Dexter Gordon in 1962.Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images LLC
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SOPHISTICATED GIANT 
The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon 
By Maxine Gordon 
Illustrated. 279 pp. University of California Press. $29.95.
Dexter Gordon, the lusty virtuoso of bebop saxophone probably best known now for his Oscar-nominated, starring performance in the movie “Round Midnight,” embodied no fewer than four jazz clichés. He made his reputation as the very image of the big, bold, tenor-sax man, blaring rattling solos from the depths of his 6-foot-5 frame. He seemed for years to be a stereotype of the jazz musician as self-destructive hedonist, arrested and imprisoned on narcotics charges and crimes related to drug use. He became a symbol of the black expat demimonde in mid-20th-century Europe, where musicians joined writers, painters and other African-American artists seeking refuge from maltreatment and underappreciation in their homeland. And he ended up an emblem of survival and redemption, weathered but still standing and still blowing, a veteran of a lifetime of battle with the world and himself.
That Gordon embodied those clichés because he invented or crystallized them in the public imagination is largely forgotten today, nearly 30 years after his death, at 67, in 1990, from kidney failure following treatment for cancer of the larynx. In his final years, Gordon set out to tell his own story, hoping to correct some misconceptions and complicate some simplifications about his life and music. He wrote notes and drafts of biographical vignettes in longhand on yellow legal pads, and for a time tried to collaborate with the novelist Wesley Brown, before deciding to work largely on his own with help from his wife and former manager, Maxine Gordon. When his health began to fail precipitately, he asked her to promise to complete the book if he died before finishing it. “Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon” is the fulfillment of that promise.
Although fairly short passages from Dexter Gordon’s notepads appear here and there, the book is mainly Maxine Gordon’s, and that’s to its benefit. She learned about jazz from the inside herself, working in various back-room roles for the composer Gil Evans, the organist Shirley Scott and others before she met her future husband in France in 1975. She worked with him, overseeing his much ballyhooed return to America in 1976, with chief responsibility for the ballyhoo, and she was with him, living quietly (half the time in Mexico), during his late period of reflection, retired from music. It helps, too, that she went back to school after Dexter Gordon’s death, studied oral history for a summer at Columbia and got a master’s degree in Africana studies at N.Y.U. “Sophisticated Giant” is a work of considerable sophistication, the first-person testimony of its subject employed with affectionate discipline, smartly contextualized and augmented by material from interviews Maxine Gordon conducted with the tenor saxophone masters Sonny Rollins and Jimmy Heath, the record producers Bruce Lundvall and Michael Cucsuna, and others.
Born into a line of high-achieving African-Americans, Dexter Gordon took pride in being part of what, in his notes, he called an “Uncommon Family.” His maternal grandfather, an officer in the United States Cavalry, was awarded the Medal of Honor during the Spanish-American War. His paternal grandfather, a barber who may have included dentistry among his services, was called “Professor” for his air of erudition. Dexter Gordon’s own father was a physician in Los Angeles, among the first black doctors to practice in the city. Dexter Gordon himself was precociously creative. Mentored as a teenager by the same African-American music teacher who taught Frank Morgan, Art Farmer, Marshal Royal and Don Cherry, among others, he proved to be so gifted on the tenor saxophone that he was offered a chair in the Lionel Hampton Orchestra while still in high school.

Gordon entered a world that, like many spheres of popular music in every era, was populated by scores of young artists entertaining other young people with work that spoke pointedly to their age and time. When he joined the Hampton group, at 17, Gordon began playing with Joe Newman and Ernie Royal, both nearly as young as he was. A few years later, he was honored to be hired by one of his lifelong idols, Louis Armstrong (whom he called “Pops”), but he grew restless playing the mainstream swing in the elder bandleader’s repertoire. He quit for an opportunity to join a radical group of young players in the Billy Eckstine Orchestra who were inventing a new music not yet called bebop. “Pops asked me if I wanted more money,” Gordon recalls in “Sophisticated Giant.” “I told him that wasn’t the problem. It was that we young guys wanted to play some new music.”
With Eckstine, surrounded by itchy, bursting, brilliant adventurers, all African-American and nearly all young — Gene Ammons, Leo Parker, Sonny Stitt, Sarah Vaughan, Fats Navarro — Gordon found his musical voice and broke out as a must-hear jazz phenomenon. He began to play in the style that would define him until his late years: saxophone jazz as a firestorm of melodic invention, harmonic surprise and charismatic energy.
Maxine Gordon astutely frames the fiery daring of Dexter Gordon’s generation of bebop innovators in the context of rising black consciousness and creative agency in midcentury America: “At the same time that the war was coming to an end, black culture exploded with unprecedented exuberance and innovation. For musicians like Dexter, that meant breaking out from the constraints of the traditional dance bands and allowing improvisations to extend into unknown places. Dexter said that the ‘Young Turks’ wanted to express a social statement through their music. They were developing their own lifestyles around the new music at a time when things were moving very fast for them and for the world.”
In addition to his autobiographical jottings, Dexter Gordon was working late in his life on a treatment for a screenplay about the rise of bebop in the 1940s. For the section of “Sophisticated Giant” dealing with this period, Maxine Gordon quotes his treatment notes at some length, and they read like a summing up of his views on jazz as an art form and a way of life. The setting is the band bus for the Eckstine Orchestra. “These boys become men at 17 or 18,” Dexter Gordon wrote. “They have a mission.” He explained that mission — his purpose, as he saw it — in a series of questions and declarations. Among them: “A life that improvises music cannot run by another’s rules. This may bring problems if based on an ordinary observer’s rules for behavior in a society that does not always understand what art is, or what an artist is or why there is nothing without music.
“How has this music survived?
“The artist is not self-destructive. …
“Even after a death of one of the members, they continue to speak of him in the present tense.”
After 14 years of semi-exile, living in Copenhagen and Paris with occasional visits to the United States for recording sessions, Gordon came home for good and signed with Columbia Records, which released an acclaimed album documenting his hot-ticket return to the New York jazz scene, “Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard.” Ten years later, when Gordon was 63 and not performing much, the French director Bertrand Tavernier cast him as the lead in “Round Midnight,” a drama with music about a fictional, aging, African-American jazz saxophonist struggling with addiction who settles in Paris, returns to New York and (spoiler alert) dies. Gordon was duly praised for his subtle, knowing portrayal of an elder whose spirit survives the ravages of time and bodily abuse.
Without data, I have to assume that most people who still picture Dexter Gordon imagine the fading shadow of a once-great artist that he portrayed in “Round Midnight.” With “Sophisticated Giant,” Maxine Gordon has produced a homecoming even more dramatic, and perhaps more important, than the one she helped arrange for him in 1976: She has brought back the restive teenage fireball who wanted only to play some new music.
David Hajdu is the author, most recently, of “Love for Sale: Pop Music in America.”
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To: Listings/Critics/Features
From: Jazz Promo Services
www.jazzpromoservices.com

Original Vinyl Records
314 State Route 94 South #7
Warwick Crossing
Warwick, NY 10990-3380
www.originalvinylrecords.com

 
For Immediate Release
 
November 30, 2018
 
Warwick, New York: 17 year Warwick, NY resident Jim Eigo, owner of Jazz Promo Services, has fulfilled a lifelong dream by opening Original Vinyl Records, a retro record store for the avid and novice vinyl album collector.  Jim, a collector himself, amassed the records he’s selling over years of collecting, picking, yard sailing and record shows.
 
Jim is a long-time veteran of the record business having worked at Cox Records in Brooklyn, NY, running the jazz dept. at the legendary Greenwich Village record store Happy Tunes Records in the 1970s, setting up the first record store in Soho the Soho Music Gallery on Grand and Wooster and managing the jazz dept. for J & R Music World back in the 1980s. Jim always planned to get back into the retail end of the music business. After years of marketing and promoting jazz musicians and record labels, he saw the opportunity and the need for a local record store.  
 
Original Vinyl Records is the first in Warwick, NY in nearly two decades.
 
Located at 314 State Route 94 South #7 Warwick Crossing (next to Sneakers to Boots), Original Vinyl Records has an inventory of thousands of rock, jazz, children’s, soundtracks, pop vocals, celebrity, classical, comedy and many odd ball records with classic covers, as well as 45s, CDs, cassettes and 8-track tapes too. 
 
You can check out any of the music on the store’s vintage hi-fi system or other available players while relaxing in the “lounge”. 
 
The store also has many vintage music related items and books, as well as original music art work for sale. 
 

Jim states that he wants the store to be a fun place where people can come and hang and browse and talk about music and records.
 
We plan to do special in-store events too,  like Vinyl Listening Night as well as local artists showcases so stay tuned by signing up for our e mail list at www.originalvinylrecords.com.
 
Check out Original Vinyl’s Facebook page, its Instagram page or its website at www.originalvinylrecords.com.

Jim was recently interviewed about the new store for  Goldmine Magazine.
 
You can read it HERE:

Considered to be the greatest female jazz drummer, Viola Smith was 103 yesterday, and according to a Twitter item, is still active in the Forever Young Band in Costa Mesa, CA.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5c_XZaArH4&frags=pl%2Cwn

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Robert Plotnik, the titular owner of NYC’s iconic Village record store Bleecker Bob’s, has died. The sad news was confirmed by friend and store partner Jennifer Kitzer. Bob had been in declining health for some time after suffering a stroke in 2001. The store stayed open till 2013. NYC/Brooklyn store Academy Records offering up this tribute:
RIP to Bleecker Bob, a true legend on the NYC record store scene and probably the most singular character among that very idiosyncratic bunch. I first got to know Bob and his wise cracking sarcasm as a teenager in the late 70s as I soiled my fingers flipping through his grimy reused record sleeves. I also quickly learned that he loved an equal dose of sarcasm in return and our interactions were some of my first tastes of what it meant to be a real New Yorker. When I first opened my store in 2001 it was a real badge of honor when he came to check it out and told me it didn’t suck too bad. Catch ya on the B side..
Bleecker Bob’s Golden Oldies was one of the most iconic record stores in NYC, with Bob’s brusk tone being as well known as the shop’s selection of vintage vinyl. Bowie, Robert Plant, Frank Zappa and others were regular customers, and Bob’s was famously a plot point in a 1993 episode of Seinfeld. (Watch a clip below.) When the store closed in 2013, SPIN ran a big feature on it, Bob, and the store’s legacy:
“Bleecker Bob’s record store was the first store I ever saw that was the model for the little indie record shops that are now everywhere,” says Blondie guitarist Chris Stein. “It was very funky, and Bob was a very specific odd character. There’s definitely a movie in there somewhere.”
One punk-era character — Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye — frequented the shop so much that Plotnik offered him a job. Kaye worked at Village Oldies from 1970 to about 1975. Long before he and Smith even considered playing music with one another, Smith would come in and hang out at the store, just spinning records. “We mostly listened to group-harmony records of the South Jersey, Philadelphia area,” the guitarist now says. “We’d play Maureen Gray’s ‘Today’s the Day,’ the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp,’ the Blue Notes’ ‘My Hero.’ And the occasional Smoky Robinson, of course. She’d come in and if nobody was in the store, we’d do a little dancing around. It was nice. She lived around the corner. It was our local hang.”
Kaye credits the way he played his favorite 45s from the ’60s at the store as one of his inspirations for his celebrated 1972 compilation of psych- and garage-rock, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. “Late on a Saturday night, when no one was around and I’d have a beer, I’d just be pulling records off the shelf,” he says. “So when I had the chance to do Nuggets for Elektra, I had kind of a basic map of the types of groups and songs that would fit into this concept. They were my favorite records from the ’60s. I’d pull out 13th Floor Elevators, then I’d pull out ‘Liar Liar’ by the Castaways and follow that up with [Count Five’s] ‘Psychotic Reaction.’”
Rest in peace, Bob.
Watch a documentary about the final days at Bleecker Bob’s, and clips from the Seinfeld episode, below

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Robert Plotnik, the titular owner of NYC’s iconic Village record store Bleecker Bob’s, has died. The sad news was confirmed by friend and store partner Jennifer Kitzer. Bob had been in declining health for some time after suffering a stroke in 2001. The store stayed open till 2013. NYC/Brooklyn store Academy Records offering up this tribute:
RIP to Bleecker Bob, a true legend on the NYC record store scene and probably the most singular character among that very idiosyncratic bunch. I first got to know Bob and his wise cracking sarcasm as a teenager in the late 70s as I soiled my fingers flipping through his grimy reused record sleeves. I also quickly learned that he loved an equal dose of sarcasm in return and our interactions were some of my first tastes of what it meant to be a real New Yorker. When I first opened my store in 2001 it was a real badge of honor when he came to check it out and told me it didn’t suck too bad. Catch ya on the B side..
Bleecker Bob’s Golden Oldies was one of the most iconic record stores in NYC, with Bob’s brusk tone being as well known as the shop’s selection of vintage vinyl. Bowie, Robert Plant, Frank Zappa and others were regular customers, and Bob’s was famously a plot point in a 1993 episode of Seinfeld. (Watch a clip below.) When the store closed in 2013, SPIN ran a big feature on it, Bob, and the store’s legacy:
“Bleecker Bob’s record store was the first store I ever saw that was the model for the little indie record shops that are now everywhere,” says Blondie guitarist Chris Stein. “It was very funky, and Bob was a very specific odd character. There’s definitely a movie in there somewhere.”
One punk-era character — Patti Smith Group guitarist Lenny Kaye — frequented the shop so much that Plotnik offered him a job. Kaye worked at Village Oldies from 1970 to about 1975. Long before he and Smith even considered playing music with one another, Smith would come in and hang out at the store, just spinning records. “We mostly listened to group-harmony records of the South Jersey, Philadelphia area,” the guitarist now says. “We’d play Maureen Gray’s ‘Today’s the Day,’ the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp,’ the Blue Notes’ ‘My Hero.’ And the occasional Smoky Robinson, of course. She’d come in and if nobody was in the store, we’d do a little dancing around. It was nice. She lived around the corner. It was our local hang.”
Kaye credits the way he played his favorite 45s from the ’60s at the store as one of his inspirations for his celebrated 1972 compilation of psych- and garage-rock, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968. “Late on a Saturday night, when no one was around and I’d have a beer, I’d just be pulling records off the shelf,” he says. “So when I had the chance to do Nuggets for Elektra, I had kind of a basic map of the types of groups and songs that would fit into this concept. They were my favorite records from the ’60s. I’d pull out 13th Floor Elevators, then I’d pull out ‘Liar Liar’ by the Castaways and follow that up with [Count Five’s] ‘Psychotic Reaction.’”
Rest in peace, Bob.
Watch a documentary about the final days at Bleecker Bob’s, and clips from the Seinfeld episode, below

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March 22, 1944 – June 23, 2018
Reynold Scott Jr., a jazz saxophonist and faculty member at the University at Buffalo, died June 23 after a brief illness in Winter Park, Colo., during a trip to Colorado to visit his sons. He was 74.
Born in Charleston, S.C., he came to Buffalo with his family as a child and attended East High School with jazz saxophone great Grover Washington Jr.
“I was playing the flute in school. My father was a music teacher and he taught me,” he told an interviewer in 2012. “Our school finally got one baritone sax. Grover got it. He opened the case, it was one of those moments where the sun was shining all over it. So then I said, ‘I’ve gotta play sax.’ The teacher got another one at the pawn shop and gave it to me.”
Before he was old enough to go into jazz clubs, he and his friends stood on boxes outside the Revilot and the Little Harlem Hotel to look through the windows and listen to greats like John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
Known to many as Rey, he began performing while earning a music degree at Morgan College, now Morgan State University, in Baltimore, where he also was a member of the marching band.
He served briefly in the Army, then returned to Buffalo. He taught music in the Buffalo schools until 1972, when he moved to New York City to play jazz full time. On his first night in Manhattan, he performed at the legendary Apollo Theater.
He went on to play with Lionel Hampton, Tito Puente, Hamiet Bluiett and Sun Ra’s Arkestra, touring the world. With the Arkestra, he performed in 2004 in Siberia in the remote Republic of Tuva, home of the renowned double throat singers, and stayed for a month in a yurt.
He also earned a master’s degree in music education at City University of New York’s Lehman College in the Bronx and studied composition there with John Corigliano.
Mr. Scott wrote works for jazz orchestra that were performed at Carnegie Recital Hall, Avery Fischer Hall and Alice Tully Hall. He also recorded three albums of his own work, which included his best-known numbers, “Peanut Butter Turf,” “Grandma and Pa Scott” and “Chili-Willi and Ms. Bing-Bong.”
He also composed “Ode to the Niagara Movement” for the civil rights group’s 90th annual conference and “Ode to the Buffalo River” for the Erie Canal Initiative of Western New York.
In Buffalo, he played with several jazz ensembles, most frequently with percussionist John Bacon Jr., trombonist John Hasselbeck Jr. and guitarist Greg Millar. With Bacon and Don Metz, he founded the New Jazz Symphonia, which was a resident ensemble at Hallwalls. His last performance was at the Burchfield Penney Art Center with Millar’s band.
He was a lecturer in UB’s Department of African American Studies, teaching “Introduction to African American Music” and the “Evolution of Spiritual and Gospel Music.”
He also taught young musicians and led youth bands through Young Audiences and introduced jazz to youngsters through the program Jazz It Up. He also coordinated programs for STEP at SUNY Buffalo State.
For many years, he and his family spent their summers in Boothbay, Maine.
This year’s Pine Grill Reunion in Buffalo was dedicated to him.
Survivors include his wife of 29 years, the former Lucinda Clendenin, a retired counselor with UB’s Educational Opportunity Program; two sons, Reynold III and John; and a sister, Suell.
There will be no services.
 
 

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Jazz in the Neighborhood founder Mario Guarneri.
The subsidy requires the participation of local venues. So far, two host regular subsidized gigs: Bird & Beckett Books and Records in San Francisco’s sleepy Glen Park neighborhood, and Marin Country Mart in Larkspur Landing.
Under the Guaranteed Fair Wage Fund program, the venue pays 60% ($90) of the guaranteed $150 wage per musician, and Jazz in the Neighborhood puts up 40%, plus an extra 10% for the band’s leader. A few other sites have hosted shows here and there, for 37 subsidized shows in all, but recruiting more regulars has been a challenge. “Believe me, we have talked to other venues. We will keep trying,” Guarneri says.
The first fair wage date was held in November 2017 at Bird & Beckett and featured a trio led by the local pianist Grant Levin. The bookstore has hosted one or two fair-wage events since then per month, with the lights turned low to help set the mood. It’s not a “glitzy place in an entertainment district,” proprietor Eric Whittington acknowledged in a recent interview at the shop. “On the surface, it’s a bookstore with some folding chairs.”

Fair wage venue: Bird & Beckett Books and Records.
The bookstore is an oasis for musicians and music lovers for many reasons, including the caliber and breadth of programming, the quality sound system, and the listening audience. On most nights, hardly anybody makes a peep, a nice contrast to the noisy, raucous environments jazz bands often live in.
At Bird & Beckett, night-of-show donations often don’t cover the store’s share of the promised fair wage, so Whittington has to dip into the bookstore’s nonprofit funds and lean on community fundraising.
“Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)”
It’s still early days for the fair wage model. In a year, Jazz in the Neighborhood has paid more than $10,000 in musician subsidies for the project.
The organization itself is funded through memberships and grants and is in the process of transitioning to a 501(c)(3) nonprofit status. That could help it expand.
Since inception in 2013, Jazz in the Neighborhood has grown into a budget of about $80,000, which it uses for the fair wage fund, and to put on its own shows and educational programs. Guarneri says it has paid $250,000 to musicians, including the subsidies, since it began.
Official figures for the average pay of a jazz musician in San Francisco are hard to come by. But Guarneri thinks that outside of private parties and corporate events, $150 per person is “one of the best gigs in town” — perhaps in the top 10% of what a jazz musician can make.
That’s because many local venues will pay $100 to $150 for an entire band or offer no base pay at all. Instead, the musicians might get a share of the door charge. Or tips only.

Pianist Grant Levin: First for the fair wage fund.
Pay of $50 or lower on a given night may mean a struggle to pay for groceries the next day. On top of that, for gigs during dinner hours, breaks and food need to be part of the negotiation, or else musicians may be out of luck and run low on blood sugar.
“It’s like Bob Marley said, ‘A hungry man is an angry man,” says Levin, paraphrasing one of Marley’s most famous songs.
Guarneri says that “a lot of people don’t even realize what is going on. They walk in, hear music and think ‘Oh, these guys are really good, they are probably making okay money!’”
Doing What You Love
There are many reasons behind the low pay.
A wide range of entertainment options have undercut live music, and — let’s face it — jazz isn’t the often the top choice for young people going out on the town with disposable income. Well-paid unionized hotel gigs downtown, once coveted, have mostly disappeared.
It’s difficult to counterbalance the steady supply of musicians willing to play for next to nothing.
For the gigs that remain, pay is commonly undercut by established working musicians who don’t need the income, by young musicians who will work for free to get established, or by those with day jobs who don’t rely on music for pay.
“Once that precedent is set, once the underbidding has occurred, it’s difficult to counterbalance. We have a steady supply of musicians willing to play for next to nothing,” Levin says.
(I am no stranger to these dynamics. I work by day full-time as a journalist and take gigs at night as a singer. Writing and music are things people love to do; offers for exposure instead of pay are all too common. For me, of the two, music is harder because I love it more and need to be able to hire skilled accompanists, whereas writing is a solo act.)
No Tip Jar
Berkeley-based bassist, composer and band leader Kurt Ribak knows intimately how musicians often must do what’s necessary to make ends meet. Once he was part of a circus act performing non-jazz music to kids in parks. One circus gig called for him to wear a big tutu. “I am told it was quite a sight to behold,” he says.
Nowadays, however, Ribak performs mostly his own tunes. He has more than 75 original compositions. On Nov. 9 he led a trio at a fair-wage gig at Bird & Beckett. The suggested donation per person was from $10 to $20.

Sight to behold: Kurt Ribak.
Ribak appreciates what Jazz in the Neighborhood is trying to do. While $150 is not a huge amount of money, it is much more along the lines of a living wage. “In San Francisco, it feels like the community aspect is eroding in a lot of areas. To have a place that really is a community is a wonderful thing,” Ribak says of Bird & Beckett.
The next night, the bookstore featured another fair wage act, a group of eight musicians led by horn player Jeff Sanford. The cover charge was $25.
On both nights, Bird & Beckett offered customers discounts based on income. No one is turned away for lack of funds.
Before the music starts, owner Whittington tells the audience about the fund and Jazz in the Neighborhood, and notes the absence of a tip jar.
Whittington says he tries to educate people that musicians shouldn’t have to rely on tips, though there may be resistance to paying for live music, “even in this day of $1.3 million homes.”
“I tell them: ‘Look, these people are performing for you. Who’s going to pay them? Should they do this for free? Should they do it for nickels? How do you feel about that?’”
Emily Hayes is a jazz/blues/country vocalist and in her spare time is a full-time journalist.
 

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/books/review/gary-giddins-bing-crosby-biography.html?mc_cid=88c189953d&mc_eid=74828b872a

How Bing Crosby Changed the Course of Pop Music

Nov. 28, 2018
By James Gavin

•  
• Nonfiction

Bing croons “White Christmas” to an enraptured Marjorie Reynolds in the 1942 movie “Holiday Inn.”HLC Properties
 

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James Gavin has written biographies of Chet Baker, Lena Horne and Peggy Lee. He is working on a biography of George Michael.  

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• Original manuscripts for hundreds of songs, including “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Lush Life,” “Something to Live For,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Rain Check” and “King Fit De Battle of Alabam”;
• Original manuscripts for musicals “Beggar’s Holiday” and “Rose Colored Glasses”;
• Contracts and other documents concerning Strayhorn’s business dealings with the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers;
• Contracts for individual works including “Absinthe,” “Blossom,” “Christmas Present,” “Love Came,” “Passion Flower,” “Rosebud,” “Tigress” and “Watch Your Cue”;
• Autographed letter to Strayhorn from longtime partner Aaron Bridgers (1954);
• Autographed letter to Strayhorn from Luther Henderson (1966);
• Autographed essay, “Harmony,” examining Strayhorn’s approach to music writing, especially jazz, and compositional technique (undated);
• Two of Strayhorn’s personal address books and passports.

Although classically trained, Billy Strayhorn is better known for his work in jazz. “His contribution to American music since the 1940s has been enormous,” said Larry Appelbaum, the Library of Congress Music Division’s jazz specialist. “The Billy Strayhorn Collection documents the creative work of a musical architect of the highest order who spent most of his adult years working behind the scenes in the shadow and employ of Duke Ellington. Unlike many other musical geniuses, Strayhorn did not seek the limelight or attention, but scholars, performers, composers and arrangers — for the first time in 50 years — will finally have full public access to someone who added greatly to the brilliance and beauty of 20th-century music.”
Born on Nov. 29, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio, Strayhorn spent most of his formative years in and around Pittsburgh, where his family moved when he was about five years old, and in Hillsborough, North Carolina, the home of his mother’s family. He began taking piano lessons at an early age, followed by harmony instruction. He was composing in his teens and produced the musical “Fantastic Rhythm” in 1935 at the age of 19. Strayhorn continued to develop his skills as a composer and pianist, aspiring toward a career in classical music. He completed his first classic, “Lush Life” in 1936 when he was 20.
Strayhorn was 25 when he met bandleader and composer Duke Ellington in 1938. A month later, he began his 28-year association with Ellington. The multi-talented Strayhorn wrote or collaborated on some of the band’s biggest hits and also arranged a substantial part of the Ellington Orchestra’s repertoire. He also occasionally served as lyricist, vocal coach and second pianist in the orchestra. He died at the age of 51 on May 31, 1967. 
Since Strayhorn’s death, his original manuscripts have been in the custody of the Strayhorn family and have been available only for limited scholarship. The acquisition of the Billy Strayhorn Music Manuscripts and Estate Papers will enhance the Library’s existing materials documenting Strayhorn’s legacy. Foremost among these are the original manuscript scores for his first musical, “Fantastic Rhythm” and the 1941 musical co-written by Strayhorn and Ellington, “Jump for Joy.” 
In addition, the Library has in its collections 50 songs composed by Strayhorn that were registered for copyright during the period of 1941-1969 and 51 compositions by Strayhorn and Ellington that were submitted for copyright from 1939-1965. All of these materials will be available in the Music Division’s Performing Arts Reading Room on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. The Strayhorn collection will enrich the existing collections of Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Billy Taylor, Gerry Mulligan, Alvin Ailey, Dexter Gordon and Shelly Manne.
A finding aid for the Strayhorn collection can be found at
findingaids.loc.gov/exist_collections/service/music/eadxmlmusic/eadpdfmusic/2018/mu018014.pdf.
The Library’s unparalleled music holdings include manuscript and printed scores, in addition to correspondence, photographs, financial and legal papers, sound recordings, books, librettos, music-related periodicals and microforms and musical instruments. The Library’s music manuscript holdings include those of European masters such as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt and Mozart, and those of American masters such as Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and Charles Mingus. The Alan Lomax collection of field recordings of American roots music, Woody Guthrie’s original recordings and manuscripts, and one-of-a-kind recordings of bluesman Robert Johnson from the 1930s are also among the Library’s musical treasures. More information about the division’s holdings of music, theater and dance can be found at loc.gov/rr/perform/.
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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PR 18-141
2018-11-29
ISSN 0731-3527
 

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New Orleans jazz is a living, breathing, evolving force, but its origins in the early 20th century require special preservation. That is the job of the Hogan Jazz Archive. (Photo by George Fletcher, courtesy Harry V. Souchon Sr. Collection)
That’s the hat. Yes, it’s the very one that jazz guitarist and raconteur Danny Barker wore. Deep in the recesses of the Hogan Jazz Archive, cocked discreetly on a shelf, is a taupe-colored fedora with a wide brown ribbon and a deep dent in the center of the crown. It’s easy to overlook, given all there is to see down here—yards and yards of sheet music and precious vinyl recordings, letters, books, old phonographs, musical instruments.
In the mid-1960s, the head on which that particular hat sat had the brilliant idea to save what was then a struggling brass band tradition in New Orleans. If Barker and his Fairview Baptist Church Christian Band had not inspired future generations of young people to reclaim their musical heritage, New Orleans would be a different place entirely. A quieter place. With fern bars. And better traffic flow. But an important part of the city’s soundscape—the social aid and pleasure club parades and the jazz funerals and all the music-filled traditions that mark the bonds of community and the passage of time—would be a memory.
The Hogan is one of the last two major university jazz archives in the nation (the other is at Rutgers) and is essential to the world’s understanding of the beginnings of jazz, black gospel music of the 20th century and the golden era of New Orleans R&B. Its more than 2,000 tapes of oral histories are a never-ending cache of teachable moments for musicians, academics and fans.
“The artifacts speak to you because they’re not just surface-level artifacts,” said ethnomusicologist and Tulane associate professor of music Matt Sakakeeny. “Let’s say it was 1959 and Richard B. Allen, one of the Hogan’s first curators, is going out to interview the Barbarin family about their place in the New Orleans jazz tradition. Well, it’s not until you get to the archive do you understand that he’s showing up at the door with a portable reel-to-reel recorder, a giant machine. So, now you know (the Barbarins’) address. He would type up his notes so you might understand what a person was wearing that day, or how old they were or what kind of shape they were in, what family members were around. Also included is a letter that the archivist has from the city—because it’s Jim Crow and a white man like Allen is not legally allowed to go into the space of a black family or even sit in a bar with a black patron. So, these archivists had official letters from the city saying, ‘Police, don’t obstruct this work that is being undertaken.’ Maybe that gives you a sense of the dynamics of an oral history interview.”
The Barbarins are one of many musical families in New Orleans, and mellophone player Isidore Barbarin was Danny Barker’s maternal grandfather. Barker’s cousin, Charles Barbarin Sr., was a co-leader of the Fairview band. A drummer in the family, Uncle Paul Barbarin, played frequently with Louis Armstrong and wrote “Bourbon Street Parade,” one of the best-known songs in the New Orleans canon. And yet, no stranger walking into the Hogan Jazz Archive, located at Jones Hall on Tulane’s uptown campus, would guess that, or suspect any of the treasures that lie within the archive’s closed stacks.
It’s quiet in here. Like, “Twin-Peaks’’-David-Lynch-what’s-gonna-happen-next quiet. Less really is more when it comes to noise in a place where people are trying to think.
But the archivists fill the void—Alaina Hebert, Lynn Abbott and, for more than 40 years, curator Bruce Raeburn. They steer visitors to materials that might excite them. They also send visitors to the archive’s glass-encased listening rooms to hear recordings at full blast (OK, full-ish). Researchers from the entire jazz diaspora come to consult with them—Europe, Japan, Australia, China, Canada, Alaska, the Seventh Ward of New Orleans, Pontchartrain Park and even Dixon Hall on Tulane’s campus. For Sakakeeny, input from Hogan archivists led to an unexpected discovery.
While researching his 2013 book Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans, Sakakeeny found evidence that shed new light on old assumptions about New Orleans brass band music. Like nearly everyone else, he’d thought the Dirty Dozen and Rebirth brass bands were transformative—the first to build their repertoires from popular, danceable, radio-friendly music.
But the fabled Olympia Brass Band, a favorite of traditional jazz purists, apparently felt like funkin’ it up,* as well. Archivists at the Hogan showed Sakakeeny vertical files of news clippings, songs and other ephemera that revealed a friskier Olympia. Turns out, they were doing what the younger Dirty Dozen and Rebirth were doing, but more than 20 years earlier.
“They were the hot, new, current band of the 1950s when Fats Domino and Professor Longhair and Dave Bartholomew were making New Orleans the center of R&B and soul and eventually funk music,” Sakakeeny said. “Olympia was playing that style of music in this ancient brass band ensemble. So I realized the story of the Olympia being these tradition-bearers was only part of the story.”
Jazz Letters
Jazz pianist and bandleader Jesse McBride is usually on the lookout for vinyl. After studying under the likes of Ellis Marsalis and multi-instrumentalist Harold Battiste at the University of New Orleans, McBride earned a master’s degree in musicology at Tulane in 2011 and is now a professor of practice. He takes his students to the Hogan, usually one at a time, and together they listen to vintage recordings and sometimes transcribe the melodies. “There are so many records that can never be put on a CD—and even CDs are really done now,” he said. “From the 1920s to the 1980s, there are some recordings that are only on LP, especially jazz recordings. Think about all the Cedar Walton records that got put out and how many will never be reproduced.
Walton was a great pianist. He played with Art Blakey. He actually went to Dillard (University) with Harold and Ellis.”
McBride asks his students what they want to hear and then pushes them toward a warren of rabbit holes. Case in point—the Tulane undergraduate listening to stride piano player James P. Johnson, the man who taught Fats Waller and accompanied Bessie Smith on “Backwater Blues.” Johnson wrote popular and classical music, including an opera in one act with librettist Langston Hughes.
“(My student) was listening to ‘Carolina Shout.’  That’s a great tune,” McBride said. “I said, ‘I know a place where we can go listen on LP, because you might want to hear it the way it came out, when it was released. Then, in looking through those James P. records, we can just see who’s around there alphabetically. If Johnson is there, ‘H’ ain’t too far. Go to (pianist Earl) ‘Fatha’ Hines and check out his records. ‘L’ ain’t too far. Check you out some Lil Hardin playing on a Louis Armstrong record. Or, let’s maybe explore and see if anybody has recorded ‘Carolina Shout’ in a different era. Or we could hear someone that was influenced by Johnson.’”
McBride is also eager to contextualize the contributions of musicians whose lifework reflects the often troubled times in which they lived—segregation, ill health, personal danger. “They attacked Nat ‘King’ Cole onstage,” he said, alluding to a 1965 incident in Birmingham, Alabama, when Cole was singing to an all-white audience and segregationists rushed the stage, injuring his back. “They attacked Harold,” McBride said, remembering that his mentor—Harold Battiste—was evacuated from a concert in the South while touring with Sonny & Cher. Battiste—a black man—was their musical director.
“He tells them stuff they need to hear,” said archivist Lynn Abbott. “He tells them the truth.”
Down on the bottom floor of the archive, there’s an infinity of truth. Abbott opens a box plainly marked:
Al Hirt papers, 1959–1977
MSS 006
Series 3: Correspondence Re: Lip Injury
Box 5 of 8
In 1970, the Dixieland trumpeter’s career was in doubt. A flying brick split open Hirt’s lip during a carnival parade. The New York Times reported the incident in a story titled, “New Orleans Ends the Most Violent Mardi Gras Season in Years with 600 in Its Jail.” Hirt required stitches, which threatened his embouchure, and the outpouring of public support was immediate. But, like all good artifacts, the letters raise as many questions as the brick:
From Vancouver, B.C., Canada:
Big Al—Don’t lose your cool, man.
—Small Al
And from Iowa City, Iowa:
Dear Mr. Hirt, I was shocked and sickened to hear of the tragic “accident” that befell you this week in New Orleans. It is surely a frightening thing how easy it is for someone insignificant and worthless to bring down someone great … I have read a good deal about Vitamin E in the prevention of rigid scar tissue … For you the prevention of bad scarring means your whole life … I have always loved hearing you play and I sincerely hope I may have the pleasure of hearing you for many years to come.
— Sincerely best wishes, Marilyn Trumpp (Mrs. Donald G. Trumpp)
Voices in the Ether
Hogan archivists want to maintain their unmatched trove of oral histories online, so everyone can have access. They boast the best customer service of any jazz archive anywhere in the world. It’s fun coming down here. With their reference request forms in triplicate and neatly stacked stacks, Hebert and Abbott create an environment in which all manner of connections can be made.
“You don’t have to be a jazz fanatic to get something deep out of here,” Abbott says, standing near blues writer Robert Palmer’s books.
This is where to find tape of Harrison Verret, who taught his brother-in-law Fats Domino to play piano. Or every research note and draft of Just Mahalia, Baby, Laurraine Goreau’s 1975 biography of Mahalia Jackson. The Hogan negotiated for 20 years for Louis Prima’s papers and effects. His room is next door. And downstairs is a 45-rpm single from the blind guitar player Snooks Eaglin—his first—called “Jesus Will Fix It For You.”
When Danny Barker’s personal archive drowned at his home in 2005 following Hurricane Katrina, his family and friends trusted the Hogan as the place to hold much of what was left. That’s why his hat is on the shelf downstairs.
The fedora, Barker’s burgundy fez and the green cotton cap he wore for the 1987 TV movie, “A Gathering of Old Men,” are reminders of the many months I spent researching him for The Historic New Orleans Collection. In 2016, editors were reissuing his memoir, A Life in Jazz, and needed a new introduction. I didn’t see the hats back then. But other, first-person material made
Barker, who died in 1994, seem as alive as ever. His voice is on tape. And hearing a voice beats reading a transcript any day.
That could be why the silence here helps. It allows sounds that are carrying over generations a chance to be heard. Ever hear Alice Zeno, mother of the traditional jazz clarinet player George Lewis, speaking on tape? It’s Alaina Hebert’s favorite oral history. Mrs. Zeno says she was born on June 7, 1864, but it’s more likely she was born in 1865, less than two months after the end of the Civil War. Her mother and grandmother were slaves. When she speaks with jazz historians Bill Russell and Dick
Allen, she’s about 94 years old.
But the way she speaks! French was Mrs. Zeno’s mother tongue. She was also conversant in English, Creole, German, Spanish and some Wolof—the language of her ancestors in West Africa. On the tape, she often sounds like a grown man’s mother. But then, she can sound like a darling young girl:
Alice Zeno: “Sometimes, when I see George look(ing) down, then I begin to sing to cheer him up.”
Bill Russell: “Could you sing a part of a little song like that right now, or even hum it?”
Alice Zeno: “Anything would come to my mind. Ah, yes, them was the good ole days. We think we have it hard now. No, no … ”
“Maybe simpler times with family is what she’s talking about,” Hebert said, “when you think about everything she lived through in her life and that she worked herself almost to death to raise George (Lewis) and provide him with an instrument on a maid’s wages. She’d lost several children, some were stillborn, some died in infancy, so she had that on her mind. Her mother told her, ‘If you call him “George” it’ll bring good luck and he’ll live.’”
The archive doesn’t tape new oral histories anymore, which ethnomusicologist Matt Sakakeeny is hoping will change. He’d like to see more modern musicians, bands and people of interest represented and stronger collaborative ties with other archives in the city. Whether that happens will depend on university leaders, the director of special collections and the successor as curator to Raeburn, who retired this year. In the meantime, Hebert and Abbott are keeping up the customer service.
“One of the missing links of the New Orleans brass band tradition is, how did the music sound during the origins of jazz,” Sakakeeny said. “I brought this question to the archivists at the Hogan Jazz Archive, and they said, ‘We recently discovered film footage of a 1920s Mardi Gras parade.’ Well, who cares, right? Almost all 1920s film footage is silent. Well, we watch the video and for some odd reason there is sound.”
The Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club hired a brass band for their parade on Carnival Day, circa 1928, Sakakeeny said. “And you hear maybe 15 seconds of brass band music. Very little melody going on, but what do you hear? You hear the bass drum playing what in New Orleans we call the ‘Big 4,’ the four-beat—Duh. Duh. Duh. DUH-DUH! We knew we were onto something when we thought that brass band and jazz musicians were playing this syncopated, African-derived, polyrhythmic music back in the teens and ’20s. But we couldn’t actually prove it. And now, we have these 10 to 15 seconds of audio only because people with a lot more patience than me are combing through the artifacts that are available.”
So, never mind the silence. Rewards await. Anything can happen at the Hogan.
Gwen Thompkins is a New Orleans-based journalist and host of the weekly public radio show “Music Inside Out.” musicinsideout.org.
Editor’s note: This article appeared first in the September 2018 issue of Tulanian.
 

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Photo: Art Kane
Sixty years ago, 57 jazz musicians gathered in front of a Harlem brownstone at 17 East 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, for a photo shoot. Though it didn’t seem like a big deal at the time, the resulting photograph, taken by Art Kane and published in the January 1959 issue of Esquire, went on to become one of the most iconic images in jazz. The shot, which featured such legends as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, and Mary Lou Williams, captured the music at an inflection point. The next year, young innovators like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Dave Brubeck would record now-canonical albums that changed jazz forever.
Jazz is often cast in terms of forward progress, each epoch neutering the previous one — small-group bebop usurping big-band swing, for instance. But “A Great Day in Harlem,” the subject of a recently published book called Art Kane: Harlem 1958, which includes several outtakes from the day, is a portrait of harmony, old and new guard alike peaceably intermingling. The photo suggests that jazz is as much about continuity and tradition as it is about radical change.
Of the dozens of musicians who showed up, only two are still alive: the tenor saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Benny Golson. At the time, Rollins, who had already recorded such albums as Tenor Madness, Saxophone Colossus, and Way Out West(recently reissued), was a titan of his instrument. But Golson, who has composed some of the most enduring tunes in jazz, including “Whisper Not,” “Stablemates,” “Killer Joe,” “Blues March,” and “I Remember Clifford,” had yet to prove himself, by his account. “I was the new boy in town,” he recalled.
In a recent phone conversation, Golson, who turns 90 in January and wrote a foreword for the book, reflected on his career in jazz, looking back on that morning in August 1958 when he appeared at the 10 a.m. shoot — unreasonably early by the standards of jazz musicians, who tend to keep unreasonably late hours — to find so many of his idols in attendance. “It was,” he said, “a small miracle.”
Tell me about the photo. How did you know to show up at the spot at 10 in the morning?
Do you remember someone named Nat Hentoff?
Of course.
During that time, he was writing for DownBeat before he became involved with politics, and he was the one who called me. At that time, I was the new boy in town, and I just thought it was another photograph — go up there, click, and that was it. But when I got up there, I saw all of my heroes, and then I wondered, Why in the heck am I here? Nobody really knows who I am. When I got there, most everybody who was supposed to be there was there, but the problem was, as Art [Kane] was trying to get everybody together collectively, there was a bar on the corner, and he had a hard time getting everyone back from the bar at the same time. Art was such a patient guy, he was trying to get that all together. It took over an hour to get that picture. And when we finally took the final shot, Willie “the Lion” Smith was in the bar — he didn’t make the shot.
Wasn’t it a little early to be drinking?
Well, it seems like this was a special occasion and they wanted to augment it a little bit.
Where did you live at the time?
Where I lived at the moment was 55 West 92nd Street. I was on the fourth floor and Quincy [Jones] was on the sixth floor. We were in the same building, but somehow he wasn’t called or he didn’t make it. Something happened, and he wasn’t in the photograph. In fact, there were a lot of people who weren’t in the photograph. But you know, a lot of people were working: John Coltrane, Miles, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman. Buddy Rich should have been there. Greatest drummer I ever heard in my life. I’m not talking about his style. His technique — nobody could touch that man. I’m telling you, no drummer that you ever speak of — Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, Gene Krupa. No way. He was in a space by himself, and I don’t know if people realize that.
That’s interesting that you should say that because he seems to be sort of excluded from the pantheon.
That’s their mistake. But his personality was horrible.
You mentioned that you didn’t feel like you belonged in the company of some of the other sort of legendary musicians.
Right, I hadn’t really proven myself by then. Most of the guys there, I knew who they were, but I didn’t know them. Who did I know? I knew Dizzy Gillespie because I was with his band. I knew Gigi Gryce — a couple of months after that picture was taken, he was the best man at my wedding. I knew Art Farmer, who is standing beside me, and I knew Art Blakey, and I knew Sonny Rollins. The other people I didn’t really know. Of course, as time went by, I got to know most of them, but initially, I was the new boy in town. I tell my audiences, a situation like that, I could have appeared there nude and nobody would have paid any attention to me.
I feel like you’re selling yourself short. By the time this photo was taken, you had already written “Whisper Not,” and you’d also put out a few records under your own name.
Well, what really got me started was when Miles Davis record “Stablemates” [in 1955]. Before that, I’m embarrassed when I look back. I would meet people and give them a lead sheet. Nothing ever happened. But when John Coltrane left to join Miles, I saw him one week later on Columbia Avenue, the street in North Philadelphia where John and I lived — I lived on 17th Street; he lived on 12th Street. I asked him how it was going with Miles because I knew he had to come abreast with the repertoire, and he said it was going good. Then he added, “But Miles needs some tunes, do you have any?” Are you kidding? I had written this oddball tune called “Stablemates.” John took it with him, and I didn’t think any more of it because nobody was recording anything of mine. James Moody recorded the very first thing, and it didn’t get much attention. Then I ran into John about a month later, and he said “Guess what?” I said, “What, he do that tune I gave you?” He said, “Yeah, we recorded it!” I said, “What? Miles recorded my tune?” He said, “Yeah, Miles dug it.” And when I saw Miles, Miles said to me, “What were you smokin’ when you wrote that?”
Miles is also sorely missing from that photo, of course.
And Red Garland, who was from Philadelphia. He wasn’t in the picture, but I assume if he were in town he would have been. But then, like I said, lots of others weren’t there. And we never knew. What do you do when you get a magazine and you finish reading it? The one that had the photograph in it, with the picture, I threw it in the trash, like we always do. And then it started to gain fame. Those who were still alive, we couldn’t believe it. When I signed with Columbia Records, Bruce Lundvall, he had the picture, and I lamented to him, “Ah, I had that picture, and I threw that magazine away!” I went back to Philadelphia — I was just about to sign with the label — and a couple of weeks later, the doorbell rang and it was somebody with a big package; he’d sent me a big-size copy of that picture, which is still in my house in Los Angeles. That picture really became iconic, and then ones, twos, threes, everybody started to depart, and then we finally wound up with Sonny Rollins and me.
Do you walk by the spot at all?
Never, never, never; it’s out of my territory. It’s up on 126th Street on the East Side. I never go on the East Side for anything. Not that I try to avoid it. What I do never takes me there. So that’s the way it is.
It seems like you’re in pretty good shape.
You know, this January, I’ll be 90 years old. Now, I tell my audiences, it’s a good thing I chose music because I’m still playing. It’s a good thing I wasn’t a quarterback. Who’s ever heard of an 89-year-old quarterback? So I’m still functional. I still do what is in my heart to do. I’m still able to play, nothing wrong with my mind and my fingers. [When] I play my solo now, there’s a chair right by the piano. I sit down, but I’m still playing. Of course, Sonny will never play again. Tragic.
What are you working on lately, anything new?
Nothing new. What has happened to me now, after being married 60 years — my wife has Alzheimer’s, and my life is not the same, not the same. She doesn’t know who my daughter is. Sometimes she knows who I am. Sometimes she’ll ask me where do I live. It’s funny and tragic at the same time.
That’s a good way to look at it.
So I don’t want to be away. We had a place in Germany for years — I had to give it up, sell the car, give the piano away, because I can’t be in Germany during the summer, because she’s here in a nursing home. So we gave it up. And I want to be here as much as I can. I don’t want to be gone too long. I don’t want to do anything that’s going to take me away too long. Yet I have to work; I’m not rich! So my life is quite different. Sometimes I feel like just lying down and crying.
So you’re mostly performing now?
No, I also do master classes. I’ve been up to Hartford and Stanford and throughout Europe and different colleges. They want me because I’m old and I have lots of information. I’ve seen it all, Matt.
I feel like you and Wayne Shorter —
That guy doesn’t show his age, does he?
That’s true, but it’s interesting that you’re both tenor saxophonists and you’ve both written such enduring tunes. I feel like it’s not often the case that tenor sax players are composers.
He’s of the same ilk, absolutely. He’s still playing, and he sounds great.
A lot of the tunes that you wrote were very memorable, melodically speaking, but I don’t hear that as much in jazz nowadays. Do you think there’s less of an emphasis on melody in modern jazz?
Not as much melody as there used to be. Some of the tunes sometimes sound athletic, you know? The memorable thing — you know, I love writing ballads, but there’s no real room for ballads anymore (like Peggy Lee, Diana Ross, Sarah Vaughan, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald), that’s kind of gone by the wayside a bit.

Photo: Art Kane
In 2004, you were featured in the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, with Tom Hanks. Do you keep in touch with him?
I hear from Tom all the time, not so much from Steve. His wife, Rita, she’s a singer. They’re both sweethearts. But they’re ordinary just like you and me. So is Steven.
Did that movie bring new listeners to your work?
They had a little gathering out there in Hollywood once, Dick Van Dyke was there. Incredible. This music has been fantastic for me. I love it. And you know, years ago, I used to be a truck driver before I really got started professionally. The first job I had, I used to deliver furniture. And then I got another job where I became an expert at hanging these big mirrors. I could put up a mirror in 20 minutes. I hated both of the jobs. And when I went in and told ’em I wouldn’t be coming back, they all asked me what I was gonna be doing. I said, “I’m gonna be a jazz musician.” And they all started to laugh. But I never went back. And there’s nothing wrong with those kinds of jobs, there’s nothing wrong with hard work, but I tell you, and I tell my audiences, being a musician is so much better than being a truck driver.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.
Nothing wrong with it at all, and I appreciated the money, but I hated every moment of it. I watched the clock from 8 o’clock till 5 o’clock, every day.
I don’t blame you.
And here I am at the end of my career. We’ve got so many young ones, and I’m inspired when I see what they’re doing. They’re doing it much faster. When I was coming up, you couldn’t go to college and get a diploma for jazz. When I went to college, I was told that if I was caught having anything to do with jazz, I would be expelled from the college. I was playing in Washington, D.C., and I used to sneak over the wall at night in the back, after having played the gig, and I went to work one night, went up on the bandstand, and I turned around and at the first table there was the head of the theory department. And when I finished playing, what I was expecting was, “See me in my office tomorrow at 9 o’clock,” but he said to me instead, “Great set,” and nothing else was ever said.
I’m wondering a little more about the photo because you’re standing behind Art Blakey. The shot was taken in August 1958, and then two months later, you recorded “Moanin’” with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. It’s one of the canonical albums released in 1959, along with Kind of Blue, Time Out, The Shape of Jazz to Come, Mingus Ah Um, Giant Steps …
That almost didn’t happen, and “Moanin’” almost didn’t happen. During breaks, sometimes Bobby [Timmons] would have a little thing he’d play, just a little lick, nobody really played any attention to it. But as time went by, we were getting ready to record. I thought about that, and I said, he’s got eight bars there, but he doesn’t have a bridge. I called a rehearsal, and I said, “Bobby, you know that little thing you play? You’ve got a potential tune there. We’re gonna sit here and make up an eight-bar bridge.” He said, “Oh, this is nothing.” I said, “Bobby, it’s got great potential, try to put a bridge to it.” And so he did. In about a half-hour, he had something together, and he played it for me. I said, “Bobby, no, you don’t have the same feeling as the original lick.” He said, “You write it.” I said, “No, Bobby, this has gotta be your tune. Try again.” And so in 15 minutes, he had a bridge, and he played it for me, and I said, “That’s it.” I said, “What are you gonna call it? What does it make you think about?” He said, “Maybe ‘Moanin’’?” I said, “Okay, call it ‘Moanin’.’” I said, “We’re going to play it tonight, and the audience is going to tell us what they think of it.”
I had just come in to the band, and Art wasn’t making that much money. There were so many things wrong, and I talked to him sometimes. One of our conversations during the break was, “Art, the way you play those drums, you should be a millionaire.” And when I mentioned the word millionaire, his eyes widened. And he said to me, “What do I do?” And I had the nerve to tell him, “Do everything I tell you to do.” And he said, “What do I do?” I said, “Get a new band.” He said, “All right, tell them they’re fired.” I said, “I can’t tell them they’re fired.” I had just come into the band, but eventually it did happen, and it’s terrible because I knew all the guys, but the guys were going to sleep on the bandstand and nodding and all kinds of crazy stuff.
And during all that time, everybody was listening to what I was saying. I said to Alfred Lion at Blue Note, “I have a photograph here, Alfred, that one of the fans took of Art. It’s a head shot. I’d like that head shot on the cover.” And they did everything I was telling ‘em to do. Up to this day, I can’t believe it. Incredible!
Sounds like it was more your band than Art Blakey’s at the time.
At the time, yeah, because I would get the money, and I would pay the men.
In Jean Bach’s documentary about the photo, A Great Day in Harlem, Marian McPartland says something early on that sort of struck me as insightful. She wonders aloud what it would have sounded like if every musician had brought his or her instrument to the shoot and everyone had played. What do you think that would have sounded like?
That never crossed my mind. That would have been something. How about that. We’d have had somebody from every instrument — piano, bass, trumpet, trombone. My goodness! Hmm. That never crossed my mind.
 
 

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Fred Hess, who died on October 27 at the age of 74, used to tell his music theory and composition students that he could lie in bed and see his whole life in front of him: the books he’d read and written, and his tenor saxophone, which he’d been mastering for the better part of his life, playing avant-garde and straight-ahead jazz. 
Trinidad later helped Hess move from his tiny carriage house, and when he first walked in, he saw exactly what his teacher had been talking about. “He was very much centered around music,” Trinidad says. “There was a barber chair he used to practice in, and his bed, and just wall-to-wall records and books. It was like a mini-library that he was basically living in, just surrounded with music.”
Instead of offering gas money in exchange for the help, Hess pointed to a stack of records and told Trinidad to take ten or twenty and call it good.
“Those records I still have today and I listen to so much,” Trinidad says. “Like some ECM Jan Garbarek records that were out there — some really beautiful stuff — and I was like, ‘Wow, this is better than gas money.’ I still hold on to those treasures that he gave me.”
Trinidad also holds on to a lot of things that Hess taught him, like playing outside of the box and digging into musical theory and composition. 
“The way he blended humor and difficult pieces of content, he was able to get us through difficult parts of learning,” Trinidad remembers. “I think that’s what made class so much fun: We would get to this really, like, deep-end stuff with theory, but his humor and the way that he approached his understanding of how those pieces of theory work in music just made it fun. So it was like we couldn’t wait to get to class — like, ‘What’s Fred going to say today?’
“It was unpredictable, actually,” he adds. “Much like his music, I think, was the way he taught. There was this playfulness and unpredictability, but still this level of high intelligence. I felt like that always encompassed him no matter what he did, whether that was a conversation or the way he taught class or played. He was always in that world. He was like that until the day he died.”
Hess was born in Abington, Pennsylvania, in 1944 but grew up in New Jersey and went to Trenton State College before attending the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock in 1979 alongside Art Ensemble of Chicago saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell. Hess, who studied with Phil Woods, moved to Colorado in 1981 and eventually earned his doctorate in musical composition from the University of Colorado. Trumpeter Ron Miles recalls first meeting Hess in 1983, when Hess and his daughter, Tara, were living in student housing in Boulder. 
Miles, who was nineteen at the time, would take the bus up to Boulder to play with Hess. He says he and Hess would be “squeaking and squawking” while a teenage Tara stayed in her room, listening to the Police.
“I remember him driving me to the bus,” Miles says, “and he had this funky old car. The windshield wipers didn’t really work. He would reach out his side and push them to one side. I’d reach out the passenger side and push them back, and we’d kind of make our way. I don’t know how we survived, but we’d make our way to the bus stop.” 
Miles would go on to collaborate with Hess many times over the next three decades, both as part of the Boulder Creative Music Ensemble, which Hess formed in 1982, and on his big-band recordings. 
Colin Bricker, engineer and owner of Mighty Fine Productions, recorded around a dozen albums with Hess, who he says “looked like an accountant but wearing a plastic Simpson’s toy watch.” 
“Fred’s music was challenging, individual and smart,” Bricker says. “He opened the door for so many Denver creatives to make the sounds they imagined, unapologetically. My favorite works were his big-band records — such massive creative endeavors. Some of the best musicians in the world playing music they could barely hang on to at times, and at others sounding like a great classic big band.”
In the liner notes to his 2011 big-band recording Into the Open, Hess wrote that the album represented his love of the traditional big-band ensemble, beginning in the 1950s with the Bill Holman and Gerry Mulligan charts that he listened to as a teenager. 
“The CD also included musical allusions and excerpts from other composers that influenced me — Gary McFarland, Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer, Rob McConnell, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and even Anthony Braxton, with his forays into the standard jazz ensemble instrumentation,” the liner notes continue. “Into the Open is about continuing this rich musical legacy from the vantage point of looking back and thinking forward. Jazz and classical music has walked a path that now includes the past and the future as one continuum.” 
Listening to Hess’s recorded output, it’s clear that the saxophonist had a high regard for the past while keeping an eye on the future. 
“He was somebody who just loved music of all stripes and was committed all his life to learning more about styles that maybe he was less familiar with than others, and all the while just maintaining his own really unique, personal voice,” Miles notes.
“I think in a lot of ways, I’m a very different composer than him,” he continues. “He would always joke that I’d always have all these themes in my music, and with one measure he would make a hundred measures, because I’m really a songwriter. But he was a real composer in the tradition of developing material and taking a small thing and making it larger. And he was so great at it. Me? I just write the next note that sounds right to me.
“But I must say, getting to play great music — which, I got to play his music — is just kind of the same as being in an orchestra and getting to play Bartók’s music or Ellington’s music. Just being around that great music lets you know whether what you’re writing is up to snuff or not, because that music is unquestionably great,” Miles adds. “Hopefully these little songs that I write aren’t the same as what Fred would write; I hopefully aspire to that level.”
While Hess composed many pieces using standard notation, he was also known for his graphic scores, particularly his “Feinman Series” of compositions, which Miles says were based on colliding atomic particles.
“He would draw these beautiful artistic structured improvisations,” Miles says. “It would give you something to base your solos on other than chord changes.”
Trinidad remembers being in Hess’s One O’Clock Big Band at Metro and performing a graphic score based on the clef family. 
“He wrote a series of how treble clef and bass clef and alto clef are this family, and he would read these stories at our concerts,” Trinidad remembers, “like, ‘Bass clef came home from the store and saw that the house was wrecked.’ And then we would play that. And then he’d be like, ‘He saw his daughter, alto clef, and he went for a walk.’ We’d play that part. Then he would stop us. There was this whole story. The music was just a picture, like a map of the family going on a walk or something, and we would just play this story. And we would all bow afterward. And that was our chart.”
While such projects forced students to get creative, Miles says he knew that when he played on Hess’s album he’d be challenged, and he knew the music would be swinging. Miles also says Hess told him that being an improvising musician is important and can generate positive energy — not only for the audience, but for other musicians and the community. 
“He was a real beacon, a real master at improvising,” Miles says. “And those lessons of musicality and deep study were things that I hold to this day — that lifelong enthusiasm. Constant learning, constant teaching is something that holds true for the rest of us as we carry on without him.”
 

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The Ear Inn on Spring Street, photographed in October 2018.Nina Westervelt
In this series for T, the author Reggie Nadelson revisits New York institutions that have defined cool for decades, from time-honored restaurants to unsung dives.
On Sunday nights, when the house band plays jazz at the Ear Inn, a bar over by the Hudson River on Spring Street, the whole building shakes. In the little apartment upstairs — once the home of the Ear’s first proprietor and now used by the current owners for occasional gatherings — old Dutch gin jugs shudder, thick glass Champagne bottles rattle, and 18th-century apothecary flasks clink. But then this building, with its sloping floors and death-defying stairs, went up some time around 1770. It has housed a bar continuously since 1817. In its early days, water lapped at the front door, which was then just four feet from the river.
The Ear is an amiable place: good music, good company, good drinks and food. Waves of customers come and go throughout the day — including tourists, of course. When I visit in October, a woman remarks in a German accent, “My book says this is the last real place in New York.” At lunchtime, there are editors who come from the Penguin Books office around the corner, as well as a few locals, some execs from the UPS outpost across the street. Then the cocktail crowd comes: the groups of 20-somethings who gather on the sidewalk in good weather and the residents of the neighborhood’s shiny new condos.
The Earregulars, the house jazz band at the Ear Inn, draw a crowd on Sunday nights.Nina Westervelt

The Earregulars, the house jazz band at the Ear Inn, draw a crowd on Sunday nights.Nina Westervelt
“It’s all dog walkers and joggers around here now,” says Richard “Rip” Hayman (that’s Captain Richard Perry Hayman, of the United States merchant marine), who has co-owned the Ear with Martin Sheridan, his partner in the venture, since the 1970s. “In the evening, you can smell the Botox,” Hayman adds with benign sarcasm. In his lilting Irish accent, Sheridan notes that during the recent fashion week, with shows happening nearby, “The models wandered past looking like lost peacocks on their high heels.”
With its affable owners and its music and poetry readings, the Ear resembles a congenial Irish pub. (And there are beers enough to satisfy any beer bore.) But what provides the almost palpable rush at this place is that it seems to vibrate with New York history, with the thrilling story of a city becoming itself. Inevitably, there are ghosts. 
Ghosts of Portuguese sailors who arrived in New York even before the Dutch; of the Dutch who drank Champagne with their oysters, leaving those old bottles behind; of Thomas Cooke, the brewer who ran the place in the late 19th century, when the waterfront had exploded with traffic, ships, cargo, passengers, all looking for a drink; of the dockworkers of the mid-20th century.
“Even in my time, you could smell the coffee and the spices from the ships,” says Hayman. When he and Sheridan bought the place in the ’70s, it was still a longshoreman’s dive where the guys who didn’t get a gig unloading ships (remember those scenes in “On the Waterfront”) drank from 5 in the morning until noon. They were plenty upset when the new owners tossed the pool table and the jukebox and changed the Ear’s M.O. by introducing food and civility.
The Ear in 1973.Courtesy of the Ear Inn
The Ear in 1973.Courtesy of the Ear Inn
Memorabilia clings to the Ear’s interiors like barnacles. In the front room, there’s the bar with bottles at the back, baseball caps hung overhead, a painting of the building as it might have been when it led directly out to the Hudson River. The walls are crammed with old beer signs, photographs, newspaper clippings. Scribbled on a chalkboard are the daily specials; today’s include braised beef rib, shepherd’s pie, halibut with lemon butter. At the bar, Chef Ng Fonglum offers spicy lamb burgers and shrimp and the best dumplings this side of Chinatown. Everything is fresh — much of the produce is schlepped down from Hayman’s farm upstate — and nothing is fried.
Over lunch — creamy soup, great cheeseburgers, Guinness for Sheridan, Goose Island IPA for Hayman — the men recall their early days at the Ear. The artist Shari Dienes lived upstairs; when Hayman wanted to buy the Ear, she sold a Rauschenberg for the cash to help pay for it. John Lennon hung out at the bar, and Allen Ginsberg recited his work at poetry readings. The red neon sign outside lured them all in.
The sign is from the 1930s, after Prohibition, Hayman believes. The Landmarks Preservation Commission refused any additions to its design but had no problem with a subtraction and so, voilà, “Bar” became “Ear.” The Ear Inn sign became a kind of beacon, a lighthouse lamp in what was a desolate corner of the city through the 1970s and even the ’80s, where the homeless warmed themselves at barrel fires. “I used to bring them sacks of potatoes for roasting,” says Sheridan. It was a block, he adds, that was scary and thrilling: a good place for a murder or a duel.
The phone booth at the Ear.Nina WesterveltMemorabilia clings to the Ear’s interiors like barnacles.Nina Westervelt
Down the street, maybe a six-minute walk, is where Richmond Hill once stood. The colonial estate served as George Washington’s headquarters during the Battle of Long Island. Later, it belonged to Aaron Burr, who left from there in 1804 to take part in that fateful duel with Alexander Hamilton. (Cue the musical.) In those days, the area was still part of the pastoral exurban village of Greenwich. In 1817, it was formally incorporated into the City of New York and everything changed.
That same year, 326 Spring Street first opened as a bar. It was also the year that construction began on the Erie Canal and, as a result, the port of New York exploded. Across the pond, Beethoven, Shelley and Byron were at work. It was the year Jane Austen died.
When construction on the condo next to the Ear began in 2006 — it was Philip Johnson’s last design, known as the Urban Glass House — the foundations of the tavern were dug up and stabilized. “They dug down about six feet,” Hayman says, and found “apothecary bottles for elixirs and salves, and pieces of the actual original pier into the Hudson, animal skeletons.” Sheridan adds that the New-York Historical Society, which received the artifacts, said it was the best find they’d had in 100 years.
The Ear is sometimes known as the James Brown House, and this is the best story of all — perhaps true, perhaps not. (This part of town was never of much interest to anyone, so it remained intact and its legends grew.) James Brown, it is said, was an African-American aide to George Washington in the Revolutionary War and might be the fellow depicted in Emanuel Leutze’s painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Given his freedom, Brown had the house built for himself in the 1770s and lived there as a prosperous tobacconist and apothecary until his death.
Around 1985, the Ear’s current owners invited the other James Brown to perform; he was playing uptown. Sheridan says a message came back: “Brown said he couldn’t come, and also that the fried chicken in New York was so bad that he was going back to Georgia.”
Late afternoon at the Ear: At the bar are a few friends, an ex-cop. Over another pint, Sheridan swears that both James Brown stories are true — more or less. But I believe it all. The Ear is that kind of place. Cue the storytelling; wake the ghosts.
 
 

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https://www.essence.com/celebrity/frances-taylor-davis-first-wife-miles-davis-dies/

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“It is with great sadness and heavy heart that we, the family of Frances Taylor Davis, announce her passing early this morning…”
A Chicago native, Davis was an entertainer at heart. Dance was her first love, an art form that allowed her to tour the world over.

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“Frances was granted a scholarship at age 16 to study dance at the Dunham Technique in NY with Katherine Dunham. She trained and toured extensively with Dunham’s professional dance company in Europe and South Africa,” according to the family’s press statement. “On the 1948 tour, Frances was recruited for a special presentation to perform with the Paris Opera Ballet. She was the first African American in the history of the company to be invited to perform with the esteemed ballet company.”
She also appeared with Sammy Davis, Jr. in “Porgy And Bess,” “Mr. Wonderful” and “Shinbone Alley,” in addition to appearing with the original cast of West Side Story on Broadway.
Despite her immense talent, however, many remember her for her relationship to Miles Davis. The famous musician put her on the cover of his iconic 1961 album “ “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
But it was a relationship marked by domestic violence, and she left him in 1965 after five years of marriage. They eventually divorced it 1968.
“Every time I hit her, I felt bad because a lot of it really wasn’t her fault but had to do with me being temperamental and jealous,” Davis wrote in his 1990 memoir “Miles: The Autobiography.”
She was portrayed by Emayatzy Corinealdi in Don Cheadle’s 2015 film Miles Ahead.
After she retired, she was a popular figure in West Hollywood, according to the WeHoVille.
“..She was best known in West Hollywood as the hostess of Hamburger Hamlet, the Sunset Boulevard gathering spot for celebrities such as Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin that closed in 2011.”
She is survived by her son Jean Pierre Durand, step-daughter Cheryl Davis, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and many who loved her.
Our thoughts are with her family and friends.
 

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https://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/ny-sports-endzone-donaldson-paige-20181114-story.html
Jazz great ‘Sweet Papa’ Lou Donaldson’s has sports memories to treasure

“Blowin’ the Blues Away,” a gala evening of Jazz at Lincoln Center celebrating blues and jazz at Apollo Theater on Monday night, June 2, 2003.This image:Lou Donaldson.(Photo by Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images) (Hiroyuki Ito / Getty Images)

He remembers it just like it was yesterday.

“Sweet Papa” Lou Donaldson, 92 years young, was talking about being a witness to one of sports’ most iconic moments.

“Usually I stood on the viaduct overlooking the Polo Grounds with my binoculars because I didn’t want to pay the $1.75 price to sit in the bleachers,” says Donaldson, adding, “there was always about 100 of us up there.”

This particular afternoon, October 3, 1951 to be precise, Sweet Papa Lou was in those $1.75 bleacher seats to watch history.

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“I used to like to sit in the bleachers to watch Willie Mays,” he recalls. “Sometimes when Willie made a running catch he would throw the ball into the bleachers.

“I got a lot of balls that way.”

When ending a good story, Donaldson leaves you with his signature half giggle, half chuckle.

“It was a beautiful day, but by four o’clock you couldn’t see the pitcher or the catcher; only the shadows,” he recalls.

What came next was the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” as the New York Giants’ Bobby Thomson connected on a drive to left field off Dodger hurler Ralph Branca.

When Bobby Thomson launched the Shot Heard ‘Round the World at the Polo Grounds in 1951, jazz great Lou Donaldson was there in the stands. (Bettmann / Bettmann Archive)

“I knew it was a home run because the people in Section 21 stood and went crazy,” he says, laughing. “I also knew it was a home run because I watched Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese put down their gloves and walk toward the clubhouse [in centerfield]. I remember watching Eddie Stanky running to third and jumping on Leo Durocher who managed the game from third base.”

The Giants won the three-game playoff and advanced to the World Series where they lost to the Yankees four games to two.

“I didn’t realize what a big deal the home run was until I got home and listened to Russ Hodges on the radio,” states Donaldson.

Sweet Lou was all of 24.

It’s hard to say whether Lou Donaldson, arguably the world’s greatest living alto sax player, is a Forest Gump or a Zelig character, but he always seems to be at the right place at the right time.

Like the time he got a chance to caddie for an all-time great.

“I was a student at North Carolina A&T Technical State University (now North Carolina A&T) shagging balls for a few dollars at the Sedgefield Country Club in Greensboro, around 1942 or 1943. A golfer asked me to caddie for him for nine holes. Did I know it was Ben Hogan? I did when I saw his name was on his bag,” says Lou with that infectious laugh. “He didn’t say too much.”

With Lou, there’s always another story.

“One day when I was on the seventh hole shagging balls, I usually stood about 150 yards away from whoever was hitting because they couldn’t hit it that far. Well, this one guy hit it over my head. Then he hit the next one so hard and fast, it almost hit me in the head. That golfer was Sam Snead.

“I also played golf with Jackie Robinson. I told him I was a scratch golfer. Whenever I swung, I scratched myself. I played better than him that day, but remember, he was sick then.”

Born in Badin, N.C., Donaldson attended A&T where he got his Bachelor of Science degree in political science in 1946. (“My family wanted me to be a lawyer, but I had music in my blood.”) He enlisted in the Navy during WWII and trained at the Great Lakes bases in Chicago where he was introduced to bop music, but Donaldson has played bebop, hard bebop, soul, and, of course jazz.

He’s been a bandleader, composer and a bad-ass saxophonist.

And to think he almost became a clarinet player.

“I used to work out with the baseball team at A&T,” he remembers. “I used to play third and I told them I may be small, but you’re not hitting it by me – and they didn’t. I showed them I could play because when I hit, they couldn’t get me out. I used to watch the ball hit the bat. I don’t know if they do that today, but I did.”

But despite the love of baseball, music came first.

“I was too busy being in the marching band playing the clarinet, but the first time I heard Charlie Parker play the sax, I threw my clarinet into Lake Michigan. I’m joking, but that’s when I switched. I knew him, but he was a junkie then,” he recalls of Parker’s battles with heroin.

The music in Donaldson’s blood must have come from his mother, Lucy, who was a music teacher and a concert pianist. His father, Andre, was a minister.

Education was important in Lou’s life. His mother graduated from Cheney University and his father from Livingstone College.

Donaldson who has played around the world with a who’s who of A-listers like Clifford Brown, Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Grant Green, George Benson, Charles Earland and countless others.

The great jazz pianist Monte Alexander, a New Yorker by way of Jamaica, knows the importance of Donaldson.

“His legacy is making soulful music,” says Alexander getting ready for a European tour. “There’s a joy and humor in his music from the earth. He’s about life. That cat uses his sharp tongue and great wit. He was playing hard on his sax from back in the ‘50s. He’s a beloved senior survivor.”

Lou’s sound can be as warm as a blanket on a cold winter’s night and electric enough to wear out a hole in your shoe from tapping to the beat on his Blue Note albums from 1952-74.

He doesn’t play much anymore. Remember, he’s 92 with a bad tooth.

“Old age got me,” he says. “Can’t play my horn with a bad tooth.”

When asked if he’s going to get it fixed, he pauses. No more Alligator Bogaloo? No more Blues Walk?

“I’m semi-retired,” he says, proudly.

We’ll have to wait and see and hopefully, not too long. He’s been around the world, but the stories, the sports stories are not far from his lips and memory.

Football seems to be high on his recall list especially when the topic is NFL bad boy Gene “Big Daddy” Lipscomb who played in the league from 1953-1962 with the L.A. Rams, Baltimore Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers.

“He told me when he played against Jim Brown and the Cleveland Browns he stopped him on the first play and he started talking about him and his mother saying all kinds of things,” says Donaldson. “He told me Brown looked at him and said, ‘We’re going to run the same play.’ So they ran it and he went for 75 yards and a touchdown. I think he scored four touchdowns that day. Someone asked him why they couldn’t stop him. Big Daddy said, ‘We hit him, but he kept running.’”

Lipscomb died of a heroin overdose in 1963.

Lou starts that laugh again and quickly talks about Fritz Pollard, the first black man to be a head coach in the NFL in addition to being one of the first to integrate the league as a player.

“Fritz told me Paul Robeson, the singer, was the best football player he ever saw,” Donaldson says noting and they had a memorable meeting on the gridiron. Robeson played on the defensive line at Rutgers and Pollard was a halfback at Brown. “Fritz told me Paul hit him so hard he broke two of his ribs.

Willie Wood, a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a defensive back, played quarterback in college at USC. He was the first black man to play quarterback at a major university and his time behind center raised a ruckus in Green Bay. His running of the offense was outstanding.

“Willie told me he was playing quarterback against the Packers’ No. 1 defensive unit and he was effective,” he states. Defensive end Willie Davis and a future Hall of Famer went to Coach Vince Lombardi and told him he’s better than Bart Starr.

“Lombardi acted like he didn’t hear him,” he says.

With all the protesting by today’s athletes, Donaldson had a short observation.

“It’s good,” he says. “It’s about time somebody did it.

“You have to remember I was born during segregation,” he says, slowly. “We didn’t think that much about it because that was the way it was.”

There was a silver lining if you believe Sweet Lou.

“I knew and met so many people during segregation, all the athletes, musicians, dancers and comedians because we all stayed at the one hotel in the big cities [that took in blacks],” says Donaldson. “There was the Hotel Theresa in New York, the Gotham Hotel in Chicago and the Adams Hotel in Los Angeles.”

There always seemed to be fun in Lou’s life when he was around athletes.

“I used to hang out at Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise on Seventh and 135th Street. It was owned by Wilt [Chamberlain] and I’d play and hung out with him and Monte Irvin and Hank Thompson of the Giants and Roy Campanella of the Dodgers. His liquor store was on Seventh and 134th,” says Lou going back in time. “One night I’m in Smalls and there was a club across the street called Connie’s and we heard Leo Durocher was there with his wife actress Lorraine Day. She was a fine woman. Man, we ran out of Smalls to get their autographs.”

Being a musician in America during segregation wasn’t all chuckles and smiles, but there were moments that have stayed with Sweet Papa.

Legendary Jazz saxophonist Lou Donaldson circa 1970. (GAB Archive / Redferns)

“I played in a club somewhere down south and the dance floor had a rope down the middle of the club,” he says like it was yesterday. “When I asked what the rope for was, they told me blacks danced on one side and whites on the other.

“When I was in the Navy and stationed in Corpus Christie, Texas, they had another added rope. The club owner told one was for the whites, one was for the blacks and one was for the Mexicans.”

Have things really changed that much in this country?

“Not really,” he says. “It’s something worse.”

No matter how rough it may seem, Donaldson always knows how to lighten the load whether on stage or just reminiscing. He’s been there a lot and seen that a lot.

“One time I was playing in Pittsburgh and we always got out late. I always got up at nine in the morning to go to this place to get some chicken and grits. Well, this day I overslept because a party came in and we had to play until five in the morning. It was 11 o’clock when I got up and I rushed to the place, but the only place open was the Kentucky Fried [Chicken] and there was this long line. I didn’t think I’d be able to get any chicken, but people started to recognize me and they let me move up to the front so that I got my chicken and sat down to eat,” says Donaldson with that chuckle of his starting to build. “After a while the whole restaurant starting screaming and I thought it was for me and I felt very honored until I realized the people were watching the TV. Willie Stargell of the Pirates had just hit a home run. The deal was when Willie hit a home run, everyone got free chicken. So the screaming wasn’t for me.”

Again, that infectious laugh, but when it comes to today’s musicians, Lou isn’t chuckling.

“Does anyone impress me?” he pauses then answers, “No.

“They don’t know too much. They go to school and study, but nobody has a style. They all seem to play the same. They play like robots. None of them have any feelings. They don’t pat their feet and shake their hips. They have knowledge in their heads, but music has to come from your heart.”

Spoken like a man who’s played with great players. He learned from the best.

“When I started out, I sounded like (alto saxophonist) Johnny Hodges,” he says, who passed in 1970. Then he developed his own style. “I played dance music, bop, bebop, jazz and now I think I sound like Charlie Parker. Nobody better that that.”

His talent has taken him all around the world, but one particular trip stands out even to this day.

“The greatest thing that ever happened to me was when I went to South Africa in 1981,” he remembers. “I went with singer Dakota Staton and sax player Willis Jackson. Apartheid was slowly dying then. When we landed, they told me I couldn’t get off the plane just yet. When I did, they had a red carpet just for me to walk on. Man, Dakota was so mad. She didn’t even want to sing.

“She was the big star, not me, but I had a hit out called ‘Funky Mama’ and she didn’t. The Africans loved it and they bought it.”

Lou Donaldson maybe 92 years old, but the saxophone legend still keeps busy in the jazz community. (Photo courtesy of Tony Paige)

Even at 92 years of age and semi-retired, Donaldson keeps busy.

“I’m going to a showing of a documentary on Blue Note Records [It Must Schwing – The Blue Note Story] and I have to speak at a class at The Julliard School taught by Wynton Marsalis,” he declares, adding, “and I’m getting ready to head to Florida to get away from the New York winter.”

He and his late wife and business manager, Maker, who died in 2006, spent 56 years together and raised two daughters in the Bronx; Lydia (deceased in 1997) and Carol. Lou has one granddaughter.

“I miss my wife’s companionship,” he says. “She was from my hometown and I knew her for a long time before we got married and she knew my family.

“She took care of my business. That’s why I have what I have.”

What he has is talent, family, legacy and memories.

“If you live long enough, you see a lot of things and you know a lot of things. You’re not exactly intelligent or smart; you just know it because you saw it,” words spoken from the heart from Donaldson.

He has indeed seen and heard a lot like this one from the great piano player Earl “Fatha” Hines.

“Earl said he played all night at this club in Chicago and was getting ready to leave when the manager told him he had to keep playing because a special guest just came in,” explains Donaldson. “Earl said, ‘I’m going.’ The manager told him the special guest was Al Capone.

“Earl said, ‘I guess I better start playing.’”

Good Gracious! There will never be another “Sweet Papa Lou” Donaldson.

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https://www.c-span.org/video/?454612-1/tour-memphis-tennessee

Country Soul

Memphis has a rich musical history tied to Blues, Rock and Roll and Soul music. In his book, Memphis Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South, author Charles Hughes talked about Memphis’ role in the music industry during the 1960s and 1970s. He discussed how the music intersected with the political issues of the time.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?454151-1/country-soul

Cable and satellite network C-SPAN will feature Memphis authors and history this weekend.
https://www.c-span.org/series/?citiesTour
Memphis weekend is Nov. 17-18 on C-SPAN2’s Book TV and C-SPAN3’s American History TV.
The programming is part of the C-SPAN’s Cities Tour. During the first and third weekend of each month, C-SPAN’s Book TV and American TV feature a selected city. As part of the tour, C-SPAN visits different sites, interviewing local historians, authors and civic leaders.
Beginning 6 p.m. on Saturday, Book TV’s Memphis block will include interviews with:

• Charles L. Hughes (director of the Lynne and Henry Turley Memphis Center at Rhodes College and author of “Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South”)
• Beverly Bond  (University of Memphis history professor and author of “Memphis in Black and White” and “Beale Street”)
• Ben Jordan (Christian Brothers University history professor and author of “Modern Manhood & the Boy Scouts of America: Citizenship, Race and the Environment, 1910-1930”)
• Sharon Stanley (U of M political science professor and author of  “An Impossible Dream: Racial Integration in the United States”)
• Aram Goudsouzian (U of M history department chair and author of “Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights Black Power and the Meredith March Against Fear”)

C-SPAN will air a tour of the Memphis Room at the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library with Wayne Dowdy (archivist and author of “Hidden History of Memphis”) and an interview with Mayor Jim Strickland about the city’s current race relations. The Tour Memphis segment will feature Royal Studios owner Lawrence “Boo” Mitchell.
Beginning 1 p.m. Sunday, American History TV will include:

• A visit to the archives at Graceland with archivist Angie Marchese.
• A lesson about the history of cotton in the city from Memphis Public Libraries archivist Wayne Dowdy.
• A visit to the National Civil Rights Museum to learn about the 1968 sanitation workers strike and last days of Martin Luther King Jr. from museum historian Ryan Jones.
• A tour of Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum with director Elaine Turner.
• A visit to Sun Studios to learn about its impact with Jason Freeman.
• A tour of Stax Museum of American Soul Music with executive director Jeff Kollath.

C-SPAN will post the videos online after the segments air.
After Memphis, the C-SPAN Cities Tour will feature Riverside, California; Lawrence, Kansas; Santa Monica, California; and Independence, Missouri.
 

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View of the Woodstock festival from backstage, August 1969. Photograph: Amalie R Rothschild
To date, more than 600 people have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, most of whom are fantastically famous. Yet, somehow, one of the least-known inductees managed to receive one of the hall’s highest honors. In 2005, Frank Barsalona, a concert promoter, received a “lifetime achievement” distinction at the Cleveland-based institution. So, how did a guy who, some might think, simply booked talent, earn such a lofty distinction?
The answers lie in an informative new documentary, The Show’s The Thing: The Legendary Promoters of Rock. In colorful detail, the film lays out how Barsalona blueprinted the modern concert business (now a $10bn industry), along the way changing how audiences relate to the music, while also providing crucial support for some of its greatest stars. “No act becomes huge without a key promoter doing his work,” says Bob Geldof in the film.
“These guys were as much tastemakers as any head of a record company,” adds manager Winston Simone.
“They’re at the center of it all,” said Philip Dolin, co-director of the documentary.
In fact, Barsalona was the one who established that center. After witnessing the size and passion of the crowd for the Beatles’ first Washington DC concert in 1964, he began to imagine a full network of concert tours by scores of rock bands. “The 40-, 50-date tour cycle didn’t exist back then because people did not realize that there was a market,” said Irv Zuckerman, who became an early rock promoter.
While other agents, journalists and music executives in the early to mid-60s viewed rock as a fad on the wane after Elvis entered the army, Barsalona recognized that “this wasn’t the end of something, it was the beginning”, said Dolin.
A key connection in realizing his vision came through the woman who became his wife, June Harris. When Barsalona met her, she was working in her native UK as one of the first rock journalists, scoring early interviews with the Beatles and the Stones. “She introduced Frank to all the British invasion acts and their representatives,” said the film’s co-director, Molly Bernstein.
Recognizing the depth of their talent, and their exponential popularity in America, Barsalona left his job as a talent agent to set up his own company. Dubbed Premier Talent, it went on to become America’s first agency that focused solely on rock ‘n roll. One of Barsalona’s innovations was to build audience loyalty by treating the music as more than just something for “the kids”. To accomplish that, he and his associates blew up the prevailing notion of rock tours, built on the corny old Vaudeville model where bands simply ran through their hits. “The change was to present full concerts where the main headliner played a long show,” said Bernstein.

Tina Turner and Janis Joplin at Madison Square Garden, 27 November 1969. Photograph: Amalie R Rothschild
The expansive concerts promoted by Premier encouraged a new level of awe from the audience, anchored on extended musicianship. The change mirrored ones the musicians were already making. As the 60s progressed, artists began recording, and performing, longer songs, driven by greater ambition. Bill Graham found himself at the epicenter of the iteration that was emerging in San Francisco with bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin. He found great success booking them into his hall, the Fillmore. It was Barsalona’s innovation to link promoters like Graham in San Francisco with others eager to carve out similar scenes in their own cities. Together, they created a tight network of hip venues in converted theaters and ballrooms. In a joking way, Barsalona based his system on the mafia, awarding each promoter his own territory to control: Larry Magid had Philly for his Electric Factory, Don Law, owned Boston for the Boston Tea Party, the Belkin brothers staked out Cleveland with the Agora Ballroom and so on. As one promoter told the film-makers: “It was like the mob, but without the violence.”
Not that the promoters were above squeezing out competition within their territories. More, not all of the money always went to the deserving parties. One observer in the film reveals how Graham would count the same number of patrons in a packed ballroom on two successive nights when, clearly, the head count in one was far greater than the other. “He was a very tough business man who took advantage of his position,” Bernstein said.

Santana at Tanglewood, 18 August 1970. Photograph: Amalie R. Rothschild
While Barsalona’s Premier team ruled the US, promoter Harvey Goldsmith performed a similar function in the UK. In the process, the names of these promoters became nearly as well-known to fans as those of the bands. “I grew up in Cleveland,” Dolin said. “And every show was ‘Belkins Presents’. You heard their name every weekend on FM radio.”
The promoters earned that fame by bringing the fans shows with improved sound, exciting lights and informed billing. Graham used his concerts to educate young rocker fans about the music’s roots by putting older artists like Chuck Berry, BB King or Miles Davis on with hotter stars just breaking, such as Neil Young or Ten Years After. He, and other promoters, then advised the bands on how to put on a show. In the documentary, Carlos Santana explains how Graham would give bands a little report card at the end of a performance, telling them what worked or what didn’t. “He would help a band develop stage craft, making suggestions like, ‘Don’t talk when you come onstage, play a great number first,’” Bernstein said.
The promoters also took pains to seed a developing band’s fanbase by putting them on bills with headliners whose fans would probably embrace them. While Premier may have been a national brand, the local roots of the regional promoters became a key way to break bands during the classic rock era. They would help an artist establish a power base at their venues in Philly or Cleveland and, from there, a band could fan out to eventually conquer the nation. Even those who never became national names could create a rabid fanbase in a given region, due to the connections and branding of the local promoters. Southside Johnny in New Jersey, the Michael Stanley Band in the midwest, and the Iron City House Rockers in Pittsburgh, all used this strategy to create strong careers in their day.
Beyond the music, the shows gave the fans a new sense of community. “You go to these places and hear the music and smoke pot and you had a family,” Bernstein said. “You’d think, ‘This is what I want the world to be.’”

The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East on 27 June 1971. Photograph: Amalie R. Rothschild
The concerts also provided one of the only ways a fan could see a band at the time. Back then, rock acts hardly ever got on TV and, in some cases, they didn’t even offer photos of themselves on their album covers. The result seeded a gripping sense of mystery. King Crimson didn’t feature a single shot of its members on its first three album covers, meaning you had to buy a ticket and see them in concert to determine if they were even corporeal beings. “Before they saw them, some people thought the Allman Brothers were African American,” Dolin said. “Can you imagine going to a show thinking you’re going to be seeing an African American band and then finding out the guys are blond?”
As a result, every fan who came to a show felt as if they were discovering a secret. That feeling was enhanced by the relatively small size of the theaters. “If you see a band live from 10ft away you become attached to them for life,” said Dolin.
That sense of intimacy and rarity started to evaporate after Woodstock. The massive scale of that event signaled to the business just how big rock’n’roll had become, ending its innocence. Starting in the early 70s, the bigger bands moved beyond the theater circuit controlled by Premier, and advanced to arenas, and, eventually, to stadiums, most of which featured hellishly bad sound at the time. As a result, Graham shuttered his Fillmores East and West and signed on to book far larger tours. The others followed suit. Barsalona sold Premier to the William Morris Agency in 2005 (he died in 2012). When an organization such as Concerts West came in, creating a uniform national touring system, it destroyed the regionalism, and personal touch, of the early promoters. It also killed the quirkiness of the shows, as well as the low prices. “It was the end of seeing the Who in a small venue for three dollars,” said Dolin.
Consolidation of the industry continued to balloon until, eventually, it metastasized into one monster company, Live Nation, which now has a stranglehold on the bulk of the business. For fans, that has meant greater distance from the stars, as well as ticket prices that, Dolin said, “are as expensive as flying to Europe”.
At the same time, more people are attending, and presumably enjoying, live music than ever. And the sound and production in the vast arenas and stadiums has vastly improved in the last decade. To the film-makers, the endurance, and escalation, of the industry only underscores the essential potency of the concert experience. “People still love live performances,” Dolin said. “They’re simply irreplaceable.”

• The Show’s The Thing is showing at the DOC NYC Film Festival in New York

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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/obituaries/roy-clark-dead.html?action=click&module=Latest&pgtype=Homepage

Roy Clark Is Dead at 85; a Face of Country Music on ‘Hee Haw’

Nov. 15, 2018
Roy Clark, right, performing with Roy Acuff during a taping of the syndicated television show “Hee Haw” in 1983. The show was conceived as a down-home answer to the sketch comedy series “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.”Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Roy Clark, right, performing with Roy Acuff during a taping of the syndicated television show “Hee Haw” in 1983. The show was conceived as a down-home answer to the sketch comedy series “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.”Mark Humphrey/Associated Press
Roy Clark, the country singer and multi-instrumentalist best known as a longtime host of “Hee Haw,” the television variety show that brought country music to millions of households each week, died on Thursday at his home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 85.
A spokesman, Jeremy Westby, said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
Mr. Clark was a genial banjo-wielding presence on “Hee Haw” for the show’s entire run of more than two decades, serving as an ambassador for country music and the culture that defined it.
Most memorable, perhaps, was his role on the show’s weekly “pickin’ and grinnin’ ” segment with his co-host, the singer and guitarist Buck Owens. A variant of the old “Arkansas Traveler” routine — a vaudeville set piece that interspersed humor with music — the segment featured the two men trading winking rural-themed jokes, to the amusement of an audience that included many urban and suburban viewers living outside the South. (Mr. Owens died in 2006.)
 
Roy Clark and Buck Owens “pickin’ and grinnin'” with Jerry Reed.Video by James Stiltner
“You can go and get educated, but you can come to ‘Hee Haw’ and get another education,” Mr. Clark said in discussing the show’s far-reaching popularity in a 2016 NPR interview. “The critics all said that the only listeners that we had were country. And I said, ‘Wait a minute — I was just in New York City, and I was walking down the street and a guy yells across and says, “Hey, Roy, I’m a-pickin’.” ’ Well, I’m obligated to say, ‘Well, I’m a-grinnin’.’ ”
Conceived as a down-home answer to “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the NBC comedy hour that featured blackout sketches, fast-cutting edits and one-liners, “Hee Haw” aired for only two years on CBS, from 1969 to 1971, before being canceled. But it then became a hit in syndication, running from 1971 to 1992. At the peak of its popularity, in the ’70s, it reached 30 million viewers a week.
Beyond “Hee Haw” and its fictional Kornfield Kounty, Mr. Clark brought country music to the living rooms and dens of the American public through his appearances as a regular guest and occasional guest host on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” He also appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and on sitcoms like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Odd Couple,” and had a long-running stage act in Las Vegas.
In August 1983 Mr. Clark played a pivotal role in establishing Branson, Mo., a small town in the Ozark Mountains, as a tourist destination when he became the first major country star to open a music venue there, the 1,500-seat Roy Clark Celebrity Theater.

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Mr. Clark, on the banjo, and his “Hee Haw” co-host, Buck Owens, on guitar, performing in front of other cast members in 1969.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

Mr. Clark, on the banjo, and his “Hee Haw” co-host, Buck Owens, on guitar, performing in front of other cast members in 1969.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images
He was also among the first country acts to perform in concert with symphony orchestras. In 1976, more than a decade before the Berlin Wall came down, he embarked on a world tour that included 18 dates in the Soviet Union.
The concert halls of Europe and North America were a far cry from the stages on which Mr. Clark got his start in the late 1940s, when he toured as a member of the band of Grandpa Jones, a banjo player and rustic comedian who would later become a regular on “Hee Haw.” On the road with Mr. Jones, Mr. Clark appeared for two weeks on a bill headed by Hank Williams.
After performing in nightclubs, on radio and on television in and around Washington in the early 1950s, Mr. Clark was hired to play lead guitar in the house band on “Country Style,” a popular Washington TV show hosted by the singer Jimmy Dean. Dismissed for tardiness in 1957, he went on to appear on Arthur Godfrey’s “Talent Scouts” and, shortly after that, to land a job in the band of the country singer George Hamilton IV.
He moved to the West Coast in 1960 to be the leader and lead guitarist of the Party Timers, the rockabilly singer Wanda Jackson’s band. Mr. Clark’s tenure with Ms. Jackson included appearances in her revue at the Golden Nugget Hotel in Las Vegas and on recordings for Capitol like her 1960 hit “Let’s Have a Party.”
Mr. Clark’s affiliation with Ms. Jackson also helped him secure a contract of his own with Capitol, for which he released his debut album, the all-instrumental “The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark,” in 1962. The next year he sang and played guitar on a remake of Bill Anderson’s 1960 hit, “The Tip of My Fingers” (the title of Mr. Clark’s version rendered “Tip” plural), which reached the country Top 10 and peaked just outside the pop Top 40.
During the 1960s and ’70s Mr. Clark placed a total of 24 singles in the country Top 40, nine of them in the Top 10.
Roy Linwood Clark, the oldest of five children, was born on April 15, 1933, in Meherrin, Va., an unincorporated community in the central part of the state. His father, Hester, was a laborer in sawmills and on the railroad and worked sporadically as a musician, playing guitar, fiddle and banjo — instruments his son would quickly master. His mother, Lillian, played piano; his brother Dick and sister Jean both played mandolin and guitar. Neither of his other two siblings, Dwight and Susan, showed any interest in playing music.
Mr. Clark began accompanying his father at local square dances as an adolescent. By the time he was 14 he had won two national banjo championships, the second of which earned him an invitation to appear on the Grand Ole Opry.
Mr. Clark performed in 2009 after being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. He titled his autobiography “My Life — in Spite of Myself!”Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Mr. Clark performed in 2009 after being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. He titled his autobiography “My Life — in Spite of Myself!”Mark Humphrey/Associated Press
In his late teens, Mr. Clark, who was also a gifted athlete and an amateur airplane pilot, pursued a career in boxing. He enjoyed considerable success as a professional fighter before settling into life as a musician.
After having his first hit with “The Tips of My Fingers,” Mr. Clark followed a stylistically expansive path, recording albums with artists ranging from the jazz guitarist Barney Kessel to the blues singer, fiddle player and guitarist Gatemouth Brown.
Over the next two decades he would have country hits with versions of songs recorded by artists, including Louis Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Jimmy Durante and Charles Aznavour, whose “Yesterday When I Was Young” he placed in the country Top 10 and the pop Top 20 in 1969. (Mr. Aznavour died in October.)
Mr. Clark was named entertainer of the year at the Country Music Association Awards in 1973 and musician of the year in 1977, 1978 and 1980. His recording of the country standard “Alabama Jubilee” won a Grammy Award for best country instrumental performance in 1983. Eleven years later he published his autobiography, “My Life — in Spite of Myself!”
He became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1987 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
Mr. Clark is survived by his wife of 61 years, Barbara Joyce (Rupard) Clark; three sons, Roy Clark II, Michael Meyer and Terry Lee Meyer; two daughters, Susan Mosier and Diane Stewart; four grandchildren; and his sister, Susan Coryell. A grandson, Elijah Clark, died in September.
Although he became known as a natural comedian, Mr. Clark was initially uncomfortable in the role of funnyman.
“All of my comedy started from the fact that I never had that much self-confidence,” he explained in 2016. “I would laugh and cut up so the audience wouldn’t think I was being too serious. But slowly but surely, I got more confidence.”

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In his landmark book, “Cubano Be, Cubano Bop: One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba,” the Cuban musician and musicologist Leonardo Acosta wrote: “Sometimes critics and historians from the United States can be excessively provincial….For this reason many say that Afro-Cuban jazz, mambo, or salsa were created or ‘invented’ in New York.” His book, he wrote, proved that “things don’t tend to be so simple.”
The complex relationship between Cuban culture and American jazz is both embedded within history that continues to be unearthed and expressed through music still spilling forth. Two new releases deepen our understanding. “The Complete Cuban Jam Sessions” (Craft Recordings) reissues as a set (in their entirety and original format) five essential volumes of “Cuban Jam Session” albums recorded in Havana from 1956 to 1964 for the Cuban Panart label—showcasing a big-bang moment for Afro-Cuban jazz. On “Jazz Batá 2” (Mack Avenue Records), recorded five months ago in New Jersey, pianist Chucho Valdés, a towering figure of Cuban music, revisits the format—featuring piano, bass and Afro-Cuban percussion—with which he began his own arc of innovation more than 40 years ago.
The high-ceilinged colonial house in Havana that Ramón Sabat converted into a recording studio while founding Panart, Cuba’s first independent label, is where Pérez Prado recorded his earliest mambos and Nat King Cole made his first Spanish-language tracks. Yet the descargas, as Cubans called their jam sessions, held there made for the label’s most thrilling recordings. According to reissue co-producer Judy Cantor-Navas, no one can cite the precise date of the 1956 all-night session, instigated by pianists Julio Gutiérrez and Pedro “Peruchín” Jústiz, that yielded Volumes 1 and 2. (Master tapes and artwork were brought to the U.S. before the Castro regime seized Panart, but production notes are gone.) Ms. Cantor-Navas’s extensive liner notes, drawing on interviews with participants, document “the flipside of Cuban music’s Golden Age: the informal gatherings that took place away from the colorful stage shows and splendid decadence of Havana’s fabled nightlife.” Along with the first recorded Cuban descargas—a 1952 Mercury session organized by U.S. producer Norman Granz, and led by pianist Bebo Valdés (Chucho’s father)—these Panart sessions document important moments of musical synthesis.
Vols. 1 and 2, crediting Gutiérrez as leader, sound spontaneous but also tightly cohesive. These musicians are having fun, yet also creating an exquisite blend of popular Cuban songs, jazz-based harmonies and Afro-Cuban religious rituals. Subsequent volumes include ones led by Niño Rivera, a bebop-loving master of the tres, a small Cuban guitar, and José Fajardo, a popular flutist and bandleader. The best-known volume is “Cuban Jam Sessions in Miniature: Descargas,” on which bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopéz displays the authority and invention that made him among the 20th century’s most influential musicians, while directing an all-star ensemble. The pulses from Cachao’s bass and the beats passed back and forth by percussionist Tata Güines and drummer Guillermo Barreto on one track, “Descarga Cubana,” must have been mesmerizing in that moment; they’ve since given rise to several musical movements. 
One could draw a straight line from the tumbao (rhythmic pattern) of “Descarga Cubana” to the one driving “Chucho’s Mood” on Mr. Valdés’s new “Jazz Batá 2.” Mr. Valdés has never lost sight of the influences of Cachao and of his own father, Bebo, who were childhood friends in Cuba—nor of American musicians that inspired generations of Cubans (he quotes Ellington and Gershwin on “Chucho’s Mood”). There are other lines to be drawn: Oscar Valdés (no relation), who was a 13-year-old bongo player at that first 1956 Panart descarga, played batá, the two-headed drums of Afro-Cuban rituals, on “Jazz Batá,” the 1972 album with which Mr. Valdés introduced the approach he furthers here. (Both musicians were founding members of Irakere, the group with which Chucho achieved a yet grander musical revolution.)
The depth and breadth of Chucho Valdés’s pianism evokes deep roots while encompassing much that the Panart musicians (and his father) couldn’t have imagined, such as the avant-gardist improvisations on “Son XXI.” For all his gifts as a pianist, Mr. Valdés’s primary instruments have always been his bands. Here, his quartet—with bassist Yelsy Heredia, percussionist Yaroldy Abreu Robles, and Dreiser Durruthy Bombalé on batá and vocals—is a wondrous vehicle, elegantly navigating even the surprising twists and turns of Mr. Valdés’s suite-like “Obatalá.” Violinist Regina Carter plays to lovely effect on two tracks, including “100 Años de Bebo,” honoring the centenary of Chucho’s father, who died in 2013.
Cachao, who died in 2008, was also born 100 years ago. Chucho recently turned 77. Grounded in traditions he first soaked up sitting alongside Bebo on the piano bench at Havana’s Tropicana nightclub (not long before those Panart sessions), emboldened by a mastery that now seems offhand and still brimming with subversive musical ideas, Chucho ensures that such legacies are neither lost nor frozen in time.
—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal.
 
 

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Photos From IT MUST SCHWING! THE BLUE NOTE STORY NYC Premiere Nov. 10, 2018

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The composer Francis Lai, left, with the filmmaker Claude Lelouch at the Cannes Film Festival in 1981. Mr. Lai wrote music for Mr. Lelouch’s movies for more than 50 years.Ralph Gatti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Francis Lai, the French composer best known for his themes for the movies “Love Story” and “A Man and a Woman,” died on Wednesday. He was 86.
His death was announced by France’s Culture Ministry, which did not say where he died or specify the cause.
Born on April 6, 1932, in Nice, France, Mr. Lai was a self-taught musician who began his career playing piano and accordion. He worked as the singer Édith Piaf’s accompanist in Paris and later wrote songs for her, Yves Montand and others.
After meeting with the New Wave director Claude Lelouch in the 1960s, he began writing music for films. The first feature he scored was Mr. Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” which won the 1967 Academy Award for best foreign-language film. Mr. Lai’s distinctive title song, featuring wordless vocals by a male-female duo, was a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.
Mr. Lai and Mr. Lelouch remained collaborators for more than 50 years, working together on movies including “Live for Life” (1967), “Happy New Year” (1973) and “A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later” (1986).
“He was the man of my life, an angel disguised as an accordionist,” Mr. Lelouch said in interview with RTL radio. “We made 35 films together, and we had a love story that lasted 50 years.”
Although most of the more than 100 films Mr. Lai scored were French, his biggest success was his music for Arthur Hiller’s “Love Story” (1970), starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, one of the most successful romantic movies of all time.
His score won both an Oscar and a Golden Globe, and the movie’s soundtrack reached No. 2 on the Billboard album chart. Recordings of his theme song by Mr. Lai himself and Henry Mancini were Top 40 hits.
As “Where Do I Begin?,” with lyrics by Carl Sigman, the “Love Story” theme was a Top 10 hit for Andy Williams in 1971. It was also recorded by Shirley Bassey, Tony Bennett and other singers.
Mr. Lai’s survivors include his wife and three children.
The New York Times contributed reporting.
 

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• Nov. 9, 2018

·  ·  On a balmy Tuesday evening, an unassuming man with gray hair in a black suit strolled into the River Café in Brooklyn and sat at a Steinway grand. Partly hidden by the fronds of a tall palm, he began to play the usual standards.
A few patrons bobbed their heads, but no one seemed to realize that the man behind the piano was none other than Dom Salvador, one of the most influential, if underappreciated, figures in the history of Brazilian music.
There was a time when listeners flocked to see Salvador perform live. In the 1950s, the child prodigy played past his bedtime at local dance clubs; by the 1960s, the young man had helped to create and was performing samba-jazz on the most renowned stages of Rio de Janeiro; and in the early ’70s, he had become a major player in samba-soul, a Brazilian twist on American funk and soul.
But he walked away from it all. In 1973, he moved to New York with the intention of making it as a jazz musician, earning a coveted position as Harry Belafonte’s music director not long after he arrived.
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He walked away from that too. In 1977, he took a steady gig playing the piano five nights a week at a new fine dining establishment on the East River, in a then-desolate area near the Brooklyn Bridge. He has been there ever since.
For the past 41 years, to be exact. It is probably the longest residency in New York history, though there are no official statistics to draw from. (One contender Salvador certainly has beat: Bobby Short, the cabaret singer who held court at the Café Carlyle for six-month stretches. He lasted there only 36 years.)
It is a lifestyle that suits Salvador, a practical man of few words who appreciates the job security. Yet if you are at all familiar with his past, it is difficult to imagine how — or why — Salvador ended up in relative obscurity.
“If he were as famous as he really deserves to be, people would be mobbing that place,” said the D.J. Greg Caz, an expert on Brazilian music.
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Though Salvador has no regrets, at 80 years old, he is also keenly aware that time is running out to make his mark in the New York jazz world — not as a solo pianist, but with a band of his own. Within the past year or so, he has intimated to those he is close to that he is, finally, ready for a change.
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Early years, in São PauloCreditvia Dom Salvador
There are plenty of musicians who burst onto the scene, fade away and are then rediscovered decades later — the jazz singer Jimmy Scott comes to mind, as does Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, featured in the documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.” Salvador’s story is curious because he never really disappeared. For the past four decades he has, quite literally, been hiding in plain sight.
In 1938, Salvador da Silva was born to a musical family, in the small Brazilian city of Rio Claro. The youngest of 11 children, he practiced fingering techniques on sheets of paper that his instructor had drawn out for him because his family didn’t own a piano.
At first, Salvador studied classical music exclusively, but he was getting a different education from the radio, which was playing the sounds of Pixinguinha, regarded as Brazil’s Louis Armstrong, along with American swing from Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman.
Salvador aspired to become a jazz musician, playing in local dance bands, but he did it surreptitiously, using an alias so his instructor, a stern Brazilian woman of German descent, would not find out. But by the time he was 14, he was playing piano in a well-known dance band, Excelsior. The secret was out.
Salvador was by far the youngest musician in the group. Weekend shows began at 10 and ended at 4 in the morning, but Salvador played only until midnight. Sometimes he would get a heads up from the doorman when a local inspector stopped by the club. “They let me know,” he said, “and then I had to hide or go to the bathroom or whatever.”
In 1961, as bossa nova, the diaphanous mix of samba and West Coast jazz, was taking off internationally, Salvador left home for São Paulo.
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It was there that he met a young jazz singer, Maria Ignes Vieira, at a nightclub. Salvador watched Maria sing “There’s a Small Hotel,” by Rodgers and Hart. He was smitten. “It was very rare to see, at that time, someone singing in English,” Salvador remembered. “Good sound. The pronunciation was very correct. I liked her voice. I said, ‘Oh, my gosh.’”
Soon thereafter, Salvador moved to Rio, and Maria followed within a few months. He quickly became a fixture in clubs around Beco das Garrafas, the alley where bossa nova was born and where musicians went to prove themselves. It was there that he met the drummer Edison Machado and the bassist Sérgio Barrozo, and they formed the Rio 65 Trio, recording two albums in samba-jazz, which melded the improvisational energy of bebop with Brazilian rhythms.
There were several well-known piano trios in Rio at the time, but Salvador, who was listening to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, said he found their approaches too slick and “organized” for his taste. His goal was to turn samba, skittering and off-kilter, into a propulsive force — a reaction, in one regard, to the way bossa nova had softened it.
If Salvador had stopped there, he would have been remembered as an important jazz innovator in Brazil. But he was moving fast, onstage and behind the scenes. Working as a studio musician in Rio, he had a contract with the Odeon label but freelanced for CBS and other companies. By his own count, Salvador played on more than 1,000 records (though he is mostly uncredited), working with composers like Antonio Carlos Jobim, who wrote “The Girl From Ipanema.”
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Dom Salvador, holding the melodica on the left, at Boite Julien Sorel, a club in São Paulo, in 1963.Creditvia Dom Salvador
At the time, Rio was under a repressive military dictatorship beginning with a 1964 coup, but there was also a strong countercultural response. In 1969, Salvador’s producer at CBS brought back a pile of funk and soul LPs from a trip to the United States: Kool & the Gang, Sly & the Family Stone, James Brown. The idea was for Salvador to do something similar, but he bristled at the notion. “I liked what I heard there, but I told him, For me to copy, I’m not going to copy,” Salvador said. “I did it my way.”
The result, a marked shift away from jazz, ended up becoming a seminal recording of Brazilian soul, in which Salvador put American funk through a samba prism. The album cover featured a photograph of Salvador, gazing sternly at the camera in a leather jacket, his arm outstretched on a table before him and his fist clenched in a subtle gesture of defiance. He called the album “Dom Salvador” (“Dom” means “Sir”). The nickname stuck.
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Next, Salvador started a samba-soul band, Dom Salvador e Abolição, or Abolition. He and his bandmates sported Afros and wore bell-bottoms and bright, long-collared shirts well before the Brazilian soul movement, known as Black Rio, took off in the late ’70s.
“He’s a pioneer in not just the music but a new understanding of blackness in Brazil” and using it “as a form of cultural power,” said Bryan McCann, a historian at Georgetown University who has written extensively about Brazilian music.
Salvador is reluctant to dwell on this period of his life — even as the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right president, echoes the former dictatorship — and he seems uncomfortable taking credit for any sort of consciousness-raising in Brazil. “For me, it’s music,” he said.
The samba-soul days were a particularly disappointing time for Salvador creatively, he said. An exacting bandleader, Salvador was also about a decade older than most of his bandmates in Abolition. He did not do drugs or drink alcohol.
“I put too much energy into that band,” Salvador said with a sigh, from his current home in the suburban Long Island town of Port Washington, as he reminisced at his dining room table under a framed photograph of his idol, Thelonious Monk. “I was very frustrated.”
He had also become a family man. Salvador and Maria had gotten married in 1965. Their first child, Marcelo, was born the next year, and Simone, in 1970.
In the late 1960s, the government began cracking down on students, artists and activists. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, the founders of Brazil’s Tropicália movement, were both arrested and later exiled. It wasn’t clear if the regime would take action against Salvador.
 

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By Gary Giddins 
Little, Brown, 724 pages, $40
You could hardly find a more striking contrast to the Hitlerian rhetoric of the opposition. I’m not surprised Crosby got enlisted not to fight but to serve as, in Mr. Giddins’s words, “an essential voice of the home front.” Yet Crosby, who was never as complacent as his public image, also insisted on taking his act into combat. He undertook brutal tours that brought him into danger, often performing during bombing raids and sometimes as close as a thousand yards from the German lines. As a result, Crosby added another honor to his list after the war: In a national poll to pick the most admired man alive, Bing Crosby finished at the top—beating out the pope (Pius XII), the president (Truman) and two legendary generals (Eisenhower and MacArthur). Pretty swell stuff for a crooner from Spokane.
Yet fate is cruel to pop-culture icons once their original audience has died. When Gary Giddins started work on his Crosby biography in 1991, his subject was well-known, a household name even. But I suspect that a survey of music fans today would find that few can identify the entertainer so admired by their parents and grandparents (and, in many instances, their great-grandparents). 
For Crosby’s renown to endure, he needs to make the transition from faded star to timeless artist. Someone has to make the case for Crosby’s historical importance—and fortunately for Bing, Gary Giddins has taken up the gauntlet with surprising vehemence. 
Mr. Giddins is one of the leading music critics of the last half-century, and for many years set the tone for jazz coverage through his influential articles in the Village Voice. His opinions carried such weight that they were often mimicked by other writers within days of publication. He hasn’t written many articles in recent years, though—probably because of Bing Crosby.
Mr. Giddins published “Bing Crosby: A Pocketful of Dreams” in 2001, but this long-awaited book only covered the first half of the artist’s life, from 1903 to 1940. Readers have had to wait 17 years for a second volume—which, as it turns out, focuses just on the period from 1940 to 1946. You can do the math: Mr. Giddins has spent around two-and-a-half biographer years for each Bing year. Crosby lived until 1977, so either Mr. Giddins has to pick up the pace or this project will take until the end of the century to complete. 
Yet Mr. Giddins makes a strong case that Crosby’s World War II years deserve their own book. Crosby dominated almost every facet of mainstream entertainment during this tumultuous period. His radio program, Kraft Music Hall, entertained Americans at home. His records were in constant rotation on jukeboxes. And when people went to the movies, they invariably preferred his comedies for laughs (especially Crosby’s “Road” films with Bob Hope), his musicals for romance and glamour (“Blue Skies” and “Holiday Inn”), and his play-acting as an Irish-American priest (in “Going My Way” and “The Bells of St. Mary’s”) for homespun inspiration. 
It almost seems like a miracle, suitable for one of these religious films, that Crosby managed this workload while also touring constantly to raise money for the war effort and entertaining soldiers at home and abroad. This is where Mr. Giddins’s thorough research pays dividends. By digging into day-by-day and week-by-week itineraries, our biographer demands our admiration for Crosby’s unflagging efforts, often with little concern for personal rewards or favorable publicity. I always assumed that Bing Crosby, in private life, was as laid-back as his onstage image. I never knew this workaholic side of his character.
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Yet a Crosby biography has also to deal with less-appealing character issues. The entertainer’s son Gary accused his father of coldness and abusive treatment, and two of Crosby’s other children, Dennis and Lindsay, committed suicide—both with a shotgun. This has left many with an uneasy sense that the Crosby persona of easygoing affability was a façade for a darker private life.
Mr. Giddins is surprisingly non-judgmental about this subject—especially when compared to his strong opinions on Crosby’s recordings. He chastises the performer when he “misses each and every high note” on a track or comes across as “stale and overemphatic” in delivering a lyric. But Crosby’s approach to child-rearing is never directly criticized, and often presented as symptomatic of its time and place. “In the lexicon of postwar psychology, [Crosby] might have been called a behaviorist,” Mr. Giddins explains at one point. Whenever possible, Mr. Giddins counterbalances the accusations of Gary with other views—for example, the testimony of his brother Phillip, who declared: “I just don’t see there was any way you could have asked for a better father.”
But no one can accuse Mr. Giddins of shortchanging us on the facts. Every aspect of Crosby’s life is laid bare for close inspection in this penetrating biography, from his tough negotiations with employers to his most casual dealings with servants and staff. I especially enjoyed previously unpublished extracts from a fan’s diary that recount minute details of Crosby’s life from the perspective of two sisters who followed him wherever he went. Today they would be called stalkers, but the accounts they left behind offer many insights into how the leading entertainer of midcentury America acted when he thought he was unobserved—almost always with charm, courtesy and an appealing nonchalance. 
It’s hard to reconcile the different facets of this oddly private man who thrived in the limelight while maintaining such reserve. Yet the biggest obstacle to Mr. Giddins’s project may be less Crosby’s complexity than the sheer fickleness of public renown. Thirty years ago, a book of this sort would have found a huge audience. But nowadays any fans who heard Bing Crosby sing at the peak of his career would be in their 80s, if not older. He could easily be forgotten in a few years’ time. 
That’s a shame. Crosby was not just a celebrity, but one of the most influential performers of modern times. No artist did more to celebrate the sublimity that can come from understatement or the grace derived from keeping cool under pressure. We could benefit from an unflappable champion of serenity guiding our current-day pop culture. I certainly welcomed this reminder that we had one in our midst not long ago. 
—Mr. Gioia is the author of 10 books, most recently “How to Listen to Jazz.”
 
 

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Oliver Herzfeld Contributor
Media & Entertainment

Brother Thelonious Belgian Style Abbey AleFlickr/Bernt Rostad (CC By 2.0)
An old quip that is widely misattributed to the famous movie producer Samuel Goldwyn states “a verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.” The truth is, with only a few exceptions, oral agreements are legal, valid and binding. However, oral agreements present other difficulties and challenges apart from enforceability. A lawsuit recently commenced by the Estate of Thelonious Monk against North Coast Brewing Co. provides an excellent opportunity to explore some of the issues raised by oral agreements.
Thelonious Monk was a legendary jazz musician and pioneer of the bebop movement. Monk passed away in 1982 and his estate now owns Monk’s name, image and likeness. According to the complaint, some time prior to January 11, 2016, Monk’s son, as administrator of Monk’s estate, entered into an oral agreement granting North Coast a license to use Monk’s name, image and likeness for the limited purpose of marketing and distributing a Trappist style ale called “Brother Thelonious Belgian Style Abbey Ale” (i.e., word play referring to the monks of Trappist monasteries that produce real Trappist ale). The license was allegedly granted in exchange for North Coast’s agreement to donate a portion of the profits from the sale of the ale to the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz.
In addition to the ale, North Coast produces and sells other products that feature Monk’s name, image and likeness, including cups, hats, hoodies, iron-on patches, soap, t-shirts, tap handles, metal and neon signs, pins, playing cards, mouse pads, posters and food products. Monk’s estate denies granting a license to North Coast for any other such products.
On January 11, 2016, Monk’s estate notified North Coast in writing that (i) any license previously granted to it for its use of Monk’s name, image or likeness was terminated and revoked, (ii) North Coast could no longer use Monks’ name, image and likeness without entering into a new merchandising agreement with Monk’s estate, and (iii) going forward, royalties must be paid directly to Monk’s estate.
Monk’s estate is claiming trademark infringement and violation of Monk’s right of publicity and is seeking an injunction to prohibit North Coast’s further sale of the ale and related merchandise, as well as unspecified monetary damages. North Coast has not responded to the complaint yet and has not ceased to sell its Monk-branded ale and other products.
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One of the key problems in this dispute is not the enforceability of the oral agreement, but what the parties agreed to in the first place. Did the parties agree to a license that is terminable at any time upon written notice by Monk’s estate? Did the parties agree to a specific agreement duration that would prohibit early termination in the absence of a material breach by North Coast? The complaint is conspicuously silent on precisely what the parties agreed to and when. Nonetheless, a right to terminate at any time for convenience is not a usual or customary provision in a license agreement because licensees typically make an investment in the creation, manufacturing, marketing and sale of licensed products and would stand to suffer losses if required to stop abruptly.
Further, under the U.S. Trademark Act, ownership of a trademark will be deemed abandoned if a licensor grants unrestricted use of its mark or otherwise fails to control the nature and quality of all products sold under a license (a so-called “naked license“). Consequently, if Monk’s estate granted a license to North Coast that did not include any provision for quality control, it would be exposed to the risk of losing its trademark rights in the Monk trademarks licensed to North Coast.
Finally, the trier of fact in this dispute will likely want to know how long has North Coast sold the related merchandise and when did Monk’s estate become aware of such products? Depending on the answers, North Coast may be able to counter the claims of trademark infringement by raising a defense of laches, which is an equitable doctrine that an infringer may assert when a trademark owner inexcusably “sleeps on its rights” and the delay prejudices the infringer.
This case is an important reminder to contracting parties to engage competent legal counsel to help prepare written agreements that properly memorialize the parties’ intent and avoid oral agreements that expose parties to “he said/she said” evidentiary battles over what was actually agreed to. And licensors should insist on the inclusion of key provisions in every license agreement, such as (i) a definition of “net sales” that royalties will be based on, including limits on discounts, rebates, returns, taxes, uncollectible accounts, commissions and costs incurred in manufacturing, selling, distributing and advertising licensed products; (ii) royalty rates, advance payments, minimum guaranteed royalties, limits on cross-collateralization, acceleration upon termination, minimum net sales, required reports and interest on late payments; (iii) records to be maintained, required statements and reports and audit rights; (iv) quality control obligations and testing, inspection and approval rights; (v) permitted distribution channels and territories, marketing requirements, seconds and disposal obligations; (vi) intellectual property protection, registrations, infringement and damages; (vii) warranties and indemnification covering product defects and other types of liability claims; (viii) a licensee obligation to maintain comprehensive insurance coverage to respond to claims involving the licensed products; (ix) term and termination conditions; and (x) sell-off requirements. Doing so will help licensors avoid getting trapped in a license without sufficient evidence to prove what was and was not agreed to.
Oliver Herzfeld is the Chief Legal Officer at Beanstalk, an Omnicom-owned global brand licensing agency and consultancy that has represented hundreds of the world’s most reputable brands, celebrities and entertainment properties since its inception in 1992. In his role, Oliv…
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Oliver Herzfeld is the Chief Legal Officer at Beanstalk, a leading global brand extension agency and part of the Diversified Agency Services division of Omnicom Group.
Follow @oherzfeld
 

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Davey Yarborough, longtime jazz director at the Duke Ellington School of the Performing Arts and founder of The Washington Jazz Arts Institute, poses next to a mural by Howard Theatre that depicts him playing the flute. Yarborough hopes to revive another one of the U Street… more
Joanne S. Lawton
A product of D.C. Public Schools and Howard University, D.C. jazz musician Davey Yarborough promised his Howard mentor upon graduation that he would “pay it forward” — and he’s been doing that for the past 30 years as a jazz program director and band leader at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. 
And though he’s about to retire, he’s not quite done with his promise. Next up? He wants to revive legendary jazz club Bohemian Caverns, a monument to the musical genre in the District that closed in 2016. 
The idea is still in its very early stages — Yarborough refers to it as a “dream” rather than a plan — but he’s working on a feasibility study to determine exactly how much money he would need to raise through a capital campaign. 
Bohemian Caverns, located at 11th and U streets NW, opened in 1926 in the heart of what was known as Black Broadway. In its heyday, it hosted musicians of international acclaim, including Ellington himself as well as John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Cab Calloway. 

Bohemian Caverns is located at 2001 11th St. NW. It has been for lease for more than two years.
Joanne S. Lawton
 

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Jazz Foundation of America co-founder Wendy Oxenhorn, left, with event host Quincy Jones, right, at the Sunday fundraiser. Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty Images
“Q & You: A ‘Wonderful, Wonderful’ Evening” honored Mathis, whose career has included three recordings in the Grammy Hall of Fame and dozens of gold or platinum albums, at a benefit Sunday for the Jazz Foundation of America. The Q in the event title stood for host Quincy Jones, and the “wonderful evening” included an award for Songwriters Hall of Famer Alan Bergman, a three-time Oscar winner for “The Way We Were,” “Windmills of Your Mind” and the score for “Yentl.”
The crowd
Danny Glover of “Lethal Weapon” and Verdine White of “Earth, Wind & Fire” teamed up for the presentation to Mathis, watched by an audience that included Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss (the founders of A&M Records), CeeLo Green, Cedric the Entertainer, former Motown chair Clarence Avant, record producer Richard Perry and, from the Jazz Foundation, creative director Steve Jordan, co-executive director Joseph Petrucelli and co-founder Wendy Oxenhorn.
The program
Davell Crawford, left, and Alexis Morrast, right, were among those who took to the stage to pay homage to singer Johnny Mathis. Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty Images
Alexis Morrast, Davell Crawford, Freddy Cole, Arnold McCuller and Deniece Williams took turns onstage, singing mostly Mathis classics, including “It’s Not for Me to Say,” “Chances Are,” “There! I’ve Said it Again” and “Too Much, Too Little, Too Late.” Bergman’s set also included songs written for Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand and a Norman Lear TV show, the latter a gender-reversal revision of Genesis.
The quotes
“Johnny’s ‘Greatest Hits’ album changed the business of music,” said White during the official ceremonies, noting that the revolutionary album remained on the Billboard Top 100 charts for a “mind-boggling” 490 weeks. “An entire new way to consume music was invented around the idea of collecting 12 classic songs like ‘Come to Me’ and ‘All the Time’ and compiling them into one album,” he said.
“John became a superstar when Eisenhower was president, and he’s never looked back,” said Glover. “No one embodies the universal language of song more than Johnny, a singer whose work has always and continues to transcend race, gender, orientation and nationality, unifying disparate groups of people under the banner of harmony and love.”
“John became a superstar when Eisenhower was president, and he’s never looked back,” Danny Glover said about honoree Mathis at the Sunday event. Chelsea Guglielmino / Getty Images
The numbers
Tickets for 135 guests in the sold-out, intimate venue ranged from $500 to $2,500, and an auction, in which lunch with Quincy Jones sold for $10,000 and lunch with Alan Bergman was sold to three different bidders, helped bring the total raised to $200,000. The foundation provides emergency funds, medical services and performance opportunities in the community to jazz and blues musicians in need.
Ellen Olivier is the founder of Society News LA.
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Japanese author lets you inside his 10,000-record vinyl collection.
As far as work spaces go, you can’t get more inspirational than a wall of 10,000 records. A jazz aficionado with a weakness for record collecting, famously reclusive writer Haruki Murakami has opened up his study for inspection, sharing an interactive tour of the space on his own website.
A glimpse into the creative environment of the man behind cult novels like Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami admits that he almost always works while listening to music, and that, of the 10,000 or so records in his enviable floor-to-ceiling collection, the majority are jazz. His sound system doesn’t look half bad either.
Visit the author’s website to explore his study in more detail.
 

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