Is the legendary guitarist and singer the last of his kind?

In spite of his accolades, Guy has always been burdened with insecurity. “I’ve never made a record I liked,” he says.
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for The New Yorker
Is the legendary guitarist and singer the last of his kind?

In spite of his accolades, Guy has always been burdened with insecurity. “I’ve never made a record I liked,” he says.
Photograph by Stefan Ruiz for The New Yorker
It’s a winter night in Chicago. Buddy Guy is sitting at the bar of Legends, the spacious blues emporium on South Wabash Avenue. He hangs out at the bar because he owns the place and his presence is good for business. The tourists who want a “blues experience” as part of their trip to the city come to hear the music and to buy a T-shirt or a mug at the souvenir shop near the door. If they’re nervy, they sidle up to Guy and ask to take a picture. Night after night, he poses with customers—from Helsinki, Madrid, Tokyo—who inform him, not meaning to offend, that he is “an icon.”
“Thank you,” he says. “Now, let’s smile!”
Buddy Guy is eighty-two and a master of the blues. What weighs on him is the idea that he may be the last. Several years ago, after the funeral of B. B. King, he was overcome not only with grief for a friend but also with a suffocating sense of responsibility. Late into his eighties, King went on touring incessantly with his band. It was only at the end that his wandering mind led him to play the same song multiple times in a single set. With King gone, Guy says, he suddenly “felt all alone in this world.”
The way Guy sees it, he is like one of those aging souls who find themselves the last fluent speaker of an obscure regional language. In conversation, he has a habit of recalling the names of all the blues players who have died in recent years: Otis Rush, Koko Taylor, Etta James, James Cotton, Bobby Bland, and many others. “All of ’em gone.”
Guy admits that no matter how many Grammys he’s collected (eight) or invitations he’s had to the White House (four), no matter how many hours he has spent onstage and in recording studios (countless), he has always been burdened with insecurity. Before he steps onstage, he has a couple of shots of Cognac. The depth of the blues tradition makes him feel unworthy. “I’ve never made a record I liked,” he says. As far as his greater burden is concerned, he radiates no certainty that the blues will outlast him as anything other than a source of curatorial interest. Will the blues go the way of Dixieland or epic poetry, achievements firmly sealed in the past? “How can you ever know?” he says.

Listen: *David Remnick highlights some of his favorite Buddy Guy recordings.*

As he talks, he keeps his eyes fixed on the stage, where a young guitar player is strenuously performing an overstuffed solo on “Sweet Home Chicago.” In this club, you are as likely to hear that song as you are to hear “When the Saints Go Marching In” at Preservation Hall. The youngster is a reverent preservationist, playing the familiar licks and enacting the familiar exertions: the scrunched face, the eyes squeezed shut, the neck craned back, all the better to advertise emotional transport and the demands of technical virtuosity. It’s fair to say that Buddy Guy, having done much to invent these licks and these moves, is not impressed. The homage being paid seems only to embarrass him. He is generous to young musicians who earn his notice—he even brings them up onstage, giving them a chance to shine in his reflected prestige—but he does not grade on a curve. The tradition will not allow it. Guy turns away from the stage and takes another sip of his drink, Heineken diluted by a glass full of ice.
“The young man might consider another song,” he says.
Guy has always been a handsome presence: slick, fitted suits in the nineteen-sixties; Jheri curls in the eighties. These days, he is bald, twinkly, and preternaturally cool. He wears a powder-blue fedora and a long black leather jacket, a gift from Carlos Santana. He flashes two blocky rings, one with his initials and the other with the word “BLUES,” each spelled out in diamonds.
His influence over time has been as outsized as his current sense of responsibility. In the sixties, when Jimi Hendrix went to hear him play at a blues workshop, Hendrix brought along a reel-to-reel recorder and shyly asked Guy if he could tape him; anyone with ears could hear Buddy Guy’s influence in Hendrix’s playing—in the overdrive distortion, the frenetic riffs high up on the neck of the guitar.
Guy can mimic any of his forerunners and sometimes he will emulate B. B. King, interrupting a prolonged silence with a single heartbreaking note sustained with a vibrato as singular as a human voice. But more often he throws in as much as the listener can take: Guy is a putter-inner, not a taker-outer. His solos are a rich stew of everything-at-once-ness—all the groceries, all the spices thrown into the pot, notes and riffs smashing together and producing the combined effect of pain, endurance, ecstasy. All blues guitar players bend notes, altering the pitch by stretching the string across the fretboard; Guy will bend a note so far that he produces a feeling of uneasy disorientation, and then, when he has decided the moment is right, he’ll let the string settle into pitch and relieve the tension.
Even on a night when he is coasting through a routine set list, it is hard to leave his show without a sense of joy. He cuts an extravagant figure onstage, wearing polka-dot shirts to match his polka-dot Fender Stratocaster. He is a superb singer, too, with a falsetto scream as expressive as James Brown’s. Joking around between songs, he can be as bawdy as his favorite comedians, Moms Mabley and Richard Pryor. This is not Miles Davis; he does not turn his back to the audience. He is eager to entertain. The unschooled think of blues as sad music, but it is the opposite. “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy, but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.” That’s how Ralph Ellison defined it. Guy puts it more simply: “Funny thing about the blues—you play ’em ’cause you got ’em. But, when you play ’em, you lose ’em.”
Three chords. The “one,” the “four,” and the “five.” Twelve bars, more or less. Guy’s devotion and sense of obligation to the blues form began long before the death of B. B. King. The story goes like this.
The son of sharecroppers, George (Buddy) Guy was born in 1936, in the town of Lettsworth, Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi River. On September 25, 1957, he boarded a train and arrived in Chicago, another addition to the Great Migration, the northward exodus of black Southerners that began four decades earlier. But Guy hadn’t come to Chicago to work in the slaughterhouses or the steel mills; he came to play guitar in the blues clubs on the South Side and the West Side. He was twenty-one. He had served his musical apprenticeship in juke joints and roadhouses in and around Baton Rouge and knew the real action was in Chicago, in smoke-choked bars so cramped that the stage was often not much bigger than a tabletop. If all went well, Guy hoped to get a contract at Chess Records, the hot independent label run by Leonard and Phil Chess, Jewish immigrants from Poland who were assembling an astonishing stable of artists, including Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry. Most important, for Guy, Chess was the record label of the king of the Chicago bluesmen, McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters.
In his first months in town, Guy found a place to crash, but he was hungry much of the time and he missed his family. He played as often as he could at blues hangouts like Theresa’s and the Squeeze Club, but it wasn’t easy to make an impression when there were so many topflight musicians around. And some nights could be scary. Guy was playing at the Squeeze when a man in the audience buried an icepick in a fellow-patron’s neck. “When the cops saw the dead man, they couldn’t have cared less,” Guy recalled years later. “Didn’t even investigate. To them it meant only one more dead nigger. In those days cops came around for their bribes and nothing else.”
One evening, emboldened by a drink or three, Guy went to the 708 Club, a blues bar on Forty-seventh Street. The owner’s name was Ben Gold. Clubs along Forty-seventh Street weren’t so difficult to crack. They stayed open deep into the morning; workers coming off the night shift were ready to drink and hear some music. A guy like Ben Gold needed all the musical talent he could get to fill the hours, whether it was from stalwarts like Muddy Waters and Otis Rush or from a nervous newcomer from Louisiana. That night, Guy was feeling desperate, and he decided to perform “The Things That I Used to Do,” a hit by one of his idols, an eccentric, self-destructive musician named Guitar Slim. When Guy was fifteen or sixteen, he bought a fifty-cent ticket to see Slim at the Masonic Temple, in Baton Rouge. He wedged himself close to the stage, hoping to watch the man’s hands, to study his moves. He waited through the opening acts until, finally, the announcer declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, Guitar Slim!” When the band started into “The Things That I Used to Do,” you could hear Slim’s guitar—but where was he? “I thought they were all full of shit and all they were doing was playing the record,” Guy told me. It was only after a while that anyone could see Slim, his hair dyed flaming red to match his suit, being carried forward through the crowd like a toddler by a hulking roadie. Using a three-hundred-foot-long cord to connect his guitar to his amplifier, he played a frenzied solo as his one-man caravan inched him toward the stage. And, once he joined the band, Slim pulled every stunt imaginable, playing with the guitar between his legs, behind his back. He raised it to his face and plucked the strings with his teeth. Many years later, Jimi Hendrix would pull some of the same stunts to dazzle white kids from London to Monterey, but these tricks had been around since the beginning of the Delta blues. As Guy watched Guitar Slim, he made a decision: “I want to play like B. B. King, but I want to act like Guitar Slim.”
That night at the 708 Club, Guy did his best to fulfill that teen-age ambition. He remembers playing “The Things That I Used to Do” as if “possessed”: “Maybe I knew my life depended on tearing up this little club until folks wouldn’t forget me.”
When the set was over, Ben Gold came up to him and said, “The Mud wants you.”
Guy did not quite understand. Gold explained that Muddy Waters had been in the club, watching. Now he was waiting for Guy on the street.
Guy went outside, and spotted a cherry-red station wagon parked nearby. He saw his idol sitting in the back seat, his pompadour done up high and shiny. Muddy Waters rolled down the window and told him to get in.
Waters said, “You like salami?”
“I like anything,” Guy said. He hadn’t eaten for a few days.
Waters knew the feeling. He produced a loaf of bread, a knife, and a thick package of sliced meat wrapped in butcher paper. “You won’t complain none about this salami,” he said. “Comes from a Jewish delicatessen where they cut it special for me. Have a taste.”
As Guy recalls in his 2012 memoir, “When I Left Home,” written with David Ritz, he and Waters talked for a long time, about picking cotton in the Delta, about music, about the clubs on the South Side. Guy admitted that things had been tough. Lonely, broke, and frustrated, he was thinking of heading back to Lettsworth.
Muddy waved that off. Look at me, he said. He’d grown up on the Stovall Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. He played blues for nickels and dimes, and figured that he’d have to make his livelihood in the fields. But he kept at his music and developed a local reputation. In the summer of 1941, two outsiders, Alan Lomax, representing the Library of Congress, and John Work, a music scholar from Fisk University, came to Coahoma County with a portable disk recorder. Lomax asked folks where he could find a singer he’d been hearing about, Robert Johnson. He was told that Johnson was dead, but that a young fellow named Muddy Waters was just as good. Lomax and Work set up the recording equipment at the commissary of the Stovall Plantation and persuaded Waters to come around. Muddy knew all kinds of songs, including Gene Autry’s “Missouri Waltz” and pop hits like “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” but Lomax and Work didn’t want the whole jukebox. They wanted the local stuff, and recorded Waters singing “Country Blues.” When Waters heard the recording, he had a realization. “I can do it,” he said. “I can do it.” He headed North, in 1943, to make a life in the blues.
In his early days in Chicago, Waters played for change alongside the pushcarts in “Jewtown,” a bustling commercial district on Maxwell Street. Some nights, he played in bars. There were a few good acts around—Big Bill Broonzy, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Eddie Boyd—but it was a dispiriting scene. “There was nothing happening,” he said at the time. You couldn’t play the country blues and expect to make a living at it. Waters made his living driving a truck. But once he’d armed himself with an electric guitar, a gift from his uncle, in 1947, Waters went about inventing a new form, an urban blues, the Chicago blues, and this caught the attention of the Chess brothers. In 1950, Chess put out a Muddy Waters original, “Rollin’ Stone,” and sold tens of thousands of records. And look at him now. “I got enough salami for the two of us,” he told his new protégé.
Guy still didn’t see how he could compete in Chicago. But Muddy assured him that Ben Gold would give him gigs. Gold had seen how Guy’s performance worked up the crowd, and, he said, when patrons get all “hot and bothered,” they drink more, the owner gets paid, and, usually, so does the band.
“Funny, ’cause tonight was the night I almost called my daddy for a ticket home,” Guy said.
“Tonight, you found a new home,” Muddy Waters told him.
Over the next generation, Buddy Guy crossed paths with Muddy Waters countless times. He recorded with him, he performed with him, he went drinking with him and heard all the lore. Along with the other top blues performers in town—Junior Wells (who played harmonica alongside Buddy for years), Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, Mama Yancey, James Cotton, Otis Rush, Koko Taylor, and Magic Sam—they played the clubs. But never for much money. Well into his forties, Buddy Guy was often making just a few bucks a night.
In the seventies and eighties, Guy ran a club of his own on the South Side, the Checkerboard Lounge. After a stadium gig, in 1981, the Stones dropped by to play with Muddy Waters and Buddy. Guy remembered it as his one chance to make some money on the club, but the Stones entourage was so large, and the room so small, that there were almost no paying customers. He didn’t make a dime.
In 1983, Ray Allison, Waters’s drummer, came by to say, “Old man is kinda sick.” Waters was dying of lung cancer, and was frightened of what lay ahead. “Don’t let them goddam blues die on me, all right?” he told Guy. A few days later, he was gone.
When my father was in his fifties, he developed a tremor in his right hand, the onset of early Parkinson’s disease. He was a dentist and it must have terrified him, but, for a while at least, he somehow steadied his hand as he gripped a dental instrument. He kept his sickness a secret as long as he could. His living, his family’s well-being, depended on it. A Parkinsonian dentist—it was like a premise for a dark Buster Keaton film, the drill, waggling in the air, inching toward the helpless, cotton-wadded patient. The patients peeled away. Soon he was retired and in a wheelchair. There were nightmares and hallucinations, butterflies flitting in front of his face.
He’d spoken very little of his life. When he told me some detail of his past—hearing Sidney Bechet at a club in Paris when he was in the Army—it seemed almost illicit. The singular joy he allowed himself was music, and music was the way I could talk most easily with my father. His recommendations—Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan—seemed to come from a happier time. I’m sure that he was the only dentist in North Jersey who abandoned Muzak for “I Got My Mojo Working.”
When I was in college, he called to tell me that a singer named Alberta Hunter was performing at a club in the Village called the Cookery. I should be sure to see her, he said, and, as a way of insisting, he sent me a check for twenty dollars to pay the cover charge. Hunter, who was a contemporary of Bessie Smith’s, was the Memphis-born daughter of a Pullman porter. As a girl, she ran off to Chicago to sing the blues, and she became friends with Armstrong, Ma Rainey, Sophie Tucker, and King Oliver. She co-wrote “Downhearted Blues” with Lovie Austin: Trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days. After Hunter’s mother died, in 1954, she spent the next couple of decades working as a registered nurse at a hospital on Roosevelt Island. Now that she had retired from nursing, Hunter decided that she would sing again. My father had led me once more to the blues, to one of the originals, in her last years. Hunter, that night at the Cookery, was bawdy, fearless, magnificently alive. At my father’s funeral, we set up a boom box and played his favorite music. People left the synagogue to the strains of “Downhearted Blues.”
Buddy Guy doesn’t get back to Lettsworth much. In December, though, he flew down from Chicago to collect what he thought of as the honor of his life. The Louisiana legislature had voted unanimously to name a piece of Highway 418 in Pointe Coupee Parish “Buddy Guy Way.” The celebration began on a Friday at Louisiana State University, where Guy had worked as a handyman and a driver. The next day, after a gumbo-and-catfish lunch at a place called Hot Tails, Guy and a small group of friends travelled the fifty miles from Baton Rouge to Lettsworth on a chartered bus.
It was cold and rainy. Very few people live in Lettsworth these days. “It’s a ghost town now,” Guy says. Some of the wooden shacks have long since been abandoned by sharecropper families who went North. But today people came out to wave from their porches. Guy looked sharp, in the Carlos Santana leather coat. The honors themselves weren’t unusual—speeches, a plaque—but it all struck deep. Guy’s mother never saw him perform. “Getting honored at the Kennedy Center and now this, it’s hard to say which one is better,” he told me. Guy invoked the words of a Big Maceo song: “You got a man in the East, and a man in the West / Just sittin’ here wondering who you love the best.”
Guy grew up in one of those shacks in Lettsworth. No electricity, no indoor plumbing, no glass windows. A white family, the Feduccias, owned the land and lived in a big house; black sharecroppers, like the Guys, picked pecans and cotton. The Feduccias took half of the proceeds. Guy’s parents had a third-grade education. His mother cooked in the big house. His father worked in the fields. As a child, Buddy went to a segregated school and early mornings and evenings he’d pick cotton, two dollars and fifty cents for a hundred pounds.
“My father worked all day cutting wood with a crosscut saw,” Guy told me. “If that ain’t exercise, I don’t know what is. I look at those gyms with all those machines and I figure, fuck that. You can’t sell me on that shit. If my father hadn’t done all that ‘exercise,’ he’d still be living.”
There were hardly any holidays. The reliable exception was Christmas. Someone would butcher a pig, and there were greens from the garden—a feast. “I never heard of other holidays,” he says. “We didn’t get no fuckin’ Fourth of July. On Labor Day, we labored.”
One friend who came around on Christmas was an odd cat named Henry (Coot) Smith. Coot carried a guitar, and, after playing a few songs and having a couple of drinks, he’d take a short nap before going on to the next house. While Coot slept, Buddy picked up that guitar and strummed it; it seemed like something magical, something he had to master. Much of the music he heard in those days was gospel music from church. On jukeboxes, he liked the bluesmen especially: Arthur Crudup, who wrote “That’s All Right,” Elvis Presley’s first hit, and John Lee Hooker, a Mississippi plantation worker, who went North to work as a janitor in a Detroit Ford factory and, in 1948, recorded a droning, spooky hit called “Boogie Chillen.” This was the first electrified blues Guy had ever heard, and he wanted to play just like that. He crafted his first instrument by stripping strands of wire out of the shack’s mosquito screens and stringing them tightly between two cans.
At the general store, Guy played the jukebox, listening to other black kids who had taken the train North and become stars. He started dreaming. Eventually, for two dollars, he got a less primitive instrument, and his favorite thing to do was to wander outside and play, all by himself. “There was nothing to stop that sound,” he says. “I’d go sit on top of the levees and bang away with my guitar, and you could really hear it. . . . That’s just how country sound is. A little wind would carry it even better.” As a teen-ager, Guy quit pumping gas and learned his craft in roadhouses around Baton Rouge. He never took a lesson. He listened. He watched. He had tremendous stage fright. Cheap wine, known as “schoolboy scotch,” was the remedy.
“Nobody ever sat me down and said here’s B-flat and here’s F-sharp,” he says. “I had to figure that out myself after I started playing with a band. I’m eighty-two years old. Most of the people above me—John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins—I faced them, I watched their hands to see where they were going. They played by ear. And that’s how I play now. I play by ear. I don’t play by the rules.”
On his valedictory trip to Lettsworth, people shyly approached him. As Guy got off the bus, a white man in his sixties said that his father had grown up with Guy. They couldn’t play together or go to the same school, but they knew each other. He talked of how proud everyone was of Guy.
Guy was getting tired, but he hung in there. Some nights at Legends, when he’s been posing for cell-phone pictures for a little too long, he gets irritable and wonders how it can take so goddam long to push the button. But now he was ready to stay as long as anyone liked. “My mother told me, ‘If you’ve got flowers to give me, give ’em to me now,’ ” he said. “ ‘I won’t smell them when I’m gone.’ I was glad to get this honor now.”
In the sixties, just as Guy was reaching a certain stature in the blues world, something curious began to happen. White people happened—white blues fans and white blues musicians. For its first half century, the blues was popular entertainment for, and of, black people. Not completely, but almost. Guy told me that, when he played clubs in Chicago during the late fifties, “if you saw a white face, it was almost always a cop.”
With time, it became clear that some white kids, including Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, were in the audience, watching Guy the way he’d once watched Guitar Slim. At the same time, the best of the British Invasion expressed a kind of community awe toward the American urban blues. When Guy first toured Great Britain, in 1965, all the white English guitar heroes—Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton—flocked backstage to ask him how he did this and how he did that. Guy had spent so much of his recording career backing up other musicians that he was shocked that people knew his name, much less the nuances of his work. But they did. As a young singer, Rod Stewart was so in thrall to Guy that he asked to carry his guitars.
“Our aim was to turn people on to the blues,” Keith Richards, who had formed a friendship with Mick Jagger by trading Chess blues records, has said of the early days of the Rolling Stones. “If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done.” When the Stones were invited to play on the American television show “Shindig!,” they insisted on appearing alongside Howlin’ Wolf, who had never received that kind of exposure. They invited Ike and Tina Turner, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and B. B. King to open for them.
And yet there was something unsettling about the spectacle of the Stones or Eric Clapton playing turbocharged versions of Robert Johnson, Mississippi Fred McDowell, and Muddy Waters to fifty thousand white kids a night, most of them oblivious of the black origins of those songs. Clapton, for one, experienced a measure of guilt and, eventually, acted on it. “I felt like I was stealing music and got caught at it,” he told the music critic Donald E. Wilcock. “It’s one of the reasons Cream broke up, because I thought we were getting away with murder, and people were lapping it up. Doing those long, extended bullshit solos which would just go off into overindulgence. And people thought it was just marvelous.” In 1976, Clapton went on a drunken, racist rant onstage, in Birmingham—an incident, he later said in an elaborate apology, that “sabotaged everything.” Clapton never stopped playing the blues. In 2004, he put out an entire album covering Robert Johnson songs; it sold two million copies.
Some critics, notably the poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), found the prospect of white blues players making a fortune enraging. In “Black Music,” he wrote, “They take from us all the way up the line. Finally, what is the difference between Beatles, Stones, etc., and Minstrelsy. Minstrels never convinced anyone they were Black either.”
Black performers almost never echoed that sentiment publicly; Waters and Guy were usually quick to express friendship with the Stones, Clapton, and the rest. Yet hints of their disappointment came through. “It seems to me,” Guy said in the nineteen-seventies to an interviewer for the magazine Living Blues, “all you have to do is be white and just play a guitar—you don’t have to have the soul—you gets farther than the black man.”
It also hurt that black audiences, particularly younger black audiences, were moving away from the Chicago blues. B. B. King told Guy that he cried after he was booed by such an audience. “He said that his own people looked on him like he was a farmer wearing overalls and smoking a corncob pipe,” Guy recounted in his memoir. “They saw him as a grandfather playing their grandfather’s music.”
As late as 1967, Guy drove a tow truck during the day and played the clubs at night. The hours were punishing, and high blood pressure and divorce followed. (Guy married twice and divorced twice; he has eight adult children.) In Germany, he played at the American Folk Blues Festival, but he got booed, he said, because the audience thought he “looked too young, dressed too slick, and my hair was up in a do. Someone said he was also disappointed that I didn’t carry no whiskey bottle with me onstage. They thought bluesmen needed to be raggedy, old, and drink.”
Expectations placed constraints on his recordings, too. As sympathetic as the Chess brothers were to black musicians, and as shrewd as they’d been in marketing their work, they had been reluctant to have Guy unleash the wildness in his playing. As the singer-songwriter Dr. John said of Guy’s early records, “You feel a guy in there trying to burst out, and he’s jammed into a little bitty part of himself that ain’t him.”
Elijah Wald, a historian of the blues who has written biographies of Josh White and Robert Johnson, told me, “I feel like Buddy Guy is somebody who, due to American racism, never quite reached his potential. He could have been a major figure, but he was pigeonholed as a museum piece, even in 1965. . . . Nobody from Warner Bros. was coming to Buddy Guy and saying, ‘Here’s a million dollars, what can you do?’ ” Bruce Iglauer, the owner of Alligator Records, a blues label in Chicago, agrees. Buddy Guy was one of a small handful of “giants,” he said, who helped define the blues but never got the chance to become household names: “The door was never open to them at the time when they were most likely to walk through. By the time the doors were opened by Eric Clapton and the Stones, these guys were already in their thirties and forties.”
In the late nineteen-sixties, Guy recounts, Leonard Chess called him into his office. “I’ve always thought that I knew what I was doing,” he told Guy. “But when it came to you, I was wrong. . . . I held you back. I said you were playing too much. I thought you were too wild in your style.” Then Chess said, “I’m gonna bend over so you can kick my ass. Because you’ve been trying to play this ever since you got here, and I was too fucking dumb to listen.”
Chess’s failure could have stayed with Guy as a bitter memory. But he has turned the episode into a tidy, triumphant anecdote. He refuses any hint of resentment: “My mother always said, ‘What’s for you, you gonna get it. What’s not for you, don’t look for it.’ ”
There is no indisputable geography of the blues and its beginnings, but the best way to think of the story is as an accretion of influences. Robert Palmer, in his book “Deep Blues,” writes of griots in Senegambia, on the West Coast of Africa, singing songs of praise, of Yoruba drumming, of the African origins of the “blue notes,” the flatted thirds and sevenths, that are so distinctive in early Southern work songs and later blues. There are countless studies on the influence of the black church and whooping preachers; of field hollers and work songs sung under the lash in the cotton fields of Parchman Farm, the oldest penitentiary in Mississippi; of boogie-woogie piano players in the lumber and turpentine camps of Texas. The Delta blues, the kind of music that would one day galvanize Chicago, originated, at least in part, on Will Dockery’s plantation, a cotton farm and sawmill on the Sunflower River, in Mississippi, where black farmers lived in the old slave quarters. Charley Patton and Howlin’ Wolf were residents. So was Roebuck (Pops) Staples, the paterfamilias of the Staple Singers. Accompanying themselves on guitar, they sang songs of work, heartbreak, the road, the rails, the fragility of everything.
“The blues contain multitudes,” Kevin Young, the poet and essayist (and this magazine’s poetry editor), writes. “Just when you say the blues are about one thing—lost love, say—here comes a song about death, or about work, about canned heat or loose women, hard men or harder times, to challenge your definitions. Urban and rural, tragic and comic, modern as African America and primal as America, the blues are as innovative in structure as they are in mood—they resurrect old feelings even as they describe them in new ways.”
The richness of a form, however, does not guarantee its continued development or popularity. Guy didn’t begin to make real money until the early nineteen-nineties, when he was nearing sixty. Like Sonny Rollins in jazz, Buddy Guy was now in the business of being a legend, an enduring giant in a dwindling realm. In 1991, “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues,” an album on the British label Silvertone, sold well and won a Grammy; not long afterward, two more albums of his, “Feels Like Rain” and “Slippin’ In,” also won Grammys. He began playing bigger halls around the world. His most recent album is titled, almost imploringly, “The Blues Is Alive and Well,” and one of the cuts is “A Few Good Years”:
I been mighty lucky
I travel everywhere
Made a ton of money
Spent it like I don’t care
A few good years
Is all I need right now
Please, please, lord
Send a few good years on down
Guy still performs at least a hundred and thirty nights a year, including a “residency” at his club every January.
Last spring, I called my elder son and asked him to go with me to see Guy at B. B. King Blues Club & Grill, in Times Square. The place opened in 2000, and a lot of great acts had performed there—James Brown, Chuck Berry, George Clinton, Aretha Franklin, Jay-Z—but the rents kept increasing, and now it was going out of business. Guy was there to close his old friend’s club. I’d be lying if I said it was a transcendent night. It was a routine night. He opened with “Damn Right,” which has become a kind of theme song, and then launched into a series of tributes. He played Muddy Waters (“Hoochie Coochie Man”), B. B. King (“Sweet Sixteen”), Eric Clapton (“Strange Brew”), Jimi Hendrix (“Voodoo Child”). He did his Guitar Slim thing, walking through the crowd while playing. He did his Charley Patton thing, cradling the guitar, playing with his teeth. He did his act, and we walked out happy to have been there.
I was talking to Bruce Iglauer, the Alligator Records man, who said that he, too, has seen many routine sets, but also some extraordinary ones. He walked into Legends not long ago and, by chance, Guy was onstage, singing “Drowning on Dry Land,” an Albert King hit from 1969: A cloud of dust just came over me, I think I’m drowning on dry land. The music was fresh and spare. “And the singing!” Iglauer said. “He was singing like the high tenor of a gospel quartet. Guy has said he doesn’t like his own voice, but when he immerses himself in his music his voice makes you cry, the pitch bending and the vibrato, and all at the top of his register, just about to crack. For ten minutes, he was the greatest blues singer on earth. People who can reach down and reach the depths of their soul and hand that to an audience—soul-to-soul communication? It’s what you hope for.”
Buddy Guy lives in Orland Park, a suburb twenty-five miles south of Chicago. His house, set back from the main road, is vast and airy, and sits on fourteen wooded acres. There’s a collection of vintage cars outside: a ’58 Edsel, a ’55 T-Bird, a Ferrari. The house became a possibility only after “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues.”
Guy gets up somewhere between 3 and 5 a.m., the lingering habit of country life. Mornings, he likes to putter around, shop, run errands. Then there is a long “siesta,” from one to seven, before the evening begins at Legends or on tour. (Even on the road, the morning after a late gig, Guy expects the band to be on the bus by four or five—“ready to go or left behind.”) He lives alone. There is an indoor pool, but, he said, “I ain’t never been in it.” He has reduced the failure of his two marriages to epigrammatic scale: “They weren’t happy when I wasn’t doing good, and when I was doing good they wasn’t happy because I was on the road all the time.”
Both of his ex-wives and his extended family came for Thanksgiving. Guy did all the cooking. He loves to cook. When I came by late on a Sunday morning, he was in the kitchen making a big pot of gumbo. Much of the animal and vegetable kingdoms simmered in his pot: crab, chicken, pork sausage, sun-dried shrimp, okra, bell pepper, onion, celery. Dressed in baggy jeans and a sweatshirt, Guy was hunched over the gumbo, adding just the right measure of hot sauce and, at the end, Tony Chachere’s Famous Creole Cuisine gumbo filé. He did this with the concentration he might apply to a particularly tricky riff. A pot of Zatarain’s New Orleans-style rice simmered nearby.
Guy took me around the house to give the flavors, as he said, time to “get acquainted.” There were countless photographs on the walls: all the musicians one could imagine, family photographs from Louisiana, grip-and-grin pictures from when he was awarded the Medal of Honor in the Bush White House and from the Kennedy Center tributes received during the Obama Administration. (Obama has said that, after Air Force One, the greatest perk of office was that “Buddy Guy comes here all the time to my house with his guitar.”)
An enormous jukebox in the den offered selections from pop, gospel, rock, soul. “I listen to everything,” Guy said. “I’ll hear a lick and it’ll grab you—not even blues, necessarily. It might even be from a speaking voice or something from a gospel record, and then I hope I can get it on my guitar. No music is unsatisfying to me. It’s all got something in it. It’s like that gumbo that’s in that kitchen there. You know how many tastes and meats are in there? I see my music as a gumbo. When you hear me play, there’s everything in there, everything I ever heard and stole from.”
As we looked at a row of black-and-white photographs, it was clear that the shadows of Guy’s elders in the blues never leave his mind. “I hope to keep the blues alive and well as long as I am able to play a few notes,” he told me. “I want to keep it so that if you accidentally walk in on me you say, ‘Wow, I don’t hear that on radio anymore.’ I want to keep that alive, and hope it can get picked up and carry it on.
“But who knows?” he continued. “The blues might just fade away. Even jazz, which was so popular when I first got here—all of that disappeared.”
We were sitting at the dining-room table. When I returned to the subject of whether the blues would survive as a living form, Guy thought awhile. He recalled the nightly ritual at Legends, when the m.c. does a cheesy-seeming thing and asks audience members where they’re from. The nightly census usually reveals tourists from out of town, new to Chicago and, often enough, to this music. When Guy hears that, he said, “I can’t help thinking: Somebody forgot us, forgot the blues.”
Well, not entirely. There are still some extraordinary musicians around who play and sing the blues with the sort of richness that Guy admires: Robert Cray, Gary Clark, Jr., Bonnie Raitt, Adia Victoria, Keb’ Mo’, Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi, Shemekia Copeland. Guy has even coached a couple of teen-age guitar prodigies: Christone (Kingfish) Ingram, who comes from the Delta, and Quinn Sullivan, who first performed onstage with Guy when he was seven. But as Copeland, a singer and the daughter of the guitarist Johnny Copeland, told me, “The blues as Buddy knows it, as he does it, really will be gone when he is gone.” In fact, she went on, “there are some artists now who think that if they call themselves blues artists it’s like saying, ‘I have herpes.’ Like it’s some terrible thing.”
Among African-American audiences, and for so many around the world, the dominant music has long been hip-hop. What’s the link, if any, between the blues and hip-hop? Willie Dixon, who created some of the most famous blues songs in the Chess catalogue, wrote in his memoir, “The blues are the roots and the other musics are the fruits.” In some of the earliest proto-hip-hop performers, those roots were easy to hear. The Last Poets, the Watts Prophets, Gil Scott-Heron, and others called on blues lines and blues chord changes. Beyoncé, a dominant figure in pop and hip-hop, is fluent in the blues, a musical and emotional strain that’s especially pronounced on a song like “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” on “Lemonade,” or when she performs as Etta James in the film “Cadillac Records.” But as beats, electronics, and the like began to dominate the form, the connection between root and branch, between blues and hip-hop, became more attenuated.
Guy’s daughter Rashawnna, born to his second wife, grew up in Chicago’s hip-hop world. She knows Kanye West and Chance the Rapper. Performing as Shawnna, she was a featured presence on “What’s Your Fantasy,” a hit for Ludacris. She had a hit of her own called “Gettin’ Some Head,” which sampled Too Short’s “Blowjob Betty.”
“When I first started listening to it I was tapping my feet and my ex-wife said, ‘You hear what she’s saying?’ ” Guy recalled. When Guy admitted that he loved the beat but could not quite keep up with the pace of the lyrics, his ex-wife just said, “Sit down.”
Guy recalls, “My daughter told me, ‘This is your music and we just take it a step further.’ It’s like when the electric guitar came up on Lightnin’ Hopkins. Leo Fender and Les Paul turned the old blues into folk music.”
Rashawnna, who now works part time at Legends, said that, if blues is often about the journey, hip-hop is about the conditions of the street. “I believe the connection is through the lyrics and the expression,” she went on. “The blues came from being down and out, and making the best of it. Hip-hop is an explanation of growing up in the ghetto, telling our story, making the best of things.” She worries that her father wears too heavily his sense of duty to the blues and to bluesmen lost. “We worry about him, but he’s happy to keep his promise to Muddy Waters and B. B. King. That’s why he won’t stop touring.”
Her father just smiles. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Every night onstage is in the service of what he loves best, and the rest was mapped out from the start. “Death is a part of life,” Buddy Guy says. “My mother would tell us as children, ‘If you don’t want to leave here, you better not come here.’ Sure as hell you come, sure as hell you go.” ♦
 

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CREDIT: ROGER BAMBER/ANL/REX/SHUTTERSTOC
Damn right, they’ve got the Blues Hall of Fame inductions they deserve. Aretha Franklin, Count Basie and Booker T. & the MGs are the household names being brought into the hall as part of the 40th class this year, in a ceremony that will take place in Memphis May 8 at the Halloran Centre for the Performing Arts and Education.
The blues and rhythm & blues are interconnected enough that installing the late Queen of Soul might seem like a no-brainer to many fans. But for anyone who doubts that Franklin counts as a true exemplar of the genre, the Blues Foundation helpfully points out that the very first record she ever released after signing with Columbia was a song called “Today I Sing the Blues,” and her fifth album was “Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington.” In 1980 she released a compilation of her more blues-oriented early material, “Aretha Sings the Blues.”
The Blues Foundation names recordings as well as artists to its Hall of Fame, and the singles being inducted this year include Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone,” Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman” and Elmore James “Shake Your Moneymaker,” along with Elmore James’ 1965 compilation “The Sky Is Crying.” Ida Cox and guitarist Pee Way Crayton are the other two performers joining the Hall of Fame, which will also honor the late Folkways Records executive Moses “Moe” Asch.
 

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Noel Jewkes
For Dr. Legato, the preeminent saxman, the day begins when it begins; and if that sounds loose and self-indulgent, even at 78, not so. He’s more focused than ever; more tuned, literally and figuratively; and an occasional toke aside, straighter than ever; and yes, more pessimistic, more in search of solace, but genuinely boozeless, and sometimes ageless; altogether kinder, softer, quicker to avoid tenuous attachments; determined to guard his time; to the point that he’s even reluctant to follow news of the Donster-monster. No, the concern now is to stay close to the music and honor a growing revelation: at some point you have to let the ego slide.
Noel Jewkes | Credit: Jessica LevantDr. Legato’s real name is Noel Jewkes. Reviewers use both names; “Legato,” because fans regard him as the master of smooth. It was Jewkes himself who came up with the name, an effort to change his musical identity, and at one point his was the Legato Group, sounding like something Robert Mueller must be investigating. Whichever the name, he’s always had a loyal following. The great Bay Area jazz critic, Phil Elwood (1926–2006), once noted, “I don’t know a better contemporary, modern saxman anywhere.” 
As one fan puts it, he’s the “ghost of Lester Young.” The irony is that he’s not that well known outside the jazz world. Nevertheless, he has hundreds of fans in social media, particularly on YouTube. He’s the saxman’s saxman, particularly for aficionados of Bebop. Moreover, he’s playing somewhere most nights; at the Seahorse in Sausalito; in the city, at Bird and Beckett in Glen Park, or the Deluxe in the Haight; or the Backroom in Berkeley, or the Sound Room in Oakland. 
Jewkes, a slender man with long fingers, plays piano, bass, flute, trombone, trumpet, along with tenor, alto, soprano sax; not to mention ukulele, Chinese flute, and guitar. He studied classical clarinet in Orem Utah, where he grew up, in a Mormon family, the son of a housewife and a cartographer. Two sometime musicians. His father was a jazz aficionado who believed that playing an instrument was “like going to musical home.” Every summer Jewkes’ father took him to a resort by the Great Salt Lake called The Lagoon, an amusement park and pavilion. It was there that Jewkes first heard Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Earl Garner, and, most memorably, Duke Ellington.
At 20, Jewkes fled to California, following an escape fantasy about the West, and at the same time feeling New York was just too storied, too competitive, the lights too bright, and so he came of age in the dim lights of the Central Valley, an unlikely hot bed of jazz insurrection. He stepped off the California Zephyr in Fresno, in 1961, with only the telephone number of some “shirttail relatives.”
In an autobiography he’s writing, Jewkes describes the moment. “I recall walking up an overpass overlooking the train yards with my tenor saxophone in a big brown case in one hand and a suitcase in the other. At that point, I had a very insecure feeling that I’d done something irreversible and also frightening and adventurous. As I look back at that moment, some 52 years later, I realize that was the crossroads of my life. From that moment on I was committed to survive by my own wits and whatever God given talents I may possess.”
On the Road
And so began the vagabond years, during which Jewkes played with whomever he could, and wherever he could. His career is backlit by the social and music history of San Francisco. In the mid 1960s, he played with Flip Nunez at Bop City; he played in bassist Fred Marshall’s warehouse in Berkeley, located next to a bronze foundry and studio belonging to Peter Voulkos, the great ceramic sculptor. The studio was a venue for a concert that attracted several noteworthy critics who “more or less said in their reviews that we were on a lonely road to nowhere. We took this as encouragement …”
He played with Bill Ham, who pioneered the psychedelic art events that became known as Light Sound Dimension (LSD). At first, Jewkes was attracted to the new culture if not the music. But gradually he began to reconsider. “Although I was greatly impressed by this new landscape of the mind, I was disturbed that we had abandoned everything familiar in favor of a nihilistic approach not only to art, but life as well. We were drawing big crowds, and this reinforced our belief that we had created something new and important.”
Backstage at the Light Sound Dimension Theatre in 1968. Top: Fred & Beverly Marshall, Noel Jewkes, Jerry Granelli; Bottom: Bill Ham and Bob Fine
He spent a few months in a USO-like show in Vietnam, along with his common-law wife and then two-year-old son, Brian. Then returned to San Francisco just as the summer of love was blooming, and promptly fell in love with a rocker named Denise, the leader of an all-girl rock ’n’ roll band called the Ace of Cups. They married and settled down in a commune in San Geronimo Valley in Marin. “It was,” notes Jewkes, “a mixture of hippies, derelicts, and drug addicts, plus a few individuals who defied categorization.” It was also the birthplace of his daughter, Tora.
After a couple of years, unhappy with both life and music, Jewkes drifted back to San Francisco. He fell in league with two Chinese twin sisters, Betty and Shirley Wong, two pianists, and refugees from the San Francisco Symphony. They were putting together a group called The Flowing Stream Ensemble, a group of eastern and western musicians to play ancient Chinese music. They invited Jewkes, who learned to play the te-tzu, a traditional bamboo flute.
True North
Throughout his professional life Jewkes has found himself in that inescapable artistic vortex, caught between the need to experiment and the need to live, enduring “selling-out periods” along the way, playing for bands on the hotel and country club circuit; and all the while watching the end of big bands and the advent of small ensembles.
These days Noel Jewkes’s daily schedule is fixed: Handle your business, make peace where you can. And then there’s the need to get new gigs and deal with singers; then lunch, nap, sit down, and write something, maybe a recollection for your autobiography, or more likely a song.
And as the afternoon goes by, if you’re lucky, maybe Kay, the very sweetest salt of the earth and your lead vocalist for the last five years, maybe she’ll come over on a whim and take away your laundry. Or maybe the two of you will get an idea for some new lyrics or a new album. Or else you’ll tell her your most recent dream, which is always full of musical spirits that have passed.
Noel Jewkes with Kay Kostopoulos and band at the Sacramento Jazz Coop | Credit: Ken Rabiroff
Or else, maybe you’ll just go the afternoon alone, and let your mind run because increasingly you’re thinking philosophically. It’s implicit in titles like “Cubist Blues,” “Tango in Blaque,” and “Viol Blues.” Your true north is Ellington, and sometimes you get there, even beyond.
Asked what he’s learned as a musician in his life in jazz, Noel told us, “It’s taught me to embrace a lot of different moods and looks in life that I was not aware of. The introduction to impressionistic music, exotic influences. Asian music, for example. I’ve also come to like writing descriptive music. Ellington is a good example, and I still consider him my main jazz hero. He loved to write music that served as portraits of his friends.”
In his notes for an autobiography, he writes, “I have learned through experience that there is a moment for everything and one of my musical duties is to find the music that fits a particular moment! (I like to play the weather sometimes because it’s so way beyond my control, that I feel like it is playing me. A good way to sublimate your ego!)”
Riding the A Train
Kay Kostopoulos lectures on organizational behavior in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She also teaches acting in the Drama Department; she’s a graduate of ACT. By night she’s a chanteuse and lyricist who found a mentor in Noel. They’ve collaborated on four albums. In some ways, Kay has also become his protector and buffer.
It was at Kay’s house in Marin where we interviewed him. She tells this anecdote: “He does not suffer fools gladly, especially musicians. A wilting look from him can crush any self-satisfied amateur — I experienced it myself one night shortly after we met. Jazz musicians almost always end tunes spontaneously, by directing the band with arm motions or a nod. I neglected to motion the end of a song and it came to a bumpy ending. I sheepishly turned to him and said, ‘I guess I let that fall off.’ He stared back at me, stone faced, and said, in that distinctive baritone, ‘Yes, you did.’ I was crushed.”
Kay Kostopoulos with Noel Jewkes and band at a at Bird and Beckett gig | Credit: Angela Bennett
The End of Jazz as We Know It
Sam Rudin plays piano, sometimes looking like a man in the throes of electroshock therapy. He also runs the Back Room on Bonita Avenue in Berkeley. Sofas, a kitchen, and a red brick wall. The performance calendar includes the likes of Clara and the Broken Barrel String Band; Faye Carol; and occasionally the Noel Jewkes quartet. “Yeah, Noel’s a real bebopper,” Rudin told us recently. He sits in with Noel from time to time. 
My style is less modern, more bluesier, a more Fatswaller-ish approach. On the night we played, at the last minute, he switched to clarinet and wailed on the clarinet. I didn’t realize he had that in his repertoire. I joined in to play old standards, “A Train,” more commercial stuff. He’s really more focused on his own arrangements, which have a different kind of intentionality.
Rudin is a bit of a jazz intellectual — Kay calls him the Philip Roth of jazz. He’s come to believe that jazz has reached the “legacy” stage. Very much, he says, like classical music. He argues that the only people keeping traditional jazz going now are “aggregators” like Wynton Marsalis. He adds that we’re moving into the “end times” for traditional instruments because the area where music is most in ascendancy is in hip-hop and electronic dance music. 
Sam Rudin
“What I’m saying,” he told us, “is that less and less music, whatever the genre, will be products of real time; it will be made in production studios.” He added, “the entire sweep of music history, all of it, all the way back to ancient folk music, all the way through European classical music along with jazz, blues and other kinds of folk music, all of it is to hip-hop as painting is to photography. Think of that.” 
The Grateful Dread
Dr. Legato has no comment on the future of jazz. In the words of a friend, he “listens to his heart and musical voices. Movements and trends mean little to him.” Nevertheless, he’s well aware that the world for musicians like him is precarious, and always has been. He’s spent an entire life trying to escape musical and material bonds, now more than ever, looking for chords with “a nebulous kind of unresolved character” that he can tie into bits and snips of other composers: a paraphrase, a reference, which gives the audience something familiar. “It’s a message I want to share,” he told us. “The point is, I’m trying to get away from trends, but I also don’t want to alienate. I’m trying to teach, not change people.”
He admits that even as he feels more creative, can see more facets of an abstraction, he’s become more negative lately. Friends say he’s becoming more “otherworldly.” The appearance is partly his dark nature; his penchant for solitude, and also perhaps being unable to forget the idea of surgeons excavating his heart valves in 2007.
The Town and Country Lodge outside FresnoAnd then there’s the constant barrage of memory, the older the more vivid. Memories of Fresno, for example, where it all began, in a small room, inside a fake windmill at the Town and Country Lodge along Route 99. He joined a six-member black band and performed in places like the Palm Olive Bar in Fresno and a lounge in Sacramento called the Los Robles Motel.
It was also during that tenuous beginning in Fresno that he fell in love with Fay, his first real love, who became for him the personification of jazz, and for a while all the jazz spots in the central valley seemed like the land of Fay. She was the local Billie Holiday, in her svelte black dress, with two small children, a nurse’s aid by day, and the daughter of a popular jazz bassist. Her family warmly received Jewkes, couldn’t have been kinder, and he responded by helping to raise Fay’s boys, one of whom grew up to become a professor of black history. 
But then there was the matter of his parents — this was 1962. They were shocked at the news of his new life, and their reaction worked against the relationship. It all might have ended there, once and for all, in their break-up-make-up rhythm, but 25 years later they found each other still again, and for a moment it was all just as they had first imagined. The note still carried. “Fated to be mated” they told each other, got married in Reno, and found a house in Richmond. But then in the next moment, the breath ran out, his ’round midnight occupation wore her down. She became lonely and depressed, and increasingly withdrawn. She also became ill, eventually retreated to Fresno, and, within a year, died.
Noel JewkesSuch is the anxiety hanging in the background, and then there’s his daily dread: the very thought of going to a gig. After so many gigs, after all these years, the energy and focus it takes — but then evening sets in, the audience awaits, and Dr. Legato, dressed elegantly, in black shirt and trousers, with porkpie hat and heavy, black-rimmed glasses, a specter from the 1940s and ’50s, drives off from his studio in Larkspur to the night’s gig.
In the end, it’s nearly always a nightful of answered prayers, as he winds through a room to the stage; nimbly moving among the music stands, settling in his chair, undoing his top collar button, tucking the short end of his tie into the label of the long end — a Jimmy Stewart moment, the unassuming everyman turned distinguished saxman — ready to do what’s he’s always wanted to, was meant to do really, taking up his instrument, tasting his mouthpiece, and then finally the first notes of the evening. At that point, he’s the first to admit, dread dispelled — “the music saves me.”
Flight Planned
Sometimes during the day, if deep space is required, Dr. Legato indulges his longing to travel and sits down before his desktop monitor, closes out of Finale, his notation software, and climbs into his flight simulation program. He’ll take the left seat in a DC-3, that twin-engine workhorse from 1935, the plane that you could shoot to smithereens and still it would fly; the plane that seeded thousands of allied paratroopers behind German lines on D-Day. He lifts off out of SFO, propellers up to Hamilton field, north of San Rafael, at 200 mph, then over to Oakland, and back across the bay, maybe dropping down at Moffett, or San Jose and then home — all in real time. The correlation between flying and writing music is the need for absolute precision, paying strict attention to all the instruments, but the correlation between Dr. Legato and the DC-3 also holds: They’re both steady and sturdy, iconic and quirky, and above all, both were designed to escape gravity and then hold it. 

The Noel Jewkes Septet includes regulars such as Charlie McCarthy/Nora Stanley – alto; Keith Saunders/Laura Klein – piano; Dave Bendigkeit – trumpet; Rob Ewing/Max Perkoff – trombone; Chris Amberger/Adam Gay – bass; Mark Lee/Bob Blankenship – drums; and Kay Kostopoulos – featured vocalist.
Upcoming gigs include:
March 31 | Chez Hanny | 4 p.m.
1300 Silver Avenue, San Francisco
June 9 |  Vallejo Jazz Society | 5 p.m.
Mark MacNamara, a writer and journalist based in Asheville, North Carolina, has written for such publications as Nautilus, Salon, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Vanity Fair. From time to time, his pieces in San Francisco Classical Voice also appear in ArtsJournal.com.  Noteworthy examples include a piece about Philip Glass’s dream to build a cultural center on the Pacific Coast; a profile of sound composer Pamela Z and an essay on the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. MacNamara recently won several awards in the 2018 Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards presented by the San Francisco Press Club.  His website is macnamband.com.
 

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Noel Jewkes
For Dr. Legato, the preeminent saxman, the day begins when it begins; and if that sounds loose and self-indulgent, even at 78, not so. He’s more focused than ever; more tuned, literally and figuratively; and an occasional toke aside, straighter than ever; and yes, more pessimistic, more in search of solace, but genuinely boozeless, and sometimes ageless; altogether kinder, softer, quicker to avoid tenuous attachments; determined to guard his time; to the point that he’s even reluctant to follow news of the Donster-monster. No, the concern now is to stay close to the music and honor a growing revelation: at some point you have to let the ego slide.
Noel Jewkes | Credit: Jessica LevantDr. Legato’s real name is Noel Jewkes. Reviewers use both names; “Legato,” because fans regard him as the master of smooth. It was Jewkes himself who came up with the name, an effort to change his musical identity, and at one point his was the Legato Group, sounding like something Robert Mueller must be investigating. Whichever the name, he’s always had a loyal following. The great Bay Area jazz critic, Phil Elwood (1926–2006), once noted, “I don’t know a better contemporary, modern saxman anywhere.” 
As one fan puts it, he’s the “ghost of Lester Young.” The irony is that he’s not that well known outside the jazz world. Nevertheless, he has hundreds of fans in social media, particularly on YouTube. He’s the saxman’s saxman, particularly for aficionados of Bebop. Moreover, he’s playing somewhere most nights; at the Seahorse in Sausalito; in the city, at Bird and Beckett in Glen Park, or the Deluxe in the Haight; or the Backroom in Berkeley, or the Sound Room in Oakland. 
Jewkes, a slender man with long fingers, plays piano, bass, flute, trombone, trumpet, along with tenor, alto, soprano sax; not to mention ukulele, Chinese flute, and guitar. He studied classical clarinet in Orem Utah, where he grew up, in a Mormon family, the son of a housewife and a cartographer. Two sometime musicians. His father was a jazz aficionado who believed that playing an instrument was “like going to musical home.” Every summer Jewkes’ father took him to a resort by the Great Salt Lake called The Lagoon, an amusement park and pavilion. It was there that Jewkes first heard Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, Earl Garner, and, most memorably, Duke Ellington.
At 20, Jewkes fled to California, following an escape fantasy about the West, and at the same time feeling New York was just too storied, too competitive, the lights too bright, and so he came of age in the dim lights of the Central Valley, an unlikely hot bed of jazz insurrection. He stepped off the California Zephyr in Fresno, in 1961, with only the telephone number of some “shirttail relatives.”
In an autobiography he’s writing, Jewkes describes the moment. “I recall walking up an overpass overlooking the train yards with my tenor saxophone in a big brown case in one hand and a suitcase in the other. At that point, I had a very insecure feeling that I’d done something irreversible and also frightening and adventurous. As I look back at that moment, some 52 years later, I realize that was the crossroads of my life. From that moment on I was committed to survive by my own wits and whatever God given talents I may possess.”
On the Road
And so began the vagabond years, during which Jewkes played with whomever he could, and wherever he could. His career is backlit by the social and music history of San Francisco. In the mid 1960s, he played with Flip Nunez at Bop City; he played in bassist Fred Marshall’s warehouse in Berkeley, located next to a bronze foundry and studio belonging to Peter Voulkos, the great ceramic sculptor. The studio was a venue for a concert that attracted several noteworthy critics who “more or less said in their reviews that we were on a lonely road to nowhere. We took this as encouragement …”
He played with Bill Ham, who pioneered the psychedelic art events that became known as Light Sound Dimension (LSD). At first, Jewkes was attracted to the new culture if not the music. But gradually he began to reconsider. “Although I was greatly impressed by this new landscape of the mind, I was disturbed that we had abandoned everything familiar in favor of a nihilistic approach not only to art, but life as well. We were drawing big crowds, and this reinforced our belief that we had created something new and important.”
Backstage at the Light Sound Dimension Theatre in 1968. Top: Fred & Beverly Marshall, Noel Jewkes, Jerry Granelli; Bottom: Bill Ham and Bob Fine
He spent a few months in a USO-like show in Vietnam, along with his common-law wife and then two-year-old son, Brian. Then returned to San Francisco just as the summer of love was blooming, and promptly fell in love with a rocker named Denise, the leader of an all-girl rock ’n’ roll band called the Ace of Cups. They married and settled down in a commune in San Geronimo Valley in Marin. “It was,” notes Jewkes, “a mixture of hippies, derelicts, and drug addicts, plus a few individuals who defied categorization.” It was also the birthplace of his daughter, Tora.
After a couple of years, unhappy with both life and music, Jewkes drifted back to San Francisco. He fell in league with two Chinese twin sisters, Betty and Shirley Wong, two pianists, and refugees from the San Francisco Symphony. They were putting together a group called The Flowing Stream Ensemble, a group of eastern and western musicians to play ancient Chinese music. They invited Jewkes, who learned to play the te-tzu, a traditional bamboo flute.
True North
Throughout his professional life Jewkes has found himself in that inescapable artistic vortex, caught between the need to experiment and the need to live, enduring “selling-out periods” along the way, playing for bands on the hotel and country club circuit; and all the while watching the end of big bands and the advent of small ensembles.
These days Noel Jewkes’s daily schedule is fixed: Handle your business, make peace where you can. And then there’s the need to get new gigs and deal with singers; then lunch, nap, sit down, and write something, maybe a recollection for your autobiography, or more likely a song.
And as the afternoon goes by, if you’re lucky, maybe Kay, the very sweetest salt of the earth and your lead vocalist for the last five years, maybe she’ll come over on a whim and take away your laundry. Or maybe the two of you will get an idea for some new lyrics or a new album. Or else you’ll tell her your most recent dream, which is always full of musical spirits that have passed.
Noel Jewkes with Kay Kostopoulos and band at the Sacramento Jazz Coop | Credit: Ken Rabiroff
Or else, maybe you’ll just go the afternoon alone, and let your mind run because increasingly you’re thinking philosophically. It’s implicit in titles like “Cubist Blues,” “Tango in Blaque,” and “Viol Blues.” Your true north is Ellington, and sometimes you get there, even beyond.
Asked what he’s learned as a musician in his life in jazz, Noel told us, “It’s taught me to embrace a lot of different moods and looks in life that I was not aware of. The introduction to impressionistic music, exotic influences. Asian music, for example. I’ve also come to like writing descriptive music. Ellington is a good example, and I still consider him my main jazz hero. He loved to write music that served as portraits of his friends.”
In his notes for an autobiography, he writes, “I have learned through experience that there is a moment for everything and one of my musical duties is to find the music that fits a particular moment! (I like to play the weather sometimes because it’s so way beyond my control, that I feel like it is playing me. A good way to sublimate your ego!)”
Riding the A Train
Kay Kostopoulos lectures on organizational behavior in the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She also teaches acting in the Drama Department; she’s a graduate of ACT. By night she’s a chanteuse and lyricist who found a mentor in Noel. They’ve collaborated on four albums. In some ways, Kay has also become his protector and buffer.
It was at Kay’s house in Marin where we interviewed him. She tells this anecdote: “He does not suffer fools gladly, especially musicians. A wilting look from him can crush any self-satisfied amateur — I experienced it myself one night shortly after we met. Jazz musicians almost always end tunes spontaneously, by directing the band with arm motions or a nod. I neglected to motion the end of a song and it came to a bumpy ending. I sheepishly turned to him and said, ‘I guess I let that fall off.’ He stared back at me, stone faced, and said, in that distinctive baritone, ‘Yes, you did.’ I was crushed.”
Kay Kostopoulos with Noel Jewkes and band at a at Bird and Beckett gig | Credit: Angela Bennett
The End of Jazz as We Know It
Sam Rudin plays piano, sometimes looking like a man in the throes of electroshock therapy. He also runs the Back Room on Bonita Avenue in Berkeley. Sofas, a kitchen, and a red brick wall. The performance calendar includes the likes of Clara and the Broken Barrel String Band; Faye Carol; and occasionally the Noel Jewkes quartet. “Yeah, Noel’s a real bebopper,” Rudin told us recently. He sits in with Noel from time to time. 
My style is less modern, more bluesier, a more Fatswaller-ish approach. On the night we played, at the last minute, he switched to clarinet and wailed on the clarinet. I didn’t realize he had that in his repertoire. I joined in to play old standards, “A Train,” more commercial stuff. He’s really more focused on his own arrangements, which have a different kind of intentionality.
Rudin is a bit of a jazz intellectual — Kay calls him the Philip Roth of jazz. He’s come to believe that jazz has reached the “legacy” stage. Very much, he says, like classical music. He argues that the only people keeping traditional jazz going now are “aggregators” like Wynton Marsalis. He adds that we’re moving into the “end times” for traditional instruments because the area where music is most in ascendancy is in hip-hop and electronic dance music. 
Sam Rudin
“What I’m saying,” he told us, “is that less and less music, whatever the genre, will be products of real time; it will be made in production studios.” He added, “the entire sweep of music history, all of it, all the way back to ancient folk music, all the way through European classical music along with jazz, blues and other kinds of folk music, all of it is to hip-hop as painting is to photography. Think of that.” 
The Grateful Dread
Dr. Legato has no comment on the future of jazz. In the words of a friend, he “listens to his heart and musical voices. Movements and trends mean little to him.” Nevertheless, he’s well aware that the world for musicians like him is precarious, and always has been. He’s spent an entire life trying to escape musical and material bonds, now more than ever, looking for chords with “a nebulous kind of unresolved character” that he can tie into bits and snips of other composers: a paraphrase, a reference, which gives the audience something familiar. “It’s a message I want to share,” he told us. “The point is, I’m trying to get away from trends, but I also don’t want to alienate. I’m trying to teach, not change people.”
He admits that even as he feels more creative, can see more facets of an abstraction, he’s become more negative lately. Friends say he’s becoming more “otherworldly.” The appearance is partly his dark nature; his penchant for solitude, and also perhaps being unable to forget the idea of surgeons excavating his heart valves in 2007.
The Town and Country Lodge outside FresnoAnd then there’s the constant barrage of memory, the older the more vivid. Memories of Fresno, for example, where it all began, in a small room, inside a fake windmill at the Town and Country Lodge along Route 99. He joined a six-member black band and performed in places like the Palm Olive Bar in Fresno and a lounge in Sacramento called the Los Robles Motel.
It was also during that tenuous beginning in Fresno that he fell in love with Fay, his first real love, who became for him the personification of jazz, and for a while all the jazz spots in the central valley seemed like the land of Fay. She was the local Billie Holiday, in her svelte black dress, with two small children, a nurse’s aid by day, and the daughter of a popular jazz bassist. Her family warmly received Jewkes, couldn’t have been kinder, and he responded by helping to raise Fay’s boys, one of whom grew up to become a professor of black history. 
But then there was the matter of his parents — this was 1962. They were shocked at the news of his new life, and their reaction worked against the relationship. It all might have ended there, once and for all, in their break-up-make-up rhythm, but 25 years later they found each other still again, and for a moment it was all just as they had first imagined. The note still carried. “Fated to be mated” they told each other, got married in Reno, and found a house in Richmond. But then in the next moment, the breath ran out, his ’round midnight occupation wore her down. She became lonely and depressed, and increasingly withdrawn. She also became ill, eventually retreated to Fresno, and, within a year, died.
Noel JewkesSuch is the anxiety hanging in the background, and then there’s his daily dread: the very thought of going to a gig. After so many gigs, after all these years, the energy and focus it takes — but then evening sets in, the audience awaits, and Dr. Legato, dressed elegantly, in black shirt and trousers, with porkpie hat and heavy, black-rimmed glasses, a specter from the 1940s and ’50s, drives off from his studio in Larkspur to the night’s gig.
In the end, it’s nearly always a nightful of answered prayers, as he winds through a room to the stage; nimbly moving among the music stands, settling in his chair, undoing his top collar button, tucking the short end of his tie into the label of the long end — a Jimmy Stewart moment, the unassuming everyman turned distinguished saxman — ready to do what’s he’s always wanted to, was meant to do really, taking up his instrument, tasting his mouthpiece, and then finally the first notes of the evening. At that point, he’s the first to admit, dread dispelled — “the music saves me.”
Flight Planned
Sometimes during the day, if deep space is required, Dr. Legato indulges his longing to travel and sits down before his desktop monitor, closes out of Finale, his notation software, and climbs into his flight simulation program. He’ll take the left seat in a DC-3, that twin-engine workhorse from 1935, the plane that you could shoot to smithereens and still it would fly; the plane that seeded thousands of allied paratroopers behind German lines on D-Day. He lifts off out of SFO, propellers up to Hamilton field, north of San Rafael, at 200 mph, then over to Oakland, and back across the bay, maybe dropping down at Moffett, or San Jose and then home — all in real time. The correlation between flying and writing music is the need for absolute precision, paying strict attention to all the instruments, but the correlation between Dr. Legato and the DC-3 also holds: They’re both steady and sturdy, iconic and quirky, and above all, both were designed to escape gravity and then hold it. 

The Noel Jewkes Septet includes regulars such as Charlie McCarthy/Nora Stanley – alto; Keith Saunders/Laura Klein – piano; Dave Bendigkeit – trumpet; Rob Ewing/Max Perkoff – trombone; Chris Amberger/Adam Gay – bass; Mark Lee/Bob Blankenship – drums; and Kay Kostopoulos – featured vocalist.
Upcoming gigs include:
March 31 | Chez Hanny | 4 p.m.
1300 Silver Avenue, San Francisco
June 9 |  Vallejo Jazz Society | 5 p.m.
Mark MacNamara, a writer and journalist based in Asheville, North Carolina, has written for such publications as Nautilus, Salon, The Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Vanity Fair. From time to time, his pieces in San Francisco Classical Voice also appear in ArtsJournal.com.  Noteworthy examples include a piece about Philip Glass’s dream to build a cultural center on the Pacific Coast; a profile of sound composer Pamela Z and an essay on the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. MacNamara recently won several awards in the 2018 Greater Bay Area Journalism Awards presented by the San Francisco Press Club.  His website is macnamband.com.
 

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Black Sound and the Archive group expands on the idea of what is an archive

 
Left to right: Count Basie, Teddy Wilson, Hazel Scott, Duke Ellington, and Mel Powell. (MSS 70, The Mel Powell Papers, Irving S. Gilmore Music Library of Yale University)
Imagine for a moment, what it would be like to not have access to conventional ways of documenting your own life experiences. What if — as a marginalized person — it was illegal for you to learn how to read and write? What if you didn’t have the resources — let alone a kind of infrastructure — to build your own museums or your own libraries?
How, then, do you go about leaving behind a trace of your “hereness,” your value, your contribution to the world? And how do you create a definition of yourself that can stand the test of time?
This is the ethos of the Black Sound and the Archive Working Group and, what Daphne Brooks, professor of African American studies, American studies, Theater Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and one of the group’s organizers, hopes to convey to all of the participants in the initiative as well as guests at the program’s events.

 
Daphne Brooks (Image credit: Dan Renzetti)
The Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, explains Brooks, is a way of acknowledging African Americans’ culture through sound, which she explains, is itself an archive. “It is the way in which you affirm your subjectivity, your visibility, your audibility, and your entire ontology through a range of practices that articulates what it means to be human,” she adds.
The project came together as a result of Brooks’ “collaboration and collegiality” with Brian Kane, professor in the Department of Music, says Brooks. The two have shared interests in African American sonic cultures and the intellectual life that emerges out of those sonic cultures.
The Black Sound and the Archive Working Group at Yale is a two-year initiative supported by Yale’s 320 York Humanities Grant that studies the history and significance of African American sonic practices in tandem with critical examination of the nature of archives. Now in its second year, the initiative seeks to augment the notion of what constitutes a black sound archive. African-American sonic practices, for example, are not only embedded in historical sound recordings, but in photographs, narratives, performances, and repertoires.
“The 320 York Humanities Grants are unique among other funding opportunities on campus, giving recipients the freedom to use the funding for curation, performance, collaborative research, teaching, or lively combinations of these,” says Amy Hungerford, the Bird White Housum Professor of English and dean of the Humanities Division at Yale. “This grant program — and the projects that are its offspring — allows us to realize the full richness of a given field at Yale across the boundaries of discipline, practice, and medium.”
When they were designing the project, Kane and Brooks thought about ways to bring together interdisciplinary communities on campus to think more about the important role that African American sound-making practices in music have played in the broad picture of American culture and “the long storied — but still, in certain quarters of our profession, under theorized — history of the ways in which African Americans used music and sound as a way to document their historical conditions and experiences,” says Brooks.
“With this project we are also thinking about the kind of documentation that indexes sound but isn’t typically thought of as part of a historical sound archive. Newspaper accounts of concerts, memoirs, sheet music, and music theory books are all part of sonic archives,” says Kane.

 
Brian Kane (Image credit: Dan Renzetti)
The participants of the working group are encouraged to work in close collaboration with archival objects and engage with artists whose work has been shaped and inspired by archival material. The working group has held and will hold again this semester workshop sessions that focus on analyzing and exploring a diverse range of archival sonic objects and performance texts. Another goal of the project is to engage practitioners in their aesthetic techniques and repertoires in an attempt to generate new black sound archives for future scholarship.
The group has hosted visits from luminaries in the field of African American music as well as noted scholars on the topic of black sound archives. These have included a seminar with John Davis, a classical pianist and of early black music and archivist and workshops and public conversations with artists such as jazz vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant, jazz pianist Jason Moran, sound artist Kevin Beasley, and folk-Americana musician Rhiannon Giddens.   
Davis, explains Brooks, is known for performing music from long-forgotten 19^th-century musicians like Thomas Wiggins, known as “Blind Tom,” a classically trained pianist who was held captive in slavery and despite that became one of the most storied classical pianists in the Atlantic world. Davis researched Blind Tom’s life, collected rare scores and ephemera, and produced the first commercial recordings of Blind Tom’s compositions. Davis’ talk, says Brooks, “gave us a more palpable sense of what it meant to be held captive as a human being in this country.”
Salvant, who has been hailed by the New York Times as “the greatest jazz vocalist of her generation,” immerses herself in repertoires from the turn of the century, going back to black musical theater and vaudeville repertoires, says Brooks.
A MacArthur genius fellow, Moran is considered to be one of the most innovative and influential jazz pianists of the contemporary era. He lectured on his own kind of documentation, or archive, of the physical spaces — the storied clubs — in which African American musicians performed around the United States. Moran has tried to reproduce those physical spaces using the architecture that reflects the ways in which African American musicians were improvising and negotiating in the spaces in which they performed.
“To have these renowned musicians visit the campus and share their own experiences of how archival cultures have informed their aesthetics and vision for their work has been an enriching part of my scholarship at Yale,” says Brooks.
Last spring, in conjunction with the Gilmore Music Library, participants in the working group created their own on-line sound archives (available at blacksound.yale.edu). They also exhibited an array of rare and unusual items found in the library’s collections, such as an arrangement written by pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams, a handwritten fragment of Duke Ellington’s memoir, and several objects (ranging from a walking stick to pajamas) that belonged to J. Rosamond Johnson, the composer of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” 

 
(Image credit: Dan Renzetti)
For Kane, the most gratifying part of his involvement with the working group has been participating in the vibrant interactions between graduate students from different departments — who don’t often get to intersect at Yale — all thinking critically around a central set of issues. “The discussions have been inspiring,” says Kane, “and I believe that we’re only at the very beginning of seeing projects that will emerge with roots in our conversations—dissertation, articles, exhibitions, and artworks.”
 
This project has resonated broadly with graduate students, says Brooks, because it allows them to feel like they can “tap into their own creative talents, be bold, and to think about creating their own archives as well.” Also, notes Brooks, “the circle of creativity that runs between the artists, the scholars, and the students is really exquisite and very special.”
 
The events and research associated with this working group underscore the importance of humanities at Yale, explains Brooks, because “what is so crucial about the humanities is that it is a kind of intellectual series of practices that allow us to always remain close to, interrogate, and affirm the preciousness of our humanity.”
Brooks continues: “It is for that reason that we’re especially grateful for the fact that we have this project to contribute to the vibrant future of the humanities at Yale, and to remind everyone of the lasting contributions of African Americans in encouraging us to think about and to really value, celebrate, but also hold close to us, the meaning of suffering and survival that one can hear through aesthetic practices and through sound in particular.”
This semester, the initiative held the inaugural “Black Sound & the Archive Symposium” Feb. 7-8.

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• Stanley Crouch—Jazz Historian, Author, Critic, Co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center (2019 A.B. Spellman NEA Jazz Masters Fellowship for Jazz Advocacy)
• Bob Dorough—Vocalist, Composer, Arranger, Pianist
• Abdullah Ibrahim—Pianist, Composer
• Maria Schneider—Composer, Arranger, Bandleader

 
More details about the 2019 NEA Jazz Masters events are below. Join the conversation about the events on Twitter using #NEAJazz19.
 
NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert—Monday, April 15, 2019
The 2019 NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert will take place on Monday, April 15, 2019 at 8:00 p.m. ET at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall at 2700 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20566 and also streamed live. Tickets will be available to reserve beginning Thursday, March 7, 2019 at 10:00am ET; see below for additional details.
 
This evening of performances by world-renowned musicians will pay tribute to the NEA Jazz Masters’ careers, with performances by Jay Anderson, Steve Berger, Terence Blanchard, Terri Lyne Carrington, Kurt Elling, 2012 NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, Bill Goodwin, Cleave Guyton, Grace Kelly, Frank Kimbrough, Noah Jackson, Christian McBride, Charles McPherson, Jason Moran, David Murray, Pat O’Leary, and Scott Robinson.
 
Jason Moran, pianist and Kennedy Center artistic director for jazz, will also host the concert, which will include remarks by 2019 NEA Jazz Masters Abdullah Ibrahim and Maria Schneider. Patrick C. Dorian, distinguished professor emeritus of music at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania will represent Bob Dorough, who passed away in 2018 shortly after being notified of his Jazz Masters honor. Loren Schoenberg¸ senior scholar with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, will represent Stanley Crouch, who is recovering from an illness and will be unable to participate in the Jazz Masters events. In addition, Mary Anne Carter, acting chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and Deborah F. Rutter, president of the Kennedy Center, will both give remarks.
 
Media who wish to request press access to this event should contact Liz Auclair at auclaire@arts.gov or Chanel P. Williams at CPWilliams@Kennedy-Center.org. Photos from the concert will be available for media use on request.
 
Ticket details:
Starting Thursday, March 7, 2019 at 10:00 am ET, up to four (4) tickets per household may be reserved for this free concert in person at the Kennedy Center Box Office, at kennedy-center.org, or by dialing 202-467-4600 or 800-444-1324. Reservation confirmations should be printed at home (note these are not tickets, but reservations), and will be valid on a first come first serve basis until 7:45 p.m. Monday, April 15, 2019. Print-at-home tickets are unavailable for this concert. Those with reservations should bring their printed reservation confirmations to the Kennedy Center Hall of Nations Box Office on Monday, April 15 between 5:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. to receive their tickets on a first come first serve basis. All reservation confirmations not presented to the box office by 7:45 p.m. will be released and distributed through a ticket giveaway line.
 
Tickets for walk-up patrons will be available the night of the concert on a first-come, first-served basis to those in a giveaway line. Patrons who do not reserve tickets in advance are encouraged to arrive from 5:30 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. to receive tickets via the giveaway line. 
 
If you or a member of your party requires accessible locations or seating in the sign-interpreted and captioned section, please indicate your needs when making your reservation and upon picking up your tickets. Please contact the Accessibility Office at 202-416-8727 or access@kennedy-center.org if you have any questions or would like to request an accommodation.
 
Live webcast and audio broadcast details:
The 2019 NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concert will be video-streamed live on the National Endowment for the Arts and Kennedy Center websites, as well as the websites for the NPR Music, All About Jazz and Jazz Near You, National Endowment for the Humanities, Voice of America (Khmer, Spanish, Creole, Tibetan, and Chinese services), WBGO, and WPFW. An archive of the webcast will be available following the event at arts.gov. In addition, SiriusXM Channel 67, Real Jazz, and WPFW 89.3 FM in Washington, DC, will audio broadcast the concert live.
 
NPR Listening Party with the 2019 NEA Jazz Masters—Sunday, April 14, 2019
On Sunday, April 14, 2019 at 2:00 p.m., NPR will host a listening party in honor of the 2019 NEA Jazz Masters at their headquarters at 1111 North Capitol Street, NE, Washington, DC, 20002. This event will include conversations with members of the latest class of NEA Jazz Masters and others who know them well, using music from their careers to tell the stories of their lives. Joining Maria Schneider and Abdullah Ibrahim will be Aralee Dorough—Bob Dorough’s daughter who is a musician—to discuss Dorough’s career, and Christian McBride to talk about Crouch’s advocacy of jazz. This event is free and open to the public but tickets are required. Reserve your tickets here.Media who wish to attend this event should contact mediarelations@npr.org.
 
Student Master Class with 2019 NEA Jazz Master Abdullah Ibrahim—Tuesday April 16, 2019
On Tuesday, April 16, 2019 from 12:40–1:40 p.m., 2019 NEA Jazz Master Abdullah Ibrahim will conduct a master class with Howard University student musicians at Howard University’s Childers Recital Hall, 2455 6^th Street NW, Washington, DC 20059. The public is invited to observe and no registration is necessary (seating is first-come, first-served). Media who wish to attend this event should contact Liz Auclair at auclaire@arts.gov or Ramzey L. Smith at ramzey.smith@howard.edu.
 
About NEA Jazz Masters
Since 1982, the National Endowment for the Arts has awarded 153 fellowships to great figures in jazz, including Ella Fitzgerald, Sonny Rollins, Dianne Reeves, Miles Davis, Chick Corea, and George Wein. The full list of NEA Jazz Masters and materials about them—including videos, podcasts, NEA Jazz Moments audio clips, and more—are available at arts.gov.
 
Recipients are nominated by the public, including the jazz community. Nominations are judged by a panel of experts, including previously-named NEA Jazz Masters. The panel’s recommendations are reviewed by the National Council on the Arts, which sends its recommendations to the Arts Endowment chairman, who makes the final decision. The agency encourages nominations of a broad range of men and women who have been significant to the field of jazz, through vocals, instrumental performance, creative leadership, and education. NEA Jazz Masters Fellowships are up to $25,000 and can be received once in a lifetime. Visit arts.gov/honors/jazz for more information and to submit a nomination.
 
The NEA also supported the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, an effort to document the lives and careers of NEA Jazz Masters. In addition to transcriptions of the comprehensive interviews, the website also includes audio clips with interview excerpts. This project has transcribed the oral histories of nearly 100 NEA Jazz Masters.
 
About the National Endowment for the Arts
Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts is the independent federal agency whose funding and support gives Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. Through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector, the NEA supports arts learning, affirms and celebrates America’s rich and diverse cultural heritage, and extends its work to promote equal access to the arts in every community across America. Visit arts.gov to learn more about NEA.
 
About Kennedy Center Jazz
Kennedy Center Jazz, under the leadership of Artistic Director Jason Moran, presents legendary artists who have helped shape the art form, artists who are emerging on the jazz scene, and innovative multidisciplinary projects throughout the year. The KC Jazz Club, launched in 2002 and dubbed “the future of the jazz nightclub” by JazzTimes, hosts many of these artists in an intimate setting; while the Crossroads Club, launched in 2012, is a nightclub dance venue. Annual Kennedy Center jazz events include the professional development residency program for young artists, Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead; NPR’s A Jazz Piano Christmas, the Kennedy Center holiday tradition shared by millions around the country via broadcast on NPR; and the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival, created in 1996 by the late Dr. Billy Taylor (Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz, 1994–2010). The Center co-produces the annual NEA Jazz Masters Tribute Concerts, celebrating iconic figures in the music.
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Canadian jazz guitar icon Ed Bickert, renowned almost as much for his quiet, self-effacing personality as for his mellow, impeccable way with his Fender Telecaster, died on Thursday. He was 86.
Until his retirement in 2000, the Manitoba-born musician was Toronto’s top guitarist for almost five decades. His masterful playing, heard with Paul Desmond, Rob McConnell and the Boss Brass, Don Thompson and Moe Koffman, would have cast a wider spell among the world’s jazz fans if Bickert had had a greater appetite for touring and the limelight. “I was born to be a side man,” Bickert once said.
Bickert grew up in Vernon, B.C., in a musical family. His father and mother played the piano and fiddle at country dances.
In 1952, the guitarist moved to Toronto to pursue his career, working initially as a radio station engineer, and then edging his way onto the music scene through session work and playing the clubs.
“Bickert quietly established himself as the city’s top dog guitarist,” said a 2012 Toronto Star profile of Bickert, which marked his 80th birthday. “International stars Bickert accompanied — from alto sax Paul Desmond to vibraphonist Milt Jackson to Rosemary Clooney — inevitably had to talk him into touring and then for only a limited time.”
Between 1975 and 2000, Bickert recorded more than a dozen albums as a leader. One of Bickert’s most elegant sideman recordings is the classic 1975 album Paul Desmond Quartet Live, recorded at Bourbon Street in Toronto.
In the liner notes of that album, Desmond wrote that he would often turn around and look at Bickert while on-stage to ”count the strings on Ed’s guitar … how does he get to play chorus after chorus of chord sequences which could not possibly sound better on a keyboard?”
In 1996, he was invested as a member of the Order of Canada for his contributions to the performing arts.
Bickert played small club gigs and festival concerts in Ottawa through the years until his retirement. He told an Ottawa Citizen interview before an early 2000 appearance:  “Some jazz people can just go ahead and do their thing regardless of noise or distractions, but that’s hard for me. I have to have a fair amount of attention and quiet to really play well.’
Bickert was renowned for his harmonic mastery, and confessed to the Citizen interviewer than harmony fascinated him.
”I really enjoy the harmonic aspect of music — not just jazz, but country and classical,” Bickert said. ”The harmony really turns me on, so I try to find things on the guitar that are more interesting harmonically than some of the basic grips.”
Unlike many a jazz musician that plays until the end, Bickert surprised and saddened jazz fans when he quit playing in 2000. He told the Toronto Star in 2012, “In 2000, my wife (Madeline) passed away, and I had arthritis and other problems which I got through. There just comes a time you don’t want to do it anymore.”
There was a star-studded concert in November 2012 in Toronto to mark Bickert’s 80th birthday. Bickert’s guitar was on stage, but Bickert was not. “I would hardly know how to hold the guitar,” Bickert told the Star.
“Jazz is imperfect but Ed gets as close to perfection as it gets,” bassist/pianist Thompson, Bickert’s collaborator for decades, told the Star.
On Facebook Saturday morning, musicians from across Canada paid tribute to Bickert.
Vancouver bassist and guitarist Andre Lachance wrote: “RIP Ed Bickert. An enormous thank you for your artistry and influence and contributions to culture. There literally is a little bit (or a lot) of Ed in every jazz guitar player in this country. Rarely has someone had that kind of influence on the practice of an instrument … true mastery.”
Gatineau, Que. guitarist Roland Doucet wrote: “I had a wonderful opportunity in Halifax around 1980 to hear him five nights in a row, front row centre in a new jazz supper club that lasted only a few months.
“As poor as I was, I was in the front table every night. (Often wondered, when will that cigarette ash drop, and will he ever play a ‘grip’ — his word for chord — that I recognize.
“Amazing artist. Amazing fingers. Best to me when working with a band, but solo was obviously incredible. A master.”
In an interview, Montreal jazz guitarist and Juno Award winner Mike Rud recalled that Bickert was the first jazz guitarist that he ever saw perform, in Grand Prairie, Alta., with Dizzy Gillespie and Moe Koffman, in the early 1980s.
“Jazz guitarists around the world rightly revere Ed Bickert,” Rud said. “But for Canadian jazz guitarists, I think he was the very voice of impeccable musical judgement — when to play, when not to.
“That’s before you even get to his chord approach, which was brand new, science-fiction level technology to all of us. Listening to his chord work, guitarists are left feeling like they are watching someone fill out the New York Times crossword puzzle, all perfectly correctly, and with many deeply satisfying, unexpected twists. Then in the next chorus, he erases all that, and fills it out all again with different, every-bit-as-perfect answers, over and over. Enchanting and infuriating.
“So much so that it’s easy to miss his single-note soloing, the sublime unfailingly swinging storytelling that made him an exquisite bandmate for Paul Desmond.
“All being done on a solid-body Telecaster, from which he coaxed a sound that would be the envy of any hollow-body player.
“I got to meet him a couple of times only, and play just a couple of tunes with him. I still play stuff I saw him play that day practically every single night. He was pleasant and soft-spoken. He’ll be more than missed.”
phum@postmedia.com
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The soul singer Jackie Shane between sets in Canada in 1967.CreditJeff Goode/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

Jackie Shane – Walking The Dog – 1965 R&B

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‘There are just so many records in Japan,” says Yusuke Ogawa, owner of Universounds, a used record shop selling jazz, soul and funk in the Western suburbs of central Tokyo. Now, with the rise of internet sales as well as the increasingly interconnected music world, buyers worldwide are catching on to Japan’s stockpile of good quality, rare records. Ogawa is one key point in this international record buying culture.
Japan was once a jazz empire. Though there had been jazz music in Japan since the 1920s, it wasn’t until after World War II with the influx of American GIs that the country became obsessed. Even now it’s normal to hear jazz in the most unlikely of places. Just recently, I heard jazz in my local sento (public bathhouse).
Still, people don’t buy records like they used to, and they are not as crazy about jazz as they used to be. That means that there are an inestimable number of old records, not just jazz, in Japan, lying in wait. This has been known for a while, and young people in Japan interested in vinyl have long been the beneficiaries.
However, with the increasing popularity of records and the rise of music communities on the internet, everyone wants to sample Japan’s record stockpile. Within that world, Ogawa has become a very important dealer.
It’s an unlikely scenario. Universounds is located in the back of the second story of a nondescript building in a shopping street in Koenji. All that’s visible at street level is a discrete sign with the store’s logo. The shop is hard to find without knowing where it is already, and was impossible to locate in the days before Google Maps.
Inside the minimal one-room store is a small, constantly rotating selection of high-quality records. The primary focus of Universounds is what in Japan is called spiritual jazz, an offshoot of the free jazz genre. In the late 1960s, jazz giants like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman played increasingly avant-garde and improvisation-focused music. Then, in the 1970s, many free jazz musicians became influenced by Indian and African musical culture. They began to be interested in mysticism and were often more explicitly political.
Japan was also going through a free jazz boom in the ’60s and ’70s. Responding to both the domestic counter-culture movements and the rise of political consciousness and musical freedom among the jazz community in the U.S., Japanese jazz began to become more political and stylistically avant-garde. At this time, jazz critics, like Kiyoshi Koyama, and musicians began to visit and live in the U.S. — collaborating first hand with musicians who were pushing the boundaries of the genre.
The music created then is inspired, exciting and free. That’s why people today want to listen to it, some 40 years after it was made. While Japanese jazz was long given short shrift by both Japanese and Western audiences, Ogawa says that, “increasingly, Japanese jazz is being more highly valued both domestically and internationally.”
Ogawa deals in exactly these kinds of records. And it’s not just free jazz fans who come to his store, but also those interested in a range of funk, fusion, soul and other jazz — all genres that were in some way interconnected at that time. Ogawa makes these connections explicit with his expertise in jazz history and in the records themselves.
Universounds has also become known in the international hip hop world. The rare groove genre has been linked to the hip hop predilection for samples that no one else had, and playing rare, though not necessarily expensive, records has become an important part of many DJs’ style. Once, when I visited the store, a Korean DJ and an American DJ had been brought to the store by a Japanese companion. The international trio were pulling out records, listening to a few seconds to get a sense of the groove, then going onto the next record.
Ogawa, with his understanding of jazz, soul and funk is an important asset to these musicians because he can find and suggest records they otherwise wouldn’t find. “Hip hop artists listen to the music part by part. It’s not just ‘I like this tune,’ but ‘I want a part with a horn,’ or ‘I want a base line that grooves.’ I’ll take out a bunch of options for them and when they say, ‘This is the kind of thing I wanted!’ I’m thrilled.”
In a world of internet downloads, there’s something special about having a record that perhaps only a few other people in the world are actively listening to now. Even if the record is less rare, Ogawa says vinyl as a medium is meaningful: “Records are objects. It’s not just the music, it’s about owning the object. If it was just about listening, you could download the music, or listen to it on YouTube. (Having the record) is very important.”
“I’ve spent my life looking at records and visiting records stores,” says Ogawa, whose knowledge and dedication to jazz and to records is increasingly becoming valued throughout the world. Now, at least one foreign customer a day manages to find his store. He’s been featured in multiple English-language music websites and magazines from around the world. These music lovers want spiritual jazz, or Japanese jazz. But most importantly, they need Ogawa’s knowledge, guidance and taste to show them new types of music they never could have dreamed of.
After finding out I play koto and improvise, Ogawa asked me if I knew Hideakira Sakurai, the legendary free jazz koto player from the ’70s who passed away very young. When I nodded, he smiled and pulled out a record he hadn’t even finished processing for his store. “Sunrise From West Sea” is a live recording from 1971 featuring Sakurai, Masahiko Sato, Stomu Yamash’ta and Takehisa Kosugi. That’s when I understood what all the hype about Ogawa was about. It wasn’t just the selection of records or his suggestion. It was his ability to find a great record for an individual person. That requires decades of study.
Ogawa and I sat and listened to both sides of the record. The music was as anarchic, free and vibrant as you can get. It was magical.
Yusuke Ogawa will be featured in a BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature documentary about Japanese jazz, presented by Katherine Whatley, airing on March 11 (at 3.45 a.m.) and available afterward online at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnwp.
 

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R.I.P. maestro Andre Previn

Jim Eigo

May 7, 2012
Every Cover Tells A Story
Back in May of 2012 I was yard-saleing in the Hudson Valley and went to Port Jervis, NY for their annual community wide sale when by chance I stumbled across a funky-old antique store with an eccentric proprietor right out of a John Waters film. He had a bunch of crappy old records in the back of the store nothing special. While I was browsing he comes over and shows me a record by Andre Previn and tells me that the woman on the cover is his wife Louise Gilkes Fouts.

He introduced me and she told me the story of how when she was attending Pratt Institute in the early 60s she was modeling on the side to earn extra money and was spotted by the *photographer who took the cover photo. And she also told me she made gowns for Nina Simone too.

The photog who took the cover photo is fashion photographer Gerald Hochman.

Be sure to check out this YouTube for a deeper dive
Love affair of a lasting fashion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKOdc0ISQTc

Great article from the Times Herald Record from 2010 about Joe Fouts and Louise Gilkes.
Port Jervis shop owners recall posh past
https://www.recordonline.com/article/20100612/NEWS/6130328

Jim Eigo
Jazz Promo Services
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André Previn in 1965. He conducted, composed, played jazz piano and scored movies in a musical life that spurned categories.CreditErich Auerbach/Getty Images

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André Previn in 1965. He conducted, composed, played jazz piano and scored movies in a musical life that spurned categories.CreditCreditErich Auerbach/Getty Images
André Previn, who blurred the boundaries between jazz, pop and classical music — and between composing, conducting and performing — in an extraordinarily eclectic, award-filled career, died Thursday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death was confirmed by his manager, Linda Petrikova.
Mr. Previn wrote or arranged the music for several dozen movies and was the only person in the history of the Academy Awards to receive three nominations in one year (1961, for the scores for “Elmer Gantry” and “Bells Are Ringing” and the song “Faraway Part of Town” from the comedy “Pepe”).
But audiences also knew him as a jazz pianist who appeared with Ella Fitzgerald, among others, and as a composer who turned out musicals, orchestral works, chamber music, two operas and several concertos for his fifth wife, the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter.
Mr. Previn was also the music director or principal conductor of a half-dozen orchestras.
Critics described him as a “wunderkind in a turtleneck” and the “Mickey Mouse maestro” when he was in his 20s and 30s, and he was often compared to Leonard Bernstein, a similarly versatile conductor, composer and pianist. Time magazine’s headline when Mr. Previn became the principal conductor of the London Symphony in 1968 was “Almost Like Bernstein.” Newsweek summarized Mr. Previn’s appointment as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1985 as “Bernstein West.”
Mr. Previn himself considered Bernstein an idol. “Bernstein has made it possible not to specialize in one area of music,” he said. “You no longer have to do just Broadway shows, or movies, or conduct — you can do any or all of them.”
And Mr. Previn did. In the 1960s, he appeared in sold-out classical and jazz concerts. Sometimes he combined genres, playing a concerto before intermission and jazz with a trio after. Dizzy Gillespie marveled at his performances: “He has the flow, you know, which a lot of guys don’t have and won’t ever get.”
Mr. Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in London. He was its musical director from 1968 to 1979.CreditJohn Minihan/Getty Images
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Mr. Previn conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in London. He was its musical director from 1968 to 1979.CreditJohn Minihan/Getty Images
He made recordings with Benny Carter and Mahalia Jackson and an album of jazz arrangements of songs from “My Fair Lady” with the drummer Shelly Manne and the bass player Leroy Vinnegar. (Mr. Previn was later the conductor and music supervisor for the film version of “My Fair Lady.”) He also made two albums with Dinah Shore and recorded a collection of Christmas carols with Julie Andrews and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with Andre Kostelanetz.
But the classical world was never comfortable with his work in jazz, and the jazz historian Ted Gioia said he became “something of a popularizer of jazz rather than a serious practitioner” as he grew older.
For his part, Mr. Previn disdained all the labels. “I never considered myself a jazz musician,” he said in 1986, “but a musician who occasionally played jazz.”
A Start in Movies
Mr. Previn — born Andreas Ludwig Prewin on April 6, 1929, in Berlin — entered in the Berlin Conservatory when he was 6, after his parents realized that he had perfect pitch. His father, Jacob, a Polish-born lawyer who was Jewish and had been an amateur pianist in Berlin, moved the family to Paris in 1938 to escape the Nazis. André studied with Marcel Dupré at the Paris Conservatory for about a year before the family left for Los Angeles. There, Mr. Previn studied with the composer and conductor Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, the violinist and composer Joseph Achron and the composer Ernst Toch. He soon recorded all the four-hand piano music of Mozart with the composer Lukas Foss, who was not quite seven years older than he was.
Mr. Previn with Audrey Hepburn in 1963. He was the conductor and music supervisor for the film version of “My Fair Lady,” which starred Ms. Hepburn.CreditAssociated Press
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Mr. Previn with Audrey Hepburn in 1963. He was the conductor and music supervisor for the film version of “My Fair Lady,” which starred Ms. Hepburn.CreditAssociated Press
Mr. Previn became an American citizen in 1943, and in 1950 he was drafted into the Army and served with the Sixth Army Band. He also studied conducting in San Francisco with Pierre Monteux, whom he later followed at the London Symphony.
A relative worked in the music department at Universal Studios, and Mr. Previn wrote music for movies even before he went into the Army. As a senior in high school, he was called in to help with “Holiday in Mexico,” an MGM musical that starred Walter Pidgeon and in which Fidel Castro was an extra. The script called for the concert pianist Jose Iturbi to play some jazz, but he was uncomfortable improvising and wanted a score to read. Mr. Previn went to a jam session, listened and wrote out a piano part for Mr. Iturbi to play when the cameras rolled.
MGM took notice and hired Mr. Previn to compose and conduct the music for “The Sun Comes Up,” starring Lassie and the once-illustrious actress Jeanette MacDonald, who was allergic to dogs. “Go figure that billing,” he once said.
Years after its premiere in 1949, he gave the movie a thumbs-down: “Like all Lassie pictures, there was hardly any dialogue, but a lot of barking. I thought it was easy, but I have since put myself through the wringer of watching it on a television rerun, and it’s the most inept score you ever heard.”
But front-office executives realized that Mr. Previn could handle the deadlines that went with studio work, and they put him on what he called “an endless stream of cheap, fast movies.”
Mr. Previn with the actress Mia Farrow, his wife at the time, and their twin sons, Matthew and Sascha, in London in 1971.CreditGeorge Stroud/Daily Express, via Getty Images
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Mr. Previn with the actress Mia Farrow, his wife at the time, and their twin sons, Matthew and Sascha, in London in 1971.CreditGeorge Stroud/Daily Express, via Getty Images
Not all his assignments fit that description. He collected Oscars for scoring “Gigi” (1959), “Porgy and Bess” (1960), “Irma La Douce” (1964) and “My Fair Lady” (1965). He did not write famous songs like “Summertime” and “I Could Have Danced All Night” — he arranged and orchestrated them, creating the versions heard on the soundtracks.
Like Bernstein, he also tried Broadway. With Allan Jay Lerner, he wrote “Coco,” a musical about the designer Coco Chanel that starred Katharine Hepburn and ran for 329 performances in 1969 and 1970. He also wrote the music for “The Good Companions,” a musical with lyrics by Johnny Mercer that ran for 252 performances in London in 1974.
Presence on the Podium
Also like Bernstein, he was a crowd-pleaser as a conductor. Five years after his surprise appointment in London, the British magazine New Statesman complained that he had given the orchestra “a strong American accent: the big-screen sound, rich, loud and brilliant.” But it said his programs on the BBC — which prefigured by a few years the American public-television series “Previn and the Pittsburgh,” broadcast when he was the music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony — had “clearly widened his box-office appeal.”
“Whereas Boulez looks boring and Boult looks bored,” the magazine said, referring to the prominent conductors Pierre Boulez and Adrian Boult, “Previn always seems to be enjoying himself.”
He remained principal conductor of the London Symphony until 1979 and was also the principal conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from 1965 to 1988. In the United States, he held the Pittsburgh job from 1976 to 1984 and became music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1985.
Mr. Previn at a book-signing event in London in 1979. He had recently published “Orchestra,” written with Michael Foss, about the life of musicians in both Britain and the United States.CreditKeystone/Getty Image
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Mr. Previn at a book-signing event in London in 1979. He had recently published “Orchestra,” written with Michael Foss, about the life of musicians in both Britain and the United States.CreditKeystone/Getty Image
He resigned in 1989, complaining that the orchestra’s managing director, Ernest Fleischmann, had maneuvered to bring in Esa-Pekka Salonen as his successor. “It has become obvious to me that there is no room for a music director,” Mr. Previn said when he quit. Mr. Salonen was named music director-designate a few months later.
An Operatic Turn
As he approached 70, Mr. Previn turned to opera, writing “A Streetcar Named Desire” to a libretto by Philip Littell based on the Tennessee Williams play. Renée Fleming sang the role of Blanche DuBois in the premiere with the San Francisco Opera in 1998, with Mr. Previn on the podium. Bernard Holland, reviewing the performance for The New York Times, wrote that “it sings very well.”
“There are angry clashes of harmony and key, many Straussian gestures, sweet-as-honey popular melody and the kinds of corporate noodling and mumbling among the strings native to a Ligeti or a Penderecki,” Mr. Holland said.
A recording with the San Francisco cast won the Grand Prix du Disque. Mr. Previn also won a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2010. He also won 10 competitive Grammys between 1958 and 2004, divided evenly between classical and nonclassical categories.
His other opera was “Brief Encounter” (2007), with a libretto by John Caird based on Noël Coward’s screenplay for the 1945 David Lean film by that name.
Mr. Previn conducting the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance at Carnegie Hall in 2005.CreditJennifer Taylor for The New York Times
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Mr. Previn conducting the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra in a performance at Carnegie Hall in 2005.CreditJennifer Taylor for The New York Times
But toward the end of his life, Mr. Previn seemed surprised at the interest in his compositions. ”I wrote a string quartet that I very diffidently mentioned to the Emerson Quartet,” he told the critic David Patrick Stearns in 2017. “And they said, ‘Where is it?’ I’m not used to that.”
In 2017, Ms. Fleming gave several performances of a song cycle he wrote, “Lyrical Yeats.” “These brief songs display Mr. Previn’s keen ear for the telling detail, for musical gestures that set a mood or conjure an image,” Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote in The Times when Ms. Fleming sang them in a solo recital at Carnegie Hall recital.
In 2018, Ms. Mutter played “The Fifth Season,” which she and Carnegie Hall had commissioned. She described it as “rather lighthearted.” “The Fifth Season” was “not a sonata,” she said, “but a one-movement work with jazz and Gypsy-like rhythmical elements — which starts with a fully improvisational cadenza.”
This year, Tanglewood had planned several events to celebrate Mr. Previn after he turned 90, including a performance with Ms. Mutter of the violin concerto and, with Ms. Fleming and the Emerson quartet, the premiere of “Penelope,” by Mr. Previn and the playwright Tom Stoppard.
Mr. Previn wrote several books, including “Orchestra” (1979), a depiction of the lives of orchestral musicians, and a memoir of his movie experiences, “No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood” (1991).
Mr Previn in 1998. Leonard Bernstein, he said, “made it possible not to specialize in one area of music. You no longer have to do just Broadway shows, or movies, or conduct — you can do any or all of them.”CreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times
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Mr Previn in 1998. Leonard Bernstein, he said, “made it possible not to specialize in one area of music. You no longer have to do just Broadway shows, or movies, or conduct — you can do any or all of them.”CreditOzier Muhammad/The New York Times
Mr. Previn’s first wife, Betty Bennett, was a singer he had seen in San Francisco jazz clubs. They had two daughters, Claudia and Alicia, and divorced in 1958.
His second marriage was to Dory Langan, an MGM lyricist, who, after they separated, recorded several albums as a singer-songwriter under the name Dory Previn, many of them reflections on their breakup and its aftermath. They had a daughter, Lovely Previn, who became a violinist in the Irish band In Tua Nua. Dory Previn died in 2012.
Their divorce in 1970 was prompted by a well-publicized affair Mr. Previn had with the actress Mia Farrow, who had been a friend of hers. Eventually Ms. Farrow left her husband, Frank Sinatra, and married Mr. Previn. They had three children, Matthew and Sascha, who were twins, and Fletcher. They also adopted Summer Song, known as Daisy, and Soon-Yi, who married Woody Allen in 1997.
Mr. Previn’s fourth wife was Heather Haines Sneddon. They had a son, Lukas, in 1984, and divorced in 1999, the year he wrote the violin concerto for Ms. Mutter. They married in 2002 and divorced in 2006 but continued to perform together.
“You know how people say that their marriage didn’t work?” he said in 2017. “With us, the divorce didn’t work. We call each other every day regardless of where we are. Maybe she’s in China and I’m in Cincinnati, but we find each other. It’s like being very best friends who have a romantic history.”
Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Previn seemed puzzled that critics continued to mention his Hollywood past long after he had begun focusing mostly on classical music. “I haven’t done anything else since the mid-’60s,” he told The Times in 1991. “I think there’s a statute of limitations here.
“When I go to Tanglewood to teach, the kids don’t know I ever did anything else. Sometimes they see a movie on the late, late show, and they say, ‘Who is that?’ And then I have to confess that the man who manufactured harp glissandos for Esther Williams to dive to was actually me.”
Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
 

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André Previn in a 1979 photograph taken in London. Previn died February 28, 2019 in Manhattan, at the age of 89. Keystone/Keystone/Getty Images hide caption
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André Previn in a 1979 photograph taken in London. Previn died February 28, 2019 in Manhattan, at the age of 89.
Keystone/Keystone/Getty Images
André Previn, a celebrated musical polymath, died Thursday morning; he was a composer of Oscar-winning film music, conductor, pianist and music director of major orchestras. His manager, Linda Petrikova, confirmed to NPR that he died at his home in Manhattan.
Previn wrote a tune in the 1950s. In the vernacular of the day, he called it “Like Young.” His Hollywood friend, the great lyricist Ira Gershwin, was critical. “Don’t you know it should be “As Young?” asked Gershwin. Previn loved that story — from his jazz side.
Tim Page, a Pulitzer-prize-winning former music critic and professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California, says that jazz was just one side of the multi-talented artist. “He really seriously distinguished himself in a lot of different fields. He was not one of these people who came in and shook up one field forever and ever,” Page notes.
Previn began his musical life “like young.” Born in Berlin on April 6, 1929, as Andreas Ludwig Priwin, he grew up in Los Angeles. His family fled Germany in 1938 and first moved to Paris, and then New York, before landing in Hollywood. As a wunderkind teenager, he played piano at the Rhapsody Theatre, improvising scores at silent film screenings.
“There was one of those huge silent epics which kept vacillating allegorically between Biblical times and the Roaring Twenties, and so I really had to pay attention,” Previn told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 1991. “But I noticed that each time they switched venues, as it were, it would stay there for a while. So we came out of a Biblical time and back into people Charleston-ing their life away. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m safe for a few minutes.’ And so I started playing ‘Tiger Rag,’ and I heard a commotion in the audience, and the manager was storming down the aisle. And I took a quick look up on the screen — and I was playing ‘Tiger Rag’ to the Crucifixion, which was a bad choice. And I was out on the pavement about three minutes later.”
When he was 16, in 1944, MGM hired Previn to work on scores for talking films. His book No Major Chords is full of stories about those Hollywood years. Page remembers one about the notoriously difficult Cleveland Orchestra conductor George Szell, who wanted to see how Previn would play with the orchestra.
There was no piano at hand. So, in Page’s recounting, Szell said: “Play it on that table top.”
Ridiculous, thought Previn. But he went ahead. Then Szell started giving directions: “‘Slower. Faster. More tender.’ It went on and on like this,” says Page. “And finally Previn had had enough, and said, ‘I’m sorry, Maestro. My tabletop at home has a much different action.’ “
George Szell threw him out. Previn went back to making music on real instruments — and writing it, too. He composed chamber music, concertos and operas, including his 1998 setting of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire.
Streetcar premiered in San Francisco, with soprano Renée Fleming playing Blanche DuBois. The composer once told NPR’s Robert Siegel on All Things Considered how he readied for responses to his new work.
“Well, I prepared myself by rereading the reviews, for instance, of the opening of Carmen,” Previn said to Siegel, referring to the infamous debut of Bizet’s now-classic opera.
“That was a disaster, apparently. A flop.” responded Siegel.
“Oh, yeah. Total,” Previn admitted.
(European critics liked Streetcar; U.S. reaction was mixed.)
André Previn served as music director of the Houston and Pittsburgh Symphonies and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, as well as principal conductor of the London Symphony and Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, and appeared as a frequent guest conductor worldwide. Page says Previn could be counted on for strong performances from any podium. But that long list of Previn-led orchestras does tell you something about the conductor.
“I guess it says a couple of things,” Page observes. “Number one, it suggests that he was very interested in performing around the world, and he worked with some very fine orchestras. On the other hand, there was never that huge sort of connection with one orchestra that, say, we have with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, and George Szell and Cleveland.”
Commitment problems, perhaps? Not only did Previn not make any married-for-life arrangements with any orchestras, but he went through five marriages. His ex-wives were jazz singer Betty Bennett, who sang with big bands including those of Stan Kenton, Woody Herman and Benny Goodman; the singer-songwriter Dory Previn, with whom he co-wrote the theme to the 1967 film The Valley of the Dolls; actress Mia Farrow; Heather Sneddon, to whom he remained married for 20 years; and finally one of the world’s most renowned concert violinists, Anne-Sophie Mutter, for whom he wrote his first violin concerto, which he named “Anne-Sophie.” (They divorced in 2006.)
Previn won four Oscars for his film work, including his adaptation of the score for the movie version of My Fair Lady. He also won 10 Grammy Awards for his film, jazz and classical recordings, as well as a Lifetime Achievement prize in 2009; he was also awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1998. This versatile, gifted musician was so multi-talented. But Page argues that his best work was far removed from the concert stage.
“As good as some of his high-classical music was,” Page says, “I’m not sure he ever did any better work than he did as a jazz pianist and writing for film. And there’s no disgrace in that whatsoever — I think [it’s] really good jazz piano. And he was so musical, and so lyrical and so inventive — it’s a real accomplishment.”
 

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Today’s encore selection — from Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York by Luc Sante.
A theater in the seedy Bowery district of New York introduces the hook:
“By the [1890s], the major venue [in the Bowery] was Miner’s theater, home to such nascent legends as the young dialect comedy duo Weber and Fields … and the Four Cohans, from which young George M. eventually graduated. …
“What made Miner’s absolutely unique for a time, however, was Amateur Night, held on alternate Fridays. … A 1905 account outlines a typical night’s fare: a juggler, buck-and-wing dancers, a blackface comedian in a red plaid suit, a clay modeler (incredibly, arts-and-crafts demonstrations carried off with a certain amount of panache and speed went over with the roughest crowds), a quartet of singing newsboys. As entertaining as the acts on stage might be, people often came to amateur nights at Miner’s to take in the audience reaction, which could be brutal. …

“Since the procession of semi-talented and utterly untalented hopefuls could be painful, not to mention boring, an enterprising stage manager at Miner’s came up with a way of policing the lengths of unsuccessful acts: the hook. The first one apparently was a stage-prop shepherd’s crook lashed to a pole. Before long, hooks were being manufactured. The hook appeared in theaters all over the world, entered the language … Back at Miner’s, ‘Give ‘im the hook’ took barely twenty-four hours to establish itself as the crowd’s favorite line. Soon it was a cliche, and stage managers were kept busy hatching entertaining alternatives: dousing performers with selzer from spray bottles, carrying them out on stretchers manned by burly stage hands.”

Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
Author: Luc Sante
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright 1991 by Luc Sante
Pages: 92-93

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The jazz critic and historian Ira Gitler, right, with the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon in the early 1980s. “Musicians respected him,” a colleague said of Mr. Gitler. “They considered him one of the tribe.”CreditMary Jo Gitler

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The jazz critic and historian Ira Gitler, right, with the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon in the early 1980s. “Musicians respected him,” a colleague said of Mr. Gitler. “They considered him one of the tribe.”CreditCreditMary Jo Gitler
Ira Gitler, who was one of the most respected and prolific jazz writers of the postwar era and an early champion of bebop, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 90.
His son, Fitz, confirmed the death, at a nursing facility.
Mr. Gitler’s criticism appeared regularly in publications like DownBeat and JazzTimes. He wrote two books about bebop, the challenging form of modern jazz that emerged in the 1940s. And, along with Leonard Feather and Nat Hentoff, he was among the most prodigious writers of liner notes, annotating more than 700 albums.
In 2017 he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.
“He had a terrific ear, and could not be fooled by reputation, no matter how,” the jazz writer Gary Giddins said in an email. “Musicians respected him; they considered him one of the tribe. You can’t say that about a lot of critics.”
Mr. Gitler’s immersion in modern jazz led him to a job with the jazz label Prestige Records in 1950. He packed and unpacked 78s, did promotional work and swept the floors. More important, he wrote his first liner notes, in 1951, for “Swingin’ With Zoot Sims,” and later that year produced his first recording session, for the saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
In 1953, he produced a memorable session with Miles Davis on trumpet and Charlie Parker and Mr. Rollins on saxophones. It was, he recalled, a difficult afternoon: Davis was late and, while the group waited, Parker drank nearly a bottle of gin in two large gulps and dozed off. After Davis’s arrival, Mr. Gitler told him, in profane terms, that he was not playing well.
“Maybe he wanted to leave — I think he was bluffing — but he started packing up his horn,” Mr. Gitler said in a 2009 video interview with the filmmaker Bret Primack. “I said I didn’t mean anything, that I was trying to get him going.”
Davis stayed, and the session proceeded. They recorded three songs, finishing with the Thelonious Monk ballad “ ’Round Midnight,” which Mr. Gitler felt would be less taxing on Davis.
“It turned out to be kind of somber,” Mr. Gitler said. “It had the feeling of that day, and to me it was a masterpiece.” The tune became a staple of Davis’s repertoire.
Mr. Gitler, an amateur saxophonist, called Prestige his finishing school, and his experience there informed the rest of his career. His knowledge of jazz — acquired by going to nightclubs, attending recording sessions and hanging out with musicians — made him an erudite figure in the field. He was an early supporter of musicians like the tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, who spent many years in Europe and out of the American limelight before experiencing a career resurgence in the 1970s.
Mr. Gitler was born on Dec. 18, 1928, in Brooklyn to parents who had immigrated from Russia. His father, Samuel, was a furrier, and his mother, Frances (Goldberg) Gitler, was a homemaker.
At age 5, Ira started taking piano lessons; soon after, he was introduced to swing music by his brother, Monroe, who was 12 years older. Together they listened to big bands on the radio and to records by Count Basie and Benny Goodman. In 1940, Ira tagged along with his brother and a date to see Jimmie Lunceford and his band at the Strand Theater in Brooklyn.
As a teenager, he traveled to nightclubs in Manhattan and first heard bebop live. Writing in 1946 for the Columbia Grammar School newspaper, he reviewed the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s electric performance at the Spotlite Club on West 52nd Street. He later recalled their brief first meeting.
Mr. Gitler in 1994.CreditDavid Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images
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Mr. Gitler in 1994.CreditDavid Redfern/Redferns, via Getty Images
“When Dizzy passed my table after his set,” he wrote, “I greeted him familiarly (even though I had never been in his presence) and asked him when he was going to record again. ‘We recorded today,’ he answered with a twinkle in his high-pitched, slightly sandpapery voice.”
While attending the University of Missouri, Mr. Gitler spent time in jazz clubs in St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo., and Chicago and, during summer vacations, on 52nd Street and in Harlem. He dropped out of college before graduating and joined Prestige.
In the mid-1950s he left the label to pursue freelance writing — the only jobs he held after that were two stints as an editor at DownBeat, between 1963 and 1970 — and quickly distinguished himself. In his notes for John Coltrane’s album “Soultrane” (1958), Mr. Gitler coined the enduring phrase “sheets of sound” to describe that saxophonist’s intense arpeggio runs.
“The image I had in my head,” Mr. Gitler told the website All About Jazz in 2009, “were bolts of cloth undulating as they unfurled. Coltrane never said anything about the term. He never referred to it when I saw him, and I didn’t ask him about it.”
Mr. Giddins said that Mr. Gitler’s liner notes had helped cement his reputation. “Those notes are as much a part of those albums as the sequencing of tracks and the cover art,” he said.
Mr. Gitler had a close association with Mr. Feather, the longtime jazz critic for The Los Angeles Times. He was an assistant on Mr. Feather’s “The New Encyclopedia of Jazz” (1960), and he completed “The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz” (1999) after Mr. Feather’s death in 1994 and was credited as co-author.
On his own, Mr. Gitler wrote “Jazz Masters of the 40s” (1966) and “Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s” (1985).
As passionate as Mr. Gitler was about jazz, he was equally passionate about another pursuit: ice hockey. He played for and coached an amateur-league team, Gitler’s Gorillas, and wrote “Blood on the Ice: Hockey’s Most Violent Moments” (1974). He also wrote for the program sold to fans at Ranger games at Madison Square Garden.
Stan Fischler, a longtime hockey writer and commentator and a friend of Mr. Gitler’s, recalled on Twitter that a high point of Mr. Gitler’s avocation was playing defense on a fantasy hockey team in 1984 in Lake Placid, N.Y., with the Hall of Famers Gordie Howe and Bill Gadsby.
Mr. Fischler wrote that Gadsby, also a defenseman, was worried that Mr. Gitler would not be able to help hold their team’s one-goal lead when he skated onto the ice in the final minute of the game. “As Bill skated past Ira,” he wrote, “Gadsby stopped, leaned over and uttered the deathless words: ‘Ira, just get in the way!’ ” The lead held.
In addition to his son, Mr. Gitler is survived by his wife, Mary Jo (Schwalbach) Gitler, an artist, and two grandchildren.
For all the musicians Mr. Gitler wrote about, Parker and Gillespie made the strongest impressions on him.
“He said that Bird was one half of his heart,” Fitz Gitler said in an interview, “and Dizzy was the other half.”
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 28, 2019, on Page A28 of the New York edition with the headline: Ira Gitler, 90, Jazz Historian and Critic With ‘Terrific Ear’ That Was Impartial. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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In February 1998, an atmospheric indie rock band from San Jose, California, released their debut album, Stratosphere, on the Seattle independent label Up. The primary members of the band were Clay Parton and Canaan Dove Amber, both of whom sang and played guitars, bass, keyboards, and drums, and soon they added a regular drummer, Jason Albertini. Duster’s music moved slowly and referenced interstellar travel. The “meaning” of their music was found in their sound, rather than in the lyrics of their songs, which were often hard to make out. A guitar chime or synth cloud or processed vocal might bring to mind the image of a lone astronaut drifting through the vacuum of the cosmos, conveying a druggy isolation that could feel blissful one moment and freighted with anxiety the next. It was music for dark spaces and closed eyelids, deeply psychedelic but without sprawl, ambient music with a serrated edge of punk.
Other records released in the first two months of 1998, which Duster would have been competing against for record-store rack space, included Air’s Moon Safari and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Duster’s label-mates, Modest Mouse, had recently released their breakthrough second album, The Lonesome Crowded West, and they’d been touring relentlessly in late ’97 and early ’98, building an audience for their mix of fractured indie rock patched with the introspection of emo. Early in February, a review of the new Modest Mouse record appeared in Rolling Stone—three and a half stars—and it compared singer Isaac Brock to the novelist Richard Ford, another writer known for dramatic tales set in wide-open Western spaces. You could tell that Modest Mouse were going places.
Duster, in comparison, were not. They were another tiny indie band in an endless sea of tiny indie bands. Information still traveled slowly in 1998—just 40 percent of the U.S. population was online—and what little was written about the band barely traveled at all. They put out an EP in 1999 and then a final full-length, Contemporary Movement, in 2000. Like many thousands of musicians before them, Duster’s members moved on to other projects and formed new bands.
For most groups, that’s typically where the story would end. The CDs get ripped and tossed and then the hard drives fail and then, a few years later, maybe, the handful of people who enjoyed the music the first time around revisit it on a streaming service. But in the years after their dissolution, Duster began to accrue some interest. In the past 10 years, bands like My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive were able to return after decades-long layoffs and play to crowds much bigger than they ever did while they were first active. But these bands at least had a starting point, a scene with which they were identified. They had already been canonized. Duster’s cult basically grew from nothing, in places where people obsess over music online—message boards, Reddit, YouTube comment sections, Rateyourmusic.com. Duster are not, were not, and never will be, a “big” band. But the intensity of their fandom, and the shadow of their influence, is remarkable, and serves as a good case study for measuring how some artists are rediscovered while others are forgotten completely.
I wrote about Duster’s records when they were first released, for the then-new webzine Pitchfork. I put on their music with some regularity over the years, and mentioned it in passing to other music fans now and then. No one I talked to seemed to remember them. I got an inkling that something was up with Duster only in the past three years when, purely as a way to satisfy my data obsession, I scanned my record collection into the online database Discogs. Launched in late 2000, Discogs is both a source of information about physical music media and an online marketplace, and the site’s growth in the past decade has closely tracked the steady increase in the sales of vinyl records. Launched in late 2000 by Portland-based music fan Kevin Lewandowski, Discogs initially grew out of his desire to collect information about his favorite electronic music producers. It was an early example of wiki-like collaboration, as anyone could submit data about the records in their collection and the accuracy of the information was voted on by the site’s users. Two years later, Discogs became a hub for connecting buyers and sellers, with the site taking a percentage of each sale. Over time, it became not just a place to buy and sell records—eBay and the Amazon Marketplace also have a long history in this space—but also for seeing what the people who still care about physical media are interested in.
On each individual release page, you can see how many people and shops have that record in their collection, how many people want the record, and what the record has recently sold for—a high, low, and median price. Looking at my collection after I’d entered it (I chipped away at the project over the course of a year), I noticed that the Duster records I owned—the 1975 EP, an LP from a side project, and two 7-inch singles—were among my most valuable records. That side project album, released under the name Valium Aggelein, routinely traded hands via Discogs for $250 or more. The debut, Stratosphere, sometimes went for $400-plus. How did this happen? The Have/Want ratio of these records, with 150 or so circulating on Discogs and 1,300 or more people who wanted a copy at any given time, underscored raw capitalism at work. Supply and demand. Even CD copies were trading for serious coin—$78 is the median price for a CD of Stratosphere as I write this. The original promo CD in a cardboard sleeve, which I was mailed back in the day and have long since discarded, sold for $60 recently.
Streaming media is limitless. Licenses come and go and songs can disappear from a given service, but the music never runs out. If you pay your monthly fee, you can listen to a given album as many times as you like. The supply is infinite by design, so play counts reflect awareness and individual desire but not scarcity. A live show, of course, is limited by venue capacity, so the relative success of a given concert is not just based on whether it sells out, but on how many tickets are on offer.
Used records work differently, because the supply is fixed. For a given release, X number of copies exist in the world, and Y, a subset of X, is the number of copies that might be available in the marketplace. The “Want” and “Have” listings at Discogs represent some fraction of the total number of copies of a given record in circulation, since most people don’t bother to put their collections on the site. Many independent record stores, on the other hand, do have a presence on Discogs and sell records that way, in addition to through their physical stores. Because of this, as any record collector can tell you, prices for used vinyl have become standardized—an out-of-the-way shop run by an owner with less knowledge of a given record’s value still has access to Discogs, so there just aren’t as many vastly underpriced rarities as there used to be.
Taken together, between the more serious collectors, the individual sellers, and the record stores selling online, Discogs offers a useful snapshot of what’s out there, who has a given release, and who wants it. We’re in a new era because everyone wondering about the relative interest in an artist, a song, or an album is looking at the same numbers. And because on Discogs these lists and selling prices are in the open for anyone to see, it becomes a way to gauge desire, to monitor records that go in and out of fashion. So if, like me, you own an original copy of Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady, you can look at the prices on offer and see the amounts tick up a few dollars when Pete Shelley dies. It’s happening in real time. Because the thing about those Buzzcocks records, and the Duster catalog, is they’re not making any more of them—at least, that is, until the reissue labels step in.
Earlier this year, Chicago’s Numero Group announced Capsule Losing Contact, a box set containing Duster’s complete works along with some unreleased rarities. The label was founded in 2003 with the express purpose of salvaging forgotten music from oblivion, and they first made their mark with their series Eccentric Soul, which focused on local soul and R&B scenes and now-forgotten labels. Released like Light: On the South Side, a wide-ranging look at Chicago soul, and Ork Records: New York, New York, which focused on an early punk and new wave label, were nominated for Grammys, and have set a standard in the reissue world for obsessive focus and care. In the past few years, Numero has added to their offerings comprehensive sets documenting bands that would seem to be a world away from geographically isolated soul scenes of the 1960s and ’70s. Their 200 series spotlights indie rock acts from the ’80s and ’90s, with hefty boxes focusing on Codeine, Bedhead, Unwound, Hüsker Dü, Blonde Redhead, and, now, Duster.
Numero’s interest in Duster extends far beyond the relative demand for their records—Ken Shipley, one of the label’s founders, is from San Jose, and knew the band from when they shared a hometown. Adam Luksetich, the Numero employee who oversaw the Duster set, told me that the idea of a Duster box had been discussed in the office for several years, and that it took some time to bring the members of the group around on the idea. When word started to spread about new Duster activity last year—the band set up an Instagram account, and mentioned that they were recording—response from fans took the label by surprise. “Any time we would tease doing Duster, it would set off a frenzy,” says Luksetich. “It was obvious early on that this project was going to be bigger than we thought.” After seeing the online reaction, Numero increased the run of the printing from a more typical 2,000 sets to 3,000.
Purely by owning some records by Duster and realizing that I could sell a 7-inch single for $90, I knew that there was a certain amount of demand out there, but the situation is more complicated for an imprint actually thinking of reissuing the music. I spoke to Luksetich, Matt Sullivan, founder of the label Light in the Attic, and Cameron Schaefer, head of Music & Brand of the subscription imprint and reissue label Vinyl Me, Please, to get a sense of how they find records to reissue and the tools they use to help them understand the marketplace. All three made clear that they looked at Discogs, YouTube, and Spotify on a daily basis to understand what is being bought, sold, and streamed, but all were equally adamant that numbers are only part of the picture, and that the urge to press records and introduce people to something that may have been overlooked is ultimately an extension of their own passion for music. To that end, the most important source of information for what obscure music might benefit from a physical reissue are the conversations they have with other record collectors and people they work with. Still, there’s no getting around the reality that pressing records is an expensive risk, and an understanding of the demand for a given title is essential before taking that leap.
In 2017, Light in the Attic reissued guitarist Link Wray’s self-titled 1971 debut, a record prized by collectors. “When we do release something like that Link Wray record, you can go to Discogs and see that it hasn’t been in print in a decade, and is going for more money than it used to, so that’s helpful,” Sullivan told me. “But we’re not going to be the label that simply looks at Discogs, sees a record going for $200, and puts it out.” Light in the Attic, like Numero, has been around for quite a while. They started in 2002, still the doldrums as far as vinyl sales were concerned. Like virtually everyone in the record business, Sullivan sees the current market for physical product as oversaturated.
Major labels are in the process of assessing their own catalogs to see which potential reissues might capitalize on the resurgence of interest in vinyl. In late 2017, Universal Music Group launched Urban Legends, an “editorial content site and ecommerce platform” that has issued deluxe editions of the company’s rap and R&B catalog, including releases by Slick Rick, Gang Starr, and Tupac. Sometimes, according to Schaefer of Vinyl Me, Please, which has put out records that weren’t initially on vinyl by major label artists like Fiona Apple and Juvenile, conversations with the record behemoths can be a balancing act. “You have to do this thing, where you convince a major label that it’s not worth it for them to do it but it is worth it for you to do it. It’s a funny dance that’s been going on in the last five or six years.” In every case, the motivation for understanding the demand is obvious. “We start with three questions,” Schaefer tells me. “Do I want to own this? Can I tell a story about it? And is there a demand?” Sullivan puts it this way: “The last thing you want to do is print 3,000 records, sell 500, and throw 2,500 of them away a few years later.”
Putting Duster’s music back into the world involved crunching numbers, but the precise figures are all relative. As part of the reissue campaign, Duster have reunited and are playing shows, and I’ve heard from Luksetich and others that the crowds have been surprisingly young. Last year, Stereogum published a piece outlining how Duster became a touchstone for young bands like Girlpool, Hovvdy, and others, groups whose members would have been in elementary school when Duster shut down. You can’t help but wonder, “Why this band?” A quick glance at Up’s roster from when Duster finished their run is filled with bands that truly have been forgotten, unless there are cults for Violent Green, Satisfact, and Mike Johnson that I’m unaware of (Johnson’s 1998 album I Feel Alright is very good, by the way).
The internet is so vast and information spreads so widely, it’s easy to forget that so much of it routinely disappears. And the years between roughly 1997 and 2002, when Duster were active, are something of a black hole for information on under-the-radar music. The handoff to the digital era was complicated and fumbling, and a lot of music fell through the cracks.
MTV’s 120 Minutes, which offered glimpses of the underground since its 1986 inception, was off the air by 2000. Record guides, which serious music fans over the previous two decades had regularly turned to in order to see what was good, relevant, and available, were no longer being published. The Spin Alternative Record Guide appeared in 1995, the final Trouser Press record guide, the Trouser Press Guide to 90s Rock, appeared in 1997, and Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide: Albums of the ’90s, his last book-length record guide, came out in October 2000. (Christgau’s website, which gathers the contents of this guide and all his others, was still a few years away at that point). Rolling Stone would issue one final Album Guide in 2004, but it immediately felt like an anachronism.
The idea of compulsively documenting what was happening in music in print was falling out of favor—replaced, we assumed, by the internet. But the internet during those years was ill-equipped for the job, and was surprisingly ephemeral. Pitchfork, where I wrote and later worked as an editor, was doing its part to map what was happening, but by 2008, much of the site’s pre-1999 content was no longer available, for reasons having to do with both its quality and the inevitable degradation of data across redesigns and format changes. (The Allmusic Guide, it should be said, has through all these shifts been the exception that proves the rule, and it’s not unusual to find an Allmusic review for a given release that is the only piece of writing online for a given record.)
File sharing, which exploded with Napster in 1999, was a chaotic space where competing services—Audiogalaxy, Limewire, SoulSeek—would pop up and then disappear, and the meticulously organized private networks of torrents were still a few years away. By 2003 and 2004, mp3 blogs and Myspace would step into the breach, and when YouTube launched in 2005, suddenly there was a place accessible to all, that showed up in Google search results, to store and share obscure music, sometimes permanently (a space that was inconsistent about compensating rights holders, to say the least).
Reddit, which also debuted in 2005, was the message board that would never go away, and the conversations happening there could be indexed and then discovered by future generations. We’re now in the process of moving these conversations and commentary to social media, which presents a new set of difficulties. But that turn-of-the-millennium black hole was a true in-between space for media, one into which we could imagine Duster slipping, never to be heard from again. Up, Duster’s label, shifted dramatically after the 2000 death of founder Chris Takino, and would soon stop issuing new records altogether.
But Duster had a few things going for them that made the band irresistible to young people discovering indie rock online. Even while they were active, there was an air of mystery around the band. There weren’t many pictures of them in circulation, and their record sleeves tended to be light on information. (Numero’s box set reissue will honor this fact by not including the wealth of documentation that typically graces its releases.) The audience for the kind of music they made, spacey psych-rock, tends to prize rarity, so the fact that there was little information about them available and physical copies of their record were hard to come by may have actually helped build their mystique. And like some bands that outlasted obscurity before them—Galaxie 500 comes to mind—they had a compact discography, and never released a record that was less than good. Bands that stick around tend to change, and eventually, and inevitably, lose some people along the way. In some cases, if the later music is of lesser quality, it can prevent fans from seeking out the rest of their catalog. Duster had a distinctive sound that varied very little from one release to the next—they made some music, played some shows, and then they were gone.
And now they’re back, reminding us how human memory is becoming dependent on and intertwined with a steadily decaying digital archive, and what happens when a collective memory gets set aside and blurred and then comes flashing back to life. Duster were remembered fondly by the few who heard them at the time, but the physical reissue of their catalog in 2019 owes everything to the younger people who discovered them later.
History didn’t seem to want them, so that meant that a group of people who heard something special in those heavenly guitar tones were able to claim them as their own. And it sparks the imagination and makes you wonder what else might be out there, what half-remembered scraps of culture are floating in the digital ether, waiting to be rediscovered and find someone who needs them. Sometimes it happens. Against the odds, Duster’s earliest transmissions remained faintly audible, a quiet sound at first that eventually became a small roar.
Mark Richardson, the former executive editor of Pitchfork, is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.
 

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Ethel Ennis with Louis Armstrong at Morgan State University in Baltimore 1958. At the height of her career, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, she also performed with Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington.CreditBaltimore Sun

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Ethel Ennis with Louis Armstrong at Morgan State University in Baltimore 1958. At the height of her career, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, she also performed with Benny Goodman, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Duke Ellington.CreditCreditBaltimore Sun
Ethel Ennis was in bed one night in the mid-1950s when Billie Holiday called.
Ms. Ennis was in her mid-20s at the time, a jazz vocalist on the rise and, like Holiday, a product of Baltimore. At first she figured it was a prank call. But she quickly recognized Holiday’s dusty voice.
“You have a great voice; you don’t fake it,” she later remembered Holiday saying. “Keep it up and you’ll be famous.”
Ms. Ennis soon fulfilled Holiday’s prophecy — but only for a short time. She recorded for major labels in the late 1950s and the ’60s; toured Europe with Benny Goodman; performed onstage alongside Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong; and appeared on television with Duke Ellington. She became a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s TV show and headlined the Newport Jazz Festival. In 1961 she won the Playboy jazz poll for best female singer.
But she soon grew disillusioned with the demands placed on young divas, and she eschewed national celebrity for a quieter life in her hometown. She became a beloved performer and jazz advocate there, earning the unofficial title of Baltimore’s “First Lady of Jazz.”
“They had it all planned out for me,” she told The Washington Post in 1979, referring to the music executives in charge of her career. “I’d ask, ‘When do I sing?’ and they’d say, ‘Shut up and have a drink. You should sit like this and look like that and play the game of bed partners.’ You really had to do things that go against your grain for gain. I wouldn’t.”
She added: “I want to do it my way. I have no regrets.”
Ms. Ennis’s performances reflected her convictions. She sang in a sturdy, beaming voice that was quite different from Holiday’s tattered-silk purr.
She drew inspiration from crooners like Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, but her vocals were a touch less stagy, more direct. Her readings of popular songs and standards had as much in common with Etta James’s effulgent soul singing as with Fitzgerald’s elegant diction.
Ms. Ennis died on Feb. 17 at her home in Baltimore at 86. Gary Ellerbe, a Baltimore radio host and friend of Ms. Ennis’s, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
She is survived by her husband, Earl Arnett, and her younger brother, the saxophonist Andy Ennis, who played in Ray Charles’s band for 10 years before settling down, like her, in Baltimore. A previous marriage ended in divorce.
Ethel Ennis in a publicity photo taken in 1958.CreditBaltimore Sun

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Ethel Ennis in a publicity photo taken in 1958.CreditBaltimore Sun
Ethel Llewellyn Ennis was born in Baltimore on Nov. 28, 1932, and grew up in the Gilmor Homes, a newly constructed public housing project in the West Baltimore neighborhood. She was raised primarily by her mother, Arabell, who played piano and organ in storefront churches, and by her maternal grandmother. Both caretakers were strict Methodists who refused to play jazz and blues in the house. But the music came thumping through the floor from the apartment below, and Ethel grew to love it.
She learned piano and began playing at the Ames United Methodist Church. At age 15, she started playing in nightclubs around town with an otherwise all-male band. When an audience member one night requested a blues song that required a female singer, she stepped up and sang it. It was a turning point.
“I sang and got the applause,” she told The Post. “I said, ‘Oh my,’ because I couldn’t sing that at home.”
Ms. Ennis became a mainstay of the Red Fox, a club on Baltimore’s main black entertainment strip along Pennsylvania Avenue. She was just 22 when she recorded her debut album, “Lullabies for Losers,” featuring the pianist Hank Jones and the drummer Kenny Clarke, for the Jubilee label.
That recording prompted the call from Holiday and a deal with Capitol Records. Ella Fitzgerald soon stated that Ms. Ennis was her favorite young vocalist, and Frank Sinatra called her “my kind of singer.”
Capitol released her album “Change of Scenery” in 1957 and followed it with “Have You Forgotten” a year later. In the mid-’60s Ms. Ennis put out four LPs on RCA. But rather than lean into her stardom, she decided to marry Mr. Arnett in 1967 (violating Maryland’s anti-miscegenation laws) and buy a house in central Baltimore.
She briefly landed back in the spotlight in 1973, when she sang the national anthem at President Richard M. Nixon’s second inaugural. A blizzard of media opportunities followed. Within days, she was invited onto the “Today” show and the nationally syndicated radio program “Monitor.” Her album “The 10 Sides of Ethel Ennis” was rushed into release.
But she continued to focus on the home front. In the 1970s she appeared on a children’s show on Maryland Public Television. From 1984 to 1988 she and Mr. Arnett ran Ethel’s Place, a jazz club in central Baltimore.
In her final decades Ms. Ennis played about a dozen shows a year around the Mid-Atlantic region and released a few albums. She never stopped expanding her repertoire.
“If Women Ruled the World,” released in 1998 on the Savoy Jazz label, found her performing songs by Joan Armatrading, Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman and others.
That album’s final track, “Hey You,” is an original composition with a chorus that amounts to a statement of beliefs:
Hey you, are you doing what you want to do?
Yes you, are you doing what you want to do?
‘Cause life’s a treasure, time’s a measure
So why not to yourself be true?
Correction: Feb. 24, 2019
An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the name of the public housing project in Baltimore where Ms. Ennis grew up. It was the Gilmor Homes, not Gilmore.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 26, 2019, on Page B12 of the New York edition with the headline: Ethel Ennis Dies at 86; Baltimore Jazz Singer Who Eschewed Fame. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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https://thegrio.com/2019/02/25/exclusive-trailer-wynton-marsalis-brings-jazz-pioneer-buddy-boldens-music-to-life-in-bolden/
EXCLUSIVE TRAILER: Wynton Marsalis Brings Jazz Pioneer Buddy Bolden’s music to life in ‘Bolden’

BOLDEN invites you to experience a world fueled by passion, greed and musical genius―in early 1900s New Orleans. Witness the compelling, powerful and tragic journey of Buddy Bolden, the unsung American hero who invented Jazz. With little biographical information known and no found recordings of his music, the film’s narrative comprises of fragmented memories of his past, against the political and social context in which his revolutionary music was conceived. The birth of jazz was the birth of American popular culture from Louis Armstrong to Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, The Fugees and Dr. Dre., Bolden is where it all began.

Bolden toiled on sidewalks and in clubs during a time of encroaching racial oppression. Persevering through the tightening grip of Jim Crow, he was instrumental in synthesizing ragtime, folk and and blues music with his new improvisational style and permeating the freewheeling Storyville section of New Orleans with his sound that still lives on as jazz.

Check out the exclusive sneak peek:

Bolden premieres nationwide on May 3.

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“I probably almost broke down a few times questioning whether or not I was gonna be able to get it done,” Pianist Kris Bowers says of learning Don Shirley’s music for Green Book. Molly Cranna/Courtesy of the artist hide caption
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“I probably almost broke down a few times questioning whether or not I was gonna be able to get it done,” Pianist Kris Bowers says of learning Don Shirley’s music for Green Book.
Molly Cranna/Courtesy of the artist
There are three pianists involved in making the music of the Oscar-nominated film Green Book. The first is Don Shirley, who was popular in the 1950s and 60s, both in person and on vinyl. The second is actor Mahershala Ali, who portrays Shirley in the film but does not play piano. And so, the third pianist is Kris Bowers, who does all the playing for Ali in the film.
Bowers recreated the music Don Shirley played just as Shirley, a jazz and classical virtuoso, played it. But on screen, you’d swear Ali was playing. The actor’s tempo is perfect and his fingers hit all the right keys. Bowers says director Peter Farrelly insisted there be no edits the first time you see Ali at the piano in the film. On screen, the camera starts on Ali’s hands and then slowly pans out to show his full body as he plays.
Before Green Book, Bowers says he had never heard of Don Shirley. Bowers immersed himself in Shirley’s recordings. That made him nervous. “I was pretty scared actually once I listened to it because of how intricate it was, how difficult it was,” Bowers says.

Don Shirley played jazz as if it were classical music. He played it as a fine art. There was no sheet music. But Bowers was no slouch at the piano — he trained at Julliard — so he could transcribe Shirley’s performances then go over them over and over, learning as he listened.
“I probably almost broke down a few times questioning whether or not I was gonna be able to get it done,” he remembers. “I was practicing eight, nine hours a day.”
But why didn’t the filmmakers simply lip sync, or finger sync, Ali to the original Don Shirley LP?
“Those original recordings just have a lower quality to them,” Bowers says. “They’re a little muddier. You would immediately recognize that this must be an old recording that we’re listening to. So we wanted to re-record them so that it could just feel live.”
That means Bowers had to teach Ali to actually appear to be playing. Bowers started with the basics.
“Our first lesson was only supposed to be an hour, and we spent three hours playing this major scale because he was so attentive to detail in a way that I had never really seen before. He just wanted to make sure that he got it as accurately as possible,” Bowers says of Ali.
After the first lesson, the actor could play a major scale with both hands. Bowers and Ali had lessons once a week for three months. By the second month, Ali was playing Shirley’s complicated arrangements. You never hear him playing in the film, but you wouldn’t know that from watching on screen. Bowers says Ali was a great student.
“When he knew that he was shooting a song, the day before, a few days before, he asked me to record video of myself playing through the song so he could watch me over and over and over again,” Bowers says. “After that, before we did the take, we set up a keyboard in his trailer and I would play for him over and over again just so he could sit across from me and watch. Then we were on stage when he was playing, and I was standing off in the wings doing air piano to show him where he should be.”
Kris Bowers Plays Don Shirley Trio’s “Blue Skies”
Ali mastered the choreography of playing so it looked authentic. But when it comes to making the music, its Bowers’ hands viewers see playing the keys. In the edit room, Green Book‘s editors made Bowers hands look darker, similar to Ali’s skin tone, through color correction. Bowers contributed other body parts, too.
“They did a combination of hands,” he says. “Sometimes it’s my body and it’s a head replacement. There are times where I actually am not sure if it’s my hands or my body or his.”
Being Green Book‘s ghost pianist has opened many doors for Bowers; lots of offers for TV and video games. At 29, he’s doing exactly what he’s wanted to do most of his life. In fact, Bowers was born to make music. In utero, his parents decided he would play piano, “so they started finding piano sampler CDs and started to put them on my mom’s stomach and played music for me.”
 

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A year ago, if you had asked up-and-coming American musicians about the pianist Don Shirley, they probably would have said, “Who?” That’s changed. Shirley is a central character in the movie “Green Book,” which is nominated for five Oscars. Based on a true story, the film follows a concert tour that Shirley, who was Jamaican-American, took through the Midwest and the South, in the nineteen-sixties. He hires Tony Vallelonga, an Italian-American bouncer from New York City, to serve as his driver. (The “Green Book” of the title refers to “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” a guidebook for African-American motorists that led to motels, restaurants, and other establishments that would serve them.) Because of several scenes that show Vallelonga stepping in to save Shirley from hostile white authorities, the film has been criticized for being the latest variation on the tired “white savior” trope. But a look beyond the film, at Shirley’s career, shows that he is more resilient and interesting than any Hollywood cliché.
My uncle Jim loved Don Shirley, especially “Water Boy,” Shirley’s biggest hit from the best-selling 1960 LP “Don Shirley Trio.” “Listen to that mournful cello!” he would exclaim during the song’s florid introduction. When the song’s gospel piano rhythm started, he would do a little uncle dance. Shirley was one among dozens of pianists who were popular at mid-century, a moment when the piano was at its zenith in American life. It wasn’t only my uncle: just about everybody had at least one LP of a pianist. Classical stars included Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein; jazz stars included Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, and Dave Brubeck; easy-listening stars included Roger Williams and Carmen Cavallaro. Liberace offered campy glamour and Victor Borge offered comic relief.
Shirley outlived his fans and died quietly, in 2013, at the age of eighty-six. Wikipedia flatly declares that Shirley was a “jazz pianist and composer,” but that’s not exactly true. Recently, I asked the jazz bassist Ron Carter about Shirley. He said that he liked Shirley but that jazz musicians from the era didn’t discuss him much. “You needed to be on the Juilliard or Carnegie Hall scene to know about Shirley,” he said. “My friend Kermit Moore, the great cellist, was close to Shirley.” Carter went on to discuss how Shirley was denied the opportunities to perform much classical music because of his skin color, a circumstance that parallels Carter’s own experience. Carter’s first love was symphonic repertoire, but the conductor Leopold Stokowski told him that the world was “not ready for a colored man to be in their orchestra.” The Pulitzer-winning composer George Walker, who died last year, faced similar racism. Walker had planned on being a concert pianist—and he certainly had the requisite technical gusto to be one—but a black composer was more acceptable to the symphonic crowd than a black pianist, apparently because there was so much less visible time onstage for a composer.
Race and music engender an uncomfortable paradox in American musical history. It’s maddening that Ron Carter and George Walker were denied careers as classical performers, yet our world has been immeasurably enriched by a generous serving of Carter’s jazz bass and Walker’s symphonic compositions. Don Shirley left no memoir, and no biography of him exists. How did Don Shirley navigate within this paradox?
Shirley’s first record, “Tonal Expressions,” from 1955, comprises jazz standards that Shirley views through the prism of classical style: his take on “I Cover the Waterfront” contains left-hand cascades that nod toward Debussy; “No Two People” begins with a quote from Bach; and “My Secret Love” is a rich chordal exploration in the style of Rachmaninoff. In “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” Shirley offers comparatively normal jazz, with a swing beat, accompanied by Richard Davis walking a bass line, and suddenly the picture isn’t as focussed. The tracks that borrow from classical music feel more natural.
Another early disk is “Orpheus in the Underworld,” a brooding and lovely set of original rhapsodies that Shirley based on his own phantasmagoric painting, which appears on the album cover. The back of the LP explains that these “improvisations” do not use jazz procedures, such as blowing on chord changes, but instead recall a classical pianist in the year 1800 spontaneously creating fantasies on themes and moods. The final effect strangely foreshadows Keith Jarrett’s minor-key improvisations in the best-selling “The Köln Concert.” As the Shirley discography continues, most of the music is fancy settings of standards, usually in a trio with bass and cello. Shirley’s decision to use classical cello goes a long way toward explaining his aesthetic, as conventional piano jazz trios usually had drums or guitar supplying rhythm and swing.
Shirley was idiosyncratic and important, but there isn’t much of an argument that any given Shirley version of a standard is in the same league as one by Art Tatum, Duke Ellington, or Mary Lou Williams. Most of Shirley’s records are probably best for cocktail hour (another reason that my uncle liked him) and can be filed next to other light listening from the era. However, renewed interest in Shirley’s music, spurred by “Green Book,” might yield some provocative new interpretations. The saxophonist Branford Marsalis plays hard-swinging jazz with his quartet and saxophone concertos with orchestras. He wasn’t aware of Shirley before “Green Book” and told me, “Don Shirley’s music is a joy to listen to. It’s not jazz, and his approach is clearly influenced through classical training. Because he is not a jazz soloist, he has to create momentum through color and melodic exploration. I have always learned a lot from musicians whose priority is not soloing.”
The pianist Kris Bowers composed the “Green Book” score, played the parts, and taught the actor Mahershala Ali (who plays Shirley) the basics of keyboard technique. I asked Bowers if he absorbed any of Shirley’s techniques in the process. Bowers said, “Shirley is now another beacon for me as I find a way to represent all of my influences in my own music. He fused the sounds of classical, American Songbook, and gospel repertoire in a way that was uniquely and unapologetically his own.” As for his favorite tracks, Bowers agrees with my uncle: the plaintive and groovy “Water Boy” really is something special. He also suggests “In A Moorish Market Place,” “My Funny Valentine,” and the outrageous multi-genre fantasia made of “Lullaby of Birdland.”
My own pick for Shirley’s best record has no flashy keyboard athletics nor extreme combinations of style. On “Piano Arrangements of Famous Spirituals,” the themes are given stark and regal settings far closer to Thelonious Monk than anything lurking on the fringes of the easy-listening category. The jacket for the 1962 LP, which features a sombre color palette and Shirley looking pensive in a velour sweatshirt, is a wonderful postcard from a nearly vanished era. In the liner notes, Shirley deliberately distances himself from forms of black music that lack a tradition of Western musical notation, even going so far as to write, “Musicologists all over the world recognize that the Negro spiritual is by far the greatest art form to come out of this country.” History is not proving Shirley right. Today’s musicologists are more interested in jazz and hip-hop than they are in the spiritual. Still, Shirley’s determination to play by classical rules despite being seen as a jazz pianist will always be provocative. Until 2010, Shirley lived his aspirational vision in an apartment perched literally on top of Carnegie Hall.
Aspiration and paradox. In retrospect, it shouldn’t be surprising that a movie about Don Shirley would provoke wildly differing responses. Branford Marsalis told me, “I loved the movie. It made me cry,” during the same week that the journalist Wesley Morris published a powerful essay called “Why Do the Oscars Keep Falling for Racial Reconciliation Fantasies?” A friend of mine, in Philadelphia, who is a major record collector, was so impressed by the movie that he promptly began acquiring the original sequence of a dozen-plus LPs that Don Shirley recorded, for Cadence, between 1955 and 1962, unaware that some members of Shirley’s family were denouncing “Green Book” as a “symphony of lies.” My own opinion of the movie is closer to Marsalis than Morris, partly because I find more truth about the racial complexity of American music in “Green Book” than in the trendy and award-winning jazz movies by Damien Chazelle. The battles surrounding “Green Book” touch on race, authenticity, homophobia, the right of families to control an artist’s legacy, the whys and wherefores of prestige filmmaking, and, undoubtedly, many other topics in our omnipresent culture war. In Shirley’s time, those battles occupied a different terrain. Many of the most important American musicians fought institutional racism by creating music that demanded respect simply by being undeniably great. This was a guerrilla war that no two artists fought in exactly the same way. The essential idiosyncratic loneliness of Shirley’s battle was hard to parse in 1960 and is even harder to capture in a hashtag. Through it all, Don Shirley plays the piano his way, as only Don Shirley could.
 

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Ira Gitler, a passionate critic and proponent of modern jazz during its rise, and a tireless chronicler of its history thereafter, died on Saturday at a nursing facility in New York City. 
He was 90. His death was confirmed by Fitz Gitler, his son.
Few writers on jazz have ever loomed as large as Ira Gitler, who opined prodigiously for more than 60 years, in publications like Metronome, JazzTimes and DownBeat, for which he served as New York editor for a time.
He was a longtime steward of The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, which he inherited from Leonard Feather, and the author of Jazz Masters of the Forties and Swing to Bop — two authoritative treatises on bebop. Gitler also wrote hundreds of album liner notes, beginning in 1951, when he was working for Prestige Records.
Gitler’s notes for John Coltrane’s 1958 album Soultrane yielded his most famous coinage. Reaching for an apt description of the saxophonist’s torrential improvising, he came up with “sheets of sound,” which proved an indelible turn of phrase. (Even in this first usage, it came bracketed with quotation marks, as if Gitler were aware of its potential as a trademark.)
Months after the release of Soultrane, Gitler’s byline appeared on the first full-length feature about Coltrane, in DownBeat. That blurring of the line between label copy and critical appraisal was typical of the era. It also underscores a truism about Gitler — that he was at his best writing about the musicians with whom he felt closest.
This was assuredly the case with the bebop titans he revered, like trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and pianist Bud Powell. Conjuring the experience of hearing Powell with Parker, Gitler wrote: “He hung the audience by its nerve ends, playing music of demonically driven beauty, music of hard, unflinching swing, music of genius.” (That passage, recalling one night at The Three Deuces in 1947, can be found in Jazz Masters of the Forties.)

Gitler had a formative influence on generations of younger jazz writers — including Bob Porter, WBGO announcer and author of Soul Jazz, who followed in Gitler’s footsteps at Prestige. “I think in many respects, he’s the guy who put bebop into perspective,” says Porter. “Jazz Masters of the Forties was just a well-organized piece of work. For somebody who was trying to get into the music, it was a nice little roadmap.”
Gitler taught at institutions including The New School and the Manhattan School of Music. And he became a vocal supporter of many musicians beyond the original bebop generation, from drummer Lewis Nash to the Russian tenor saxophonist Igor Butman. 
He was no less outspoken about his dislikes, sometimes notoriously so. He gave Dave Brubeck’s Time Out a mere two stars in DownBeat, writing: “I appreciate the tender moments of jazz and fully realize that you can’t swing hard all the time, but when the underlying tenor is more like drawing-room music, I leave the drawing room and go to the bar.”
Even more contentious was his two-star review of Abbey Lincoln’s Straight Ahead, in 1961. Taking issue with the album’s implicit embrace of African nationalist and liberation politics, he charged Lincoln with “becoming a professional Negro.” His remarks caused an immediate uproar, so much so that DownBeat organized a panel discussion on racial bias in jazz.
“He delighted in arguments,” attests Porter. “If he disagreed with me about something I wrote, he would call me immediately. And if I disagreed with him, I would never tell him.”
Gitler also dabbled in poetry — he was known to send elaborate birthday poems to friends and acquaintances — and wrote song lyrics. His best-known contribution in that vein would be the lyrics to a Horace Silver tune, “Filthy McNasty,” recorded by Eddie Jefferson in 1968.
Gitler also wrote extensively on hockey — from the press box of his home team, the New York Rangers, and in books including Make the Team in Ice Hockey and Blood on the Ice : Hockey’s Most Violent Moments. “It was the other great avocation of his life,” recalls Fitz Gitler. “He was involved in hockey in so many ways. He wrote about it, he coached, he played, he had that sort of all-encompassing love of it, just as he did with jazz.”
Stan Fischler, the noted hockey historian and broadcaster, worked with Gitler and Richard Beddoes on Hockey!: The Story of the World’s Fastest Sport, which was published in 1973. On Twitter, Fischler posted a series of tributes to Gitler, including this one:
Gitler’s Gorillas, a formidable team in the amateur league, officially formed in 1973, and quickly amassed a reputation. George Plimpton wrote fondly of the team in Open Net: A Professional Amateur in the World of Big-Time Hockey. And in 1980, Mark Singer wrote about the Gorillas in a Talk of the Town piece for The New Yorker:
The Gorilla jersey, which is green and white and black, features a caricature of Gitler as King Kong — straddling Midtown, with the Empire State Building at knee level, a loving cup in one hand, and the head of King Kong tucked under his arm. It is an impressive rendering of the founder, who has a drooping pepper-and-salt mustache that matches his slightly drooping midsection.
Ira Gitler was born on Dec. 18, 1928, in Brooklyn. His love of jazz began when he was in grade school, thanks to the influence of his brother, Monroe, a dozen years his senior. Ira was already a budding aficionado of the music in middle school; by his teens he was a denizen of the clubs on 52nd Street. He wrote his first piece about jazz for his high school newspaper, after hearing Gillespie perform at the Spotlite Club there. 
“He did it for love, and then somehow managed to turn it into a career,” says Fitz of his father’s jazz legacy. “While he’s thought of as a writer and an author, his reach was kind of into every place where he could help share that love of his with other people — to help inform and clarify and evangelize for the music that he loved.”
Ira Gitler was recognized as a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017, receiving the organization’s A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974. He received Lifetime Achievement Awards from the New Jersey Jazz Society and the Jazz Journalists Association.
In addition to his son, Gitler is survived by his wife of 46 years, the former Mary Jo Schwalbach, a visual artist. For many years the Gitlers lived in an Upper East Side brownstone apartment that had previously been occupied by filmmaker Woody Allen.
JazzTimes caught up with Gitler at home in 2000, and posed a series of questions, including what would constitute the perfect day. His response: “The Mets and Rangers both win on the same day, a great meal in between games, followed by the late set at The Village Vanguard listening to Roy Hargrove.”
According to Fitz Gitler, Ira was with Mary Jo when he died, listening to a compilation called The Definitive Art Tatum, and wearing a DownBeat T-shirt.
 

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NEW YORK — Hank O’Neal may be the most interesting person you’ve never heard of.
Himself an accomplished photographer, O’Neal, 78, has been friends with several of the foremost photographers of the 20th century: from Berenice Abbott (she was maid of honor at his wedding) to André Kertész and Robert Frank.
For many years the owner of a jazz record label, Chiaroscuro, O’Neal has been friends with an even more head-spinning array of people in the music world: from Dizzy Gillespie to Dave Brubeck, to the music executives John Hammond (they were business partners in the ’80s) and Ahmet Ertegun, to the classical trumpeter and conductor Gerard Schwarz and the ballerina Allegra Kent.
“Back in the ’70s, my primary interest in life, besides making records and taking pictures, was chasing ballet dancers,” O’Neal says with a post-sheepish smile. 
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He’s sitting in his office, which has more books on its shelves than many small libraries and more recordings than most small radio stations. On the walls in the rest of the apartment, which he shares with his wife, Shelley Stier, there are enough photographs to keep a gallery in business. The apartment is in the East Village, a few doors from the Strand Bookstore and within walking distance of the Village Vanguard and Blue Note jazz clubs. O’Neal gets around, but he doesn’t need to go far to do so. 
The author of more than a dozen books, O’Neal has another half-dozen on the way. The most recent is a reissue of “A Vision Shared,” his pathbreaking 1976 book on the Farm Security Administration photographers of the ’30s and early ’40s. The group included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. O’Neal knew him, too. 
The new edition is published by Steidl Verlag, the world’s most prestigious publisher of photography books. Steidl has also issued a half-dozen volumes on Abbott co-edited by O’Neal and Ron Kurtz. 

Library of Congress
“Drought refugees from Abilene, Texas, following the crops of California as migratory workers. . . .,” August 1936, by Dorothea Lange
“Hank is one of the more interesting people I’ve met in my life,” says Kurtz, a collector and philanthropist, in a telephone interview. The MIT Museum’s Kurtz Gallery for Photography is named for him. “He’s sort of an aw-shucks guys, a selfless guy, in a way. He understands how much you can get done when you don’t give yourself pats on the back.” 
It was writing that brought O’Neal into contact with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who edited one of his books. “She was the real deal: a nice, nice person,” O’Neal says. Nice isn’t the same as uncritical. O’Neal laughs when he recalls the time his editor complained about some copy he’d handed in. “Goddammit, Hank, Caroline could have written something better than that, and she’s only 14!”
An even more unlikely connection is with Ty Cobb, the legendarily mean baseball Hall of Famer. “Well, he wasn’t mean to boys who wrote him letters,” O’Neal explains. Their correspondence when O’Neal was in his early teens is the subject of one of those forthcoming books, “Sincerely, Ty Cobb.” It comes out later this year.
O’Neal, who’s on the boards of the Jazz Gallery performance venue and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, is also on the honorary founders board of the Jazz Foundation of America. Wendy Oxenhorn, the foundation’s executive director and vice chairman, is a longtime friend.
“The thing that makes Hank great is his continued child-like curiosity,” Oxenhorn says in an e-mail. She likens him to “a walking art gallery that lets whoever he is gracing get that ‘one man show’ they always wanted in whatever format they choose because the world in his eyes is all Art. He just keeps walking, to see what he can see.”
O’Neal’s many associations might make him sound like a real-life Zelig, the Woody Allen character who seemed to know anyone who was anyone in 20th-century culture. Except Zelig wasn’t a CIA agent: Yes, O’Neal served with the agency — as a junior officer, not a spy — from 1963 to 1976. He was still on the payroll when he began Chiaroscuro and started hanging out with Abbott. His CIA training came in handy the three times he helped her smuggle gold across the Canadian border.
O’Neal put in a mandatory stint at Camp Perry, the CIA training facility in Virginia, more familiarly known as “The Farm.” “You’d go out and trail people in Norfolk. Learn how to pick locks and stuff, how to do a black-border crossing. I remember one night I was all by myself, playing pool. They had a wonderful rec room. I realized I wasn’t alone, and there was [former CIA director] Allen Dulles.” 
The Farm was also where O’Neal saw his first James Bond movie. “It cost a quarter,” he recalls.
O’Neal’s star-studded stories might sound like a severe case of the name-drops. In fact, all those bold-face names are as naturally a part of his conversation as the occasional bad joke and his wheezy laugh. It’s more that he’s connecting the dots in his life, much in the way he’s spent nearly half a century connecting the dots in American culture — introducing Abbott to Allen Ginsberg (who was photographer at O’Neal’s wedding) or trying to record Ornette Coleman with Arnett Cobb (“Hey, they were both Texas horn players,” O’Neal says with happy shrug). Few people alive today have such a widespread set of dots, let alone ones of such high artistic quality.
“It’s just part of the concentric thing where one person leads to the next to the next to the next,” O’Neal says with a smile. He smiles a lot. “You know, it was just a matter of happenchance.”

Library of Congress
“Roadside Stand near Birmingham, Alabama,” 1936, by Walker Evans
Might “happenchance” be an East Texas-ism? O’Neal was born in Kilgore, near the Louisiana border. For once, a question vexes him. “I don’t know,” he frowns. “It’s just a word I use.” He says this in a slightly reedy voice that still betrays a bit of Lone Star drawliness. 
O’Neal has the easy-as-pie manner of a country boy, which complements his city-boy cultural accomplishments. Named for his father, Harold L. O’Neal, he was “Hank” from the get-go. His parents didn’t want to call him “junior,” he explains, “and they wanted to get a name that sounded like a cowboy.”
When O’Neal was 10, he and his parents moved to Bloomington, Ind. Two notable things happened there. He won a Hawkeye camera in a grocery-story prize drawing, starting him on the road to photography; and, in one of the more beguiling bits of Hankian happenchance, he played a cabin boy in the US premiere of Benjamin Britten’s opera “Billy Budd.” “The only time I’ve ever been onstage with music in my life,” O’Neal says, “other than to announce a band.”
The family moved to Syracuse, N.Y., a year later, when he was 13. O’Neal got a job in a music store. “I would use every nickel that I had to buy a jazz record,” he says. “Everything was new at the same time. Nothing sounded old.” That eclecticism informed the musical sensibility that would define the Chiaroscuro roster: grounded in mainstream jazz, but by no means limited to. The label’s best-selling LP: The South African pianist Dollar Brand’s “Capetown Fringe.” The best-selling CD: Jay McShann and Ralph Sutton’s “The Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players.” 
“It didn’t seem strange to me to do [the avant-garde saxophonist] Hamiet Bluiett one day and [the Dixieland cornetist] Wild Bill Davison the other day. It was just really good music. It still really is.” Another mark of the label’s catholicity: More than half of the inductees in the Jazz Hall of Fame recorded for Chiaroscuro at one time or another.
How did O’Neal come to have a record label? More happenchance. During his CIA service, he met a wealthy jazz fan named Sherman Fairchild. Fairchild bankrolled the label, originally called Halcyon, with the pianist Marian McPartland as third partner. That was 1969. “The partnership dissolved eventually,” O’Neal explains, “because Marian was primarily interested in recording Marian, and I was primarily interested in recording Marian and everybody else.” When Fairchild died, his estate sold the label to O’Neal for a nominal sum.
A year at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute taught O’Neal he wasn’t cut out to be an engineer. Happenchance took him to Syracuse University. A course on Soviet government brought him to the attention of a CIA recruiter. When he learned that he could do his ROTC-required time in the Army working for the CIA, that sealed the deal. 
O’Neal spent a few years in Washington working as an analyst, then was sent to New York. This was 1967. When it’s pointed out that its domestic activities got the CIA in trouble right around this time, O’Neal makes a useful distinction. “The covert part, not the overt part.” Extrovert that he is, O’Neal was definitely overt.
Its expensiveness made New York an unpopular posting. O’Neal didn’t mind. He stayed for three consecutive three-year tours and finally left the agency because it wanted to send him to Pittsburgh. 
New York was where happenchance really kicked in. A senior agency administrator who’d once played with the ’20s jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke introduced O’Neal to the jazz guitarist and bandleader Eddie Condon. When O’Neal moved to New York, Condon was a neighbor. They decided to do a book together, O’Neal’s first. “Eddie was full of fun stories, and we were having a ball.” 

Photos courtesy of Hank O’Neal
Photos of Berenice Abbott (left) and Hank O’Neal, taken by each other in Maine in 1990.
The book’s designer had been a student of Abbott’s. O’Neal met Abbot and bought some prints (always a good way to endear yourself to a photographer). “She told me if I ever got a real camera to come up to Maine [where Abbott lived] and she’d show me how to use it.” The first lesson did not go well. “You’ve got to do a damn sight better than that, buster!” Abbott told him. But it saw the beginning of a friendship that would last until Abbott’s death, in 1991. It was a mark of how much Abbott came to depend on O’Neal that, yes, she enlisted him those three times to go with her to Canada to buy gold and smuggle it back into the States.
It was Abbott “who put me into photography in a really serious way,” O’Neal says. Around this time, he began to take an interest in the work of the Farm Security Administration (originally, the Resettlement Administration). The dozen photographers this small government agency employed between 1935 and 1943 amassed some 175,000 images documenting social conditions in America. At least two of those images are among the most famous in the history of the medium: Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and Arthur Rothstein’s photograph of an Oklahoma farmer and his two sons hunched against a Dust Bowl storm. 
Taken as a whole, these photographs are the greatest work of public art in US history. All of them can be seen on the Library of Congress website, at www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fsa/. Having access to them was a very different story in 1976, when “A Vision Shared” appeared.

Library of Congress
“Sunday dinner, Jackson, Ohio,” April 1936, by Theo Jung
What gives the book its enduring importance is that O’Neal sought out nine of the 10 surviving photographers, as well as Lange’s widower and Ben Shahn’s widow, and had them select the photographs they wanted to include, write the captions, and tell him their stories. The one regret O’Neal has is not including the 12th photographer, Gordon Parks. “He was there only for a minute or two,” O’Neal says, “but he would have given [the book] greater breadth.” 
Kurtz had the idea for the new edition. “When I first saw this book,” he says, “the images were wonderful but the reproduction was not. So I suggested it was time for a redo.”
What most pleases O’Neal about “A Vision Shared” is the human element: The tribute it offers not just to a remarkable body of work but, even more, to that body of work’s creators. 
“It was finding people who’d sort of been overlooked,” O’Neal says. “The very best thing about the ‘Vision Shared’ book, from a lot of standpoints, is the fact that — not that they were unknown — but Jack Delano and Russ Lee and Marion Post Wolcott started getting shows. Then a zillion different books followed. If you had a nickel for every book that had FSA pictures after that you could retire.” O’Neal says this with a laugh, then gets serious. “America sometimes has a problem with recognizing what it really has. And particularly in those years recognizing people who were no longer young and hot and cool and so forth.”
O’Neal says something similar about music. “I made 12 records with Earl Hines — and I do not have one alternate take. He never made mistakes! But he hadn’t made a solo record in forever. When I recorded Mary Lou Williams, it was her first solo record sincethe ’40s,. And these are major American artists who were being completely ignored because the RCAs and Columbias of the world —” His voice trails off. “They wanted to do what was current and hot or make an R&B record. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you have to do it all.”
If one thing defines O’Neal’s happenchance journey through the past half century it’s been just that: an ongoing attempt to do it all, or at least do it all as regards much of what has been uniquely American about American culture and so enhance and enlarge appreciation of that American uniqueness. If O’Neal ever writes his autobiography, “A Vision Shared” would be an ideal title, except that it’s already taken.

Annie Tritt for The Boston Globe
FSA photographs line the walls of Hank O’Neal’s New York City apartment.
Mark Feeney can be reached atmfeeney@globe.com.
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Pianist Jason Moran, saxophonist Yosvany Terry, bassist Linda May Han Oh part of two-week excursion into jazz culture, politics, activism
Feb 14, 2019 — Article by: Rob Enslin

Larry Blumenfeld
Larry Blumenfeld, cultural journalist, music critic and longtime contributor to The Wall Street Journal, will serve as the 2019 Jeanette K. Watson Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at Syracuse University, March 25-April 5.
Blumenfeld’s residency, titled “Jazz in Troubled Times: The Relevance and Resonance of a Culture,” will explore the convergence of politics, activism and the arts, while rethinking the nature of jazz as an enduring culture.
The Humanities Center in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) supports the annual Watson Professorship in partnership with a faculty host—this year’s is Eric Grode, assistant professor in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and director of the Goldring Arts Journalism Program. 
Blumenfeld will headline eight scholarly and artistic events, drawing on his extensive fieldwork in New York City, New Orleans and Havana. The schedule includes public discussions with performances by saxophonist Yosvany Terry and his quartet (March 29) and pianist Jason Moran (April 5), as well as a listening party co-curated by bassist Linda May Han Oh. (April 4). 
All events are free and open to the public. For more information, including a complete schedule, contact the Humanities Center at 315.443.7192 or visit humcenter.syr.edu.

Jason Moran
Humanities Center Director Vivian May looks forward to Blumenfeld’s residency, saying it will underscore how jazz culture influences—and is influenced by—social change.
“Larry’s work embodies public humanities scholarship,” says May, also a professor of women’s and gender studies in A&S. “He will explore jazz’s deep resonance as an art form; its improvisational power to bridge arts and activism; and its continued relevance as framework for understanding questions of inequity, identity and community in turbulent times.”
Undergirding Blumenfeld’s visit is jazz’s alleged resurgence. In the WSJ, he wrote, “Reports of jazz’s death have been ill-advised. So, too, have tales of [its] resurrections.”
Against this backdrop, the former Jazziz editor-in-chief will examine “America’s classical music” through a multicultural lens. Emphasis will be on how questions of race, gender, ethnicity, class and cultural heritage are intertwined.
One of Blumenfeld’s lectures will draw on his extensive study of cultural recovery in post-Katrina New Orleans—also the basis for his forthcoming book from the University of California Press. “Jazz has been a powerful conduit for political action, social justice and healing,” he says, recalling his time along the Gulf Coast, in the wake of the deadly 2005 hurricane.
Another lecture will stem from his research into the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), a Chicago-based nonprofit that, for more than 50 years, has championed original music spanning avant-garde jazz, classical and world music. Blumenfeld considers the AACM the “clearest driving force of any new jazz aesthetic,” responsible for erasing borders between genres and disciplines.

Yosvany Terry
Among the beneficiaries of AACM’s aesthetic—and the consistent foci of Blumenfeld’s scholarship—are Moran, the Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz, who teaches at New England Conservatory (and whose artwork is on view this fall at the Whitney Museum of American Art), and Terry, a leading proponent of Afro-Cuban jazz, who is both a senior lecturer on music and director of jazz ensembles at Harvard.
Terry and Moran will precede their performances at La Casita Cultural Center and in Hendricks Chapel, respectively, with interdisciplinary discussions about jazz culture.
“How do you write about something being created in front of you?” Grode asks. “How do you harness art for the greater good?
“Larry has spent decades answering these questions, and music lovers of all stripes will benefit enormously from hearing what he’s learned, through workshops, roundtables, lectures, performances and a public listening session of recordings made by female musicians throughout jazz history.”

Linda May Han Oh (Photo by Shervin Lainez)
The listening party co-led by Oh, who teaches bass at The New School, involves The Diane Arthur Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive in the University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center. 
Blumenfeld adds that, with all the recent talk about walls, jazz stands as a metaphor for and a document of this nation’s multicultural truth.
“Its aesthetic demands and develops an elevated, open-minded exchange of ideas that opposes caricature and fundamentalism,” says the Brooklyn resident, who also curates a music series for Spoleto Festival USA and presents the popular “Jazz and Social Justice” series for the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. “Jazz is not in need of a revival; it is a culture through which we summon spiritual energy, humanistic focus and political power—the stuff of real transformation.”
 

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Duke Ellington at the piano, circa 1940.
John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
This story is part of American Anthem, a yearlong series on songs that rouse, unite, celebrate and call to action. Find more at NPR.org/Anthem.

What makes a jazz anthem? NPR’s American Anthem series has spanned pop, rock, folk and more, but in most cases the songs are catchy, sing-at-the-top-of-your-lungs hits we all know and love. Less obvious is how an anthem grows out of a genre that is primarily instrumental and rarely crosses over into the pop charts these days. Luckily, we have an expert to help us figure it out.
“There’s a lot of songs that I think the novice jazz listener could really latch onto in terms of its intensity of melody, its intent, and the story behind the piece,” says bassist and composer Christian McBride, who hosts NPR’s Jazz Night in America. But rather than choose an obvious standard, McBride pointed to something more ambitious: a massive, sprawling, three-movement suite by Duke Ellington called Black, Brown and Beige.
Introducing the piece at Carnegie Hall in 1943, Ellington announced to the mostly white audience, “We would like to say that this is a parallel to the history of the American Negro. And of course, it tells a long story.”
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For this installment of American Anthem, McBride joined Audie Cornish on All Things Considered to discuss the power of putting a work about black life before that crowd at that time — and how the section called “Come Sunday” became an anthem unto itself, eventually growing into a hymn for the civil rights movement. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read an edited transcript below.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Audie Cornish: The title Black, Brown and Beige refers to three movements of a suite, and each one represents a period in black history: “black” being the lives of slaves; “brown” I understand [as] emancipation and service in American wars; and “beige” is when he was taking on contemporary black America at that time.
As a composer, when you listen to this piece — starting with the opening section, “Work Song” — what are you hearing?
Christian McBride: Just the way the textures build, the way the melody builds. The sort of sophisticated harmony: It’s not just dominant seventh chords or triads, you get these flat nines, these flat 13s, these superimposed chords. That was just not standard.
YouTube
I read press reports that said the crowd at that Carnegie Hall performance included Eleanor Roosevelt, Count Basie and Frank Sinatra. This was supposed to be a big revelatory moment from Ellington. But it also, in the end, got really mixed reviews. Can you talk about what people expected from him and why this somehow didn’t meet expectations?
I think it’s fair to say that particularly someone like Duke Ellington would expect mixed reviews. First of all, you have an African-American bandleader and composer playing a piece about a “parallel to the history of the American Negro” in 1943 at Carnegie Hall. That alone might get you a couple of bad reviews before you even play a note.
I think there were a lot of critics who sort of deem themselves experts on “fine music” — you know, classical music. So when you have this African-American composer using timpani, violins, but mixing it with swing rhythms, African rhythms — you mix all this together, and I’m sure a lot of reviewers had no idea what they were listening to. How do you write about something you don’t know about?
So if Ellington’s work is trying to tell a story, what of the story are we hearing in the “Come Sunday” section? How have you come to think of this moment in the music?
One thing that’s always been important to the history of of black folks in America is the church, and Duke Ellington also wrote a lot of sacred music. So I think “Come Sunday” was his musical portrait of what the Gospel meant to the African-American community.
I guess it’s fitting, then, that some 15 years later there is a new recording of this song, and he brings in Mahalia Jackson.
A titan and a titan together. In 1958, when this album was recorded, I think it’s safe to say that there was no more powerful of a voice in the gospel world than Mahalia Jackson.
YouTube
It’s also important to remember, you didn’t find gospel artists collaborating with jazz artists. Culturally, that was too stark a line to cross: There was a contingent of gospel artists or church people who still thought jazz is secular music, music that is not of the church. So I think it says something to the power and majesty of Duke Ellington’s musicality to be able to have this singular artist of another so-called “genre” to say, “I don’t usually do this, but this music is so powerful. I want to help further this artistry, the majesty of this song.”
The next decade saw this explosion of music that did address political and racial issues in America. Heading into the ’60s, we have “A Change Is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. “We Shall Overcome” becomes an anthem of the civil rights movement. So where did Black, Brown and Beige fit into this new, politically aware musical landscape? Or was it forgotten?
It’s interesting because, also that same year, you had Sonny Rollins, who recorded the Freedom Suite. In 1960, you had Max Roach recording We Insist!, the “Freedom Now Suite.” So there was a younger generation that was much more direct in their message; the message got much more visceral.
Duke Ellington tended to use metaphor. He was always very poetic in the way he expressed the joys, the pains, the sorrows and the hopes of the black community. But the younger musicians like Sonny and Max Roach, they always tip their cap to Ellington, because they know that Duke Ellington really did set the tone for what’s known as protest music.
 

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The genre would not exist if it weren’t for black music serving as an inspiration and a source. But there was no modern black country star before Charley Pride.

Photograph Courtesy American Masters / PBS

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• Feb. 22, 2019

Ken Nordine in his home studio in the late 1970s. His free-form, stream-of-consciousness poems were a kind of spoken jazz, delivered in a resonant baritone.CreditCreditvia Ken Nordine Jr.
Ken Nordine, who improvised poetry in a silky voice to cool, vibrant musical accompaniment, creating a form of storytelling that he called “word jazz,” and that brought him renown on radio and led to collaborations with Fred Astaire, Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and other artists, died on Feb. 16 in Chicago. He was 98.
His son Ken Jr. confirmed the death.
Mr. Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects. His free-form poems could be cerebral or humorous, absurd or enigmatic, and were heard on the radio and captured on records, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.
“Ken Nordine can pontificate on any small object and make it resonate with the profundity of consciousness and the euphony of a beautiful piece of music,” the critic Neil Strauss wrote in The New York Times in 1996, previewing a performance by Mr. Nordine at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan.
Mr. Nordine spent time in Chicago nightclubs in the 1950s reciting poems by writers like T. S. Eliot and Omar Khayyam, accompanied by jazz musicians. But when he realized that many of the same people kept returning to the clubs, he began to ad-lib new verses.
He felt that jazz was ideal for his stream-of-consciousness poetry.
“I like jazz for the principle of what jazz is: a flight of musical fantasy within structure,” he said in an interview for the book “Incredibly Strange Music, Volume II” (1994). “I’m trying to do the same thing verbally: take off on a theme so you become tangential and transcendent at the same time.”
His first album, “Word Jazz” (1957), included a romantic hipster poem, “My Baby,” which attracted the attention of Bud Yorkin, the producer of the 1959 television special “Another Evening With Fred Astaire.” A finger-snapping Mr. Astaire danced sensuously with Barrie Chase on a nightclub set while Mr. Nordine recited his words offstage and a combo played jazz:
I couldn’t help myself, it was love for sure.
I picked my baby up, danced over to the stage
And I told the leader: “Leader, this is my baby”
He just said, “Crazy!”
My baby gave him a special look like she does
He could see my baby had eyes to swing.
Speaking to the audience, Mr. Astaire declared that Mr. Nordine had “invented a new kind of contemporary beat.”
Mr. Nordine told The Chicago Tribune that the goal of his poetry was to “make people think about their thinking and feel about their feeling, but even more important to think about their feeling and feel about their thinking.”
The success of Mr. Nordine’s first album, “Word Jazz,” and its follow-up, “Son of Word Jazz,” led to a popular radio show in Chicago.
Image
The success of Mr. Nordine’s first album, “Word Jazz,” and its follow-up, “Son of Word Jazz,” led to a popular radio show in Chicago.
He brought that approach to the inner life of colors in a series of 10 poems commissioned in the early 1960s by one of his radio voice-over clients, the Fuller Paint Company. He preferred it when his clients let him improvise, rather than read from a prepared script, and his paint ads were indistinguishable from his poetry, except that they were intended to sell products.
He subsequently released an album, “Colors” (1966), which included odes to 34 colors, including those he did for the paint company.
In “Blue,” he wrote about how blue stopped feeling so blue:
But then, on a Thursday of a year,
Who can remember except blue?
Something sudden happened.
Blue went as high as sky is high,
Flipped fathoms up,
Began to swing easy, sensibly.
Kenneth Edward Nordine was born on April 13, 1920, in Cherokee, Iowa, and moved with his parents, Swedish immigrants, to Chicago when he was 3 or 4 years old. His father, Nore, was an architect who built apartment buildings, and his mother, Theresia (Danielson) Nordine, was a real estate investor and sculptor.
By his teenage years, people had taken notice of Ken’s smooth baritone and suggested that he work in radio. He took their advice and, after attending the University of Chicago, got a job working the mimeograph machine at WBEZ, a local station.
He later had radio jobs in other cities, but by the mid-1940s Mr. Nordine was back in Chicago. He hosted radio and television shows there, including “Faces in the Window,” in which he recited works by Edgar Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant and Honoré de Balzac.
“It was just him, one camera and stark lighting,” Ken Nordine Jr. said in a telephone interview. “He scared the heck out of people.”
Mr. Nordine’s reputation for improvisational poetry grew with the release of “Word Jazz” and “Son of Word Jazz” in 1957, which led to a “Word Jazz” radio show on WBBM in Chicago in the 1960s, followed by a run on NPR in the ’70s and a long-running syndicated show. Repeats are now carried at midnight on Sundays on WBEZ and will continue to be broadcast.
For decades Mr. Nordine’s voice was heard on radio and television commercials for, among other products, Levi’s jeans, Taster’s Choice coffee, Chevrolet, the Chicago Blackhawks, Motorola and the wines made by Ernest and Julio Gallo.
Mr. Nordine in around 2000. He once said that the goal of his poetry was to “make people think about their thinking and feel about their feeling, but even more important to think about their feeling and feel about their thinking.”CreditSkrebneski Photograph
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Mr. Nordine in around 2000. He once said that the goal of his poetry was to “make people think about their thinking and feel about their feeling, but even more important to think about their feeling and feel about their thinking.”CreditSkrebneski Photograph
He adapted one of his poems, “Flibberty Jib,” in 1971 for an animated commercial for Levi’s that told of a tall stranger — with eyes “that could look right down to the bottom of you” — who introduced townspeople to colorful pants with flared legs, made from Dacron polyester.
“I’m wearing Levi’s,” Mr. Nordine said, deliberately and a bit ominously. “Dull has gone out of style.”
His poetry found a fan in Mr. Garcia, the lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, and in the early 1990s Mr. Nordine began an association with the band when it invited him to record “Devout Catalyst” (1992) at its studio. Mr. Garcia and a group that included the bassist Jim Kerwin and the mandolinist David Grisman backed Mr. Nordine’s poems; two of the cuts featured collaborations with Mr. Waits.
Also in the 1990s, Mr. Nordine began to add a new element to his verbal improvisations: Working from his elaborate home studio, he used a computer to introduce distorted, psychedelic visuals to recordings of his poems, which he posted on YouTube.
In addition to Ken Jr., Mr. Nordine is survived by two other sons, Kristan and Kevin; nine grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and a sister, Karen Bothwell. His wife, Beryl (Vaughan) Nordine, a radio and film actress, died in 2016.
In 2015, Mr. Nordine collaborated with Laurie Anderson, the avant-garde multimedia artist, at the SFJazz Center in San Francisco. They improvised — he participated via Skype, with his face projected onto a giant screen — as hosts of a call-in show called “Mr. and Mrs. God.”
“It was the greatest fun,” Ms. Anderson said by telephone. She recalled listening to Mr. Nordine’s “crazy little vignettes” while growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and how happy she had been to become his friend in the 1990s.
Mr. Nordine, she said, “was a combination of a fellow artist and a crazy uncle.”
 
 

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Kiyoshi Koyama, the longtime editor of the jazz magazine Swing Journal, at his home in Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo, last year. By the end of his life, his personal archive included close to 30,000 vinyl albums and CDs.CreditCreditKatherine Whatley
Kiyoshi Koyama, widely regarded as Japan’s pre-eminent jazz journalist, who covered the music’s development throughout the 1960s and ’70s before becoming a producer of archival albums, died on Feb. 3 in Kashiwa, Japan. He was 82.
Katherine Whatley, a journalist and friend of Mr. Koyama, said the cause was stomach cancer.
As the editor of Swing Journal, the leading jazz magazine in one of the world’s most jazz-loving countries, Mr. Koyama rigorously covered the music being made on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, often traveling to the United States.
He went to New York in the summer of 1969 to report on the city’s avant-garde scene, which was abuzz with insurgent energy, and paid a consequential visit to the saxophonist Ornette Coleman, a creator of free jazz, who had recently moved into a loft space at 131 Prince Street in SoHo. Mr. Koyama watched Coleman’s band rehearsing and spent time with him in his living quarters above the rehearsal space.
“My style is to meet a musician and see his home, and find out how they live. That shows me another side of the musician. That’s interesting to me,” Mr. Koyama said in a 2015 interview with Ms. Whatley. “That’s why I visited Ornette’s place, too. You can find a different side of a musician from the one on stage.”
Throughout his career Mr. Koyama conduced interviews with many of the leading figures in American jazz, including Miles Davis and Albert Ayler, as well as esteemed Japanese musicians like Sadao Watanabe and Toshiko Akiyoshi.
The Prince Street loft, which Coleman would soon rename Artist House and convert into a venue for public performances, became a harbinger of things to come in Lower Manhattan, where a community of artist-run lofts soon sprang up.
Mr. Koyama’s 1969 dispatch was one of the earliest international reports on the so-called loft jazz scene and predated most such reporting even from domestic sources. He returned to New York almost every summer throughout the 1970s to continue covering creative developments there.
After becoming editor of Swing Journal in 1967, Mr. Koyama quickly converted the publication from a tabloid that relied heavily on articles from wire services and pieces adapted from English-language publications into a source of first-class music criticism and reportage.
He remained editor until 1981, when he shifted his focus to producing historical albums, often by mining his own extensive record collection.
By the end of his life, Mr. Koyama’s personal archive included close to 30,000 vinyl albums and CDs. He also retained a copy of nearly every issue of Swing Journal, hundreds of books, and cassette tapes of his interviews. He recently donated the archive to New York University.
Mr. Koyama was Swing Journal’s editor again from 1990 to 1993. The magazine ceased publication in 2010, amid falling advertising revenues.
Kiyoshi Koyama was born in Sakai, in the Osaka Prefecture, on Feb. 12, 1936. His father had owned a sewing machine factory, but it burned down during World War II.
He is survived by his wife, Takako Koyama, and a brother.
Mr. Koyama’s earliest exposure to jazz came in the 1940s through the Far East Network, a group of radio stations run by the United States military, and the Japanese station NHK. “I would rush home on the train after school to listen to NHK,” he told Ms. Whatley for a 2018 article in the English-language publication The Japan Times.
He first heard live jazz as a teenager, in 1953, when Louis Armstrong came through Osaka on his second tour of Japan. He received a degree in English literature from Kansai University, writing his thesis on uses of the word “jazz” in modern American literature.
After graduating, he left Osaka for Tokyo, where he began working for the Japanese edition of DownBeat magazine.
At a news conference in 1966, early in his career, Mr. Koyama asked John Coltrane where he saw himself in 10 years. Coltrane responded, “I’d like to be a saint.”
Though said jokingly, the answer took on an illuminative significance in the mythos around Coltrane. It would later seem to have foreshadowed his unexpected death a year later, at 40, and the kind of mythical status that he acquired thereafter.
In the 1980s, having left Swing Journal, Mr. Koyama often worked as a consultant for Japanese record labels, producing boxed sets. He was responsible for “The Complete Keynote Collection,” a 1986 anthology of selections from a label that recorded Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton and others in the 1940s, and the 1989 collection “Brownie: The Complete EmArcy Recordings of Clifford Brown.” Both were released in the United States and nominated for Grammy Awards in the historical album category. Dan Morgenstern’s notes for the Clifford Brown anthology won a Grammy.
Mr. Koyama was a disc jockey on NHK for over 50 years. He hosted a Saturday-night show called “Jazz Tonight,” featuring records from his collection and interviews with musicians, until four months before his death.
Correction: Feb. 20, 2019
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the source of the quotation from Mr. Koyama that begins “My style is to meet a musician and see his home.” It appeared in the online music journal Point of Departure, not in The Japan Times.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 21, 2019, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Kiyoshi Koyama, 82, Chronicler of Jazz. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 
 

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The Monkees, in 1966, featured Davy Jones, Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith. The made-for-TV pop band spawned a frenzy of merchandising, record sales and world tours that became known as Monkeemania. (AP)
Peter Tork, a blues and folk musician who became a teeny-bopper sensation as a member of the Monkees, the wisecracking, made-for-TV pop group that imitated and briefly outsold the Beatles, died Feb. 21. He was 77.
The death was announced by his official Facebook page, which did not say where or how he died. Mr. Tork was diagnosed with adenoid cystic carcinoma, a rare cancer affecting his tongue, in 2009.
If the Monkees were a manufactured version of the Beatles, a “prefab four” who auditioned for a rock-and-roll sitcom and were selected more for their long-haired good looks than their musical abilities, Mr. Tork was the group’s Ringo, its lovably goofy supporting player.
On television, he performed as the self-described “dummy” of the group, drawing on a persona he developed while working as a folk musician in Greenwich Village, where he flashed a confused smile whenever his stage banter fell flat. Off-screen, he embraced the Summer of Love, donning moccasins and “love beads” and declaring that “nonverbal, extrasensory communication is at hand” and that “dogmatism is leaving the scene.”
A versatile multi-instrumentalist, Mr. Tork mostly played bass and keyboard for the Monkees, in addition to singing lead on tracks including “Long Title: Do I Have to Do This All Over Again,” which he wrote for the group’s psychedelic 1968 movie, “Head,” and “Your Auntie Grizelda.”
At age 24, he was also the band’s oldest member when “The Monkees” premiered on NBC in 1966. Not that it mattered: “The emotional age of all of us,” he told the New York Times that year, “is 13.”

The Monkees in 1966. (AP)
[Hey hey, it’s the . . . Monkees? A dispatch from the band’s 1986 reunion.]
Created by producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, “The Monkees” was designed to replicate the success of “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Help!,” director Richard Lester’s musical comedies about the Beatles.
The band featured Mr. Tork alongside Michael Nesmith, a singer-songwriter who played guitar, and former child actors Micky Dolenz and Davy Jones, who played the drums and sang lead, respectively. Like their British counterparts, the group had a fondness for mischief, resulting in high jinks involving a magical necklace, a monkey’s paw, high-seas pirates and Texas outlaws.
“The Monkees” ran for only two seasons but won an Emmy Award for outstanding comedy and spawned a frenzy of merchandising, record sales and world tours that became known as Monkeemania. In 1967, according to one report in The Washington Post, the Monkees sold 35 million albums — “twice as many as the Beatles and Rolling Stones combined” — on the strength of songs such as “Daydream Believer,” “I’m a Believer” and “Last Train to Clarksville,” which all rose to No. 1 on the Billboard record chart.
Almost all of their early material was penned by a stable of vaunted songwriters that included Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Neil Diamond, David Gates, Neil Sedaka, Jeff Barry, Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart. But while the band scored a total of six Top 10 songs and five Top 10 albums, they engendered as much critical scorn as commercial success. In one typical review, music critic Richard Goldstein declared, “The Monkees are as unoriginal as anything yet thrust upon us in the name of popular music.”

When the Monkees landed in Tokyo in 1968, around 1,000 fans gathered to see them arrive. (T. Sakakibara/AP)
Detractors pointed to the fact that the band, at least initially, existed only in name. While the Monkees appeared on the cover of their debut album and were shown performing on TV, their instruments were actually unplugged. The songs were mostly done by session musicians — much to the shock of Mr. Tork, who recalled walking into the recording studio in 1966 to help with the group’s self-titled debut.
He was “mortified,” he later told CBS News, to find that music producer Don Kirshner, dubbed “the man with the golden ear,” didn’t want him around. “They were doing ‘Clarksville,’ and I wrote a counterpoint, I had studied music,” Mr. Tork said. “And I brought it to them, and they said: ‘No, no, Peter, you don’t understand. This is the record. It’s all done. We don’t need you.’ ”
After the release of the band’s second album, “More of the Monkees” (1967), Mr. Tork and his bandmates wrested control of the recording process and wrote and performed most of the songs on records including “Headquarters” (1967) and “Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.” (1967).
[The 2012 obituary for Davy Jones, the Monkees’ velvet-voiced heartthrob]
They also started touring, playing to sold-out stadium crowds and backed by opening acts that briefly included guitarist Jimi Hendrix. But as Mr. Tork’s musical ambitions grew, leading him to envision the Monkees as a genuinely great group of rockers, he began to clash with bandmates who saw the Monkees as more of a novelty act.
He left the group soon after the release of “Head,” a satirical, nearly plot-free film flop that featured a screenplay co-written by actor Jack Nicholson. Mr. Tork seemed to have taken his cue from musician Frank Zappa, who made a cameo in the movie, telling Jones’s character that the Monkees “should spend more time” on their music “because the youth of America depends on you that show the way.”
For much of the 1970s, Mr. Tork struggled to find his own way. He formed an unsuccessful band called Release, was imprisoned for several months in 1972 after being caught with “$3 worth of hashish in my pocket,” and worked as a high school teacher and “singing waiter” as his Monkees wealth dried up. He also said he struggled with alcohol addiction — “I was awful when I was drinking, snarling at people,” he told the Daily Mail — before quitting alcohol in the early 1980s.
By then, television reruns and album reissues had fueled a resurgence of interest in the Monkees, and Mr. Tork had come around to what he described as the essential nature of the music group, which he joined for major reunion tours about once each decade, beginning in the mid-’80s, in addition to performing as a solo artist.
“This is not a band. It’s an entertainment operation whose function is Monkee music,” he told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper during a Monkees tour in 2016. “It took me a while to get to grips with that but what great music it turned out to be! And what a wild and wonderful trip it has taken us on!”
He was born Peter Halsten Thorkelson in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 13, 1942. His mother was a homemaker, and his father — an Army officer who served in the military government in Berlin after World War II — was an economics professor who joined the University of Connecticut in 1950, leading the family to settle in the town of Mansfield.
Both parents collected folk records and bought him a guitar and banjo when he was a boy. Peter went on to take piano lessons and studied French horn at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., where he reportedly flunked out twice before settling in New York City. At coffee shops and makeshift folk music venues, he performed with the shortened last name Tork, which had been emblazoned on one of his father’s hand-me-down sweatshirts, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Mr. Tork played with guitarist Stephen Stills before moving to Long Beach, Calif., in 1965. Stills moved west as well and auditioned for “The Monkees” after the show’s producers placed an advertisement in Variety calling for “4 Insane Boys, Ages 17-21.”
When Stills didn’t get the part — purportedly on account of his bad teeth — he suggested that Mr. Tork audition. “I went, ‘Yeah, sure, thanks for the call,’ and hung up,” Mr. Tork later told the Los Angeles Times. “Then he called me a few days later,” finally persuading Mr. Tork to try out.
He later appeared in episodes of television shows such as “Boy Meets World,” playing the love interest Topanga’s guitar-strumming father, and in recent years performed with a band called Shoe Suede Blues. Mr. Tork also released a well-received 1994 solo album, “Stranger Things Have Happened,” and partnered with folk singer James Lee Stanley for several records.
Mr. Tork’s marriages to Jody Babb, Reine Stewart and Barbara Iannoli ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Pamela Grapes; a daughter, Hallie, from his second marriage; a son, Ivan, from his third marriage; a daughter, Erica, from a relationship with Tammy Sustek; a brother; and a sister.
Many of the Monkees reunion tours were conducted without Nesmith, who inherited a fortune from his mother, the inventor of Liquid Paper, and worked as a country-rock musician, songwriter and producer after the band first split up. Nesmith returned to performances after the death of Jones, the Monkees’ singer, in 2012, which helped spur a 50th anniversary reunion tour and album, “Good Times!,” four years later.
And while the Monkees were dogged by reports of squabbling and frequent tensions — Mr. Tork was once head-butted by Jones and said he dropped out of a 2001 tour because he had a “meltdown” and “behaved inappropriately” — Mr. Tork insisted that they were at their best when they were together. Their musical chemistry was special, he said, even if it was the result of a few producers looking to cast a few handsome men for a television show.
“I refute any claims that any four guys could’ve done what we did,” he told Guitar World in 2013. “There was a magic to that collection. We couldn’t have chosen each other. It wouldn’t have flown. But under the circumstances, they got the right guys.”
 

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Over a frenetic period between the mid-1960s and the early ’70s, Guy Webster photographed many leading artists for some of rock’s best-known albums.
Guy Webster was smoking pot with the Mamas & the Papas in the group’s rented house in Los Angeles in 1966 when he had an idea about how to photograph them for the cover of their debut album.
He told them to head into a bathroom, where all four squeezed, fully clothed, into the tub: John Phillips sat in the foreground, and behind him were Cass Elliot, Denny Doherty and Michelle Phillips, her legs stretched across the others’ laps. (Mr. Doherty told a slightly different story: that they had been hiding from Mr. Webster in the tub.)
“You can see how stoned they were,” Mr. Webster said when he showed the picture to an audience attending an exhibition about his career at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles in 2012. But the picture had a flaw: It included the toilet — an image, he said, that would have limited sales of the album, “If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears,” in family-oriented chain stores.
“So Lou Adler,” he continued, referring to the producer of the album and the president of Dunhill Records, “came up with the idea that when we put shrink wrap over the album, and put a sticker on it that says, ‘Including “California Dreamin’,” we can sell it at Sears. And when the kids take it off, there’s the toilet.”
“If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears” rose to No. 1 on the Billboard album chart and enhanced Mr. Webster’s growing reputation as one of the top rock ’n’ roll photographers of his time.
 “He knew about the power and longevity of music,” Harvey Kubernik, who, with his brother, Kenneth, wrote “Big Shots: Rock Legends and Hollywood Icons: The Photography of Guy Webster” (2014), said by telephone. “He treated music as an art form that would be around for the next century.”
Mr. Webster died on Feb. 5 in Ojai, Calif. He was 79. His wife, Leone (James) Webster, said the cause was liver cancer.
Several months after that bathtub session, Mr. Webster invited the Doors to his small studio behind his parents’ house in Beverly Hills to photograph them for their first album, which would be released in early 1967.
“In walked Jim Morrison, and he said, ‘Guy!’ ” Mr. Webster recalled in an interview in “Big Shots.” He did not recognize this longhaired lead singer, but Mr. Morrison reminded him that they had been in the same philosophy class at U.C.L.A.
After removing his cheap beribboned shirt at Mr. Webster’s request, Mr. Morrison became the focus of the cover photo, his face much larger than those of Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger and John Densmore, who looked more like satellites than bandmates.
“I’m sure they hated me for this cover because they weren’t equal in size,” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg lecture. “The songwriter is the guy on the far right — Krieger wrote ‘Light My Fire,’ Morrison didn’t.” But, he added, “I’m happy I went with it, because it was so popular.”
Mr. Webster at his Venice, Calif., studio in 2014.CreditLisa Gizara
Image
Mr. Webster at his Venice, Calif., studio in 2014.CreditLisa Gizara
Guy Michael Webster was born on Sept. 14, 1939, in Los Angeles. His father, Paul Francis Webster, was a lyricist who shared Academy Awards for best original song for “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “Secret Love.” His mother, Gloria (Benguiat) Webster, was a homemaker.
After graduating from Beverly Hills High School, Guy attended Whittier College and then entered the Army, stationed at Ford Ord in California. When asked whether he knew anything about photography, he pretended that he did and quickly began studying photograph books in the base’s library. He eventually became the head of its photo department.
After his discharge, he disappointed his parents by telling them he would study photography at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena rather than attend Yale. They refused to pay for his education, fearing he would become no more than a paparazzo.
While he was at Art Center, his ambition to be a fine-art photographer was derailed by his friend Terry Melcher, Doris Day’s son, who was a producer for Columbia Records. Mr. Melcher introduced him to Mr. Adler, who was intrigued by Mr. Webster’s portfolio and hired him at Dunhill.
One early project was Barry McGuire’s third album, named for his apocalyptic hit single, “Eve of Destruction” (1965). For the cover, in black and white, he photographed Mr. McGuire in a manhole.
Columbia asked Mr. Webster to work with Simon & Garfunkel on their album “Sounds of Silence” (1966). He brought the duo to the shady grasslands of Franklin Canyon in Los Angeles, where he posed them on a dirt road looking as if they were walking into an unknown future. He also brought them to meet his father, who had collaborated with Johnny Mercer, Hoagy Carmichael and others.
“Paul Simon said, ‘Hey, you want to hear our new song?’ ” Mr. Webster recalled in “Big Shots.” “And he pulled out his guitar in the living room in Beverly Hills, and my dad was sitting there, who is not a rock and roller, and he listened to ‘Sounds of Silence’ for the first time. ‘Oh, my God, you guys, what a brilliant song.’ ”
By the early 1970s, Mr. Webster, burned out by the pace of his rock work, moved to Europe for several years. In Italy, he studied art history at the University of Florence and started building a large collection of vintage Italian motorcycles.
Returning to the United States, he began photographing Hollywood stars like Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Candice Bergen and Jane Fonda. He also photographed actors for publicity shots and movie productions on location.
“He had an ability to make celebrities feel very safe,” Leone Webster said in a telephone interview. “He also had these adorable pictures of the Kardashian girls growing up — he was like their family photographer.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Webster is survived by his daughters, Sarah, Merry, Jessie and Erin Webster; a son, Michael; two grandchildren; and a brother, Roger, who is also known as Mona. His marriage to Bettie Beal ended in divorce.
Mr. Webster’s work with the Rolling Stones — including the photo for the bucolic cover of the United States release of the anthology “Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass)” (1966) — began with an unusual offer in 1965 from Andrew Loog Oldham, their producer and manager: Take photographs, but don’t expect to be paid because it’s an honor simply to work with the band.
“And I said, ‘Well, it’s an honor for you that I take these pictures,’ ” Mr. Webster said at the Annenberg event. “He paid me for one album cover. Three of them came out during the years using my photographs.”
 
 

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The Illusions – hit-makers of “Give Me Mercy” in 1967. L-R: Eugene “Skeets” Boiani, Jack Pender, Ruff Francis, Phil Bazicki and Michael “Micky” Caruso. Photo courtesy of rufffrancis.com.
You’ve heard many people say, “Oh, I should write a book.” Many people think their lives are extraordinary.
For Ruff Francis, it’s true.
He was born Ralph Francis Passonno, Jr. into an industrious family. His grandfather founded the paint company bearing the family name and his parents expected him to continue in the busi- ness. But music beckoned. His quintet made the national scene. And today he is the president of a major firm, Uncle Sam Auctions of Troy.
In the 1960s his quintet The Illusions (later a sextet) played many of the top spots upstate (and down) from Duke’s in Troy to the 1965 World’s Fair in New York. They opened for the Dave Clark Quartet at Colonie Coliseum. Their recording of “Give Me Mercy” ranked numbers 14 and 20 on two Capital District radio stations,
hit nine and 10 in San Francisco and seven in Pittsburg. It was recorded at the CBS studios in NYC in the autumn of 1966.
Ruff was the leader, Fender Jazz bassist and vocalist; Phil Bazicki (brother of Tommy of the Valentinos), tenor sax; Eugene “Skeets” Boiani, guitar; Jackie Pender, tenor; and Micky Caruso, drums. Later drummer Alphonse “Pops” Jones joined them.
As time went by, they tended more toward jazz. Lyman “Butch” Strong, a mighty fine organ- ist, was added. They often played with Troy’s award-winning saxophonist Nick Brignola and Albany drummer Larry Jackson.
In 2014 they released a record of the Francis- composed ”Misery Loves Company,” which can be heard on YouTube, as can “Give Me Mercy.”
–C. ROBIE BOOTH

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6dxtaBhW4U

 

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Ethel Ennis, Baltimore’s “First Lady of Jazz” who during her more than nearly seven-decade career performed with such noted musical luminaries as Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Miles Davis-John Coltrane Sextet and Wynton Marsalis, died Sunday from complications of a stroke at her Greater Mondawmin home.
She was 86.
Born in a North Calhoun Street rowhouse in Baltimore and raised in Sandtown-Winchester, Ethel Ennis was the daughter of Andrew Ennis Sr., a Harlem Park barber, and Arrabell “Bell” Ennis, a homemaker, who played piano at Ames United Methodist Church.
Ms. Ennis grew up in a home where jazz and the blues, which represented the “fast life,” were not played.
“‘I could hear the music coming from an apartment below us,’” she told The Baltimore Sun in a 1998 article.
“So, to get a better earful, the young Ennis got down on the floor, one ear pressed to the concrete,” the article read. “‘I came from a rather conservative background. Jazz and blues were forbidden,’” she said.
Ms. Ennis was urged by her mother to study the piano, which turned into her first paying job as a church pianist. By the time she was in her teens, she had discovered popular rhythm and blues music, which didn’t entirely please her family, who thought it was just a phase she was passing through.
She joined a group of young enthusiastic jazz musicians, Riley’s Octet, which was led by Abraham Riley, as a $2.50 a week pianist.
“I was much too young to play in clubs, so we played in places like VFW and fellowship halls where my age was accepted,” she explained in the Sun interview. “My grandmother always emphasized ‘being a lady.’ She kept saying to always be a lady. So, I’ve been a lady singing the blues in these bars forever.”
The first time Ms. Ennis sang in public was as a 15-year-old when Riley’s Octet was playing an Odd Fellows Hall in Randallstown, after an audience member promised her a $5 tip if she sang “In the Dark.”
After her performance, her days as the group’s pianist came to an end.
“Her angelic, full-throated singing brought the house down,” wrote John Lewis in Baltimore Magazine in 2011. “The crowd demanded encores, and, from then on, she was a vocalist.”
After she graduated in 1950 from Frederick Douglass High School, attended business school during the day, she performed with Montell Poulson, a bassist, or solo. They played strip clubs on Baltimore’s Block and other joints, including Sherrie’s Bar on Pulaski Highway, a truckers’ bar.
“She and Poulson played mostly ballads, jazz tunes, and R&B at Phil’s Lounge, The Zanzibar, and Pennsylvania Avenue’s Club Casino,” Mr. Lewis wrote.
This article will be updated.
fred.rasmussen@baltsun.com
 

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