record Man Sign (https://www.facebook.com/SaveSamSign) .” The page was created by Jeffrey Balmer, a Toronto-born architecture professor based in Charlotte. Balmer was so upset the night he found out about the sign’s uncertain future last Labor Day weekend (http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/08/29/ryerson-university-nixes-plan-to-display-iconic-sam-the-record-man-sign-on-new-building/) that he “got up in the middle of the night and launched the page.”

In October, city councillors officially deferred the issue to Deputy City Manager, John Livey, who then put James Parakh, the city’s urban design program manager, in charge of coming up with a solution. Parakh and his team went through a lengthy consultation process, which included talking to Sniderman’s family as well as Ryerson. After looking at all the possible relocation sites along Yonge, the city came up with a unique option— the roof of a city-owned tower at 277 Victoria St., the site of the Toronto Public Health building.
What 277 Victoria looks like now (top left) and what it will look like after Sam the Record Man’s storefront is placed on top of it (top right and bottom). (City of Toronto)

Facing the city’s equivalent of Times Square, the rather bland building could stand some decoration. In fact, Parakh argues, the old neon signs may help it fit in better with its surroundings. “277 Victoria has no signage, which makes it stand out from the rest of Dundas Square.” Matching up with Mayor Rob Ford’s interest in making Toronto as synonymous with music (http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/09/19/toronto-mayor-rob-ford-heading-to-texas-to-study-austins-celebrated-live-music-scene/) as Austin, Texas (the city already hosts NXNE (http://nxne.com/) , Canada’s answer to SXSW), the building will also have a sign running down its facade that says “Toronto Music City.”

The city council approved the relocation plan two weeks ago, all of which will be paid for by Ryerson (therefore, the actual costs of the reinstallation are private). With this involving an aging public building in a bustling part of the city, however, both Parakh and Matlow told us that they wouldn’t be surprised if the city put out a RFP to developers at some point in the next few years. Uninterested in another preservation fight, Matlow added a motion in the council’s decision that would force future owners of 277 Victoria to preserve the sign no matter what kind of redevelopment they propose.

The musicians, politicians, and preservationists who wanted Sam’s spinning discs to stay would have preferred to keep them where they’ve always been, but nearly everyone is happy with the outcome. “If you had to have a second choice,” says Matlow, “it’s a remarkable location.”

And for a city that has struggled to save much of its heritage, Toronto now has something old, unique, and nearly impossible to miss, preserved in a cityscape dominated by newer and mostly forgettable buildings. “A kid will look at it and ask their parents ‘What is that?’,” says Matlow. “That’s the point in a heritage structure.”

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July 24, 2014 / No Comments / More

phonograph records — 7/24/14 from American Roots Music by Robert Santelli

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Today’s encore selection — from American Roots Music by Robert Santelli. When commercial radio first appeared in 1920, the sales of phonograph-records began to collapse. The unlikely savior of the phonograph-record companies was a little-known genre of music from the South that came to be called country music:

“The first shot in the media revolution occurred on November 2, 1920, when the first commercially licensed radio station, KDKA in Pittsburgh, made its debut broadcast by announcing the results of the Harding-Cox presidential election. Within months, new commercial stations were popping up around the country like dandelions after a spring rain. Some were a little bizarre — an early Washington, D.C., station was licensed to a priest and boasted the call letters WJSV, ‘Will Jesus Save Virginia.’ Others went to big commercial enterprises, like Chicago’s WLS, owned by Sears and standing for ‘World’s Largest Store.’ Still others were licensed to insurance companies, like Nashville’s WSM — standing for ‘We Shield Millions,’ the slogan of the owners, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company. By 1922 and 1923, most major cities could boast of a radio station, and in the uncluttered airwaves of the time, people routinely picked up signals from hundreds of miles away.

“One effect of the popularity of the new radios had was to knock the bottom out of phonograph-record sales. The flat 78 rpm records had been around since the turn of the century, but record companies saw them as playthings for well-to-do families of the time; they featured a lot of light opera, pieces by Sousa’s Band, vocal solos by Caruso, and barbershop harmonies by the Peerless Quartet. Now, suddenly, people found they could hear music free on the radio; why buy records for seventy-five cents apiece? Desperate to maintain sales, the record companies began casting about for new markets. They stumbled upon one in 1920, when the Okeh label released a song called ‘Crazy Blues’ by a vaudeville singer named Mamie Smith. It was the first blues record by an African-American artist, and it became a bestseller by appealing to a hitherto untapped record market — black Americans.
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The Carter Family

“In June 1923, the same man who had recorded Mamie Smith — Ralph Peer, a thirty-one-year-old, moon-faced A&R (artists & repertoire) chief who had been born in Kansas City, Missouri, but now worked out of New York — found himself in Atlanta looking for talent. A local dealer promised to buy five hundred copies if Peer would record the town character — Fiddlin’ John Carson — a fifty-five-year-old former millworker who had won fame at the Municipal Auditorium’s annual fiddling contest. Peer agreed and in a temporary studio recorded Carson playing the fiddle unaccompanied and singing ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.’ ‘I thought his singing was pluperfect awful,’ Peer admitted years later. But he released the record — and was surprised to see it become a modest hit.

“Within months, the race was on as the major record companies scrambled to tap into this new market of working-class southerners. At first they didn’t even know what to call the music: Some ads mentioned ‘oldtime southern tunes,’ others ‘hill country music,’ others ‘oldtime music.’ Victor called its series ‘Native American Melodies.’ In 1924, a Texan singer working in New York, Vernon Dalhart, actually had a nationwide hit with a train-wreck ballad called ‘The Wreck of the Old ’97.’ He followed this up in 1925 with a topical ‘broadside’ ballad called ‘The Death of Floyd Collins,’ about the miner who attracted widespread attention when he was trapped in a Kentucky sand cave; this record sold more than three hundred thousand copies, and if any of the record companies had lingering doubts about the marketability of southern music, these reservations were put to rest.

“Following Ralph Peer’s lead, the companies began sending talent scouts into the South to hunt up and record on-location fiddlers, singers, banjo players, and gospel quartets. In the summer of 1927, Peer hit pay dirt once again. In an old hat factory doubling as a temporary studio, in the Virginia-Tennessee border town of Bristol, he discovered the two acts that were to dominate country music’s first decade: a singing trio called the Carter Family and a former railroad brakeman named Jimmie Rodgers.”

American Roots Music
Edited by Robert Santelli, Holly George-Warren, and Jim Brown
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Copyright 2001 by Ginger Group Productions Inc. and Rolling Stone
Page 20
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Delanceyplace is a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, are occasionally controversial, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came.

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July 24, 2014 / No Comments / More

Branford Eagle | Jazz Legend Lifts The Green

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** Jazz Legend Lifts The Green
————————————————————

Paul Bass File photo
When he was 13, back in 1940, Donn Trenner started his own jazz orchestra, the Donn Trenner Orchestra, at the old downtown Hillhouse High School in New Haven. The orchestra included 16 of his local classmates who played jazz arrangements that Trenner wrote for them.

“Now, there are jazz orchestras in a lot of schools and it’s become a definite art form and it’s very special,” Trenner said. “In my high school, that wasn’t the case. Mine was the only band,” he told the Eagle in an interview after a recent concert on the Branford Green.

Jazz took over his life, as it has been known to do. He managed to graduate from high school and then took off for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to sign up with a swing band.

A year later he was in New York playing piano for Ted Fiorito’s band, with which he traveled out West. He was the youngest member of the band until it hit Jantzen Beach, Oregon, and took on Doc Severinson, who would later appear on TV screens every weeknight as the leader of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show band. He has performed in music venues around the world, playing on over 100 records, leading The Steve Allen Show house band in the 1960’s and appearing on TV and in movies.

Bill O’Brien Photo

Bill O’Brien Photo
On July 10 he brought the Hartford Jazz Orchestra, which he now plays with and conducts, to the stage at Branford’s Jazz on the Green. At 87 Trenner is still going strong. Click here (http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/a_jazz_legend_reforms_a_meter_beater/) to read an earlier story about him.

He is still “writing charts.” He also conducts the great Hartford Jazz Orchestra, and he plays often on Sundays at 7 p.m. at Jazz @ Ayuthai in Guilford, his hometown these days. He is a busy guy.

Throughout his life, Trenner has experienced the perpetual growth of jazz, playing piano with the greats, in the Les Brown Orchestra and then with Stan Getz and Charlie Parker. He also played for films and landed a spot with Les Brown and his Band of Renown. And last week he recorded his latest album.

As he looks back over a life time of evolving jazz, he observed that it isn’t easy for jazz musicians to make a living doing what they love to do.

“The struggle for many musicians is that it’s difficult for any musician to make a living once they become adults,” Trenner said. “The ability to be able to make a decent living is difficult, but I’m an arranger, a composer, and a conductor, so I have had a pretty busy career.”

Bill O’Brien Photo
Each week, Branford’s Jazz on the Green series presents a jazz band that performs a wide range of music, from personal mash-ups to classical pieces and even duets with vocal jazz performers. Hearing Trenner, who came up in the ranks of early bebop pianists, was a treat for the audience on the Green that night.

“The fact that you can be out there, have all these people assemble, sit and enjoy their families, and have the orchestra perform in a nice situation like that is a great thing,” Trenner said of the Branford venue.

Bill O’Brien Photo
Jazz as an American art form continues to grow within the United States, Trenner was happy to say.

One of Jazz on the Green’s founders, Charlotte Mattei, said in an interview with the Eagle: “I like the way jazz makes you feel,” “It’s a relaxed and cool feeling.”

Bill O’Brien Photo

Bill O’Brien Photo
That it is, especially when Trenner is hitting the keys.
###

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July 23, 2014 / No Comments / More

Jazz News No. 24/2014 (17 – 23 July 2014)

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graphic
17 – 23 July 2014

Ausgabe 24, 2014

We read the morning paper for you!

Dear colleagues and jazz friends,

Now, have fun reading about the jazz week that was!

17 July 2014

Duke Ellington / France

Legal action has been sought by the heirs of the actor John Wayne and Duke University in Durham, North Carolina ( USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/07/09/john-wayne-duke-university-bourbon/12438509/) , The Dispatch (http://www.the-dispatch.com/article/20140716/OPINION01/307169995?tc=ar) ). Wayne’s heirs want to market a bourbon whisky by Wayne’s nickname “Duke”, and the college officials argue that such action would violate the university’s trademark. Jazz connection: the other “Duke”, of course — we learn that “the United States Patent and Trademark Office lists 250 active trademarks that include the word ‘Duke’, including jazz legend Duke Ellington and a brand of mayonnaise”. — Jean-Claude Renard talks to the bassist Didier Levallet about the closure of the “Bureau du Jazz” at Radio France and its consequences for the French jazz scene ( Politis (http://www.politis.fr/spip.php?page=imp&id_article=27733) ).

18 July 2014

Fair Trade Music

Daphne Carr discusses the possibilities for a fair trade movement in the music world “enforcing a set of standards for wages and conditions that would allow musicians to live better lives”, envisioning a kind of seal which “would allow presenters to exhibit their good ethics (…) which would then be rewarded by a paying public” ( New Music Box (http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/good-vibrations-towards-a-fair-trade-standard-for-live-music/) ). She gives examples for improved working conditions such as special parking zones for musicians outside venues in Seattle, and outlines an ideal world in which musicians knew they would have “a dressing room, load-in space, decent stage equipment, and earn a living wage at every venue you played”.

19 July 2014

Coco Schumann / Moers (Germany)

Michael Scatturo talks to the 90-year-old German guitarist Coco Schumann who had started his career as a jazz musician in Nazi Germany, then was arrested in 1943 and confined to the concentration camps of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and Dachau (Deutsche Welle (http://www.dw.de/jazz-in-auschwitz-coco-schumann-looks-back/a-17776790) ). Schumann talks about having to make music in the death camps, about meeting his wife after the war, about his emigration to Australia, and his subsequent return to Berlin in the mid-1950s. Schumann had not talked about his experiences for a long period but then decided that his memories should help a younger generation remember what happened. — Jürgen Stock talks to Burkhard Hennen who founded theMoers Festival in 1972 and was its artistic director through 2005 about the Café Roos in Moers which was a place of desire in his youth, a meeting place for the kids after school and a place to find your first dates ( Rheinische Post
(http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moers/moerser-sehnen-sich-nach-dem-cafe-roos-aid-1.4392550) ). No further jazz content…

20 July 2014

Jason Moran

Ayana Byrd talks to the pianist Jason Moran about the security of a MacArthur Fellowship, about his different ongoing projects, about the need to be aware of who you are, what you wear, how you look and how you communicate with your instrument during a concert, and about how music has a life after it has been played – in the heads of the music’s listeners ( Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/3033133/innovation-agents/jason-moran-is-expanding-what-it-means-to-experience-music) ).

21 July 2014

Dick Hyman / Bill Charlap / Manfred Schiegl

Nate Chinen talks to the pianists Dick Hyman and Bill Charlap about the concert series “Jazz in July” at New York’s 92nd Street Y which starts its 30th season these days ( New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/21/arts/music/jazz-in-july-celebrates-30th-season-at-92nd-street-y.html) ). Arnold Jay Smith shares his memories about Hyman as well ( Jazz Vent (http://www.arnoldjaysmithjazzvent.com/dick-hyman-man-for-all-reasons/) ) — Herbert Kullmann talks to the German percussionist Manfred Schiegl who turns 75 these days and has performed in all contexts between contemporary classical music and jazz (Aalener Nachrichten (http://www.schwaebische.de/region_artikel,-Musik-ist-sein-Leben-das-Schlagzeug-seine-Leidenschaft-_arid,10051205_toid,1.html) ).

22 July 2014

Dave Holland / Royal Connections

Anne Grages talks to the bassist Dave Holland about the Wuppertal jazz scene of Peter Brötzmann and Peter Kowald, about the differences of concert stages and audiences, about what he learned from Miles Davis as well as about how he keeps fit at 67 (Westdeutsche Zeitung (http://www.wz-newsline.de/lokales/wuppertal/dave-holland-die-wuppertaler-szene-war-toll-1.1696816) ). — Martin Chilton learns that the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall visited a jazz workshop and reflects about British royal connections to jazz, going back to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s concert at Buckingham Palace in 1919, King George V’s love for jazz as well as George V’s son who mingled with jazz musicians and played drums himself at times, Queen Elizabeth who invited Duke Ellington to Buckingham Palace and received a suite composed in her honor in return, as well as Princess Margaret who was a regular at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club ( Telegraph
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/worldfolkandjazz/10980246/The-royals-and-their-love-of-jazz.html) ). (Connoisseurs of both Ellington and the British royal family question numerous statements in this article, by the way, including Ellington’s invitation to Buckingham Palace.)

23 July 2014

… what else …

The pianist Herbie Hancock wrote a letter to a federal judge supporting a friend of his who faces charges for smuggling marijuana from Mexico ( New York Daily News (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/jazz-legend-aides-pot-smuggler-letter-judge-article-1.1869816) ). — The founder of the Jazzhaus in Heidelberg, Germany, was given a suspended sentence for failing to pay the performing rights dues for his club ( Rhein-Neckar Zeitung (http://www.rnz.de/heidelberg/00_20140716060000_110717294-Jazzhausgruender-Graf-muss-nicht-ins-Gefaengni.html) ). — Kevin Whitehead looks back at Albert Ayler’s album “Spiritual Unity” 50 years after it was recorded ( Wondering Sound (http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/albert-ayler-spiritual-unity-history/) ). — O.E. Schütz talks to the trombonist Manfred Schmelzer from Mönchengladbach, Germany, who has been playing for 60 years next year ( Rheinische Post
(http://www.rp-online.de/nrw/staedte/moenchengladbach/wenn-hobby-und-beruf-verschmelzen-aid-1.4397203) ). — The widow of jazz critic and comic book legend Harvey Pekarauctions off a 200 CD jazz collection from the late author’s estate for a fundraiser helping the family of a Cleveland bar owner who was killed recently during an armed robbery (News Net 5 (http://www.newsnet5.com/news/local-news/cleveland-metro/harvey-pekars-jazz-collection-up-for-auction-in-slain-bar-owner-jim-brennans-family-fundraiser) ). — Joanne Kaufman has a home story on classical cellist David Finckel and his wife, classical pianist Wu Han ( New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/realestate/the-manhattan-apartment-of-david-finckel-and-wu-han.html) ). Jazz angle (but not mentioned in the text): Finckel is the son of the legendary arranger Eddie Finckel, one of the adventurous arrangers for the Boyd Raeburn orchestra in the 1940s. — The German producer and label manager Christian
Kellersmann (formerly Universal) will be the new head of the Edel:Kultur department overseeing the label’s classic and jazz productions (Musikmarkt (http://www.musikmarkt.de/Aktuell/News/Christian-Kellersmann-heuert-bei-Edel-an) ). — The drummer Dennis Chambers has been hospitalized and is in intensive care ( Jam Bands (http://www.jambands.com/news/2014/07/21/parliament-funkadelic-drummer-dennis-chambers-hospitalized) ). — A German journalists attends one of Woody Allen’s Monday night gigs at the Café Carlyle ( Frankfurter Rundschau (http://www.fr-online.de/panorama/montags-mit-woody-allen–jazz-im-carlyle-hotel,27392196,27879070.html) ); Nate Chinen hears the trumpeter Sean Jones ( New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/arts/music/sean-jones-quartet-at-the-jazz-standard.html) ) and the guitarist Julian Lage ( New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/arts/music/julian-lage-brings-new-partners-to-the-jazz-standard.html) ), both performing at New York’s
Jazz Standard; Stefan Michaczik hears the percussionist Trilok Gurtu at Palmengarten, Frankfurt ( Frankfurter Rundschau (http://www.fr-online.de/musik/jazz-palmengarten-gurtu-halb-eingeloestes-versprechen,1473348,27895908.html) ). — Franziska Buhre reads Kevin Whitehead’s book “Warum Jazz? 111 gute Gründe” as well as Daniel Martin Feige’s “Philosophie des Jazz” ( die tageszeitung (http://www.taz.de/digitaz/2014/07/22/a0085.archiv/textdruck) ).

Obituaries

Howard Reich talked to the late bassist Charlie Haden last year who told him about his medical problems, the post-polio syndrome which he died from last week ( Chicago Tribune (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/columnists/reich/ct-charlie-haden-appreciation-20140717,0,7423746.column) ). Ethan Iverson offers a heartfelt tribute to the Haden ( Do the Math (http://dothemath.typepad.com/dtm/silence.html) ) and collects memories and tributes by Geri Allen, Reid Anderson, Joey Baron, Django Bates, Tim Berne, Matt Brewer, Alan Broadbent, Chris Cheek, Greg Cohen, Stephan Crump, Benoit Delbecq, Mike Formanek, Bill Frisell, Larry Goldings, Jerome Harris, Billy Hart, Albert ‘Tootie’ Heath, John Hébert, Mark Helias, Fred Hersch, Frank Kimbrough, David King, Guillermo Klein, Joe Lovano, Tony Malaby, Branford Marsalis, Joe Martin, Brad Mehldau, Ben Monder, Jason Moran, Sam Newsome, Matt Penman, Chris Potter, Tom Rainey, Joshua Redman, Eric Revis, Jorge Rossy, Kenny Werner, Jeff
Williams, Matt Wilson and Ben Wolfe ( Do the Math (https://www.blogger.com/) ). More Haden obituaries by Kevin Whitehead ( Wondering Sound (http://www.wonderingsound.com/feature/charlie-haden-obituary-tribute/) ), Juan Rodriguez ( Montreal Gazette (http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/Juan+Rodriguez+Charlie+Haden+death+leaves+without+anchor/10049870/story.html) ) and Geoff Dyer ( The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/jul/20/charlie-haden-music-marrow-bones) ). — We read another obituary about the flutist Paul Horn who had died three weeks ago at the age of 84 ( The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/paul-horn-jazz-flautist-and-new-age-pioneer-who-recorded-inside-the-taj-mahal-and–the-great-pyramid-of-giza-9610722.html?origin=internalSearch) ). — We learned of the passing of the blues guitarist and singerJohnny Winter at the age 70 ( Los Angeles Times
(http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-johnny-winter-20140718-story.html) , The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/johnny-winter-guitarist-whose-blistering-slideplaying-made-him-a-favourite-from-woodstock-to-the-royal-albert-hall-9613489.html?origin=internalSearch) , Neue Zürcher Zeitung (http://www.nzz.ch/panorama/tod-eines-rockstars-in-einem-buelacher-hotel-1.18345731) , Frankfurter Rundschau (http://www.fr-online.de/musik/blues-legende-johnny-winter-gestorben,1473348,27870296.html) , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/pop/nachruf-auf-johnny-winter-im-meer-seiner-traenen-13050915.html) ), the trumpeter Lionel Ferbos at the age of 103 ( New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/07/lionel_ferbos_the_longest-tenu_1.html) , Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/APffcbe713151347f099d8d8c7613cacdc.html?KEYWORDS=jazz) ,Washington Post
(http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/lionel-ferbos-the-oldest-jazz-musician-in-new-orleans-dies-at-103/2014/07/19/92c1b026-0f6c-11e4-8c9a-923ecc0c7d23_story.html) ) (only days after his birthday for which he had been celebrated by Keith Spera before, New Orleans Times-Picayune (http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2014/07/lionel_ferbos_the_longest-tenu.html) ), the British critic Jack Massarik at the age of 74 ( London Evening Standard (http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/a-passionate-jazzman-jack-massarik-obituary-9608559.html) ), the club owner Pete Douglas (Half Moon Bay Jazz Club) at the age of 85 ( San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Pete-Douglas-owner-of-renowned-Half-Moon-Bay-5636722.php) ), the singer Rufus McKay who was in his late 80s ( The Clarion-Ledger (http://www.clarionledger.com/story/life/2014/07/21/red-tops-singer-rufus-mckay-dies-vicksburg/12956647/) ) and the guitarist and educator Jeff Friedman.

Last Week at the Jazzinstitut

After the Bundeskonferenz Jazz (http://www.bk-jazz.de/) published its report about the situation of jazz in Germany in June, Burghard Egdorf talked on-the-air to Wolfram Knauer, one of the three speakers of the BK jazz, last Wednesday, discussing some of the suggestions of the interest group ( SWR2 Cluster (http://www.swr.de/swr2/programm/sendungen/cluster/bericht-der-bundeskonferenz-fuer-jazz-2014/-/id=10748564/did=13790820/nid=10748564/998lrf/index.html) )

Last Saturday we were part of a regular roundtable meeting of the Network of Jazz in Hesse (http://www.netzwerk-jazz-hessen.de/) , bringing together jazz activists (musicians, promoters, journalists, labels and others) to discuss strategies to improve the situation of jazz in the state of Hesse, Germany. At the AFIP in Offenbach we talked about a possible presentation of the Hesse jazz scene at a future JazzAhead trade fair in Bremen as well as about specific events to focus on the diversity of Hesse jazz within the state itself.

Again, we received a couple of donations last week, among them a collection of French magazines (Jazz Hot, Jazz Magazine) from the 1960s which enable us to close gaps in our archive. We also received program booklets for German or European tours of the Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, George Lewis and Art Blakey, all of them from the early 1960s, as well as several discographies for instance about Sidney Bechet, Eric Dolphy and Hans Koller.

Last week saw the Zbigniew Seifert Competition in Lislawice and Cravoc, Poland, organized by the Zbigniew Seifert Foundation, an event we are a partner in. The winners have been announced on the Seifert Competition website (http://seifertcompetition.com/en/index.php) .

Next Monday we will start our 23rd Darmstadt Jazz Conceptions (http://jazzinstitut.de/Conceptions/Concept-de.htm) , a one-week workshop which the Jazzinstitut organizes annually since 1992 in cooperation with the cultural center Bessunger Knabenschule. For our 2014 edition, our artistic director, the bassist Jürgen Wuchner, hired a number of renowned musicians as teachers: the saxophonist Norbert Stein, the pianist Uli Partheil, the guitarist Kalle Kalima, the drummer Felix Astor as well as the composer and arranger Hazel Leach. Five of these teachers will lead small ensembles, Hazel Leach has agreed to coach a large ensemble made up by as many workshop participants as possible (or willing). Every night will see sessions and first results from the workshop performed at different venues all around the city of Darmstadt; next Friday will be the first final concert featuring the small ensembles, and on Saturday the large ensemble will perform as will all of the teachers.

About this mailing:

Jazzinstitut Darmstadt is a municipal cultural institute of the city of Darmstadt, Germany.

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July 23, 2014 / No Comments / More

Jazz in Auschwitz – Coco Schumann looks back | Music | DW.DE | 11.07.2014

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** Jazz in Auschwitz – Coco Schumann looks back
————————————————————

A few weeks ago, reporters crammed into Heinz “Coco” Schumann’s bungalow in a western Berlin suburb to celebrate the performer’s 90th birthday. His humble abode seems like that of any other nonagenarian German. A closer look at the photos on the walls, however, reveals a life shaped and ultimately saved by music.

Schumann’s father was German and a Protestant, his mother a German Jew. Coco Schumann stayed in Berlin for the first 10 years of Nazi rule. He refused to wear a yellow star and to limit his activities to those deemed suitable by the Nazis.

While his parents moved around Berlin, at times being hidden by German friends, he made a name for himself in Berlin’s underground jazz scene – which remained popular despite the authorities’ ban on the popular American import.

** …on a false sense of security in the 30s
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‘Arrest me, too’

In 1942, Schumann had his first close call with Nazi racial laws. A group of German SS officers came into a bar where Schumann and his band were playing. The guards were searching for Jews and others whom the German government sought to eradicate. Upon the men’s entry, a Jewish audience member mounted the stage and tried to escape through a back door while Schumann and his band were playing.

“I went up to the SS officer and said, ‘If you’re going to arrest him, you should probably arrest me, too,'” Schumann recalled. When asked why, Schumann continued, “I told him, ‘First, I’m Jewish. Second, I am underage. And third, I am playing jazz.'”

Although he wasn’t arrested at that time – Schumann thinks the officers did not believe he was Jewish – things changed one year later. In 1943, German authorities began deporting Germans of Jewish-Christian parentage – and someone had apparently informed the authorities that Coco Schumann’s mother was Jewish. Schumann received a letter from the police authorities that he was to report to the Alexanderplatz police station. The letter didn’t state his crime. He was promptly arrested upon arrival and sent to the Gestapo. They then deported him to the concentration camps.

“Theresienstadt. Auschwitz, Dachau. No one believed that I was actually in these places,” Schumann said. “For a long time, I felt that no one would understand what I saw. I didn’t understand it myself.”

Suppressed memories

Schumann was saved from the gas chambers of Auschwitz because a guard who was charged with sorting out new arrivals recognized him from Berlin’s jazz scene and placed him in a Roma musical group.

Previously, at Theresienstadt, Schumann had begun playing in a band known informally as “The Ghetto Swingers.” Following his transfer to Auschwitz in September 1944, he played songs such as “La Paloma” for the German guards during an approximately five-month stay in the camp, while they murdered thousands of innocent Jews, ethnic Poles, Roma, gays and others.

“For a long time, I suppressed what I saw – the eyes of children who were led to the gas chambers, the bodies being offloaded,” Schumann recalled.

But he survived the camps and returned to Berlin in 1945. While strolling down the bombed-out remains of Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm shopping street, he met his future wife, herself a survivor of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

“I didn’t know when I met her that she was also in Theresienstadt,” Schumann said. “But she knew me because I was the drummer in the Ghetto Swingers group. The musician doesn’t know the public, but sometimes the public knows the musician.”

The couple married in Berlin, and later emigrated to Australia, where they lived for five years. But the two missed the jazz scene in their former home, and returned to West Berlin in the mid-1950s.

A change of heart

His career took off as Berlin’s jazz scene saw its rebirth in the post-Nazi years. Schumann began to write music, arrange, and experiment with the electronic guitar. At one point, he played with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. He gave concert tours in Europe and on cruise ships, and became known as Germany’s most famous swing guitarist.

But for years, the musician would not talk about his experiences in the German death camps. That did not change until a decade ago, when he attended an event in Berlin for concentration camp survivors.

** …on survival and looking back
————————————————————

“I didn’t speak about it,” Schumann said. “But then, I was at a function for concentration camp survivors with my wife. People from Israel and New York and from all over the world were in attendance. But when I saw the camera, I turned away. The reporter then asked someone about me and learned that I was in a concentration camp. Then he came over to me again, and said to the camera man, ‘Switch off the camera for a moment.’ He asked, ‘Why do you always go away when you see the camera?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to speak about it.’ But then he said, ‘If you don’t speak about it, who should tell the people what happened there?’ And at that moment something clicked – and I thought he was right.”

Since then, Schumann has told his story to German school classes and in a television documentary. His feeling is that he was lucky to have survived the camps. While the experience left an indelible mark on his life, he says he holds no bitterness towards Germany or German society.

“I was happy that I got out of the concentration camp,” Schumann said. “That was the only thing that counted. I survived. I am still alive.”

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July 23, 2014 / No Comments / More

Military bands offer musicians great jobs, similar challenges to orchestras – The Washington Post

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** Military bands offer musicians great jobs, similar challenges to orchestras
————————————————————

Look on YouTube for the tenor Matthew Loyal Smith, and you’ll find him hitting strong high C’s in the showcase aria from Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment (http://youtu.be/n-fons53JO0) .” Look onstage, and you might find him at Strathmore with the National Philharmonic, or at the National Gallery of Art (http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/national-gallery-of-art-vocal-ensemble-provides-some-pleasant-surprises-in-concert/2014/06/09/e71daa24-efe3-11e3-ba99-4469323d5076_story.html) , or at the Washington National Opera, where, like many singers, he will supplement his income performing in the chorus: this season, in “The Flying Dutchman.”

Look on his Web site (http://matthewloyal.com/) , and you’ll find a picture of him with Nancy Reagan (http://matthewloyal.com/gallery3/index.php/Pictures/Reagan) . That’s because Smith, also like many singers, has a day job. He’s lucky to have one that includes health benefits and a housing allowance; and he’s even luckier to be a full-time singer. He is a staff sergeant in the United States Army Chorus (http://www.usarmyband.com/chorus/the-us-army-chorus.html) .

In musical circles, there’s a lot of disgruntlement that the government doesn’t do more to subsidize the arts. In one area, though, the government does plenty. The military is one of the largest employers of musicians in the Washington area; indeed, the Army’s Web site claims that the institution is “the oldest and largest employer of musicians in the world.” The combined budget for the nation’s military bands was projected, in 2013, at $388 million (before sequester-related cutbacks). Each of the nation’s five service branches has a flagship band, four of them — the Marine Band (“The President’s Own”), the Army Band (“Pershing’s Own”), the Navy Band and the Air Force Band — based in Washington, with annual budgets in the range of $2 million. These budget figures don’t include musicians’ salaries. A musician who wins an audition with one of the premier bands enters the service at the military pay grade of E6, which, when benefits and housing allowances are factored in, amoun
ts to around $56,000 — with built-in annual raises.

Yet all of this funding doesn’t protect military bands from some of the challenges that face private-sector ensembles: shrinking budgets, aging audiences and larger questions of purpose.

“I’m always trying to compare what we’re doing with the orchestra world,” says Col. Larry H. Lang, the commander and conductor of the Air Force Band, “because I do think there are a lot of similarities. We’re struggling for audience, and relevance.”
The President’s Own United States Marine Band performs. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post )

‘Pay my rent and eat?’

What is the point of making music? If orchestras offer an exalted answer, the military offers a pragmatic, functional one. In practice, however, there may not be as much difference between the two as it first appears. Both kit the players out in distinctive uniforms; both have traditions that can be off-putting to first-time audiences; both are focusing on education and outreach. And both see themselves as ambassadors representing the interests of our nation — the military bands explicitly, as part of their mission statements, and symphony orchestras in the name of cultural diplomacy, from the Cleveland Orchestra’s tour of Russia in the 1960s to the New York Philharmonic’s 2008 performance in North Korea.

And the world of military bands offers, for musicians who choose to take the plunge into military life and a non-union job, a haven where not only brass and wind players, but also harpists, cellists, percussionists and even singers can support themselves as musicians.

“Oh, I can pay my rent and eat?” says the clarinetist Lucia DiSano, a staff sergeant and one of the Marine Band’s newest members. She is an Eastman graduate who auditioned four or five times for the group before she got in. “And I get to do this thing that I love and people will pay me for it?”

Barry Hearn, a trombonist with the National Symphony Orchestra, played in the military for nine years, seven of them with the ceremonial branch of the U.S. Army Band, before winning his NSO chair. The ceremonial band is a grueling assignment involving lots of funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, standing for hours in heat or cold, playing a relatively limited repertoire. The NSO offers air conditioning, world-class conductors and the whole symphonic repertoire. Nonetheless, Hearn says of the ceremonial band, “It probably will always be one of the most rewarding jobs I will ever have the opportunity to do.”

Emily Leader, a violinist who joined the Army Band at 31, after years as a freelance orchestral musician, has seen musical diplomacy at work when the frosty mood at a diplomatic function with representatives from Jordan turned warm after musicians performed arrangements of Bedouin music.

“If you think of music as gigs,” says the violinist, who used to support herself playing one “Nutcracker” after another, “what is the end result, and what is of importance? It’s neat to think you might have had a more significant role.”

Flexibility and fine skills

Washington’s elite military bands are hardly a secret. Each performs more than 1,000 times a year (the Army logs some 5,000 performances), from funerals at Arlington Cemetery to summertime concerts on the Capitol steps (http://www.navyband.navy.mil/concerts_at_the_capitol.shtml) . But the bands do not tend to be on the radar of the mainstream classical audience — or of musicians. “I don’t think people even realize it’s an option,” says Smith. “You’d be surprised, with a job this good, that people don’t know about it.”
Chmara, of The President’s Own United States Marine Band, assembles his tenor saxophone. (Astrid Riecken/For The Washington Post )

“I don’t think any of us in the strings, or very few of us, planned to be in the military or knew about the strings job,” says Leader, who freelances occasionally with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

Leader heard of the military bands from a friend at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. “I said, ‘You’re crazy,’ and she said, ‘It’s a great job.’ ” Eventually, Leader auditioned — a process much like for an orchestra, starting with playing anonymously behind a screen — and won a position. “The good news,” she says, “is you’ve won the job. The bad news is you’ve got to go to boot camp.”

Members of the Marine Band, established in 1798 to provide music for the White House, do not have to go through basic training. Musicians with the other elite bands have to deal with it. “It was a great weight-loss program,” Leader says wryly. She cites a drill sergeant who, hearing that she was in the band, subjected her to corny musical references for the rest of her training. “ ‘Make music with that M-16, soldier!’ I actually was a good shot,” Leader says.

To win that audition, you need to be a crack musician — and a flexible one. “You can’t just sing an operatic aria,” says Casey Elliott, the associate music director of the Navy ensemble the Sea Chanters. “It needs to be Broadway and jazz and pop.” Good sight-reading skills are essential, and singers have to be ready to perform in any of 20 or 30 languages at diplomatic receptions. “I’ve sung in Japanese, Hebrew, Urdu, French, Polish, Swahili, Zulu,” says Elliott. In effect, military performers have to be as versatile as studio musicians — which, indeed, some of them have been.

“Obama is a huge jazz fan,” says Col. Michael Colburn, the recently retired 27th commander of the Marine Band (“The President’s Own”). “We support [his events] with jazz combos. During the Clinton administration, it was more string quartets.” The Marine Band tries to satisfy every request. “The only time I had to say no to the White House,” Colburn said, “was when they called asking for a bagpipe band. We cannot come up with a bagpipe band.”

Reducing the numbers

In each service, the premier band is part of a larger musical network. The premier bands have traditionally stood apart; the Army Band, for instance, does not share a budget with the 99 Army service bands around the world. Things are changing, though — and shrinking. This fall, the Navy will gather all of its bands under one umbrella, according to Capt. Brian Walden, who as leader of the Navy Band will head the whole enterprise. “It was a result of streamlining and efficiency,” he says. Two Navy bands also will be deactivated in the process. The Army is losing 13 of its 99 bands as the entire force scales down; the Air Force already has gone through a painful contraction. “When I came in 24 years ago, there were 21 bands,” says Lang, the Air Force Band commander, “and now there are 10.”

The issue is partly money and partly effectiveness. Some of the military ensembles date back to the heyday of big bands and choruses; today, such groups appeal more to an older audience. “It’s indicative,” says Col. Thomas Palmatier, the commander and leader of the Army Band, “that it’s now called the Army Music Program, as opposed to the Army Band Program. It’s much more inclusive of a wide variety of musics and genres.”

In the field, meanwhile, the profile of war has changed; gone are the days of civilian musicians entertaining the crowds. “We have reacted to the need to put popular music groups on the battlefield,” Palmatier says. “We’ll have a rock band or brass quintet, something that can fit into a helicopter, go out to a combat outpost and spend a couple of days not just performing, but helping with what they do.” The civilian music world, too, is looking toward smaller ensembles to animate contemporary music and younger audiences.

Suddenly, no more ‘Taps’

Music doesn’t always have to be high art. It can also be a powerful tool of communication. In focusing on this side of music, the military espouses a social function of the art form that orchestras, increasingly, are trying to tap into as well.

“I’d like to think that we’re about the cheapest and most effective publicity tool the Air Force has,” Lang says. “There’s no other more effective way of telling a very positive Air Force story than through music. We’re pennies on the dollar for what they would have to spend to reach the same number of people” in some other manner.

He adds, “I think if [detractors] really had a chance to come and see how effective we were, how powerful music is when we’re trying to work with diplomatic efforts; when we’re trying to help a wounded warrior recover; when you’re trying to introduce a young person in school to music: I’m seeing every day how powerful and effective it is.”

Many orchestra conductors might make the same argument.

The bands are often called a waste of taxpayer money, although they represent a tiny fraction of the military’s budget. Getting rid of musicians, Palmatier says, would not be cost-effective. “Unless you reduce the strength of the army by that amount, you haven’t saved any money; you just turn them into something else, and end up contracting what they did,” he says. “And you find out they did a lot.” He adds, “9,000 of those [services] are funeral honors. You can wave your hands and say you don’t care, but suddenly, no more ‘Taps.’ ”

However pragmatic the goal, any serious musician is bound, at times, to want to reach a little higher when it comes to the actual music-making.

“I do feel like we’re doing some substantial things musically,” says Colburn. On July 12, at the concert marking his retirement and succession by Lt. Col. Jason Fettig, the repertory demonstrated his ambition: arrangements of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Bernstein’s “Symphonic Dances from West Side Story,” Percy Grainger’s “Early One Morning,” and even some songs by Charles Ives, in which the soprano and Gunnery Sgt. Sara Dell’Omo, who served as emcee for the evening, valiantly strained to convey the tongue-tripping lyrics, with a mike, over the ensemble.

Is it art? Is it function? It was notable that the band, although it played brilliantly, seemed to have a sense of restraint in, for instance, Bernstein’s voluptuous rhythms. When it broke into the military marches accompanying the retirement ceremony, the music moved into higher gear — the music the group was formed to play.

By the same token, the NSO does not play pop music as well as it plays the classics. Every musical institution has its specialty. The military bands, though, seem to reach more broadly than many civilian groups. They also offer their musicians a wider range of opportunities. Elliott, the Navy singer, has learned to produce CDs. Fettig, the Marines’ new commander, got a master’s degree in conducting from the University of Maryland, on the Marines’ dime. When a pinched nerve (since resolved) hampered Leader’s violin playing, she was switched to an administrative role. “With most organizations,” she observes, “if you’re hired to play and you can’t play, you’re out of there.”

“I’m not going to lie and say it is the most musically fulfilling job in the world,” says Staff Sgt. Emily Ross, who plays clarinet in the Army’s ceremonial band. “But I like that there are opportunities.”

“It’s definitely a different job than what I had in mind as a dewy-eyed 20-year-old at Eastman,” Ross adds. “But I’m earning my living playing my instrument, [which is] more than I can say for a lot of my fellow graduates.” And, she adds, “I’ve definitely more positive feelings about the military in general.”

The military bands perform public concerts free of charge throughout the year. For more information, click here. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/anne-midgette)

On Bands: A Postscript (http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2014/07/18/on-bands-a-postscript/)

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July 22, 2014 / No Comments / More

‘Do Not Sell at Any Price’ and ‘Dust & Grooves’ – NYTimes.com

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** ‘Do Not Sell at Any Price’ and ‘Dust & Grooves’
————————————————————

Continue reading the main story Slide Show

** ‘Dust & Grooves’
————————————————————

CreditEilon Paz

Something unexpected happened to Amanda Petrusich when she set out to explore the “oddball fraternity” of fanatical collectors of 78 r.p.m. records, the increasingly hard-to-find shellac discs that circulated before World War II. At first she was almost repulsed by the avidity of their passion. But when she heard the music ofSkip James (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtZ6DoeimP4) , Charley Patton (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=336dDZsU1Eg) , Blind Uncle Gaspard (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_gZydeV_9k) and Geeshie Wiley (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22%7D&_r=0) played in its original format, she fell under its spell, just as the collectors had.

“Eventually, I started to want what they wanted,” she writes. “For me, the modern marketing cycle and the endless gifts of the Web had begun to feel toxic,” its surfeit of always-available music leading to a response that surprised her: “I missed pining for things. I missed the ecstasy of acquisition.”

“Do Not Sell at Any Price” is full of little epiphanies like that, as well as detailed portraits of individual collectors, their quirks and obsessions on display. They are initially suspicious of Ms. Petrusich and her motives, as they are of all outsiders and even their fellow collector-competitors, but her persistence pays off in the form of stories and observations that humanize the collectors and their pursuit.
Photo
Amanda Petrusich CreditBret Stetka

The book’s title, for example, comes from a sticker she saw on a pair of 78s in separate collections, with a sadly ignored warning that she regards as an expression of “commitment to music as a thing to work for and revere and treasure and save, till death do you part.” She finds even more poignant examples of the collector’s worst nightmare, that of estranged or indifferent heirs ignoring these injunctions. A young collector named Nathan Salsburg rescued Don Wahle’s collection from a Dumpster in Louisville, Ky., in 2010, and from it compiled “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard,” (http://www.npr.org/2012/12/19/166003018/tunes-to-work-hard-play-hard-pray-hard-to) a three-CD set nominated for a Grammy this year.

“Collectors of 78s, maybe more than any other curators of music or music memorabilia,” she writes, “are doing essential preservationist work, chasing after tiny bits of art that would otherwise be lost.”

Ms. Petrusich, who has written on culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, Pitchfork and Spin, effectively uses the prism of her personal experience to analyze the aesthetics of collecting, consuming and enjoying music. She has done her theoretical homework, too, reading works like John Elsner and Roger Cardinal’s“The Cultures of Collecting” (http://ninalp.com/bfarts/Media/collecting_baudrillard.pdf) and Jean Baudrillard’s “The System of Collecting” as a prelude to testing, and often revising, hypotheses of her own.

“Time and circumstance shape our understanding of art in substantial ways,” she concludes while on the hunt for 78s in rural Virginia with Chris King (http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/under-cover-in-pursuit-of-an-unearthly-record/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Aw%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22%7D) , a collector who becomes a friend. “But what I still couldn’t unpack — probably because I often caught myself conflating the two — was whether my subjective context (the fact of me, where I live now and when I was born, my understanding of heartache and what I ate for lunch) can or should be trumped or augmented by a more objective context (the fact of the song, of how and where and why it was made).”
Continue reading the main story

She seems on less solid ground when she tries to explain the psychology of collecting. It’s fine for her to say that “collecting seemed, to me, to more closely resemble plain old addiction” than anything else. That’s a comparison that collectors use themselves. But when she starts to ponder possible links to autism, Asperger’s syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder and wonders about “the neurological basis for the collector’s behavior, and how those habits might be inherently gendered,” she is, as she admits, in a scientific realm less amenable to speculation.
Photo
Eilon Paz Credit Laura Banish

And sometimes Ms. Petrusich’s cataloging of her growing enthusiasm goes a step too far. An account of how she learned to use scuba gear so that she could dive into the murky Milwaukee River seeking ultrarare Paramount Records (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/arts/music/jack-white-explores-history-of-paramount-records.html?pagewanted=all&module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A10%22%7D) sides and master plates, discarded in the 1930s from a nearby plant, could easily have been described in a couple of sentences rather than an entire chapter.

Ms. Petrusich’s collectors of 78s view themselves as a breed apart from — and superior to — the people who focus on LPs and 45s, which are vastly more plentiful. For one of her collectors, she reports, “the distinction is acute, comparable to collecting pebbles versus collecting diamonds.”

But Eilon Paz’s “Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting” makes clear that collectors of vinyl can be just as eccentric and obsessive. His lavishly illustrated coffee-table book contains portraits of some 130 “record diggers,” as he sometimes calls them, who have often gravitated to genres as obscure as Turkish psychedelia, “Sesame Street” albums, lounge acts, sexploitation and horror film soundtracks, ’60s girl groups from France and Japan, and even colored discs.

Ms. Petrusich focuses on the East Coast of the United States, but Mr. Paz, an Israeli-born photographer who created the Dust & Grooves collectors’ website (http://www.dustandgrooves.com/) , ranges wider. He located, photographed and interviewed collectors in Britain, France, Italy, Israel, Holland, Argentina and Japan, and even traveled with Frank Gossner, “a determined, no-nonsense record collector from Germany” who specializes in Afro-Pop, on a buying expedition to Ghana.

The difference between the Petrusich and Paz approaches can be gauged by the way they portray the one collector who appears in both their books, Joe Bussard (http://www.dustandgrooves.com/joe-bussard-frederick-ma/) of Frederick, Md., whose collection of about 25,000 discs is the product of six decades of what Ms. Petrusich calls “boots-on-the ground grunt work, pointedly removed from the estate-sale lurking most contemporary collectors indulge in.” She provides excerpts from a daylong conversation with him and tells us that “watching Joe Bussard listen to records is a spiritually rousing experience” in which he “sticks his tongue out, squeezes his eyes shut and bounces in his seat, waving his arms around like a weather vane.”

Mr. Paz’s photographs, in contrast, let the reader actually see the delight Mr. Bussard feels in listening to his collection, and instead of interpreting what Mr. Bussard says, uses a question-and-answer exchange that allows his clipped and cranky voice to be heard clearly. Here is Mr. Bussard on why he hates rock ’n’ roll: “Don’t like the sound of it, the meaning of it … doesn’t promote anything meaningful. Idiotic noise, in my opinion.”

Both methods seem valid. Mr. Paz’s is more visceral and joyous, Ms. Petrusich’s more meditative. But as Ms. Petrusich says, in a somewhat different context, “There’s no wrong way to enjoy music, and I understood that certain contextual or biographical details could help crystallize a bigger, richer picture of a song.” The same applies to the people who devote their lives to collecting those songs.

**
————————————————————

DO NOT SELL AT ANY PRICE

The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78 rpm Records

By Amanda Petrusich

Illustrated. 260 pages. Scribner. $25.

**
————————————————————

DUST & GROOVES

Adventures in Record Collecting

By Eilon Paz

Illustrated. 411 pages. Dust & Grooves Publications. $68.

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July 22, 2014 / No Comments / More

Jazz in July Celebrates 30th Season at 92nd Street Y – NYTimes.com

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** Jazz in July Celebrates 30th Season at 92nd Street Y
————————————————————

The emblematic image of Jazz in July, the tried-and-true concert series at the 92nd Street Y, would probably be a pair of grand pianos facing each other across the stage. A New York City summer institution about to begin its 30th season, the festival has always found good use for that setup, drafting an impressive roster of jazz pianists into the service of musical dialogue. Among them are Dick Hyman, who founded Jazz in July and programmed its first two decades, and Bill Charlap, his handpicked successor.

“Between the two of us, we’ve greatly expanded the two-piano presentations,” Mr. Hyman said last week, in a small conference room at the 92nd Street Y.

“That may be,” Mr. Charlap replied. “And the experience of playing two pianos is very telling.”

The two men were seated at a table with no piano in sight. But their rapport felt as alert and magnanimous as it often has onstage. Mr. Hyman, 87, who lives near Sarasota, Fla., had agreed to a joint interview with Mr. Charlap, nearly 40 years his junior. The subject at hand: the history of Jazz in July as well as its current edition, running Tuesday through Thursday, this week and next.
Photo

The first Jazz in July band outside 92nd Street Y in 1985. The founder, Dick Hyman, is second from the right, in the back row. Credit Steve J. Sherman

The legacy of Jazz in July, which extends well beyond piano colloquy, has a lot to do with the exaltation of the American songbook. It also has something to do with the execution of jazz repertory, the veneration of jazz elders and the endorsement of young jazz talent. More than anything, it has reflected the personalities of its artistic directors, each in his time an eminent jazz pianist with a humming career.

Mr. Hyman was known as a virtuoso (http://youtu.be/V9285cnFfXI) of encyclopedic insight and peripatetic interests — a regular collaborator to the filmmaker Woody Allen and the choreographer Twyla Tharp — when he began the festival in 1985. He was also known for bringing recorded jazz history to life in concert, as a former musical director of the New York Jazz Repertory Company. With encouragement from Hadassah Markson, then the director of the 92nd Street Y’s school of music, he made Jazz in July a kaleidoscope of his tastes.

The early programs featured celebrations of ragtime and stride piano; a tribute to the 1920s cornetist Bix Beiderbecke; and a foray onto the tentative meeting ground of jazz and classical music, with orchestral works by James P. Johnson and George Antheil. For all his erudition, Mr. Hyman tried to keep the concerts nondidactic in tone.

“Not to be too blunt, but the music takes itself too seriously now,” he told Jon Pareles (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/07/22/arts/92d-street-y-to-present-rags-swing-and-bop.html) of The New York Times in 1986. “I don’t think that there shouldn’t be newer music, but what this festival is not about is music that is somber, perplexing, hostile or boring. It’s a festival of hot jazz, not any of the opposites.”

That mildly contrarian ethos helped define the series as a bastion of conservatism — what the critic Whitney Balliett once called “a paean to old practices, old principles, old joys” — even though it was also an occasional platform for new music, and always a showcase for living musicians. Jazz in July started a couple of years before the earliest stirrings of Jazz at Lincoln Center, which has endured similar criticism under the leadership of Wynton Marsalis.
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The conservative rap doesn’t seem to bother Mr. Hyman half as much as it does Mr. Charlap, whose assumption of duties at Jazz in July had the feeling of a smooth inevitability. A distant cousin of Mr. Hyman’s (they have a great-grandfather in common), he spent his youth tagging along to recording dates and rehearsals, soaking up information. His father, the Broadway songwriter Moose Charlap, and his mother, the singer Sandy Stewart, both worked with Mr. Hyman.
Photo

Dick Hyman, right, with Bill Charlap, who now runs the series. Credit Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

But Mr. Charlap’s own track record, including several well-regarded albums on the Blue Note label, underscored his qualifications for the role. “I didn’t have anybody else in mind to take over,” Mr. Hyman said. “It just seemed Bill was a natural.”

The last decade of programming at Jazz in July has validated that hunch, with a steady, sensible diet of songbook elucidation and jazz-historical homage, along with that signature emphasis on pianism. The offerings this season are true to form, beginning with explorations of the music of Hoagy Carmichael (http://movies.nytimes.com/person/84200/Hoagy-Carmichael?inline=nyt-per) (on Tuesday),Leonard Bernstein (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/leonard_bernstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per) (Wednesday) and Miles Davis (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/miles_davis/index.html?inline=nyt-per) (Thursday).

Next week will bring “Three Generations of Piano Jazz,” with Mr. Charlap, Mr. Hyman and the up-and-comer Christian Sands (July 29); a salute to Sarah Vaughan featuring one of her brightest contemporary heirs (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/arts/music/cecile-mclorin-salvant-jazz-vocalist-tweaks-expectations.html) , Cécile McLorin Salvant (July 30); and “I Won’t Dance: The Fred Astaire Songbook,” with vocals by Sachal Vasandani and tap-dancing by Randy Skinner (July 31).

The audience for Jazz in July is loyal, drawing from jazz and cabaret constituencies alike. But it has never been a magnet for younger listeners, a stubborn reality that the 92nd Street Y has tried to address with target marketing and 35-and-under discounts. Mr. Hyman and Mr. Charlap were quick to agree that the aging demographics presented a challenge. A recent upswell of youthful enthusiasm (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/arts/music/new-york-hot-jazz-festival-takes-over-players-club.html) for hot jazz in New York might seem to hold some hint of a solution, but both pianists were surprised to hear about it.

“This is, in many ways, a very New York festival,” Mr. Charlap said, eliciting instant agreement from Mr. Hyman. That designation derives, he clarified, from the musicians, a cream-of-the-crop arrangement of available talent.

At times, Mr. Charlap has seemed insular in his choice of personnel — his mother is a series regular, as are his wife, the accomplished pianist Renee Rosnes, and the members of his longtime trio — but he has presented dozens of players from outside his immediate circle. Along with a murderers’ row of pianists, they have included the guitarist Jim Hall, the singer Freddy Cole and, at least on one occasion (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/22/arts/music/22char.html) , Mr. Marsalis.

Mr. Charlap, like Mr. Hyman before him, seems keenly aware of Jazz in July’s mandate to serve a core audience without becoming stale. “Every summer, I have a thesis, in a way,” Mr. Charlap said. “There’s really a lot of work to do. I’ve learned a lot by necessity. There’s all this music that we’re presenting, and I may have an idea for a concert. But after that, it’s about finding a way to make everyone comfortable being themselves.”

That feeling begins, it would seem, with the artistic director and his own ambitions. “There’s a reason why I wanted to play Hoagy Carmichael and Leonard Bernstein again,” Mr. Charlap said. “Not just, ‘That’s going to sell tickets.’ I wanted to look at it a little deeper. Those previous concerts were successful. But I feel like it can be better now.”

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July 21, 2014 / No Comments / More

Weekend Extra: Brownie Speaks

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** Weekend Extra: Brownie Speaks
————————————————————

July 19, 2014 by Doug Ramsey (http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/author/dramsey) Leave a Comment (http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/07/weekend-extra-brownie-speaks.html#respond)
http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/07/independence-day-with-fischer-and-cohn.html

Independence Day With Fischer and Cohn (http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/07/independence-day-with-fischer-and-cohn.html)
http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/05/rushing-river.html

Rushing River (http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/05/rushing-river.html)
http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/06/recommendation-artt-frank-on-chet-baker.html

Recommendation: Artt Frank On Chet Baker (http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2014/06/recommendation-artt-frank-on-chet-baker.html)

http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/CliffordBrown020.jpgUntil recently, admirers of the great trumpeter Clifford Brown heard him speak only a few words on the albumThe Beginning and the End (http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-The-End-Clifford-Brown/dp/B000002ATP/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=ur2&tag=rifftidougram-20) . Recently, however, a YouTube contributor who identifies herself as Nespasisi posted a segment of Brown being interviewed by Willis Conover of The Voice of America. Nespasisi explains that she found the fragment “on one of my dusty old cassette tapes.” The discussion was shortly before Brown died in an automobile accident on June 27, 1956, four months short of his 26th birthday.

Clifford Brown with Lou Donaldson, alto saxophone; Elmo Hope, piano; Percy Heath, bass; and Philly Joe Jones, drums, playing “Brownie Speaks,” included on this album (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005MIZ6/?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=ur2&s=music&tag=rifftidougram-20) . If you’re in the mood for more about Clifford, listen to Nat Hentoff talk about him with Clifford Brown, Jr., in a Philadelphia Institute of the Arts symposium (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcB16zkRaXc) .

For even more, go to this Rifftides archive piece (http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/2011/06/from-the-archives-clifford-brown.html) .

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July 20, 2014 / No Comments / More

Lionel Ferbos @ The Palm Court Sept 2012 Phots by Jim Eigo

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Lionel Ferbos @ The Palm Court Sept 2012 (https://plus.google.com/photos/104623439729389703490/albums)

I took these when I attended the 2012 IAJRC Convention in NOLA

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July 19, 2014 / No Comments / More

Lionel Ferbos, the longest-tenured jazz trumpeter in New Orleans, dies at 103 | NOLA.com

** Lionel Ferbos, the longest-tenured jazz trumpeter in New Orleans, dies at 103
————————————————————

Trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, who enjoyed a late-in-life celebrity as the oldest active jazz musician in New Orleans, died early Saturday, July 19. He celebrated his 103rd birthday two nights earlier, on July 17, at a party at the Palm Court Jazz Café, a favored venue of his.

His life in music spanned the Roosevelt administration to the Obama administration, the Great Depression to the Internet era. Louis Armstrong was only 10 years his senior, but Mr. Ferbos outlived Armstrong by more than 40 years.

Mr. Ferbos was the personification of quiet dedication to one’s craft. Few people in his 7th Ward neighborhood realized he was a musician — they knew him as a tinsmith who had taken over his father’s sheet metal business. That occupation sustained him and his family for decades.

But he always nurtured a musical career on the side.

“He proved that the greatness of the city of New Orleans is that ordinary people can be extraordinary on a daily basis,” said trumpeter and New Orleans Jazz Orchestra founder Irvin Mayfield. “Everyone has an opportunity to be something special. The culture gives us the opportunity. He was an example of that.”

He was never a “hot” player. He wasn’t flashy, wasn’t prone to showy improvisation. He never promoted himself as a bandleader or soloist — his horn was part of whatever ensemble he was with at the time. As a result, he made relatively few recordings in his lifetime.

Born in 1911, he represented one of the last living links to the earliest years of jazz. His understanding of the music, and how to play it, were formulated by primary sources unavailable to musicians today. As a result, his style was subtly different, especially his sense of time.

With Mr. Ferbos and his contemporaries, “there’s a certain way that they play melodies — it’s a different beat, a different rhythm,” Mayfield said. “When you listen to King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton, you hear it. I would describe it like sitting on the note, as opposed to playing in back of the note. Every time I played with Mr. Ferbos, that was apparent to me. That’s one of the lost things that we won’t be able to hear in person again.”

Mr. Ferbos’ first professional gigs were in the 1930s with society jazz bands — the Moonlight Serenaders, the Starlight Serenaders. He was the lead trumpet player in the Works Progress Administration jazz band during the Great Depression.

In the 1970s, he played trumpet for the house band of the musical “One Mo’ Time,” but declined to move with the show to New York. He toured Europe several times with the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra. A skilled reader of sheet music, he wrote charts for the Danny Barker-led brass bands that helped revive the brass band tradition. More recently, he fronted his band the Louisiana Shakers weekly at the Palm Court Jazz Café on Decatur Street, his home away from home.

Across all those decades, he never stopped practicing. As long as he played — well into his 102nd year — he also practiced.

“There was nothing more beautiful that to watch this man in his 90s, and then at 100, and then 101, saying that he had to practice,” Mayfield said. “I’d call his house and they’d say, ‘Paw-Paw is practicing.'”

Over the past decade or so, Mr. Ferbos received more attention and accolades that at any point in his career. His longevity became his claim to fame, a fact that was not lost on him. Being the oldest active jazz musician in New Orleans — and possibly the world — had a cachet to it. He truly earned the Lifetime Achievement Award he received at the 2003 Big Easy Awards — at that point, he’d been a musician for 70 years.

As one longtime friend put it, he loved the attention he received late in life, but didn’t seek it. At gigs, he was there to do a job. And ultimately, that job was pleasing the public.

For his 100th birthday, the Palm Court Jazz Café hosted a gala celebration (http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2011/07/lionel_ferbos_birthday_bash_wo.html) . The event sold out quickly. Mr. Ferbos spent most of the evening — more than two hours — onstage with the jazz band, playing, singing, or just taking it all in. USA Today profiled him in advance of the party. The New York Times sent a writer to cover the event.

In August 2013, he and the Louisiana Shakers were featured for one of the monthly house party concerts Mayfield hosts at his home in the Broadmoor neighborhood.Mr. Ferbos brought tears to the eyes of some attendees (http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2013/08/lionel_ferbos_irvin_mayfield_f.html) as he gamely sang “When I Grow Too Old to Dream.” Despite a nearly 70-year age gap, he and Mayfield sat side by side, finding common ground as they raised their trumpets in tandem. After the gig, Mr. Ferbos gladly accepted congratulatory pecks on the cheek from a progression of women decades younger than him.

This year, however, Mr. Ferbos slowed down considerably. He last performed publicly on March 30 for a Sunday afternoon gig at the “Nickel-a-Dance” traditional jazz series at the Maison on Frenchmen Street. He missed both the 2014 French Quarter Festival and the 2014 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival presented by Shell.

He grew increasingly frail in recent months, confined to a relative’s home. Family and friends hosted a party for him on July 17 at the Palm Court on his 103rd birthday. Palm Court proprietor Nina Buck had offered to bring the birthday party to his home, but members of his family insisted he would prefer to celebrate at the Palm Court, in public. Far too weak to perform, Mr. Ferbos instead posed for pictures and greeted dozens of well-wishers in what turned out to be his final public appearance.

He outlived his wife of 75 years, Marguerite Gilyot, who died in 2009, as well as his son, Lionel Ferbos Jr., who died in 2006. Survivors include his daughter, Sylvia, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

Music writer Keith Spera can be reached at kspera@nola.com or 504.826.3470. Follow him on Twitter @KeithSpera.

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July 19, 2014 / No Comments / More

“Alive Inside” Documentary Shows Power of Music to Evoke Memory | Re/code

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** “Alive Inside” Film Explores Power of Music to Restore Memory
————————————————————
Alive Inside documentary
Projector Media

Audiences first encounter Henry hunched over in his wheelchair, head down, hands clasped firmly together, unresponsive to the world around him.

As soon as a pair of headphones are placed on his head, the 94-year-old dementia patient opens his eyes, sits up straight and begins swaying and humming along with the music. Henry speaks animatedly about his favorite band leader, Cab Calloway, and even begins to emulate the jazz artist’s style of scat singing — at one point launching into a rendition of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”

The dramatic transformation, which takes place against the bleak institutional setting of the nursing home where Henry has spent the last decade of his life, is a powerful set piece for the documentary film “Alive Inside,” (http://www.aliveinside.us/) which opens this weekend in New York.

“Alive Inside” follows social worker Dan Cohen, whose nonprofit Music & Memory (http://musicandmemory.org/) organization works to bring iPods loaded with personalized playlists to elderly Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. So far, Cohen’s program has expanded from three nursing homes to 489 in 42 states — with the help of private donations spurred by the film.

Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett said he was hired to create a video for Cohen’s website. The scope of the project changed as he witnessed Henry’s transformation when the music of his youth was returned to him.

“I had goosebumps over my whole body when he was waking up. I had tears in my eyes,” said Rossato-Bennett. “They say every artist only tells one story over and over again. If I had to tell my story, it’s the finding of life where you think there is none.”

“Alive Inside: A Story of Music and Memory” is winning acclaim on the festival circuit, collecting the prestigious audience award for documentary film at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival and best documentary at the Milan International Film Festival.

Apple is lending the film a promotional nudge, as it opens to limited release in theaters throughout the U.S.

The documentary uses Henry’s story, and those of other patients, to illustrate music’s power to reach parts of the brain that remain intact, even late in the onset of Alzheimer’s, and evoke memories.

“Music therapists know all this. They practice it,” Cohen said. “But there are very few music therapists in the world of the elderly. It’s knowledge that was siloed.”

Cohen, who has spent a career working in technology, viewed the problem as one of technical limitations, and he set out to solve it, one iPod and custom playlist at a time. His goal is an ambitious one: To bring personalized music to 16,000 long-term care facilities in the U.S.

“It’s not a cure for Alzheimer’s, but it does work most of the time,” Cohen said. “And there is no downside. The worst case scenario — you don’t get a benefit. Sometimes, it’s a dramatic change in someone’s life.”

Here’s the trailer for the film:

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July 19, 2014 / No Comments / More

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Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed

Full Concerts From The Newport Jazz Festival

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Exclusive: The Lost Legendary Voice of Sam Cooke’s Brother – Esquire

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100 Great Records Of The 1920s

Music Festival: The Newport Jazz Festival – WSJ

Idris Muhammad, legendary New Orleans drummer, is dead at 74 | NOLA.com

Saving Sam the Record Man’s Giant Spinning Discs – CityLab

phonograph records — 7/24/14 from American Roots Music by Robert Santelli

Branford Eagle | Jazz Legend Lifts The Green

Jazz News No. 24/2014 (17 – 23 July 2014)

Jazz in Auschwitz – Coco Schumann looks back | Music | DW.DE | 11.07.2014

Military bands offer musicians great jobs, similar challenges to orchestras – The Washington Post

‘Do Not Sell at Any Price’ and ‘Dust & Grooves’ – NYTimes.com

Jazz in July Celebrates 30th Season at 92nd Street Y – NYTimes.com

Weekend Extra: Brownie Speaks

Lionel Ferbos @ The Palm Court Sept 2012 Phots by Jim Eigo

Lionel Ferbos, the longest-tenured jazz trumpeter in New Orleans, dies at 103 | NOLA.com

“Alive Inside” Documentary Shows Power of Music to Evoke Memory | Re/code

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