https://www.forbes.com/sites/billrosenblatt/2018/09/18/vinyl-is-bigger-than-we-thought-much-bigger/#16062c8c1c9c
 
Vinyl Is Bigger Than We Thought. Much Bigger.
Bill Rosenblatt

A used record seller at Brooklyn Flea in New York City.Bill Rosenblatt
Music industry watchers know that vinyl records have been enjoying a resurgence since their near-death in the mid-2000s, and the market continues to grow. But vinyl sales are actually much larger than what industry figures report, because they don’t count used vinyl sales. Now, thanks to some new data, we know that with used sales taken into account, the true size of the vinyl market is at least double those industry figures.
Revenue from sales of used records is particularly significant in the digital era, now that most of the attention is on streaming, where users can’t “resell” music. The music industry doesn’t bother to count used sales because no revenue from used sales goes to record labels, artists, or songwriters. “Given the size of the overall market, I am always shocked that these numbers are ignored when reporting sales,” says Ron Rich, SVP of Discogs Marketplace, one of the two largest online marketplaces for used records, along with eBay.
In honor of eBay’s first-ever Vinyl Obsession Week this week, the company has offered a rare glimpse into its vinyl sales data. Discogs also supplied data for this story. A household name among record collectors, Discogs is an online database of detailed info about physical music products — mostly vinyl — that launched in 2000 and started its e-commerce marketplace in 2007.
Both Discogs and eBay have very large catalogs of used vinyl available. Discogs lists 5.7 million used vinyl items in its marketplace from U.S. sellers (Discogs doesn’t distinguish between new and used; it only lists items by condition. The 5.7 million figure doesn’t count a million items rated as “Mint”). eBay lists 2.3 million used vinyl items from U.S. sellers. Amazon is likely the third-largest player in this space; it lists about 900,000 used vinyl records on its U.S. site. If those numbers seem small compared to streaming catalogs like those of Spotify and Apple Music, bear in mind that Amazon is the largest online seller of new vinyl but lists “only” about 300,000 new titles.

Vinyl record unit volume sales, 2007-2010, millions of units. Sources: RIAA (new), eBay (used, 2007-2017), Discogs (used, 2010-2017).GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
These online marketplaces also sell several million vinyl records per year. As this figure shows, unit sales numbers from eBay and estimates based on Discogs data added up to about 6 million last year. Compare that to new vinyl sales, which reached 16 million units and $395 million in revenue last year, according to RIAA figures. (Skeptics counter that this is a far cry from vinyl’s early 1980s market peak, when vinyl pulled in $2 billion from 300 million units.)
Note that Discogs’ sales are growing at roughly the same rate as new vinyl sales, while eBay’s sales have stagnated. Discogs is becoming the preferred marketplace for serious record buyers and sellers. That’s because Discogs requires that sellers submit highly detailed metadata about music releases — including such things as identifiers, country of release, pressing information, artist credits, and conditions of both discs and sleeves — whereas eBay has looser metadata standards to encourage more casual sellers and buyers (and, of course, supports auctions). It takes more effort to list your records on Discogs, but collectors like having all that information.
Meawhile, beyond eBay and Discogs’ 6 million, Amazon and other specialized online vinyl marketplaces (like these and these, which focus on classical, jazz, world music, rarities, and so on) probably account for one or two million more. That gets us to about half of the RIAA’s 16 million figure.
But these figures don’t count offline sales — of which there are likely at least as many as online. Discogs’ Rich says that their online sales represent only “a fraction of what is out there in the used market, considering the amounts of used inventory selling through local record stores.”
To make a stab at offline sales volume, consider that there are over 2000 record stores in the U.S., the vast majority of which are indie stores that sell used as well as new vinyl. If each of those stores sold just one piece of used vinyl every hour, that would add roughly another 6 million total annual units sold. If we add in sales at thrift shops, garage sales, and flea markets, we probably get to the RIAA’s new-vinyl figure of 16 million. In other words, the overall vinyl market is likely about double the size that the RIAA reports in unit sales, possibly more. 
It’s also interesting to note that used vinyl prices are almost as high as new — and new vinyl is quite a bit more expensive than new CDs. In fact, as this chart shows, average used vinyl prices (currently $22.80) are 92% of new ($24.73) and have been mostly tracking at that percentage since 2010. Meanwhile used CD prices are a much lower percentage of new CD prices.

Average prices of new and used vinyl records. Sources: RIAA (new), eBay (used).GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
That’s because vinyl albums have become collectibles, while CDs haven’t really (apart from special editions, box sets, and so on). This chart shows that this happened around 2009-2010, when the average price of used vinyl on eBay almost doubled. Prices have risen steadily since then; even adjusting for inflation, used records have appreciated 9% in price since 2010. And the turntable market is growing too: NPD reports that revenue from turntables with prices over $250 grew 135 percent from 2016 to 2017. That’s the market for quality vinyl-enthusiast machines like this, not novelty/nostalgia items like this.

Revenue from vinyl records, 2007-2017, $millions. Sources: RIAA (new, left Y-axis), eBay (used, right Y-axis).GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
Finally, here’s a revenue chart that shows eBay’s revenue from used vinyl juxtaposed with RIAA new vinyl figures on apples-to-apples scales. It shows that while revenue from new vinyl sales grew at a fairly constant rate since 2007, used vinyl sales jumped dramatically between 2011 and 2012. That’s remarkably consistent with music industry trends at that time. 2011 was the year when the music industry began its big shift to streaming. Spotify launched in the U.S. in July 2011, and the major record labels concluded license agreements with YouTube by the end of that year. Revenue from on-demand music streaming started to skyrocket, while revenue from digital downloads started to decline and then plummet.
In other words, 2011-2012 was the time when music fans found that the best way to hear music digitally was on demand from an enormous online library, for $10/month or free with ads, rather than through permanent downloads at $9.99 per album or 99 cents per single; and by then, the collectible nature of vinyl had grown into a sizable movement.
Vinyl fans have various reasons for their love of black discs, but audio quality is the one heard most often. “Despite the broad availability of digital today, the unique sound qualities of vinyl are resonating more than ever,” says Michael Mosser, General Manager of Lifestyle, Media & Toys at eBay. While no one will argue that vinyl is any threat to streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, now we know that vinyl is still a stalwart presence in the music market and will likely remain so for years to come.
 

http://www.wbgo.org/post/big-jay-mcneely-rb-legend-who-defined-honking-tenor-saxophone-style-dies-91 – stream/0

Big Jay McNeely, R&B Legend Who Defined the Honking Tenor Saxophone Style, Dies at 91

By Bob Porter • 23 hours ago

Big Jay McNeely, a rhythm-and-blues legend known as “King of the Honkin’ Sax,” died on Sunday, according to multiple sources. He was 91. Bob Porter, the author of Soul Jazz, remembers him here.
Big Jay McNeely burst forth in 1949 with “Deacon’s Hop,” a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Race Records chart. The instrumental was a tour de force for McNeely’s tenor: a medium-tempo workout involving honks, squeals and smears in a solo that defined the soon-to-be-named rhythm and-blues saxophone style.

That success determined his future playing style, which also involved such antics as lying on his back onstage, and walking through the crowd. Many of the extracurricular activities of R&B tenor players can be traced directly back to Big Jay.
He was born Cecil James McNeely in 1927 in Los Angeles, and spent his entire life as a California resident. Early musical associates were alto saxophonist Sonny Criss, a high school classmate, and pianist Hampton Hawes. Upon hitting the big time, he formed a five-piece band that also featured his brothers, Bob and Dillard. The band was exceptional popular with the Mexican-American community of Los Angeles.
He toured nationally, playing clubs like Birdland and often headlining R&B concert packages. He recorded for a constellation of labels: Savoy, Exclusive, Aladdin, Imperial, Federal (1952-’54), Vee Jay and Atlantic. In 1959, he had another hit with “There Is Something On Your Mind” — yet his first album for Warner Brothers wasn’t recorded until 1963. By that time things had slowed to the point that he had taken a job with the United States Postal Service.
An early 1980s R&B revival in England brought McNeely to Europe for the first time. Now retired from the post office, he recorded for the Ace label, and his career kicked back into high gear. He parlayed this success into more than a dozen recordings and annual European tours right into 2016. He was elected to the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 2014.

His last album, Honkin’ and Jivin’ at the Palomino, was recorded live in North Hollywood in 1989 and released, on the Cleopatra Blues label, just last year.
 

https://forward.com/culture/410167/the-secret-jewish-history-of-joan-baez/?attribution=home-hero-item-text-2
 

The Secret Jewish History Of Joan Baez

On her remarkable rise to the top of the folk-music heap in the late 1950s and early 1960s, singer-activist Joan Baez — who, at age 77, is currently saying goodbye to audiences on a worldwide “Fare Thee Well Tour” — had some help from a couple of Jewish organizations; Jewish songwriters, teachers, and producers; as well as one obscure Yiddish theater song that she made famous.

Baez first picked up the guitar and opened her mouth only to discover she boasted a gorgeous soprano at age 13, after having attended a Pete Seeger concert. She caught the folk-music bug, and within a few years, while still a teenager, she gave one of her earliest public performances in Saratoga, Calif., at a retreat for a Jewish youth group from Congregation Beth Jacob of Redwood City.

Just a couple years after that, having made quite a stir on the then-vibrant Boston folk-music scene after moving there from the Bay Area with her family in 1959, Baez gave her New York City concert debut at the tender age of 19, in November 1960, at the 92nd Street Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association — the 92nd Street Y, for short. Almost two years to the day after that, at age 21, Baez appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, an astonishing feat for a 21-year-old folksinger who had only just released her third album, a live recording entitled “In Concert,” which included two songs written by a complete unknown from northern Minnesota — a Jewish guy named Robert Allen Zimmerman who had adopted the pseudonym Bob Dylan — alongside her rendition of “Kumbaya.”

Chances are good that the audiences at the Jewish retreat and the 92nd St. Y concert were treated to Baez’s English-language rendition of a song that, while often assumed to be a traditional Yiddish folk song, was in fact written for the Yiddish theater in the early 1940s by the same composer responsible for “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn.” Baez’s hit song “Donna Donna” began life as “Dana Dana,” also known as “Dos Kelbl,” or “The Calf,” written by Sholom Sekunda and Aaron Zeitlin for the latter’s stage show. Later on, Sekunda translated the song into English, along the way changing the title to “Dona Dona.” In the mid-1950s, Arthur Kevess and Teddi Schwartz retranslated the song into English, and it was their version — now spelled “Donna Donna” but still pronounced with a long “o” — that Baez included on her eponymous debut album. The song, about a calf being led to slaughter, became a staple of Baez’s concerts and entered the canon of folk-protest (and summer-camp) songs of the 1960s.

Incidentally, that debut album — which achieved gold status (which at the time meant earning $1 million in retail sales) — was produced by Brooklyn-born Fred Hellerman, a member of the folk music supergroup the Weavers (alongside Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, and Ronnie Gilbert), and whose Jewish-immigrant parents hailed from Riga, Latvia.

Over the years, Baez has credited educator and bookseller Ira Sandperl — a self-taught Gandhi scholar who was born into a leftist Jewish household in St. Louis, Mo., in 1923 — as her intellectual mentor. The two cofounded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in the mid-1960s, and he remained her guru of civil disobedience tactics for decades.

The daughter of a Mexican father and Scottish mother, Baez endured schoolyard taunts for being a “dirty Mexican.” She found strength, however, in her family’s devotion to the Religious Society of Friends, more commonly and informally known as the Quakers, distinguished by their belief in conscientious objection against fighting in wars, which she channeled into her activism against the Vietnam War and other subsequent military conflicts.

Baez has primarily been a song interpreter rather than a songwriter, although she has on occasion written her own songs, the best-known of which was the title track to her album, “Diamonds and Rust,” one of several tunes she has written about her relationship with Bob Dylan. Baez was an early booster of Dylan’s, taking him on tour with her as a surprise guest (often to the chagrin of her audiences) and recording dozens of his songs, including some of his most Jewish numbers, such as “I Shall Be Released,” “With God on Our Side,” and “Forever Young.” They went their separate ways after Dylan’s European tour of 1965, captured in the documentary film, “Don’t Look Back,” and noteworthy in that Dylan never invited Baez to join him onstage. They reunited professionally in 1975 for Dylan’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” tour, where the two played a duet section at each concert and after which Baez was featured prominently in the Dylan-directed tour film, “Renaldo and Clara.” Baez has also favored songs by the other two members of the Great Male Jewish Rock-Poet Trinity — Paul Simon and Leonard Cohen, as well as those by Jewish-American folk-protest singer Phil Ochs.

Baez’s “Fare Thee Well Tour” – described as “her last formal extended concert tour of the world” – pauses in mid-November after several concerts in the Bay Area. The tour reboots on February 1, 2019, for one last trek through Europe, before making one last swing through the U.S. next April and May.

Seth Rogovoy is a contributing editor at The Forward and the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” (Scribner, 2009).

 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/arts/music/big-jay-mcneely-dies.html
 

Big Jay McNeely, 91, Dies; R&B’s ‘King of the Honkers’

Sept. 17, 2018

 

 
By Bill Friskics-Warren
 
Big Jay McNeely, whose wailing tenor saxophone and outrageous stage antics helped define the sound and sensibility of early rock ’n’ roll, died on Sunday in Moreno Valley, Calif. He was 91.
His death, at Riverside University Health System Medical Center, was confirmed by his granddaughter Brittney Calhoun, who said the cause was advanced prostate cancer.
Hailed as the King of the Honkers, Mr. McNeely was at the forefront of a group of post-bop saxophonists who, in the late 1940s, abandoned the heady reveries of jazz for the more gutbucket pleasures of rhythm and blues. In the process he played a pivotal role in establishing the saxophone — before the electric guitar supplanted it — as the featured instrument among soloists at the dawn of rock ’n’ roll.
Best known for his acrobatics and daring in performance, Mr. McNeely whipped up crowds by reeling off rapid sequences of screaming notes while lying on his back and kicking his legs in the air. Other times he would jump down off the stage and blow his horn while strutting his way through the audience.
Among his many admirers were Clarence Clemons, the longtime saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, and the young Jimi Hendrix, who after seeing him perform in the late 1950s incorporated some of Mr. McNeely’s showstopping moves into his guitar-slinging persona.
Incidentally, given his typically raucous approach, Mr. McNeely’s signature hit was a smoldering ballad, “There Is Something on Your Mind,” a Top 10 R&B hit in 1959 featuring vocals by the doo-wop singer Little Sonny Warner. The song was widely recorded by others, most notably the New Orleans crooner Bobby Marchan, who had a No. 1 R&B single — and Top 40 pop hit — with it in 1960.
Mr. McNeely’s breakthrough record, however, had come a decade earlier: “Deacon’s Hop,” a growling, percussive instrumental released on the Savoy label. Based on Lester Young’s tenor saxophone solo on the Count Basie Orchestra’s 1940 recording “Broadway,” “Deacon’s Hop” spent two weeks at the top of Billboard’s Race Records chart, as it was then called, in 1949.
His popularity notwithstanding, Mr. McNeely’s more flamboyant exploits hardly met with universal approval.
At times his theatrics prompted white nightclub owners to summon the police to avert what they feared would be rioting by hysterical teenagers. Some of Mr. McNeely’s fellow African-Americans also disapproved of his over-the-top displays, shunning them as uncouth.
“I played with Nat King Cole up in Oakland one time, and I came on powerhouse, the crowd was screaming,” Mr. McNeely told LA Weekly in 2016. “I ran into him later that night at Bop City, an after-hours spot, and he said, ‘You’ll never work with me again.’
“I thought he was joking. He wasn’t.”
The poet Amiri Baraka detected something more disruptive — and culturally more pressing — than mere unruliness in Mr. McNeely’s performances. In his book “Blues People: Negro Music in White America” (1963), he wrote that he heard Mr. McNeely’s blaring riffs as a “black scream,” an expression of individuality and protest in the face of racial oppression.
Cecil James McNeely was born on April 29, 1927, the youngest of three boys, in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. His father, Dillard, was a porter on a floating casino moored off the Santa Monica coast. His mother, Armonia, a Native American, made Indian blankets and quilts that his father sold to supplement the family’s income. Both parents played the piano; Mr. McNeely’s brothers, Dillard Jr. and Robert, also played musical instruments.
Mr. McNeely started playing in bands in high school, including a trio with the alto saxophonist Sonny Criss and the pianist Hampton Hawes, both of whom would distinguish themselves as jazz musicians.
In the clubs of Los Angeles, Mr. McNeely heard and met bebop luminaries like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, who in the late 1940s appeared often on the West Coast. But his biggest early influence was the tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet, particularly his honking 64-bar solo on the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton’s popular 1942 recording of “Flying Home.”
“Every time we picked up our horns we were just elaborating on that, trying to make it bigger, wilder, give it more swing, more kick,” Mr. McNeely explained, referring to Jacquet’s solo, in the biography “Nervous Man Nervous: Big Jay McNeely and the Rise of the Honking Tenor Sax!” (1994), by Jim Dawson. “If you want to know where rhythm and blues began, that’s it, brother.”
After Mr. McNeely’s unhinged appearance in an amateur night at a club in Watts, Johnny Otis, the renowned bandleader and talent scout, persuaded him to join his ensemble.
Mr. Otis was then under contract to Savoy Records, whose owner, Herman Lubinsky, christened Mr. McNeely “Big Jay,” not because of his size — he was 5-foot-10 and of average build — but because of his outsize talent.
Mr. Lubinsky also began recording Mr. McNeely under his own name, billing him as Big Jay and His Blue Jays and releasing, along with seven other singles, the career-defining “Deacon’s Hop.” (The saxophone he played on “Deacon’s Hop” is now enshrined at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle.)
Mr. McNeely recorded for a number of labels and toured widely, including performances at Birdland and the Apollo Theater in New York, before retiring from the music business in the early 1960s. He took a job as a postal carrier.
At the time, rhythm and blues was being eclipsed by smoother sounds from Motown and elsewhere, and the ’60s rock culture would soon prize the electric guitar over the saxophone.
In 1960 Mr. McNeely married Jacqueline Baldain, a soul singer who recorded under the name Jackie Day. The marriage ended in divorce. In addition to Ms. Calhoun, he is survived by a son, Richard; a daughter, Jacquelene Jay McNeely; three other grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In 1983, after two decades out of the limelight, Mr. McNeely staged a comeback. He toured and recorded into the 21st century. He released the album “Blowin’ Down the House: Big Jay’s Latest and Greatest” just months before his 90th birthday in 2016.
In 2017, in an interview with Blues Blast magazine, Mr. McNeely reminisced about his heyday in the 1940s and ’50s and the changes in music that came after.
“The saxophone was really big back then,” he said. “It was the big thing. But it wasn’t long before they took the saxophone out and put the guitar in. That’s when they changed what they were calling it from rhythm and blues to rock ’n’ roll.”
 

https://www.notreble.com/buzz/2018/09/16/in-memoriam-max-bennett/
 
In Memoriam: Max Bennett
by Kevin Johnson  Bio 
Sunday, September 16th, 2018 

Sad news to report today: session bass legend Max Bennett, who worked with artists ranging from Ella Fitzgerald to The Beach Boys to Frank Zappa, has passed away. He was 90 years old. 
Bennett grew up between Kansas City and Oskaloosa, Iowa. He had his first professional gig with Herbie Fields in 1949, after which he served in the Korean War. After his time in the Army, he worked with Stan Kenton and eventually moved to Los Angeles. Bennett is regarded as a member of session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew, who played on the majority of hits in the ’60s and ’70s. He recorded with Elvis, Joni Mitchell, Celine Dion, Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Lalo Schifrin, and many more. Fans of more radical music may recognize him as the primary bassist on Frank Zappa’s classic Hot Rats album. 
“I was not familiar with Zappa’s music. Our paths never crossed,” Bennett told The Observer. “I was never a big fan of avant garde music in that sense. It was while I was working in the studio, what was it, 1967, I think? And I got a call from John Guerin. He said, ‘Get your stuff over to TTG’—that was in Hollywood—‘I got a double session for you with Frank Zappa.’ So we get there and we worked two double sessions for two nights. And that was the album, that was ‘Hot Rats.’”
In 1973, Bennett helped form the L.A. Express with Joe Sample, Larry Carlton, John Geurin, and Tom Scott. Besides their own releases, the band recorded on the Joni Mitchell albums Court and Spark and The Hissing of Summer Lawns. After L.A. Express folded, the bassist started his own band, Freeway. He had been performing up through the past year with his latest band, Private Reserve, which his websitedescribes as “the best of contemporary concepts” blending “the richness of jazz, blues, rock and latin music.”
Fellow legendary session bassist Leland Sklar shared his thoughts on Facebook, writing, “The bass community lost a pillar this week. The great Max Bennett. I have known Max for so many years and his work was exemplary of what a great studio musician is all about. You will be missed my brother but your legacy is deep and will endure for years to come. Loved you Max…Rest in Peace and Rest in Groove!”
Our thoughts are with the family and friends of Max Bennett.
 
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/nyregion/blue-moon-rodgers-hart.html?action=click
 
Elvis and Ella Fitzgerald Sang It. She Says Her Father Wrote It.
Sept. 16, 2018

Liz Roman Gallese with her father’s documents relating to his involvement in the song “Blue Moon,” at her home on Friday in Wellesley, Mass.Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
Uncle Chris said, “Go up to the attic.” This was at a brother-in-law’s funeral, in 1992.
He also told the niece he was talking to, Liz Roman Gallese, a documentary filmmaker and the daughter of the man who had just been buried: “You’ll see. They changed the quarter notes to eighth notes, that’s all.”
She did not follow Uncle Chris’s instructions until years later, but when she finally went through her father’s things, she discovered tantalizing clues that appeared to back up one of those improbable family stories: Her father, not Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, had written the endearing, enduring standard “Blue Moon.” Letters she found indicated he dashed it off in late 1930 or early 1931. Her father, Edward W. Roman, was 17 years old then and lived in Troy, N.Y., across the Hudson River from Albany.
“Blue Moon” is one of those heart-rending songs that was recorded by everyone from Mel Tormé to Ella Fitzgerald.
Ella Fitzgerald – Blue Moon (1957)Video by Overjazz Records
There is a subdued Elvis Presley version.
And there is a doo-wop group called the Marcels that rode up the charts with a high-energy take on “Blue Moon” in the early 1960s.
The story told in the family when Ms. Gallese, 70, was growing up was that her father had sold the song for $900 to buy a car, or maybe that he had “settled” with the rich and famous Rodgers and Hart for that amount. Either way, there was a car. Ms. Gallese found a snapshot of it that showed her father standing by the passenger-side door. She thinks it was a DeSoto, because the word in the family was that he had one. And the early DeSotos looked like the car in the photo.

Edward Roman in front of the car he bought in early 1937, after receiving a settlement for his song for $1,200; Edward Roman with the ice skates he wore when he skated on Burden’s Pond, which is where he saw the moon reflected blue in the water; Edward Roman and Mary Roman; and Edward Roman.Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
Ms. Gallese — after talking to yet another uncle, Uncle Dom — concluded that he did not end up with $900, but $1,200. But she had been convinced about the story long before that.
“My father wrote ‘Blue Moon,’” she announced in her freshman dormitory at Skidmore College in 1965. She was remembering the one and only exchange about “Blue Moon” that she ever had with him, a conversation when she was 9 or 10, or maybe 11.
“You wrote ‘Blue Moon,’ didn’t you?” she asked.
She recalled that he did not say no, but he did not say yes, either. His reply was, “Who told you that?”
She said she “mumbled something about having heard the stories.”
He then told the story his way: He would go speed-skate racing on a frozen pond — he still had the skates when Ms. Gallese was a child, and he often took her and a sister skating with a cousin. That night in 1930 or 1931, he said, “the moon reflected blue on the ice.” She said he formed a circle with his hands, like the moon.
That was it, the end of the story. He said nothing about Rodgers, Hart, a Tin Pan Alley go-between or a lawsuit.
Uncle Dom said that Rodgers and Hart had called Mr. Roman offering to settle for $1,200. As Ms. Gallese pieced the story together, Mr. Roman took the money but did not tell Uncle Chris, who became furious when he heard that “Blue Moon” had rung up $75,000 worth of sheet music sales in the first year after it was published, with Rodgers and Hart listed in the credits.
A contract sent from Jack Mahoney and Associates to Mr. Roman for the right to use “Blue Moon.” Mr. Roman never signed it.Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
Ms. Gallese said that her father had sent his version of the song to a Manhattan music broker who offered to represent him. Back came a contract, but her father never signed it. “They continued to write to me at intervals, sending me contracts to fill out and make them my agent,” her father said, according to a 1936 newspaper article about the lawsuit he eventually filed.
The newspaper article, from the long-gone Knickerbocker Press in Albany, said the lawsuit had named Rodgers and Hart, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Robbins Music Corporation and Jack Mahoney, who Ms. Gallese said was the person who had sent the contracts her father never returned.
The article said Mr. Roman figured that he had forfeited his rights by the time the song turned up on the radio, but filed suit after being advised otherwise.
She found the letter from Mahoney, with the contract, proposing to represent Mr. Roman and handle the song. It was dated Jan. 12, 1932, a year and a half before the first MGM copyright on an unpublished song with the “Blue Moon” melody.
She said she assumed that Mahoney sent the song to MGM; that someone there “foisted it” on Rodgers and Hart; and that Jack Robbins, who ran MGM’s music-publishing unit, saw potential in the melody a little later on.
What to make of Ms. Gallese’s story?
“This is news to me,” said Ted Chapin, the chief creative officer of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, who added, after hearing more of Ms. Gallese’s story, that it seemed “a little far-fetched.”
The 1932 letter from Jack Mahoney and Associates to Mr. Roman accepting “Blue Moon.”Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times
Robert Kimball, who edited “The Complete Lyrics of Lorenz Hart” with Hart’s sister-in-law Dorothy, went a step further, saying, “I don’t believe ‘Blue Moon’ was written by someone other than Rodgers and Hart.”
Mr. Chapin pointed to a section in the 1976 book “Thou Swell, Thou Witty: The Life and Lyrics of Lorenz Hart,” by Ms. Hart. “Larry and Dick,” she wrote, referring to Hart and Rodgers, “never believed in letting a song go to waste,” adding that “no Rodgers and Hart tune ever led as many lives as the one that finally became ‘Blue Moon.’”
She then quoted Rodgers, who died in 1979, as tracing the song’s origins to the months between December 1932 and April 1933 when he and Hart worked at MGM. He said they wrote the song when a producer had the idea for a movie called “Hollywood Party” as a vehicle for Jean Harlow.
“Hollywood Party” was not made, but Rodgers said that Hart kept the melody and wrote new lyrics for another movie, “Manhattan Melodrama.” That second version was dropped too, but Hart churned out yet another set of lyrics that made it in, with the title “The Bad in Ev’ry Man.” (The Hart biographer Gary Marmorstein added a footnote: “The Bad in Ev’ry Man” was the last song that the gangster John Dillinger ever heard. He was strolling out of a theater when he was gunned down by F.B.I. agents. The movie he had just seen was “Manhattan Melodrama.”)
By July 1933, Rodgers and Hart had moved to Paramount, but Robbins, the MGM music publisher, sent them a telegram asking for a more commercial lyric to go with the melody. Rodgers said in “Thou Swell, Thou Witty” that the new lyric was written “sometime in the next three months” and that Robbins “personally suggested changes in the last three lines of the chorus.”
Ms. Gallese said she was well aware that there was a missing link in her story — how the song got from Mahoney to Hollywood. But that is the nature of a mystery.
“And who knows if he sent it to other people first?” she asked.
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 17, 2018, on Page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Blue Moon,’ Ballad Sung by Many, Is Also a Family Story. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
 
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opinion/sunday/learning-jazz-piano-online-internet.html?nl=todaysheadlines
 
Piano Lessons in the Panopticon
Sept. 15, 2018
By Elias Muhanna
Mr. Muhanna teaches literature at Brown University.

Gaurab Thakali
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A few years ago, I began taking jazz piano lessons on the internet.
It had been almost a decade since my last lesson, the old-fashioned kind that involved driving to my teacher’s house, sitting down at the piano in his cluttered living room and playing for an hour.
This was different. Instead of meeting with a person, I stayed home and watched YouTube tutorials. I did this guiltily at first while searching for a real teacher but soon became absorbed by the wealth of instruction on every style of jazz that I found online. Some nights, I’d take notes on a lesson about angular bebop patterns. Other nights, I’d practice neo-soul grooves over a trap beat, trying to pick out a teenager’s spontaneous jam on Instagram.
My favorite teacher was a pianist from St. Louis named Peter Martin, a virtuosic player regarded in jazz circles as one of the finest pianists in the world. His early lessons were brief, shaky clips recorded on an iPhone. As Mr. Martin’s following grew, some of his video tutorials began to incorporate a lot of technological gadgetry. Multiple cameras provided different angles of the keyboard; transcriptions of the music scrolled along as he played. Viewers could loop sections of video and change their speed, studying the teacher’s flying fingers in slow-motion like football players reviewing tapes of past games.
Performance of Charlie Parker’s “Donna Lee” with interactive notation by Peter Martin (piano), Greg Hutchinson (drums), Reuben Rogers (bass).Video by Open Studio
Jazz is difficult to learn, both because of its complexity and because of its improvisational nature. Many players amass an encyclopedic knowledge of the music’s structures, but learning to improvise is as much a bodily skill as a mental one.
After a couple of years of diligent practice, I flew to St. Louis to meet the teacher I had spent hundreds of hours listening to. As an educator myself, I wanted to understand why my playing had improved so dramatically under his tutelage. I’d been taking piano lessons since the age of 7, but no teacher had ever had such an effect on me. Was that his doing? Or is there something about the peculiar intimacy of the online lesson — the way it permits a student to scrutinize a teacher’s subtlest movements — that has transformed the learning process?
I arrived on an August morning last year, as a crew was getting ready for a recording session. A videographer was adjusting the light balance on one of four cameras surrounding the Steinway grand piano, while an audio engineer positioned microphones. In the previous two years, Mr. Martin’s website had grown from a simple, one-person operation into a flourishing online school called Open Studio, offering lessons by some of the world’s leading jazz artists. Enrollments were surging.
“It used to be that you could never find a cab in St. Louis, and then Uber came along. That’s kind of how I think about the online lessons,” he told me.
Growing up in a musical family, Mr. Martin became interested in jazz at an early age. When he was 13, he met Wynton Marsalis when the trumpeter came to town to perform with the St. Louis Symphony, where Mr. Martin’s father played viola. Skipping school, Mr. Martin went to the concert hall early and played for Marsalis, who was wowed by the teenager.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing, but Wynton was so encouraging,” he said. “He told me to transcribe Thelonious Monk’s solos, and so I started dropping the needle on those records and trying to hear what Monk was playing.”
I asked Mr. Martin if online education was leaving that model behind, and serving up the secrets of the craft. Now students can study their masters — world-class performers — from every angle, again and again. And they can interact with them on social media, asking questions about intonation, trill technique, rhythmic feel.
“Yeah, maybe we’re making it too easy,” Mr. Martin said. “That’s something that I wrestle with. You don’t want it to be too easy, because you miss out on that grit that you get from having to learn it on your own.”
I nodded and began to respond before he interrupted, brightly, “Hey, want to have a piano lesson later?”
The rest of the day passed in a fog.
The crew taped a Facebook Live session, where my teacher fielded questions about quartal voicings over major seventh harmony. I stood in a corner, panicking about the looming lesson. The progress I’d made now seemed cartoonish.
I heard my name being called. He was motioning me over to the piano.
“I thought it would be nice to tape a master class,” he said as someone clipped a microphone to my shirt. “I’m sure the members will get a lot out of it.”
Two worlds had collided, and I was stuck between them. The pressure of an old-fashioned piano lesson was poised to be magnified by the panopticon of the internet.
“So, what did you have in mind to play today?” he asked.
I played the first thing that popped into my head: His own arrangement of the Gershwin standard “Love Is Here to Stay.” When the time came for a solo, I played the one that Mr. Martin had improvised spontaneously in the lesson, which I’d transcribed and learned like a bedtime prayer. “Wow,” he said when I came to a clattering halt. “I played all that?”
I don’t remember much of what happened over the next hour. I felt like I was wandering through a musical hall of mirrors: Here was the teacher commenting on the student’s performance of the teacher’s own solo. It was uncanny, yet it made sense. Hadn’t I spent the last two years inspired by Martin’s beautiful performances, studying his tics and flourishes and trying to make them my own?
The technological aspects of our encounter suddenly seemed irrelevant. Inspiration and imitation were the true teachers, as they’d always been.
 
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/10/arts/music/popcast-village-voice-music.html?mc_cid=04c8525882
 
Sept. 10, 2018

Late last month, the owner of The Village Voice, the storied alternative weekly that for decades had been a leading light for music criticism, among other things, announced that the publication would be closing.
Much of how we think about contemporary music criticism traces its roots to The Voice, which was a 1960s counterculture bible, a 1970s and 1980s downtown bible, and after that, a boisterous town square for cutting-edge conversation about cutting-edge arts. The writing was passionate and intricate, and the coverage was wide. The paper provided crucial early coverage of hip-hop, was dedicated in its coverage of jazz and modern classical, and weighed in on obscure rock and hyper-mainstream pop.
On this week’s two-part Popcast, several former Village Voice music editors and music critics, whose tenures date from the paper’s early years up to the last decade, look back:
Part 1 (above): The Early Years
·        Robert Christgau, who for several decades wrote The Voice’s Consumer Guide column, and who is currently the Expert Witness columnist at Noisey and the author of the forthcoming collection “Is It Still Good to Ya?: Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017”
·        Jon Pareles, a former Voice critic and music editor and now the chief pop music critic for The New York Times
·        Nelson George, who covered hip-hop extensively for The Voice in the 1980s and who is a producer of the upcoming Cinemax series “Tales From the Tour Bus”
·        Kyle Gann, who for years covered modern classical and new music for The Voice, and is now a professor of music at Bard College
·        Joe Levy, a former Voice music editor and now a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and host of the “Inside the Studio” podcast
Part 2 (below): The Later Years
 
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/14/arts/music/amina-claudine-myers-gospel.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmusic
 
Amina Claudine Myers, a Singer Who Still Needs No Words
Sept. 14, 2018

Amina Claudine Myers has recorded 11 albums as a leader since 1979. In October, she’ll debut a new program at the Community Church in Midtown.Amanda Hakan for The New York Times
Amina Claudine Myers was sitting in her apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, surrounded by paintings and photographs as she recalled a rehearsal there almost 40 years ago. She’d been playing the same baby grand piano that sits in the living room today, and Cecil McBee had brought his upright bass. She recalled that sounds came spontaneously to her lips. “I do remember thinking: You don’t need words to express,” she said. “Just your voice, the sound, can relay a message.”

Ms. Myers plays the same baby grand piano in her home that she did 40 years ago.Amanda Hakan for The New York Times
The wordless song that emerged became “African Blues,” the finale of her rousing 1980 album, “Amina Claudine Myers Salutes Bessie Smith,” and a good distillation of her powers.
Now 76, Ms. Myers never became a top name, but devotees know her as an uncategorizable force, someone who can communicate powerfully through poetry, piano, organ and voice, and even as an actor. She has recorded 11 albums as a leader since 1979 — mostly solo or trio efforts — but her legacy runs much deeper.
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When she sings, especially without words, Ms. Myers’s voice can work like a horn or a drum — an instrument in which air passes straight through, responding directly to the vessel. Her vocals don’t have the clothespin tightness of a scat singer or the loose delirium of a gospel crescendo, but you can hear her savoring every note.
In her piano playing, the blues, the black church, classical music and free improvising coexist. She often paints in warm, billowing sheets, skirting both the classic lexicon of traditional jazz and the brazen outsiderism of the avant-garde.
In recent years, Ms. Myers has been performing solo almost exclusively.Amanda Hakan for The New York Times
On Oct. 19, in a performance at the Community Church in Midtown, Ms. Myers will debut a new program celebrating the classic gospel groups of the 1950s. The music will also reach into Ms. Myers’s songbook, and the black spirituals of the slavery era. She’ll be joined by Generation IV, a group featuring Pyeng Threadgill, Luna Threadgill-Moderbacher and Richarda Abrams, all children and grandchildren of Ms. Myers’s longtime associates in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or A.A.C.M. And, covering the repertory of groups like the Staples Singers and the Gospel Harmonettes, she’ll be accompanied by memories of her own childhood.
Born in 1942 in the tiny hamlet of Blackwell, Ark., Ms. Myers grew up playing the piano at Baptist and Methodist church functions, and leading gospel quartets. After graduating from college, she moved to Chicago and in 1966 joined the A.A.C.M., a newly formed group of black composers dedicated to shepherding one another’s work. She developed a particularly close musical partnership with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams (“my spiritual brother,” she said). At the same time, she was gigging with Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, eminent soul-jazz figures. She soon began writing poetry and setting it to music. Her first serious work was “I Dream,” a set of songs for choir and band.
She continues to compose ambitious, large-form pieces — a long-gestating opera based on the life of Harriet Tubman remains in the works — but of late Ms. Myers has been performing solo almost exclusively. The shows I’ve seen have been transcendent. In 2016, playing at the Community Church, she sang a tired, disillusioned, defiant original, her voice rising on a slant as she repeated a biting refrain: “Ain’t nobody ever gonna hear nobody hearing us now.” But moments later, drawing the concert to a close, she played a simple, lapping, major-to-minor progression, and insisted on gratitude. “Thank you for life,” she sang. “Thank you for blessings/Thank you for family/Thank you.”
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bTzubV_Ny8
 
A short documentary about collectors and traders at an indoor market in east london. Directed, and edited by Mark Windows

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/ira-sabin-dc-record-store-owner-founder-of-jazztimes-magazine-dies-at-90/2018/09/13/a1590754-b76c-11e8-a2c5-3187f427e253_story.html?utm_term=.e6693f6b0c5b
 
Ira Sabin, D.C. record-store owner, founder of JazzTimes magazine, dies at 90
Matt Schudel

September 13 at 7:30 PM
During World War II, when Washington was booming and many musicians were in the military, young Ira Sabin launched what became a lifetime gig in jazz. He had his first professional jobs as a drummer when he was 15, led groups in clubs and concert halls for nearly 20 years, became a promoter and record-store owner and in 1970 founded the publication that became JazzTimes magazine, one of the most successful and influential journals of its kind.
Mr. Sabin died Sept. 12 at an assisted living facility in Rockville, Md., at age 90. He had cancer, said a son, Glenn Sabin.
When he was 12, Mr. Sabin began playing in a school drum-and-bugle corps, then quickly fell under the spell of jazz. By 15, he was working as a professional musician.
“A man called me up one day and asked me what kind of drums I had,” he said in a 2000 interview with School Band and Orchestra magazine. “I told him what I had — tom toms, cymbals and everything. He said, ‘I’ll pick you up at 6:30.’ He didn’t even want to know anything about me, just that I could play.”
He earned his musicians’ union card at 16 and quickly found himself working three jobs a day in nightclubs, concert halls and society gatherings, “gaining a lifetime of professional experience in a few short years,” he later wrote in JazzTimes.
He performed in some of Washington’s first integrated jazz groups and sometimes entertained at private parties at the Georgetown home of Sen. John F. Kennedy (D-Mass.) before he became president. By the late 1950s, Mr. Sabin was producing concerts and other performances, featuring such acclaimed musicians as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Oscar Peterson.

Ira Sabin, right, with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, circa 1984. (Courtesy of Glenn Sabin/Courtesy of Glenn Sabin)
In 1962, he bought out a brother-in-law who had a record store, renaming it Sabin’s Discount Records. The store, at Ninth and U streets NW, was in the heart of Washington’s thriving jazz district, within walking distance of two theaters and six jazz clubs. The shop carried one of the country’s largest collections of jazz recordings, and musicians often stopped by to shop and chat.
“He seemed to attract folks and had this bon-vivant manner,” Lee Mergner, a former editor and publisher of JazzTimes, said in an interview. “In Ira’s world, people were all ‘cats’ and ‘chicks.’ He called everybody ‘baby’ and ‘man.’ ”
Mr. Sabin began to publish a four-page newsletter for his customers, highlighting new record albums and upcoming performances at jazz venues. Soon enough, disc jockeys around the country were sending him playlists, and record labels were taking out two-page advertisements.
Some of the country’s most respected jazz critics, including Leonard Feather, Ira Gitler, Stanley Dance, Dan Morgenstern and Martin Williams, began to write for Mr. Sabin. In 1970, he dubbed his newsletter Radio Free Jazz, in an effort to promote jazz to radio programmers. Published on rough newsprint paper, Radio Free Jazz grew from four pages to 12 to 28. The first paid subscriber was the renowned bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie.
“I was flying by the seat of my pants,” Mr. Sabin wrote in JazzTimes in 1995. “I was the writer, editor, publisher, advertising sales person, artist, proofreader, photographer, distributor, you name it. Editorial decisions were simple, though: whenever I’d hear a player that knocked me out, he or she would be on our next cover.”
In 1980, at Feather’s suggestion, Mr. Sabin renamed his publication JazzTimes. It retained a newspaper format until 1990, when Mr. Sabin’s son Glenn took over as publisher and converted JazzTimes to a glossy monthly magazine. (Another son, Jeffrey, was the general manager.)
JazzTimes reached a peak circulation of more than 115,000 in the late 1990s. The Sabin family sold the magazine in 2009, but it remains, along with DownBeat, one of the primary journals chronicling the music, personalities and educational opportunities in jazz.
“What Ira did when he started that magazine was so important to the world of jazz,” saxophonist Jimmy Heath said in an interview. “He was a pioneer in that respect.”
Ira Sabin was born Aug. 10, 1928, in Brooklyn and moved with his family to Washington in 1939. His father was a businessman, his mother was trained as a pharmacist.
When Mr. Sabin was a student at Washington’s Eastern High School, jazz was evolving from the swing music of the 1930s to the more complex bebop style of the 1940s.
“I learned jazz playing in small combos, and by going to the neighborhood record store, buying Charlie Parker records and trying to play what was on the records,” Mr. Sabin said in 2000. “But much of jazz playing, particularly improvisation, can’t be taught — it’s inborn. Sure, people can show you, but it has to be in you.”
In the 1950s, he served as an Army musician and performed in musical groups in the United States and Japan. He returned to Washington in 1956 and began to branch into producing musical events, as well as performing.
During the 1968 riots in Washington, Sabin’s Discount Records was looted but, unlike many other businesses along the U Street corridor, was not burned down. Mr. Sabin later moved the store to Southeast Washington before selling it in 1981.
He lived in Kensington for many years before moving to Silver Spring, Md., in retirement. Survivors include his wife of 67 years, the former Irma Leish of Silver Spring; three children, Marla Sabin and Jeffrey Sabin, both of North Potomac, Md., and Glenn Sabin of Silver Spring; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
In addition to founding JazzTimes, Mr. Sabin organized one of the first national conventions for people working in jazz in 1979. He later moved the JazzTimes convention from Washington to New York, where later incarnations of the gathering have become major networking events for musicians, radio hosts, record company executives, nightclub owners, festival promoters, educators and writers.
“For him, it really was a labor of love,” Mergner said of Mr. Sabin’s leadership at the magazine. “He really wanted to serve these musicians and the music.”
Read more Washington Post obituaries
Wakako Yamauchi, celebrated Japanese American playwright, dies at 93
Adam Clymer, veteran New York Times political reporter and editor, dies at 81
Bill Daily, comic actor in ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and ‘The Bob Newhart Show,’ dies at 91
 
 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/arts/music/wayne-shorter-emanon.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmusic
 
Wayne Shorter, Jazz’s Abstruse Elder, Isn’t Done Innovating Yet
Sept. 12, 2018

The composer and saxophonist Wayne Shorter is releasing his first album in five years, a triple-disc set called “Emanon.”Christian Weber
Wayne Shorter is not only one of jazz’s greatest composers but its angel of esotericism, an enlightened and arcane elder. He reminds us that good improvising is about chance-taking and suspending disbelief as much as it’s about mastery. The saxophonist, 85, is also one of the genre’s last remaining figures to have come of age in the 1950s, when jazz was a popular music as well as an intellectual one.
Since 2000, Mr. Shorter, a National Endowment for the Arts jazz master, has held together a fabulous quartet that plays an inimitable style of flared-up chamber jazz with the pianist Danilo Pérez, the bassist John Patitucci and the drummer Brian Blade. This band lives onstage: It doesn’t do rehearsals, and almost none of its recorded output has been made in a studio. “Emanon,” which Blue Note will release Friday, is an exception — the first of its three discs was done in studio.
The album, Mr. Shorter’s first in five years, comes with a 36-page graphic novel telling the story of a “rogue philosopher” named Emanon, who takes up arms against the powers of evil. (Mr. Shorter created the book alongside the writer Monica Sly and the artist Randy DuBurke.) On Disc 1, the quartet embeds itself within the 34-piece Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, doing Mr. Shorter’s soaring, relentless scores. The other two discs feature only the quartet, playing some of its best music yet.
Speaking on the phone from Los Angeles, Mr. Shorter waxed plenty abstruse as he discussed the quartet, the opera he’s working on with Esperanza Spalding and his reaction upon first hearing “Both Directions at Once,” a recently discovered recording by his old friend John Coltrane. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
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Your quartet has become so comfortable with each other while preserving an intense feeling of risk. How have you kept the mystery in the music?
We never rehearse anything. There’s one piece we play named “Unidentified Flying Objects.” Those are the notes. We don’t know where the hell they’re going. It’s a little thing we call trust and faith. To me, the definition of faith is to fear nothing. And here’s a funny line: Trust don’t throw anybody under the bus.
When we get together, we don’t fight. We don’t argue over who’s going to do what when someone’s playing. Say someone’s playing a line and then someone else cuts across the line and takes over. We don’t think of it as an interruption. Matter of fact, we don’t think. We just use it as an opportunity.
It makes sense that you’ve always loved comics, because to me your music is visual. When you compose, do you think of images or films?
Yeah, it’s visual stuff, but it’s also things unenvisioned. It’s like something needing encounter — an encounter that’s hard to imagine, and you cannot put any color, weight, dimension to it. It’s something even more than a what-if.
When we played in San Francisco, we were invited to Stanford, and they were showing us this stuff that they have related to the CERN in Switzerland, the collider. And we saw two baby galaxies playing. It takes millions of years for them to play. But you can say that they are playing. And the scientists are into the music, too. Every time we go to San Francisco to play, there they are.
You’re working on an opera with Esperanza Spalding. Is it close to done?
No, it’s not close to done. [Laughs.] But we’re having a lot of fun with it. Because we are in charge of everything ourselves. The first opera was done by Monteverdi — they actually had fun. Then it turned into something else; it turned into divas and arias and all these arrogant conductors. And you can’t get in unless you have the money for a bow tie and a tuxedo. That’s bull.
I liked that the protagonist in “Emanon” is a “rogue philosopher,” because that’s how I think of you. How did music become a canvas for such broad philosophical inquiry for you?
I think that music opens portals and doorways into unknown sectors that it takes courage to leap into. I always think that there’s a potential that we all have, and we can emerge, rise up to this potential, when necessary. We have to be fearless, courageous, and draw upon wisdom that we think we don’t have.
You’re fond of talking about eternity, and the need to recognize how fleeting and comparatively inconsequential our current moment is. How do you use music to connect with what’s beyond the moment?
To me, a song is not finished. To me, there’s no such thing as a finished anything. All of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, to me, are one. I think of it as having no beginning and no end. Do you know that it took Beethoven eight years to get the first several notes of the second movement of his Fifth Symphony together? So it was no deity that went through him and said, “O.K., genius!” You’ve got to challenge inspiration not yet begun to come out. There’s all kinds of closets, you know.
You hear about people saying, “You gotta get things fast because you only live once.” I think that’s a misnomer right there. Words like “only,” “never,” and all that, they’re crutches. We have to have people who are willing to — I don’t want to say it like this but — go down with the ship. Don’t worry about wealth and fame and all that stuff. It’s up to the person who’s being creative to find ways to emerge and shake up the world of wealth. And we have to do it ourselves. Want to change this stuff? Let’s change it ourselves. It’s like Miles Davis said: “Don’t you ask nobody for nothin’.”
Did you listen to the new John Coltrane album that came out?
Oh yeah, I knew about it. When I heard the first three notes, I knew it was “Nature Boy.”
Did you have any thoughts on the record?
No, it just confirmed my thought that nothing’s finished! [Laughs.]
 
 

https://thesmartset.com/giant-steps/#more-40940
 
Giant Steps
Getting hip to jazz
Matt Hanson
09/10/2018

If you ask me, there were quite a few cringe-worthy moments in the movie La La Land but one moment especially hit home. Early in the story, Emma Stone’s character, Mia, apprehensively confesses to Ryan Gosling’s idealistic jazz pianist that she “hates” jazz. It’s probably intended to show Mia’s relatability for the audience, but this viewer at least winced with recognition. The fact that Mia eventually discovers that she likes jazz after all is less about digging the music than about giving the viewer the Hollywood ending they want. She’s not alone in her defensiveness when it comes to America’s music — believe me, plenty of people tend to give us jazz fans the side-eye whenever the topic comes up.
The sad truth is that all too often jazz suffers the same kind of casual dismissal that hip-hop, country, and EDM used to get before they took over the mainstream. Granted, this might be something only a jazz lover would notice but since at least the ’70s, jazz has become something of a niche market, to put it mildly. In terms of yearly record sales, jazz usually sells as much as classical music does, one of the many things the two genres have in common. Far too often jazz comes off as dated or quaint; it’s your granddad’s make out music. Worse, there’s an implied snobbishness often projected onto loving jazz — it’s a little like explaining that you prefer to spend your Saturday nights translating Hegel or making artisanal cheese.
As much as I disagree with all of this, I can’t say that I don’t understand it. Growing up in the ’90s, my radio was always tuned to classic rock and alternative rock, which meant that like most of America, I was consuming different varieties of pop music almost exclusively. Part of what makes pop music popular is that it’s so easily digestible. You know the drill: introductory riff, verse, chorus, verse, maybe a bridge, usually a guitar solo, maybe a repeat of the chorus, and then over and out. Pop songs subtly cue the listener about when to sing along about how you can’t get no satisfaction or how the haters are gonna hate, hate, hate or that we all live in a yellow submarine. Don’t get me wrong, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this — only a true snob belittles a song for being fun or accessible. Writing a well-crafted song requires great skill, any old way you choose it. I love the Beatles, the Ramones, and a slew of other rock bands with a lifetime’s passion, but the one question I want to submit to the jazz-phobic is very simple: have you listened to it lately?
I remember the way I felt after popping a John Coltrane CD in the boombox — I told you it was the ’90s — all those years ago. Basically, it was culture shock. Nothing had prepared me for such a radical departure from how I had unconsciously assumed music was supposed to sound. A jazz tune could easily be up to 18 minutes long, often totally instrumental, and featuring three or four different extended solos from unfamiliar instruments, maybe from a saxophone, trumpet, and upright bass. I admit that I didn’t like it at first — jazz was weird, intimidating, and kind of overwhelming.

It felt a little like that scene in the movie Amadeus when the emperor attends Mozart’s new opera, and awkwardly explains that he nodded off in the middle because there were “too many notes.” New art of any kind can be a lot to take in at first; that’s part of the point. And whether the Emperor Joseph II actually did say this, his reaction is pretty common. Lena Dunham said pretty much the same thing about jazz in a social media post. The thing is, Mozart’s legendary rebuttal speaks for all musicians who find themselves in a similar situation: “there are as many notes as there should be.” What a wonderful defense not only of the composer’s skill, but a vindication of the artistic process. There’s often a method in what initially sounds like madness. Sometimes it takes a while for one’s aesthetic aperture to open. It’s up to the listener to find their own way into the new experience being offered. And once I did, when it all finally clicked, I was hooked for life.
The song that converted me was John Coltrane’s immortal version of “My Favorite Things.” In some ways, it’s a perfect place to start. Coltrane, the devoted craftsman, knew exactly what he was doing. The melody is instantly recognizable, easy to hum along to, and flexible enough to allow the musicians to stretch out. It became one of his most enduringly popular songs, and he experimented with it throughout his career, occasionally going for hour-plus excursions. His rarely-used soprano saxophone swoops and dangles along the edges of those familiar cadences, bending those familiar notes, searching for the key that will unlock the next ecstatic cascade of sound while Steve Davis’s bass throbs like a heartbeat and McCoy Tyner’s piano ripples like the wind gliding over a clear blue stream. Don’t take my word for it, have a listen yourself.
That’s only one song, of course, a mere drop in the bucket of Coltrane’s massive discography, but there’s so much more where that came from. Everything that makes jazz great is in there: the harmony and the dissonance, an appearance of effortlessness amid deep concentration, the amazing ways in which the musicians take a hoary old standard and make it new. Each musician is giving it everything they’ve got, staying open to what’s happening in the moment, encouraging and accentuating the rhythm and the melody to change and adapt to new textures and moods. Scholars have pointed out that jazz is an example of deep democracy in action — everyone collaborates while also being given their own space in which to tell their own story.
Listening to jazz is a bit of a lost art in our ADD age, where we are constantly checking and updating our social media profiles, posting pictures and texts, commenting, liking, tweeting and retweeting, perpetuating a discourse that is everywhere and nowhere. No surprise that hip-hop, with all its verbal density and obsessive self-promotion, has become the soundtrack to our era. I’d argue that jazz offers the same kind of pleasure in a different form. Jazz and rap have plenty in common, not only because of their deep roots in the African-American experience (more on that later) but their reliance on improvisation, storytelling, and the competition and mutual encouragement inherent in community. Replace words and phrases with notes and scales and it’s not that different at all, as MCs from Rakim (who cited Coltrane’s sheets of sound as a lyrical influence) to DJs like A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad, who used innumerable jazz samples as the backbone of classic Tribe tunes, can attest.

Jazz’s connection to other musical genres extends beyond classical and hip-hop, as well. If you can rock out to, say, Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton’s extensive riffing, then there’s no reason why you can’t enjoy Sonny Rollins or Dizzy Gillespie’s epic solos. Jazz offers plenty of opportunities for the same kind of thrills, and with a greater variety of tone and mood and texture. The level of freedom inherent in this kind of improvisation is exhilarating. Like any acquired taste, it might take some getting used to, not in an eat-your-broccoli way but in the sense of rewiring how you hear music in the first place.
The best way that I can describe it is that instead of listening for the usual type of pop song (though jazz offers plenty of those), you’re listening to sound. Jazz exalts in the beautifully minute cadences that come fresh every time, often made up on the spot, a thousand little melodies pouring out of one source. Falling in love with jazz has deeply enhanced the way I hear all music; instead of always waiting for the big climax or the familiar repetition, I learned to go with the flow. Sometimes, listening to jazz is like hearing an impassioned speech or running at top speed, other times it’s the perfect accompaniment for late night brooding or a romantic swoon.
It isn’t surprising that jazz musicians are often interested in things like Zen and spirituality (not to mention drugs and drink), and the reason might be because they have the professional obligation to be both deeply in the moment and outside of it at the same time. It’s fun to watch, too, as live clips and classic photographsdemonstrate. There’s something wonderful about watching a musician’s breath animating their instrument, fingers flying over drum kits, thick strings and gleaming keys struck at just the right moment, telling a million stories in a voice beyond words.

Jazz has something to offer for every taste, no matter what musical itch you want scratched. If you’re feeling spiritual, there’s the testimony of Coltrane, of course, and his underrated wife Alice. If you want to get a party started, you could do a lot worse than hanging with the likes of Cab Calloway or Louis Armstrong. For smoldering ballads, try Miles Davis’s muted horn or Chet Baker’s delicate croon. Feel free to march along with Charles Mingus or Max Roach when in a militant mood. Put on Cannonball Adderley’s Somethin’ Else on a breezy summer’s day as you drive with the windows down. Try Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” or the restrained elegance of Bill Evans for poetic expressionism. Feeling lovelorn and want to cry in your beer? May I suggest a liquid lunch with Billie Holliday and Lester Young, who were lovers in every way but one.
Jazz can be athletic music, too: give Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers a spin the next time you’re at the gym. After Sun Ra and his Arkestra take you to outer space, explore the eccentric genius of “the high priest of bebop,” Thelonious Monk, and let the hard driving swing of Count Basie bring you back down to earth. If you’re into electric instruments, then may I suggest tripping the light fantastic with Bitches Brew or the Mahavishnu Orchestra. As for the ladies of jazz, you haven’t lived until you’ve heard what Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Blossom Dearie or Nina Simonecan do with a melody. Of course, I’m only scratching the surface of each of these categories — there’s roughly a century of music to choose from, and the varieties of tone and mood are endless.
Contemporary jazz doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it once did, but there are scores of amazing musicians playing right now who deserve to be heard. The Marsalis brothers are probably the best-known, maybe Joshua Redman too, and they are all certainly worthy, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg of what’s happening now. Try Brad Mehldau’s ineffable reworkings of Nick Drake and Radiohead tunes to start, or delve into Noah Preminger’s atmospheric take on ancient blues. Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Madlib and Flying Lotus intriguingly mix their love of hip-hop with their fluency in traditional jazz stylings. Tomas Fujiwara and Vijay Iyereach explore the outer limits of the music like no one else. Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall keep the torch song lit, and the brilliant Esperanza Spaulding graces every note she plays with her unique spirit. Each of these musicians (to name but a few) keeps jazz alive in their own way, on their own terms, which is the only way it should be done.
The recent spate of documentaries and biopics are an encouraging sign that the mainstream is starting to notice that jazz musicians aren’t exactly boring people. Their lives can be as dramatic as their music, and I’m looking forward to the day when people like Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, and Eric Dolphy get their proper retrospectives and have their legacies reinvigorated like Johnny Cash and Ray Charles did. Jazz records tend to have intriguing titles, too, which is often indicative of the wonders contained within. Check these out, for a start: Money Jungle, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, The Creator Has A Master Plan, East Broadway Run Down, Moon Beams, The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Out to Lunch, The Sidewinder, Empyrean Isles, and Sketches of Spain, just to name a few.

It’s no secret that jazz was born out of the crucible of oppression endured by African Americans that began long before anyone even considered declaring that all men were created equal. Appreciating jazz’s deep roots in the blues (like most of American music) is crucial to understanding its role in American musical history. As Cornel West says, “the blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed” and the opportunity for this kind of expression provided a means of survival through catharsis, a way of living with pride and self-affirmation within a degraded and degrading social structure.
It takes a tremendous amount of unredeemed suffering to learn how to swing this hard, which makes jazz not only a powerful aesthetic statement but a social and political one as well. For many, jazz offered a rare opportunity to engage in all manner of forbidden freedoms: pleasure, movement, community, critique, and unrestrained self-expression, when such things were routinely repressed by official state policy. The technical virtuosity required to play it at its highest levels gave people like Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker special resonance for a community that refused to be defined by other people’s belittling projections. After hearing Art Tatum, an awestruck Arthur Rubenstein said that if Tatum ever took up classical music, he’d quit the next day.
Nowadays, other genres of music tend to carry this kind of socio-political weight. What was transgressive and alluring for previous generations has now become commonplace, but there’s so much further we need to go until the possibilities imagined by the music match the realities of our society. For example, consider Kendrick Lamar, himself a jazz fan, vindicating his art form by being the first ever rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. It would be a devastating loss to our culture if we were to let jazz be callously dismissed as merely a relic of a bygone era, a quaint historical oddity, and let its exuberant innovation fall on deaf ears. Everything old becomes new again, and we can still learn a lot from what jazz can teach us.
Any artist, regardless of whatever intentions they might have, ultimately wants the same thing: to be valued, debated, studied — in a word, to be heard. Appreciation isn’t exploitation if it’s rooted in respect and a willingness to approach the art on its own terms, which leads to awe at what human beings can create. Over the years, jazz has inspired countless poets and writers, musicians of all kinds, rappers and DJs, filmmakers, painters, and even a president or two. Once you let it infuse your life, jazz is far from snooty; it’s sublime. If you haven’t gotten hip to it yet, why miss out? There are decades of amazing music just waiting to be (re)discovered. All you need to do to listen. As Louis Armstrong once said, “if you have to ask, you’ll never know!” •
All images by Isabella Akhtarshenas.
Matt Hanson lives in Western Mass and writes for The Arts Fuse,  Boston’s online independent arts and culture magazine.  His work has also appeared in The Baffler, The Millions, and 3 Quarks Daily, and other places.  He can usually be found in the nearest available used bookstore.
 
 

Oral History Project of the NAMM.  It is quite a collection, and can be found here:

https://www.namm.org/videos/orh

Many of the interviews are with jazz musicians.  This is a way to get lost in a wonderland.

Oral History Project of the NAMM.  It is quite a collection, and can be found here:

https://www.namm.org/videos/orh

Many of the interviews are with jazz musicians.  This is a way to get lost in a wonderland.