Jazz Musician And Subject Of Iconic Photo Revisits ‘A Great Day In Harlem’ Sixty years ago, Esquire magazine published a now-iconic photo of jazz luminaries, titled “A Great Day In Harlem.” NPR talks with saxophonist Sonny Rollins, one of only two surviving artists in the photo.
Jazz Musician And Subject Of Iconic Photo Revisits ‘A Great Day In Harlem’
February 17, 20195:22 PM ET
Sixty years ago, Esquire magazine published a now-iconic photo of jazz luminaries, titled “A Great Day In Harlem.” NPR talks with saxophonist Sonny Rollins, one of only two surviving artists in the photo.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Finally today, we’re going to revisit an iconic photograph. The photo “A Great Day In Harlem” was published in 1959 in Esquire magazine in the magazine’s golden age of jazz edition. It’s black and white, and it pictures nearly every jazz luminary of the era standing on the steps of a Harlem brownstone and fanning out onto the sidewalk in front. There were 57 musicians in all.
SONNY ROLLINS: There was Dizzy Gillespie. There was Roy Eldridge. There was Thelonious Monk.
MARTIN: Saxophonist Sonny Rollins stood in the front row.
ROLLINS: My god. I’ve looked up to these – all of these people that were in this photo. So when I was asked to do it, I mean, it was an honor. It was my saxophone idol Coleman Hawkins. Then there was also my other idol, Lester Young. There was Art Blakey, the great drummer. And the women who were represented – there was Mary Lou Williams and Marian McPartland. Miles Davis was out of town, and John Coltrane was out of town. And I think Duke Ellington was out of town. But everybody that was in New York seemed to be there.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONNY ROLLINS SONG, “ST. THOMAS”)
MARTIN: Sixty years later, Sonny Rollins is one of only two of the artists in the photo who are still living.
ROLLINS: It was just great for me being there and being with all these great people, some of whom I knew, many of whom I didn’t know. That’s one thing about that photo – it went through generations. I was the youngest guy in that photo, by the way.
MARTIN: His career was on the rise. He’d recorded the record “Freedom Suite” just months earlier. It was the first major work by a jazz musician to address civil rights concerns.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONNY ROLLINS’ “FREEDOM SUITE”)
ROLLINS: The “Freedom Suite” was my signature number in which I had a statement going into it about the injustices that exist in the country and so on and so forth. The “Freedom Suite” opened the door for a lot of other jazz artists who began recording jazz protest albums. So it was very important, actually.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONNY ROLLINS’ “FREEDOM SUITE”)
MARTIN: As for the photo, Sonny Rollins watched over the years as that picture of “A Great Day In Harlem” became an important part of music history. The scene has been recreated by everybody from hip-hop artists to Netflix actors. Sonny Rollins praises the photographer, Art Kane, as a visionary.
ROLLINS: The photo has become huger and huger and huger every day. It humanized the jazz world, the jazz people. And I don’t know if Art Kane thought about that when he did it, but he should be really praised highly for getting that picture together. I still don’t know how he called all of those guys and got them together, and they all came (laughter). You know, it was just amazing.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONNY ROLLINS’ “FREEDOM SUITE”)
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Before 1919, the music was considered more novelty than art. Then a military band changed everything.
By David Sager
Mr. Sager is a research assistant at the Library of Congress and a jazz historian.

• Feb. 18, 2019
•  

The 369th Infantry Regiment band led by James Reese Europe playing in the courtyard of a Paris hospital for wounded Americans.CreditLibrary of Congress

Image
The 369th Infantry Regiment band led by James Reese Europe playing in the courtyard of a Paris hospital for wounded Americans.CreditCreditLibrary of Congress
The Armistice to end World War I brought elation and a sense of relief to millions of Americans, but also a jolt of reality. The country had only been in the conflict for 19 months, but it had already adjusted to the rhythms and strictures of a society on a total-war footing. When it ended so abruptly, the result was a sudden permissiveness in the culture, a weakening of social rules and an opening for new ideas, creating a fertile atmosphere for America’s new, unruly musical child: jazz.
What was jazz? It had no real definition; it referred to many things. The year 1919 is usually not considered an important marker on the jazz timeline, but that year subtle yet compelling forces took hold that would turn this invasive novelty into something with far more clarity and promise as an art form. It was the year jazz came into its own.
Feb. 17, 1919, was a cold, overcast New York day that threatened snow. Tens of thousands of people had come to the streets of Manhattan for a victory parade. At the corner of 60th Street, a crowd packed the sidewalks and clustered onto a grandstand, vying for a glimpse of the returning heroes parading northward.
Along the route marched the 369th Infantry, a highly decorated all-black regiment that had just returned from a year in France. The Germans, whom they flushed from their trenches, called them “blutdürstige schwarze Männer,” or “bloodthirsty black men” — or more respectfully, “Hellfighters.” The French government gave the unit the Croix de Guerre for its bravery.
On cue, the cheering crowd fell into an abrupt hush, as line upon line of soldiers appeared, proceeding in immaculate precision. “For a moment there was almost complete silence, as the throngs of men and women gazed upon the dark-skinned warriors who had beaten the best regiments of veterans the enemy could send them,” wrote The New York Tribune.
Nearly all accounts of the parade singled out the 369th’s band, under the direction of Lt. James Reese Europe, an immensely successful and well-known African-American musician. The press consistently referred to them as a “jazz band,” whose “jazz music” had become the sensation of France. Even Gen. Henri Gouraud, a staid and dignified French commander, was enthralled, and made his headquarters wherever the band was stationed. Lieutenant Europe was already known as the “Jazz King.”
Such praise marked the first time anything associated with jazz had received such glowing approval. In 1919, jazz, or “jass,” as some still called it, was a peculiar word with musical and sexual connotations. It could be noun, verb or adjective, indicating pep, liveliness and noise. Jazz was the new counterculture dance music replacing ragtime — but more dangerous, disorderly and discordant, consisting of random, wrong-sounding musical obstreperousness and percussive turmoil. The music had been considered a scourge on polite society, particularly by whites, even if many of them had no idea what the word meant. Now, thousands — both white and black — cheered Europe’s “jazz” band.
They kept the “jazz music” under wraps at first. Marching along, Europe kept his men reined in, playing dignified military music, matching the solemnity and discipline of the moment. But as they passed 60th Street, where the crowd became more and more densely populated with African-Americans, the band let loose with “That Moaning Trombone” and other syncopated numbers. Verve and enthusiasm stood in bold relief.
James Reese Europe was born in 1881 in Mobile, Ala., and raised in Washington, D.C., where he studied violin, piano and composition. In 1903, he relocated to New York, seeking work as a musical director and composer. There he associated with the black musical cognoscenti of Manhattan, including Bert Williams, J. Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole. He became New York society’s favorite band leader, charming the likes of the Vanderbilts, and was musical director for Vernon and Irene Castle, a popular pair of white dancers. Along the way he mentored a string of future musical stars, like Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake.
Although historians often associate Europe with ragtime and jazz, his focus was on neither. He wanted to create music that he believed reflected the artistic temperament and souls of African-Americans, whatever style it took, and to use it to promote the validity and viability of Negro musicians.
In 1910 he formed the Clef Club, a union for New York’s black musicians, along with the enormous Clef Club Symphony Orchestra, which emphasized instruments that he felt were commonly used by black musicians: banjo, mandolin, bandora and harp guitar. In interviews, Europe avoided the word “ragtime,” simply calling it “Negro music.” The orchestra performed lavish concerts — several at Carnegie Hall — featuring works by black composers like Will Marion Cook, William H. Tyers and Europe himself. It played marches, concert pieces, tangos and waltzes, with a sprinkling of ragtime.
Europe’s reputation as a purveyor of ragtime and “proto jazz” is based on recordings made in 1913 and 1914. Of these, “Castle House Rag,” a Europe composition, captures our imagination today, offering a rare glimpse into black dance music, partly read and partly played by ear. Exciting and edgy, it has hints of “Shortenin’ Bread” and what might be described as “country ragtime.”
Few who heard Europe’s music were acquainted with the dance music then brewing in New Orleans, which some regarded as “ragtime played by ear.” Because it went largely unrecorded during the 1910s, it would be years before the rest of the country could hear the rhythmic drive and hot quality of its pioneers, like King Oliver, Freddie Keppard and Jelly Roll Morton. One exception was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who made a recording in 1917 that was listened to from California to New York. Many musicians tried to copy their seemingly discordant approach, and failed. Most couldn’t hear, beneath that mélange, the band’s harmonic and rhythmic order, spontaneous sounding counterpoint and interlocking parts. Musicians copied the effects — the musical veneer. Capturing musical essence was a far more complex task than aping the obvious.
And yet 1919 was the year when that began to change. In March, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band sailed for England, to tour British theaters. While there, they rerecorded a number of their old hits, along with two waltzes, unlikely choices for a New Orleans jazz band. Still, those recordings, “Alice Blue Gown” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” have the propulsion and lilt that characterized New Orleans. More and more people, far outside New Orleans, were suddenly hearing, and enjoying, jazz.
As they did, New York bands began to get the swing of the music. In March 1919, a group from Coney Island called the Original Memphis Five emerged with a streamlined version of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s style. They made hundreds of recordings between 1921 and 1929.
Nineteen-nineteen was also the year that a young cornetist named Louis Armstrong, who had been electrifying patrons of New Orleans saloons and honky-tonks with his distinctive sound, began to set his sights beyond his hometown. Armstrong possessed a rare gift for fusing disparate types of music that moved him — he had command over the passion of blues, excitement of ragtime, and the poignancy of operatic and classical melodies. His was the unnamed music of New Orleans: organic, confident and sincere. Playing on Mississippi riverboats, his horn was heard for the first time outside of New Orleans. Inevitably, young musicians like the trombonist Jack Teagarden and the cornetist Bix Beiderbecke heard Armstrong; within a few years, both of these young men would emerge as jazz originals in their own right.
Armstrong’s mentor, Joe Oliver, moved to Chicago in 1917. By 1919 he was one of the busiest musicians in town, giving Chicago a taste of the Crescent City’s hot music. In 1922 he sent for Armstrong to join his Creole Jazz Band as the second cornetist. The 1923 King Oliver recordings would spread New Orleans music — some called it “jazz” — throughout the land.
On the very day of the 369th’s parade, 2,900 miles to the west, a struggling dance orchestra leader named Paul Whiteman was recovering from a nervous breakdown. A violinist formerly with the San Francisco Symphony, Whiteman had become fascinated with the sensuous, unpolished sounds he heard from musicians in Barbary Coast saloons. He attempted to notate this strange music, orchestrate it and normalize it. Hiring the best “jazzers” in town, Whiteman formed a dance band to play at the Fairmont Hotel. Taxed by overworked and worry, he collapsed, and soon left music, and San Francisco, behind.
But he didn’t stay gone. Whiteman moved east, in 1920, and drew national attention when he signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company. Striving to “make a lady” of jazz led to his fabulous 1924 concert “An Experiment in Modern Music,” which premiered Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” Whiteman became known as the “King of Jazz,” a moniker which — while he never took it literally — served him well. He went on to hire Frank Trumbauer, Beiderbecke and others, a dream team of young jazz musicians. By the mid-1920s, jazz was firmly in place as the reigning American popular music style.
All that was in the future as Europe and the 369th wrapped up their parade through Manhattan. Soon afterward they were mustered out of the service. For most, there was no question what they would do next: Reforming the band as civilians, they set out to tour the East Coast and Midwest. According to a review of their show in Philadelphia, The Evening Bulletin wrote: “Many ragtime, jazz time and popular air tunes were played with a swing, a swerve and a tempo that lifted the soul as well as the feet of the listener and carried him away to the Land of Shuffling Feet.”
Though they were praised for their jazz, Europe and his band ranged widely. He typically programmed light classical overtures, specialties like “Evolution of Dixie,” some ragtime, and medleys of syncopated hits under the rubric “A Potpourri of Jazz.” A recording of a medley they often played on the road, “Plantation Echoes,” contains not a speck of jazz, or ragtime, by anyone’s definition. But the crowds demanded jazz, and Europe gave it to them — not only on the stage, but in interviews, where he tried to explain this new form. As he told The Newark Evening Ledger, “Lots of people think jazz is easy. It’s as hard as anything. The French bandmasters thought we had trick instruments. They’d ask to examine our instruments and then cry in surprise ‘Meme que les autres’ — ‘The same as the others.’ You see we get those special effects with a roll of the tongue and blowing the instrument about twice as hard as usual.”
Europe’s comments reflected commonly held beliefs about jazz: It was about effects, such as distorting the embouchure to produce fluttering effects. Europe was a master tactician, and provided good copy.
The band’s recording of “Memphis Blues” illustrates their approach to jazz. The final minute displays many of the effects Europe described: crying clarinets, flutter-tongued cornets, trombone glissandos and a “shave and a haircut” ending. There is one exception: a surprise solo “break” by a trombonist who tosses off an insouciant, swinging phrase.
That break, only two measures long, speaks volumes: a rarity on such an early recording, signifying the exciting nature of jazz as it was still maturing.
On May 9, 1919, the band arrived in Boston, to perform at Mechanic’s Hall. Europe, suffering from a cold and exhaustion, courageously pushed himself through the concert’s first half. During intermission, an altercation erupted when a disgruntled musician entered Europe’s dressing room and attacked him with a penknife. The injury, which seemed at first superficial, was anything but. Europe died a few hours later.
In a flash, James Reese Europe was gone, the band broke up, and postwar excitement and acceptance for jazz were temporarily forgotten. Nevertheless, Europe’s final testament had a lasting legacy. During that final tour, a wide range of Americans had begun to realize that jazz was something of which they could be proud. Photos from the parade, with jazz-playing musicians surrounded by returning soldiers, made it clear that this was a homegrown, even patriotic, art form. The old notion about “jazzing” suddenly seemed quaint. “Jazz” had become a noun.
Europe’s dream, to see African-Americans accepted as serious and respected performers, lived on through his two closest associates, Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake. Their 1921 Broadway hit “Shuffle Along” was in a sense, a tribute to their mentor and friend.
Looking at 1919 from both sides of a timeline clarifies how pivotal this year was for jazz. On one side there was the diligent, focused work of James Reese Europe, which brought dignity to both African-American musicians and jazz. On the other, Paul Whiteman continued his work legitimizing jazz in the public’s mind. In the middle were the pioneers of the art: Louis Armstrong, his mentors and disciples.
Encompassing a span of a decade in a single year, 1919 was the fulcrum of momentous musical activity when jazz — in many forms and many definitions — was nurtured, whether by Europe, Whiteman or the growing number of jazz musicians who understood it.
David Sager is a research assistant in the Recorded Sound Research Center at the Library of Congress and a Grammy-nominated jazz historian and jazz trombonist.

Further Reading (and listening): Louis Armstrong, “Louis Armstrong in his own Words,” ed. by Thomas Brothers; Reid Badger, “A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe;” Tim Brooks, “Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919;” H.O. Brunn, “The Story of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band;” “James Reese Europe with his 369th U.S. Infantry “Hellfighters” Band: The Complete Recordings,” Memphis Archive, MA7020 (compact disc); “Original Dixieland Jazz Band: The First Jazz Recordings, 1917-192,”. Timeless CBC1-009 (compact disc); Don Rayno, “Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music;” David Sager, “King Oliver Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Recordings,” Off the Record — ARCH-OTR — MM6-C2 (liner notes for compact disc).

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Music|A Pianist Swings Hard in Both Classical and Jazz
Critic’s Notebook
The pianist Aaron Diehl will be featured in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s mini-festival this weekend celebrating the Harlem Renaissance.CreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times

 
The pianist Aaron Diehl will be featured in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s mini-festival this weekend celebrating the Harlem Renaissance.CreditCreditMichelle V. Agins/The New York Times
At the Juilliard School, the pianist Aaron Diehl studied both classical and jazz traditions. And in the years since, he’s chosen to follow each of those paths — and sometimes both, simultaneously.
Mr. Diehl has played with Cécile McLorin Salvant and Wynton Marsalis. His own recordings as a bandleader have revealed him to be not only a stylish improviser, but also a composer worth watching.
In recent years, he has revived the practice of interpreting Gershwin’s concert music through an improvisatory filter. His imaginative yet idiomatic turn in the Concerto in F with the New York Philharmonic at their opening-night gala in 2016 contained the hardest-swinging note I’ve ever heard inside David Geffen Hall. (It was an interpolated low D that Mr. Diehl tossed off with casually elegant force toward the end of the first movement.)
This weekend, Mr. Diehl plays “Rhapsody in Blue” (on Saturday) and the less familiar “Second Rhapsody” (on Sunday) with the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of the brief but potent series “William Grant Still and the Harlem Renaissance.”
“The challenge is creating this balance between the improvisation and the written score,” Mr. Diehl said of his approach to “Rhapsody in Blue.”
Gershwin, in a way, is the exception this weekend: The rest of the Philharmonic’s programming puts the spotlight on black composers. William Grant Still’s symphonies serve as anchors of the programs, the First on Saturday and the Fourth on Sunday.
Symphonic arrangements of works by Duke Ellington also appear all weekend, and a new piece — Adolphus Hailstork’s “Still Holding On” — will have its premiere on Sunday. (It’s one of the 50-plus commissions the orchestra has made as part of its centennial season.)
An earlier orchestral miniature by Mr. Hailstork, “Celebration,” was captured in the 1970s for Columbia Records’s Black Composers Series, a set which was recently remastered and reissued. That recording was the conductor Thomas Wilkins’s introduction to Mr. Hailstork’s music.
Two symphonies by William Grant Still, one famous and one lesser known, will be played this weekend.CreditLibrary of Congress
 
Two symphonies by William Grant Still, one famous and one lesser known, will be played this weekend.CreditLibrary of Congress
“I’ve always found him to be a great craftsman,” said Mr. Wilkins, who will be conducting the Los Angeles concerts. “You hear his upbringing in his music; you hear his culture in his music. But it’s not on the sleeve.”
“It’s quite tonal,” he added, “but it’s not without chromaticism. And some of the time, because he’s sort of hinting at a blues lick or a jazz gesture, we find notes that are bent or twisted. Or a jazz harmony all of a sudden.” (Two other pieces by Mr. Hailstork will be performed by the Harlem Chamber Players on Feb. 28 at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.)
Mr. Wilkins said that he and the Philharmonic wanted to acknowledge Still’s earlier and better-known First Symphony — subtitled “The Afro-American Symphony” — but also push audiences toward less familiar parts of the composer’s body of work.
“He’s unapologetic about being a black person,” said Mr. Wilkins. “In the last movement of the First Symphony, he begins with this plaintive song in the entire orchestra, that eventually finds its way to the cello section only — which I think is the instrument which sounds most like the human voice. There is this ‘Lord have mercy’ kind of sound in that music. And then, of course, the allegro takes over. It’s ‘we have no choice but to go forward.’ That’s what that music does.”
Adolphus Hailstork in 1989. His piece “Still Holding On” will have its premiere in Los Angeles on Sunday.CreditPaul A. Aiken/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated Press
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Adolphus Hailstork in 1989. His piece “Still Holding On” will have its premiere in Los Angeles on Sunday.CreditPaul A. Aiken/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated Press
In the Fourth Symphony, Mr. Wilkins identifies “that same longing, that same aspirational sound world. But this symphony ends not allegro, but profoundly — it’s like a pronouncement at the end. It’s grand, and the gestures are large and bold. And not lickety-split fast. It is its own kind of affirmation: ‘Yes, this is who I am.’”
Asked what else they could imagine programming, were the Philharmonic’s short festival to be longer, Mr. Wilkins named William Dawson’s “Negro Folk Symphony” and “more Hailstork.”
Mr. Diehl said he would be eager to tease out unexpected connections between different centuries: “I would have Scarlatti on, maybe, the top half of the set. And then end with, like, Roscoe Mitchell. I just feel like good music is good music. Duke Ellington always said that.”
Los Angeles Philharmonic
Saturday and Sunday at Walt Disney Concert Hall; laphil.com.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 16, 2019, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: In Los Angeles, a Spotlight on Black Composers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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Movies|‘A Tuba to Cuba’ Review: A New Orleans Jazz Band Makes a Caribbean Connection
Critic’s Pick
A scene from the documentary “A Tuba to Cuba.”CreditBlue Fox Entertainment

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A scene from the documentary “A Tuba to Cuba.”CreditCreditBlue Fox Entertainment
High on music and hot with the thrill of discovery, “A Tuba to Cuba” swarms with shiny happy people.
Directed by T.G. Herrington and Danny Clinch, this joyous, wide-ranging account of a New Orleans jazz band’s 2015 visit to Cuba is crammed with fascinating facts and toe-tickling tunes. Its myriad voices, humble despite their extreme musical gifts, guide a journey to forge new connections and untangle the music’s Afro-Caribbean roots.
Everyone has a story to tell, a tradition to illuminate or a musical style to lay claim to, and the filmmakers weave these diverse threads into a colorful blanket of sights, sounds and spirituality. A mini urban opera emerges from the percussive rhythms of street life, and complex beats spring from the simple slap of a hand on a wooden seat. The movie exudes such an abundance of pleasure, talent and fellowship that we barely notice the poverty that backgrounds many of its scenes. Instead, it seems more logical to ponder why a neighborhood with its own conga organization isn’t on top of everyone’s house-hunting list.
Trailer: “A Tuba to Cuba’CreditCreditBlue Fox Entertainment
Intimate and easy, Ben Jaffe’s narration grounds the film’s ambitions in his parents’ 1961 founding of the historic New Orleans jazz venue Preservation Hall, whose name his band bears. Serene beneath a riot of ginger ringlets, Jaffe is an evangelist for the music’s ability to bridge colors and cultures. (His parents fostered the hall’s success at a time when it was still illegal for blacks and whites to socialize together.) Politics are never mentioned, but, in these depressingly divisive times, any movie this devoted to inclusiveness is well worth seeking out.
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 15, 2019, on Page C5 of the New York edition with the headline: Love Notes Forge a Caribbean Bond. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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In the 80th anniversary year of legendary jazz label Blue Note Records, a new documentary reflects on the two German-Jewish immigrants who introduced the label to America: Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff.
Together they signed some of the greatest names in 20th century music history while striking a chord for racial equality. Now they are the subject of “It Must Schwing! The Blue Note Story,” directed by German filmmaker Eric Friedler in partnership with acclaimed executive producer Wim Wenders, who is also from Germany. The film will screen at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on February 12.
“I was always fascinated by the story of two young Germans who came to America in 1939 and started a record label that went on to become a legend,” Friedler told The Times of Israel. “[They] escaped Nazi Germany and with no money in their pockets tried to establish one of the most important jazz labels in world history.”
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Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, John Coltrane, and Quincy Jones are among the greats who recorded with Blue Note at some point during the three-plus decades of Lion and Wolff’s tenure. Many of the still living musical greats share their thoughts in interviews during the film.

Alfred Lion looking over the shoulder of Hank Mobley. (Courtesy Altanta Jewish Film Festival)
The title of “It Must Schwing!” stems from Lion’s requirement for success, delivered in his German accent.
According to the film press statement, “The most important thing was that the music had the right swing, or as Alfred Lion used to put it in his characteristic accent, when issuing the only instructions he ever gave to the musicians: ‘It must schwing!’”
Under Lion and Wolff, much of the Blue Note music did, in fact, “schwing.” Of the 1,000 records cut at Blue Note during that era, 95 percent became classics, according to Friedler. Lion and Wolff even took chances on unheralded artists whose music might prove noteworthy later on — and were notably on the mark in the case of Thelonious Monk.
“It Must Schwing!” is actually the second recently-released documentary about Blue Note. The first, “Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes,” was directed by Swiss filmmaker Sophie Huber and took more of a long-range view of the company, headed today by celebrated Jewish-American musician Don Was.
All gifted and talented welcome
At Blue Note, Lion and Wolff created a welcoming atmosphere for many African-American musicians in genres such as jazz and blues who had been discriminated against by other labels at a time of racial hostility in America.
In the 1950s and ‘60s, civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would take the call for equality to the American public. The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival screenings of “It Must Schwing!” take place in the city of King’s birth as the United States celebrates Black History Month in February.
Friedler said that Lion and Wolff were “not political activists,” but that their embrace of racial equality was a “totally normal way of behavior” for them. He calls them “two German guys who regarded the music as admirable, done by extraordinarily talented people, and simply wanted to show respect [to] the artists, treat them with dignity and humanity.”

Alfred Lion, seated, and Francis Wolff. (Courtesy Atlanta Jewish Film Festival)
The Hamburg-based Friedler is the director of over 10 films. “It Must Schwing!” has a personal connection: Friedler describes himself as “raised on jazz records,” with his father playing Blue Note records for him when he was a child.
“One day, I thought, ‘OK, I have to tell the story,’” Friedler said, but called partner Wenders crucial to making the film. “He’s one of the most important documentary makers of music documentaries in the world,” Friedler said. “It’s an honor to work with him.”

German filmmaker Eric Friedler, who directed ‘It Must Schwing!’ at the Grimme Awards in 2014. (Wikimedia commons/CC-SA-3.0/Krd)
Friedler said the project began some five years ago — first in Germany, then in the US. The filmmakers uncovered a trove of material, including a 1964 interview of Lion and Wolff by German journalist Eric T. Vogel. It is the only German-language interview with the duo that has heretofore been unearthed, according to Friedler.
Filmmakers also interviewed living legends with connections to Blue Note in the Lion and Wolff years — including Hancock, Jones and Shorter, as well as Lou Donaldson, Benny Golson, Sheila Jordan, Kenny Burrell and Sonny Rollins, among many others.
Friedler said, “The moment they found out the film was about Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff, the first thing they said was yes.”
Kismet at the Admiralspalast
Lion and Wolff had a love-at-first-sight relationship with jazz going back to their days growing up in Germany in the 1920s. The then-teenagers met during a concert by African-American musicians Sam Wooding and his Chocolate Dandies at the Admiralspalast venue in Berlin. From that moment, a love of jazz would unite Lion and Wolff in friendship.
This friendship proved vital when the situation of German Jews rapidly deteriorated after Hitler and the Nazis took power in the 1930s. Lion emigrated first — “the only place he could think of leaving [for] was to the US, especially New York,” Friedler said. He credits Lion with getting Wolff out of Germany as well, on the last ship out of Hamburg that was not guarded by the Gestapo.
“They helped each other,” Friedler said. “They trusted each other very deeply.”

Jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock in ‘It Must Schwing!’ (Courtesy Atlanta Jewish Film Festival)
Lion trusted Wolff enough to bring him into the record label he had founded in early 1939. (According to the 2003 book “Blue Note Records: A Biography by Richard Cook,” the two “main figures” in the company’s creation were Lion and Max Margulis, “a writer and committed left-winger.”) Under Lion and Wolff, Blue Note became a rare opportunity for African-American musicians.
Friedler said that when Lion emigrated to New York, he was “shocked” that “the stars and music he admired so much were actually discriminated against. He could not really understand what was going on.”
“White companies, big record companies, did not record African-Americans during that time,” said professor Eddie Meadows of the UCLA global jazz studies department. Lion and Wolff were different, he said: “Because both were from outside the US, I think they witnessed the music culture of African-Americans and saw an opportunity.”
“They just loved jazz,” Friedler said. “They were against all barriers.”
As Lion and Wolff worked to develop a label that would promote jazz, their personalities complemented each other.
“Alfred was the more extroverted person,” Friedler said. “He made everything happen … He was a very good partner. Francis was more introverted, more shy, more in the background.”

Musician Quincy Jones speaks about Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff in ‘It Must Schwing!’ (Courtesy Atlanta Jewish Film Festival)
Yet neither shied away from taking chances on overlooked musicians or unfamiliar genres. Meadows praised Lion and Wolff for recording modern jazz artists such as Monk, Fats Navarro and Bud Powell, and bebop artists such as Howard McGhee, James Moody and a young Miles Davis.
“Even though there was not a large market, Blue Note recorded them anyway,” Meadows said. “It’s very important for African-American culture.”
A continued legacy

Don Was attends the 56th Grammy Awards at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, January 26, 2014. (Christopher Polk/Getty Images, via JTA)
Current Blue Note president Was reflected on Lion and Wolff’s willingness to take risks in an article on the website of Universal Music, which owns Blue Note.
“Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff wrote a manifesto when they started the label, and they dedicated themselves to the pursuit of authentic music and affording the artist uncompromising artistic freedom,” Was wrote. (Attempts by The Times of Israel to contact Was were unsuccessful.)
“I think, ultimately, that philosophy enables you to create music by virtue of the fact that it is honest expression. It becomes music that endures for decades because it’s coming from a real place,” Was added in the article.

Sheila Jordan in ‘It Must Schwing!’ (Courtesy Atlanta Jewish Film Festival)
UCLA’s Meadows said that Lion and Wolff tried “to make recording sessions very open, make people very comfortable.” This is echoed by the film, which portrays Lion and Wolff as treating musicians in a respectful way, from paying for rehearsals to a policy of fair wages. It’s an approach that was appreciated by the musicians filmmaker Friedler interviewed.
“As Kenny Burrell is pointing out, and Lou Donaldson, it was not a label in the sense that there were executives and managers,” Friedler said. “It was more like a family with, somehow, everybody the same.”
Lion and Wolff sold Blue Note to Liberty Records in 1965, with Lion retiring and eventually dying in 1987, aged 78. Wolff stayed on at the label but died just six years later. Yet the creators’ vision continued to manifest itself.

Still from ‘It Must Schwing!’ (Courtesy Altanta Jewish Film Festival)
“Blue Note seemed to evolve with the times,” Meadows said. “It still continued to record jazz that was reflective of modern times, not just stick with the old styles that were around.”
Today, Blue Note has worked with current stars like Norah Jones and Jason Moran, with its music being sampled by hip-hop artist Madlib. Meadows said that “in the sense [the label has] tried to keep current, keep up with what’s going on in culture, around new markets, I think it’s quite fascinating.”
Eighty years after Blue Note made its debut, music lovers can appreciate the two friends from Hamburg who helped connect America with music that could swing — or is it schwing?
“I thought, isn’t it great to show a film, how two refugees from Germany, what [an impact] they made on music?” Friedler said.
 

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To: Listings/Critics/Features
From: Jazz Promo Services
www.jazzpromoservices.com

On Sunday February 17, 2019 at 1:15 p.m. Jim Eigo will present a gallery talk about his time working as publicist for Les Paul and the Iridium Jazz Club.

This talk will take place in the upstairs gallery of The Mahwah Museum. Seating is limited; advanced reservations are recommended. To reserve, email gallerytalks@mahwahmuseum.org or call 201.512.0099.
Gallery talks are free with museum admission.

For nearly a decade Jim was the publicist for The Iridium Jazz Club in New York City where Les Paul performed every Monday night.

He is the founder and president of Jazz Promo Services.  He sends out email blasts from his home base in Warwick NY. He will share with us his stories of working with Les.

This gallery talk is hosted by Mahwah Museum, located at 201 Franklin Turnpike Mahwah, NJ 07430.  The Museum is currently featuring the exhibits Kilmer: The Man Kilmer: The War Years, and WWI Part I and WWI Part II. Permanent exhibits are Les Paul in Mahwah and The Donald Cooper Model Railroad, which is open weekends 1-4 pm. The Museum is open weekends and Wednesdays from 1-4 pm.; admission $5 for non-members, members and children are free. Visit www.mahwahmuseum.org or call 201-512-0099 for information on events, membership and volunteering.

Rusty Hassan’s career in Washington, D.C., jazz radio spans four stations and more than five decades. His recounting of his times on air and the connections he made in the city’s jazz community are the subject of an essay in the book DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC. This excerpt has been edited.
It was serendipity that started my broadcasting career. One afternoon during my junior year I was drinking beer with friends when I noticed another student holding some jazz albums. To check out how hip he was, I asked to see what he had. He passed the hipness test and we talked about the music. He had just played the recordings on his radio show on the campus station, WGTB-FM, but he had to give up the program to take a class that was scheduled at the same time. Evidently I passed his hipness test because he asked me if I would take over his show.
I don’t remember the exact date of my first broadcast. It was probably in January 1966, the beginning of second semester of my junior year. I remember being nervous, but I soon overcame my natural shyness as I began to share my love of jazz and introduce others to the music as I had been by Symphony Sid and Mort Fega. I have been broadcasting jazz over the Washington airwaves almost continuously ever since.
To be in Washington in 1968 was an incredible experience. Students at Georgetown demonstrated against the war in Vietnam and pushed for the abolition of ROTC. Students at Howard University struck for the inclusion of Black Studies in the Eurocentric curriculum and jazz in the music program, where Donald Byrd would become its first director. The assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and subsequent riots dramatically changed the city for decades. The music I programmed reflected the times: “Ascension,” by John Coltrane, and “Meditations on Integration,” by Charles Mingus. As a VISTA volunteer, I became connected to a community organization in Adams Morgan called The New Thing Art and Architecture Center, where I met Sondra Barrett, who was teaching African dance to children. The New Thing, named after a term applied to avant-garde jazz, also sponsored photography, art, music, and karate classes. It held weekly jazz performances at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church on Connecticut Avenue, featuring such artists as Shirley Horn, Andrew White, Paul Hawkins, and Byron Morris. Morris was the first musician I interviewed on the air. I also interviewed New York saxophonist Noah Howard, who had come to Washington for a performance at the New Thing that didn’t work out. But an on-air discussion with the director Topper Carew had a major impact on my broadcasting career.
After I had Topper on my show to talk about the jazz performances and other programs at the New Thing, he decided that the organization should have its own radio show. He sent out proposals to various stations, and WAMU-FM came up with airtime on Sunday afternoons. I helped to get the first shows on the air in July 1969. The New Thing Root Music Show kicked off what would be a golden age for jazz radio in Washington, DC, as jazz radio programming proliferated during the 1970s.

Sondra and I got married in August and went to Europe, where we heard performances by Miles Davis, Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Archie Shepp, Duke Ellington, and Bill Evans. When I resumed broadcasting on WAMU, the listening audience was beginning to shift from the AM to the FM band. For decades AM radio dominated the airwaves with Top 40 music programming, but there were also some commercial jazz shows, such as Felix Grant’s on WMAL-AM. FM radio had a much clearer sound than AM but reached a smaller audience, partly because at that time fewer people had FM receivers. A couple of factors changed this. The FCC ruled that commercial stations could not simulcast all of its programming on both AM and FM. In the early 1970s college stations on FM attracted young listeners by featuring rock albums by The Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, and many others that weren’t getting played on commercial AM stations. The “underground” format would become a feature of commercial FM stations such as WHFS. Jazz programming benefited from this shift. Paul Anthony, for example, could play Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” on WRC-FM, whereas Felix Grant could not play such an extended cutting-edge piece on WMAL-AM. Washington also benefited from the addition of three new FM stations in the 1970s that featured jazz: WHUR, WETA, and WPFW.
Although the organization folded, I kept the title of The New Thing Root Music Show through the seventies. I was joined on WAMU by Gerald Lee and Russell Williams, two American University students who established a Saturday afternoon workshop called Sound, Color and Movement, later titled Spirits Known and Unknown. The workshop was intended to train African American students in broadcasting techniques, and among those who participated in the program were Vincent Muse, David Muse, P. W. Robinson, and the late Aaron Hiter. One highlight was a visit by Charles Mingus. Lee completed his legal studies and later became a federal judge. Williams became a professional sound technician for film and won Academy Awards for Glory and Dances with Wolves. He is currently a professor at American University.
WGTB evolved into a free-form underground rock station while maintaining much of its jazz programming. W. Royal Stokes, a freelance writer for the Washington Post, had two shows. I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say covered traditional jazz, while Since Minton’s featured bebop and beyond. Stokes would later edit Jazz Times and publish four books on the music. Another programmer on the station was a Georgetown student named Ken Steiner, who got hooked on jazz while attending a Duke Ellington concert on campus and later became an Ellington scholar.
At Georgetown, meanwhile, WGTB was featuring a women’s collective called Sophie’s Parlor and health advice from the Washington Free Clinic. A free-form mix of Frank Zappa, Jefferson Airplane, and Bob Marley included a dose of radical politics. The gay-oriented show Friends, and the birth control advice provided on air, however, were too much for the university’s Jesuit administration. The station was shut down for a few months in 1976 and finally ceased broadcasting on January 29, 1979. Father Timothy Healey, president of the university, sold the license to the University of the District of Columbia for one dollar.
In 1976 I participated in getting a new station on the air as part of the Pacifica Network that would play jazz, blues, and world music. But in February 1977 when Von Martin played “Take the ‘A’ Train” to open the WPFW-FM signal to the Washington airwaves, I opted to keep The New Thing Root Music Show on WAMU. I thought that jazz should be played on as many stations as possible. A number of my friends did get volunteer shows on the station. Ken Steiner came over from WGTB. Jimmy Gray did Black Fire, where he would “tell stories though the music” and rarely announce what he played. Saxophonist Byron Morris had a program named after Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Bright Moments.” Tom Cole started a Sunday morning show focusing on guitar music called G-Strings that is still on the air today.
The decade of the nineties was one of friendly rivalry between WDCU and WPFW.
About this time Ron Sutton introduced me to his neighbor, Jerry Washington, who had retired from the Air Force and was currently working for the United Planning Organization. Washington in turn showed me his collection of jazz and blues LPs. Although Sutton was employed by WHUR, he volunteered to do a show on WPFW with his friend Wash sitting in with him. One Saturday afternoon he could not make it to the station and Jerry Washington had to do the show on his own. This was so successful that Washington eventually became the host.
Jerry shifted the focus of the Saturday afternoon show to the blues and created a persona that was a brilliant mix of fantasy with a dose of reality that he called “the Bama.” In African American parlance, a “bama” is someone from the country, unsophisticated in city ways and very likely to wear overalls. The Bama Hour would become the most popular show on WPFW. Jerry Washington would mix in philosophical and political commentary, discussions about what went down at the barbershop, and laments about fights he had with his girlfriend, Denise. Like most of his listeners, I bought into his stories. Since I knew him before he went on the air, I wondered when he broke up with his wife. Denise was a real person; Wash introduced me to her at a WPFW fundraiser at the Panorama Room in Southeast. But the on-air relationship and the stories were made up. Jerry Washington and his wife remained together until her passing, and he missed her terribly as a widower.
The Bama Hour was so popular that WPFW gave him another show featuring jazz on Sunday afternoons called The Other Side of the Bama. Now doing shows opposite each other, we developed a friendly rivalry. Wash would say, “If you don’t like what I’m playing, turn the dial and listen to Hassan.” Because he frequently played scratchy records on his show, whenever I played a recording with surface noise I would announce that it was from the Jerry Washington Collection of Classic Jazz.
Another friend who really blossomed as a personality on the WPFW airwaves was Nap Turner. I first met him when he was playing bass with Julie Moore Turner in a club at Fourteenth and Rhode Island Avenue, NW, when it was a rough neighborhood. His program on WPFW, however, focused more on blues vocals than jazz instrumentals, and soon he was singing at live performances. He called his show Don’t Forget the Blues. Sometimes he read on air from the “Simple stories” by Langston Hughes, and his acting ability came through in the voices he used in portraying Jesse B. Semple.
The expansion of jazz programming in Washington continued in the 1980s. WAMU added a daily overnight show hosted by Carlos Gaivar. I had been offered the slot but opted to continue my weekly show, now called Jazz Sunday. I had been employed as a union representative for a few years and decided to continue that career rather than jump into broadcasting full time. The station also added to the jazz programming on Saturday. Spirits Known and Unknown continued with its workshop concept for young African American announcers, and in 1980 Hot Jazz Saturday Night, with Rob Bamberger, premiered and is still on the air today. [Editor’s note: WAMU canceled Hot Jazz Saturday Night in June 2018.] In the early years Bamberger had five hours to explore early jazz, with an hour of Duke Ellington to start. The show is now three hours. Bamberger’s scholarly and entertaining approach examines the recordings of a particular artist such as Bix Beiderbecke or Teddy Wilson, focusing on the recorded output of a few years. It is undoubtedly the best show for jazz up through 1945 in the country.
By 1980 Paul Anthony was a veteran broadcaster. He got his start in broadcasting as a student at Georgetown University on WGTB before my arrival. In the 1970s he established himself professionally doing voice-overs for commercials, the weather on television, and jazz shows on WRC-FM and National Public Radio. He convinced the management of WGMS, the classical music station in Washington, that it should air jazz, America’s classical music. For a decade he broadcast a show on Saturday nights on a commercial station where his ratings were good and the advertising book solid. In 1990 new owners decided Bill Evans did not mix with Beethoven and dropped jazz. Anthony went on to Sirius satellite radio until the merger with XM.
National Public Radio also played a major role in getting jazz on the Washington airwaves. NPR offered programs such as Jazz Alive, Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, and JazzSet, which were aired on WAMU. I served on a program selection panel with Dr. Billy Taylor, where we discovered we had some personal connections. My wife’s mother, Mary Barrett, and Dr. Taylor were in the same Dunbar High School class of 1940. He and my father-in-law, Tom Barrett, shared a close friendship with John Malachi. After Dr. Taylor became artistic director for the jazz program at the Kennedy Center, he did a show for NPR in which his trio would perform with an artist such as Jackie McLean and discuss the guest’s career between musical performances. I would delight in taking Tom Barrett to hear someone like Harry “Sweets” Edison perform with Dr. Taylor, then eavesdrop on the conversation after the show.
In 1980 a new station came on the air to replace WGTB at 90.1 on the FM dial. The University of the District of Columbia designated the station as WDCU-FM, but it was soon known as Jazz90. The first announcers were Faunee Williams, who hosted the morning drive-time show, and Gwen Redding, who was heard in the afternoon. By mid-decade the lineup included Bill McLaurin, Whitmore John, Steve Metalitz, Tim Masters, and later Candy Shannon. Steve Hoffman hosted a blues show and Ernest White did public affairs.
In the Washington Post on August 22, 1986, Jeffrey Yorke did a short profile of Felix Grant and also listed other jazz radio shows. The programs on WDCU were included along with Paul Anthony’s on WGMS. Among the WPFW programmers were Art Cromwell, Jerry Washington, Tom Cole, John Zimbrick, Miyuki Williams, and Larry Appelbaum. WAMU programs were Rob Bamberger’s Hot Jazz Saturday Night, my Jazz Sunday, and Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz. By then WAMU had begun to cut back jazz programming. The overnight show and Spirits Known and Unknown had been dropped, and most of the musical offerings were bluegrass and folk.
Yorke’s profile of Grant focused on his Saturday afternoon show on WRC-AM, mentioning his earlier thirty-year tenure as WMAL’s nightly jazz authority. Not mentioned was the fact that when WMAL management first announced it was dropping his show in 1979, the outcry in letters and phone calls was so overwhelming that the station kept him on the air with a public apology, including advertisements on Metro buses. In 1983, just short of his thirtieth anniversary, the station dropped him permanently. At sixty-seven, he was evidently content to do a weekly show at WRC because, as Yorke pointed out, his other jazz activities took him around the world with visits to Europe and China.
In 1987 WRC dropped his show and shortly thereafter WAMU dropped mine. The ensuing letter campaign supporting my show did not change the decision of WAMU management. I had had a good run at the station, interviewing my heroes and even being honored by the proclamation of Rusty Hassan Day in 1984 by Mayor Marion Barry on the fifteenth anniversary of my show. But I was depressed until Edith Smith, general manager of WDCU, called, offering me airtime on Sunday afternoons. She added that I would start the same weekend as Felix Grant, who would be hosting a show on Saturdays. It was a real thrill to join the station at the same time as Grant. Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.) had the debuts of our shows mentioned in the Congressional Record.
How people listen to music has changed dramatically. Downloads are convenient, but background and appreciation for the music is lacking. An informed announcer on the radio provides the names of the soloists and tells stories about the music.
The decade of the nineties was one of friendly rivalry between WDCU and WPFW. The stations frequently would be cosponsors of performances. I met long-time WPFW programmer Jamal Muhammed at a concert at Fort DuPont, where we both introduced Ahmad Jamal. We became close friends, and I enjoyed his stories about hanging out at the stage door of the Howard Theatre with his childhood friend Nap Turner in order to see Charlie Parker, or about the time he spent on Rikers Island incarcerated with Ike Quebec.
WDCU lacked the strong broadcast signal of WPFW, but it established its jazz identity in the Washington community. The station broadcast performances from the university auditorium, including the annual battle among the bands of Howard University, University of Maryland, and the University of the District of Columbia. It sponsored jazz cruises where Jazz90 listeners could hear Sarah Vaughan, Joe Williams, Clark Terry, Jay McShann, Benny Carter, and Phil Woods, and it cosponsored performances by Wynton Marsalis at Lorton and the DC Youth Center to enable the incarcerated to hear great music.
The years I spent at WDCU were among the best in my broadcasting career. The friendships and camaraderie that I had with fellow announcers Faunee Williams, Whitmore John, Candy Shannon, Gwen Redding, Bill McLaurin, Tim Masters, and Felix Grant were especially rewarding. I hosted concerts with Wynton Marsalis and Sonny Rollins. On a station-sponsored cruise, I hung out with Jay McShann, Clark Terry, and my friend Yale Lewis. I interviewed Albert Murray. My favorite show, however, was with a retired letter carrier, cab driver, and pianist who played only for family and friends, my wife, Sondra’s, father. On August 6, 1995, I interviewed Thomas Barrett on his eightieth birthday. He spoke of his early years in West Virginia, playing piano in houses of prostitution as a teenager; hopping a freight train to Washington, DC, where he played professionally on U Street; meeting his wife, Mary, at a Hot Shoppe; his friendship with John Malachi and what a thrill it was to have Billy Eckstine’s band perform at the army camp in Louisiana where he was stationed in 1944; service in the Pacific. We played his favorite recordings by Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and Clifford Brown, and he explained why he loved Bill Evans. Not too long after the show, Askia Muhammad from WPFW told me how much he learned from the interview.
Unfortunately WDCU became a victim of the District of Columbia’s budget woes. The university sold the license to C-SPAN to close a budget gap for $13 million. There was some community opposition to the sale, but not enough to stop the sale, and the station went off the air in 1997.
I was soon asked to become a substitute host on WPFW, filling in for such programmers as Rick Bolling and Guy Middleton. This led to a permanent slot. I was now on the air with my friends Jamal Muhammed, Tom Cole, Miyuki Williams, Larry Appelbaum, Hassan Ali, Nap Turner, and Askia Muhammad. Over the next few years other WDCU programmers joined me on WPFW, including Faunee Williams, Candy Shannon, Steve Hoffman, and Tim Masters. WHUR veteran Robyn Holden also joined the family of volunteer announcers broadcasting jazz and blues.
Since 1997 WPFW has been the only station broadcasting jazz in Washington, with the exception of Bamberger’s show on WAMU. WAMU now focuses almost entirely on talk and public affairs. WETA has been featuring European classical music since WGMS changed format. Neither of these NPR affiliates broadcast jazz offerings from the network such as Piano Jazz or JazzSet. WPFW has been on a rollercoaster of internal management problems for the past fifteen years that the volunteer announcers have always managed to work around and continue to play music. But in December 2012 the station manager abruptly dropped all of the daytime jazz shows to expand the talk and public affairs programming. My show was shifted from Monday evening to late Thursday night. The programming for jazz remains strong with such announcers as Brother Ah, a musician who has performed with Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Peggy Lee, and Willard Jenkins, a jazz journalist who collaborated with Randy Weston on Weston’s autobiography. The daily blues show at noon survived the changes, and an hour of jazz has been inserted in the afternoon. The community response has been strong, and it remains to be seen if other daytime jazz shows will be restored. WPFW faced other challenges in 2013, but new managers and their positive attitude instill the programmers with confidence that the jazz shows will continue.
In the March 2013 issue of JazzTimes, Giovanni Russonello wrote about jazz radio finding itself at an existential crossroads, with technology upending the media landscape and public funds drying up. The situation at WPFW is but one example of the crisis confronting jazz radio across the country. Russonello notes the explosion of music on the internet and the change in listening habits through downloads and online music services. His suggestion that WPFW embrace its niche audience and invest in event programming is solid advice and exactly what on-air hosts Miyuki Williams and Robyn Holden have been urging station management to do.
How people listen to music has changed dramatically. Downloads to iPods are convenient, but background and appreciation for the music is lacking. An informed announcer on the radio provides the names of the soloists and tells stories about the music, conveying what Whitney Balliett called and Larry Appelbaum named his show: The Sound of Surprise. Washington, DC, is fortunate to have WPFW still broadcasting the music with knowledgeable programmers. I feel fortunate that I am still on the air attempting to educate and entertain listeners with the music I first heard on the radio as a kid. Radio is still the best way to discover jazz.
Copyright 2018 by Georgetown University Press. Rusty Hassan, “Jazz Radio in Washington, DC.” From DC Jazz: Stories of Jazz Music in Washington, DC, Maurice Jackson and Blair A. Ruble, Editors, pp. 91–106. Reprinted with permission. www.press.georgetown.edu.
This essayappears as part ofRewind: The Roots of Public Media, Current’sseries of commentaries about the history ofpublic media. The series is created in partnership with the Radio Preservation Task Force,an initiative of the Library of Congress.Josh Shepperd, assistant professor of media studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and national research director of the RPTF, is Faculty Curator of the Rewind series. Email:shepperd@cua.edu
 

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Drake accepting the award for best rap song for “God’s Plan.”CreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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Drake accepting the award for best rap song for “God’s Plan.”CreditCreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Compiled by Sara Aridi and Lauren Messman

• Feb. 10, 2019
•  

Best New Artist
Dua Lipa
Best Pop Solo Performance
“Joanne (Where Do You Think You’re Goin’?)” — Lady Gaga
Best Pop Duo/Group Performance
“Shallow” — Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper
Best Pop Vocal Album
“Sweetener” — Ariana Grande
[Never miss a pop music story: Sign up for our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
Best Rock Performance
“When Bad Does Good” — Chris Cornell
Best Rock Song
“Masseduction” — Jack Antonoff and Annie Clark, songwriters (St. Vincent)
Best Rock Album
“From the Fires” — Greta Van Fleet
Best Alternative Music Album
“Colors” — Beck
Best R&B Performance
“Best Part” — H.E.R. featuring Daniel Caesar
Best Rap Song
“God’s Plan” — Aubrey Graham, Daveon Jackson, Brock Korsan, Ron LaTour, Matthew Samuels and Noah Shebib, songwriters (Drake)
Best Rap Album
“Invasion of Privacy” — Cardi B
Best Country Solo Performance
“Butterflies” — Kacey Musgraves
Best Country Album
“Golden Hour” — Kacey Musgraves
Best Jazz Instrumental Album
“Emanon” — The Wayne Shorter Quartet
Kacey Musgraves won four awards for best country solo performance, best country album, best country song and album of the year.CreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Kacey Musgraves won four awards for best country solo performance, best country album, best country song and album of the year.CreditRobyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Best Latin Pop Album
“Sincera” — Claudia Brant
Best Latin Rock, Urban or Alternative Album
“Aztlán” — Zoé
Best Americana Album
“By the Way, I Forgive You” — Brandi Carlile
Best Song Written for Visual Media
“Shallow” — Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt, songwriters (Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper)
Producer of the Year, Non-Classical
Pharrell Williams
Best Music Video
“This Is America” — Childish Gambino
Best Comedy Album
“Equanimity & the Bird Revelation” — Dave Chappelle
Best Musical Theater Album
“The Band’s Visit” — Etai Benson, Adam Kantor, Katrina Lenk and Ari’el Stachel, principal soloists; Dean Sharenow and David Yazbek, producers; David Yazbek, composer and lyricist
Best Instrumental Composition
“Blut Und Boden (Blood and Soil)” — Terence Blanchard
Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella
“Stars and Stripes Forever” — John Daversa
Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals
“Spiderman Theme” — Mark Kibble, Randy Waldman and Justin Wilson, arrangers
Best Recording Package
“Masseduction” — Willo Perron, art director
Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package
“Squeeze Box: The Complete Works of ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic” — Meghan Foley, Annie Stoll and Al Yankovic, art directors
Best Album Notes
“Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris” — David Evans, album notes writer
Best Historical Album
“Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris” — William Ferris, April Ledbetter and Steven Lance Ledbetter, compilation producers; Michael Graves, mastering engineer
Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical
“Colors” — Julian Burg, Serban Ghenea, David “Elevator” Greenbaum, John Hanes, Beck Hansen, Greg Kurstin, Florian Lagatta, Cole M.G.N., Alex Pasco, Jesse Shatkin, Darrell Thorp and Cassidy Turbin, engineers; Chris Bellman, Tom Coyne, Emily Lazar and Randy Merrill, mastering engineers
[Can the Grammys please anyone?]
Best Remixed Recording
“Walking Away (Mura Masa remix)” — Alex Crossan, remixer
Best Immersive Audio Album
“Eye in the Sky – 35th Anniversary Edition” — Alan Parsons, surround mix engineer; Dave Donnelly, P.J. Olsson and Alan Parsons, surround mastering engineers; Alan Parsons, surround producer
Best Contemporary Instrumental Album
“Steve Gadd Band” — Steve Gadd
Band Best Gospel Performance/Song
“Never Alone” — Tori Kelly featuring Kirk Franklin; Kirk Franklin and Victoria Kelly, songwriters
Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song
“You Say” — Lauren Daigle; Lauren Daigle, Jason Ingram and Paul Mabury, songwriters
Best Gospel Album
“Hiding Place” — Tori Kelly
Best Contemporary Christian Music Album
“Look Up Child” — Lauren Daigle
Best Roots Gospel Album
“Unexpected” — Jason Crabb
Best World Music Album
“Freedom” — Soweto Gospel Choir
Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media
“The Greatest Showman” — Hugh Jackman (and Various Artists); Alex Lacamoire, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Greg Wells, compilation producers
Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media
“Black Panther” — Ludwig Göransson, composer
Best New Age Album
“Opium Moon” — Opium Moon
Best American Roots Performance
“The Joke” — Brandi Carlile
Best American Roots Song
“The Joke” — Brandi Carlile, Dave Cobb, Phil Hanseroth and Tim Hanseroth, songwriters
Best Bluegrass Album
“The Travelin’ Mccourys” — The Travelin’ Mccourys
Best Traditional Blues Album
“The Blues Is Alive and Well” — Buddy Guy
Best Contemporary Blues Album
“Please Don’t Be Dead” — Fantastic Negrito
Best Folk Album
“All Ashore” — Punch Brothers
Best Children’s Album
“All the Sounds” — Lucy Kalantari & the Jazz Cats
Best Spoken Word Album (Includes Poetry, Audio Books and Storytelling)
“Faith – A Journey for All” — Jimmy Carter
Best Regional Mexican Music Album (Including Tejano)
“¡México Por Siempre!” — Luis Miguel
Best Tropical Latin Album
“Anniversary” — Spanish Harlem Orchestra
Best Regional Roots Music Album
“No ‘Ane’i” — Kalani Pe’a
Best Music Film
“Quincy” — Quincy Jones; Alan Hicks and Rashida Jones, video directors; Paula Dupré Pesmen, video producer
Best Country Duo/Group Performance
“Tequila” — Dan + Shay
Best Country Song
“Space Cowboy” — Luke Laird, Shane Mcanally and Kacey Musgraves, songwriters
Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” won song of the year, best rap/sung performance, best music video and record of the year.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” won song of the year, best rap/sung performance, best music video and record of the year.CreditAngela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album
“My Way” — Willie Nelson
Lady Gaga’s “Shallow,” from the movie “A Star Is Born,” won two awards, for best song written for visual media and best pop duo/group performance.CreditKevin Winter/Getty Images
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Lady Gaga’s “Shallow,” from the movie “A Star Is Born,” won two awards, for best song written for visual media and best pop duo/group performance.CreditKevin Winter/Getty Images
Best Engineered Album, Classical
“Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 11” — Shawn Murphy and Nick Squire, engineers; Tim Martyn, mastering engineer
Producer of the Year, Classical
Blanton Alspaugh
Best Orchestral Performance
“Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 4 & 11” — Andris Nelsons, conductor
Best Opera Recording
“Bates: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” — Michael Christie, conductor; Sasha Cooke, Jessica E. Jones, Edward Parks, Garrett Sorenson and Wei Wu; Elizabeth Ostrow, producer
Best Choral Performance
“Mcloskey: Zealot Canticles” — Donald Nally, conductor
Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance
“Anderson, Laurie: Landfall” — Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet
Best Classical Instrumental Solo
“Kernis: Violin Concerto” — James Ehnes; Ludovic Morlot, conductor
Best Classical Solo Vocal Album
“Songs of Orpheus – Monteverdi, Caccini, D’india & Landi” — Karim Sulayman; Jeannette Sorrell, conductor; Apollo’s Fire, ensembles
Best Classical Compendium
“Fuchs: Piano Concerto ‘spiritualist’; Poems of Life; Glacier; Rush” — Joann Falletta, conductor; Tim Handley, producer
Best Contemporary Classical Composition
“Kernis: Violin Concerto” — Aaron Jay Kernis, composer
Best Dance Recording
“Electricity” — Silk City and Dua Lipa featuring Diplo and Mark Ronson
Best Dance/Electronic Album
“Woman Worldwide” — Justice
Cardi B accepting the award for best rap album for “Invasion of Privacy.”CreditKevork Djansezian/Getty Images
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Cardi B accepting the award for best rap album for “Invasion of Privacy.”CreditKevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Best Reggae Album
“44/876” — Sting and Shaggy
Best Improvised Jazz Solo
“Don’t Fence Me In” — John Daversa, soloist. Track from: “American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom”
Best Jazz Vocal Album
“The Window” — Cécile Mclorin Salvant
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
“American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom” — John Daversa Big Band featuring DACA Artists
Best Latin Jazz Album
“Back to the Sunset” — Dafnis Prieto Big Band
Best Traditional R&B Performance
“Bet Ain’t Worth the Hand” — Leon Bridges and
“How Deep Is Your Love” — PJ Morton featuring Yebba
Best R&B Song
“Boo’d Up” — Larrance Dopson, Joelle James, Ella Mai and Dijon Mcfarlane, songwriters
Best Metal Performance
“Electric Messiah” — High on Fire
Best Rap/Sung Performance
“This Is America” — Childish Gambino
[Read our coverage and analysis of the ceremony.]
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2019, on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: 2019 Grammy Winners. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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nytimes.com
Ron Hutchinson, Restorer of Early Sound Films, Is Dead at 67
By Richard Sandomir

Ron Hutchinson in the coming documentary “Viva Film!,” directed by Peter Flynn. The Vitaphone Project, which Mr. Hutchinson founded with four friends, has been restoring short films from the 1920s and ’30s since 1991.CreditPeter Flynn

Ron Hutchinson in the coming documentary “Viva Film!,” directed by Peter Flynn. The Vitaphone Project, which Mr. Hutchinson founded with four friends, has been restoring short films from the 1920s and ’30s since 1991.CreditCreditPeter Flynn
Ron Hutchinson, an ebullient film buff who led a campaign to restore scores of largely forgotten short sound films from the 1920s and ’30s that featured comedians, vaudevillians, opera singers and musical acts, died on Feb. 2 at his home in Piscataway, N.J. He was 67.
His wife, Judy (Morton) Hutchinson, said the cause was colon cancer.
United by their passion for old films and vintage music, Mr. Hutchinson and four like-minded friends created the Vitaphone Project in 1991 with an ambitious mission. They set out to preserve the one-reel shorts that Warner Bros. made under the name Vitaphone Varieties at studios in Brooklyn and Burbank, Calif., from 1926 to 1931, as Hollywood was shifting from silent movies to talking pictures like “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talkie.
Those early shorts used Vitaphone, a Bell Labs technology, which synchronized the speeds of the film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs. The challenge was to find the largely lost records that contained the voices of entertainers like George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Rose Marie, as well as lesser-known vaudevillians like the comedy team Al Shaw and Sam Lee.
Warner employed the Vitaphone system for its theatrical release of “Don Juan” (1926), a feature starring John Barrymore. But that movie had no dialogue, only music and sound effects.
“It went over great, but the people loved the shorts, with people speaking,” Mr. Hutchinson, who became a historian of the era, said at a meeting of the New Jersey Antique Radio Club in 2016.
So before showings of a subsequent Vitaphone feature in 1926, he said, “they had Al Jolson, Georgie Jessel and other popular performers, each in five- to ten-minuteshorts, and this just set off everything.”
George Burns and Gracie Allen in “Lambchops” (1929), one of the many short films restored by the Vitaphone Project.CreditWarner Bros./Photofest
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George Burns and Gracie Allen in “Lambchops” (1929), one of the many short films restored by the Vitaphone Project.CreditWarner Bros./Photofest
For Mr. Hutchinson, restoring those shorts became a delightful second career. A chemical engineer who worked for companies that specialize in environmental health and safety, he diligently searched for the sound discs through letters and emails to record collectors and relatives of the performers.
He found one trove of 80 discs from the family of a man who had taken them home from the theaters he ran in Connecticut. He tracked down discs as far away as Australia and New Zealand.
“The discoveries of soundtracks never seems to slow down,” he told the Chicago Film Society in an interview in 2011. “We average several hundred new soundtrack discoveries a year.”
Mr. Hutchinson helped raise money for restoration of the shorts, largely through the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive, and Warner Bros. has released about 200 of them in various DVD sets. (He also found discs for other studios’ shorts.)
For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Hutchinson has hosted showings of the films at Film Forum in Manhattan. The cable channel TCM paid tribute to Vitaphone in 2016 with a 24-hour marathon of the shorts.
“He’d call me up and say he’d restored 10 more films and we’d schedule a showing,” Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s director of repertory programming, said by phone. “And it was amazing stuff; he discovered vaudevillians who had been forgotten for years, like Shaw and Lee, who made the funniest short of all time, ‘The Beau Brummels.’ ”
Ronald Porter Hutchinson was born on Aug. 30, 1951, in East Orange, N.J. His father, Frank, was a machinist, and his mother, Betty (Reese) Hutchinson, was a homemaker and volunteered for an organization that helped women with legal problems, especially divorces.
Vitaphone equipment, like this — used for “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talking picture — synchronized the speeds of a film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs.Creditvia Turner Theatrical Library
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Vitaphone equipment, like this — used for “The Jazz Singer” (1927), the first full-length talking picture — synchronized the speeds of a film projector and a turntable that played 16-inch sound discs.Creditvia Turner Theatrical Library
During Mr. Hutchinson’s childhood, his interest in vintage music and early talking pictures was ignited by watching Joe Franklin’s nostalgia-fueled New York television show. As a teenager, he made films with his friends. But he followed a more practical career path, earning a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and pursuing a career in environmental safety.
“When we got married, he got a Victrola, and the next thing you knew we had 20,000 78s,” his wife said in a telephone interview. “And while collecting records, he came across these huge Vitaphone discs, and he knew other collectors had them.”
The Vitaphone Project was founded in Mr. Hutchinson’s house in Piscataway, which continued to be its headquarters.
“We were all friends, united by what we could find — treasure hunters in a way,” said Vince Giordano, a founder of the project and the leader of the band Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, which specializes in authentic arrangements of vintage jazz. “Ron had so much joy and exuberance in the discovery of the discs. It was almost like a hunger.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Hutchinson is survived by a daughter, Heather Miranda; a son, Jared; a grandson; and a brother, Robert.
The first Vitaphone short restored thanks to Mr. Hutchinson was “Baby Rose Marie, the Child Wonder” (1929). Rose Marie, who decades later became known for her role as the wisecracking Sally Rogers on “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” was a child star who would go on to spend nearly every day of her life in show business. She was already a veteran when she sang to a Vitaphone camera.
“When I first told her that we’d found the disc, she said to me that Jack Warner had told her it had been lost,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview in 2014 on the America’s Comedy podcast. He recalled her reaction when the short was screened in Los Angeles in 1994.
“She looked at the screen — now blank — and said, ‘You know, the dress I wore was blue,’ ” he continued. “ ‘And I was looking over at the side, where my mother was.’ All these memories came rushing back to her.”
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 11, 2019, on Page D6 of the New York edition with the headline: Ron Hutchinson, 67, a Restorer of Early Sound Films. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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Feb. 10, 2019, 4:27 AM EST / Updated Feb. 11, 2019, 10:26 AM EST
By Tia Fuller, saxophonist and Grammy nominee
Throughout the entertainment industry, we’re seeing a rising level of consciousness when it comes to gender discrimination and sexual harassment. In Hollywood, the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have shone a spotlight on the way some men in power have acted as corrupt and abusive gatekeepers for decades. I am encouraged by the fact that that many of us are now speaking out about these issues. And thankfully, I feel that there has been more thought to the inclusion and recognition of women on the scene since I started playing. But we still have a long way to go in the music industry.
As a female jazz musician, and a woman of color, I’ve dealt with sexism throughout my career. Early on, when I would first meet other musicians who hadn’t heard me play, I felt that I wasn’t always taken seriously. People would stop me when I was traveling and ask me about my saxophone case. “Oh wow! Do you actually play that?” Usually, I’d respond in a nice way. But what I really wanted to say was: “No, I’m just carrying it.” This is why it’s important that we reshape the narrative around jazz and redefine, literally, what a jazz player is assumed to look like.
I remember once a man came up to me and said, “Why aren’t you smiling? Maybe you should smile a little more on stage.”
I grew up in Denver, Colorado and began performing my senior year of high school. At age 18, I started sitting in at a local jazz club, the El Chapultepec Lounge. I remember once a man came up to me and said, “Why aren’t you smiling? Maybe you should smile a little more on stage.” At the time, I didn’t have the confidence to respond assertively, but it made me think. He didn’t say anything to anybody else on stage about smiling, and of course, everybody else on stage with me was a man.
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The historic underrepresentation of women in jazz means the very landscape of jazz has been shaped by his-story. For the most part, it is men who have told the story of jazz music, and men who have decided which players represent the genre publicly.
Here’s another example: When I first moved to New York in 2001, I remember going to a jam session where a long line of musicians was waiting to get up on stage. When it was my turn, a male horn player behind me almost immediately cut me off. I looked around and noticed that once again, I was the only woman in the room. That was the last time I let a man play over me like that ever again.
Unfortunately, women of color have been marginalized in so many industries for so long that it has become to feel almost normal. This in turn colors the expectations of audiences, who are too often surprised to see a woman playing. We are judged differently, either because we are viewed as exceptions or because we are assumed to be token hires and thus not as skilled. Then there’s the issue of looks. It’s not enough for women to play well — sometimes our musicianship is diminished simply because of how we may appear on stage. Men are never as heavily scrutinized, and especially not when it comes to their appearance.
These stereotypes are so pervasive, they’ve even influenced my own thinking. I’ve had to check myself regarding my own socialization and reckon with instances when I’ve subconsciously been sexist toward other women — even making assumptions about a female artist’s abilities before hearing her play. Unfortunately, women have seen and felt discrimination so often that the oppressed too easily becomes the oppressor.
Just like with sexism in other industries, a lot of this oppression has to do with gatekeepers.
Just like with sexism in other industries, a lot of this oppression has to do with gatekeepers. Club owners are often men, a tradition that dates back to founding of some of the oldest American clubs in the 20th century. Especially earlier in my career, I’d pitch my band for gigs and feel like these male club owners were treating me differently because of my gender. I was there for a professional meeting, but the conversation too often shifted to flirtation. I was not taken seriously as a musician, but I was taken seriously as someone to potentially ask out on a date.
I have a transparent and vulnerable demeanor — something that stems from my childhood in the laid-backed Denver area — so I’ve had to adjust the way I present myself and overemphasize that I’m about business. There’s a subtle strength in that, the balance of communicating in a nice, but clear and precise way. I am careful now never to leave any wiggle room for misunderstandings. But this balancing act shouldn’t be a requirement of my profession.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had many male mentors who have advised and looked out for me in my career: Master drummer Ralph Peterson Jr., whose band I played in for a long time; Cecil Brooks III, former owner of Cecil’s Jazz Club in West Orange, New Jersey, where I would sit in; saxophonist Bruce Williams, who played with Frank Foster and the late Roy Hargrove; and Denver natives and saxophonists Javon Jackson and Brad Leali. Systemic sexism doesn’t mean all men in the jazz business are sexist, obviously.
And I am very thankful for the female mentors I have met in the last six years or so, women like drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, who produced my Grammy-nominated album “Diamond Cut,” multiple-Grammy-winning vocalist Dianne Reeves and the late pianist Geri Allen. But the fact that I only recently have been able to really connect with women in my field is just one more example of the way the industry tilts towards men.
And just like the way male club owners can discourage or undermine female players, the stories we tell about the history of jazz have erased the contributions of women for years. Musicians and fans alike have been deprived of the genre’s many female’s heroes. In fact, women have long played pivotal roles in the business, even if they weren’t properly recognized for those roles.
For example, plenty of Americans have heard of the great players Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk — but fewer people know about Mary Lou Williams, who played with and influenced them. Her Harlem apartment became a gathering place for some of the most important musicians of the 1940s.
Similarly, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis Armstrong’s wife, was an accomplished player in her own right who promoted her husband’s career and also wrote arrangements for his Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings. Where’s her Hollywood biopic? in the 1940s, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm — an African-American, all-female band — was the biggest-selling and most popular all-female band of the era, breaking racial and gender barriers as they toured across the country.
We also need to be talking more about trombonist Melba Liston, who played and wrote many arrangements for Gerald Wilson, and tenor saxophonist Vi Burnside, whose peers were Coleman Hawkins and Sonny Rollins, and Vi Redd, the alto saxophonist who played and sang with the Count Basie Orchestra. These women were foundational to the genre but their stories have since been mostly forgotten.
Fortunately, it feels like people are now starting to speak up and take ownership. Organizations like the We Have Voice collective — which I am a part of — are speaking out about equity in the performing arts.
The young men of this new generation are also becoming more sensitive and aware of these issues. I’ve seen it with my students at the Berklee College of Music. This is a problem women cannot change on our own. We need male allies to stand with us; to rebuke the male club owners, to correct their male peers in their bands. And I have personally taken it upon myself to address this issue with my male peers and students; to hold them accountable for inadvertent sexist remarks that they may make about women, even online.
The solution begins with the next generation. We have to move beyond teaching traditional gender roles and activities. Young girls can fly a rocket ship, throw a football and solo on the saxophone — but it is always harder to be what you cannot see. I hope being a woman of color in the music industry will help show other women and girls what they can be, too. We have to be proactive in deconstructing sexist and racist mindsets.
Saxophonist Tia Fuller is a first-time Grammy nominee whose album, “Diamond Cut,” is nominated for Best Instrumental Jazz Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. Fuller has worked with a who’s who of jazz and popular music including Beyoncé, Esperanza Spalding, Dianne Reeves, Terri Lyne Carrington, and the late Nancy Wilson and Geri Allen. She is also a full-time professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston. 
 

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/at-81-jazz-titan-archie-shepps-legacy-comes-into-clear-focus/2019/02/08/d453202c-2959-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html?utm_term=.de0eb20d4c96

At 81, jazz titan Archie Shepp’s legacy comes into clear focus

Lauren Du GrafFebruary 8 at 11:00 AM
Legendary saxophonist Archie Shepp was menotred by John Coltrane, but makes music that stands alone. (Giorgio Perottino/Getty Images for OGR)
It was July 1969, a few weeks before Woodstock. Men had just landed on the moon. After 132 years of French colonialism, Algeria was independent, and 1 million settlers had left the country. It was a time of revolutionary optimism, and the music of Archie Shepp fit the mood.
The Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers drew artists, musicians and intellectuals from dozens of countries in Africa to Algeria. Nina Simone, Oscar Peterson, Miriam Makeba, Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver were there, too.
“I remember we all kissed the ground,” Shepp told me last fall at his home in the Parisian banlieue of Ivry-sur-Seine, where his wife and manager, Monette, served me tea. “Even though it was North Africa, for us it was Africa.”
“Everyone was out in the streets, even the veiled women,” says Elaine Mokhtefi, who helped organize the festival. “We would never have thought it would be so brilliant. Algiers has never seen anything like it since.”
But Shepp stood out. His performance, which unfolded at the festival’s climactic conclusion, merged his lyrical, squawking free jazz inventions alongside traditional Saharan sounds of indigenous Touareg musicians. The collaboration, which was Shepp’s idea, left quite a mark on the Algerian people, says Mokhtefi, who helped invite him to the festival. Contrary to other Americans at the festival, Shepp was very much at ease.
“Just look at him!” says Mokhtefi, 90, who now lives in Manhattan. We are seated before a desktop computer in her kitchen, watching clips from the festival on YouTube. Shepp paces back across the stage in a caftan, wild and emotional, his saxophone and his presence soaring.
Mokhtefi hasn’t seen Shepp since her days in Algeria, but she’ll travel to Washington to catch him once more on Sunday, when the legendary tenor saxophonist headlines a tribute to his former mentor John Coltrane at the Kennedy Center. (Shepp appeared on Coltrane’s “Ascension” and recorded on sessions for “A Love Supreme,” two of Coltrane’s late-career masterpieces.) There, he will share the stage with Kennedy Center Jazz Artistic Director Jason Moran, who first discovered Shepp’s album “Fire Music” while still in college. Although, at first, Moran didn’t know what to make of an album that contained such a wide range of pieces, he came to appreciate the breadth of Shepp’s career and vision as a model for his own.
“Archie has spent his life examining the tight relationship between America and the sounds it produces. He has followed the music around the world, continually looking for the intersections of struggle that informs his music,” Moran wrote in an email. “He finds meeting places in the music, which breeds profound conversations from the musicians he performs with.”
Moran, left, and Shepp will share the stage on Sunday at the Kennedy Center. (Jati Lindsay)
Shepp has maintained a residence in Paris for years, though he distances himself from the term expatriate. “I am a proud American — I never left,” he said.
At 81, he is one of a small number of jazz musicians over the age of 80 still gigging — a group that includes Benny Golson, Ron Carter, Roy Haynes and Ahmad Jamal, among others. Shepp splits his time between Paris and Massachusetts (he taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for 30 years). In Europe, he is treated as a living legend, performing sold-out shows and getting stopped in the streets, said Stephen McCraven, who has played drums in Archie’s quartet for more than three decades. That’s not the case back home. “I know I’m not that famous,” Shepp said.
His influence is unquestioned, though. He’s almost certainly best known as a Coltrane protege, someone on the vanguard of free jazz who was part of Cecil Taylor’s group and helped found the New York Contemporary Five and the Jazz Composer’s Guild. Shepp is also the architect of some of the most potent musical political statements of the 20th-century (Monette later emailed me the file the FBI kept on him), perhaps most crucially on the album “Attica Blues,” which memorialized the Attica prison riots.
He also rightly belongs in any discussion of rap’s godfathers; along with the Last Poets and his former neighbor LeRoi Jones, he was involved in the earliest efforts to set spoken word to drums and bass with songs such as “Malcolm, Malcolm, Semper Malcolm,” all the way back in 1965. He did a project with Chuck D. He has authored tracks of epic, anomalous beauty such as “Mama Rose,” a stirring, free spoken-word track recorded over minimal deep synth, live in concert in West Germany in 1982.
His speech may have slowed with age, but his passion for politics hasn’t waned in the slightest. “It’s as if we became too relaxed with the freedoms we had fought so hard for,” said Shepp, who also denounced voter suppression in Georgia, the treatment of minorities and the poor, and the state of public education in the United States. “We went to prison, some died. And now with the current president, it is astounding we have lost so much ground. It is as if we’ve gone back further. I know I am not that well known, but I can use the little clout I have to change people’s minds.”
His revolutionary music lives on in Algerian culture, in the cinema of the country’s most prominent filmmaker, Tariq Teguia (whose film “Rome Rather Than You” draws upon Shepp’s “Live at the Pan-African Festival” album for its soundtrack) and the work of Franco-Algerian rapper Rocé, who made an album with Shepp in 2006.
Over the phone from France, Rocé told me that he decided to work with Shepp because of his philosophical engagement with questions of identity, questions that were strikingly relevant to present-day France. “In France, the government wanted to tell us that we couldn’t choose our identity. You are either French or you are Algerian. Our record said that identities are multiple,” said Rocé, whose father is Russian and mother Algerian. “Archie had already had these discussions.” To Rocé, Archie’s manner of musical engagement, “to listen and to watch the world, and then to improvise and adapt yourself to meet it,” is a thoroughly political mode of being.
Shepp sees things in a much more straightforward way. “I just think of it as music,” he said of his collaborations with French rappers.
Besides his global influence, Shepp has also made his mark at the local level, particularly at U-Mass. Amherst, where he taught ethnomusicology and African American history for 30 years. There, Shepp was known as far more than just a music instructor — he was an ardent explicator and a torchbearer of African traditions.
“He put me on a river that put me right into the ocean of life,” said former student Sulaiman Hakim, who met Shepp at age 21. Hakim, who grew up in Watts, passionately recalled how Shepp’s illustrations of the boundless expanse of African music helped “turn a kid from the ghetto of South Central Los Angeles into a globe-trotter.” It was Shepp’s example that inspired Hakim, now 65, to move to Paris, where he still lives. “Certain artists have had a planetary effect. He’s part of the puzzle that has fed the planet,” Hakim said.
Steve McCraven first met Shepp when he was a student at U-Mass. Amherst in the early 1970s. Now, he knows Archie’s routines by heart. “I’ve been with him so long, I’ve seen it. The first thing he does after his feet hit the floor in the afternoon is grab his horn and play long tones” McCraven said. The drummer says that age has made Archie slower and more subdued, but he still plays his heart out. “He plays like a god; he is relentless,” McCraven said over the phone from Paris. “I have 100 percent respect for Mr. Shepp, especially with the pain he’s in.”
The legacy of Archie’s influence is evident in Steve’s son, Makaya McCraven, the transnational drummer-producer who thought of Archie as an uncle growing up. “Archie was always collaborating with different people — rappers, gnawan musicians, younger players, people of every genre,” the 35-year-old musician said. “So much of what I do and what I want to do is because I grew up around that. It was never like the jazz police, ‘You can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ ”
Makaya recalls how, at age 22, Archie let him sit in on drums at a huge concert in France. Later, as Makaya prepared to move to Chicago, Shepp made sure Makaya knew the deep history of the city’s jazz scene and told him which musicians to look up. “He is a singer on his instrument. The way he would squawk or screech is like a blues singer. His melodic, lyrical approach feels more oral than scales and arpeggios,” he said. To McCraven, Shepp’s playing reinforces an understanding of jazz as an oral tradition, and not as an academic practice.
Into his ninth decade, Shepp still practices two to five hours a day. He may move slower these days, but his commitment to his music remains as strong as ever.
Our interview ended as he retreated to the basement of his house in Paris. He was going to practice.

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Hezekiah Leroy Gordon “Stuff” Smith was the life of any party he ever walked into. He loved a crazy story; he lived out his share of them. And I don’t think there can be much doubt he was the most important American jazz violinist of the 20th century. Stuff Smith wrote songs recorded by Louis Armstrong and Sarah Vaughan. He made albums with Ella Fitzgerald and Nat “King” Cole. Pianists Oscar Peterson and Shirley Horn backed him on albums he cut for Verve Records. And Art Kane’s 1958 photograph of jazz royalty, “A Great Day in Harlem,” finds him smack dab in the middle.
More than any other violinist, Smith lived at the center of jazz, as jazz was becoming jazz. As the great jazz historian Dan Morgenstern said to me recently, Smith “could outswing ’em all.”
In recent years, my own obsession with Smith’s sound led me to connect with some of those who know his music best, and with family members including his 94-year-old widow, Arlene Smith, and his grandchildren, Cheryl Smith and John Smith. Their help ultimately led to the rediscovery of a real jazz treasure: Stuff Smith’s favorite violin. He called it “Big Red.” You can see it on several of his album covers, including Stuff Smith and Black Violin.
When I first met Big Red, it had remained in its case, unplayed, for the 50 years since Smith’s passing in 1967. Opening up Big Red’s case answered a number of mysteries. It also raised a big question: Who should play it next? That took six more months to answer, but I finally got there. Smith’s favorite violin has now begun its next musical journey in the hands of a gifted young jazz violinist who’s also a big Stuff Smith fan.
* * *
I fell for Smith’s sound 30 years ago, when I heard his late-career live album Swingin’ Stuff. His playing is infectious, funny, irresistible. And when he plays a ballad, as today’s leading jazz violinist Regina Carter put it to me, it’s like he’s just talking to you.
Swingin’ Stuff sounds like a party you’d never want to leave. One track, “Bugle Call Rag,” is also captured on a video that Carter loves: Smith and his band swing so hard, it seems they might levitate through the roof of the club.
The path leading me to Smith’s violin itself didn’t open until I started digging for old Stuff Smith source material in 2017. Before I knew it, I heard from Dan Morgenstern himself. In a generous email, time-stamped just before midnight, the preeminent jazz historian who’s now 89 connected me with the world’s leading Stuff Smith scholar, Anthony Barnett.
I ordered a couple of Barnett’s books, available at abar.net. One, Pure at Heart, includes a memoir fragment in which Smith tells his “crazy stories” — like driving through New York with pianist Art Tatum (who was blind) at the wheel. It also affirms his hatred for hospital beds, his love for Jesus and his love for “Mr. Whiskey.” And Smith’s passion for life and music rings out like a bell:
Almost every day I meet an old friend I haven’t seen in a long while and it’s like every day was Christmas. And a wonderful family and good wives and a son twice as tall as me who is really straight and I’m proud to be Dad to. And then the greatest thing of all — Music. And, man, here, I can’t tell you anything at all because music starts where words leave off and who tries to talk words about it, is missing the whole point.
Smith was no stranger to Washington, D.C. My teacher, jazz violinist Eddie Drennon, remembers going to hear Smith in the late ’50s at the Hollywood, near 9th and U Streets NW. That night, Smith introduced Eddie, then 16, to the pickup he used to amplify his violin — the DeArmond Model 700. (Eddie later relied on a DeArmond when he became Bo Diddley’s music director.) At the Hollywood, Eddie remembers that Smith swung hard, accompanied by an organist on the house Hammond B-3.
Smith also played a festival near D.C. in 1959. One of Anthony Barnett’s books has photos of the band: Oscar Peterson, piano; Ray Brown, bass; Ed Thigpen, drums; Herb Ellis, guitar. The vocalist was Ella Fitzgerald.
Smith recorded in D.C. with pianist Ed Warren and saxophonist Buck Hill. And on Aug. 7, 1959, he cut 11 tracks with Shirley Horn as his pianist. Though Horn is credited for fewer tracks than she played on, several of these appear on Smith’s album Cat on a Hot Fiddle.

John Smith, Cheryl Smith and John’s fiancee Stephanie Presar (left) pose with Stuff Smith’s encased violin. Courtesy David Schulman
In 2017 Anthony led me to Smith’s widow, Arlene Smith. Now 94, Arlene was his fourth wife. They had no children. After his death in 1967, his violin was sent from Europe (where he had taken residence) back to Arlene in the U.S. She in turn sent Big Red to his son Jack in Buffalo, N.Y. Jack died in the 1980s, leaving two grandchildren, Cheryl and John.
Arlene called me one day to ask if I had their address. She wanted to send a card. I didn’t, but I started calling Smiths in upstate New York. Eventually, I tried a certain John Smith. I hung up at the voicemail prompt — what message could I possibly leave? But the next morning, he called me back. He was Stuff’s grandson.
That led to our first meeting on Oct. 7, 2017, almost exactly a half century after Stuff Smith’s death. John carried a blonde Jaeger case. When we opened it, a green cloth was draped over the violin, the name “Stuff” hand-stitched in red. One compartment contained his last rock of rosin. Another held his DeArmond pickup.
The violin itself was in remarkably good shape. No new cracks had developed in all those years, though the soundpost had fallen and it had only three strings intact. I carefully picked it up. There was a false bottom in the case. Underneath were old strings, a scrap of lyrics, letters and a postcard Smith sent his son from Warsaw:
Dear Jack. I played here last night at a Jazz festival. It was something else. I leave today for Copenhagen. I hope Betty and the children are well. Kiss them for me. It is getting real cold here now. Boy I don’t like that — Be good.
Dad
(For the full story of the violin’s recovery, listen to this radio documentary I helped to create for Australia’s ABC Radio National.)
* * *
The jacket copy of the Stuff Smith self-titled album on Verve says his violin was a “Guarnerius,” like the one played by Paganini himself. Today, Guarneri violins easily fetch millions of dollars. Arlene Smith knew the truth: Big Red was made for Smith by a luthier in Michigan. It is a fine copy of a Guarneri. For all these years, though, the maker’s identity had remained unknown. John and Cheryl and I looked inside the violin with a penlight. The label read: “Bernard J. LeBlond, 1946 Battle Creek, Michigan.”
The Smiths were clear: They wanted Stuff’s violin to be played again, as a way of reviving their grandfather’s musical legacy. So Big Red should not go to a museum. And it should not go to a classical violinist.

David Schulman with violinist Yannick Hiwat and the album cover of the self-titled album Stuff Smith. Courtesy David Schulman
“It’s jazzy,” Cheryl said. “The violin wants to dance.”
In June 2018, John and Cheryl invited me to visit again, and sent me home with a precious item of carry-on luggage: Big Red. As we all worked to find it a new home, I was discreet about the special “guest violin” I was looking after in our Takoma Park apartment. Violins, especially very good violins, need to be played regularly to sound their best. The old wood needs to vibrate and resonate. An instrument that has rested half a century needs time to reawaken from its slumber. So after a luthier made some minor repairs, I played Big Red most mornings, always including at least one Stuff Smith tune. I tried not to shy away from it. Smith was a vigorous player. He loved big, ringing double-stops and forceful accents.
A jazz lover once asked if I could “feel its mojo” when I played Big Red. The answer, of course, was yes. But besides that mojo and its powerful sound, the violin also physically expresses Smith’s musical personality. The neck is subtly worn down in two places where, over the course of 21 years, Smith rested his thumb and his first finger. Fifty years later, his violin was actually teaching me how Smith himself used to hold it.
You can see Smith’s distinctive hold on the violin in a midcentury television broadcast.
In September 2018, Yannick Hiwat rode the Vamoose bus down from New York. He’d just played the Blue Note. Yannick, whose parents are from Suriname, grew up and lives in the Netherlands. His conservatory studies were interrupted when, as a teenager, he won an audition to join one of South Africa’s top orchestras. Yannick is a big Stuff Smith fan, an alumnus of Snarky Puppy and, at age 30, a fluent jazz improviser.
I picked him up at the bus stop and we drove back to Takoma talking about Smith. In our living room, I handed Yannick Big Red. As he started playing, my spouse and I exchanged glances: Something was happening. When I played the instrument, there were three musical personalities in the mix: me, Stuff Smith and Big Red. It was a three-way confabulation. When Yannick played Big Red, it was something else: It was one sound. One voice. He quickly noticed how the violin responded, particularly in “jazz keys” — like E-flat — where most violins tend to be more muted.
It felt like a match, but such a purchase is no simple thing. Then, in mid-December, an anonymous donor appeared and made an offer to buy the violin and put it into Yannick’s hands for the next two years. (The deal requires that the buyer not be identified, so I won’t say any more about this.)
For six months, I’d had my time with Smith’s violin. I was satisfied. Before it left, though, I wanted to have a farewell party for Big Red. I booked the evening of Dec. 20, 2018 at Allyworld in Takoma Park — a studio with room for a small private audience. Two of the finest musicians now working in D.C. — pianist Janelle Gill and bassist Michael Bowie — joined me.
The session marked the first time in more than 50 years that Smith’s violin had played alongside other instruments. Here’s our set list. All the tunes are Stuff Smith originals that deserve to be played far more widely, and not just by jazz violinists:

• “Blue Violin” — an infectious ballad from Smith’s 1960 Verve release, Cat on A Hot Fiddle.
• “Only Time Will Tell” — one of my favorite tracks from the album Swingin’ Stuff.
• “Calypso” — a catchy groove from a 1957 session for Norman Granz, during which Smith recorded two standards and six originals.
• “Timme’s Blues” (aka “Play”) — a rollicking number launched by one of Smith’s favorite double-stop motifs. Music to finish your beer by.
• “Hillcrest” — racehorse swing from a 1963 album Smith made with Herb Ellis. Once, talking by phone with Arlene, I played the opening of this tune down the line. She said it was one of Smith’s favorite riffs.
• “Desert Sands” — a signature composition Smith recorded several times. Anthony Barnett borrowed its name for the title for his definitive bio-discography of Stuff Smith.

Among the guests at Allyworld was Jennifer Betts, daughter of the great bassist Keter Betts — who played 24 years with Ella Fitzgerald and was a mentor to Michael Bowie. Jennifer brought a big, stunning photograph Keter had taken of Smith in full swing. We propped the frame up against one wall, so Smith looked out over Janelle’s shoulder as we played.
Another guest was Kathy Hybl, Bernard LeBlond’s granddaughter. Kathy brought old photographs of her grandfather making violins. He was a meticulous craftsman who invested in Italian violin-making tools; after his death in 2001, these went to a Bethesda luthier. LeBlond labeled few instruments with his own name, and a number of his violins likely were sold under the label of the Battle Creek, Mi.-based V.C. Squires company.

David Schulman performs with Janelle Gill (piano) and Michael Bowie (bass) in Takoma Park, Md. Courtesy Ken Avis.
LeBlond was a Marine stationed in D.C. during World War II, working on instruments for the U.S. Marine Band. He returned after the war to Michigan, where he built Big Red. But his family remembers that during his D.C. years, he often went into the city to hear jazz. He was a particular fan of the violinist they knew by the nickname of “Stuffie.”
* * *
After our night at Allyworld, I put Smith’s violin away and let it rest. The purchase became final on Jan 3, 2019. Nine days later, I met Yannick Hiwat again. He’d flown from the Netherlands to pick up Big Red. As we drove towards Takoma Park, Yannick said it was a dream come true. I asked if he’d ever heard Smith’s music in an actual dream. He said that in fact, he had dreamt of jamming with Smith two nights before.
Back in Takoma Park, we opened the case. Yannick picked up Big Red. The tune from the dream was the first music he played.
I picked up my own violin, and Yannick and I played some impromptu duets — including “Blue Violin.” Soon, though, it was time for him to get back on the road. Yannick’s got recordings and concerts planned in Europe. With luck, he’ll return before long to D.C. and New York, and bring the swinging sounds of Stuff Smith and Big Red back to American jazz clubs.
Since Big Red and Yannick left, one phrase keeps running through my mind. It’s a line Dan Morgenstern used as his sign-off when he sent me that first midnight email: “Stuff lives!”
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“As the film delves into his past loves, personal relationships and addictions, a clearer portrait of Davis the man emerges,” the synopsis continues. “Davis is fearless and engaging throughout, and his intellectual fervor is only tempered by his insecurities. Director Stanley Nelson’s epic biopic collects the strands of a creative life and weaves them together for us to understand one of the great modern American artists like never before.”
 

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Home  Leonard Maltin  FAREWELL TO VITAPHONE CHAMPION RON HUTCHINSON—ONE OF THE GOOD GUYS

In It’s a Wonderful Life, James Stewart’s George Bailey required an angel to show him how much his life mattered to the people around him. I don’t think Ron Hutchinson needed evidence of the impact he made by cofounding The Vitaphone Project and resuscitating dozens of dormant films. He has done heroic work since the early 1990s and deserves all the accolades imaginable.
He didn’t do it for credit or glory; he did it because he cared. That’s one reason his untimely passing last weekend comes as such a blow to the film community.
For me it’s also personal. I counted him as a friend for more than 25 years, and I am devastated.
Some collectors hoard their goodies; Ron was the opposite, an unabashedly enthusiastic guy who couldn’t wait to share his discoveries. Whenever I found myself in New York on a Monday or Tuesday evening he would organize a gathering of like-minded folks to hear our favorite band, Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks. We would happily pass the night away reveling in the vintage music we loved, laughing and trading stories.
Bob Furmanek took this photo of Ron, son Jared and daughter-in-law Lyubov following Ron’s popular Vitaphone presentation at the TCM Classic Film Festival in 2016. I’ll never forget that wonderful smile.
His now-famous calling began as an outgrowth of his hobby. An avid collector of 78rpm records, he came upon a number of rare 16 –inch discs that provided soundtracks for some of the first sound movies ever made. The majority of them were Vitaphone short subjects featuring Broadway and vaudeville stars, and hadn’t been seen since they were made in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Several archives had the equally-rare 35mm film negatives for these shorts but were missing the audio to go with them. With no professional experience in this arena, Ron played matchmaker for major institutions like the Library of Congress and UCLA Film and Television Archive and got them to cooperate in order to make the films whole again. Before Warner Bros. made a major (and welcome) commitment to its vintage talkies, he raised private funds from individuals who wanted to see these tantalizing shorts. He organized Vitaphone programs around the world and even tracked down relatives of old-time vaudevillians to give them the thrill of seeing their parents and grandparents in action. Over the course of time, news of his work yielded more “finds” and helped put feature films as well as shorts back into circulation.
He was proud of his family, all the more so when his son Jared had Vince’s band play at his wedding. I know Ron’s wife Judy must have been a patient soul to see her husband devote so much time and energy to his hobby—a hobby that ultimately became an international resource. My heartfelt condolences go out to his entire family.
This is not the time or place to talk about the history of The Vitaphone Project, although it and Ron have become synonymous. I encourage you to visit the official website http://www.vitaphoneproject.com/ to learn more.
 

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Izzy Young in 1963 in front of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. Mr. Young’s store, Bob Dylan once wrote, “was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”CreditDavid Gahr/Getty Images

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Izzy Young in 1963 in front of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. Mr. Young’s store, Bob Dylan once wrote, “was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”CreditCreditDavid Gahr/Getty Images
Izzy Young, whose Greenwich Village shop, the Folklore Center, was the beating heart of the midcentury folk music revival — and who in 1961 presented the first New York concert by a young Bob Dylan — died on Monday at his home in Stockholm. He was 90.
His death was confirmed by his daughter, Philomène Grandin.
Anyone wanting to capture the essence of the times could do far worse than head to the Folklore Center, at 110 Macdougal Street, between Bleecker and West Third Streets. Established in 1957, it was nominally a music store, selling records, books, instruments, sheet music and fan magazines, most sprung from sweat and mimeograph machines, like Sing Out!, Caravan and Gardyloo.
In actual practice, the center was also equal parts hiring hall; Schwab’s Pharmacy, where young hopefuls awaited discovery; matchbox recital space for organized performances and impromptu jam sessions; nerve center for gossip on a par with any small-town barbershop; and forum for continuing, crackling debate on the all-consuming subject of folk music, which thanks in no small part to Mr. Young was enjoying wide, renewed attention.
“I began hanging out at the Folklore Center, the citadel of Americana folk music,” Mr. Dylan wrote in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), recalling his arrival in New York in 1961. “The small store was up a flight of stairs and the place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institute.”
Crackling loudest above the din was Mr. Young, who, with his horn-rimmed glasses, prodigious vocal capacity and bottomless cornucopia of opinion, was the platonic, genially abrasive New York nebbish from Central Casting.
“His voice was like a bulldozer and always seemed too loud for the little room,” Mr. Dylan wrote. “Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good-natured. In reality a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold. It did for me, too.”
Until he closed the shop in 1973 to move to Stockholm and start a similar center, Mr. Young reigned supreme as a handicapper (“The first few times I met Dylan, I wasn’t that impressed,” he said. “But as he began writing those great songs, I realized he was really something”); an impresario (he organized hundreds of concerts throughout the city, including Mr. Dylan’s first formal appearance, at the Carnegie Hall complex, as well as performances by the New Lost City Ramblers, Dave Van Ronk, Jean Ritchieand Phil Ochs); and an evangelist who almost single-handedly put the “Folk” in Folk City, the storied Village nightclub.
He was also a writer, with a regular column in Sing Out!; a broadcaster, with a folk music show on WBAI in New York; an agitator (in 1961, he helped organize successful public protests after the city banned folk music from Washington Square Park); a ferocious keeper of the castle (“He was even known to throw people out of his store,” Dick Weissman, a former member of the folk group the Journeymen, wrote, “simply because they irritated him”); and an equally ferocious defender of the faith. (Mr. Young repudiated Mr. Dylan after he began wielding an electric guitar in the mid-’60s.)
If, at the end of the day, the Folklore Center was a less-than-successful capitalist enterprise — who, after all, goes into folk music to get rich? — it scarcely mattered. Joni Mitchell was discovered there. Peter found Marythere, after seeing her photo on a wall. (Paul joined them soon afterward.) Mr. Van Ronk, then the more established musician, met the newly arrived Mr. Dylan there and invited him to take the stage at the nearby Gaslight Cafe.
Mr. Young, in short, was the original folknik — quite literally, for it was he who had coined the term, in the late 1950s, as attested by the Oxford English Dictionary.
One of Mr. Young’s most memorable achievements was presenting Bob Dylan’s first New York concert, at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. 
CreditAmerican Folklife Center, Library of Congress
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One of Mr. Young’s most memorable achievements was presenting Bob Dylan’s first New York concert, at Carnegie Chapter Hall in 1961. 
CreditAmerican Folklife Center, Library of Congress
Israel Goodman Young was born on March 26, 1928, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and reared in the Bronx. His parents, Philip and Pola, were Jewish immigrants from Poland.
As a youth, Izzy spent most of his time, he later said, “trying to avoid committing myself to anything.”
Then, while a student at the Bronx High School of Science, he was smitten by folk dancing, becoming a member of the American Square Dance Group. The company, founded in New York by the folklorist and teacher Margot Mayo, revived traditional dances of many kinds.
The dances led him to folk music, and he was soon collecting books on the subject. He attended Brooklyn College but did not finish.
In the mid-1950s, after working for several years at Borough Park Shomer Shabbos, the bakery his father had established in Brooklyn, Mr. Young became a dealer in rare folk-music books. His private clients included Harry Belafonte and Burl Ives.
He opened the Folklore Center in April 1957, and it quickly became a mecca for pleasurable activity of all kinds.
“Drugs weren’t allowed,” Mr. Young told the newspaper The Weekend Australian in 2013. “But every time you opened the toilet door a big cloud of purple smoke would waft out.”
In the early 1960s, Mr. Young persuaded a Village restaurateur, Mike Porco, to emphasize folk musicians at his establishment, Gerdes. They proved such a success that the restaurant’s name was changed to Gerdes Folk Cityand eventually simply to Folk City.
Over the years, Folk City featured the likes of Mr. Dylan, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Tom Paxton and Muddy Waters. It closed in 1987.
In 1961, Mr. Young helped spearhead a protest known in the press as the Beatnik Riot. That year, the New York City Parks Department, under pressure from conservative groups and real estate interests, banned folk musicians from Washington Square Park. The park, in the heart of the Village, had been a traditional gathering and performing place for musicians since the 1940s.
With the Rev. Howard R. Moody, the minister of the nearby Judson Memorial Church, Mr. Young formed the Right to Sing Committee. On April 9, 1961, as scores of New York City police officers looked on, the committee staged a protest in the park, with hundreds of musicians marching and singing.
Mr. Young in 2016 at the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm, the successor to the Folklore Center. It endured for more than four decades before closing last November, as an announcement said, “due to Izzy’s age.”CreditCasper Hedberg for The New York Times
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Mr. Young in 2016 at the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm, the successor to the Folklore Center. It endured for more than four decades before closing last November, as an announcement said, “due to Izzy’s age.”CreditCasper Hedberg for The New York Times
“I have everybody singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner,’ ” Mr. Young told NPR in 2011. “I said, ‘They can’t hit us on the head while we’re doing that.’ ”
The committee held more demonstrations in the weeks that followed but could not stop the State Supreme Court from upholding the city’s ban later that spring. In July, however, an appellate court lifted the ban, and the park was once more awash in folk music.
The Folklore Center moved to Sixth Avenue in 1965. Eight years later, after being transfixed by traditional Swedish fiddle music, Mr. Young closed the store and relocated to Stockholm, where he opened the Folklore Centrum.
There, as in New York, he led a threadbare existence. In 2014, Mr. Young put up for auction at Christie’s the manuscripts of two obscure early songs by Mr. Dylan: “Talking Folklore Center,” about the old Macdougal Street establishment, and “Go Away You Bomb,” about nuclear disarmament. Both failed to meet their reserve price and were not sold.
The Folklore Centrum remained open and active for more than four decades; Mr. Young was presenting concerts there as late as the spring of 2018. But that November the center announced that it would be closing at the end of the month “due to Izzy’s age.”
The announcement said that Mr. Young’s daughter, Ms. Grandin, a Swedish actress, had “spent the last few months cataloging and packing up Izzy’s vast folklore library” and hoped to sell it “as one collection to any interested parties.”
“It’s sad to close the place,” Ms. Grandin said at the time, “but it has been a beautiful ride and it’s so nice to see all the love and music that Izzy is still surrounded with.”
In addition to Ms. Grandin, Mr. Young is survived by a son, Thilo Egenberger, and three grandchildren.
Mr. Young was the subject of a documentary, “Izzy Young: Talking Folklore Center” (1989), directed by Jim Downing. His Sing Out! columns and other articles were anthologized in “The Conscience of the Folk Revival:The Writings of Israel ‘Izzy’ Young” (2013), edited by Scott Barretta.
Perhaps Mr. Young’s most memorable achievement came in presenting Mr. Dylan’s first New York concert, atCarnegie Chapter Hall— a space of about 200 seats above what is now Weill Recital Hall, on West 57th Street — on Nov. 4, 1961. The program included Woody Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre” and Roy Acuff’s “Freight Train Blues.”
Though the concert is now considered a landmark, Mr. Young, who charged $2 a ticket, lost money.
“There were only 53 people there,” he told an interviewer in 2004. “Now 3,000 people remember it well.”
 
 

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Jacqueline Steiner in about 1990 in Norwalk, Conn., where she lived. It was during her stay in Cambridge, Mass., that she and Bess Lomax Hawes wrote “Charlie on the M.T.A.” for a local politician.CreditErma Benedetto

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Jacqueline Steiner in about 1990 in Norwalk, Conn., where she lived. It was during her stay in Cambridge, Mass., that she and Bess Lomax Hawes wrote “Charlie on the M.T.A.” for a local politician.CreditCreditErma Benedetto
From those first banjo licks, Bostonians know what’s coming:
“Let me tell you the story of a man named Charlie. …”
As sure as the train is roaring down the tracks, it’s the cautionary tale of Charlie, the Everyman who gets caught up in Boston’s soul-crushing subway system, whence he will never return.
Jacqueline Steiner, who died on Jan. 25 at 94, was the lyricist who conjured up poor Charlie early in her singing and songwriting career. She and the song’s co-writer, Bess Lomax Hawes,dashed it off for a Boston mayoral candidate in 1949. They expected it to fade after the election along with their candidate, who received only 1 percent of the vote.
But 10 years later, the folk music group the Kingston Trio picked it up. With a slightly new spin, the trio gave it a second life, and their “At Large” album, with the song, “M.T.A.” (also known as “Charlie on the M.T.A.”), as the opening track, hit No. 1 on the charts.
“M.T.A.” received an astonishing third life in 2004, when Boston officials did away with subway tokens and issued an automated fare card. They called it the CharlieCard, which is still its name. At the ceremony showing it off, Gov. Mitt Romney heartily joined the Kingston Trio and belted out the song.
The original versionwritten by Ms. Steiner and Ms. Hawes and based on the tunes of two old folk songs, had a political edge. They wrote it for a progressive candidate named Walter A. O’Brien, who opposed the latest fare increase. Subway riders would pay a dime to get onto a train, but if they transferred to an aboveground streetcar, they had to pay an extra nickel to exit. (The system was so complex that the M.T.A. issued a 15-page booklet with instructions for both riders and subway operators; the agency ended the system after only a few months.)
Charlie, alas, did not have that extra nickel.
His absent-minded wife came down to the station every day, but instead of handing him a nickel, “through the open window she hands Charlie a sandwich as the train comes rumblin’ through.” (Ms. Hawes wrote the sandwich verse, which Ms. Steiner always believed gave the song its punch.)
Charlie was thus doomed to “ride forever ’neath the streets of Boston / He’s the man who never returned.”
After the election, Mr. O’Brien was deemed a Communist and blacklisted. The clean-cut Kingston Trio, trying to advance their careers in the midst of the McCarthy era, generally avoided overtly political songs. They sanitized the Steiner-Hawes version of “M.T.A.” and changed the name Walter O’Brien to the fictitious George O’Brien.
The song remains embedded in Boston’s collective unconscious and is something of an unofficial city anthem.
It has also served as a metaphor for other horrors, as when a Soviet cosmonaut was stranded in spaceafter the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union; Fred Small wrote a parody called “Sergei in the Milky Way,” based on the Kingston Trio’s arrangement.
Ms. Steiner with the folk group Boston People’s Artists around 1948. The next year she helped write “Charlie on the M.T.A.” With her, from left, were Al Katz, Leon Rabin, Sam Berman and Arnold Berman, Ms. Steiner’s first husband.CreditIda Berman
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Ms. Steiner with the folk group Boston People’s Artists around 1948. The next year she helped write “Charlie on the M.T.A.” With her, from left, were Al Katz, Leon Rabin, Sam Berman and Arnold Berman, Ms. Steiner’s first husband.CreditIda Berman
Some in Boston find an enduring poetic resonance in Charlie’s plight. Thomas Whalen, a social scientist at Boston University, said that with the fare increase, resentment toward the onerous arm of government and hints of corruption, the song taps into a rich vein of Boston history.
“Charlie is caught in that political vortex, as we all are in Boston,” he said in a telephone interview. “It’s this Kafkaesque nightmare — Charlie can’t get off that train.”
Jacqueline Steiner was born on Sept. 11, 1924, in Manhattan to Joseph and Jane (Lippert) Steiner. Her father was a clothing retailer, her mother a telephone operator. Her parents divorced when Jackie, as she was known, was a toddler, and two aunts and sometimes her mother raised her, mostly in Greenwich Village.
Jackie skipped two grades and arrived at Vassar College at 16. She graduated in 1944 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, then headed to Radcliffe to study philosophy but dropped out to pursue a career as a folk singer and songwriter, taking odd jobs to support herself. It was while she was living in Cambridge that she and Ms. Hawes, who died in 2009 at 88, wrote “M.T.A.”
Ms. Steiner’s first marriage, to Arnold Berman, ended in divorce after three years. Her second marriage, to Myron Sharpe, ended in divorce in 1980.
Her son, Matthew Sharpe, said his mother died from complications of pneumonia in Norwalk, Conn., where she lived. In addition to him, she is survived by her daughter, Susanna Sharpe, and five grandchildren.
Ms. Steiner was always politically active, starting early in the peace and civil rights movements. In Norwalk, she served for many years as secretary of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P.
A mezzo-soprano, Ms. Steiner was passionate about singing and playing the guitar. She sang at hootenannies with Pete Seeger and others and studied voice with Max Margulis, a founder of Blue Note Records, who also coached Judy Collins.
She also recorded two albums. The first, “No More War,” which she recorded in 1966 as Jacqueline Sharpe, consisted entirely of original antiwar songs. The title track, “No More War,”was based on a 1965 speech by Pope Paul VI at the United Nations. On her second album, “Far Afield: Songs of Three Continents,” released in 1991, she sang her own version of “M.T.A.” as well as songs in multiple languages.
As a singer for hire, Ms. Steiner sang solo and in choirs, at churches and synagogues. She even sang for prisoners at Sing Sing. She often hummed around the house, her son said, usually classical music.
But at parties, he said, someone would inevitably coax her — “and it didn’t take much coaxing” — to bring out her guitar and sing “M.T.A.”
“She wasn’t famous, but the song was famous,” he said. “And it gave her great pleasure to have created something known by so many people, and that had such enduring value.”
 

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Julie Adams and Ben Chapman, as the title character, in the 1954 movie “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” “No matter what you do,” Ms. Adams once said, “you can act your heart out, but people will always say, ‘Oh, Julie Adams — “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”’”CreditUniversal Pictures/Photofest

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Julie Adams and Ben Chapman, as the title character, in the 1954 movie “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” “No matter what you do,” Ms. Adams once said, “you can act your heart out, but people will always say, ‘Oh, Julie Adams — “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”’”CreditCreditUniversal Pictures/Photofest
Julie Adams, a Hollywood film and television actress for more than six decades widely remembered as the terrorized swimmer in the 1954 cult classic “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her son Steve Danton.
A lithe beauty from Arkansas — she was Miss Little Rock of 1946 — Ms. Adams subdued her Southern drawl, got into the movies in 1949 and appeared in about 50 feature films with a Who’s Who of leading men, including Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, Tony Curtis and Elvis Presley.
Her starring breakthrough under a long-term contract with Universal-International Pictures was Anthony Mann’s “Bend of the River” (1952), in which she played a frontier woman who falls for James Stewart on the Oregon Trail in a cast that also included Rock Hudson and Arthur Kennedy. It was one of the top box-office hits of the year.
A year later, she starred with Tyrone Power in “The Mississippi Gambler” and with Van Heflin in “The Wings of a Hawk,” a tale of guerrilla resistance to federal despotism under President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico. Critics called both films standard, if scenic, but praised Ms. Adams’s performances.
Her slender, expressive face, flitting from joy to love to fear as needed but never far from tears, became familiar to millions on television. She was seen on more than 90 series, including “The Rifleman,” “Bonanza” and “Perry Mason” in the 1960s; “Mannix” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” in the ’70s; “Capitol” in the ’80s; and “Murder, She Wrote” (1987-93), on which she played a real estate agent and friend of the show’s central character, the writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher, played by Angela Lansbury.
In a retrospective interview with the film historian Tom Weaver in 1991, Ms. Adams voiced no serious regrets, although she noted, “No matter what you do, you can act your heart out, but people will always say, ‘Oh, Julie Adams — “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” ’ ”
She was initially skeptical about the role and the movie, which seemed to her like a horror comic book. She was to play the victim of a gruesome merman who takes her off to his grotto, with filming done both above and under water in 3-D black and white. She considered rejecting the part but feared suspension by Universal, which, after all, had made “Phantom of the Opera” in 1925 and “Frankenstein” and “Dracula” in 1931.
Like the title character in the classic 1933 movie “King Kong,” the creature is a proud, sensitive monster who falls in love at first sight with a beauty and must die for his devotion. In a lost world up the Amazon, the creature lurks in the depths as Kay Lawrence (Ms. Adams) and two scientists (Richard Carlson and Richard Denning) chug upstream on an expedition aboard their laboratory boat.
In a white one-piece bathing suit, Kay takes a swim in a murky lagoon as the creature, a reptilian terror about the size of a tall (costumed) man with gills, webbed feet and hands, stalks her with backstrokes from below in a submarine pas de deux.
At one point he glides up and touches her foot. Startled, she dives but finds nothing in the murk. Later, the creature is caught and caged. He escapes and carries her to his cavern, where armed men ultimately arrive to rescue her.
Ms. Adams with Elvis Presley in “Tickle Me” (1965).CreditAllied Artists Pictures/Photofest
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Ms. Adams with Elvis Presley in “Tickle Me” (1965).CreditAllied Artists Pictures/Photofest
Critics were unenthusiastic. But the film, directed by Jack Arnold, was a hit, taking in $1.3 million at the box office (a little more than $12 million in today’s money), even though not every theater showed it in 3-D. It generated two sequels, “Revenge of the Creature” (1955) and “The Creature Walks Among Us” (1956), both starring other women.
The original attracted later generations of fans when it was rereleased to theaters in 1975 and on home video in 1980.
The director Guillermo del Toro acknowledged that “Creature From the Black Lagoon” had been an influence on “The Shape of Water,” his Oscar-winning 2017 movie about the unusual relationship between a woman and an amphibious creature. In a 2018 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he traced his film’s genesis to the first time he saw “Creature,” when he was 7 years old.
“The creature was the most beautiful design I’d ever seen,” he said. “And I saw him swimming under Julie Adams, and I loved that the creature was in love with her, and I felt an almost existential desire for them to end up together.”
Giving little thought to the legacy of her role, Ms. Adams continued her Hollywood successes. In recent years, however, as her career faded, she found herself with a new lease on entertainment life, in demand by monster movie fans seeking autographs, memorabilia (including lurid posters of her in the scaly arms of the creature) and stories of her black lagoon adventure.
In 2011 she published an autobiography, “The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon,” written with her son Mitchell Danton. In 2012 she starred at three conventions for science fiction and horror fans: Monsterpalooza in Burbank, Calif., WonderFest in Louisville, Ky., and Monster Bash in Butler, Pa.
She was born Betty May Adams in Waterloo, Iowa, on Oct. 17, 1926, to alcoholic parents who moved often. She grew up in Blytheville and Little Rock, Ark., and attended Little Rock Junior College. But after being named Miss Little Rock, she dropped out at 19 and went to Hollywood, resolved to be an actress.
She married the screenwriter Leonard Stern in 1951; they divorced in 1953. She married the film director Ray Danton in 1954. They had two sons, Steven and Mitchell, before they, too, were divorced. She is survived by her sons and four grandchildren.
After making low-budget westerns for Lippert Pictures, Ms. Adams signed with Universal, which changed her name to Julia, then to Julie, and insured her legs for $125,000.
Her other notable films included “Six Bridges to Cross” (1955), with Tony Curtis; “Away All Boats” (1956), a war drama with Jeff Chandler; “Tickle Me” (1965), with Elvis Presley; and “The Last Movie,” (1971), a Venice Film Festival award winner for which Dennis Hopper was producer, director and star, about the effects of a Hollywood movie company on a Peruvian Indian village.
In recent years Ms. Adams, who lived in Los Angeles, appeared on TV in episodes of “Family Law” (2000), “Cold Case” (2006) and “CSI New York” (2010). She also attended conventions and film festivals to meet devotees of her creature feature from long ago. Cinecon, the classic film festival in Hollywood, honored her in 2011 with a career achievement award.
Francis Mateo contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 5, 2019, on Page B11 of the New York edition with the headline: Julie Adams, 92, Dies; ‘Black Lagoon’ Ingénue And a Veteran Actress. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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Ronald P. Hutchinson passed away swiftly and unexpectedly from cancer on February 2 in New Jersey, he was 67. He was beloved by many for the second career he took on as a volunteer, finding, preserving, and restoring hundreds of films from the early “talkie” era. He was active even recently, posting a final detailed article on Classicmoviehub.com on January 22nd. His passing came as a shock to the many friends and associates whom he has helped along the way. Many recall his generosity in lending materials and advice as they worked to complete books or other research related to early film.
The Vitaphone Project brought to life films from the brief period (1926-1930) when picture reels and sound records had to be cued up separately. In many cases, the film had survived decades in obscure archives while 78 RPM collectors preserved the shellac records. Many of these were “shorts” highlighting work of Vaudevillians, comedians, and musicians that might otherwise be lost to us. Tracking down these lost gems and bringing them back together was Ron Hutchinson’s magic.
 
 
Among the highlights of the project, in 1994 they discovered a lost ten minute Al Jolson film predating The Jazz Singer by a full year, the film had been considered lost since 1933. The following year they were able to pair it with the proper shellac disc, containing three songs, found in a barn owned by the descendants of an employee. A 2018 discovery led to a professional restoration of a Vitaphone short featuring a 20-year-old Benny Goodman and Jack Teagarden with Ben Pollack’s Park Central Orchestra in 1929. The project garnered substantial national attention when they found and released a lost early color Three Stooges short.
Hutchinson established the project in 1991 with the help of several other film enthusiasts. Together they have located over 6500 shellac sound disks in private hands and compiled a database of them. They work with Turner/Warner Bros. to make the movies available and cull film from archives, primarily at the U.S. Library of Congress, UCLA’s Film & Television Archive, and the British Film Institute. Through their cooperation, Warner Bros. has released over 250 Vitaphone shorts on DVD. The Vitaphone Project itself has restored dozens of shorts and at least 12 feature films,  raising $400,000 for the preservation work.
Professional restoration of one 8-10 minute reel costs around $12,000. There are scores of films for which no sound has been discovered, but might yet be.  Many further releases to DVD are planned. Vitaphone Project films also appear at vintage movie festivals and the cable channel Turner Classic Movies regularly highlights them.
 
 
A memorial service is planned for Saturday, February 9th from 1 – 4 pm at the Piscataway Funeral Home in Piscataway NJ.

The Syncopated Times would appreciate having someone closer to Ron write a remembrance of him and his work for our March issue. Contact us if you can be of service.
 
 
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travsd.wordpress.com
R.I.P. Ron Hutchinson
By travsd
3-4 minutes

Ron at our 2013 Palace Theatre centennial tribute/ vaudeville show 
I am devastated. Word has reached me that mentor and friend Ron Hutchinson, director of the Vitaphone Projecthas passed away.
No one was more generous or helpful to me in the creation of my book No Applause. Early in my research process, long about 2001 he had me and my five year old son over to his house and we spent the day talking vaudeville. He told me anecdotes, he showed me his collection, shared primary materials, played his old 78s, and even made my kid a sandwich and a glass of milk for lunch. He gave me phone numbers of people to interview…Rose Marie, Sylvia Froos, Harold Nicholas. Besides me and my editor, there is no one who’s more “in” the book than Ron.
Because, ALSO, I attended all of his Vitaphone screenings over the years, giving me my first real glimpse of so many vaudeville acts, moments that shook me to the core. He was generous with his audiences, too. He stood and talked to everybody. A lot of people don’t know that his work for the Vitaphone Project — which preserves old Vitaphone films from the late 1920s and early ’30s (and reunites the film portions with their soundtracks, which are on disks) — was performed on a volunteer basis. He didn’t take a penny. (Or at least a salary). That’s damned important work he’s been doing all these years. And he’s been GIVING it to us.
In 2012, Ron contributed to my pieces on vaudevillians Georgie Price and Richie Craig Jr. His work also greatly enhanced my posts on Eddie White, Jay C. Flippen, Herman Timberg , Ed Lowry, Shaw and Lee,and Joe E. Brown. Some other posts I’ve done about his work may be found here, and here.But honestly he’s had a hand in more posts than these. Do a search on Travalanche for “Vitaphone” and you will find 130 posts. It’s not an exaggeration to say that something of his work is in all of those posts and others.
In 2013 he came and screened a special tribute film at a benefit vaudeville show I put together at the Players Club for the Theatre Museum. This was the last time we hung out I think.
Just a few months ago, we were thrilled to watch him on TCM, presenting his Vitaphones to the country! I DVR’d the whole thing, kept the movies and Ron’s intros for months. Cherished them.
I’m told he was taken by cancer. He was relatively young. And right now, I’m having deja vu. Another generous friend, Rich Conaty, was similarly stolen from us almost exactly two years ago.I am sad on a personal level. Ron was a nice guy. But I’m also concerned about what his loss means for the work I care about. It’s on us. It’s on us to carry his work forward.
 

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With each passing year, the Grammy Awards veer closer to a more populist viewpoint with regards to the acts chosen for the coveted nominations in a myriad of categories. Yet as the expansions of country, pop, hip-hop, R&B and rock help keep the televised awards show in declining but still formidable ratings, the modest success comes at the expense of categories not deemed camera-friendly enough for the grand stage. And undoubtedly the biggest snub with regards to screen time is for jazz, which has been regaining an extensive amount of its popularity back in the wake of its always-evolving sonic rapport with hip-hop, R&B and electronic music over the course of the last 15 years.
“That record changed music, and we’re still seeing the effects of it,” Kamasi Washington told Pitchfork in 2017 in reference to Kendrick Lamar’s genre-blurring masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly. “It went beyond jazz; it meant that intellectually stimulating music doesn’t have to be underground. It can be mainstream.”
This year, the appearance of Lamar as part of the multiply nominated soundtrack to Black Panther remains one of the anticipated highlights of Grammy night, while jazz is celebrated almost exclusively during the pre-broadcast portion of the evening.
Even so, the Recording Academy continues to recognize and champion jazz on a number of fronts across the Grammy ballot, where it is the tenth field on the big sheet. Perusing the nominees in each category, one cannot be but a bit disappointed in seeing the absence of such critically lauded acts of 2018 as Andrew Cyrille, Makaya McCraven, Sons of Kemet and the aforementioned Mr. Washington, whose second triple album opus Heaven & Earth is a snub almost as offensive as the time they picked Jethro Tull over Metallica for the best hard rock/heavy metal trophy 30 years ago.
Not to take away from the massively talented pool of artists on display across the jazz field this year, however. For serious fans of the format, it will certainly make for an interesting evening — even if you won’t get to see a lick of it on CBS.
Here’s a quick rundown of the hottest prospects in each category, including best contemporary instrumental album, which theoretically features recordings made almost entirely by jazz artists yet is given its own designated field. The 61st Annual Grammy Awards air on Feb. 10 live from the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
Field 10 – Jazz
Category 31 – Best Improvised Jazz Solo
(For an instrumental jazz solo performance. Two equal performers on one recording may be eligible as one entry. If the soloist listed appears on a recording billed to another artist, the latter’s name is in parenthesis for identification. Singles or Tracks only.)
• “Some Of That Sunshine”
      Regina Carter, soloist
      Track from: Some Of That Sunshine (Karrin Allyson)
• “Don’t Fence Me In”
      John Daversa, soloist
      Track from: American Dreamers: Voices Of Hope, Music Of Freedom (John Daversa Big Band Featuring DACA Artists)
• “We See”
      Fred Hersch, soloists
• “De-Dah”
      Brad Mehldau, soloist
      Track from: Seymour Reads The Constitution! (Brad Mehldau Trio)
• “Cadenas”
      Miguel Zenón, soloist
      Track from: Yo Soy La Tradición (Miguel Zenón Featuring Spektral Quartet)
This category essentially whittles down a clash between two modern masters of jazz piano in Fred Hersch and Brad Mehldau, both of whom are representing exceptional solos off their best albums in years, Live In Europe and Seymour Reads The Constitution!, respectively. For Hersch, it would mark his 14th nomination while Mehldau will be enjoying his ninth overall shot at a little golden gramophone. And when you take into consideration that neither piano man has won a statue yet, surely it’s looking to be a piano duel for the ages.
Field 10 – Jazz
Category 32 – Best Jazz Vocal Album
(For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new vocal jazz recordings.)
• My Mood Is You
      Freddy Cole
• The Questions
      Kurt Elling
• The Subject Tonight Is Love
      Kate McGarry With Keith Ganz & Gary Versace
• If You Really Want
      Raul Midón With The Metropole Orkest Conducted By Vince Mendoza
• The Window
      Cécile McLorin Salvant
Don’t underestimate the potency of The Questions, Grammy-winning Chicago crooner Kurt Elling’s Branford Marsalis-produced album of interpretations of deep favorites by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and more. But it’s gonna take more than a few cool covers to override the momentum of Cecile McLorin Salvant, whose brilliant duet set with pianist Sullivan Fortner is being hailed as her finest work yet, and a shoo-in for a third consecutive statue in this category. And with the quiet fire of her translation of the Great American Songbook on The Window, the competition better be shook.
Field 10 – Jazz
Category 33 – Best Jazz Instrumental Album
(For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new instrumental jazz recordings.)
• Diamond Cut
      Tia Fuller
• Live In Europe
      Fred Hersch Trio
• Seymour Reads The Constitution!
      Brad Mehldau Trio
• Still Dreaming
      Joshua Redman, Ron Miles, Scott Colley & Brian Blade
• Emanon
      The Wayne Shorter Quartet
This is by far the most stacked category in the jazz department. And on any other day, there wouldn’t be any argument against seeing onetime Beyonce saxophonist Tia Fuller taking home the gramophone for her excellent, spirited fifth LP Diamond Cut, especially when she blows pure lightning against the dream rhythm section of Dave Holland on bass and drummer Jack DeJohnette. But the peaks of several year-end lists in 2018 — including Billboard’s — all point towards legendary reedist Wayne Shorter redefining the term he’s most associated with, fusion, through an ingenious amalgamation of creative jazz and comic books as visionary as anything he’s done with Miles, Joni or Jaco. And at 85, he’s far from finished pushing things forward.  
Field 10 – Jazz
Category 34 – Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
(For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new ensemble jazz recordings.)
• All About That Basie
      The Count Basie Orchestra Directed By Scotty Barnhart
• American Dreamers: Voices Of Hope, Music Of Freedom
      John Daversa Big Band Featuring DACA Artists
• Presence
      Orrin Evans And The Captain Black Big Band
• All Can Work
      John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble
• Barefoot Dances And Other Visions
      Jim McNeely & The Frankfurt Radio Big Band
Kamasi Washington’s Heaven & Earth should’ve made the cut for this category, no questions asked. Not that it would’ve stood a chance against the strongest contender in this pack — if based only on sentiment. However, that’s what makes American Dreamers: Voices of Hope, Music of Freedom such a sharp competitor. Not only is this a killer big band album, it’s a beautiful story of this union between modern trumpet giant John Daversa and a choir of talented young men and women, all of whom happen to be protected under DACA, a program in constant danger of being cut by the Trump Administration. Songs like James Brown’s “Living in America,” Cole Porter’s “Don’t Fence Me In,” Led Zeppelin’s “The Immigrant Song” and Sondheim’s “America” from West Side Story are transformed into call-to-action hymns for the very souls singing them.
Field 10 – Jazz
Category 35 – Best Latin Jazz Album
(For vocal or instrumental albums containing at least 51% playing time of newly recorded material. The intent of this category is to recognize recordings that represent the blending of jazz with Latin, Iberian-American, Brazilian, and Argentinian tango music.)
• Heart Of Brazil
      Eddie Daniels
• Back To The Sunset
      Dafnis Prieto Big Band
• West Side Story Reimagined
      Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band
• Cinque
      Elio Villafranca
• Yo Soy La Tradición
      Miguel Zenón Featuring Spektral Quartet
All five of these nominees have proven their championship level abilities in shaping the vibrancy of Latin jazz in the 21st century. But it’s hard to see anyone in this group beat out alto sax player Miguel Zenón’s elegant chamber jazz tribute to his beloved, embattled Puerto Rico. Accompanied by Chicago’s Spektral Quartet, Zenón turns a decade’s worth of research on his homeland’s rich traditions in music, religion and folklore into a singular sound that pushes the definition of Latin jazz unlike any record in recent memory.
Field 3 – Contemporary Instrumental Music
Category 11 – Best Contemporary Instrumental Album
(For albums containing approximately 51% or more playing time of instrumental material. For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new recordings.)
• The Emancipation Procrastination
      Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah
• Steve Gadd Band
      Steve Gadd Band
• Modern Lore
      Julian Lage
• Laid Black
      Marcus Miller
• Protocol 4
      Simon Phillips
Since its implementation in 2001, the contemporary instrumental category has largely consisted of jazz fusion acts. Why the Recording Academy won’t just make it part of the jazz field is a real wonder. But it does provide an opportunity for New Orleans trumpet great Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah to finally land the Grammy that’s eluded him since his last nomination in 2006 for best contemporary jazz album (a category that doesn’t even exist anymore). The third and final chapter of his Centennial Trilogy, The Emancipation Procrastination, is peak Christian as he and his group meld the worlds of Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way and Mezzanine by Massive Attack, highlighted by an otherworldly take on Radiohead’s “Videotape” from the band’s consistently misunderstood masterpiece In Rainbows. This music transcends category.
 

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Harold Bradley performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2007. A prolific studio musician, he was the first instrumentalist elected to the Hall who did not have a significant career as a solo artist.CreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press

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Harold Bradley performing at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2007. A prolific studio musician, he was the first instrumentalist elected to the Hall who did not have a significant career as a solo artist.CreditCreditMark Humphrey/Associated Press
NASHVILLE — Harold Bradley, who played on thousands of country, pop and rock ’n’ roll recordings, including landmark hits like Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” died on Thursday in Nashville. He was 93.
His death, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was confirmed by his daughter Beverly Bradley.
Beginning in the 1940s, Mr. Bradley’s work on six-string bass and guitar was also featured on records by, among many others, Red Foley, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Loretta Lynn.
Mr. Bradley, known for his spare, soulful playing, also played banjo and other instruments. But according to Guitar Player magazine and other sources, he is among the most recorded guitarists in history.
The younger brother of the pioneering record producer Owen Bradley, Mr. Bradley also served for decades as the de facto leader of Nashville’s A-Team, the elite circle of first-call session musicians immortalized in the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 Top 10 hit “Nashville Cats.”
“Clear as country water” is how that song characterized the intuitive, uncluttered playing of the team under Mr. Bradley’s direction, an expansive ensemble that also included the pianist Floyd Cramer and the pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake. By the late ’60s, the group’s laid-back, no-frills approach drew folk and rock luminaries like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Byrds to Nashville to record with them.
“Everything that was happening in the studio — that was my world; that was as big as it got,” Mr. Bradley said, looking back on Nashville’s 1950s and ’60s heyday in a 2013 interview with NPR.
“And then one day, my brother came up and he said, ‘We’ve got 25 out of the top 50 songs,’ ” Mr. Bradley continued, referring to the profusion of hit singles that featured Nashville’s A-Team. “All of a sudden I’m thinking, ‘That stuff we did in the studio, people are listening to that all over the world.’ ”
Although he was a capable lead guitarist, Mr. Bradley made his mark as a rhythm specialist. His signature style featured a clicking, propulsive figure, often performed on six-string electric bass, that mimicked the lines of the acoustic bass.
Known among industry insiders as “tic tac,” Mr. Bradley’s less-is-more approach furnished the supple rhythm bed for both Eddy Arnold’s “Make the World Go Away” and Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.” In the process he helped shape not only the pop-inflected “Nashville sound” of singers like Mr. Arnold and Ms. Cline, but also the more soulful “countrypolitan” sound of Ms. Wynette, George Jones and Conway Twitty.
As accomplished an entrepreneur as he was a musician, Mr. Bradley, with his brother Owen and Owen’s son Jerry, was among the first to build independent music studios on Nashville’s Music Row. By 1955 the three of them had merged their initial two ventures into Bradley Film and Recordings Studios, a musicians’ haven more commonly known as the Quonset Hut.
Mr. Bradley, right, with Willie Nelson in an undated photo. According to various sources, Mr. Bradley is among the most recorded guitarists in history.Creditvia the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
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Mr. Bradley, right, with Willie Nelson in an undated photo. According to various sources, Mr. Bradley is among the most recorded guitarists in history.Creditvia the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
During its first months of operation, the Quonset Hut produced blockbuster hits like Gene Vincent’s “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” Marty Robbins’s “Singing the Blues” and Sonny James’s “Young Love.” By the time Columbia Records purchased the facility in 1962, the Bradleys, along with visionary record executives like Chet Atkins and Don Law, had established Nashville as a major recording center.
Later in his career, as subsequent generations of studio players rose to prominence and he worked fewer sessions, Mr. Bradley became active in the Nashville chapter of the American Federation of Musicians. From 1991 to 2008 he was the union’s president. He was also vice president of the international division for more than a decade.
Mr. Bradley was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. He was the first instrumentalist without a significant career as a solo artist to be so honored.
Harold Ray Bradley was born on Jan. 2, 1926, in Nashville, one of six children. His father, Vernon, was a salesman for Cumberland Tobacco Works for 46 years. His mother, Letha Maie (Owen) Bradley, was a homemaker.
Mr. Bradley first learned to play the tenor banjo, but he switched his focus to guitar after his brother Owen observed that guitarists were in greater demand than banjo players. At 17 he became lead guitarist in Ernest Tubb’s band, the Texas Troubadours.
After serving in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, he returned to Nashville and began playing in his brother’s local dance orchestra, which featured the future pop stars Snooky Lanson and Kitty Kallen as vocalists.
Mr. Bradley worked his first studio session in Chicago in 1946, recording with the Grand Ole Opry star Pee Wee King and his Golden West Boys. He did not make his Nashville session debut until four years later (the city would not emerge as a recording hub until the 1950s), when he played acoustic guitar on Red Foley’s “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy,” a No. 1 country and pop hit.
Mr. Bradley also produced numerous television variety shows and movie soundtracks and made a brief appearance in Robert Altman’s acclaimed 1975 film, “Nashville.”
In addition to his daughter Beverly, Mr. Bradley is survived by his wife of 66 years, Eleanor Allen Bradley; another daughter, Bari Bradley Brooks; and two grandchildren.
Although he released three instrumental albums under his own name, Mr. Bradley regarded himself primarily as a contributor to the work of others.
“We had a setup,” he said, reflecting modestly on his decades as a session musician in Nashville in 2013.
“We would work from 10 to 1, 2 to 5, 6 to 9 and 10 to 1 at night,” he continued. “To me, it was like going to a party. A Brenda Lee party in the morning, then a Ray Stevens party in the afternoon. A Bill Monroe party and then end up with Henry Mancini and Patsy Cline and Elvis and just other people. I was just glad to be on board.”
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 1, 2019, on Page B14 of the New York edition with the headline: Harold Bradley, Who Led Nashville’s A-Team of Studio Musicians, Dies at 93. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 

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‘Thriller,” one of Michael Jackson’s biggest hits, rendered as timbá, set to Cuban dance rhythms? How about Koji Kondo’s theme for the popular Nintendo videogame “Super Mario Bros. 3” moving to those beats? When pianist Alfredo Rodriguez created videos along these lines and posted them online, he wasn’t just messing around: He was working on something.

It took percussionist Pedrito Martinez, a masterly and individualistic interpreter of Afro-Cuban rhythms, to help Mr. Rodriguez get there. On their new joint release, “Duologue” (Mack Avenue), out Friday, what in lesser hands might have sounded merely clever makes for rewarding, even enlightening, listening. On “Thriller,” performed as an instrumental, Mr. Rodriguez turns brief snatches of familiar melody into counterpoint that fuels the groove, overdubbing acoustic and Rhodes electric pianos to create intriguing textures. Mr. Martinez, who uses a hybrid setup combining the hand drums of Cuban percussion with elements of a trap set, staggers rhythms to build and then quickly deconstruct dance beats. The two musicians turn “Super Mario Bros. 3” into timbá yet also hint at the melody’s natural affinity with danzón, an elemental Cuban form.
When Messrs. Rodriguez and Martinez first performed as a duo at Manhattan’s Jazz Standard two years ago, their deep rapport and shared joy was evident. So was their intention to combine the traditions of their native island, Cuba, and their tantalizing technical skills into something accessible yet, beneath the surface, complex. At the club, this meant using Cuban forms as jumping-off points for free-flowing exchanges. The new CD’s title track—the shortest and most satisfying of these 11 pieces—best captures that feeling. Mr. Rodriguez has an ability to turn simple motifs into emotionally charged pianistic statements. Mr. Martinez is a singular rhythmic presence: Sitting atop a cajón (box drum), playing congas and snare drum, hi-hat cymbal and occasionally batá, the two-headed drums of Afro-Cuban religious rituals, he is by turns forceful or tender, and always precise.

Percussionist Pedrito Martinez and pianist Alfredo Rodriguez team up on the new album ‘Duologue’ Photo: Anna Webber
Mr. Martinez, who is 45 years old and lives in Union City, N.J., grew up in the Cayo Hueso neighborhood of Havana, where he’d often ditch classes for religious ceremonies, studying instead the drumming and chants of Cuba’s African-derived rituals and folkloric music. Since moving to the U.S. in 1998, he has stirred up the excitement in many musical environments—leading his powerhouse quartet, and supporting a wide range of projects led by stars including Chucho Valdés, Paul Simon and Wynton Marsalis.
Mr. Rodriguez, who is 33 and has lived in Los Angeles for the past decade, is also from Havana. The son of a popular singer and television host, he studied classical piano at celebrated Cuban conservatories. Once he took up jazz, he caught the ear of Quincy Jones, who has co-produced all his albums, including this one (and who produced the original version of “Thriller”). Mr. Martinez played on Mr. Rodriguez’s 2014 release, “The Invasion Parade,” which interpreted Cuban folk music.
Here, the two perform one Cuban classic, “El Punto Cubano,” for which Mr. Rodriguez uses the sampled sound of the tres, a small Cuban guitar. Most of the other tracks are collaborative original compositions: Mr. Rodriguez recorded rough demos; Mr. Martinez wrote lyrics and devised rhythmic patterns; then, the two reworked things in the studio. As do many Cuban pianists, Mr. Rodriguez takes a distinctly percussive approach to the piano. Mr. Martinez’s drums are finely tuned. Thus, the harmonic and rhythmic weight is carried equally by both musicians, lending this music rare balance. Even a song such as “Flor,” whose smooth textures and laid-back feel sound too much like 1980s fusion, bears enough subtle tension and finely wrought detail to hold interest.
Mr. Martinez is as powerful and sensitive a singer as he is a percussionist (both musicians sing here). Mr. Rodriguez has a knack for soaring melodies. Mr. Martinez’s wondrous voice elevates these all the more, as on the ballad “Cosas del Amor” and especially on “Yo Volveré,” when Mr. Martinez, in Spanish, invokes the Yoruba deity Yemaya and pines for his native Cuba. These two musicians might well have stretched out and communed through extended improvisations (some listeners will wish they had). Instead, they’ve channeled a common passion for their homeland and cross-cultural mastery into tight, catchy and deceptively dense songs that work the way good pop music should.
—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal.
 

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Jim Cullum is a traditional guy — a suit, bow tie, a little mustache, glasses. He looks like an old-time banker.
Cullum is a jazz man. He plays traditional jazz, hot and loud in the style of King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong. His band, seven musicians and the man himself on cornet, plays in San Antonio mostly, but he was in San Francisco for a bit, at Pier 23, to talk about the San Francisco sound, which was born here, lost for a while, then reborn, and now reborn once again on the internet.
He talked about it over lunch at Sam’s Grill — about the jazz pioneers from the Barbary Coast a century ago, about Lu Watters and his Yerba Buena Jazz Band in the ’40s, Turk Murphy’s band up to the ’80s.

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“It was a very special sound,” he said. Not like modern jazz, which is swingier and softer, but a bit like Dixieland. “Big, brassy and loud,” Cullum said.
You could almost hear the music as he talked about it, and you can hear the sounds — Sid Le Protti on piano, Lu Watters, Turk Murphy and the rest — at a new traditional jazz website offered by the Stanford University library.

There’s Turk Murphy with his growly voice, old programs, pictures, matchbook covers, interviews — and music. You don’t have to pay a cover charge, buy a drink or tip the doorman. It’s all free and can be found at http://exhibits.stanford.edu/sftjf.
Cullum was in town to get the word out about the website.
The website was a long time coming and a lot of work. It’s dedicated to Charles Huggins, who played a little and listened a lot. His widow, Donna, had a big hand in it.
Jazz has deep roots in San Francisco’s gaudy past. The accepted view is that jazz has African American roots in New Orleans and spread across the country, to Chicago and Kansas City. But there are roots in San Francisco, too, on the old Barbary Coast in the dives and dance halls along Pacific Street — or “Terrific Street” as they called it in the days when Frisco was wide open.
One joint on the Coast was Purcell’s So Different, where black musicians and dance hall girls catered to black and white patrons. It was called a “black and tan” establishment, and was illegal as hell. Unless you paid off the cops.
The leader of the So Different house band was Sid Le Protti, an African American from Oakland, who also played the piano. This was just over a hundred years ago, when jazz was just getting going. Le Protti was influenced by ragtime, and Dixieland, but his band developed its own style.
One film clip on the website shows Le Protti’s So Different Jazz Band playing for dancers on the sidewalk in 1910. The So Different band was the first to use the word “jazz” for his group.
A lot of new dances came out of the Barbary Coast, too. It was a time when old conventions were fading away. They said a new world was being born, and new music. On the coast it had a San Francisco twist.
But not long after reformers pressed the cops to close down the Barbary Coast, the traditional jazz style faded away. Le Protti and his band couldn’t get steady work, and he opened a bootblack stand in Berkeley, and then in Walnut Creek, playing piano now and then.
In the late 1930s, the heyday of the swing dance bands, a musician named Lu Watters and his friends revived the traditional jazz music. They played at a basement dive called the Dawn Club in an alley near the Palace Hotel. It was a sensation — lost music rediscovered, uniquely San Francisco.
“A native-born style,” Cullum said of the music. “A unique sound like nowhere else in the world. It didn’t come here. It came from here.”
Melvin “Turk” Murphy, a Stanford dropout, musical arranger and trombone player, joined the Lu Watters band. When it broke up, about 1950, Murphy started his own band, the Bay City Stompers. They played all over, even in New York for a bit.
But San Francisco was home. Murphy lived in the Marina and played at the Italian Village, the Tin Angel, and Earthquake McGoon’s. He played Easter Sundays at Grace Cathedral, and for the last two years of his life at the New Orleans Room in the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill.
Murphy’s band played what Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called “gut bucket, rock bottom, come-home-to-mama style” music. “He’s a white boy but he plays real good,” said renowned clarinetist Jimmy Noone, who was black.
In January 1987, Turk Murphy’s Jazz Band played Carnegie Hall in New York. Cullum’s band was on the bill as well. It was Murphy’s last big show. He died of bone cancer five months later.
At his funeral at Grace Cathedral, C. Julian Bartlett, the dean of the cathedral, said Murphy was a “unique child of God. His gift to us will last, and last, and last, and last, and last.”
The collection at the Stanford library, and the internet, is making sure that Bartlett was right.
Carl Nolte’s column appears Sundays. Email: cnolte@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @carlnoltesf
 

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Earl Whaley Band, Shanghai, China, 1937/Weihsien Prisoner-of-War Camp During World War II
Image Ownership: Public Domain/Image Courtesy of Palmer Johnson
Desmond Power, a third generation British subject born in Tientsin (now Tianjin), China in 1923, was incarcerated along with 1,500 other foreign nationals in 1943 in Weihsien, a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in North China during World War II.  In the article below, Power recalls Earl Whaley and other African American jazz musicians who were placed there as well and how their music lifted the morale of the prisoners.
I do not write this as a historian, nor do I have sources to which I can refer readers. I write simply as a contemporary and close comrade of some black jazz musicians with whom I was incarcerated in a Japanese prison camp in China during World War II. The war ended 67 years ago, yet most of my memories of the time and place remain intact though somewhat generalized.
Few need reminding that the Shanghai of the 1920s and 30s was called the “Paris of the Orient” for its profusion of extravagant nightclubs, cabarets, casinos, and bordellos, and that while the US was dragging itself out of the Great Depression, Shanghai was enjoying a boom, its nightlife going full tilt, attracting big names in the U.S. jazz world eager to cash in on the opportunities there.
As jazz band leader Earl Whaley told it, by the time he arrived there in 1934, most of the big names had come and gone, but there was no stopping him from cashing in. His seven man group, the Red Hot Syncopators, that had set Seattle, Washington’s jazz world ablaze was now doing the same at St. Anna’s Ballroom at 80 Love Lane, close by the Shanghai Race Course.
His popularity zoomed, not only with jazz lovers among the city’s 100,000 foreign residents, but also with the modern set among the local Chinese. For three long years, everything went Whaley’s way. Money was good, living cheap, and the racial demeaning of blacks so common in the U.S. at that time, was practically unheard of.
Then in 1937 disaster struck when Japan began its subjugation of China. Japan was not quite yet ready to take on the U.S. and its Allies (that would happen 4½ years later at Pearl Harbor) so its forces avoided Shanghai’s foreign settlements. However, those neutral zones did not escape collateral damage from the furious bombardment in which hundreds of civilians perished.
No wonder American jazzmen wanted out! They had not bargained on getting caught up in a battle zone. Buck Clayton, whose twelve man ensemble, the Harlem Gentlemen, had arrived in Shanghai the same year as Whaley, booked out on the next ship. He was good enough to offer his band passages back to the States, and all but bass player Reginald Jones, better known as “Jonesy,” accepted and sailed off.  
Whaley, who had decided to keep on going in Shanghai, faced a tough problem. His pianist, drummer, trombonist, and trumpeter headed back home without him. He was lucky enough to sign on black pianist F.C. Stoffer and to pick up Jonesy, who even before his Shanghai days with Clayton was already known in the jazz world, having starred at Harlem’s Cotton Club and in Charlie Echols’s fourteen piece orchestra.
Still missing a lead brass player, he negotiated with the Filipino, Lope Sarreal, who happened to be not only a star trumpeter but also an eminent promoter of musical and sporting events throughout the Far East. As it turned out, Sarreal signed up Whaley’s group to be featured performers in his own swing band.
The Lope–Whaley Swing Band continued playing in Shanghai but not for long, for by 1940 they were up north at Tientsin, close to the ancient capital, Peking, and under contract to play at the Little Club there.  Tientsin, like Shanghai, was under foreign domination, but its foreign population diminutive by comparison, its nightclubs fewer and less garish. Nevertheless, that didn’t stop “Earl Whaley and His Coloured Boys,” so named by the local press, from creating a sensation at the club. They became the talk of North China’s foreign communities throughout 1940 and most of 1941. Regrettably for Whaley, the club’s visitors included the owners of Peking Hotel, who made an offer to his guitarist, Earl West, he could not refuse. West, an original Red Hot Syncopator, left to start up his own group in Peking, Earl West and his Night Owls.  
Then it all ended for the cozy world of the Treaty Ports. At dawn on December 8th, (December 7th at Pearl Harbor) Japanese storm troops swarmed into the foreign settlements of Shanghai and Tientsin and the Legations at Peking. Allied nationals were ordered to remain strictly within the bounds of their settlements and to wear red arm bands denoting they were enemy subjects.
In Tientsin, with banks and businesses closed, many soon ran out of money and food. With help from the Swiss Consul, the Masonic Hall on Race Course Road was converted into a mess where Allied nationals could get a meal. Quite a furor was caused among the volunteer waiters vying for a chance to serve the table taken by Mr. Whaley and his famed jazzmen!
After their meal, the jazzmen would move to a seating area where there was a grand piano. The tallest musician, the handsome and debonair one, ran his fingers over the keys. Then, he drifted into We Three with such a delicate touch that the servers stood mesmerized. They soon learned his name was Stoffer. And it wasn’t long before they got to share jokes with him and with the clarinetist, Wayne Adams, and the boisterous happy-go-lucky bass player, Jonesy. But it was obvious from the start that the older one, Earl Whaley, was their leader and spokesperson. He was not a bit shy in telling his audience how he had put the band together in Seattle and brought it to Shanghai, and about their good and hard times there and their surprising success in Tientsin. Meeting at the mess hall nearly every day throughout the whole of 1942 and into the spring of 1943 allowed bonds to form between those jazz players and the British volunteer workers. 
Up until then, life under the Japanese seemed not all that hard to take, but soon rumors began sounding on all sides that they were preparing concentration camps throughout occupied China for the Allied civilians in their hands. For once, the rumors had truth in them. The 1,800 detainees in Tientsin, Peking, Tsingtao and other North China centers received official notice from the Japanese authorities stating that early in 1943 they were to be sent by train to a camp at Weihsien, deep in the heart of Shantung Province.
In March 1943, Earl West arrived there with the trainload of 300 prisoners from Peking. A day or two later came the larger contingent of nearly 1,000 from Tientsin, among them Lope Sarreal, Earl Whaley, Reggie Jones, Wayne Adams, and F.C. Stoffer. As they were about to pass through the camp’s main gate, Stoffer doubled up in agony. His appendix had ruptured. He was put on the next train to the nearest town Tsingtao, but he died before they could get him to hospital there.
The black jazzmen were still in shock over their cruel loss even as they were having to meld into the curious cornucopia of missionaries, academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, bankers, traders, shopkeepers, clerks, bar girls, and vagrants caught up in the Japanese dragnet.
And the Japanese put the onus entirely on the prisoners to do everything for themselves, from collecting raw rations to preparing and cooking meals on primitive Chinese stoves, collecting garbage, clearing drains, repairing buildings (all in decrepit state) and caring for the sick.
As days passed into weeks and the weeks into months, the prisoners fell into a routine that made life bearable but they were always under a shadow of not knowing what tomorrow might bring. For jazz lovers this concern disappeared altogether when the band voluntarily played for them at dances.   
Earl West was now the band’s leader. At a typical camp dance, there he’d be, a solidly built black American, standing with his group in a space cleared of tables in a kitchen eating area. He would begin by snapping off a catchy all-chords intro on his guitar that launched the combo into several bouncing choruses of Shine, he and Jonesy coming in with peppy vocals that had the dancing couples and spectators showing their appreciation with bursts of applause. Then off again he’d lead the band into two electrifying hours of old favorites, including sometimes a jaunty Coquette, sometimes Hold Tight, and more often than not for a grand finale, heating it up with an uproarious Nagasaki. 
What a boon those dances were for the romantically inclined, especially among the shy! Many a couple’s relationship started at a dance, some leading to marriage. Earl West’s union could not have been one of those, for he simply worked too hard leading the band. In April 1944, at a camp religious ceremony, he married the beautiful English/Chinese girl from Peking, Deirdre Esmond.  Not quite a year later, in January 1945, their daughter Fern was born in the camp hospital.
In the following weeks deep concern spread throughout the camp, when Earl Whaley was rushed to that same hospital suffering from acute appendicitis. Those who knew of Stoffer’s tragic end dared not think the worst. But thank God, Earl survived the surgery. When visitors were allowed, I found him in much distress, his stomach bloated with gas. At his request, I called for a nurse, but the high and mighty Sister of some Victorian Nursing Order blasted me and sent me packing.
Our internment ended with a suddenness that astonished us all. On August 17, 1945, a four engine U.S. plane flew over the camp, circled it once, twice, and then dropped a team of parachute troops within two hundred yards of the perimeter. The OSS team that took over the camp met with no resistance from the Japanese. Within days, squadrons of giant B29s were dropping great loads of food, medicine, and clothing into and around the camp.  
World War II might be over, but the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalists and Communists burst out into the open, cutting all road and rail traffic between Weihsien and the outside world.
During the crazy and, bittersweet time after we had been liberated but still behind barbed wire, I heard that Earl West wanted to see me. When I got to his hut, he held out his precious guitar and told me it was mine to keep. Of course, I refused. But he was adamant. He wouldn’t take no. To this very day, the man’s incredible generosity stuns my mind.
In late September 1945, U.S. Marine Corps officers at the port of Tsingtao managed to arrange a cease fire between the opposing Chinese armies to allow trains from Weihsien to get through, and two did before the line was blown for good. And in one of those trains the black jazzmen got away, all of them sound of life and limb. From Tsingtao, they sailed back to the United States aboard the USS Lavaca. I never had a chance to say good-bye, nor did I ever see any of them again.
I never found out what happened to Wayne Adams after he returned to the States, but I was shown Earl Whaley’s card after he had established himself as a real estate agent in Los Angeles, California during the 1960s. Jonesy alone made it back to a regular band according to eyewitnesses who met him in Vancouver (Canada) and San Francisco while he was touring the West Coast. Earl West’s daughter, Fern, told me that on arrival at San Francisco in October 1945, her parents decided to settle in the Bay Area. There they raised another daughter and two sons before Earl contracted lung cancer, from which he died on October 19, 1959, at the early age of 49.
After getting twelve good years use out of Earl’s guitar in China, England, and New Zealand, I handed it over to a Russian lad keen to learn the instrument. I’m sure Earl would have approved.
 

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Shortly after publishing the biography John Coltrane: His Life and Music, Lewis Porter received a letter from a man who identified himself as a Coltrane. Only not, presumably, one related to the great jazz musician. His ancestors had been white farmers in North Carolina. “He said, ‘I’ve been looking into my family history,’” Porter recalled recently, “‘and I have here a bill of sale that could be interesting.’” 
The bill, dated June 6, 1828, records the purchase of a slave, the faded scrollwork of the cursive still legible after all these years. “Abner Coltrain two hundred dollars in full consideration for a Negro boy named Handy,” it reads, using a variant, Coltrain, that was common at the time. The sale occurred in Fayetteville and was intended as a gift, or else conducted by proxy, since the receipt for Handy was signed by Jacob, Abner Coltrain’s father. 
Porter was intrigued by the document, yet he doubted it had anything to do with John Coltrane. Coltrane was brought up in North Carolina, in the city of High Point, but “going back that far,” Porter told me, “there are going to be plenty of descendants, and plenty of people from North Carolina had slaves. It’s like, What are the chances?” 
He sent the bill to David Tegnell. Retired now, at that time Tegnell held an administrative job at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Coltrane history, and prehistory, is his hobby. Tegnell has been researching the family for decades, spending his weekends in the microfilm labs of libraries and digging through courthouse records and pieces of chancery. He was not shocked by Porter’s find. “Handy” was a nickname he had encountered before, in auction papers and an old widow’s allowance. He knew it stood for Andrew, John Coltrane’s great-grandfather, one of four male slaves listed as belonging to Abner on the 1830 census. 
The bill, I said to Tegnell one day, must be the earliest trace of Coltrane in the historical record. Actually, no, he replied, and proceeded to describe an incident involving Coltrane’s relatives on his mother’s side. They were named Blair and also rose out of slavery, living on a large plantation near Edenton, in Chowan County. After a dispute with the master, one of them, named Bill, was sold. Matching census data with slave auction tallies, Tegnell dates the event to 1820 and believes Bill’s children were raised as orphans. “They certainly would have been doing labor. It shines a different light on Coltrane—if you think family history is determinative.” 
Tegnell is a recognizable type—obsessive, solitary, and male, forever in search of the next clue to add to his vast and singular archive. Such private sleuths and record collectors compiled the first histories of America’s prewar blues and hillbilly music. His background, curiously, is not in jazz but in early Western music. He plays sackbut and came to UNC to pursue a doctorate in musicology. He never finished. Instead, he spent a lot of time in churches, making field recordings, while gathering all the evidence he could about Coltrane’s tenure in High Point, which lasted from 1926, the year he was born, until 1943, when he graduated from high school and moved to Philadelphia. Along the way Tegnell believes he stumbled on the secret of Coltrane’s sound, though he concedes not everyone is able to understand or accept his theories. 
“It’s a stretch,” he said. “I don’t think it actually is, but it requires a leap. There’s an existing intellectual assumption that the North saved the Southern jazz musicians from a primitive culture. And most people who are interested in jazz just want fanboy stuff. They don’t want to dig into this.” 
Tegnell still lives in Chapel Hill, not far from me, and over the summer we met several times. I am fascinated by his research because ever since I discovered Coltrane in college, he has been presented to me as otherworldly, demoniac almost, the supreme virtuoso whose catalog simultaneously draws on all of jazz—bop, modal, and free—as well as the blues, select world traditions, and classical sources. Coltrane I had always understood to be beyond category, beyond origin. Even if he came from someplace, he covered his tracks long ago. 
This was the exact sort of thinking Tegnell wanted to correct. “All I’ve ever aspired to was to bring Coltrane home,” he told me. “Embracing Coltrane, to my mind, is also to embrace the community that gave rise to him. And I’ve been thwarted at every turn.” 
The house where Coltrane grew up still stands at 118 Underhill Street in High Point. There’s no sign pointing the way from downtown and no marker out front. Many of the properties around it are abandoned and choked with vegetation. The city purchased the home in 2005, and there has been some talk, locally, of turning it into a museum, but that would require significant renovation. As of now, the foundation looks warped and there is mold blooming on the siding. 
William Blair, Coltrane’s maternal grandfather, built the house in 1928. In one interview Coltrane described him as “pretty militant” and “the dominating cat in the family.” Pastor for a time at St. Stephen, an African Methodist Episcopal church in High Point, Blair was also an elder of the AME and traveled across the South to attend religious conventions. He lived with Coltrane and Coltrane’s parents at 118 Underhill. “Religion was his field,” Coltrane recalled. “I grew up in that.” 
On the face of it, Coltrane’s years in High Point appear to be unremarkable. Some tantalizing artifacts remain—in fifth grade, for a Mrs. M. S. Adams, he prepared a “Negro History Book,” beginning with the lines by Langston Hughes: “I am a Negro / Black as the night is black”—but there is no creation tale, no clear or dramatic genesis moment to give us a glimpse of the genius to come. Though voted Most Musical by his class, Coltrane was not a prodigy, and he dropped out of the high school band. A shy and indifferent student, Coltrane left High Point after graduating in 1943, and following his discharge from the Navy at the end of World War II, he never came back. Why, we cannot say. Coltrane died in 1967, at the age of forty, and in interviews he tended not to discuss his youth in any detail. 
As a result, how High Point might have influenced him is thought to be a mystery, and it is a period of his life that is often overlooked. The composer Steve Reich told me he had no idea Coltrane was from North Carolina. Reich saw Coltrane perform many times in the 1960s and credits him as a foundational influence on minimalism, especially his own work Drumming, which he said derives, in its pattern of rhythmic and tonal variation, from “Africa,” a Coltrane composition from 1961. “But I was never interested in the life,” Reich said. “I don’t doubt his time in North Carolina had an influence on him. It would be impossible not to. These are the interesting biographical footnotes. Every musician has a similar story.” 
Coltrane, for his part, thought of music in spiritual terms, not regional ones. “Let us sing all songs to God,” he wrote in a poem accompanying A Love Supreme, the suite from 1965 that many consider his masterwork. “No road is an easy one but they all go to God.” His command of the saxophone, so legendary, was achieved not for its own sake but because he was searching for a pathway to the divine. “I would love to discover a process,” he said, “such that if I wanted it to rain, it would start raining. If one of my friends were sick, I would play a certain tune and he would get better.” 
This faith, and the association of song and sacrament, is usually tied to the environment Coltrane was raised in, particularly the mentorship of the Reverend Blair. Few are willing to carry the investigation past this point. It is sometimes assumed that in a work like A Love Supreme Coltrane was simply producing jazz with a religious title. For Tegnell the connection runs much deeper. He doesn’t view this part of Coltrane’s life as a mystery, and he doesn’t think of it as a footnote. If you’d like to find out what Coltrane took from High Point, he can show you where to go. 
Not long after moving to Chapel Hill in 1983, Tegnell asked a professor where he could hear sacred music. The professor gave him a list of churches, and Tegnell began hanging out at one, the Bright Hope Divine Holy Church of God, a Pentecostal house of worship in Raleigh. He had never visited a Holiness church, and his was the only white face in the room. Parts of the service perplexed him. The invocations were delivered quickly, in a heavy accent. Now and then the congregation would get up and move around the church, as in the shout rituals of old. 
But the music, Tegnell said, that made sense to him. He had heard something like it before. “The heterophony, the emphasis on individual testimony, all that I recognized from Coltrane.” 
Traditional Pentecostal services like the ones that were held at Bright Hope would have been similar to those in North Carolina towns like High Point in the 1930s. Tegnell knew Coltrane was raised AME. But he also knew the practices of other denominations would have been available to him, and however he might have picked it up, Tegnell believes elements of the Pentecostal ceremony seeped into Coltrane’s DNA. 
“Often during services,” Tegnell observed of Bright Hope, “time seemed to stand still. Members acknowledged the Holy Spirit, then basked in His presence. This happens often in Coltrane improvisations—time seems to unfold endlessly. Church members call this preaching under the anointing, when words are directed by God. This kind of ecstatic state is achieved through the interactions of the speaker and members of a spiritually sophisticated congregation.” 
To get a sense of what he is talking about, listen to “Spiritual,” the last track on Coltrane’s Complete 1961 Village Vanguard set. “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” is the tune. The performance lasts for twenty minutes and feels twice that. Between the bookends of the main theme time seems to bend and stretch in just the way Tegnell described; the musicians are on their own clock, forging a communion that is at once highly personal yet also symphonic in the way each voice feeds off the others. 
But not every Coltrane song sounds like that. “Mature Coltrane,” Tegnell clarified when I pointed that out, “after he gets rid of chord changes. Classic quartet stuff.” 
The classic quartet, as it’s called, was Coltrane’s band for much of the 1960s. Elvin Jones on drums, McCoy Tyner on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass. This was also the decade when Coltrane’s music became expressly devotional. On recordings like Crescent, Meditations, and A Love Supreme, Coltrane discarded the complex harmonic theorems he had been experimenting with during the previous decade. He could base a song off a single chord or scale, and that freed up the group. Taking away chords meant fewer restrictions, more responsiveness; the band was locked in to each other the way a church group is, their songs resembling a drawn-out prayer, or what Tegnell terms “collaboratively constructed meditation.” Once Coltrane decided, that is, to make his music an offering, his songs began to take on the shape and dynamics of the revival services he witnessed as a boy. 
“Do you think it was conscious?” I asked. 
“No, no,” Tegnell replied. “It can’t be. It’s bigger, cultural.” 
For all the documents he has accumulated over the years, Tegnell’s most important discovery, ironically, turns out to be intuitive. He is not, himself, a religious person, and he maintains that his investment in the subject is merely that of a scholar, even if some are unwilling to hear him out. “I couldn’t get Ravi to pay attention,” he said, recalling an unhappy dinner with Coltrane’s son. “It’s like, if I can’t get Ravi, what am I going to do?” 
Still, I did not have to go far to find others who share Tegnell’s assessment. Branford Marsalis, another saxophonist and Southerner, told me there was a limit to what you could learn about Coltrane in the woodshed, by memorizing solos and dreaming up elaborate harmonic maps. Marsalis moved to Durham in 2002 and recorded a version of A Love Supreme with his quartet a year later. He found it disappointing, he said, and could not figure out why. Only later did he realize what was missing. 
“I went to a Pentecostal church,” he said. “And listening to A Love Supreme afterwards, I realized, Wow, this is the same thing. This is what it is. Trying to figure out what we were doing wrong, it hit me. We’re playing data; we’re not playing sound.” 
When I asked if he would explain what was so striking about the service, he said, “If you’ve never been to a Pentecostal church, then I can’t. There’s a thing that they do. They bring the heat. It’s such an intense experience. If you go to a small town in North Carolina, not a big production, where the band is basically an organ player and a tambourine—it’s hot, man.” 
As it happens, this is also what Reich told me he remembers about watching the classic quartet in clubs: “the total commitment, the radiation of intensity.” 
“That’s the thing you learn from spending time in those churches,” Marsalis went on. “It’s how to play with a certain level of intensity brainpower cannot duplicate.” 
Marsalis eventually recorded A Love Supreme again—the second time it was a live release—but the version I ought to hear, he said, was by a Pentecostal group. “The Campbell Brothers. You should talk to them.” 
The Campbell Brothers, a sacred steel outfit from Rochester, New York, were commissioned by Lincoln Center Out of Doors and Duke Performances to perform A Love Supreme in 2014. Their version, which can be seen on YouTube, is about as good as Marsalis says, though the band was initially bewildered by the musicianship of the classic quartet. “We cannot mimic the notes,” said Chuck Campbell, the group’s pedal steel player. “We don’t have the skill. Frankly no one has the skill.” Finally they decided to treat A Love Supreme like any other piece of gospel music. “As soon as you tap into it from a spiritual standpoint,” said Chuck, “the notes made sense. Then you can hear call-and-response. You can hear unison. You can hear chanting.” 
“A prime example would be ‘Psalm,’” added his brother Phil, who plays guitar and bass for the Campbell Brothers. “The way that piece is phrased out, that’s the way someone would pray in a Pentecostal service.” 
“Psalm” is the final movement of A Love Supreme. Coltrane is out in front, his tone measured and strident, the band falling away to provide a spare and ornamental backing. Lewis Porter has long speculated that in “Psalm” Coltrane used his saxophone to articulate the words of the poem he wrote to go along with the suite and that, if you listen closely, you can hear him “read” such lines as “thank you God” and “blessed be His name” and so on. It’s possible. Certainly, “Psalm” is homiletic in design. “Each section of several lines has an arched shape—an ascending phrase, a recitation on one tone, and a descending phrase,” noted Porter. “This is just the way black American preachers work.” 
Chuck Campbell told me the only way a saxophone can sound like that is if the player has been exposed to line-hymn singing, a rite of the church when a preacher will sing a prayer’s verses rather than recite them, using a range of pitch and subtle modifications of meter. “‘Psalm,’” he said, “reminded us so much of hymns being outlined and then sung.” 
Line-hymn singing is some of the oldest music in the United States, and it was the music, as Tegnell said one day, “of the brush arbor service, when slaves would steal sleep and leave their houses, go into the woods and hold religious services in the deep of night, out of earshot.” Coltrane’s songs may in the end memorialize this inheritance, and to listen to “Psalm” or to “Spiritual” in this way is to wonder whether his music would have been lost on his forebears, on “Handy,” Bill Blair, and all the other ghosts Tegnell has been chasing in the reading rooms and courthouse basements of North Carolina. Perhaps, given its modern sound and configuration, it would have been. Or maybe they would have heard, in the music’s cadence, its loftiness and energy, something like their own pleas for renewal and survival.

“Crepuscule with Nellie (Take 2)” by Thelonious Monk, featuring John Coltrane, is included on the North Carolina Music Issue Sampler.

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Michel Legrand at the Birdland Jazz Club in New York in 2009. He continued to perform into his ninth decade, with gigs in London and Tokyo last year and a further tour scheduled for 2019.CreditJoe Kohen for The New York Times

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Michel Legrand at the Birdland Jazz Club in New York in 2009. He continued to perform into his ninth decade, with gigs in London and Tokyo last year and a further tour scheduled for 2019.CreditCreditJoe Kohen for The New York Times
Michel Legrand, the invariably romantic pianist, arranger and composer of hundreds of film scores and songs that have became pop hits and love anthems, died on Saturday. He was 86.
His death was confirmed on the artist’s official Facebook page by his management team.
Over a career of more than 60 years, Mr. Legrand collaborated onstage, onscreen and in the studio with dozens of celebrated musicians of his era, from Miles Davis to Perry Como, Stéphane Grappelli to Liza Minnelli.
A three-time Academy Award winner and five-time Grammy winner — he was nominated for a total of 13 Oscars and 17 Grammys — Mr. Legrand made the love song his métier. Among his better-known compositions are “The Windmills of Your Mind” from “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), which won the Oscar for best song; “The Summer Knows,” the theme from “Summer of ’42” (1971) (Mr. Legrand won an Oscar for the movie’s score); and the Oscar-nominated “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from the film “The Happy Ending” (1969). All three were written with the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman.
His recording of “Brian’s Song,” his theme from the TV movie of the same name, made the Billboard pop chart in 1972, peaking at No. 56.
A three-time Academy Award winner and five-time Grammy winner — he was nominated for a total of 13 Oscars and 17 Grammys — Mr. Legrand made the love song his métier.CreditKeystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
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A three-time Academy Award winner and five-time Grammy winner — he was nominated for a total of 13 Oscars and 17 Grammys — Mr. Legrand made the love song his métier.CreditKeystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images
Other standards of the Legrand canon include “I Will Wait for You” and “Watch What Happens,” both from “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964), the writer-director Jacques Demy’s musical tale of star-crossed love. (Norman Gimbel wrote the English lyrics.) A pop opera whose entire story was sung, “Umbrellas” first brought Mr. Legrand’s talents to the attention of American moviegoers and earned him a devoted following in the United States. He also scored Mr. Demy’s follow-up, “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” which included spoken dialogue as well as songs and which, like “Umbrellas,” starred the up-and-coming Catherine Deneuve.
On the occasion of the 2009 British rerelease of “Rochefort,” Mr. Legrand told Time Out London of meeting Mr. Demy.
“I just finished scoring a François Reichenbach movie called ‘America as Seen by a Frenchman,’” he recalled. “Demy loved the score, so we met and he wanted me to score his first movie, which was called ‘Lola.’ So then I scored ‘Lola’ and we became friends and we came to know, appreciate and love each other, and we stayed friends until the very last.”
Mr. Demy, who died in 1990, was married to the filmmaker Agnès Varda, with whom Mr. Legrand also worked extensively. He even appeared onscreen, as a pianist, in her 1962 film, “Cleo From 5 to 7.”
Mr. Legrand, center, at at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1993 with, from left, the French singer Rejane Perry, the American composer Quincy Jones, the American singer Barbara Hendricks, and the Canadian singer Robert Charlebois.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Mr. Legrand, center, at at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1993 with, from left, the French singer Rejane Perry, the American composer Quincy Jones, the American singer Barbara Hendricks, and the Canadian singer Robert Charlebois.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Among Mr. Legrand’s other notable compositions was “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” from the Barbra Streisand film “Yentl” (1983), also written with the Bergmans. He received three Oscar nominations for his work on that film, and won for its score.
In 2018, he composed music for “The Other Side of the Wind,” a lost film by Orson Welles, whose “F for Fake” he had scored in 1973.
Although Mr. Legrand composed far less for the theater than he did for film and television, he was nominated for Tony and Drama Desk awards for the show “Amour,” although it ran for only 17 performances on Broadway in 2002. He also wrote the music for “Marguerite,” a musical that had a brief run in London in 2008 whose creative team also included the writers and lyricists of “Les Misérables” and “Miss Saigon.”
Mr. Legrand recorded more than 100 albums, with such disparate stars as Maurice Chevalier (for whom he worked as an accompanist early in his career), Kiri Te Kanawa, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne and Barbra Streisand. Others who recorded his music ranged from Frank Sinatra to Sting.
Mr. Legrand with his third wife, the French actress Macha Méril, in 2015.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Mr. Legrand with his third wife, the French actress Macha Méril, in 2015.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Legrand celebrated over 50 years in show business in 2010 with a concert at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas that featured Dionne Warwick, George Benson, Melissa Manchester, Patti Page and Jennifer O’Neill (the star of “Summer of ’42”). He observed his 80th birthday in 2012 by beginning a world tour that included performances in France, Ireland, Japan, Argentina, Brazil, Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands. His schedule last year included performances in London, New York and Tokyo, and he was planning to tour again in 2019.
Michel Jean Legrand was born on Feb. 24, 1932, in Bécon-les-Bruyères, a suburb of Paris, to a French father, Raymond Legrand, a composer and actor, and an Armenian mother, the former Marcelle der Mikaelian. From 1942 to 1949, he studied at the Conservatoire de Paris, where his teachers included the celebrated pianist Nadia Boulanger, before becoming an in-demand arranger, working for French stars like Édith Piaf and Yves Montand.
In 1947, Mr. Legrand recalled in a 2011 interview, he became interested in jazz when he saw the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie in concert in Paris (“I was ecstatic”). He would eventually work with Mr. Gillespie and other jazz greats, on albums like “Dizzy Digs Paris” (1953) and, most notably, his own “Legrand Jazz” (1958), for which he arranged well-known jazz compositions for three different groups of established musicians, one of which included Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans.
Mr. Legrand worked as an arranger with artists in various genres, including the opera singers Natalie Dessay and Anne Sofie von Otter.
Mr. Legrand and the French director Agnès Varda after the screening of the film “Jacquot de Nantes” in homage to film director Jacques Demy, during the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Mr. Legrand and the French director Agnès Varda after the screening of the film “Jacquot de Nantes” in homage to film director Jacques Demy, during the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“While I was studying in Paris I decided that I wanted to touch on and exist within every possible musical discipline,” Mr. Legrand told Time Out London in 2009. “Concerts, records, radio, playing piano, conducting, singing, composing, classical, playing jazz. So when I started to work, it was really on that decision.”
Mr. Legrand became an international sensation in 1954 with “I Love Paris,” a collection of well-known French songs, followed by “Holiday in Rome” and “Michel Legrand Plays Cole Porter.” All were hits.
He was invited to the Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in 1958, and aboard the ship from Paris to Moscow he met his future wife, Christine Bouchard, an Yves Saint Laurent model. They had three children. He would eventually marry three times, most recently in 2014 to the actress Macha Méril.
Back in Paris, he began composing for film, working notably for New Wave directors like Jean-Luc Godard and later for Mr. Demy, whose “Umbrellas” earned Mr. Legrand his first three Oscar nominations. “The Young Girls of Rochefort” followed, and in 2009 Mr. Legrand was asked if that was a film of which he was particularly proud.
Mr. Legrand with Jerry Lewis at the 2013 of the Cannes Film Festival.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
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Mr. Legrand with Jerry Lewis at the 2013 of the Cannes Film Festival.CreditAnne-Christine Poujoulat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“Yes,” he said, “but I must tell you, I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. All the films that I’ve done — and I’ve worked on about 250 — are like my children. So they are all special for different reasons.
“But I like everything that I’ve done, and why not? I always did it with pleasure, and I did it because I wanted to do it. There is always a reason, and that is important for me.”
In 1966 Mr. Legrand moved to Hollywood, where his friends and fellow composers Quincy Jones and Henry Mancini introduced him to the Bergmans. The first of his many collaborations with them was “The Thomas Crown Affair.”
On the occasion of a 2010 concert at Olympia Hall in Paris, Mr. Legrand was asked by French radio whether any of his dreams had gone unfulfilled.
“Off the top of my head,” he said, “I regret that I didn’t learn more languages, visit certain countries and listen to music that I don’t yet know about. In other words, there’s a whole cultural process that it’s been difficult for me to undertake because I’ve written a lot, worked, traveled, played around. So I haven’t had time to read some of the extraordinary books that I still think about.”
“And then,” he added, “I would have liked to work with Judy Garland, who I nurture a mad passion for. But I was born too late. So no regrets.”
Palko Karasz contributed reporting.
 

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Duke Ellington was among the preeminent American composers of the 20th century, and the most exhaustively studied of all jazz artists. There are more books and articles about him than any other jazz musician, and collectors have pored over his vast discography — not just a prolific half-century studio output but also hundreds of hours of radio broadcasts, audience tapes, and film and television appearances.
It might seem, then, that there couldn’t possibly be much Ellingtonia left uncharted. But here is a major find — an eight-minute recording that you’ve almost certainly never heard. It’s the oldest surviving Duke Ellington radio broadcast, known only to a small handful of connoisseurs and never made available to the public.
Duke Ellington Orchestra at the Publix Allyn Theatre in Hartford, Conn., April 11, 1932. Courtesy of Steven Lasker.
This broadcast emanated from the Publix Allyn Theatre in Hartford, Conn., from 11:45 p.m. to midnight on April 11, 1932. It was recorded off the radio — WTIC, now an AM news and talk station — using a disc recorder. This precedes by four years the next-earliest Ellington airchecks, from the Congress Hotel in Chicago on May 9 and 26, 1936.
How Ellington was recorded off the air in ‘32, and where that disc has been for the last 86 years, is a fascinating story. But it’s just one facet of what we’ll unpack in this installment of Deep Dive.
Before we take the plunge, it’s important to acknowledge Steven Lasker, a jazz historian who has won two Grammy awards as a reissue co-producer, notably in 1999 for The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition – The Complete RCA Victor Recordings (1927-1973). He has ample experience remastering old recordings for that and other reissues, and did the best possible job of cleaning up and optimizing the sound of the track.
Steven has asked me to convey his joy and relief at finding a suitable outlet to share this historic document, which he believes to be the earliest surviving broadcast by an African-American jazz band recorded off the airwaves, and the second-earliest surviving broadcast of any type by such a band.
The first known example, by Cab Calloway on April 21, 1931, is a “line transcription.” That is, rather than being recorded off the radio, it was recorded onto discs by RCA Victor from an NBC line direct from the floor of the Cotton Club. This was issued in 2003 on Bear Family records, Live From the Cotton Club, a 2-CD set with a hardcover book. (The book mentions that it was likely broadcast over German radio in September 1931 — so although it was recorded “live,” it wasn’t broadcast until months later.)
But that’s not the only historically significant aspect of our aircheck from Hartford. The longest item of the broadcast, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” is a song far better associated with Louis Armstrong. It was only recorded by Ellington three decades later, in a different arrangement, for an LP wistfully titled Will Big Bands Ever Come Back?
So to truly understand the significance of our find, we’ll need to delve into the history of that song, the circumstances around the broadcast, and the twisty provenance of this recording as a physical object. First let’s listen again and consider what we hear.

Duke Ellington and His Original Cotton Club Orchestra at the Publix Allyn Theatre in Hartford, Conn., April 11, 1932. Courtesy of Steven Lasker.
One of the pleasures of this broadcast is that we’re able to hear a performance that would not have fit on one side of a 78 r.p.m. recording, which typically ran for about 3 minutes. The recordist of this 10-inch home recording disc cut it at 33 1/3 r.p.m., and the slower speed meant that the disc lasted much longer.
First, you’ll notice an announcer speaking over the music, and naming the theater in Hartford where Duke’s “nationally famous dance band” would appear through Thursday. While he speaks, the band performs Ellington’s theme song at the time, “East St. Louis Toodle-O” (later spelled with two O’s).
The announcer mentions that “at the conclusion of the signature number, you’ll hear…‘The Duke Steps Out’” (Duke had recorded this in 1929) — but at this point, 39 seconds in, the person recording the aircheck flipped over the disc in order to record on the other side, so that tune is missing altogether here.
At 0:40 the band goes into “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” Ellington performed the song for broadcast at other times, but this arrangement was never preserved anywhere else. And it has many nice touches, starting with a grand introduction. At 1:14 the brass play a staccato triplet, echoed by the drums at 1:33.
At 2:07 Ellington provides a few seconds of piano interlude, freely and out of tempo, to introduce a clarinet solo. The clarinetist, Barney Bigard, is accompanied only by the rhythm section, so it’s a great opportunity to hear what piano and bass are doing.
Then Sonny Greer, the band’s drummer, sings the famous lyric. In the early days Greer sang on the occasional Ellington number, though this sounds different because it’s quite high in his range. (It resembles his vocal on “Dinah,” recorded with Duke in February 1932.) At 4:47 the full band returns, and the clarinet continues to be featured, including trills starting at 4:54. Bigard gets a break to himself at 5:39.
At 6:02, there’s a surprise for those who know their Ellington: The band plays the theme of “Lazy Rhapsody.” At the bridge (6:30), it goes into a dramatic passage somewhat like the later “Echoes of Harlem,” with Greer capping it on orchestral tubular bells. The announcer says “Time for one more, going to be ‘Double Check Stomp.’” Duke had recorded this three times in 1930, featuring different soloists each time.

Ellington was constantly rethinking pieces, so that they often sounded different from one recording session to the next. In keeping with that spirit, this version of “Double Check Stop” has several unique aspects. First, Duke plays the intro, formerly for full band, by himself on solo piano. After the bass solo, also found on the 1930 versions, Freddie Jenkins plays a trumpet solo not found on the studio versions. He quotes the opera Pagliacci at 7:46, as Armstrong liked to do, and at very end, he plays sequences of three fast eighth notes, a ragtime standby.
Let’s return for a moment to “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” which was written for a Los Angeles theatrical production titled Under a Virginia Moon, in June 1930. The star of that show was Dulce Cooper, but today the more familiar name is her love interest, Randolph Scott, who went on to a long film career. He wasn’t yet a star, and didn’t receive any billing in ads.
A review from the time notes: “Miss Dulcie Cooper, who plays the daughter, and Randolph Scott are sitting on the steps holding hands when they break into the refrain of ‘Sleepy Time Down South.’ It is taken up and sung to excellent effect, by Clarence Muse in the person of Jackson, the Negro servant.” (Muse, the other best-known name in the cast today, was a well-respected actor, writer and director who became a pioneer of film roles for black actors.)
According to copyright records, the cover of the original sheet music from 1931 shows the title as “Sleepy Time Down South,” and the song is described as a “syncopated spiritual.” The song is credited as follows: Words and Music by Leon Rene, Otis Rene and Clarence Muse. But this doesn’t tell us who did what. The Rene brothers appear to have been musicians, and Muse, who was co-credited on a few other songs, seems to have been a lyricist as well as, at times, a composer of melodies. That Muse was probably involved here as more than a lyricist is suggested by a 1979 interview in which he says of “Sleepy Time” (at 43:54) that the song “was born in 15 minutes.”

“When It’s Sleepy Time Down South,” recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1931.
Louis Armstrong made the first recording of “Sleepy Time” on April 20, 1931. Recordings on 78 r.p.m. came out quickly — most were sold in brown paper sleeves, with no artwork or liner notes — so it was probably for sale by the end of May.

Mildred Bailey recorded the song twice before the end of 1931, and the most commonly known early sheet music bears her likeness. It’s nice to think that in performing the song, Ellington was toasting Armstrong. But at the time Bailey was more closely associated with the song.
So how did Duke get connected with “Sleepy Time,” precisely? Lasker points out that the Ellington band was in California in Aug. 1930, filming the movie Check and Double Check at RKO and staying at the Dunbar Hotel. It’s possible that the Rene brothers plugged the song to Ellington that month. The Rene family did recall pitching the song to Armstrong at a dinner with Les Hite and others that must have taken place that fall.
Sonny Greer told the pianist and Ellington expert Brooks Kerr that he was the first to sing “Sleepy Time” (and, incidentally, “Star Dust”) over the airwaves, before Armstrong. But NBC Radio logs of Ellington’s Cotton Club broadcasts between Sept. 29, 1930 and Feb. 3, 1931 omit any mention of “Sleepy Time,” so that claim can’t be verified.
On the April 11 aircheck from Hartford, we hear more than just a pass through “Sleepy Time.” After that extended solo by Bigard, the key and chord progression stay the same while the band goes into a bit of “Lazy Rhapsody.”
Duke had recorded “Lazy Rhapsody” in the studio for the first and only time on Feb. 2. I suppose that the word “Lazy” was Duke’s witty way of indicating that this was a song based on “Sleepy Time,” as the British swing composer Spike Hughes correctly noted at the time.
By segueing from one song into the other, Duke makes the connection explicit, in a way that he apparently did not continue to do — and in a way that radio listeners would not “get,” because the Brunswick record, titled “Swanee Rhapsody,” was not to be released until May 5, 1932. (The record company’s notes at first gave the title as “Lullaby,” later changed to “Lazy Rhapsody,” and then to “Swanee Rhapsody,” which appeared on some original 78 labels).
Bigard is quoted discussing the similarities between “Lazy Rhapsody” and yet another song, the popular standard “Moonglow” (written this way on the sheet music, but sometimes written as two words) in Stanley Dance’s book The World of Duke Ellington:
All composers borrow from one another. That’s nothing new, so long as they don’t go too far. [Take] over eight bars of anybody’s song, and there’s likely to be trouble. You take “Moon Glow.” That was taken from “Lazy Rhapsody,” and I believe Mills arranged a big settlement with Duke over that.
Irving Mills was Duke’s manager and music publisher from 1926 to 1939, and working with him meant that Mills was credited as coauthor on many songs, including “Moonglow”— not an unusual business arrangement for the time. (Besides Mills, it was credited to musician Will Hudson and lyricist Eddie DeLange.) “Moonglow,” even before it was published in January 1934, was something of a hit, like “Sleepy Time” before it. If you’re a movie buff, you might recall its delightful use in this dance scene from Picnic.
Both songs turn up about 600 times in Tom Lord’s master discography of jazz, and this count omits many versions by pop artists. For “Sleepy Time,” the count includes many short versions by Armstrong, who used it as his theme song from 1931 until his death.

“Lazy Rhapsody” by Duke Ellington, studio version, Feb. 2, 1932.
Despite Bigard’s account, we should note that it is never considered plagiarism when two songs incorporate the same harmonies. Certain harmonic progressions are so common that if that were the case, thousands of songs would be considered plagiarized from each other — besides which, it’s not always clear when and where a certain sequence of chords originated. (Some can be traced back to classical compositions.) As you can hear, “Sleepy Time,” “Lazy Rhapsody” and “Moonglow” each has a distinct, catchy and original melody. Yes, each is based on the same sequence of chords (at least in the A sections, the main themes), but there is no plagiarism here.
The sequence of events around “Sleepy Time” reveals a lot about how the music business used to work. Someone writes a song, then tries to get artists — in this case Ellington, then Armstrong — interested in recording and performing it. A publishing deal is arranged, and the sheet music becomes available. That publication is circulated widely and aggressively by “song pluggers” to get the song recorded quickly and frequently, hoping for a “hit.” In addition, the publisher might be affiliated with a recording company.
Finally, one artist after another records the song: first Armstrong in this case, then clarinetist Jimmy Noone, then two versions by Mildred Bailey, even a recording from London, and more. It’s no wonder that Ellington tried his hand at it, though, for whatever reason, he never recorded it.
We’re lucky to have his version. So how did we get it?
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Larry Altpeter isn’t a name widely known even to the most devoted connoisseurs of the swing era, but he had a successful journeyman career. A trombonist who first recorded with bandleader Paul Specht, sometimes as “The Georgians,” from 1928-31, he continued to work with a variety of groups — among them Louis Prima (in ’35); singers Chick Bullock, Bea Wain, and a vocal group called the Smoothies; and studio orchestras accompanying the likes of Sarah Vaughan (1952) and Tony Bennett (1956).
On this version of Prima’s “Put on an Old Pair of Shoes,” Altpeter takes a nice solo at about the minute-and-a-half mark. He is also just barely visible in a 1936 film of Freddie Rich’s band, featuring trombonist-comedian Jerry Colonna and trumpeter Bunny Berigan. That’s him at the left end of the brass section.
One more thing we know about Larry Altpeter is that he must have been an audio hobbyist. We’re talking about him because he was the one who recorded Ellington’s broadcast from Hartford in 1932, using a disc recorder. Remember that broadcasting technologies were strictly designed for transmission, without a moment’s thought given to preservation.
Radio shows only survived if the station recorded them for later broadcast, or if a listener had a means of recording it at home (which wasn’t common until the advent of reel-to-reel tape — which, while invented in Germany around 1936, wasn’t readily available in the United States until the ‘50s). Still, home disc recorders, while rare, were available at that time.

The original medium for our Ellington aircheck is a ten-inch diameter blank “RCA Victor Home Recording Record.” It was recorded on an RCA Home Recording Electrola, first advertised in the Oct. 1930 issue of Talking Machine World. The Electrola used a “Special RCA Victor Home Recording Needle” to mechanically etch and reproduce sound modulations in a guide groove pressed onto each of the disc’s two sides. These discs are made of a semi-flexible, plastic-like substance the company called “Victrolac.”
Here are some images of an Electrola from 1930, the RAE-57. Altpeter used the model introduced in late 1931, the RAE-59. Visually similar to the model 57, it crucially had the capacity to record at 33 and 1/3 r.p.m.
The slower speed capability was added in anticipation of Victor’s soon-to-be introduced “Long-Playing Record,” or “Program Transcription,” as they were described on their labels. Yes, this was 33 and 1/3, some 17 years before Columbia Records introduced its “long playing” record, a.k.a. the LP. (The history of science is filled with thousands of inventions that surfaced again years later — or didn’t, such as 16 r.p.m. super-long-play recordings, a few of which were made in the ‘50s.)
An aside: Ellington made two recordings at 33 1/3, both medleys, in 1932. Because simultaneous recordings were made from two locations in the room that day, these two medleys have been issued in stereo, though they weren’t conceived of in that way. (Steven Lasker and his fellow researcher Brad Kay made this discovery in 1981.)
Altpeter recorded the aircheck with no apparent motive beyond personal enthusiasm. The disc sat in his home for some 60 years — until the bassist and bandleader Vince Giordano, an early-jazz specialist, found out about it. As Vince told me, he got a call in the early 1990s from David Sager, a fine trombonist and noted early-jazz expert who works at the Recorded Sound Research Center at the Library of Congress. (David is also a graduate of my M.A. program in jazz history at Rutgers-Newark.)  
David Sager’s uncle was the bandleader and violinist Nat Brusiloff. The trombonist in Brusiloff’s band was Larry Altpeter. Sager informed Giordano that Altpeter had recorded music off the radio in the 1930s. As Vince recalls:
I called Altpeter and went down to his unfinished basement crawlspace and saw 50 or so RCA Home Recording discs he had recorded off the air in an old soda box. They had no sleeves and there was lots of dust, dirt  and sand on them. I asked what he wanted for them, he refused to take any money: “Just take them and enjoy them.” When I brought them home and cleaned them and tried to play them — there was hardly any sound!  What I didn’t know was, they needed a special, very large phonograph needle to play them and get the music out of the grooves. I had no idea what was on these records — the labels sometimes had very little handwritten info. The other 50 discs were a mixed bag of Boswell Sisters, a Cab Calloway disc, and some other hot music from the early 1930s.
Word of the Ellington disc started to get out. It was first mentioned by John Hasse in his 1993 bio Beyond Category: The Life And Genius Of Duke Ellington. It was then listed in a discography by W. E. Timner, The Recorded Music of Duke Ellington and His Sidemen (Fourth Edition, Scarecrow Press) in 1996. Since then it has been mentioned in other discographies, though few people had heard it.
In 1998, Giordano was working for the BMG archive (which included RCA). There he met Lasker, who was co-producing the Duke Ellington RCA boxed set. Steven purchased the Ellington disk from Vince, and has since played it for a few Ellington specialists. But even though he’s often consulted for Ellington reissue projects, there hasn’t been an appropriate format in which to present the broadcast properly.
What do we learn from these eight minutes of raw broadcast footage from 1932? On the most basic level, this recording gives us new information about one of our most significant composers and his band at a fast-moving point in their development.
In his early years — especially from roughly 1928 to 1932, the period we’re studying here — Duke was expected to record and perform pop songs by others, especially if the songwriter and/or sheet music publisher had connections to his manager, or to the record label. That’s why you find him recording “That Lindy Hop” in 1930, for example.
This was typical of the music business. For example, on Billie Holiday’s recordings in 1935, with pianist Teddy Wilson, they recorded mostly newly written songs that were not of their own choosing. But artists of this caliber bring much to that situation, and Duke certainly brought his imagination on “Sleepy Time,” even if he never got around to recording this version for commercial release.
During the time period just after this aircheck, Ellington enjoyed more independence, regularly composing and releasing his own hit songs. “Sophisticated Lady” was first recorded in 1933; “Solitude” in Jan. 1934; “In a Sentimental Mood” in April 1935; and “Prelude to a Kiss” in 1938. All of these — and later gems, many of those composed with Billy Strayhorn, whom he met at the end of ‘38 — have remained part of the American consciousness. (They were often instrumentals at first, with lyrics added later.)
I hope we’ve illustrated the many reasons that a newly discovered Ellington item is exciting. It’s not only a chance to hear some new music by the maestro, but it also enables us to make connections in time and place between other events, recordings, bands and composers of the era. No recording happens in a vacuum, and every new piece of information fits into the ever-changing puzzle that is the writing of history.
______________
Dr. Lewis Porter is the author of acclaimed books on John Coltrane, Lester Young and jazz history, and has taught at institutions including Rutgers and The New School. He’s also a pianist whose latest album as a leader, Beauty & Mystery (Altrisuoni/Unseen Rain), features Terri Lyne Carrington, John Patitucci and Tia Fuller.
Deep Dive with Lewis Porter carries on a project originally known as You Don’t Know Jazz! with Lewis Porter, produced for WBGO by Alex W. Rodriguez and Tim Wilkins.
 

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A sense of sophistication
Recording techniques in the 50s were very different from what they are today. This was a time even before multi-track reels, when mono sound reproduction ruled and the equipment was quite primitive. Even so, Rudy Van Gelder brought a sense of sophistication to the Blue Note sound. From 1957, he began recording musicians directly to two-track tape while Blue Note began issuing stereo LPs alongside mono ones, before the former format took over in the 60s. But though recording a quartet on two tracks might seem a fairly easy and straightforward task in comparison to the layered multi-tracking and overdubbing that came in during the 70s, getting the right balance between the instruments was crucial and couldn’t be altered once the recording had taken place (there was no mixing that could be done after the fact). Rudy Van Gelder’s gift was for adjusting the sound balance while the musicians ran through a song prior to doing a take, so that by the time the red light came on, all of the musical parts fitted together perfectly and no one was louder than anyone else. Getting the sound balances just right was an art, and Van Gelder was a master at it.
By the late 50s, Rudy Van Gelder had become so busy (with dates for Blue Note, Prestige, Savoy, Riverside and Pacific Jazz) that it was getting harder for him to juggle his work as an optometrist with recording sessions, so he began assigning different record labels different days of the week at his Hackensack studio (Fridays were assigned to Blue Note). Among the many Blue Note albums recorded at Hackensack are such classics as Horace Silver And The Jazz Messengers, Hank Mobley Quintet, Introducing Johnny Griffin, Sonny Clark’s Sonny’s Crib, John Coltrane’s Blue Train, Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers’ Moanin’, Lou Donaldson’s Lou Takes Off and Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else.

“Good things happen after dark”
According to Rudy Van Gelder, Alfred Lion “held a belief that good things happen after dark, musically”, an allusion to the alchemy that jazz musicians could create in front of a live audience. But capturing that accurately had proved almost impossible – especially because of the acoustic problems that could occur – until Van Gelder found a way of doing it consistently well. Evidently, though, it was something of a chore for the engineer because it involved three days of preparation and necessitated him transporting all his vital studio equipment by car to the concert venue. Though it was a tough challenge to capture musicians on stage in front of an audience, groundbreaking Blue Note recordings such as Art Blakey’s A Night At Birdland and Sonny Rollins’ A Night At The Village Vanguard showed how Van Gelder helped to make the live album a valid and viable musical document in the jazz world while extending the Blue Note sound beyond the confines of his studio.
With his recording work booming, it wasn’t long before Rudy Van Gelder gave up practising as an optometrist altogether. In 1959, inspired by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and after visiting the converted Armenian church that Columbia used for their 30th Street studio in New York, he elected to build a new recording facility a few miles down the road from his Hackensack base, at 455 Sylvan Avenue in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. Van Gelder got one of Lloyd Wright’s protégés, David Henken, to construct a distinctive chapel-like main room for recording. Built from wood and masonry and boasting a high-domed ceiling as its pièce de résistance, Van Gelder Studio (as it was known) was both classic and futuristic: a state-of-the-art facility that ushered in a new age for the Blue Note sound.
The studio’s high ceiling gave a sumptuous natural reverb to Van Gelder’s recordings (though, apparently, Alfred Lion preferred a drier sound) and, from 1959 right through to the 70s (by which time Lion and Wolff had left the label), Blue Note continued to record at Englewood Cliffs. So did other labels – namely Impulse! (Van Gelder engineered Coltrane’s masterpiece for the label, A Love Supreme, there), Verve and, in the 70s, CTI.
“I tried to make them heard in a way they wanted to be heard”
One of the reasons the Blue Note sound was so distinctive was thanks to Rudy Van Gelder’s fastidiousness in the studio. He was a boffin-like genius who brought a scientific mindset and forensic attention to detail to the art of audio recording. He was also extremely protective of his techniques and was known to use tape to conceal the manufacturers’ names on his equipment. Musicians who questioned him about his methods got short shrift, and touching his equipment was not permitted. Only Van Gelder himself was allowed to move microphones, which he did wearing a pair of garden gloves. Some musicians have described him as eccentric – but as idiosyncratic as his behaviour and some of his methods were, Van Gelder certainly got results and made an indelible mark on both jazz and Blue Note’s history.
Rudy Van Gelder’s rationale behind his quest for sonic perfection was simple: “I tried to make these individual people be heard in a way they wanted to be heard,” he told Blue Note producer and historian Michael Cuscuna in 2004 for a short film released on the DVD portion of a Blue Note retrospective called Perfect Takes. Just as designer Reid Miles had been for Blue Note’s artwork, Van Gelder was a crucial part of Blue Note’s creative team. He brought Alfred Lion’s sonic vision to life and was able to present the label’s musicians in the best possible light.

In his later life, between the years 1999 and 2008, the veteran engineer used his expertise to supervise the remastering of a great many classic Blue Note albums that he had originally recorded. They were released on CD in a series called RVG Editions, which helped Blue Note to find a new, younger audience but also reaffirmed how indispensable Van Gelder was to the Blue Note sound.
It’s no an exaggeration to say that, if it wasn’t for Van Gelder’s genius at capturing sound and his accuracy in recording musical instruments, it’s doubtful whether Blue Note as we know it would even exist. Rudy Van Gelder was instrumental in not only giving the label a unique sonic identity but also, perhaps more importantly, changed the way jazz was recorded. He was a true pioneer whose musical legacy is intertwined with Blue Note’s history.
Follow the Blue Note: The Finest In Jazz Since 1939 playlist for more essential Blue Note.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/opinion/nashville-music.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage&login=email&auth=login-email

The Day the Music Died

By Margaret Renkl

Unchecked growth has claimed Bobby’s Idle Hour, the last live-music venue on Nashville’s fabled Music Row.

Jan. 21, 2019
One of the most beloved performers over the years, Dave Saunders during a set at Bobby’s Idle Hour, which closed last week.Photographs by Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York Times

One of the most beloved performers over the years, Dave Saunders during a set at Bobby’s Idle Hour, which closed last week.Photographs by Kyle Dean Reinford for The New York Times
NASHVILLE — I am not a musician, or even an aspiring musician, but I moved to Nashville in 1987 because of music. One of my college roommates was in graduate school at Vanderbilt and invited me to visit, and my own grad school boyfriend tagged along. Haywood was, and still is, a picker himself, and he expected to fall in love with Music City; he even packed his résumé.
Katy Ginanni, my college friend, lived on 17th Avenue South, in the section called Music Square West. It’s part of a rectangle of streets that collectively form Nashville’s fabled Music Row, which became the heart of Nashville’s music industry — not just country music, but also gospel music and Christian music and, in recent decades, pretty much every other kind of music. Music Row is the very definition of a cultural center, but Nashville’s cultural center didn’t spring from the mind of an urban planner. It grew up organically, as music-related businesses opened in the mid-20th century to capitalize on the growing popularity of country music.
Centered on 16th and 17th Avenues, it was originally the site of recording studios (many of which have lately moved elsewhere), music-publishing firms, talent agencies, publicists and booking offices, all nestled among old bungalows and churches and human-scale commercial buildings. B.B. King and Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton and Elvis Presley and Charlie Pride all recorded there, which you probably know, but so did Bob Dylan and Neil Young and Simon & Garfunkel and the Beach Boys, which you might not. In 2015, the National Trust for Historic Preservation designated the whole district “a national treasure.”
Tour buses drive up and down the streets of Music Row, their guides telling tourists the stories they came to town to hear. But the city’s explosive growth in the last decade has imperiled its own beating heart, with quaint Music Row houses and historic Music Row studios falling again and again to developers who put up fancy condominiums and trendy restaurants and shiny office buildings in their place, despite concerted efforts by individuals and historic preservation nonprofits to save the Row’s character. In 2014, we even nearly lost the iconic RCA Studio A.

Patrons gathered at Bobby’s Idle Hour last week.

Old photos, notes and dollar bills cover the walls at Bobby’s Idle Hour.
Back in 1987, my friend Katy’s apartment was within walking distance of the Country Music Hall of Fame (it has since moved downtown), as well as seemingly innumerable tiny “museums” dedicated to specific stars. Broke as we were, Haywood and I paid to have our picture made with a wax museum version of Dolly Parton, just to have a souvenir of our visit. It was so hot in the building that even Dolly’s wax doppelgänger is sweating in that Polaroid photo.
We loved the kitsch, but what really sold us was the music. We had arrived in Nashville in time for a music festival called Summer Lights, an act-after-act marvel of unfathomable talent. Near Katy’s place on Music Row, music and cigarette smoke poured out of the neighborhood bars, and during our visit we stopped in to tap our feet and drink a beer at I don’t know how many of them. We especially loved a shabby little tavern called Bobby’s Idle Hour.
Back in those days Bobby’s occupied a trailer, which I remember thinking was like a living stereotype, the kind of place that becomes the center of the story every time you talk about the time you went to Nashville. It’s nothing like the music-themed bars that now line the tourist center known as Lower Broad, where neon and big-hat country hold sway — the part of Nashville that the journalist Steve Cavendish, writing in Rolling Stone, calls the “bar industrial complex.”
Thom “Lizard” Case, 72, (center) says, “Tourists love this place so much, they just want to leave some part of themselves here.”

Thom “Lizard” Case, 72, (center) says, “Tourists love this place so much, they just want to leave some part of themselves here.”
Bobby’s is an altogether different kind of bar. It began life in 1948 simply as the Idle Hour. By 1978, when Bobby Herald bought it and added his name to the sign, it had already been on the Row for decades, a place where songwriters and neighbors and music scouts and industry regulars gathered. On weekend afternoons, people would bring their kids to hear the music.
In 2005, the Idle Hour was evicted from its longtime site — a condominium complex sits there now — and Bobby Herald and his wife, Dianne, moved the bar to its current location on 16th Avenue, eight doors down from the old trailer. Bobby died later that year, but Dianne kept the bar going. It still has autographed head shots of musicians taped to the walls, interspersed with dollar bills signed by guests. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollar bills, many yellowed by smoke from the years before the bar banned smoking.

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Lizard Thom Case, 72, bought the place in 2013 after Dianne retired, but he’d been a regular at the bar there for years before he bought it — so much of a regular that Dianne handpicked him to be Bobby’s “steward,” as Mr. Case calls himself. Even he doesn’t remember how the tradition of taping dollar bills to the walls began: “I don’t know how it started, but it grew like a fungus,” he said. His best guess: “Tourists love this place so much, they just want to leave some part of themselves here.” Visitors still come back years later, he said, and take selfies next to their own signed bills.
Last summer Mr. Case’s landlord announced that he was selling the site and four adjacent buildings to a developer. (All five evicted businesses are quintessentially Music City: a clothing store called So Nashville, a guitar repair shop, a music academy, a music publisher, and Bobby’s.) Short of the kind of 11th-hour miracle that saved Studio A, Bobby’s Idle Hour (“The only live music venue on Music Row!” according to its website) would end its seven-decade run, and yet another office building would rise in its place.
“Nashville doesn’t have preservation tools that other cities use as a matter of course,” Carolyn Brackett, senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, told The Tennessean last summer. “There are practical solutions that would balance development with the preservation of Music Row’s historic fabric and retain the music businesses that fill them. We urge Mayor Briley and Metro Nashville leaders to adopt them before it’s too late.”
For the current iteration of Bobby’s Idle Hour, it’s already too late. Last fall Bobby’s was named to the “Nashville 9,” an annual list of the most endangered historic places in Nashville, but this time no miracle was forthcoming. Mr. Case has until the end of the month to clear everything out.
It was never his plan to retire: “If we’d been able to stay in this venue, this particular building, I could’ve kept this bar another 10 years,” he said. “I love it. I love nurturing the songwriters. I love setting up these great nights of music. It’s been my life.”
Music Row is the very definition of a cultural center, but Nashville’s cultural center didn’t spring from the mind of an urban planner. It grew up organically, as music-related businesses opened in the mid-20th century to capitalize on the growing popularity of country music.

Music Row is the very definition of a cultural center, but Nashville’s cultural center didn’t spring from the mind of an urban planner. It grew up organically, as music-related businesses opened in the mid-20th century to capitalize on the growing popularity of country music.
I stopped by the bar on Jan. 12, the last day it was open to the public, and spoke with Josh Distad, 29, a songwriter and Minnesota native who’s been tending bar at Bobby’s for the past four years. He and three other investors, all Bobby’s regulars, had just bought the contents of the bar, along with its name, from Lizard Case. They hope to open again at a new location in the summer. Mr. Distad isn’t worried about making Bobby’s a success; Bobby’s is already a success, and he’s been studying what makes it work. But he recognizes the forces that he and his partners are up against, too.
They’re considering a site just around the corner from the current Idle Hour, but there may be zoning issues to address there — it’s near a church — and other obstacles to repurposing the building as a tavern.
The chief obstacle is Nashville itself. The five-year lease the building’s owner has offered is within the new owners’ price range, but they know they may well be priced out of the neighborhood again as soon as the lease is up, and they can’t afford to buy. “The real estate in this area — real estate in the city, really — is so high now that a small mom-and-pop shop just can’t succeed,” Mr. Distad said. “The lowest property we found on the market in this area is listed for a million dollars.” Even so, he believes the right place will turn up in time.

Bobby’s Idle Hour is “part of the fabric of this town.”

The death of a neighborhood bar in a growing city is in no way a tragedy. There are much more disruptive consequences to poorly planned growth: the loss of affordable work-force housing, the destruction of a vibrant tree canopy that offsets the effects of greenhouse gases, destabilized communities and debilitating strains on aging infrastructure, among others. But cultural continuity does matter. Bobby’s Idle Hour is “part of the fabric of this town,” said Carolyn Lethgo, 29, a Middle Tennessee native and one of Mr. Distad’s co-investors. “We just want to carry on the meaning and the legacy of this place.”
It’s a quite a legacy. Before you even walk in the door, the big plywood guitar out front tells you that Bobby’s Idle Hour is the place you’ve been looking for, the kind of place that makes you pack up and move to a new city to start your life all over again. In part because of Bobby’s, my husband and I have been here 31 years, our entire adult lives.
Jonathan Long, 72, is a songwriter from upstate New York who came here in 1971. He’s also one of the Idle Hour’s longtime bartenders: “I’ve been working here 20 years,” he told me, “but I’ve been drinking here 47.” He plans to be at work at the new Idle Hour, too, wherever it lands, even if that’s not on Music Row.
I asked Mr. Long if the Nashville moment had passed, if it’s too late now for a songwriter with a dream to make a life in Nashville. He wasn’t entirely hopeless: “If it’s something you want to do, don’t even bother to come here,” he said. “If it’s something you have to do, you might want to come. But if it’s something you are, get your ass down here. It has to be who you are, or it’s not going to work.”
 

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https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2019/01/18/guitarist-reggie-young-dies-memphis-music-elvis-presley-nashville-music/2613228002/

Legendary guitarist Reggie Young — key sideman to Elvis, Waylon, Willie and more — dead at age 82

Bob MehrUpdated 3:23 p.m. CT Jan. 18, 2019
Reggie Young’s name may not be instantly familiar to the masses, but his guitar work has been heard by nearly everyone with a set of ears: The sultry opening of Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man,” the signature electric sitar of the Box Tops’ “Cry Like a Baby,” the dramatic swells on Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” and “In the Ghetto,” and literally hundreds of other hits and classics.  
The 82-year-old Young died Thursday night at his home outside Nashville, following an illustrious seven-decade career. Young served as the anchor of house bands at Memphis’ Hi Records and American Studios and as one of Nashville’s most revered session men.  

Legendary guitarist Reggie Young died Jan. 17 at age 82. His guitar work appeared on hundreds of hits and classics. (Photo: Chart Room Media)
His passing was confirmed by family, friends and several artists he worked with, including singer B.J. Thomas. 
“From the first time I was in the studio with Reggie in 1967, we just fit together like a hand in a glove, and over the years became like brothers,” Thomas said.
Young played on most of Thomas’ big hits including “Hooked on a Feeling” and “(Hey, Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song.” 
“It’s hard to really get it straight in your mind that a guy who had no ego about what he was doing could play the amazing things Reggie played,” Thomas said. “He was never trying to stand out. That’s the difference between Reggie and a lot of guitar players. He’d be playing right in the groove — but all the while doing these little things that made a song special or made it a hit. 
“But then, when he wanted to, like with ‘Hooked on a Feeling,’ he stepped up with that (signature Coral electric sitar) part and did what I think is one of the classic solos of all time,” Thomas added. “You know, after working with Reggie, Eric Clapton said he was the greatest guitar player he ever heard — that’s a pretty good accolade.”
Reggie Young: Fans, musicians mourn legendary guitarist’s death
Born in 1936 in Caruthersville, Missouri, and raised in Osceola, Arkansas, Young moved with his family to Memphis in 1950 at the age of 14. A relative prodigy, Young was gigging professionally at age 15. He would go on to back local rockabilly singer Eddie Bond — putting his signature lick on Bond’s hit “Rockin’ Daddy” — before being hired away by country star Johnny Horton. In the late-’50s Young would land as the house guitarist at the fledgling South Memphis’ Royal Studios/Hi Records, making hits with Bill Black’s Combo.
After being drafted and serving a stint in the Army, where he was stationed in Africa, and recruited by and rebuffed an offer to join the CIA, Young returned stateside. He would tour with Bill Black’s Combo, getting a first-hand glimpse of Beatlemania as the Fab Four’s opening act in 1964. Young also played on some of the great soul sides Hi Records began producing under bandleader Willie Mitchell. 

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Reggie Young through the years
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By the mid-’60s Young had moved on to work with producer Chips Moman at his American Studios. As part of American’s famed house band, “The Memphis Boys,” Young and company would sire an unprecedented run of chart hits — more than 120 — into the early ‘70s for the likes of Elvis, Neil Diamond and B.J. Thomas, among others. 
Like most of the American crew, Young would leave Memphis in 1972, briefly for Atlanta, before settling in Nashville and becoming one of Music City’s top guns. Over the next two decades Young worked with country giants, adding his signature licks to songs by Merle Haggard (“Pancho & Lefty), Willie Nelson (“Always on My Mind”), Waylon Jennings (“Luckenbach, Texas”), Hank Williams Jr. (“Family Tradition”), Kenny Rogers (“Lucille”) and Reba McEntire (“Little Rock”).  
 
 
Though he was a self-effacing and humble character, fellow musicians always took note of Young’s great gifts. His talents were revered by fellow guitarists like Eric Clapton and George Harrison, and utilized by a stunning array of artists from Bob Dylan to Gladys Knight, the Staple Singers to Paul Simon, Herbie Mann to Joe Cocker, B.B. King to Sinead O’Connor.
Fellow Music City session legend Norbert Putnam recalled Young as “perhaps the greatest studio guitarist I ever worked with.”
“Country, pop, R&B, blues — Reggie could play about a dozen styles,” Putnam said. “The thing that made him so amazing was that a producer could say, ‘Hey Reggie — play something for the intro, OK?’ And, literally, he’d play something off the top of his head that would absolutely make the song. He didn’t say, ‘Give me 20 minutes and I’ll think of something.’ If he was called upon, he’d have something every time.
“Reggie got to Nashville about ’71 or ’72, and I remember Dobie Gray came in with ‘Drift Away.’ Mentor Williams was producing and he said, ‘Reggie, you got an idea for the intro?’” Putnam recalled. “And, on the spot, Reggie played that opening part that’s so iconic. It was the biggest record of that year. I don’t know anyone who was faster or better than Reggie. He was special. All the studio guys are special, but Reggie was a cut above.”
Young, who remained in the Nashville area, was a frequent presence in Memphis, participating in numerous Elvis-related programs with the Memphis Boys in recent years.   
Despite his prolific career as a sideman, Young waited until 2017 to release his first solo album, “Forever Young,” a collection of soulful original instrumental compositions, via the U.K. label Ace Records.
Later this month — which marks the 50th anniversary of Young and the American Boys’ sessions with Elvis Presley — Ace is set to release “Reggie Young: Session Guitar Star,” a compilation highlighting Young’s work in the studio. 
Plans for funeral services have not been announced. 

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PBS film tackles Native American links to rock, blues, jazz

Russell Contreras
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As a child, Fred Lincoln “Link” Wray, Jr. hid under a bed when the Ku Klux Klan came to his parent’s home in rural North Carolina. Racist groups often targeted the poor family of Shawnee Native American ancestry as the Wrays endured segregation in the American South just like African-Americans. 
Wray eventually took all that rage of his early years and crafted a 1958 instrumental hit “Rumble” using a distinct, distorted electric guitar sound that would influence generations of rock ‘n’ roll musicians from Iggy Pop, Neil Young , Pete Townshend of The Who and Slash of Guns N’ Roses. Though the song had no lyrics, it was banned in the 1950s for allegedly encouraging teen violence.
Wray is one of many Native American musicians whose stories are featured in a new PBS Independent Lens documentary showing how Native Americans helped lay the foundations to rock, blues and jazz and shaped generations of musicians. “RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World” is set to air online and on most PBS stations Monday.
The film is the brainchild of Apache guitarist Stevie Salas who has performed with the likes of Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger. It was during a tour with Stewart that the Oceanside, California-raised Salas began to wonder if there had been any other Native American rock musicians before him. “I was there with Rod Stewart and thinking, ‘Am I the only Indian to have ever played at (New York’s) Madison Garden?'” Salas told The Associated Press. “So I started to investigate.”
Soon Salas, now 54, stumbled upon Wray, a musician he’d admired but had no idea he was Native American. Then he found out about the Norman, Oklahoma-born Jesse Ed Davis, a guitarist of Kiowa and Comanche ancestry who performed with John Lennon. 
The hobby searching for Native American rock musicians eventually launched an exhibit at Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, then a film.
“People need to know about Link Wray. People need to know about Jesse Ed Davis,” Salas said.
But rock musicians aren’t the only popular musicians “RUMBLE” seeks to highlight. The documentary touches upon blues pioneer Charley Patton, an early 20th Century Mississippi Delta guitarist of Choctaw and African American ancestry. The film shows how some of Patton’s music preserved on rough vinyl recordings is similar to traditional American Indian songs. Those traditions were fused black music.
Legendary bluesman Howlin’ Wolf would say he learned to play the guitar from an “Indian man” by the name of Charley Patton.
The film also introduces viewers to the largely forgotten jazz vocalist Mildred Bailey. A member of the Coeur d’Alene tribe in the Pacific Northwest, Bailey began signing ragtime in the 1920s and developed a swing style that fused traditional Native American vocals with jazz. She became known as the “The Queen of Swing” who performed at speakeasies and had a style so unique that young Italian-American aspiring singers Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra began copying her form.
“She was one of the great improvisers of jazz,” Bennett said on the film. “I was completely influenced by Mildred Bailey. She sang perfect, for me.”
The film also explores the career of Robbie Robertson, a Canadian musician of Mohawk and Cayuga descent, who performed with Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s before forming his own group called The Band.
“Be proud that you’re an Indian,” Robertson said he was told as a child, “but be careful who you tell.”
The documentary dives into the career of Davis, lead guitarist for Taj Mahal, who died in 1988 of a heroin overdose. And it goes into the momentous career of Randy Castillo, the Albuquerque, New Mexico-born Isleta Pueblo drummer for Ozzy Osbourne and Mötley Crüe, whose life was cut short by cancer in 2002. 
As the Native American musicians get closer to the 21st Century, the film shows that they stopped hiding their identity and began to celebrate it.
“This is a missing chapter to this history of music,” co-director Catherine Bainbridge said. “Native Americans were at the center of our popular music.”
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