Slice of Life

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Larry Blumenfeld will host a lecture series at Syracuse University entitled “Jazz in Troubled Times: The Relevance and Resonance of a Culture.” Blumenfeld will be featured in nine scheduled events, running from March 25 to April 5.
The era of jazz clubs frequenting every street corner now only remains behind glass cases in museums. Larry Blumenfeld, a music critic and former editor-in-chief of JAZZIZ magazine, is helping to bring jazz to the forefront.
“Jazz is not a popular music by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, “but this is a timely, hot topic.”
This year, Blumenfeld is Syracuse University’s Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor. His lecture series, entitled “Jazz in Troubled Times: The Relevance and Resonance of a Culture,” will run from March 25 to April 5, and feature listening experiences, workshops, discussions and concerts from renowned musicians.
Blumenfeld was selected for this honor after Eric Grode, an SU professor and director of the Goldring Arts Journalism program, suggested his name for the invitation.

Blumenfeld is a music critic and frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, known for his exploration of jazz music’s relationship with social justice and contemporary issues. Courtesy of Ellen Mbuqe
From there, the two worked closely to curate a list of topics for the event. Unlike some speakers in the past, Blumenfeld’s lecture series will span numerous disciplines — a testament to his own research, Grode said.
“Larry has been as instrumental as anyone in the last decade for just yanking jazz and social justice back together,” Grode said, “and reminding people that when you’re listening to music, you’re also listening to any number of cultures that have converged, sometimes harmoniously sometimes non-harmoniously, to become this thing that we listen to.”
Blumenfeld attended graduate school at Columbia University as a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program. Once he connected with jazz, Blumenfeld said he explored the deep, rich culture ingrained in the music. Soon after, he began writing about jazz as it pertained to issues of a different caliber, specifically social justice.
Through reporting on musicians and the music itself, Blumenfeld said he could draw connections between jazz and current issues. He cited the United States embargo against Cuba as an example of how music and global issues are intertwined.
“Music and culture are the some of the deepest bonds between the U.S. and Cuba and that embargo is an act of violence between that familial connection,” Blumenfeld said.
More recently — in addition to the numerous publications he writes for — Blumenfeld has assisted with curating and producing jazz festivals, including the Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina. But equally important, he said, was his research, which brought him to the cities of Chicago and New Orleans.
With decades of expertise in the jazz realm, Blumenfeld has utilized a portion of his research as a focal point in each lecture. He said he hopes that audience members walk away from his lectures with the answers to questions surrounding jazz’s contribution to society, its invaluable nature and what it means today for the university and world.

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Blumenfeld and Grode will host each event of the series, which features performances by Harvard’s Yosvany Terry and pianist Jason Moran — who Blumenfeld described as “one of the best jazz musicians of our day.”
“You don’t have situations where everyone in the audience can draw upon firsthand experience of jazz music,” Grode said. “So I think having artists of their caliber helps contextualize and make sense of the stuff being talked about in a theoretical and abstract way.”
Grode added that Blumenfeld will also be doing other events outside of the university, including appearances on radio stations in Rochester and Ithaca. The SU series has attracted professors and others beyond Syracuse’s campus, especially in part to Terry and Moran’s reputations as seminal jazz artists.
Blumenfeld said he is thrilled by this opportunity and what it can explore in the greater jazz culture.
“My career and my work has led me to feel that culture is precious, and we’re in a moment where culture in this country needs to be amplified,” Blumenfeld said.
Published on March 24, 2019 at 10:18 pm
 

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Slice of Life

Daily Orange File Photo
Larry Blumenfeld will host a lecture series at Syracuse University entitled “Jazz in Troubled Times: The Relevance and Resonance of a Culture.” Blumenfeld will be featured in nine scheduled events, running from March 25 to April 5.
The era of jazz clubs frequenting every street corner now only remains behind glass cases in museums. Larry Blumenfeld, a music critic and former editor-in-chief of JAZZIZ magazine, is helping to bring jazz to the forefront.
“Jazz is not a popular music by any stretch of the imagination,” he said, “but this is a timely, hot topic.”
This year, Blumenfeld is Syracuse University’s Jeannette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor. His lecture series, entitled “Jazz in Troubled Times: The Relevance and Resonance of a Culture,” will run from March 25 to April 5, and feature listening experiences, workshops, discussions and concerts from renowned musicians.
Blumenfeld was selected for this honor after Eric Grode, an SU professor and director of the Goldring Arts Journalism program, suggested his name for the invitation.

Blumenfeld is a music critic and frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, known for his exploration of jazz music’s relationship with social justice and contemporary issues. Courtesy of Ellen Mbuqe
From there, the two worked closely to curate a list of topics for the event. Unlike some speakers in the past, Blumenfeld’s lecture series will span numerous disciplines — a testament to his own research, Grode said.
“Larry has been as instrumental as anyone in the last decade for just yanking jazz and social justice back together,” Grode said, “and reminding people that when you’re listening to music, you’re also listening to any number of cultures that have converged, sometimes harmoniously sometimes non-harmoniously, to become this thing that we listen to.”
Blumenfeld attended graduate school at Columbia University as a fellow in the National Arts Journalism Program. Once he connected with jazz, Blumenfeld said he explored the deep, rich culture ingrained in the music. Soon after, he began writing about jazz as it pertained to issues of a different caliber, specifically social justice.
Through reporting on musicians and the music itself, Blumenfeld said he could draw connections between jazz and current issues. He cited the United States embargo against Cuba as an example of how music and global issues are intertwined.
“Music and culture are the some of the deepest bonds between the U.S. and Cuba and that embargo is an act of violence between that familial connection,” Blumenfeld said.
More recently — in addition to the numerous publications he writes for — Blumenfeld has assisted with curating and producing jazz festivals, including the Spoleto Festival USA in South Carolina. But equally important, he said, was his research, which brought him to the cities of Chicago and New Orleans.
With decades of expertise in the jazz realm, Blumenfeld has utilized a portion of his research as a focal point in each lecture. He said he hopes that audience members walk away from his lectures with the answers to questions surrounding jazz’s contribution to society, its invaluable nature and what it means today for the university and world.

Susie Teuscher | Digital Design Editor
Blumenfeld and Grode will host each event of the series, which features performances by Harvard’s Yosvany Terry and pianist Jason Moran — who Blumenfeld described as “one of the best jazz musicians of our day.”
“You don’t have situations where everyone in the audience can draw upon firsthand experience of jazz music,” Grode said. “So I think having artists of their caliber helps contextualize and make sense of the stuff being talked about in a theoretical and abstract way.”
Grode added that Blumenfeld will also be doing other events outside of the university, including appearances on radio stations in Rochester and Ithaca. The SU series has attracted professors and others beyond Syracuse’s campus, especially in part to Terry and Moran’s reputations as seminal jazz artists.
Blumenfeld said he is thrilled by this opportunity and what it can explore in the greater jazz culture.
“My career and my work has led me to feel that culture is precious, and we’re in a moment where culture in this country needs to be amplified,” Blumenfeld said.
Published on March 24, 2019 at 10:18 pm
 

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He looked different, he played different, he was different. Lester Young stood out: green eyes, reddish hair that earned him the boyhood nickname “Red,” a porkpie hat, an ankle-length black coat, his saxophone held at a 45-degree angle. In a musical field known for individuality, he was an outsider’s nonconformist, swinging to his own beat: shy, sensitive, averse to loudness and ostentation, inventor of his own eccentric lingo, and progenitor of cool as hipness in music, language and persona. If he didn’t invent “cool” to mean “hip,” he popularized it and other phrases that spread well beyond jazz. Most important, he created a poetic new aesthetic, altering the course of music. Sixty years after his death, the tenor saxophonist continues to rank as one of the most influential jazzmen in history.
Born in Mississippi in 1909 and raised in nearby New Orleans, by the time he was a teenager he was touring with a family band led by his father. But before he was 20 he decided to go out on his own. He went on the road, living for a time in Albuquerque, N.M., Minneapolis, and then in Kansas City, Mo., a jazz hotbed hosting dozens of nightclubs for listening and dancing. As part of Count Basie’s soon-to-be-discovered, quintessential swing band, Young made his first recordings. In 1936, on “Lady, Be Good,” he plays a wondrous two-chorus solo that sparked a sensation among musicians.
His solo on Basie’s 1937 “One O’Clock Jump”—Young hits a B-flat 20 times in a row—was memorized by legions of tenor sax players. Young’s 1939 showpiece “Lester Leaps In”—rife with rhythmic surprises—spotlights his superior note choices and interlinking melodic ideas. These recordings have much to offer listeners today.

Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and Gerry Mulligan in 1957 Photo: Getty Images
A decade earlier, cornetist Louis Armstrong had crystallized the model jazz solo; Lester Young—a brilliant soloist and melodist—reimagined how an extempore statement could sound. Young’s feathery-floating tone; dearth of vibrato; long, flowing lines; and seemingly endless melodic ideas grabbed listeners’ ears. Inspired by the white saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer, Young presented a lyrical contrast to the hot style of the dominant tenor saxophonist, Coleman Hawkins. Young’s approach played down harmonies and emphasized melodic invention. He nailed his solos on the first take, spinning out golden melody lines at the speed of thought.
Achieving a balance between lyrical and earthy, between poise and punch, Young’s new paradigm made him the most influential jazz musician between the rise of Armstrong in the 1920s and saxophonist Charlie Parker in the mid-1940s.
Young and singer Billie Holiday forged a warm friendship, crowning each other with admiring nicknames. He called her “Lady Day” (short for Holiday) and she dubbed him “The President” or “Prez”—the top man in her realm. Their recordings of 1937-41—such as “Mean to Me” and “I Must Have That Man”—still sparkle after 80 years.
If Young’s sound was essentially romantic, his life arced toward the tragic. In 1944, shortly after appearing in a celebrated, arty movie short, “Jammin’ the Blues,” he was drafted into the U.S. Army, one of the worst possible fates for someone introverted, soft-spoken, detached and suffering from epilepsy. The Army charged him with smoking marijuana and placed him in disciplinary barracks for nine months, a trauma from which he never fully recovered: “a nightmare,” he said, “man, one mad nightmare.”
As Young’s alcoholism grew worse in the 1950s, his tone grew huskier, his vibrato wider, and his pitch range lower. He died on March 15, 1959, at age 49, ending a recording career of just 23 years. Four months later, his musical soulmate Billie Holiday expired in a Harlem hospital at age 44.

It’s been 60 years since the influential Young died Photo: Getty Images
Young influenced scores of saxophonists—such as Stan Getz and Dexter Gordon—as well as bebop, cool jazz, bossa nova and Hollywood soundtracks. Beyond music, such beat writers as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac hero-worshiped Young, and Bertrand Tavernier would base his 1986 movie “’Round Midnight” on the lives of Young and pianist Bud Powell.
The premature deaths of Young and Holiday testify to jazz musicians’ hard road then: irregular incomes, often-itinerant work, ever-present temptations of substance abuse, unscrupulous club owners and record producers, and vicissitudes of public taste.
If you were an African-American musician, you also faced the psychic brutality of widespread racism, discrimination, segregation and the risk of physical violence. “It’s all bullshit,” said Young, “and they want everybody who is a Negro to be a Uncle Tom or Uncle Remus or Uncle Sam.” And yet, despite sustained assaults on his dignity and humanity, Young and other musicians of color, fortified by the strength of their character and culture, produced so much splendid, evergreen art.
—Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian. His books include “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington” (Da Capo) and “Discover Jazz” (Pearson).
 

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Last year proved to be a pivotal one for streaming music in Japan. According to a report by the Recording Industry Association of Japan, 2018 saw plays via platforms such as YouTube, Apple Music and Spotify overtake digital downloads.
This would be a great piece of evidence for futurists trying to argue that the Japanese music market is actually catching up to where most other nations are today. But mucking that up is the total lack of info regarding physical sales, a still-major slice of the proverbial pie. And recent changes only underline how important they are, even as different developments point toward other directions.
Tower Records opened Tower Vinyl on the 10th floor of its Shinjuku store on March 21. The space, once reserved for pop-up events, now houses 70,000 records, according to the company, with more than half being secondhand.
It stands as the latest sign of a renewed interest in records in Japan. HMV launched a new Shibuya location devoted to vinyl in 2014 after several years out of the area — and has since opened more stores.
Contemporary J-pop acts have started releasing vinyl editions of their albums, probably helped by Sony opening a new pressing plant. You can even spot more boutique record shops sprouting up (like in Yoyogi-Uehara, where you can now find old city pop and yacht rock albums at a place called Adult Oriented Records). Record Store Day Japan has grown from a niche celebration to a bonanza bringing in Yellow Magic Orchestra members as spokespeople.
The “vinyl revival” has been a trend for a while now globally, with sales in the U.S. continuing to grow according to Nielsen Music. Plenty of digital ink has been spilled on why this is happening, though I’m a fan of the theory that it is partially because consumers are starting to value physical music in an age of digital impermanence (though even tactile releases can disappear from shops here if an artist is caught enjoying narcotics). It’s also a bit of a status flex.
Tower has long offered records, but Tower Vinyl latches on to this trend (check the branding …”Tower Vinyl” sounds like a flooring company when “Tower Records” already works wonderfully). The new space highlights the demand and absurdity of this development, capped off by selling special vinyl editions of old Morning Musume albums, despite that group being a powerhouse of the CD era.
Speaking of which, CDs remain prevalent in Japan (see the other floors at Tower Records Shinjuku). They’ve actually made a bit of a comeback in places like South Korea, another country big on idol pop, but lack the cool cachet of records in Japan or elsewhere, at least for the time being. Maybe the format’s heyday is still too fresh in people’s mind to strike up the same nostalgia as vinyl, so a few more decades are needed for discs to win over a new audience.
Then again, it has been said that CDs from 30 years ago are now starting to disintegrate, while records remain solid. At that rate, Tower Records might want to stock up on vinyl for other departments, too.
 

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Verve Label Group president/CEO Danny Bennett has stepped down, Universal Music Group announced Thursday. Oversight of Verve will be taken over by Dickon Stainer, president/CEO of Universal Classics and Jazz, who will add the labels to a stable that already includes heading up Deutsche Grammophon and the Decca Label Group.
The restructuring was cited by the company as part of a “move to further internationalize Verve.” Stainer works out of both the London and New York offices for UMG.
Bennett — pictured above at a recent Grammys after-party with his father, Tony Bennett, and UMG chairman/CEO Sir Lucian Grainge — will continue to operate the management company he founded in 1979, RPM Productions.
UMG issued amicable statements from Bennett and Grainge as well as Stainer. “I’d like to thank Danny for helping to revitalize Verve and bringing some extraordinary artists into the UMG family,” said Grainge. “We look forward to working with him in the future.”
Said Bennett, “It has been an honor to work with Sir Lucian Grainge and Michele Anthony, along with the whole UMG family, and I’m thankful for the privilege of being able to build an amazing roster of new artists as well as a talented team of creative professionals who share my passion for the music.”
Bennett took the reins of Verve in 2016, following a four-year run by the famous producer David Foster. Under the helm of both Bennett and Foster, Verve and its sister labels had aligned with artists well outside the jazz and classical boxes, from New Orleans’ Tank and the Bangas to Lyle Lovett and an upcoming release from T Bone Burnett. It remains to be seen whether that will remain an emphasis under the new structure.
Diana Krall and Andrea Bocelli (who had a No. 1 bestselling album in November) are the biggest contemporary names on Verve, with the label’s catalog containing valuable titles from jazz greats like Nina Simone, Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald and John Coltrane.
Stainer emphasized several of the company’s successful and developing artists in his statement. “Classical and jazz are amongst the musical wonders of the world,” he said. “Streaming has opened a flood of discovery and has further enabled us to ensure our artists have a global reach. The developing international success of Max Richter, Gregory Porter, Lang Lang, Jacob Collier and Sheku Kanneh-Mason, among others, has demonstrated that we need to work with a seamlessly coordinated global approach (that) achieves the greatest results possible on behalf of our exceptional artists.”
 
 

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The Cuban jazz great’s son Arturo O’Farrill will lead a concert at the Manhattan School of Music honoring his father’s legacy.
Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies has acquired Cuban jazz great Arturo “Chico” O’Farrill’s music and personal archives. The collection includes O’Farrill’s renowned “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” and other compositions essential to the history of both Latin music and jazz.
“Chico would’ve been honored to know that his work is now available to scholars and students of jazz history,” Chico’s son Arturo O’Farrill said in an announcement from the Institute.
The O’Farrill acquisition will be the first major Latin jazz collection to become part of the 60-year-old institute’s archives, where jazz greats including Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Benny Carter and many others are represented. The O’Farrill Family and Estate donated the collection representing Chico’s legacy, which includes original music manuscripts, photographs and sound recordings.
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“The Institute is thrilled to add O’Farrill’s illustrious archives to its collection to celebrate Chico’s monumental impact in jazz during his lifetime,” the announcement from the Institute of Jazz Studies reads. 
The trumpeter, composer and arranger, who was born to an Irish father and German mother in Cuba, passed away in New York City in 2001 at age 79. He had moved to New York in the late forties; he played with Benny Goodman’s orchestra and was a sought after arranger, a pioneer in the fusion of jazz and Latin music. He and his wife Lupe Valero moved to Mexico in the 1950s, and later brought their family back to New York.
Grammy-winning pianist and bandleader Arturo O’Farrill will lead the Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra at a March 28 concert honouring Chico that will also include Arturo’s son Adam. The musicians will perform the “Afro Cuban Jazz Suite,” as well as other compositions by the three generations of the O’Farrill family.

Selena Quintanilla fans have a reason to rejoice today (March 21) thanks to Forever 21’s announcement that it will honor the late Mexican-American singer with her own clothing line on the 22nd anniversary of the Selena biopic movie starring Jennifer Lopez.
Celebrating her iconic legacy and timeless music that transcends generations, the brand’s “Selena: The While Rose Collection,” incorporates imagery of the Queen of Tejano, alongside well-known quotes and lyrics.
Available for women, men and kids, “The White Rose Collection” is size-inclusive and includes a range of retro-inspired graphic tees, hoodies, biker shorts, crop tops, accessories and more. Ranging from $7 to $40, the new Selena merch is already available in stores nationwide and online here.
Even though March 31st marks Selena’s 24th death anniversary, her legacy continues to shine on the Billboard charts, closing off 2018 with five positions on the year-end charts, including No. 3 on the Top Latin Artists – Female chart following Shakira and Natti Natasha.
See a preview of the collection below:

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Poetry Commentary: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Turns 100 — The Beats Go On
 
Ed MeekMarch 20, 2019
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By Ed Meek
The Beats came before the ’60s, the decade of civil rights protests, women’s rights, the anti-war movement, and the civil strife that included riots and assassinations.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 2007 at the City Lights Book Store. Photo: Wiki Common.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100^th birthday in four days. It must be hard even for him to believe he outlived all his Beat writer contemporaries, many of whom he published through the press he ran out of his now famous landmark, the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. For art to matter, there must be two factors. One, of course, is the talent of the artists. But there must  also be readers and institutions who support authors. Ferlinghetti was more important as a promoter and publisher of Beat poetry than as an artist. The era of Beat poetry, which began in the’40s following World War 2 and flowered in the ’50s, was the last period when poetry flourished in America — it became part of the national culture, its rebellious vision crossing over into fiction, movies, politics, and lifestyles. Today, we see a similar pattern, with poetry branching out into music and rap, spoken word and performance.
There are clips online of Jack Kerouac appearing on late night talk host Steve Allen’s television show, reciting his lyrical prose to jazz piano accompaniment. Kerouac, like Ginsberg, wrote in stream of consciousness — a free flowing, associative opening up of the mind. It was a ‘flinging open the doors’ as their precursor Walt Whitman put it, an approach that also recalled the unrhymed, long lines, based on alliteration and rhythm (or beat), found in Anglo Saxon poetry. Ironically, Ferlinghetti’s take on this cry for freedom was to emphasize its accessibility, perhaps because he did not have the level of talent of Ginsberg or Kerouac.
Beat writing departed, radically, from the tightly written, economical, highly controlled prose and poetry of modernists such as Hemingway and William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot. The beats were the forerunners of the ‘anything goes’ openness of the ’60s: the hippies, the drug culture exemplified by William S. Burroughs, the songs of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen as well as the novels of Ken Kesey and the gonzo journalism of Hunter Thompson as well as the new journalism of Tom Wolfe, the rebellion chic of James Dean and Marlon Brando and the changing attitudes toward homosexuality following Ginsberg’s very public embrace of his sexual identity. You can also draw a connection between the beats and the current popularity of performance poetry.
Here is an excerpt from a poem by Ferlinghetti entitled “Baseball Canto”:
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem,
with some Irish tenor’s voice piped over the loudspeakers,
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops in their black suits and little
black caps pressed over their hearts,
Standing straight and still like at some funeral of a blarney bartender,
and all facing east,
as if expecting some Great White Hope or the Founding Fathers to
appear on the horizon like 1066 or 1776.
But Willie Mays appears instead,
in the bottom of the first,
and a roar goes up as he clouts the first one into the sun and takes
off, like a forerunner from Thebes.
You can see a kind of inclusiveness working here, an open-heartedness an attempt to speak to Americans as a whole via a a common experience. But there isn’t much of interest going on in the poem’s language,. Not a lot of compelling invention at work. It works pretty well as a paragraph.
Here is a quotation from Kerouac’s novel On the Road:
“[…]the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Here the author expresses a way to live, a kind of go-for-the-gusto, live all the way up, burn the candle at both ends. Those who are able to do so, for Kerouac, inspire a kind of reverence. We are called on to emulate the sway of  “the mad ones.” For him, this adolescent spirit of embracing the edge is embodied in a character named Dean Moriarty, who was based on his friend Neal Cassidy, who died a year before Kerouac at the age of 41. (He was found beside train tracks in a coma and died hours later. Kerouac died in 1969 at the ripe old age of 47 of a hemorrhage, no doubt the result of years of heavy drinking.)
Kerouac called on young Americans (males, not females) to hop in their cars or jump on trains or stick out their thumbs and travel across the country. It was a way to escape the post-World-War-Two stultification of the suburbs, to break out of the conformity of the ’50s, at time when the “Greatest Generation” were feeling pretty complacent, pretty happy with themselves for winning the war and saving the world. Despite the limitations of his vision, Kerouac was a gifted, at times poetic, writer who knows how to make effective use repetition and metaphor.
Ginsberg was the most talented of the Beats. Drawing from Whitman, he used long lines in order to “extend the breath.” He drew on a technique called parataxis — joining unlikely combinations of words and phrases together to create new meanings. And, although he embraced the stream-of-consciousness technique, he edited his work.
From the famous beginning of Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz…
Ginsberg captures the anxieties of his generation in the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald  probed the insecurities of the ’20s in The Great Gatsby. He mythologizes his peers and their actions via a jazz overlay that makes stimulating use of powerful imagery and metaphor. It’s quotable, yet much denser than everyday prose. The poem was performed in 1955 and published in 1956 by Ferlinghetti. He and Ginsberg were both arrested on obscenity charges. The case went to court and, with the help of the ACLU, the charges were dismissed.
It’s important to note that the Beats came before the ’60s, the decade of civil rights protests, women’s rights, the anti-war movement, and the civil strife that included riots and assassinations.
“Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist,” thundered Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance.” The Beats made nonconformity popular. As such, they set the stage for the ’60s. Dylan released  his song “Masters of War” in 1963 and it still resonates.
Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could?
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
Soul — it’s a (nonconformist?) word we might want to reclaim as Ferlinghetti celebrates his centennial year on our fragile blue planet in our unrepresentative capitalist democracy as we wonder how the hell we got to where we are today.

Ed Meek is the author of Spy Pond and What We Love. A collection of his short stories, Luck, came out in May. WBUR’s Cognoscenti featured his poems during poetry month this year.
 

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James Dapogny in an undated photograph. He applied his vast knowledge of music to transcribing early jazz works, notably the music of Jelly Roll Morton, widely regarded as the first great jazz composer.University of Michigan
James Dapogny, a jazz pianist, bandleader and musicologist who was instrumental in solidifying Jelly Roll Morton’s place in the jazz pantheon, died on March 6 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 78.
His wife, Gail Johnson Dapogny, said the cause was colon cancer.
Professor Dapogny (dah-POG-nee) taught music at the University of Michigan for decades but also found time for frequent performances, leading James Dapogny’s Chicago Jazz Band (“his pride and joy,” his wife said) and other groups as well as playing and recording as a solo artist.
He applied his vast knowledge of music to transcribing early jazz works from recordings, most notably in his 1982 book “Ferdinand ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton: The Collected Piano Music,” which helped fuel a rediscovery of Morton (1890-1941), who had fallen out of favor but is now widely regarded as the first great jazz composer.
Professor Dapogny further cemented Morton’s legacy by overseeing “Jelly Roll Morton, the Library of Congress Recordings, Volumes 1-4,” a landmark compilation of 1938 material that was released by Rounder Records in 1994. “The reissue of this body of music is undeniably a major event,” Tom Piazza wrote in a review in The New York Times.
Professor Dapogny’s edition of the collected piano music reflected its complexity far more than the published sheet music versions, William Bolcom, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and a colleague at the University of Michigan, said by email.
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“Just as important,” he said, “Jim could swing in performance, with a quiet demeanor and deadpan humor, in person, in recordings and on stage.”
Morton was only one of Professor Dapogny’s interests. He also resurrected a blues opera by the poet Langston Hughes and the jazz pianist and composer James P. Johnson called “De Organizer,” which had been performed at Carnegie Hall in New York in 1940, then became a longstanding musical mystery. Although Hughes’s lyrics were preserved, Johnson’s score went missing; Professor Dapogny was one of a number of scholars who searched for years with no luck.
Professor Dapogny joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1966 on a one-year appointment and ended up staying for more than 40 years.University of Michigan

Professor Dapogny joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1966 on a one-year appointment and ended up staying for more than 40 years.University of Michigan
“I called people who knew the whole story,” he told the University of Michigan’s news service in 2002, “and I heard the same message over and over: ‘Forget about it. Everyone’s looked for it. It’s gone.’ ”
Then, in 1997, he was taking in an exhibition on Eva Jessye, a choral director whose credits included the original production of “Porgy and Bess” and whose papers had been donated to the university. In a display case, he saw a notebook with “De Organizer — Property of Eva Jessye” written on the cover.
“I went weak in the knees,” Professor Dapogny told The New York Times in 2002. “This was something that truly seemed to have disappeared.”
The notebook contained most of the music. Professor Dapogny filled in about 80 missing measures himself. In 2002 the opera, about a labor organizer who inspires sharecroppers in the South, was reborn with performances in Detroit and Ann Arbor. Professor Dapogny played piano in the orchestra.
In 2006 he presented “De Organizer” again in Ann Arbor, this time paired with another lost work that he had reconstructed, “The Dreamy Kid,” composed by Johnson and with a libretto by Eugene O’Neill.
“The Johnson opera restorations were a huge challenge, and an opportunity to work with the material of one of his heroes,” Christopher Smith, a sousaphonist and trombonist who played with Professor Dapogny in the band Phil Ogilvie’s Rhythm Kings, said by email. “There was no one better qualified to do that work, and he delivered brilliantly.”
James Elliot Dapogny was born on Sept. 3, 1940, in Berwyn, Ill. His father, Irving, was a manager at a printing press company, and his mother, Evelyn (Neumeister) Dapogny, was a homemaker.
James grew up in Downers Grove, a Chicago suburb, and as a teenager would go to the city to listen to jazz. He was playing in groups as well, including the Stompers, where his fellow members included the clarinetist Kim Cusack, who lived in a nearby town.
Professor Dapogny recognized Jelly Roll Morton, pictured here, as a remarkable multidimensional artist. Morton’s music, he once said, “was not like anything any of his forerunners wrote because it has a depth of thought that doesn’t exist in earlier jazz or ragtime.”Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Professor Dapogny recognized Jelly Roll Morton, pictured here, as a remarkable multidimensional artist. Morton’s music, he once said, “was not like anything any of his forerunners wrote because it has a depth of thought that doesn’t exist in earlier jazz or ragtime.”Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“We would go over to his house, and — it was not exactly a front porch, it was like a room, like a foyer, where the family piano was,” Mr. Cusack recalled in a video interview on the Jazz Lives blog. “Jim was always there, and he was always at that piano. You could rest assured that just about every time we went to his house, that’s as far as we got.”
Professor Dapogny received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in composition at the University of Illinois and, in 1971, earned a doctorate there as well. By then he was already teaching at the University of Michigan, having arrived there in 1966 on a one-year appointment that lasted more than 40 years. He took emeritus status upon his retirement in 2006.
Professor Dapogny was captivated by early jazz.
“He’s said that the energy of prewar jazz was always appealing to him,” Mr. Smith said. “That and the compositional interest of multi-strain works which also afforded improvisation.”
In the early 1980s Professor Dapogny had a chance to serve as accompanist to someone who was part of the 1920s jazz scene: the singer Sippie Wallace. He performed with her at the Bottom Line in New York and other nightclubs when she was in her 80s. His Chicago Jazz Band backed her on her 1982 album, “Sippie.”
That band also released a number of its own albums, including, in 1993, “Original Jelly Roll Blues,” which applied Professor Dapogny’s knowledge of Morton and his style to compositions by Morton and others. He recognized Morton as a remarkable multidimensional artist, as he explained in a 2000 interview with The Times.
“If you only heard the piano solos he recorded in 1923 and ’24, you’d say he was doing stuff nobody else was doing,” he said. “If you only saw his music on paper, you’d say it was not like anything any of his forerunners wrote because it has a depth of thought that doesn’t exist in earlier jazz or ragtime. If you only heard his band music, you get this sense of how perfectly he used an ensemble. And if you only hear the Library of Congress sides, you see what a fabulous improviser this guy was.”
Professor Dapogny’s first marriage, to Ellen Bunning, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, whom he married in 1965, he is survived by two brothers, David and Douglas.
For someone who was constantly onstage, Professor Dapogny was surprisingly low key, Mr. Smith said.
“I’m sure many of his university colleagues had no idea of his accomplishments in the jazz world, and vice versa,” he said. “When introducing him on gigs, I would sometimes joke (in a booming voice) that he was ‘the most subtle man of all time!’
“I have long felt that Jim was underappreciated because of his subtlety, but it didn’t seem to bother him one bit — he just kept on cranking out magnificent work.”
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R&B singer Andre Williams, who collaborated with Stevie Wonder and The Temptations among many others, died Sunday, March 17, in Chicago, his label Pravda Records reports. He was 82.
Williams died as a result of colon cancer after being diagnosed two weeks ago and following a string of other health issues, his manager Kenn Goodman confirmed to Billboard. “But was committed to trying to sing and record again,” Goodman says.
Zephire “Andre” Williams was born Nov. 1, 1936 in Bessemer, Ala. His career began in the early 1950s when he moved to Detroit and situated himself in the city’s hotbed R&B scene, eventually leading him to collaborate with a fledgling Motown Records. His first stint was with Fortune Records, where he sang lead vocals for The Five Dollars (later Andre Williams and the Don Juans) and recorded his biggest hit that also landed him the title “Godfather of Rap,” “Bacon Fat.” You can hear Williams,. a.k.a. “Mr. Rhythm,” sing that tune during his 2012 Daytrotter session below.
Williams was a co-writer on “Thank You (For Loving Me All The Way)” by a then 13-year-old Stevie Wonder. He also co-wrote “Shake a Tail Feather,” famously sung by Ray Charles in The Blues Brothers. Williams remained in the music industry for six decades, later collaborating with artists like Ike & Tina Turner and Parliament and pursuing a solo career all the while. His final studio album was 2016’s Don’t Ever Give Up on Pravda. The statement from the label is below:
We are extremely saddened to report that our beloved artist Andre Williams passed away Sunday March 17, 2019. He was 82 years old. Andre was a major force in Chicago, Detroit, and the entire world of soul, rock , garage, and every other genre he ventured in. He worked with everybody, saw it all and had a presence that was hard to describe. He will be missed, but thankfully, his music lives on. His last recording on Pravda is appropriately titled “Don’t Ever Give Up”.
Again, listen to Andre Williams’ 2012 Daytrotter session below. Further down, listen to recordings from a 1998 show at Tramps in New York City.
Andre Williams & The Goldstars – Bacon Fat 01/19/2012

I Can Tell
 

Andre Williams “Bacon Fat” (1956)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0kr0IFsM6E

 

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Guitarist Dick Dale attends the 2010 NAMM show at the Anaheim Convention Center on Jan. 14, 2010. The guitarist died Saturday at age 81. (David Livingston)
Nearly 60 years ago, surfers flocked to the waves along Newport Beach to try mastering the new craze. When the sun set, they needed someplace to dance and Dick Dale delivered it at Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula. Nearly every week for two years, Dale and his band packed over 3,000 people into the ballroom.
“The energy between the Del-Tones and all those surfers stomping on the hardwood floor in their sandals was extremely intense. The tone of Dale’s guitar was bigger than any I had ever heard,” recalled Del-Tones bandmate Paul Johnson.
Dale, whose death was confirmed Sunday, manifested a quintessentially Southern California story, forged in surf, sand and rock ’n’ roll. They called him the Pied Piper of Balboa Beach, but his musical instrument of choice was defiantly not a flute. Rather, the electric-guitar playing son of a Lebanese father melded elements of the music of his ancestral homeland with roaring instrumental rock sounds emerging in the late-1950s, and helped pioneer an iconic American genre known as surf music.
“When I got that feeling from surfing,’” he told writer Barney Hoskyns, “‘the whitewater coming over my head was the high notes going dikidikidiki, and then the dungundungun on the bottom was the waves, and I started double-picking faster and faster, like a locomotive, to feel the power of the waves.”
Those rushing guitar lines energized generations across the Southland and reverberated around the world.
Dale, who was 81, died Saturday after a long bout with rectal cancer, longtime friend and former bassist Steve Soest said Sunday.
That guitar tone arrived via a blindingly fast picking technique, one of the centerpiece elements of his breakthrough hits “Let’s Go Trippin’” in 1961 and “Misirlou” the following year, that caused guitar picks to melt in his hand. A few decades later, director Quentin Tarantino tapped “Misirlou” to serve as the theme to “Pulp Fiction.”
The sound featured a liberal use of electronic reverb with his signature Fender Stratocaster guitar, cranked to wall-rattling volume through juiced-up Fender amplifiers. Other rock instrumentalists charted wordless hits before Dale came to the fore in the early days of the electric guitar, among them Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser,” but Dale helped push surf music into the mainstream through those high-energy performances, supplying a sound that paired perfectly with that growing surf craze.
It began as a regional phenomenon in Southern California and soon spread around the world influencing the likes of the Beatles and Rolling Stones in England, and a high-school aged Canadian named Neil Young long before he found fame. According to Hoskyns’ “Waiting for the Sun,” a young Jimi Hendrix was said to have seen Dale and his band play. Echoes of Dale’s fiery guitar runs and showmanship can be heard in Hendrix’s style.
Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour on May 4, 1937, in Boston to a father who had emigrated from Lebanon and a mother who was Polish Belarusian. Growing up in a Lebanese neighborhood in Quincy, Mass., outside of Boston, exposed him to the sounds of Arabic music, which became a signature of his musical amalgam.
His musical training started with his childhood interest in piano. Early on, he studied trumpet and also acquired a ukulele before eventually picking up a guitar and trying his best to emulate one of his heroes, country music titan Hank Williams. A friend suggested he call himself “Dick Dale,” rather than Richard Monsour, because it sounded more fitting for a would-be country singer.
The Monsour family moved to Southern California in 1954, when his father landed a job at Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo, near the beach. Dale became a regular at the weekly live country music television show “Town Hall Party.”
“I wanted to be a cowboy singer, so I went on ‘Town Hall Party’ and entered their talent contest every week,” he told the Glendale News-Press in 2015. “And I did, every week.”
The confluence of Dale’s ethnic heritage and newfound geographic proximity to the beach and to the flourishing factory in Fullerton, Calif., where electric guitar innovator Leo Fender worked, all blended into the music Dale would soon bring to listeners.
“Misirlou” represented a cross-cultural blend, coupling minor key motifs and Middle Eastern musical scale with pounding drums and throbbing bass, all fueling Dale’s stinging “wet” electric guitar pyrotechnics. A section of the song featuring trumpet also brought in an element of the mariachi music that was prevalent around Southern California.
In interviews he would often overstate his role in the development of Fender products, but he was an important early adopter of instruments and amplifiers that would change the sound and content of popular music beginning in the 1950s. Dale liked to consider himself one of Fender’s favorite guinea pigs, and he did push guitars and amplifiers to the limits in his live performances.
“Playing guitar was only a window in my life,” he said in 2015. “I never practiced the guitar and when I’m done playing I just put it down. Music is like building a house. It’s like going out deep into the desert to see what nature is doing. It’s like painting, like Salvador Dali. I try to do that with my music, make it like a Salvador Dali painting.”
A freak accident — when hot oil exploded while he was cooking popcorn in 1983 left second-degree burns over much of his body — put him out of commission as a musician for months.
“With every problem comes a gift in hand,” he told The Times in 1985. “For instance, when I do shows to raise money for burn victims, now I can talk to them and know what they are going through. And I can tell their family and friends that when the doctor says the recovery has begun, that’s really the time they need your concern and love.”
As a celebrity, he capitalized on quirky passions. At one point he kept live tigers at his Balboa Peninsula mansion, which had previously belonged to Gillette shaving company magnate King Gillette, and titled an early-’80s live album “The Tigers Loose.” That was his first album in 18 years after surf music fell out of favor in the mid-1960s with the rise of the Beatles, the British Invasion, psychedelic music and other genres.
A decade ago Dale battled back from cancer, even playing a show in South Orange County shortly after being released from a nine-day stay at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for treatment of an infection.
“I thought, ‘I cannot cause this [club owner] to lose thousands of dollars,’” he said at the time.
That’s when he started trying to promote a new moniker to substitute for the “King of the Surf Guitar” label often applied to him: he wanted to be referred to as “Dick Dale-Cancer Warrior.”
With characteristic bravado, he told The Times, he would soon return to the hospital because “everything is messed up, and if it continues that way, I will die. But I’m not ready to leave my son, not ready to leave [his wife] Lana, I’m not ready to leave all the Dick Dale music lovers. They’ve been my medicine.”
Although he has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was elected to the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville a decade ago. He experienced recurring brushes with widespread popularity, notably in 1994 when Tarantino used “Misirlou” in “Pulp Fiction.”
In 2010, a career retrospective album “Guitar Legend: The Very Best of Dick Dale” also helped introduce his music to a new generation.
Through his life Dale practiced martial arts and explored Eastern philosophy, which he often quoted in interviews.
“There are four sentences [taken from Eastern philosophy] in my life that I go by: ‘To experience is to know. To know is to understand. To understand is to tolerate. To tolerate is to have peace’,” he told The Times in 1985. “It took me 17 years and [training with] masters of the martial arts to make me understand what that means. But I understand it and that’s how I can put up with all the stuff that goes on.
“That’s one of the reasons I like working with tigers and lions. If you can understand animals like that, then you can really put up with the reasons why people are the way they are and love them.”
Dale’s survivors include his wife, Lana, and his musician son, Jimmy. Information on services was not immediately available.
Times staff writer Sonaiya Kelley contributed to this story.

Randall Roberts is a staff writer covering music, and pens the weekly California Sounds column for the Los Angeles Times. His recent Times series on the geography of L.A. music has explored Sunset Boulevard and Rosecrans Avenue. In his career with The Times, Roberts has been music editor and pop music critic. A St. Louis native, he was schooled in the power of sound as a radio and club DJ, and schooled in supply and demand as an indie, punk and electronic buyer at a major Midwest record store.

Randy Lewis has covered pop music for the Los Angeles Times since 1981, working in that time as a reporter, music critic and editor for the Calendar section. He has interviewed most of the members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He’s also written first-person accounts of performing the music of Shostakovich and Prokofiev on clarinet and singing Mozart’s Requiem with world-class professionals. In addition, he enjoys belting out “Wooly Bully” in dive bars with his band, the Rounders.
 

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Picture this: a retrofitted warehouse turned acoustically perfect urban loft, that doubles as a listening room for piano jazz and a man’s home. No sign betrays the goings-on inside.
The fashionably repurposed barn-door permitting entrance is opened circumspectly even by those who’ve come to be in the know—because regardless of how many times you’ve been there, it’s still hard to believe this place is real. It will feel like a secret society for those with ears finely tuned for jazz and tastes in interior design tending toward high-concept Scandanavian-minimalism.
And the biggest, most well-kept secret: it’s open to everyone.
A decade ago, this would have been dismissed as the kind of hipster fantasy only possible some 90-odd miles due Northeast in Brooklyn or Greenwich Village.  
But that’s not today’s Philadelphia, where live jazz has rebounded from an early-millenium ebb. In the city that nurtured the careers of Lee Morgan and John Coltrane, Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, live jazz, once again, thrives—in Chestnut Hill and Mt. Airy, in Center City and Northern Liberties, and on N. Broad St. And, yes, even in one man’s immaculately appointed, acoustically optimal, converted warehouse loft just steps from the EL, in the middle of Kensington.

Matt Yaple has been a Philadelphian since 1974, when he moved from the Midwest to pursue an MFA in film from Temple University. He is originally, however, from rural Illinois, from the type of place that evokes the puritanical town in Footloose—probably not a lot of dancing, definitely not a lot of jazz.
But a lot of good can come from having a musician for a father.
Yaple’s father played the double bass. Interestingly, his father’s bass sits about 20 yards from me and Matt as we talk at his handmade kitchen table of reclaimed wood long enough to host a state dinner, the bass occupying the space between the full drum set and the Steinway grand piano.
The instruments sit quietly in elegant repose on a rug that looks expensive, possibly Persian, the rug doing a very hip impression of a bandstand. This makeshift bandstand backs up to a white-brick wall, the bricks signed by the musicians who’ve played here. Many of the signatures are those of some of the biggest names in contemporary jazz—Terell Stafford, Tamir Hendelman, Victor North, Mike Boone.
All instruments have a story, some more interesting than others. The story of this bass, Matt’s father’s bass, it’s provenance, is in the rarefied category of most interesting.
Matt’s father, the man who’d introduce him to jazz, served in the military during World War II. He was captured by the Germans after the Battle of the Bulge and held in a POW camp. The Germans came to learn that Matt’s father was a musician, that he played the bass. And as Matt tells it, “they [the Nazi commandants at the POW camp] found one [a bass] and scrounged up a guitar and a violin for a couple of the other prisoners and they would play every night for the German mess.”
When Matt’s father was liberated from the Nazi POW camp, he didn’t neglect to liberate the bass. Which undoubtedly required no small amount of probity and care and sheer physical effort. If you’ve never before done it, you might consider the unwieldy nature of extricating an upright bass from a war zone. Especially when the man emancipating the largest, and undoubtedly most cumbersome, string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra from Nazi possession is almost certainly in something less than top physical form from having served as a Nazi POW.
So you can understand why Matt Yaple takes music, and particularly jazz, seriously—if not for music, he literally might not be here.
This is how a white boy from a rural, puritanical region of Central Illinois comes to learn about and become enamored of and transfixed by jazz. His war-hero of a father takes him to the Illinois State Fair. And between the cornfields in Springfield, Illinois, the son sees Pops and Duke and Billy Strayhorn, and Count Basie’s band, Tommy Dorsey’s Band, and Glenn Miller’s Band.
And it’s where a young man can come to realize that not only is jazz the pinnacle of cool (ask Matt about Duke Ellington, and he reverts to the fanboy he was in 1963: “Duke, he was the most refined…the way he moved, the way he spoke, he was just the most stylish, the most erudite, he was just as cool as cool can be”), it can also serve as a set of guiding principles, an ethos, something akin to a religion—that jazz’s values correspond very neatly with the best of American values: where individual expression and interdependence are not thought of as competing ideals, but rather as indispensable to one another, as two sides of the same coin.
It’s this ethos that is the engine for @exuberance, the jazz salon that brings some of the best-known names of jazz’s present and some of the brightest young musicians of jazz’s future to play music for up to 80 invited guests in the middle of Matt Yaple’s home—yes, the acoustically perfect, immaculately curated, converted warehouse loft-space referenced above.
These ideals are memorialized on the @exuberance website in what Yaple calls his “manifesto for what this place is about”—a mission statement, or manifesto, he’s titled “The United States of Jazz.”
It’s about civics and jazz and community, and it’s also about diversity, a concept Yaple believes a necessary component to what he’s trying to accomplish with the @exuberance series.
This means that the @exuberance venue has a policy of race and gender diversity in the ensembles. Yaple doesn’t want to be misunderstood; he’s adamant that he’d never tell any musicians with whom he or she should or should not play. But, he’ll tell you very matter-of-factly: “I have an agenda here in this room to cultivate an audience that looks like America, and I don’t see how to do that without having ensembles that look like America…. Segregation is back on the rise everywhere—housing, education…we have to stand against that. Some people march, I’m not a marcher, but I can do my piece here, which I intend to do.”
So, this is part of what you can expect when you’re “invited” to a show at Yaple’s home on N. Mascher St. in the Kensington section of Philadelphia. Note: all that is necessary to secure an “invite” is to RSVP to the “invitation” on the @exuberance website, which consists of a thorough description of the music and musicians you’re RSVP’ing to come see. Note, also: the “invitation” expires after 85 people have RSVP’d, so if there’s an act you really want to catch, act quickly.
Twenty-five dollars at the door goes to pay the musicians and cover the cost of refreshments (price of admission comes with two drink tickets). Yaple keeps none of the proceeds. It’s a totally not-for-profit enterprise; this is something about which he strives to be as transparent as possible. He’ll gladly open up his books for anyone interested. Not someone who would understand books even if they were showed to me, I politely declined, but did appreciate the offer.
A few other things you should expect, or not expect, when attending an @exuberance performance. Don’t expect atonal, avant-garde or fusion influences to predominate. It’s Yaple’s house, and the groups he hosts fulfill his stated social agenda and play, for the most part, the type of jazz he prefers: straight ahead, melodic bop and post-bop.
Which is to say, those acts whose musical forebears trace back to Duke, Count, Miles, Trane, Art Blakey & the Messengers, etc. Yaple will tell you that, to date, these conditions have not proven unduly burdensome or stifled the growth of his “experiment.”
“So far I’ve programmed the music that I love and that I want to hear, and from a programming standpoint, that brings a reliability to the undertaking. If what I like becomes too old and people stop coming, that will be the end of it…. Meanwhile it seems we’re on the ascent.”
One last thing to keep in mind if you expect to take in a show @exuberance: Put your phone away, lest you get on the wrong side of your otherwise good-natured host. Texting, checking e-mail, referencing your mobile device in any way during a performance is verboten. The master of the house is unabashedly curmudgeonly on this point. He’ll toss you out onto Mascher St. I’ve seen it. So do yourself a favor and disconnect for a bit. Just pretend you’re on an airplane with the absolute best, most elegant in-flight entertainment.
The compromise is small when you consider that, less than a decade ago, jazz in its natural habitat appeared seriously threatened in Philly. Now it seems the jazz ecosystem—in one of jazz’s most important cities—is just about at homeostasis. And the renaissance has not been restricted to the clubs. Matt Yaple has turned his home into an optimal venue for live jazz—and the musicians, they have come. Orrin Evans and Josh Lawrence, the Curtis brothers, Tootie Heath, Russell Malone…the list literally goes on and on.
It’s no longer a question of whether Matt Yaple’s little “experiment” will yield encouraging results. The question now is: How long will @exuberance remain the best-kept secret in Philadelphia’s live-music scene?
Matt Silver is a writer, radio host, recovering J.D., and jazz fanatic whose own saxophone playing can most aptly be described as somewhere between not altogether hopeless and delightfully adequate. He lives and works in Philadelphia.
 

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Rebuilding the ARC!

As costs and rents have skyrocketed we are launching a Go Fund Me campaign to help keep ARC alive.  Thanks to the generous support of The Jaharis Family Foundation the first $50,000 raised will be matched dollar-for-dollar.  We are also seeking other matching funds with a goal of $100,000.

Contribute here and help us reach this goal!

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The French pianist Jacques Loussier, who became famous for fusing Bach and jazz, in concert in London in 1970.Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images
Jacques Loussier, a French pianist who led a trio that performed jazzy interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach, selling millions of albums and touring the world, died on March 5 at a hospital in Blois, in France’s Loire Valley. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Hélène Loussier Oziouls Toulouse. His son Julien said the cause was complications of a degenerative disease.
Mr. Loussier was classically trained, but he had dabbled in jazz improvisation for years when he formed the Jacques Loussier Trio in 1959. The other members were the drummer Christian Garros, who had played with Django Reinhardt, and the bassist Pierre Michelot, who had recorded with Miles Davis.
The trio played recognizable Bach melodies or pieces, like “Air on a G String” and the Prelude No. 1 in C, then took flight into bebop improvisations. They quickly found a devoted audience and released a popular series of albums on Decca under the overall title “Play Bach” beginning in the early 1960s.
Many critics bridled at the idea of jazzing up the work of Bach. John Rockwell of The New York Times, reviewing a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1975, wrote that he was “actively appalled by the very notion of ‘popularizing’ Bach — or any classical composer, for that matter.”
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“Mostly,” Mr. Rockwell continued, the trio “stuck too close to Bach for jazz and too close to cocktail/salon jazz for satisfaction.”
Mr. Loussier at the San Sebastian International Jazz Festival in Spain in 2006. His original trio, formed in 1959, and a later version, formed in 1985, performed all over the world.Javier Echezarreta/European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Loussier at the San Sebastian International Jazz Festival in Spain in 2006. His original trio, formed in 1959, and a later version, formed in 1985, performed all over the world.Javier Echezarreta/European Pressphoto Agency
In 2002, Mr. Loussier told the British newspaper The Independent that such criticism did not bother him. “Bach himself,” he noted, “was improvising on these pieces for many years.”
Other critics were more positive about Mr. Loussier’s playful style, including Robert Sherman, who reviewed another Carnegie Hall performance by the trio in The Times in 1966.
“Mr. Loussier is a man with a fertile imagination, excellent musical instincts (given the basic premise of his transcriptions) and a powerhouse technique,” Mr. Sherman wrote. “The snippets he played ‘straight,’ or reasonably so, showed flair and intelligence, and even when poor old Bach was left far behind, Mr. Loussier’s volatile pianism was never less than compelling.”
The Jacques Loussier Trio broke up in the late 1970s, and Mr. Loussier went on to compose original works, including music for French films and television.
In 1985, the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth, Mr. Loussier rebuilt the trio with André Arpino on percussion and Vincent Charbonnier on bass. The new trio embraced other composers in its jazz adaptations, including Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Vivaldi and Beethoven, and released more albums. His last new release, on the Telarc label, was a version of Schumann’s “Kinderszenen,” in 2011.
Mr. Loussier was born on Oct. 26, 1934, in Angers, in western France, to René Loussier, who worked in a bank, and Marguerite (Duvat) Loussier, a homemaker. He started playing the piano at 10, and later said that his distinctive approach to Bach developed while he practiced the Prelude in G Minor.
“I played it 100 times or so,” he said. “Then one day I started to change the melody, then the left-hand harmonies. It was a natural instinct.”
The Jacques Loussier Trio released a series of popular albums under the overall title “Play Bach” beginning in the early 1960s.
The Jacques Loussier Trio released a series of popular albums under the overall title “Play Bach” beginning in the early 1960s.
He studied for a time at the National Conservatory of Paris.
“My fellow students would always ask me to play some Bach with my improvisations,” he said. “At that time, the Modern Jazz Quartet was doing this thing already: I heard them, and that gave me the idea to transform it with bass and drums.”
In 1959, the year the Jacques Loussier Trio released its first album, he married Sylvie de Tournemire. Their marriage ended in divorce. In 1998 he married Elizabeth Note.
In addition to his wife, with whom he lived in Cour-sur-Loire, France, and his son and daughter, Mr. Loussier is survived by three other sons, Thomas, Jean-Baptiste and Pierre; 13 grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
In a case that brought Mr. Loussier renewed attention, he sued Eminem and Dr. Dre for $10 million in 2002, charging that they had used his music without credit. He asserted that “Kill You,” the first song on Eminem’s album “The Marshall Mathers LP” (2000), was suspiciously similar to one of his compositions, “Pulsion.”
Mr. Loussier said that he thought Eminem or Dr. Dre, who produced most of “The Marshall Mathers LP,” had heard a snippet of “Pulsion” that he had played on one of his Bach recordings and “thought it was Bach’s music, not mine.”
“So they used it without asking permission,” he continued. “If they had come to me, I would have accepted, and allowed them to use it for nothing, but they didn’t, which is not nice.”
The case was settled out of court.
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Follow Daniel E. Slotnik on Twitter: @dslotnik
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Donald Shirley in his Carnegie Hall apartment in 1979.CreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Image
Donald Shirley in his Carnegie Hall apartment in 1979.CreditCreditFred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Like Mahershala Ali as he accepted the best supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of the pianist Donald Shirley in the best picture winner “Green Book,” I always, or almost always, called him Dr. Shirley. He instructed me to do so within a few minutes of our first conversation, in December 1992, and I honored his wishes in the dozen or so long and unruly talks we had over nearly 10 years. Though I can’t speak directly to the accuracy of “Green Book” — I wasn’t part of the events depicted in the film — I came to know Dr. Shirley well in the 1990s, and the man I knew was considerably different from the character Ali portrayed with meticulous elegance. Cerebral but disarmingly earthy, mercurial, self-protective, and intolerant of imperfections in all things, particularly music, he was as complex and uncategorizable as his sui generis music.
I approached him at the suggestion of the arranger and composer Luther Henderson, for insight into their mutual friend Billy Strayhorn, whom I was researching for my 1996 biography of Strayhorn, “Lush Life.” Henderson phoned him at the end of one of our interviews, while the tape recorder was still running, and said, “F.B.!”
Henderson laughed, looked my way and winked. “I have a boy here who’s writing a book about Swee’ Pea,” he said. “Give him the real story, and try to behave yourself.” Henderson laughed some more, chatted awhile, hung up, and told me Dr. Shirley said I should write a proper letter of introduction and mail it to him care of Carnegie Hall.
I asked Henderson what he meant by “F.B.” He said those were initials for his nickname for Shirley, “Funky Butt,” and recommended I use a less informal term of address.
When Dr. Shirley received my letter he phoned me, correcting me for addressing him in the correspondence as “Mr. Shirley.” His first name, he added for the record, was Donald. He “despised” the familiar Don, he said, because he considered it “vulgar.” I replied that I understood and promised not to ask what “F.B.” stood for. After a pause, he barked, “Fine,” and invited me to his home that evening.
As “Green Book” shows, Dr. Shirley had been living for decades in one of the magisterial studios above Carnegie Hall. He greeted me in casual finery: billowing, satiny pants and beaded slippers, with an intricate carved medallion dangling over a white turtleneck. He had a plate of cheese and crackers, and a bottle of sparkling apple juice set up on a small table. I soaked in the faded opulence of the space, a gallery of art objects and knickknacks collected over a lifetime of world travel, lit solely by early evening light pouring through windows overlooking West 57th Street. In the center of the room, there was a nine-foot Steinway concert grand piano, and alongside it, an industrial humidifier for the preservation of the instrument.
I requested permission to record our conversation, and Dr. Shirley held up an index finger to mime “Hold on a minute.” Before he would agree to speak on the record, he needed to evaluate my competence as a musician, he said, instructing me take a seat on the piano bench and play something of my choice for him.
While I can read music, with effort, and play almost serviceable rock-band piano, I don’t consider myself worthy of polishing a Steinway concert grand. I tried to explain that I thought of scholarship, rather than musicianship, as the discipline relevant to my purpose with him, and demurred with feigned gratitude for the opportunity. Immovable on the matter, Dr. Shirley clapped his hands twice quickly, as if to signal the start of an imperial amusement. I took a seat at the piano and plunked my way through a semblance of “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road),” the only standard I could think of that’s close enough to a 12-bar blues for me to fake.
Shirley as played by Mahershala Ali (with Dimiter D. Marinov, center, and Mike Hatton) in “Green Book.”CreditUniversal Studios
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Shirley as played by Mahershala Ali (with Dimiter D. Marinov, center, and Mike Hatton) in “Green Book.”CreditUniversal Studios
“Wellll …” Dr. Shirley said. “You don’t know what the hell you’re doing. I can’t imagine what we could possibly talk about.”
I asked if he could apply his obvious expertise to the subject of my research, Billy Strayhorn, and his collaborator and sponsor, Duke Ellington, and we were set for the evening. I had to wrap things up mid-conversation because I had brought only two 90-minute tapes.
Dr. Shirley could expound with deep authority and even deeper passions on the subject of music — or, I soon learned, on the subjects of human psychology, American society, politics, cuisine, fine art, folk art, commercial art … whatever struck him as suitable for exposition at the moment. The second time we met in his studio, he cut me off after about an hour and said: “All you want to talk about is Billy Strayhorn. Is that the only thing you care about?” Clearly well read and gifted with extraordinary capacities for recall and synthetic analysis, he had a seemingly inexhaustible body of knowledge at ready disposal and fierce opinions about everything.
“The intellectual curiosity of creative people is something always present,” he told me. “It’s not something you go out one night and come home with, like the damn clap.”
Erudite and salty in roughly equal measures, he once broke down the musical structure of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” in eloquent detail, adding that “it was employed in the score of ‘The Red Shoes,’ but nobody hears it because they’re too busy staring at the girl’s legs.”
After about a year, I ran out of things to ask him about Strayhorn and Ellington, but we continued to get together in his studio for conversation and cheese and crackers. He did nearly all the talking, though his talk shifted easily into ranting, often screaming, sometimes in objection to things I did or said. He loathed the magazine I was working for, Entertainment Weekly, while I researched my book, though he never once read it — on principle, he said — and conflated it with the puffy TV series “Entertainment Tonight.” For the first several years of our friendship — and I did come to see it as a friendship, because there was no longer business in it — I served as president of the Duke Ellington Society, a hybrid study group and fan club, and Dr. Shirley found the idea of the organization offensive. “It’s idol worship,” he said. “It’s uncivilized. You need to resign immediately!” (I did not.)
I saw his fiery temper as an outgrowth of his stalwart sense of right and wrong. To me, it seemed of a piece with the exquisite sensitivity of his musicianship. One afternoon in September 1993, I interviewed the choreographer Talley Beatty, who had collaborated with Strayhorn and Ellington, and he asked me if I had talked to Donald Shirley. Indeed, I told him, I saw him fairly regularly. Beatty suggested we go together to Dr. Shirley’s studio that evening, because he wanted to hear him play Scriabin. A few hours later, I was sitting with Beatty as Dr. Shirley played the Scriabin Prelude No. 15 in D flat (from Op. 11), for us. At the conclusion, Beatty and I were both so shaken by the beauty of the music that we were on the brink of tears. Dr. Shirley looked at us and said: “Get yourselves together. This isn’t a damn wake!”
For all his freewheeling pontificating, there were a few subjects Dr. Shirley refused to discuss. He would never tell me where he earned his Ph.D., but would say only that he had three advanced degrees from various institutions. There were aspects of his private life, as well, that he discussed with me strictly on the condition that I would not quote him on these matters by name.
Not long after my biography of Strayhorn was published, the film rights were optioned, and the columnist Liz Smith published an item noting that Denzel Washington would make an excellent Ellington. The next time I visited Dr. Shirley, I told him the news and asked him how he would feel about being portrayed on screen. “Damn foolishness,” he said. “I want nothing to do with it!”
A version of this article appears in print on March 11, 2019, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Donald Shirley, Salty and Frank. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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Brian Wilson, left, in a recording studio in the 1960s working with “Wrecking Crew” drummer Hal Blaine (Magnolia Pictures)
Drummer Hal Blaine, one of the most recorded musicians in pop music history whose powerful percussion work shaped the sound of scores of hit records, died Monday at age 90, his family announced.
Blaine’s signature beat can be heard on countless hits by Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, the Byrds and others.
In a post to Blaine’s official Facebook page, his family referenced his “inspiration to countless friends, fans and musicians,” adding: “May he rest forever on 2 and 4,” referencing the accented beats that have powered hundreds — if not thousands — of hit recordings over the decades.
“I’m so sad, I don’t know what to say,” Beach Boys creative leader Brian Wilson said of the man he typically called first for many of his group’s recording sessions in the 1960s. “Hal Blaine was such a great musician and friend that I can’t put it into words. Hal taught me a lot, and he had so much to do with our success — he was the greatest drummer ever. We also laughed an awful lot. Hal, we love you and our memories will last forever.”
Blaine was a key member of the ace Los Angeles studio musicians who came to be known as “the Wrecking Crew,” and is even credited with coining the term. The name is an allusion to the way a new generation of professional players emerged in the 1960s and ostensibly “wrecked” the careers of their predecessors, who often disdained performing on rock, soul and R&B recordings that became the lingua franca of popular music after World War II.
Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts said Monday, “Godspeed Hal. He gave us all so much. Feeling very blessed to have celebrated his life with him,” referring to Watts’ participation in Blaine’s 90^th birthday gathering last month at Wrecking Crew musician Don Randi’s Baked Potato jazz club in Studio City.
“Hal was huge in my life,” another veteran studio drummer, Jim Keltner, told The Times on Monday. “Ninety years is a good run. We should all be so lucky.”
Blaine’s floor-rattling “thump, thump-thump, crack!” drumbeat that opened the Ronettes’ 1963 hit “Be My Baby,” one of many produced by “Wall of Sound” creator Phil Spector, remains one of the most influential musical introductions in rock history. It was a key reason that Wilson, who has consistently cited “Be My Baby” as his favorite record of all time, tapped Blaine to play on many of that group’s most important recording sessions. “Be My Baby” directly inspired the Beach Boys’ 1964 hit “Don’t Worry Baby.”
Blaine’s relationship with Wilson included work on such signature Beach Boys songs as “California Girls,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Good Vibrations” that helped expand the sounds and textures of rock music in the ‘60s.
Consequently, his role in Wilson’s music played a significant part in “Love & Mercy,” the 2014 biopic documenting Wilson’s life and career.
According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2000 among the first five studio instrumentalists ever elected to the hall, Blaine “has certainly played on more hit records than any drummer in the rock era, including 40 No. 1 singles and 150 that made the Top 10.”
Scoffing at the notion of being an “unsung hero” in pop music at the time of his induction, Blaine told The Times, “I’ve had 263 gold and platinum record awards, made literally a couple of million bucks — it goes on and on — so at the time I was laughing all the way to the bank.”
Yet he famously lost much of his material wealth following a messy divorce, and he spent some years working as a security guard in Arizona after he and many of his Wrecking Crew mates ceded their studio supremacy to subsequent generations of musicians.

Hal Blaine, photographed in 2003, plays with his sticks in his home in Palm Desert. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Blaine was born Harold Simon Belsky on Feb. 5, 1929, in Holyoke, Mass., and after moving to Los Angeles, he participated in thousands of recording sessions that included most of Presley’s movie soundtracks as well as TV and movie themes including “Batman” and the original cast recording of “The Rocky Horror Show.”
Other hits featuring Blaine’s drumming include Paul Revere & the Raiders’ “Kicks,” Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park,” Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” and “Mrs. Robinson,” “The Byrds’ “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and the Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and “Monday, Monday.”
“We come in wearing blue jeans, smoking, and the older guys said, ‘They’re gonna wreck the business,’” Blaine said in the 2015 documentary “The Wrecking Crew” directed by Denny Tedesco, son of similarly prolific studio guitarist Tommy Tedesco.
That film included a scene that crystallized the magic the often anonymous studio professionals brought to the sessions.
When Byrds lead singer Roger McGuinn entered a studio surrounded by such journeymen, it took only an hour to lay down the group’s career-launching hit “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
When the rest of the group joined McGuinn to create a follow-up single, the full band needed 77 takes to perfect “Turn! Turn! Turn!”
“It’s kind of a shock to the general public when they find out that a lot of [musicians in famous bands] didn’t play on their records,” Blaine told The Times in 2000. “But not everybody can be a plumber and go fix a broken pipe. Sometimes you need an expert, and that’s all there is to it.
“Most of it was economics,” he said. “We could go in and do an album in six hours. Kids today, sometimes it takes them months to get one song down.”
Of the wildly varied demands placed on studio musicians, Blaine recalled, ”One minute I’d be playing with Count Basie, the next minute I was with Lawrence [Welk] and the next minute I was with the Beach Boys,” he told author Ken Sharp for his companion book to Tedesco’s “Wrecking Crew” documentary, “Sound Explosion.”
“We played every genre of music,” Blaine said. “We’d play with the top jazz people in the world, like Gerry Mulligan or Chet Baker. There were no nerves in our bodies. Nobody was shaking in their boots. Our chops were perfect in those days. There was nothing we couldn’t do.”
Blaine often credited getting his start in the L.A. recording studio scene to New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer, who came west in 1957 and quickly became the first-call studio drummer, as he had been in New Orleans.
When he received requests for sessions he was too busy to handle, he frequently directed callers to Blaine.
The contributions of the studio players shouldn’t be underestimated.
“I don’t know how many times I’ve seen an artist go into the studio and have to be guided along by the musicians,” Palmer told The Times in 2000, “because the artists and even the producers didn’t know what to do.”
Atlantic Records executive and producer Jerry Wexler explained it this way: “All we would start with was a bunch of chords — we didn’t have written arrangements. The musicians routinely came up with things that made those records.
“If you just play the chords, it’s [nothing],” Wexler said. “It’s how you fill it in — the in-between notes, the upbeats, the downbeats, the walk-ups, the walk-downs, the rhythm pattern — that puts the icing on the cake.”
Such was the respect that Blaine and his cohorts commanded among the singers, producers, composers and others who worked with them that songwriter Jimmy Webb, in his 2017 memoir “The Cake and the Rain,” said that he remembered only one thing about winning the Grammy Award for song of the year for his 1967 Fifth Dimension hit “Up, Up and Away.
“I had not prepared a speech and I don’t know what I said,” Webb wrote, “except that I thanked Hal Blaine.”
The statement from Blaine’s family said his survivors include his daughter, Michelle, and seven grandchildren, and added that “no further details will be released at this time.”
 

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‘It was originally called Funky Onions – but to laced-up, deep-south America, that sounded like a cuss word, so we had to retitle it’

 
‘We had problems with things like segregated eating’ … Booker T Jones, front, with Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, Steve Cropper and Al Jackson. Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
Booker T Jones, organist
I grew up in Memphis and by the time I was 17, I was learning saxophone, piano and Hammond organ, paid for by my paper round. I started going over to Stax Records after school. Soon enough, I was the keyboard guy in the house band.
One Sunday, we were supposed to be working with a singer called Billie Lee Riley, but something hadn’t worked out. He’d packed up and left, so we had the studio to ourselves. We started playing around with a piano groove I’d been performing in the clubs, trying to emulate Ray Charles. It sounded better on the organ, so I kept on playing that. Stax owner Jim Stewart liked what we were doing and wanted to put it out. Then it occurred to him that we needed a flip-side.
So I started playing another bluesy riff I had. This was how Green Onions began. That band – Al Jackson on drums, Lewie Steinberg on bass, Steve Cropper on guitar – was a once-in-a-lifetime unit. We clicked because of our devotion to simplicity. The bassline was basic 12-bar blues. Al was a human metronome on the drums. Lewie called this doodling jam Funky Onions, but Jim’s sister said: “We can’t use that word.” To laced-up, deep-south conservative America, it sounded like a cuss word. So we retitled it Green Onions.
We were a racially integrated band before civil rights. One white person and three black people – one of whom looked white! Nobody realised this until we started performing in public. We had problems with things like segregated eating, but we survived.
Green Onions started the “Memphis soul sound”, that deep organ. Years later, in the 70s, I was sitting in a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and this dude jumped up and started dancing on the table, plates flying. Everyone was laughing, then he just took off. I said: “Who was that guy?” It turned out to be Keith Moon from the Who, paying me a form of tribute. Shortly afterwards, the Who used Green Onions in Quadrophenia, and it became a hit in the UK all over again.
It’s still one of my favourite songs. It’s defined my life. But it’s deceptively simple. There’s a magic in there that’s hard to capture. To get it right, I still have to practise.
Steve Cropper, guitarist
When Jim Stewart said he liked what we were doing and wanted to record us, we were dumbfounded. “Is this guy serious?” we thought. On the original master tape, you can actually hear us laughing at the end. I was 21 and playing at my limit. By the third take, we had Green Onions.
There was no name for the group, nor even a title for the track, but I knew it was a hit. I called my buddy Scotty Moore over at Sun Records and asked him if he could cut a disc. I took it to Reuben Washington, the drivetime DJ on the Memphis station WOLK. He gave it a spin and said: “That’s pretty catchy!” Then he played it again – but this time live on air. The phones lit up. Everyone wanted to know what this record was and where they could get it.
At that point, Green Onions was being pressed as the B-side to Behave Yourself. But it was quickly reissued as the A-side and became a smash. I don’t remember it being called Funky Onions, but I do remember it being called Onions until I said: “But onions make you cry and give you indigestion.” So it became Green Onions because we had them for Sunday dinner.
Someone at Stax had an MG motor car, so we called ourselves Booker T and the MGs. When the British car firm’s lawyers told us to desist, we told them it stood for Memphis Group. We all had to swear to secrecy that we’d never talk about the car again. Years later, we were being interviewed and someone asked: “What does MG actually stand for?” Duck Dunn [who replaced Steinberg in 1964] said: “Musical geniuses!”
Booker and I looked at each other. I think we wanted to kill Duck, because we’d never say that about ourselves. But at least they got an answer to their question.
 

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Here it is in color:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/inkvision/142518674
 
 
Jim Eigo
Original Vinyl Records
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845-987-3131
OriginalVinylRecords@gmail.com
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Where Old Records Go To Live
 

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Film / TVMusic
By Awa Gueye
March 7, 2019
8.7K Picks
Jazz flute legend Ron Burgundy has met his match. The once-icon of the jazz world was dethroned after losing a challenge initiated by Lizzo. Since 2004, Burgundy has been cemented as the jazz flute icon of our era. We think we can speak for all when we say we didn’t think we’d find a brighter star in our lifetime. Watch the moment when Burgundy lost it all: 
How embarrassing :/
To add insult to injury, Lizzo has cemented her place as Lord of the Flutes with her recreation of a classic Anchorman scene. A true collaborator, she has put her own twist on the moment. In the way only stars can, she has remixed the scene with added words like “Bitch” being repeated multiple times. Inspiring.
We are honored to say you can catch Lizzo, the shining star of the flute world at AFROPUNK Paris 2019. Tickets available HERE.
Love ya Ron, but Lizzo got you 2-0. 
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New York Will Add 4 Statues of Women to Help Fix ‘Glaring’ Gender Gap in Public Art

March 6, 2019
 
By Julia Jacobs

Billie Holiday, the groundbreaking jazz singer, will have a monument depicting her in Queens. Holiday moved to New York with her mother when she was about 13 years old.William Gottlieb/Redferns, via Getty Images

A world-renowned jazz singer. A public health champion. A teacher who helped desegregate New York’s public transit. And a lighthouse keeper who is credited with saving dozens of lives.
On Wednesday, the city announced that these four female historical figures would be honored with statues in New York. The announcement followed a monthslong process seeking to fix what New York’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, called a “glaring” gender imbalance in the city’s streets and parks.
Statues of the four women — Billie Holiday, Helen Rodríguez Trías, Elizabeth Jennings Graham and Katherine Walker — will be placed in the boroughs they once called home. Once the statues are installed, all five boroughs will have at least one public statue of a woman.
Only five female historical figures are depicted in statues in New York City in outdoor public spaces, according to She Built NYC, a city effort to expand representation of women in public art and monuments. All of those statues are in Manhattan, like the sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt in Riverside Park and the bronze of Harriet Tubman in Harlem.
Last year, the city introduced an initiative to honor women with a significant connection to New York, and it called upon the public to make suggestions. (And New York Times readersmade some recommendations of their own.)
“We pledged to do better by the leaders, achievers and artists who have not gotten their due in the histories written by men,” Ms. McCray said in a speech announcing the new statues. The announcement was meant to coincide with the first week of Women’s History Month.
A statue of Eleanor Roosevelt sits in Riverside Park. Only five female historical figures are currently depicted in statues in New York City.Mark Kauzlarich for The New York Times

A statue of Eleanor Roosevelt sits in Riverside Park. Only five female historical figures are currently depicted in statues in New York City.Mark Kauzlarich for The New York Times
In November, the city announced that it planned to install a statue of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the House of Representatives.
In 1972, Ms. Chisholm became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, and the first black woman to seek the presidential nomination of either major party. She died in 2005 at 80.
“Is one new statue of a righteous, working, trailblazing achiever enough?” Ms. McCray said on Wednesday. “No.”
Each new statue is expected to cost between $300,000 and $1 million, and the city has said it is trying to commission female artists to do the work.

Billie Holiday Is Coming to Queens

A monument to Holiday, the famed jazz singer, will be built near Queens Borough Hall, the city said. Born in 1915, Holiday came to New York with her mother when she was about 13 years old.
Holiday helped break down racial barriers in the arts before the civil rights movement. She was one of the first black women to sing with a white orchestra. And her song “Strange Fruit,” a protest song about lynching, continues to shake the public consciousness.

Elizabeth Jennings Graham Will Grace Manhattan

In 1854, Graham, a teacher in her 20s, boarded a New York streetcar without noticing the sign refusing service to black people. When the conductor tried to haul her from the car, she clung onto his coat, and a policeman eventually threw her out onto the sidewalk.
She ultimately sued the Third Avenue Railroad Company and won more than $200 in damages. It was a first step in desegregating New York’s streetcar lines.
A statue of Graham will eventually have a home near Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan.

Helen Rodríguez Trías Returns to the Bronx

Dr. Rodríguez Trías was an outspoken advocate of improved maternal and family heath care. As a pediatrician in New York, she worked with sexually abused children and those susceptible to AIDS.
In the late 1980s, Dr. Rodríguez Trías developed programs for families affected by H.I.V. at the New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute. She also became the first Latina director of the American Public Health Association.
The monument of Dr. Rodríguez Trías will be installed in St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx, near Lincoln Hospital, where she was the head of the pediatrics department.

Katherine Walker Will Stand on Staten Island

Walker spent nearly three decades as the keeper of the Robbins Reef Lighthouse, which lighted the way for ships that were passing through the busy shipping channel between Staten Island and Bayonne, N.J. She took the job after her husband died, and she raised her two children at the lighthouse during the early 1900s.
As part of her job keeping the lighthouse, Walker signaled for assistance when shipwrecks occurred. Historians credit her with helping to save the lives of at least 50 people.
Walker’s statue will be installed at the Staten Island Ferry landing. Every school day, she would take her children to class on the island in a rowboat.
 

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These days music-lovers are inclined to disregard the rusty sectarianisms that used to keep genres apart, with elite art supposedly towering over scruffy popular entertainment. But during the early career of Jacques Loussier, the multimillion-selling, eclectic French pianist/composer, who has died aged 84, the rules were very different.
When Loussier began applying jazz improvisation and swing to Johann Sebastian Bach’s exquisite symmetries, some jazz pundits and fans dismissed it as a betrayal of an African-American music’s expressive earthiness and blues roots, aimed at an audience that preferred its jazz pretty rather than passionate. And from the classical angle, observers were liable to perceive the young Frenchman’s work as little short of vandalism.
The New York Times critic John Rockwell’s review of a Loussier concert at Carnegie Hall in 1975 reflected that distaste when he proclaimed: “There is a certain sort of sensibility that is actively appalled by the very notion of ‘popularising’ Bach – or any classical composer, for that matter. This listener’s sensibility is one of those, and so he found the Tuesday evening performance at a sparsely attended Carnegie Hall by the Jacques Loussier Trio tiresome and offensive.”
Nonetheless, the success of concerts and recordings by Loussier and his Play Bach trio (originally formed with eminent Paris jazz sidemen Pierre Michelot on bass and Christian Garros on drums) took off almost overnight from the group’s first appearances in 1959 – shifting millions of Play Bach recordings in the almost two-decade life of the original band. The group’s suitably chilled-out, languidly hip treatment of Bach’s Air on a G String famously accompanied the Hamlet cigar company’s TV advertising from 1962, with cinema versions finally being banned at the end of the century, though these soundtracks did not include Michelot’s subsequent driving bass-walk and Loussier’s freewheeling improv theme-stretches.
Loussier, however, was no one-trick populist who had chanced on a hit formula and milked it. A piano virtuoso from early childhood, he attended the Conservatoire National de Musique in Paris from his mid-teens under a celebrated mentor – the classical pianist and educator Yves Nat – travelled in the Middle East and Latin America absorbing musical ideas in his early 20s, had composed scores for more than 60 films and TV shows. There was also the tireless touring of the Play Bach trio – and after its breakup, he worked on both acoustic and electronic projects at his own Studio Miraval in Provence.
Born in Angers, in north-west France, Loussier began piano lessons at the age of 10, and within a year was fascinated by the music of Bach. When he heard a piece from the Notebook for Anna Magdalena at 11, he took to playing it incessantly. “I was studying this piece and I just fell in love with it,” Loussier told an interviewer in 2003. “Then I found I loved to play the music, but add my own notes, expanding the harmonies and playing around with that music.”
In this, as Loussier was later to observe, he was not subverting Bach but paying his respects to an improvising tradition the composer himself belonged to, even if classical music’s subsequent assumptions preferred to bury that unruly element.
Loussier’s potential had been brought to Nat’s attention when he was 13, and Nat supplied him with practice projects that the boy would visit Paris every three months to demonstrate. At 16 he entered the Conservatoire, financing his courses by playing jazz in the city’s bars. In the mid-1950s Loussier then took off on travels to the Middle East, South America – and Cuba, where he stayed for a year. Back home, he found work as an accompanist, to the singer and actor Catherine Sauvage and Charles Aznavour.
Loussier later recalled that in 1959 he had told Decca Records that he was a classical pianist and they said they already had plenty. Then he said he was a jazz pianist and they said they had plenty of those, too. “Finally I started to play some Bach with my improvisations and they said, ‘What is that? Why don’t we make a record of that?’ I was still doing it out of fun. I never thought the public would like it. I was wrong.’”
With Michelot and Garros, and with America’s chamber-musical Modern Jazz Quartet as a significant and celebrated inspiration, the Play Bach trio made four hugely successful Decca albums between 1960 and 1963, launched a performance schedule rarely numbering fewer than 150 shows a year worldwide, and expanded the repertoire to include double-tracked recordings of Loussier parts on organ and piano, and arrangements of Bach concertos.
In the midst of it all, Loussier was also a sought-after composer for film and TV. In 1978, weary of travelling, he wound the trio up and retired to Studio Miraval to explore composition more deeply, experiment with electronics and studio techniques, and play host and offer recording time to visiting rock stars including Pink Floyd, AC/DC and Sade.
He wrote the full-scale symphony Lumières (with the countertenor James Bowman, soprano Deborah Rees and a rock rhythm section on its Paris premiere), concertos for trumpet and violin, strings suites, a ballet score and the crossover fusion works Pulsion, Pagan Moon, and Pulsion Sous la Mer.
But Bach’s 1985 tercentenary had already tempted Loussier back to the piano stool. With the jazz/classical bassist Vincent Charbonnier, followed after illness in the 90s by the comparably virtuosic Benoit Dunoyer De Segonzac and the percussionist André Arpino, Loussier formed a more broadminded, genre-fluid and technically sophisticated version of the Play Bach trio, which if anything amplified just how creatively musical his original vision had been.
Recording for Telarc from 1996, Loussier returned to his beloved Bach, explored Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in improv conversations with Charbonnier and Arpino with an affectionate nod to the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Django (1997), and Satie with De Segonzac and Arpino (1998).
Interpretations of Ravel, Beethoven, Mozart and Chopin followed (with the last-named occasioning Loussier’s first solo piano album in his 70th birthday year, on which he breezily threw flamenco, gospel, calypso and stride-piano into the mix), and ambitious Bach homages taking on the Goldberg Variations and the Brandenburg Concertos.
In 2002, the pianist’s life took an unlikely turn when he embarked on a lawsuit against the rapper Eminem for allegedly stealing hooks from Pulsion for the track Kill You from the Marshall Mathers LP – a confrontation eventually settled out of court. In a conversation that year with the writer Sholto Byrnes, Loussier seemed mainly miffed that the Americans had not asked him first, and typically claimed: “I like good music whatever it is.” He later registered an interest in Eminem’s music.
Jazz reference books have not been so generous to Loussier, but, a true jazz improviser rather than an embellisher of the classics, he sidelined the snobberies from both sides in his early years. He paid tribute to the composers he loved with unmistakable and expert devotion, performing long enough to see his inclusive vision of a music with far fewer borders come to pass.
He is survived by his wife Elizabeth and five children.
• Jacques Loussier, pianist, born 26 October 1934; died 5 March 2019
 
 

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Hugh Fordin in a Manhattan recording studio in 2018. DRG Records, which he founded in 1976 and was still presiding over at his death, released cast albums of Broadway musicals, albums by singers of the American songbook and reissues of recordings from the past.CreditDamon Brandt

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Hugh Fordin in a Manhattan recording studio in 2018. DRG Records, which he founded in 1976 and was still presiding over at his death, released cast albums of Broadway musicals, albums by singers of the American songbook and reissues of recordings from the past.CreditCreditDamon Brandt
Hugh Fordin, a versatile behind-the-scenes show business figure who wrote detail-filled books, including a biography of Oscar Hammerstein II, and founded a record company specializing in cast albums and other recordings related to film and theater, died on Feb. 26 at his home in Titusville, N.J. He was 83.
Hannah Fordin, his grandniece, said the cause was cardiac arrest.
As a record producer and executive, Mr. Fordin, working in an era when the business was increasingly geared toward youth, made sure that music from the great American songbook and from stage and movie musicals had a chance to be heard.
DRG Records, which he founded in 1976 and was still presiding over at his death, released cast albums for shows like the 21st-century revivals of “Wonderful Town” and “Sweet Charity” as well as albums by singers like Barbara Cook and KT Sullivan, the “Forbidden Broadway” parody series and reissues of notable recordings from the past.
His albums were nominated for numerous Grammy Awards, and he and others won a 2001 Grammy for best musical theater album for the cast recording of “The Producers,” which he made for Sony.
Mr. Fordin “relentlessly sought the performers who interpreted the great American songbook best,” Cynthia Daniels, his engineer from 1985 until his death, said by email. “No other record company or producer filled this particular space for the recorded version of these timeless songs.” (DRG later became part of Entertainment One, a Toronto-based company involved in music distribution.)
Mr. Fordin’s interests were also evident in his books, which included “The World of Entertainment!: Hollywood’s Greatest Musicals” (1975), later reissued as “M-G-M’s Greatest Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit,” and “Getting to Know Him: A Biography of Oscar Hammerstein II” (1977).
Both were sharply observed studies of their subjects. The first examined great musicals made under the auspices of the producer Arthur Freed.
“Fordin reproduces interoffice memos, production notes, art-department blueprints and hundreds of rare photos,” Walter Clemons wrote in a review in Newsweek in 1975. “The result is one of the liveliest records of the day-by-day process of filmmaking ever published.”
The Hammerstein biography was similarly rich in anecdotes.
“Mr. Fordin is careful about not crediting the sentimental Mr. Hammerstein with wit and sophistication,” Mel Gussow wrote in his 1977 review in The New York Times, “but he does acknowledge his humor. When corn grew too slowly for the location filming of ‘Oklahoma!,’ Mr. Hammerstein suggested that he might have to change his lyric to ‘as low as an elephant’s toe.’ ”
Hugh Grant Fordin was born on Dec. 17, 1935, in Brooklyn. His father, Leon, owned a luggage store in Manhattan, and his mother, Annette (Bernstein) Fordin, was a homemaker.
Mr. Fordin at the 2002 Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. He and others won for best musical theater album of 2001, for the cast album of “The Producers.”CreditGlobe Photos/Zuma Press, via Alamy
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Mr. Fordin at the 2002 Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles. He and others won for best musical theater album of 2001, for the cast album of “The Producers.”CreditGlobe Photos/Zuma Press, via Alamy
After graduating from James Madison High School, Mr. Fordin attended Syracuse University, though he left before graduating to begin working as a theater and music producer. Among his early producing credits was “Together With Music,” a 1955 album of music from a television special starring Noël Coward and Mary Martin. That same year he produced the cast album for “Silk Stockings,” a musical comedy that starred Don Ameche and ran on Broadway for more than a year.
Mr. Fordin also produced some live shows in this period, including the final concert tour of Édith Piaf in 1962 and 1963.
In the late 1960s Mr. Fordin spent three years as casting director for David Merrick, the prolific and famously difficult-to-work-with Broadway producer, helping on shows like “Play It Again, Sam.”
“Every one of his employees down to the switchboard operator walked on eggshells,” Mr. Fordin wrote in a letter to The Times upon Mr. Merrick’s death in 2000, “but we knew we were working for the greatest Broadway producer of our time.”
As a record producer and executive, Mr. Fordin took particular joy in reissuing titles from the past, whether from the French label Disques Swing or artists like Judy Garland and Peggy Lee.
And he issued new music, some of it recorded live in concert, by artists like Karen Akers, Julie Wilson, Eartha Kitt and Ms. Cook, who was a favorite.
“Judy Holliday had a special singing voice, and she did an album,” he said in 2003. “And the album died. Why? Because the Judy Hollidays and the Larry Kerts and the John Raitts — they’re doing performances like what they do in the theater. It lacks intimacy. But Barbara sings as if to one or two people in their living room.”
Mr. Fordin, Ms. Daniels noted, was an early adapter of CD technology, for both new work and reissues.
“Hugh tried to modernize the production and availability of Broadway and Off Broadway recordings in this new format,” she said, “while maintaining the arrangements and musical integrity of the times they were born into.”
In addition to his grandniece, Mr. Fordin is survived by a niece, Lynn Fordin; a nephew, Scott Fordin; and a cousin, Damon Brandt.
Ms. Daniels said that Mr. Fordin was a first-class storyteller, drawing on his deep knowledge of film and theater history to put artists at ease in recording sessions.
“As I worked,” she said, “usually editing and mixing, I would inevitably hear chuckling and then everyone in the room break into laughter.”
 

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Hello friends,

You may have heard that bassist Tony Marino had a car accident recently which has temporarily put him in a disabled condition.
His sternum, ribs, and wrist were broken which has curtailed his playing ability and will impact his income.

David and I have decided to institute a method to accept donations to help Tony during his time of recuperation and until he’s able to get back to work which is estimated in months.

We have set up a PayPal account for your consideration and look forward to you being able to give a helping hand to a wonderful musician and person.

Go here: http://perla.org/tony/

Thank you,
David Liebman & Gene Perla
 

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