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Henry Grimes, Bassist of Avant-Garde Pedigree and a Storied Return, Dies of COVID-19 at 84 | WBGO

Henry Grimes, Bassist of Avant-Garde Pedigree and a Storied Return, Dies of COVID-19 at 84 | WBGO


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https://www.wbgo.org/post/henry-grimes-bassist-avant-garde-pedigree-and-storied-return-dies-covid-19-84#stream/0
 

Henry Grimes, Bassist of Avant-Garde Pedigree and a Storied Return, Dies of COVID-19 at 84

By  • 9 hours ago

 

Henry Grimes met with a hero’s welcome, his first of many, when he lugged an upright bass onstage at the eighth annual Vision Festival.

This was May 24, 2003, and the feeling in the room, at Old St. Patrick’s Youth Center in SoHo, was momentously charged. It had been 35 years since Grimes last played in New York, and for much of that time he’d been a ghost — an unanswerable whatever-happened-to question, as far as the jazz world was concerned. Some reference books had actually listed him as deceased.

His performance that evening, with fellow bassist William Parker and alto saxophonist Rob Brown, served notice that Grimes was not only alive but still a vital force — bowing his instrument with manic clarity, burrowing into the thorny center of the sound.

It marked the start of a legendary comeback that stretched more than 15 years, until his death on Wednesday at Northern Manhattan Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Harlem. His wife, Margaret Davis Grimes, confirmed the details to the Jazz Foundation of America, which had been assisting with his care. She said the cause was complications from the coronavirus.

Before his disappearing act, Grimes had been a bassist in high demand and even higher promise. Known both for his versatility and the stout fullness of his sound, he began to make a mark in the mid-to-late 1950s, on albums by saxophonists Lee Konitz (who also died this week of COVID-19), Gerry Mulligan and Sonny Rollins.

Grimes played the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with Rollins, and is captured in the film Jazz on a Summer’s Day with an ad hoc trio featuring Thelonious Monk and Roy Haynes.

 

 

In the ‘60s, Grimes began to branch into a burgeoning avant-garde: he appears on Haynes’ Out of the Afternoon and Gil Evans’ Into the Hot; he anchored the Steve Lacy-Roswell Rudd Quartet on School Days and the McCoy Tyner Trio (again with Haynes) on Reaching Fourth. Then came a decisive pivot to free jazz, which had become an onrushing force by 1965, the year of Grimes’ first album, The Call.

By that point, Grimes had already appeared on several albums by saxophone firebrand Albert Ayler, notably Spirits and Witches & Devils. In ‘65 he played on Ayler’s Spirits Rejoice — along with a handful of other avant-garde touchstones, like Don Cherry’s Complete Communion, Sunny Murray’s Sunny’s Time Now, and Frank Wright’s Frank Wright Trio.

Grimes was a member of the Cecil Taylor Unit, which appeared on half of Into the Hot. Taylor’s fluent yet spiky pianism, and his comfort with atonality, didn’t faze him in the slightest; he subsequently appeared on Conquistador! and Unit Structures. Each is an essential album in the avant-garde canon, and each represents a high-water mark for early Taylor.

In 1968, Grimes headed for California, in search of sunshine and the promise of work. Things didn’t work out that way. His bass was damaged, and he pawned it. Without an instrument, gigs were hard to come by, so he did an assortment of construction and custodial work. He was homeless at times, and prone to erratic behavior. (This aspect of his story invites comparison with saxophonist Giuseppi Logan, who also died this week of causes related to COVID-19.)

His rediscovery came through the tenacious efforts of a social worker named Marshall Marrotte, who studied court records and other documents in order to find him in 2002. Grimes owned no instrument, so Margaret Davis began a campaign to get him one. This led to William Parker donating one of his own, a green-painted bass he’d dubbed Olive Oil.

Grimes would go on to play hundreds of gigs with that instrument, in New York and around the world. Among them was a return to the Vision Festival in 2004, when he performed in a trio with pianist Marilyn Crispell and drummer Andrew Cyrille. He also rekindled his musical relationships with Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon, and forged new ones with a wide range of admirers, like guitarist Marc Ribot. He could often be seen in the audience at performances in New York, typically wearing a trademark headband, with Davis by his side.

Henry Grimes was born in Philadelphia on Nov. 3, 1935. His first instrument was the violin, which he picked up again in earnest after his return to performing. He graduated from the Jules Mastbaum Vocational/Technical School in the Kensington neighborhood of Philly, and went on to Juilliard in New York, to study with Frederick Zimmermann, principal bassist for the New York Philharmonic. (There was no jazz outlet at Juilliard then, and he left after a year.)

Grimes led a prolific second act — enjoying his avant-garde eminence, performing on many more Vision Festivals, and holding the center of gravity in countless improvisational settings. One of his most fruitful collaborations was with Ribot, who had revered his work with Ayler. In 2005, Ribot released an Ayler tribute called Spiritual Unity, with Grimes, trumpeter Roy Campbell and drummer Chad Taylor.

In a  2012 interview with Brad Farberman for The Village Voice, Ribot reflected on what made Grimes such an ideal musical partner:

First of all, he’s a great improviser. Full of ideas. One of the things that you see in some beginning improvisers are that if you play a note they have to play the same note just to show, “Hey. See, I heard you.” [laughs] Henry manages to counterpoint whatever’s going on, but he doesn’t have that insecure reaction at all. He counterpoints while following his own trajectory, and it always works.

Ribot, Grimes and Taylor played a week at The Village Vanguard that year. Reviewing the opening set for The New York Times, I called it “a rough astonishment, restless and altogether riveting.” (The first set of the second night was broadcast by WBGO.) Pi Recordings released an album culled from the run.

Grimes published a book of poems he’d written during his time off the scene, calling it Signs Along the Road.

In a 2012 interview with For Bass Players Only, he reflected on his period of exile.

“I never gave up on music, not for a minute,” he said. “You could say I was absent for a long time, but I always believed I would be back one day. I just couldn’t see the way to get there, but I knew it would happen.”

 

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HENRY GRIMES November 3, 1935-April 17, 2020 + Giuseppi Logan (May 22, 1935 – April 17, 2020) The New York City Jazz Record – Posts

HENRY GRIMES November 3, 1935-April 17, 2020 + Giuseppi Logan (May 22, 1935 – April 17, 2020) The New York City Jazz Record – Posts


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Mary Lou Williams at Les Mouches, NYC, 1978 Cabaret Show, Carline Ray – YouTube

Mary Lou Williams at Les Mouches, NYC, 1978 Cabaret Show, Carline Ray – YouTube


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Legendary jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams performs a one-hour cabaret show at Les Mouches in NYC, 1978. Carline Ray, one of the original Sweethearts of Rhythm, is on bass.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcLwQn9PDE4

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Why Count Basie’s Band Was the Rolling Stones of Swing | Music Aficionado

Why Count Basie’s Band Was the Rolling Stones of Swing | Music Aficionado


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https://web.musicaficionado.com/main/article/pw_why_count_basie_band_was_the_rolling_stones_of_swing_by_mitchellcohen?utm_source=email
 

Why Count Basie’s Band Was the Rolling Stones of Swing

Post–World War II America was a bleak period for the big-band business. It was the sound that accompanied the country during the Depression and through the war—the comforting warmth of Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, the Dorseys; the sentimental ballads of loss and longing, the lively escapism—but with peacetime, those large ensembles for dancing and dreaming were falling out of fashion. It was a time of smaller groups, like Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five and the Nat King Cole Trio, and the economics of taking more than a dozen players out on the road simply weren’t adding up at the end of the ’40s. Some bandleaders scaled back, keeping reduced combos. At the time, pianist Count Basie commanded an orchestra that made a mighty noise and featured such musicians as Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, and Illinois Jacquet, and singers Jimmy Rushing and Helen Humes (and, for a short time, Billie Holiday, before she joined Artie Shaw’s outfit). Basie did the math and dismantled his powerhouse ensemble.

If Duke Ellington’s orchestra was the Beatles of the swing era, a sophisticated, innovative band with a broad stylistic palette, and a genius in-house composer, then Basie’s big band was the Stones, steeped in blues influences, visceral and assertive, more about the beat and the propulsion. It was music that jumped (two of the most famous tunes in their repertoire, both written by Basie, were “Jumpin’ at the Woodside ” and “One O’Clock Jump “). As early as 1937, the Basie band was pointing towards rhythm and blues, with Rushing-sung numbers like “Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong) ,” and honking instrumentals like “Swingin’ the Blues .” If any of the bands of the ’30s and ’40s could make itself heard when be-bop and rock’n’roll were rewriting the musical playbook, it was Basie’s. It always felt modern; it had punch; it was brash and optimistic, like America in the early part of the 1950s. There wasn’t anything corny about it, or dated. It was going to continue to move forward.

In 1952, Basie reassembled his orchestra, took it on tour, took it into the studio, cutting sides for Norman Granz’s Clef Records. Singer Joe Williams, a fearsome blues shouter who could also caress a ballad, came on board in ’54. The Basie-Williams version of “Every Day I Have the Blues ” (Williams had cut it earlier for Checker Records) became a big R&B hit, and the 1955 album ‘Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings ‘ was a landmark example of how big-band arrangements of blues songs and standards could be utterly contemporary. Sammy Cahn and Gene DePaul’s “Teach Me Tonight ” brushed against Percy Mayfield’s “Please Send Me Someone to Love ” and Leroy Carr’s “In the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down) ,” and Basie’s new gang of players, including Sonny Payne on drums, Freddie Green on guitar, sax players Frank Wess and Frank Foster, and trumpet players Joe Newman and Thad Jones formed a tightly swinging group. This “New Testament” band created a sound that helped define a corner of the jazz world through the rest of the decade and beyond.

What Basie was up to around ’55–’57, especially when Williams was front and center, was not miles away from what Atlantic was doing with Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, and Ruth Brown; it was blues-based popular music, except with jazz credentials. It’s odd: people always say that a strict dividing line was drawn when rock’n’roll came along, between teen and adult music, but it wasn’t as clear-cut as all that. There was a considerable amount of overlap, stylistically (the Platters, for example, owed quite a bit to the Ink Spots) and strategically. Was it bizarre that Count Basie and his Orchestra were the house band for disc jockey Alan Freed’s Camel Rock & Roll Dance Party on CBS Radio, doing their own songs and backing up acts like Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers and LaVern Baker? Or that the Basie band with Williams was featured in the rock ‘n’ roll movie Jamboree, alongside Fats Domino and Jerry Lee Lewis? (The music supervisor for the film was frequent Basie composer-arranger Neil Hefti.) Or that the music trade magazine Cash Box named the Basie orchestra the top Rock ‘n’ Roll band in America as chosen by the nation’s jukebox operators? Basie was quoted as saying, “Rock ‘n’ Roll started the kids dancing again—that’s certainly a blessing for us.” (Later, in 1961, he put out a 45, “The Basie Twist ,” because that’s what the kids were dancing to.)

The Basie band’s initial tenure with Norman Granz’s label (now with a new name, Verve) peaked with Wild Bill Davis’s exciting arrangement of the Vernon Duke–Yip Harburg standard “April in Paris ,” and ended with a 1957 set at the Newport Jazz Festival that brought back alumni Lester Young and Jimmy Rushing for guest slots. It was an emotional, musically thrilling performance, hosted by John Hammond, a snapshot of a band absolutely roaring with confidence. The next era for Basie began when Morris Levy signed him to Roulette Records, and in 1958, ‘The Atomic Mr. Basie ‘ was released, an album written and arranged by Hefti that was, as its title promised, explosive. Tracks like “The Kid from Red Bank ,” “Splanky ,” and “Lil’ Darlin ” instantly entered Basie canon, and the album was honored with a couple of trophies at the first Grammy Awards. This was jet-age big-band jazz.

Throughout the ’50s and ’60s, Basie and his crew (sometimes without their leader) made many essential recordings. There were always going to be fans who had a more profound attachment to the earlier Basie period, the jumpin’ band with Lester Young and Jimmy Rushing, but the influence of the New Testament band was widespread and vital. Here’s just a sampling of how Basie thrived creatively during the rock era. Let’s take it, as he said on the tag of “April in Paris,” one more time.

The Beginning of the New Era

The new era for Count Basie and his Orchestra began with the band’s expansion in 1952, and there were some fun records released on Clef (“Blee Blop Blues,” Bread,” “Cash Box”: all those and more can be found on ‘The Complete Clef & Verve Fifties Studio Recordings’), but everything clicked into place with the release of ‘Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings’ in 1955). Basie had found an ideal singer, and hit on the sweet spot where boogie, blues, jazz, and standards intersected. Everything on that album is impeccably performed, but what’s so intriguing is how, on tracks like “Roll ‘Em Pete,” they tiptoe up to the R&B line. The track on ‘One O’Clock Jump ‘ is notable for being the first recorded encounter of Count Basie and Ella Fitzgerald. She does a duet with Williams on the LP’s lead-off track, “Too Close for Comfort ,” then disappears for the rest of the session; it’d be more than a half-decade before Basie and Ella got down to serious business. On ‘Count Basie at Newport’, you hear the band ripping up “Lester Leaps In ,” Joe Williams’s exuberant “Smack Dab in the Middle ,” and Jimmy Rushing rejoining his old boss to revisit “Boogie Woogie (I May Be Wrong) ” from two decades earlier.

Doodlin’ and Moanin’

When Morris Levy held Basie’s recording contract, Basie was not always made available for sessions with other artists (for Tony Bennett to collaborate with Basie, they had to do two albums, one for Columbia and one for Roulette). But that didn’t prevent artists on other labels from using the Basie band sans Count, which is how the sound of the orchestra made its way on to albums by Sarah Vaughan, Nat “King” Cole, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Ray Charles. The Vaughan setrounds up everyone except the leader-pianist for a romp through the Great American Songbook (Berlin, Carmichael, Porter, Kern) and adds Horace Silver’s “Doodlin’ ,” which was given lyrics by Jon Hendricks. Cole’s album is bright and brassy, and the title song is filled with hep patter: “Love went and threw me, but we all snap back, mac.” ‘I Gotta Right to Swing ‘ leans decidedly in the direction of Ray Charles (on the opening “The Lady Is a Tramp ,” Sammy sings, “And for Ray Charles, she whistles and stamps”), and Davis is comfortable in that zone (“Mess Around ” is particularly fun). On six tracks on ‘Genius + Soul = Jazz’, including Bobby Timmon’s bop-standard “Moanin’ ,” arranger Quincy Jonesputs Charles’s Hammond organ at the center of the Basie orchestra.

In 1957, the dazzling vocalese trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, with Basie’s rhythm section (Freddie Green, Eddie Jones, and Sonny Payne) recorded the album ‘Sing a Song of Basie ‘, on which lyrics were added to such Basie staples as “Avenue C ,” “Down for the Count ,” and “Little Pony .” So it made sense for the group, plus Joe Williams, to make a follow-up with the whole band. It’s a swinging session , naturally, opening with “Jumpin’ at the Woodside ” and concluding with the Hefti composition “Lil’ Darlin .” Of the two Bennett-Basie albums, the nod goes to the one on Roulette (the Columbia companion, ‘In Person! ‘, was not quite in person), where they romp through “Chicago ,” “Anything Goes ,” and the Depression-era “With Plenty of Money and You .” The set with Eckstine is dominated by blues material, including Charles Brown’s “Drifting ,” “Stormy Monday Blues ,” and Eckstine’s own “Jelly Jelly ,” which he first recorded with Earl Hines in 1941.

Back on the Verve roster…

Back on the Verve roster, Basie was in full swing. The reunion started with a 1962 album of Hefti songs that continued in the ‘Atomic Mr. Basie’ mode (‘On My Way and Shoutin’ Again! ‘), followed by a set devoted to songs associated with Frank Sinatra. The highpoint of his second stint at Verve was his first full-length teaming-up with Ella Fitzgerald . It is a total joy, and picking out a single track is kind of crazy: there are two flawless Ellington interpretations (“Satin Doll” and “I’m Beginning to See the Light “); Ella adds her own lyrics to Frank Foster’s “Shiny Stockings ” and is girlish and giddy—and scatting like wild—on “Them There Eyes ,” which also features a sprightly Basie solo. There should have been a Verve Ella-Count sequel, but no luck. Not that Basie was lacking for duet partners: he was nicely matched with the deep-voiced Arthur Prysock(again, an excellent Ellington cover ) and with Sammy Davis, Jr. now able to bounce off each other in the studio, and with Quincy Jones on board, they get into, as they used to say, a solid groove, riffing on the Quincy–Peggy Lee anthem “New York City Blues .”

Pop Goes the Basie

Three albums on three different labels, each an attempt to stay in the contemporary musical conversation. For Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label, Quincy Jones arranged a program of mainly recent material (the album’s subtitle is ‘Hits of the 50’s and 60’s’): “I Left My Heart in San Francisco ,” “Moon River ,” “Walk, Don’t Run .” The original LP concluded with the romantic theme from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment . ‘This Time by Basie ‘ was the only time—except for his collaborations with Sinatra—that a Basie album made the Billboard top 20, so mission accomplished. It did so well that, two years later, Reprise did a sequel, ‘Pop Goes the Basie ‘, where “Do Wah Diddy Diddy ” met “Call Me Irresponsible.” In the interim, there were the Beatles to contend with. Many jazzy and mainstream pop artists were sent into the studio to wrestle with the songs of Lennon and McCartney, and Basie did about as well as most . His cleverest move was to include Leiber and Stoller’s “Kansas City ,” which you could imagine him doing in the ’50s with Joe Williams (and of course there was Basie’s own time playing in Kansas City in the early ’30s). Basie made a brief stop at United Artists Records: one album and out, a collection of James Bond–related tracks . The band sounds particularly at home on John Barry’s theme from Thunderball .

The Best is Yet to Come

You’ve got to wind up with Frank Sinatra and Count Basie. Not because Basie didn’t carry on until the ’80s, and have musical encounters with artists like Jackie Wilson, Big Joe Turner, the Mills Brothers, and old acquaintances like Ella and Sarah. But because when Sinatra and Basie got together, especially live, there was something electrifying about the combination. They’d gotten together twice in the studio, for 1962’s ‘Sinatra-Basie: An Historic Musical First ‘ (Hefti with the arranger gig) and ‘It Might As Well Be Swing ‘ in 1964 (Quincy in the chair), and each of those albums holds up. Those versions of “Fly Me to the Moon ,” and “The Best Is Yet to Come ” from the Quincy sessions have become embedded in our brains. But ‘Sinatra at the Sands ‘ topped them easily. Sinatra was in peak swagger when he and the Basie band took over the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in early 1966. And the guys who weren’t backing him up weren’t simply backing him up: they were pushing him. They didn’t play games. Introducing “Fly Me to the Moon,” Sinatra says of the Count, “This man here is gonna take me by the hand and lead me down the right path… in the right tempo.” (“Let me swing among those stars,” Sinatra snaps.) On an alternate version of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” from a different show than the one on the ‘Sands’ album, he tells the audience, “We’re gonna take this here building, and move it three feet that way. Now, hold on to your handbag.” And he isn’t kidding. This was a band that could move buildings, and blast a singer into orbit.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Konitz-Getz Prestige 10″

Konitz-Getz Prestige 10″


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Anybody remember Norman Levy’s Subway Record Store in Times Square.

I think it was like 43rd St & 8th Ave down in the Subway station (correct me if I’m wrong).

I paid $2 bucks for this one:

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2020 Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists Virtual Bass Orchestra – “Azure” by Duke Ellington – YouTube

2020 Richard Davis Foundation for Young Bassists Virtual Bass Orchestra – “Azure” by Duke Ellington – YouTube


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLPCA54k498

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Lee Konitz, Jazz Saxophonist Who Blazed His Own Trail, Dies at 92 – The New York Times

Lee Konitz, Jazz Saxophonist Who Blazed His Own Trail, Dies at 92 – The New York Times


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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/arts/music/lee-konitz-dead-coronavirus.html
 

Lee Konitz, Jazz Saxophonist Who Blazed His Own Trail, Dies at 92

He was a pioneer of the cool school, but he resisted pigeonholing and focused on “making a personal statement.” He died of complications of the coronavirus.

By Peter Keepnews

Updated 2:55 p.m. ET

 

From left, Miles Davis, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan in a 1949 recording session. Mr. Konitz’s work with the Miles Davis Nonet early in his career helped establish his reputation. From left, Miles Davis, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan in a 1949 recording session. Mr. Konitz’s work with the Miles Davis Nonet early in his career helped establish his reputation.Credit…PoPsie Randolph/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images

By Peter Keepnews

  • April 16, 2020Updated 2:55 p.m. ET
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This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Lee Konitz, a prolific and idiosyncratic saxophonist who was one of the earliest and most admired exponents of the style known as cool jazz, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 92. 

His niece Linda Konitz said the cause was complications of the coronavirus. She said he also had pneumonia.

Mr. Konitz initially attracted attention as much for the way he didn’t play as for the way he did. Like most of his jazz contemporaries, he adopted the expanded harmonic vocabulary of his fellow alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, the leading figure in modern jazz. But his approach departed from Parker’s in significant ways, and he quickly emerged as a role model for musicians seeking an alternative to Parker’s pervasive influence.

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Where modern jazz in the Parker mold, better known as bebop, tended to be passionate and virtuosic, Mr. Konitz’s improvisations were measured and understated, more thoughtful than heated.

“I knew and loved Charlie Parker and copied his bebop solos like everyone else,” Mr. Konitz told The Wall Street Journal in 2013. “But I didn’t want to sound like him. So I used almost no vibrato and played mostly in the higher register. That’s the heart of my sound.”

Although some musicians and critics dismissed Mr. Konitz’s style as overly cerebral and lacking in emotion, it proved influential in the development of the so-called cool school. But while cool jazz, essentially a less heated variation on bebop, was popular for several years — and some of its exponents, notably the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and the trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, both of whom he sometimes worked with, became stars — Mr. Konitz for most of his career was a musician’s musician, admired by his peers and jazz aficionados but little known to the general public.

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This was in part because of his personality: An introvert by nature, he was never entirely comfortable in the spotlight. And it was in part because of his musical philosophy, which valued spontaneity above all else and often led him to pursue daring improvisational tangents that could leave his less adventurous listeners feeling a little lost. (His way of preparing for a performance, he once said, was “to not be prepared.”)

“My playing was about making a personal statement — getting audiences to pay attention to what I was saying musically rather than giving them what they wanted to hear, which is entertainment,” he said in the 2013 interview, referring to his early struggles to find an audience. “I wanted to play original music.”

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His willingness to take chances was admired by advocates of so-called free jazz, which, beginning in the late 1950s, defied established rules of harmony and rhythm. But ultimately no label, not even “cool,” really fit Mr. Konitz; he was best characterized as sui generis.

Reviewing a performance in 2000 for The New York Times, Ben Ratliff called Mr. Konitz “as original a player as there is in jazz” and praised the “boiled-down wisdom” of his playing, noting that “even when he is in the heat of improvisation, it sounds like someone whistling a tune he has known all his life.” 

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Mr. Konitz in performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2011. Mr. Konitz in performance at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater in 2011.Credit…Richard Termine for The New York Times

Leon Konitz was born in Chicago on Oct. 13, 1927, the youngest of three sons of Jewish immigrants. His father, Abraham, who owned a laundry, was from Austria; his mother, Anna (Getlin) Konitz, was from Russia.

Inspired by Benny Goodman, he persuaded his parents to buy him a clarinet when he was 11. He later switched to saxophone, and in 1945, with the ranks of the nation’s dance bands depleted by the draft and opportunities for young musicians plentiful, he began his professional career with the Chicago-based band of Jerry Wald.

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His first big break came in 1947 when he joined the Claude Thornhill orchestra, whose soft sound and pastel colors meshed well with his playing style. A subsequent stint with the more dynamic and aggressive Stan Kenton ensemble proved an uneasy musical mix but helped spread his name in the jazz world.

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The recordings that did the most to establish Mr. Konitz’s reputation were made in the late 1940s and early ’50s, after he had moved to New York, under the leadership of two of the most distinctive artists in modern jazz: the pianist and composer Lennie Tristano, with whom he studied for several years and whose unorthodox approach to improvisation helped shape his own; and the trumpeter Miles Davis, whose short-lived but influential nine-piece band sought to adapt the ethereal Thornhill sound to a bebop context.

Those recordings, and others Mr. Konitz made as a leader in the 1950s, were widely admired by other musicians. But that admiration did not translate into work, and he struggled to find bookings; for a brief period in the ’60s he stopped performing altogether.

He did not find steady employment as a musician again until the mid-’70s, when New York City experienced a small jazz renaissance. He attracted a loyal audience for his work both with small groups and with a nonet that, despite its ambitious repertoire and arrangements, ultimately did not last much longer than the Miles Davis ensemble on which it was partly modeled.

He had a bigger following in Europe, where for the last several decades of his life he spent much of his time and did most of his recording. His European discography ranged in style and format from “Lone-Lee” (1974), on which he played unaccompanied, to “Saxophone Dreams” (1997), on which he was supported by a 61-piece orchestra.

While Mr. Konitz rarely maintained a working group for more than a few months, he performed and recorded as both leader and sideman with an impressive array of top-rank musicians, ranging from the pianist Dave Brubeck (on Mr. Brubeck’s 1976 album “All the Things We Are,” which also featured the avant-garde saxophonist Anthony Braxton) and the drummer Elvin Jones (on Mr. Konitz’s influential 1961 album “Motion,” an experiment in spontaneity recorded without planning or rehearsal) to, in more recent years, the pianist Brad Mehldau and the guitarist Bill Frisell. In 2003, in a rare foray outside the jazz world, he played on Elvis Costello’s album “North.”

Despite health problems, Mr. Konitz continued to perform into his 90s. In recent years he would often stop playing in mid-solo and continue improvising vocally.

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Mr. Konitz was married three times. He is survived by two sons, Josh and Paul; three daughters, Rebecca Pita, Stephanie Stonefifer and Karen Kaley; three grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter.

Like many jazz musicians, Mr. Konitz often found himself plying his trade in bars and nightclubs where the audiences were less than completely attentive. He professed not to mind.

“Wherever I’m at, I’m happy to have a chance to play,” he told the British jazz writer Les Tompkins in 1976. “People come in and say, ‘How can you work in this noisy little joint?’ I say: ‘Very easy. I take the horn out of the bag, and I put it in my mouth.’ I appreciate the opportunity.”

Julia Carmel contributed reporting.

 

 

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McCann keeps jazz flowing on WCDB

McCann keeps jazz flowing on WCDB


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McCann keeps jazz flowing on WCDB

For 35 years, DJ’s tastes, choices Saturday morning fare

R.J. DeLuke

April 13, 2020Updated: April 14, 2020 10:33 a.m.

 

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Bill McCann in WCDB studios at the University at Albany Saturday, April 11, 2020. (Gary Hahn Times Union) 1of6Bill McCann in WCDB studios at the University at Albany Saturday, April 11, 2020. (Gary Hahn Times Union)Times Union / Gary Hahn

 

Bill McCann inside WCDB studios at the University at Albany Saturday, April 11, 2020. (Gary Hahn Times Union) 2of6Bill McCann inside WCDB studios at the University at Albany Saturday, April 11, 2020. (Gary Hahn Times Union)Times Union / Gary Hahn

 

Bill McCann outside WCDB studios at the University at Albany Saturday, April 11, 2020. (Gary Hahn Times Union) 3of6Bill McCann outside WCDB studios at the University at Albany Saturday, April 11, 2020. (Gary Hahn Times Union)Times Union / Gary Hahn

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Bill McCann has been spreading the gospel of jazz on radio in the Capital District seemingly forever. Actually, this year he’s celebrating 35 years as the creator and host of “The Saturday Morning Edition of Jazz” on WCDB, 90.9 FM, from the campus of the University at Albany.

Each Saturday morning, from 8 a.m. to noon, there he is. Like a rock. For some, Saturday morning means rising uneasily, teetering toward the kitchen, and reaching the coffee maker. For countless jazz fans it’s also means tuning in to McCann and great jazz.

McCann  runs his show with the flavor of a jazzman, improvising on selections, keeping it fresh.

“The show is not pre-planned. I have stuff that I want to play. But there’s no set order, per se. I don’t want to plan out my show. Put it together and then show up and have it on autopilot. I want it to be spontaneous,” said McCann, who is a University at Albany alumni. “I might open up with this piece. But after that, we’re off to the races. Wherever the music takes me. I can literally stop on a dime and change my mind. Even if I have something cued up and I’m on the mic and something comes in my brain, I’ll have a change of direction.

“I try to do it like I’m in my living room. … It’s very relaxing. I don’t want it to be a job.”

Anyone on radio for 35 years deserves some attention. And on Saturday there was to be a music event featuring 10 jazz bands at Alumni House on the college campus. But it’s not possible because of the coronavirus pandemic. McCann hopes it can be held later in the year.

“We’re certainly going to do it. I raised the funds. I’m sure the musicians will be very anxious to get to work. I was very excited about it. It wasn’t going to be a concert, it was going to be a hang, with bands playing from 1 p.m. until toward midnight, one after the other.”

Nonetheless, the radio show goes on.

McCann’s ritual is to take his time. He gets to the studio by about 6:30 a.m. (“I don’t want to feel rushed”). There are papers and notes. He has an idea of the basic framework for the day. Then off he goes, into an activity he says has made his life “more complete” over the years.

He was influenced heavily his father, a huge jazz fan, who liked to go hear live jazz in Rockland County, where they lived. Young McCann would tag along and developed a fascination. Dad’s record collection was a shared aural experience.

McCann found UAlbany had a radio station on a visit in 1980, not knowing he would soon enroll there. He trained for an on-air spot and it came to fruition in 1985. Of course, he wanted it to be a jazz show.

In the beginning the music was vinyl. DJs worked like watchmakers, cuing up records just in the right groove so the music started correctly without listeners hearing the sound of the needle sliding, or missing the first strains of a song. He remembers that fondly.

“I tend to keep the music more in the pocket. More mainstream. So was my Dad,” he said. “I tend to dig mainstream jazz from the ’50s and ’60s. Count Basie and Joe Williams and stuff.” It took him awhile to get used to bebop and beyond: John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Art Blakey. But after a short time that became part of his vernacular as well.

“The problem is that there are so many awesome musicians. I find myself saying, ‘I can’t remember the last time I played that guy.’ That kind of thing. Even though I have four hours, it doesn’t seem like enough time. I would need to have many, many, many more hours.”

McCann seems to be known everywhere. He says he gets hollers of “love your show” when he is in a store or walking down the street. “I have no idea who these people are.”

People bring gifts of pastries, cookies and the like to the studio. When a longtime fan passed away—someone McCann had never met except via weekly call-ins—he noticed the obituary in the newspaper and attended out of respect. The family was excited to see their father’s favorite DJ show. (The family was not allowed to telephone the man on Saturday mornings during McCann’s broadcast). To his amazement he was gifted the man’s extensive collection of jazz recordings. He was humbled by the affection.

McCann appreciates his fan base and with technology, it has no bounds. The station only has 100 watts of power via terrestrial radio, which is extremely limited. But in more recent years, “I’ve literally had people message me or email me, or go to our website and get on the request line, from Egypt or the Philippines or Spain. And all over the United States. Which is really cool,” he said. “It’s become truly a worldwide thing.”

Working at a college station, he also encounters his share of young DJs who are impressed by his knowledge.

“I’ve had student DJs come in unannounced, to do something at the station. They’ll come in the master control room. I’ll be doing my thing and they’ll say, ‘Man, how do you do that?’ Thirty-five years, you know? It’s second nature,” he said.

He also received major recognition, as when the Jazz Journalists Association honored him with a Jazz Heroes award in 2012.

McCann makes it a point to highlight the plethora of jazz talent in the Capital District and keeps listeners informed about what’s going on in the region during the upcoming  week or month. .

“I think that’s critical. I have a segment called the Jazz Corner” said McCann. “I make it a regular point to promote a calendar. Not only read it by rote, but have people in the studio to visit and do a segment. If they’re putting on a jazz series or if there are some events coming up. Or if musicians have a new CD out. I definitely want to have them come to the station and promote what they’re doing. It changes the flavor of the program, but I think its important to give back to the jazz community.”

He said of that community, “It may be an inch wide, but it’s miles deep. Pound for pound, I would take the Capital District over any place. Between the clubs that we have. And places like The Egg and Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Proctors, Skidmore. The colleges have different jazz programs. There are so many outlets for not only great local musicians, but world-class musicians. So, I like to promote the cause.”

As far as favorite moments, McCann recounted that the Lee Shaw Trio once did an in-studio live set. Pianist Shaw was based locally but was renowned on the national jazz stage. Another was when the great swing-style, sweet-toned tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton—McCann’s favorite–appeared on the Saturday morning show the day after his gig in Schenectady as part of the long-running A Place For Jazz series.

So on rolls “The Saturday Jazz Edition.”

“I hope I can do it for many years to come. I’m 55…I wouldn’t mind getting 50 years on the radio. That would put me at 70.”

Bottom line: “I don’t think my love of the music will ever change.”

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Professor Joe Torres, Pianist with Salsa Legends Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, Is Dead at 76 | WBGO

Professor Joe Torres, Pianist with Salsa Legends Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, Is Dead at 76 | WBGO


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Professor Joe Torres, Pianist with Salsa Legends Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, Is Dead at 76

By  • 22 hours ago

 

Professor Joe Torres, a pianist who came to the public’s attention with salsa bandleader and trombonist Willie Colón, died on Monday at a senior home in the Bronx. He was 76.

Percussionist José Mangual, Jr., a close friend and longtime band mate, said he died of natural causes.

Torres started his career with renowned bassist Bobby Valentín. He would go on to work with other leading bandleaders, like timbalero Willie Rosario; trombonist and vocalist Johnny Colón; and top charanga groups like Típica Novel. His discography also encompassed work with vocalists Rubén Blades, Celia Crúz and Héctor Lavoe.

But he was best known for his work in Willie Colón’s band, which burst on the scene in the mid-to-late 1960s. An instant hit with young Latin New Yorkers, the band featured a power front line of two trombones. That sound, paired with Lavoe, propelled the band to superstar status.

 

 

Its surging success provoked the disdain of some established bandleaders from the golden age of mambo: “Can you imagine Tito Puente’s big band playing at a dance with all those sophisticated arrangements?” says Mangual. “Then we would come on with just two trombones and the audience would rush the stage.” 

As the band’s pianist, Torres was at its vortex. “He’s very underrated; he was just excellent,” Colón said in a 2009 interview with New Music Box. “He used to do such strange things; he made a lot of those songs fly.”

Those flights can be heard on a number of Fania Records releases regarded as touchstones of salsa, like La Gran Fuga (1971), El Juicio (1972) and The Good, The Bad, The Ugly (1975). Torres also appears on Siembra (1978), a collaboration between Cólon and Blades often cited as the best-selling album in salsa history.

Then there was the album that got young Nuyoricans back in touch with our island’s roots through Colón’s reimagining of traditional Puerto Rican Christmas music, Asalto Navideño (1971). 

José Manuel Torres, Jr., was born in Manhattan on Nov. 29, 1943. His parents both hailed from Puerto Rico: José Manuel, Sr., came from Guayama, and Elena López Quilles came from Ponce, the city of musicians. Like many Nuyoricans, José Jr. was raised in the Bronx; he grew up on Fox Street, with his parents and four siblings.

He attended a grammar school that would become legendary in the annals of New York City Latin music history. Centrally located in the Longwood section of the South Bronx, P.S. 52 served the predominantly Puerto Rican community that had grown by leaps and bounds after World War II. Its student body included future NEA Jazz Masters Ray Barretto and Eddie Palmieri, timbalero Orlando Marin, percussionists Manny Oquendo and Benny Bonilla and a slew of other musicians.

Torres was inspired in his youth by virtuosic Latin piano players like Charlie Palmieri, Ray Coen and Noro Morales. According to a peer, Gilberto “Pulpo” Colón (no relation to Willie), his ultimate hero was a little-known Puerto Rican pianist named Felo Bergaza.

It was his ability to sight-read music that earned Torres the nickname “Professor Joe.” Pulpo Colón recalls: “Joe could absolutely read anything. Charlie, Sonny Bravo and other well-known pianists would always call him first as a sub, because in those days arrangers like Tito Puente wrote out very detailed piano parts, like classical music. Joe would also save people a lot of time in the recording studio because of the ease he had in interpreting the parts.” 

In a 2010 interview with the salsa blog Sones Y Soneros, Torres says: “The young pianists of today should not only be able to play by ear, which is a good thing, but also be able to sight-read so they can be able to execute anything they are called upon to do on the instrument with seriousness and responsibility.”

Mangual says that skill set propelled Torres’ career. “Joe was a great sight-reader, very professional,” he says. “He was always in demand, especially [for] charangas. He must have played with every charanga orchestra that existed at the time.”

Torres came into Willie Colón’s orbit through a recommendation from concert promoter and manager Richie Bonilla. “At the time Willie Colón was looking for a new piano player, so I told him about Joe, who at the time was working with Orchestra Flamboyan,” Bonilla recalls. “I took Willie to hear him. The rest is history. I always remember that Joe was very professional and had a great sense of humor. He never complained on the road. He always did great work and was very well liked by everyone.”

But Colón’s internal conflicts with Lavoe — who would often show up late for a gig, or not at all — spelled the end of the group. “Willie couldn’t take it anymore with Hector and I had to tell promoters that he had broken up the band,” Bonilla says.

While Lavoe’s reputation for unreliability earned him a sarcastic moniker, “The King of Punctuality,” his charisma and unique improvisational skills made him a cult-like figure with audiences. “You can have the greatest band, with the greatest musicians in the world,” says pianist Gilberto “Pulpo” Colón (no relation to Willie). “But in this genre, if you don’t have a great vocalist that connects with the public, it doesn’t mean jack. Hector was beyond great. He was a genius.” 

Lavoe formed his own group, with Torres in the piano chair; he appears on the 1976 album De Ti Depende, best known for the song “Periódico de Ayer.”

 

 

Torres was succeeded in Lavoe’s band by Pulpo Colón, who maintained that association for many years. “I idolized him,” Pulpo says of Torres. “My generation of pianists — Oscar Hernández, Willie Rodriguez and others — were influenced by jazz through Eddie Palmieri. But Joe was true to the típico style of playing in octaves, which was rooted in Cuban music.” 

After his time with Lavoe, Torres would continue as a pianist in high demand, while working as a computer technician. Blades memorialized him on Facebook as “a true representative of the ‘hard sauce,’” adding: “Of excellent wit and sense of humor, ‘Professor Joe’ was always characterized by his kindness, equanimity and intelligence. In our conversations he always demonstrated his education and mental acuity.”

Torres is survived by his wife of 42 years, Nilda; a son, José Torres III; a daughter, Danielle Torres; a brother, Dennis; and two grandchildren.

In 2000, a reunion concert of P.S. 52 alumni, produced by noted folklorist Elena Martínez of City Lore, featured Torres along with Ray Barretto, Orlando Marin, Manny Oquendo, Ray Coen, Benny Bonilla and others. It was a standing-room-only event, portions of which were featured in the award-winning television documentary From Mambo To Hip Hop – A South Bronx Tale. Joe appears in a scene with other alumni in the school ’s auditorium, joking with the school’s principal.

Despite the respect that he commanded in Latin music, Torres never recorded as a leader. Mangual attributes this fact to his personality. “Joe was a very humble man,” he says. “But if he wasn’t there in the piano chair, believe me, you’d notice right away.”

 

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Lee Konitz Quartet @ Charlie Parker Fest 2013 – YouTube

Lee Konitz Quartet @ Charlie Parker Fest 2013 – YouTube


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Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Lee Konitz, Alto Saxophonist Who Exemplified Jazz’s Imperative to Make It New, Is Dead at 92 | WBGO

Lee Konitz, Alto Saxophonist Who Exemplified Jazz’s Imperative to Make It New, Is Dead at 92 | WBGO


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Lee Konitz, Alto Saxophonist Who Exemplified Jazz’s Imperative to Make It New, Is Dead at 92


By David R. Adler • 9 hours ago

 

Lee Konitz, an exemplar of modern jazz improvisation, and arguably the most influential alto saxophone soloist after bebop progenitor Charlie Parker, died on Wednesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. He was 92.

His son, Josh Konitz, said the cause was pneumonia, related to COVID-19.

Konitz was one of the last jazz musicians of his era still in active circulation: his career has hummed along, apparently impervious to popular trends or external pressure, for the last 75 years. A sound as individual as his can’t be reduced to a buzzword, but he was commonly associated with the “cool” school in jazz. He embodied the idea, as he once put it, that “it’s possible to get the maximum intensity in your playing and still relax.”

His first major exposure came in 1947, in an impressionistic big band led by Claude Thornhill; he can be heard soloing with striking promise and originality on Gil Evans’ arrangements of “Yardbird Suite” and other Charlie Parker themes. Through his association with Evans, he was part of the coterie involved in Miles Davis’ historic Birth of the Cool sessions in 1949. His playing on the eerie coda of “Moon Dreams” remains one of that album’s most unconventional moments.

But Konitz’s pivotal association, from 1943 intermittently until 1964, was with the blind pianist and teacher Lennie Tristano, creator of an enigmatic, almost cult-like offshoot of bebop known as the Tristano School.

Doggedly advocating a theory of improvisation that eschewed all predetermined licks and patterns, Tristano taught his disciples — Konitz and tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh chief among them — to focus on intuitive melodic shapes and rhythmic displacement within the steady 4/4 beat. Though the Tristano school ultimately proved too insular and constricting for Konitz, he remained devoted to many aspects of Tristano’s philosophy throughout his career.

Tristano did not approve of Konitz playing with a range of musicians in ever-changing settings, but for the alto saxophonist, this became a central mission. His hunger for musical conversation led him to amass one of the largest discographies in all of jazz (very much unlike Tristano).

But save for a few short periods, and despite remaining prolific well into old age, Konitz didn’t lead a steady working group. He simply played with everyone. Remarking on a younger musician he admired, one with a well-rehearsed band and an ever-growing book of music, Konitz once said: “Bravo. I don’t seem to need that in my life.”

He often played in duos or trios, or alone: on Lone-Lee (1974), probably the most intimate document of his sound that exists, he plays “The Song Is You” unaccompanied for nearly 40 minutes, and then “Cherokee” for nearly 20. He sought meaning and human connection from every encounter; ego was not a factor. “A good solo doesn’t care who plays it,” he once said.

His ethic as a wanderer and committed listener had a major impact on the younger musicians he sought out. “I always think of Lee as a Zen master,” Dan Tepfer, a pianist and frequent Konitz duo partner, said in a 2012 interview. “There’s nothing keeping [him] from responding to what’s actually going on in the moment.”

Tenor saxophonist Mark Turner once referred to Konitz’s “jarring rhythmic sense,” in an interview with Ted Panken for DownBeat. “Phrases are never in groups of two or four or eight beats or notes,” Turner added, “but in sevens or nines or fives or sixes. His lines are also very involved, long, connected, extremely lyrical.”

Particularly in his later years, Konitz preferred to play standards — and well-worn ones at that, such as “Stella By Starlight” and “I’ll Remember April.” In the liner notes to his 1957 Atlantic release The Real Lee Konitz, he wrote: “I feel that in improvisation, the tune should serve as a vehicle for musical variations…. For this reason I have never been concerned with finding new tunes to play. I often feel that I could play and record the same tunes over and over and still come up with fresh variations.”

Still, he addressed a wide body of original music over the years. An Image: Lee Konitz with Strings (1958) finds him playing ambitious, Third Stream-type compositions by Bill Russo. Other examples include a deliciously odd 1977 trio encounter with pianist Paul Bley and guitarist Bill Connors called Pyramid; trumpeter Kenny Wheeler’s 1997 album Angel Song; and a series of refined collaborations with saxophonist and composer Ohad Talmor from the mid-2000s on, the most recent of which, Old Songs New, was released last fall.

Konitz himself composed relatively little, and what he did write, following the practice of Parker  and Tristano, were mostly contrafacts — melodies based on existing chord changes. His best-known piece, “Subconscious-Lee,” was based on Cole Porter’s “What Is This Thing Called Love.” (Here is televised footage of Konitz and Marsh performing the song in 1958, with partners including Billy Taylor on piano and Mundell Lowe on guitar.)

 

 

Another Konitz standard, “Thingin’,” is based on “All the Things You Are.” “Dream Stepper” was a line on “You Stepped Out of a Dream.” “No Splice” came from “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To.” And “Palo Alto” was derived from the Gershwins’ “Strike Up the Band.”

The many song and album titles that pun on Konitz’s name (“Sound-Lee,” “Knowinglee,” “Lovelee,” “Unleemited,” “Ice Cream Konitz,” Warne Marsh’s “Bop Goes the Leesel”) suggest a whimsical character. And indeed Konitz’s had a pronounced comic side. But he could also be sharply critical, a curmudgeon.

“His total honesty and integrity goes with high critical standards, and he is not interested in a mollifying niceness,” wrote Andy Hamilton in his 2007 book Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art. And yet he was, Hamilton adds, “a warm, gentle, and artistically vulnerable soul.”

Leon Lee Konitz was born to Jewish immigrant parents in Chicago on October 13, 1927. He was the youngest of three brothers. His father, Abraham, from Austria, ran a laundromat (the family lived in the back). His mother, Anna, was from Russia. His parents spoke Yiddish at home and were not religiously strict, nor musically aware, though they were supportive when Lee picked up a clarinet at 11, after hearing Benny Goodman. (He soon came to prefer Artie Shaw.)

After a period of classical training with Lou Honig (who also taught saxophonists Johnny Griffin and Eddie Harris), Konitz switched to tenor saxophone at 12 and studied with Santy Runyon. He took up the alto for a gig, and discovered that it reflected his true voice. Still, his tenor playing graced numerous recordings, most significantly the stunning Tenorlee (1978), with pianist Jimmy Rowles and bassist Michael Moore. His elegant and personal soprano saxophone voice is abundantly documented as well.

Konitz was a great admirer, but never an imitator, of Parker. His influences reached farther back. He fell in love with and memorized Lester Young’s solos from Count Basie’s Old Testament period of the late 1930s. His enduring love for that music, and its role in shaping his aesthetic, was the focus of an interview with pianist Ethan Iverson in 2009.

Konitz also absorbed Johnny Hodges, Roy Eldridge, Willie Smith, Scoops Carry and more. He deeply appreciated Louis Armstrong: “Struttin’ with Some Barbecue” from Armstrong’s Hot Fives was long in his repertoire, with the trumpet solo played note-for-note on alto. Konitz also cited Benny Carter’s 1940 solo on “I Can’t Believe that You’re in Love with Me” (with the Chocolate Dandies) as a major influence. (He plays the song on Konitz Meets Mulligan, from 1953; the same chords underlie Tristano’s “Two Not One,” which appears on the 1955 classic Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh.)

Beginning in 1945, Konitz got his first serious gigs with Jerry Wald, Lloyd Lifton and Teddy Powell. He became immersed in his studies with Tristano; left home at 20 to play with Thornhill; and was soon in the thick of Birth of the Cool in New York. He headed west in 1952 to play with bandleader Stan Kenton, on New Concepts of Artistry in Rhythm and other releases. He expressed particular pride in his solo on the up-tempo Bill Holman composition “In Lighter Vein.”

Konitz began to flourish as a leader in the mid ’50s, with albums like In Harvard Square, Inside Hi-FiVery Cool and Tranquility. His 1959 outing Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre, and the follow-up You and Lee, prefigured the expanded ensemble sound he would pursue with his ’70s nonet, which recorded four fine albums including Yes, Yes Nonet (1979).

The 1961 trio release Motion, with bassist Sonny Dallas and drummer Elvin Jones, remains a touchstone, mapping the road forward for his oblique approach to standard tunes. He had an avant-garde side as well: having joined Tristano’s 1949 group in venturing what are considered the first two free improvisations on record, “Intuition” and “Digression,” he went on to work with the likes of guitarist Derek Bailey, pianist Andrew Hill and vibraphonist Karl Berger. Konitz did not erect boundaries, and was comfortable in a number of experimental settings.

On The Lee Konitz Duets (1968), with tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson, guitarist Jim Hall and an array of others, Konitz took to what would become perhaps his favorite format of all. He went on to make duo albums with many partners, including Tepfer and other pianists of high distinction, like Martial Solal, Michel Petrucciani, Kenny Werner and Gary Versace. And his two-volume 1980 duo outing with Gil Evans, Heroes and Anti-Heroes, is worth seeking out for the Mingus interpretations alone.

Konitz’s many other notable performances on record include a pair of trio dates at the Jazz Bakery in the mid-1990s, with bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Brad Mehldau; they appear on Konitz’s only albums for Blue Note, Alone Together and Another Shade of Blue. Konitz, Haden and Meldau reunited, adding drummer Paul Motian, for Live at Birdland, recorded in 2009 and released on ECM the following year.

Along with his son Josh, Konitz is survived by another son, Paul; three daughters, Rebecca, Stephanie and Karen; three nephews and a great-niece; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

The National Endowment for the Arts named Konitz an NEA Jazz Master in 2009. Just over a decade later, he performed at the induction ceremony with Tepfer — playing an old standby, “All the Things You Are,” and interspersing his alto saxophone with a scat improvisation, as he had been known to do in recent years.

 

 

In a 1985 article in DownBeat, Konitz outlined a system of 10 layers, or “gradients,” of improvised melodic development that one could attempt on a standard tune. The last three of these were:

8) Still a subtle reference to the original song

9) Totally new theme

10) An act of pure inspiration

The gradients now reach to infinity. The act of pure inspiration was Konitz’s life itself, never to be repeated or forgotten.

Additional reporting by Nate Chinen, with thanks to Dan Tepfer

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Column: A fond farewell to jazz and big band singer Betty Bennett Lowe – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Column: A fond farewell to jazz and big band singer Betty Bennett Lowe – The San Diego Union-Tribune


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https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/columnists/story/2020-04-13/a-fond-farewell-to-jazz-and-big-band-singer-betty-bennett-lowe
 

Column: A fond farewell to jazz and big band singer Betty Bennett Lowe

Local Jazz singer performed with Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton and others

Betty Bennett Lowe was paid 50 cents for her first professional singing gig as a young girl, she recalled during an oral history interview. And she never stopped singing. 

From growing up in a tiny town in Iowa, the young woman, known to the music world as Betty Bennett, went on to share the stage with jazz and swing artists and big band leaders of the era — Claude Thornhill, Alvino Rey, the Stan Kenton All StarsCharlie Ventura, Woody Herman, Charlie Barnet and Benny Goodman. Her rendition of the song, “Treat Me Rough,” was on the soundtrack of the “Music of ‘Mad Men’” album.

Lowe passed away April 7 at age 98 in her Tierrasanta home, which she shared with her daughter and caregiver, Alicia Previn. The singer had two daughters, both born when she was married to conductor André Previn from 1952 to ’57, long before Mia Farrow left Frank Sinatra for the Academy Award-winning music arranger. 

Bennett later met her soulmate, celebrated guitarist Mundell Lowe, and they married on the eve of the 1975 Monterey Jazz Festival with jazz trumpeter Clark Terry playing “When I Fall in Love.” “There wasn’t a dry eye,” recalls daughter Claudia Previn Stasny.

 

The couple moved to Tierrasanta in 1989. They recorded albums and occasionally performed together locally and on the road. She was still driving Lowe to gigs until 2017, the year he passed away.

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After her long career as a singer, Betty Bennett Lowe, who passed away on April 7, 2020, spent a lot of time reading and created a large library in her Tierrasanta home.

(Courtesy photo)

As a child, Bennett studied voice and piano and dreamed of an opera career until she was seduced by the music of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. She had a natural ability to put her own twist on classic songs while staying true to the melody.

As she gave an oral history interview to the National Association of Music Merchants on Oct. 1, 2018, three weeks before her 97th birthday, Lowe emphasized her love of being on the road with the big bands. Often, she was the only woman on a bus full of male musicians, Alicia says.

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Lowe recalled those days with humor and insight in her memoir published in 2000, “The Ladies who Sing with the Band.” She offered behind-the-scenes glimpses of jazz icons, her marriage to André Previn, her soulmate Mundell Lowe, and her stays in London when her trio opened for headliners in Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in the mid-’60s.

“I just idolized her. She was my favorite singer ever,” notes Alicia, a professional violinist. “She could take Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan and mush them together. … The musicians loved her.”

Alicia applauds her mother’s encyclopedic repertoire of music. “You could say any word that came into your head, beginning with any letter of the alphabet, and she would know a song with that word in it.”

In later years, when Lowe had retired from performing, she read voraciously. “She practically ate books,” Alicia laughs.

But she also kept herself in great shape. “She was one of San Diego’s oldest Jazzercisers,” notes Claudia, saying she took classes until she was 93 or 94. Claudia describes her mom, who served in the Navy WAVES during World War II, as her best friend. “She always had a marvelous way about her and a great sense of humor. I’ve never met anyone who spent time with her who didn’t love her.”

Lowe’s daughters are planning a memorial, but COVID-19 has changed the landscape. They are considering an online memorial via Zoom or Facebook Live. However, once restrictions are lifted, Claudia says, “There will be a big party and everyone will get together.” That was the way her mom wanted it.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Record Your Own Vinyl Records at Home (with the toy record maker) – YouTube

Record Your Own Vinyl Records at Home (with the toy record maker) – YouTube


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Tip Of The Hat to Joe Schwab for this one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWBL8ff8emo

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Hubert Laws Zipper Hall 11-04-16 – YouTube

Hubert Laws Zipper Hall 11-04-16 – YouTube


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMr-n7IQN94

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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The Strange Art of Lathe Recording — X-RAY AUDIO

The Strange Art of Lathe Recording — X-RAY AUDIO


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https://www.x-rayaudio.com/x-rayaudioblog/2020/4/14/the-strange-art-of-lathe-recording
 

The Strange Art of Lathe Recording

April 14, 2020

 

The machines used to make x-ray records are called ‘lathes’. In the latest edition of our Bureau of Lost Culture Show on Soho radio, we dig deep into the strange art of lathe recording with US vinyl artist Mike Dixon and Jim MGuinn professional lathe cutter, both experts in the field of short run and handmade records.

A lathe operates as a kind of record player in reverse. With a lathe, instead of a needle there is a cutting head that vibrates and ‘writes’ a groove into a spinning blank disc when an audio signal is fed into it.  The resulting disc can be played back just like a conventional record. 

The process is quite different than the pressing method by which conventional records are made. Pressing involves the creation of a master matrix that is stamped into soft hot vinyl. Pressing is a mass production method – many discs can be made quickly and all are exactly the same. Recording with a lathe is generally done in real time, one disc at a time, and each record is slightly different than all the others.

The lathe we use to cut x-ray records live is a 1957 MSS – MSS made lathes for the BBC to make recordings in the field and for transcription purposes. The Soviet bootleggers built their own lathes based on ones that had been smuggled into the USSR or brought back as war trophies after the second world war. 

We have a homemade Soviet lathe built by a bootlegger in the early 1960s as part of then music exhibition.

In the program, we also hear about chocolate records, ice records, records made from road signs and escalator hand rails, cutting records live for an American sports team, Nazi transcription machines, wire recorders and much more esoterica from the arcane byways of audio history…

Find out more about Mike HERE

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Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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“Musically, my influences  are John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Sunny Rollins, Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. Guitar.com | All Things Guitar

“Musically, my influences  are John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Sunny Rollins, Wes Montgomery and Grant Green. Guitar.com | All Things Guitar


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https://guitar.com/features/collections/comedy-star-jeff-garlin-on-why-hes-serious-about-guitars/?utm_source=Guitar.com
 

Comedy star Jeff Garlin on why he’s serious about guitars

4 days ago

Jeff Garlin

From Curb Your Enthusiasm to The Goldbergs and his latest comedy special on Netflix, Jeff Garlin has been splitting sides onscreen for decades. We visit him at home in Los Angeles to find out about his biggest offscreen passions: guitars and music.

When you head out to interview somebody, walk up to their front door and pluck up the courage to knock, it’s a lot like waiting in line for a roller coaster. But on this occasion, our trepidation is dismissed when the door swings open and we’re greeted by the friendly, familiar face of Jeff Garlin and welcomed into his Mulholland home.

You may know Garlin from any number of TV and film projects. There’s long-running sitcom The Goldbergs, acclaimed comedy Arrested Development, Pixar smash Wall-E and, of course, Curb Your Enthusiasm, one of the most well-regarded shows in TV history and now in its 10th season. What you may not know about Garlin, however, is that he is a huge fan and student of the guitar.

“I look at myself as a Chicago bluesman. That’s how I approach my work”

At Garlin’s side is Sage, his constant Cockapoo companion, who happens to be a TV star in her own right, having played the part of The Goldbergs’ pet dog Lucky from season three onwards. “She’s a bigger star than I am,” says Garlin.

Boisterous and gregarious, Garlin is excited to chat about comedy and guitar collecting, as well as even deeper and more philosophical subjects. His recent Netflix comedy special is entitled Our Man In Chicago but, although he was born in the Windy City, Garlin’s musical epiphany took place much further south.

You grew up in Chicago, a big music town.

“Yes but I moved to Florida in the 1970s when I was 12, so I was around the radio. My favourite music was R&B like Marvin Gaye, Al Green and Earth, Wind & Fire.”

You were around when Tom Petty was happening.

“I discovered Petty from the movie FM, the song was Breakdown. I love Tom Petty. I became a security guard for rock concerts – Tom Petty was on tour I believe with Nick Lowe or Rock Pile – and my job when the girls ran on stage was not to throw them off but move them. I’ve since become friendly with Mike Campbell and pretty good friends with Benmont Tench. I had him on my podcast a few years ago. I love that.”

Did you ever connect with Tom?

“I’m friends with [Petty’s wife] Dana Petty but I never met Tom. I found out later what a huge Curb fan he was. I would have loved to have met him. He’s special to me.”

Jeff Garlin
All images: Eleanor Jane

Growing up and moving around, was music important to you?

“Hugely important to me. I have a very high reference level with jazz, blues, rock and R&B. But I don’t have much of a reference level for anything past the mid-2000s.

Who were your key musical influences?

“Musically, my influences – which have totally affected my comedy, by the way – are John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Sunny Rollins, Wes Montgomery and Grant Green.

“Truly, I’m an improviser in stand-up, and I’ll be an improviser when I’m good enough in music. In terms of what I do, it’s all blues. It’s all blues. I’d say John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Buddy Guy, my hometown hero.”

Your comedy feels like the blues. It has a beginning, middle and end, with plenty of room to riff in between.

“I look at myself as a Chicago bluesman, I do. That’s how I approach my work. I’m inspired by Buddy Guy. As a matter of fact, the phrase that I use is ‘living the blues through comedy’.”

So there’s plenty of room for tangents, mistakes?

“Oh, mistakes are beautiful. You know what else? Lulls. Let’s just be quiet here for a second. Just be present. That’s how I improvised so much in my [Netflix] special, I was just present. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on!

“Don’t try to hide mistakes! Who wants perfection? I don’t. It’s about being okay with a moment that’s human, being okay with it not being perfect. I aspire to it. I think I have moments of brilliance, I have moments of perfection. But most of it is not in the land of perfection.”

Jeff Garlin

So when it comes to music, what moves you?

“Kingfish hits me pretty hard. I’ve been digging a band called Temples. My second-favourite rock band is Radiohead, number-one is Spoon. I love Spoon. Every album that Spoon puts out gets better and better. I’m inspired by them.

“I listen to a lot of 1950s jazz, 1950s blues, 1960s and 1970s blues and classic rock. Peter Green, Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton, obviously, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor. Oh, and the Irish fellow, Rory Gallagher, I love Rory. I’m open to new bands and new sounds but not much inspires me.”

You’re on Instagram. Is there anyone you’re following who inspires you?

Kingfish! Him, I follow. Jared James Nichols, he’s a pal. He’s been here playing guitars. The best player I have ever seen in my life is Nathaniel Murphy (@zeppelinbarnatra). I’ve actually written ‘fuck you’ in his comments.

“I’m friends with different guitarists, I know so many. Steve Lukather. I’ve gotten to know Jonny Greenwood. Tom Morello and I filmed a thing with Vince Vaughn in Chicago. Jerry Cantrell. Conan O’Brien’s band leader Jimmy Vivino. He’s a pal of mine, an actual pal. Great guy.”

And you used to be roommates with Conan, who is way into guitar.

“Conan! He’s the one who really made me appreciate Led Zeppelin, ’cause that’s pretty much what he listened to exclusively when we were room-mates. What’s funny is, he played the later stuff, Physical Graffiti. Whereas I was all III, and to a degree, III, because I love the blues. Zeppelin’s first album is my favourite, I just love it.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m a collector – I have guitars that mean something to me”

How did you start playing guitar?

“I always loved the guitar and music but I didn’t start taking lessons until I did a movie called Daddy Day Care in 2003, where I had to look like I knew what I was doing. To tell you the truth, looking back on it now, there’s no way I looked like I knew what I was doing. I just gripped the neck but I had no idea. I just strummed. I can’t even watch it.”

So you learnt on the job?

“Yes. I started taking lessons with a guy called Fast Freddy Rapillo, former guitarist for Rick James. He still teaches me guitar to this day.”

How’s that going?

“You know, here’s the problem I have: my schedule is too busy to allow me to be a really good guitarist. I’ll practice, I’ll start feeling good about it and then I stop because of filming.”

1955 Hardtail Sunburst Stratocaster

Do you ever take a travel guitar with you on set?

“I did but I’m not going to anymore. I had a parlour guitar in my trailer but I had no time to play it. It served its purpose, and its purpose is to show me I’m not going to play it. You’re looking at somebody who’s been playing for 12 years and I am as mediocre as any human can be at guitar.

“It was ‘Ideal Jeff’, who I’m a big fan of, who played guitar in his trailer. I didn’t play though, ‘Real Jeff’ would stare at it and face immense guilt.”

Do you ever sit around and jam with anyone else?

“Nope, no one sees me play. I did that with photography, I didn’t show anybody any pictures. I think the first time I showed pictures was at the nine-year mark. I wish I could have done that with comedy, where nobody saw me.”

“The market is always up for Les Pauls and Blackguards. There’s some strange magic between those two”

It seems like you’ve taken up guitar collecting.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a collector – I have guitars that mean something to me. I think for me, there’s always a Blackguard. My dream guitars are 335s and Teles, and I’ve just fallen in love with a hardtail Strat. I’ll never buy a ’58, ’59, ’60 Les Paul, it’s too crazy. I won’t. Besides, the ones that Gibson makes now are so delightful.

“My favourite guitar is the one that I use in the special, my ’55 Les Paul. Reminds me of Robby KriegerNeil Young.”

Are you after a connection to a certain player or just a great guitar?

“Both. It’s often a connection to a player and a connection to the guitar. My year is ’64. Because of Mike Bloomfield, I would love to get a ’64 Tele. I have a ’64 Strat, which is what Dylan played when he went electric. But I have to say, the Blackguard is my most valuable guitar. It’s all original. For Fender, it’s the Blackguards that are the ones that are always gonna go up, you won’t lose money.”

You seem to understand how the guitar market works.

“The market is always up for Les Pauls and Blackguards. There’s some strange magic between those two. And a ’59 ES-335 is always gonna be delightful. If you have a blonde one? You’re fuckin’ loaded. That’s only gonna go up. I had a very rare Epiphone Sheraton that was blonde but I didn’t keep it. I got rid of it because playing it didn’t bring me joy. I don’t care about the money.”

 

 

So while you’re aware of the investment potential, that’s not your motivation?

“God, no, not at all to make money. When you invest, you probably won’t lose money, but my ’55 Les Paul, that’s a refret. Somebody else made that mistake. I own a ’58 Tele that I love and someone refinished it.”

So you’re not opposed to issues?

“Look, I’m not a nitpicker. If someone else refinishes or refrets, I’m the one who benefits. Because it’s still the same magical guitar. I am a collector if the instrument sounds good. Generally, guitar collectors don’t care how it sounds but to me that’s the first thing. I’m not going to buy any old guitar if it’s not a good player, a great player. For me it’s about the playing. I’m going to play them.

“Let’s say I get a great deal on a Les Paul and it’s all original, perfect shape – if it doesn’t sound good then I’ll have no interest. Sound is number-one. Number-one!”

Jeff Garlin's 1964 Stratocaster Body
Garlin might not be terribly attached to this 1964 Strat, but it’s in sensational condition, with a vivid finish

You mainly stick to Fender and Gibson. What appeals to you about those brands?

“Fenders are tools that are instruments and Gibson are works of art that are instruments. As much as I love a Blackguard, it really could defend me in a fight. I couldn’t defend myself with a 335 but if I’m holding a Strat, you better get the fuck away from me. But as a guitar, there’s the same thing. There’s an aggressiveness with a Telecaster that you can’t get with other guitars.”

It’s an incisive sound.

“That’s why all the punk guys use them. What can’t you do with a Tele?!”

Speaking of sounds, we noticed pedals in your practice room.

“I’m experimenting with them to see what I’ll keep. The pedals I always use are a Tube Screamer and maybe a wah. I learnt that from watching Buddy Guy. He has the wah and the Tube Screamer and that’s it.”

Jeff Garlin

We hear you were at NAMM this year but you used a pseudonym on your pass.

“Baron Von Hugecock! [Laughs] I used it in the Soderbergh movie Full Frontal with Julia Roberts. We were doing this thing where we were improvising our porn name – first dog and the street you grew up on. Everyone’s doing the porn name, and it comes to me and I say ‘Baron Von Hugecock’. Everyone bursts out laughing and I say, ‘What? My first dog’s name is Baron and I grew up on Hugecock Avenue’.”

Did anything at NAMM blow your mind?

“What blew my mind were the new Gibson Custom Shop models, the wall of Les Pauls, SGs, custom colours. The 335s were remarkable. I love Gibson, the people and the guitars. They contacted me on Instagram and said, “Come visit us”. I met with them and they’re some of my closest friends now. I was with JC [Curleigh] and Cesar [Gueikian] at NAMM. They refer to me as a Gibson spokesperson, the way they treat me is so kind and thoughtful. But I’m not paid by them, I just want them to succeed.

Jeff Garlin's 1953 Fender Telecaster Body (Case)
Garlin’s 1953 Telecaster – in its original red-lined ‘poodle’ case, no less – is one of the most impressive pieces in his collection
Jeff Garlin's 1953 Fender Telecaster Fretboard
Jeff Garlin's 1953 Fender Telecaster Headstock
Jeff Garlin's 1953 Fender Telecaster Bridge
Jeff Garlin's 1953 Fender Telecaster Body
Jeff Garlin's 1953 Fender Telecaster Fretboard

“They just started the Gibson TV thing and did an interview with me and my J-45. Cesar asked me in one of our interviews, ‘What do you want to see from Gibson?’ I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about new tuners, new bridges, I want to see respect for what you’ve done’. And that’s what I saw from the Custom Shop: they give a shit. There’s such great craftsmanship in their guitars. Beautiful instruments.

“The colours are beautiful. There’s not one colour that anyone would watch someone play and call them a tool. The bubblegum pink SG, I would play that, I thought that was the coolest. But nothing there was douchey.”

Did you see that orange Firebird?

“I saw it! Oh, beautiful! Look at the way we’re talking! This is joy, it’s joyful for me.”

Joy seems to be a recurring theme.

“Joy is huge. Love joy. Life is filled with melancholy and darkness – and happiness. When I speak at a college I ask them, ‘What do you look for?’ So many of them say I just want to be happy and I say, ‘You’re going to fail because there are so many days where you’re not happy’.

“When you’re down, you can look for joy, try to find joy in anything. Reading a book, petting your dog. In the darkest moments, that you can do.”

Jeff Garlin
Jeff’s dog Sage doesn’t seem nearly as impressed as we are by the 1955 Les Paul Custom

You make a distinction between joy and happiness.

“There is a distinction. Happiness to me is such a temporary thing that it’s whimsical whether or not it hits you. Whereas joy, I’m never going to stop enjoying my dog, I’m never going to stop enjoying my 1962 ES-335. At all times, that will bring me joy, but happiness is just so whimsical.

“I can be down and get joy from my dog, I can be down and get joy from my guitars. That’s the best part of playing. My joys are comedy, music, and photography.”

You just had a gallery opening. That must be a huge source of joy.

“It is. I will never tell anyone that anything I do is great but I will tell people when I’m proud of it. My special? Very proud. This photo show? Very proud, very proud of it. So I hope people dig it. I’m going to keep doing more.”

Do you see parallels between photography, comedy and music?

“It’s the stuff between the notes that separates the greats. What’s between the notes. In any art form that I’m performing live, I’m just present. I don’t think. Thinking gets in the way. If I’m doing a scene and I’m worried about my lines, I’m not going to be as good as when I know my lines inside and out. Same with playing the guitar. If I’m worried how a song goes, it’s not going to be as good as one that I know.”

“It’s the stuff between the notes that separates the greats”

What about when it’s a bad gig? Do you have any survival tips for musicians?

“First off, any musician should feel better about it than I would, because you play your song and people applaud, even if it’s a smattering. For a comedian, when they die, the whole room knows they’re dying. At least with musicians, they let you play your song, get your smattering, move on.

“There’s no comparison as to which is more difficult. And if you’re in a band, you’re all going through it together. When I stand up there, I’m improvising and I’m dying, there ain’t nowhere to go.

“I would go into my head and go, ‘Okay, the crowd’s not digging me, this is not practice. What do I do? What pleases me right now because I’m clearly not communicating with them?’ You have to get to a core place of like, ‘I’m going to do good work, I’m going to accomplish things, I’m not going to let the night be a waste and I’m going to bring myself joy here.’”

Jeff Garlin's Buddy Guy Stratocaster Body
Garlin calls his prized polka-dot Buddy Guy Stratocaster – signed by Guy himself at his Chicago nightclub – his ‘TV guitar’ because he plays it while watching the box

There’s that word again.

Joy abounds as we wrap up our interview and a grinning Garlin brings out guitar after guitar, beginning with his prized, polka-dot Buddy Guy Stratocaster. Garlin calls this his “TV guitar,” the one he plays while he’s watching a show. It also has his favourite neck shape, the soft V.

What makes this one so special to the Chicago-born comedian is that it was signed by Buddy Guy, at his Legends nightclub in the Illinois city. “They pulled it out of the box, he signed it, and do you know what he told me?” says Garlin. “He said, ‘I expect you to play it’. That hangs over me.”

Next, he shows off his recent model Gibson L-5, strung with flats and beautifully ornate. “A work of art,” says Garlin. He calls this his “bedroom guitar”. This one lives by his bed, plugged into a hand-wired Fender Champ. “I keep this in my room to play before bed, so I fall asleep with a smile on my face.”

For Garlin, this guitar is a direct connection to Wes Montgomery, who he cites as a favourite. When asked about his most-loved Montgomery tunes, Garlin hedges his bets. “The entire first album, all of it,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever turned off Montgomery.”

Jeff Garlin's Gibson L5 Body
Jeff’s gorgeous Gibson L-5 is one of his ‘bedroom guitars’ and provides a connection to one of his favourite jazz players: Wes Montgomery

Garlin’s ’59 ES-330 is another bedroom guitar, and among his most cherished. He also feels that the 330 is a bit of a sleeper. “Everybody talks about Casinos because of The Beatles but the ES-330 is the most underpriced for what it is. Delightful guitars.”

The binding on this example has faded to a wonderful mellow gold, which sets off the figured sunburst top. The black pickup covers are always a sharp look, and the neck is full in the hand. In fact, the neck is the whole reason Garlin has this one. “The neck is over-sprayed,” he says. “Somebody must have thought it was too worn. But who wins? Me! It takes the price right down.”

Old Stratocasters are always breathtaking, and Garlin’s sunburst ’55 is no exception. What makes this early Strat so special is that it’s a factory hardtail instrument, a rare option for the time. Every note we audition bursts forth with an unusually warm and full character. Acoustically, this guitar is loud. Garlin describes it as “the Stratocaster version of a Telecaster”.

Jeff Garlin's 1959 ES-330 Body
Jeff clearly has a thing for sunburst guitars, and when they look like this gorgeous ’59 ES-330, frankly who can blame him?

The wear of its honey-toned sunburst finish tells a story – one of practiced technique and a locked right arm. The edge of the maple fretboard shows the telltale tooth marks of a hard-strummed plectrum, while the body above the neck and middle pickups speaks to more acrobatic moments. The guitar has been refretted and sports 1960s pickup covers as well as two replaced tone knobs from the same era.

Two more Stratocasters feature in Garlin’s enviable collection. There’s a Custom Shop Robert Cray model, which strangely doesn’t bear his name. It’s a beautiful guitar with a highly figured neck, a ’64-style logo, the requisite hardtail bridge, and a Fiesta Red finish. At the time of writing, it happens to be for sale at Garlin’s favourite shop, Imperial Vintage Guitars.

Jeff Garlin's Fender Custom Shop Robert Cray Fiesta Red Stratocaster Body
Garlin’s Fender Custom Shop Robert Cray Stratocaster has a Fiesta Red finish

The other Strat he trots out for us is, as he puts it, “in quite extraordinary condition”. This 1964 Stratocaster has a shockingly bright and intact finish; each band of the ’burst is vibrant and in technicolor hues. Its original pickguard has aged to that familiar shade of greenish-tan that’s so hard to replicate and, unsurprisingly, has split at the neck-pickup mounting screw due to shrinkage.

Strummed acoustically, the ’64 has a mellow response and a noticeably wide neck with very little wear. Even the Brazilian rosewood fretboard shows little in the way of divots. Garlin calls the guitar “delightful” but admits that he’s not entirely attached to it. “As much as I love this one, I’d sell it to get something I wanted more,” he says. “I’d keep this one forever if Strats prove to be my thing but I’m still discovering. I’m still learning which guitars work best for me.”

As we work through the collection, we breeze past two recent Gibsons. There’s a Murphy-aged Goldtop and a J-45 Custom, which you can see more of on YouTube in the Gibson TV series My First Gibson. Garlin picked it out at Chicago Music Exchange from a group of three, based on its sound. “It’s beautiful and sweet-sounding,” he says. “That’s good enough for me.”

Jeff Garlin's Gibson Les Paul Goldtop Body
Jeff’s Les Paul Goldtop is a Gibson Custom model aged by Tom Murphy

His ’62 ES-335 has a special place in his heart. “There are certain ones that are personal,” says Garlin. “This was on a shelf when I was born. It’s not going anywhere.” It’s in amazing condition, retains its original PAF pickups, and boasts Garlin’s ideal neck profile. “I like the ’62 neck a lot. It was fat in ’59, in ’60 it started going down, in ’61 they’re thin, and in ’62 they came back up a little bit.”

Surely the crown jewel of Garlin’s guitar arsenal is his 1953 Fender Telecaster. As he sets it down, he’s careful in his handling of the original red-lined ‘poodle’ case, as if it houses the button of an atomic bomb.

Of course, it’s stunning, and 100 per cent original. The neck bears the signs of a vigorous player, with finish missing between the strings. The back of the neck is blackened from sweat and oxidisation, almost as if the owner changed his oil and went straight to the gig from the garage. Garlin even has photos of its original owner playing the guitar in a barn somewhere. “Blackguards are my investment collector shit,” he admits. “Family investment. If I was a pro, I’d totally refret this one and play the fuck out of it.”

Jeff Garlin's 1959 ES-330 Body
The ES-335 is one of Jeff’s all-time favourite guitars – this ’62 model has a special place in his heart
Jeff Garlin's 1959 ES-330 Bridge
Jeff Garlin's 1959 ES-330 Knob
Jeff Garlin's 1959 ES-330 Fretboard

Finally, Garlin’s 1955 Les Paul Custom makes an appearance, which those of you familiar with his Netflix special will recognise from its closing moments, in which a smiling Garlin, reclined on his couch, strums to the camera. The Les Paul boasts a staple pickup in the neck and a P-90 in the bridge, and is almost entirely original, save for a refret (“I win again!”).

The tuners have been replaced due to deterioration of the buttons but the originals are safely stowed away. The black finish is intricately checked, with a few spots of exposed mahogany on the edge of the body. When we point that out, Garlin cries, “Beautiful! Come on!”

The stand-up has big plans for the evening, generously hosting a party for Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram’s 21st birthday. We take one last opportunity to pet Sage – she is a very good girl – and wish him well on the imminent festivities. Shortly before leaving, we ask Garlin about his preferred string gauge and, with a wry smirk, he says, “I’m Baron Von Ten.”

Follow Jeff Garlin on Instagram: @jeffgarlin

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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WILL FRIEDWALD’S CLIP JOINT LIVESTREAM presents  “SONGS OF THIS WORLD (AND THE NEXT)”

WILL FRIEDWALD’S CLIP JOINT LIVESTREAM presents  “SONGS OF THIS WORLD (AND THE NEXT)”


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WILL FRIEDWALD’S CLIP JOINT LIVESTREAM presents 
“SONGS OF THIS WORLD (AND THE NEXT)”

An evening of inspirational, Gospel, and spiritual songs

Will Friedwald is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Will Friedwald’s CLIP JOINT LIVESTREAM via ZOOM: MONDAY MOSTLY MUSIC MARATHON
Time: Apr 13, 2020 07:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/510972559
Meeting ID: 510 972 559

NOTE: Last Monday’s session had an emphasis on Jewish / Yiddish / Hebrew performances (both sacred and secular) in time for Pesach. This Monday (April 13)’s show will have an emphasis on spiritual, inspirational and uplifting songs, in honor of Easter & Resurrection Sunday. (We cast a wide net for inspirational songs, from Gospel Greats to to show tunes to Bob Dylan.) Plus the usual random, wacky zany fun!

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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More Jazz Treasures From YouTube

More Jazz Treasures From YouTube


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byMrJEFd6I8
 

Elvin Jones – A Love Supreme Memorial Concert, Messina 1987

 

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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James Moody plays “Cherokee” with Mike Longo-Pno, Paul West-Bass and Candy finch-Drums- YouTube

James Moody plays “Cherokee” with Mike Longo-Pno, Paul West-Bass and Candy finch-Drums- YouTube


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY6gDNey45w

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Ryo Kawasaki death, he died on April 13 at 73: Photos, Videos • JazzBluesNews.com

Ryo Kawasaki death, he died on April 13 at 73: Photos, Videos • JazzBluesNews.com


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Ryo Kawasaki death, he died on April 13 at 73: Photos, Videos

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Ryo Kawasaki Death – The family of Ryo Kawasaki has announced the passing away of their beloved one. He died on April 13, 2020.

Ryo Kawasaki has passed away. we got to know about this through the news posted across social medias earlier today.

For every start of a journey, there must be an end. Ryo Kawasaki journey has sadly come to an end on earth.

Friends, Family and loved ones are extremely sad and currently grieving as the news of his death was announced.

Ryo Kawasaki cause of death is still unknown. It is has not been released yet, we are also still searching for more information surrounding his death. we will surely update this news as soon as we are able to get more information regarding his death.

It is with incredible sadness and heavy hearts that we announce that our friend and colleague has passed away. Celebrate the life of Ryo Kawasaki, leave a kind word for him. Friends, Family and Loved ones has poured out their grieve and condolence to honor the passing away of the deceased.

 

 

 

 

Ryo Kawasaki (川崎 燎, Kawasaki Ryō, February 25, 1947 – April 13, 2020) was a Japanese jazz fusion guitarist, composer and band leader, best known as one of the first musicians to develop and popularise the fusion genre and for helping to develop the guitar synthesizer in collaboration with Roland Corporation and Korg. His album Ryo Kawasaki and the Golden Dragon Live was one of the first all digital recordings and he created the Kawasaki Synthesizer for the Commodore 64. During the 1960s, he played with various Japanese jazz groups and also formed his own bands. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York City, where he settled and worked with Gil Evans, Elvin Jones, Chico Hamilton, Ted Curson, Joanne Brackeen amongst others. In the mid-1980s, Kawasaki drifted out of performing music in favour of writing music software for computers. He also produced several techno dance singles, formed his own record company called Satellites Records, and later returned to jazz-fusion in 1991.

Early life (1947–1968)

Ryo Kawasaki was born on February 25, 1947, in Kōenji, Tokyo, while Japan was still struggling and recovering from the early post World War II period. His father, Torao Kawasaki, was a Japanese diplomat who had worked for The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs since 1919. Torao worked at several Japanese consulates and embassies, including San Francisco, Honolulu, Fengtian (then capital of Manchuria, now Shenyang in China), Shanghai, and Beijing while active as an English teacher and translator for official diplomatic conferences. Ryo’s mother, Hiroko, was also multilingual, and spoke German, Russian, English, and Chinese aside from her native tongue Japanese. Hiroko grew up in Manchuria and then met Torao in Shanghai. Torao was already 58 years old when Ryo was born as an only child.

Kawasaki’s mother encouraged him to take piano and ballet lessons, and he took voice lessons and solfege at age four and violin lessons at five, and was reading music before elementary school. As a grade scholar, he began a lifelong fascination with astronomy and electronics (he built his own radios, TVs and audio systems including amplifiers and speakers as well as telescopes). When Ryo was 10, he bought a ukulele and, at 14, he got his first acoustic guitar. The album Midnight Blue by Kenny Burrell and Stanley Turrentine inspired Ryo to study jazz.

In high school, he began hanging out at coffee-houses that featured live music, formed a jazz ensemble and built an electronic organ that served as a primitive synthesizer. By the time he was 16, his band was playing professionally in cabarets and strip joints. Although he continued to play music regularly, he attended Nippon University, majored in quantum physics and earned his Bachelor of Science Degree. Although he has failed to prove his main interest and intuitive belief at that time, which is to prove that speed (acceleration) of gravity must be much greater than speed of light. He also did some teaching and contest judging at the Yamaha musical instrument manufacturer’s jazz school. Additionally he worked as a sound engineer for Japanese Victor Records and BGM/TBS Music where he learned mixing and editing.

Early career in Japan (1969–1973)

He recorded his first solo album for Polydor Records when he was 22. Although he continued to perform with his jazz group, and at a young age was voted the No. 3 jazz guitarist in a Japanese jazz poll, Kawasaki spent most of the next three years working as studio musician on everything from advertising jingles to pop songs including countless radio and TV appearances. He recorded his second album for Toshiba when he was 24. He played with B.B. King at a blues festival and also met George Benson (they jammed for five hours at Kawasaki’s house).

He also has recorded and worked with notable Japanese jazz musicians such as drummer Takeshi Inomata and Sound limits, saxophonist Jiro Inagaki and Soul Mates, saxophonist Keiichiro Ebisawa, saxophonist Seiichi Nakamura, pianist Masahiko Sato (佐藤允彦), saxophonist Hidehiko Matsumoto (松本英彦) and many others.

Developments in New York City (1973–2002)

In 1973, Kawasaki arrived in New York. A friend picked him up at the airport and offered him an immediate gig with Joe Lee Wilson playing at the Lincoln Center as part of the Newport Jazz Festival. Soon Kawasaki was jamming regularly as part of the jazz community’s “loft scene”, and was invited to play with Bobbi Humphrey. A few months later, Kawasaki walked up to his apartment and found a stranger waiting for him at his front door. It was Gil Evans and he invited Kawasaki to join The Gil Evans Orchestra (David Sanborn, Howard Johnson, Tom Malone, Lew Soloff) which was then working on a jazz recording of Jimi Hendrix compositions, The Gil Evans Orchestra Plays the Music of Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix had dreamed up the concept with Evans, but Jimi died a week before the project started in 1970. Kawasaki also played on another Gil Evans album on RCA, There Comes a Time, with Tony Williams on drums. Kawasaki rehearsed for a month with the third edition of Tony Williams’ Lifetime with trio format with bassist Doug Rauch working with Carlos Santana at that time, but Tony left to spend a year in Europe before the band got the chance to perform in public.

Kawasaki followed in the footsteps of Jim Hall, Gábor Szabó and Larry Coryell by becoming the guitarist in the Chico Hamilton Band, playing on a U.S. tour and working on various film scores that Chico recorded in Hollywood. Kawasaki made his debut U.S. album, Juice, in 1976 for RCA and was one of the first Japanese jazz artists to sign with a major label in the States. Sidemen on the project included Tom Coster (Carlos Santana) and Sam Morrison (Miles Davis). Kawasaki followed that recording with two more albums, Prism and Eight Mile Road, for the Japanese label East Wind. He also joined the Elvin Jones Band for a year-long tour of North and South America and Europe. By 1978, Kawasaki was tired of touring with other bands and returned to his own projects.

He explored Music of India, learned ragas and recorded an Audio Fidelity album, Ring Toss, that combined eastern and western music. With Dave Liebman he recorded Nature’s Revenge for the German MPS label and they toured Europe. Ryo also toured European jazz festivals with Joanne Brackeen as piano – guitar duo, and they recorded a pair of albums—AFT and Trinkets and Things—for Timeless Records in the Netherlands. In Japan, Sony’s Open Sky label signed Ryo for three albums—Mirror of my Mind, Little Tree and Live—the latter, recorded in a Tokyo club, was one of the first all-digital recordings. Notable musicians participated on those recordings include Michael Brecker, Harvey Mason, Leon Pendarvis, Azar Lawrence, Anthony Jackson, Lincoln Goines, Badal Roy, Nana Vasconcelos, Buddy Williams, Larry Willis, and Alex Blake. He also recorded an album called Sapporo for Swiss label America Sound in 1980 while touring Switzerland and Germany.

1979–1990 (as inventor and programmer)

Kawasaki invented his own guitar synthesizer in 1979, and used it to perform numerous solo shows at planetariums from 1980 to 1983. He also formed the jazz-rock group The Golden Dragon and performed concerts regularly in early 1980s. Fostex developed the first quarter- inch-tape, eight-track recorder called A8 along with 2 track mastering machine A2 and asked Kawasaki to be the first artist to use it. He recorded the album Ryo in 1981 for Philips Records and gained notoriety for creating all the music himself. He played only a nylon-string acoustic guitar with all his backing tracks created on his guitar synthesizer including the entire original orchestration of Joaquin Rodrigo’s well known Concierto de Aranjuez – Adagio movement. He did another similar recording, Lucky Lady, the next year.

When the Commodore 64 computer came out with a sound-chip in it, Kawasaki became fascinated by the possibilities. He learned to write computer programs and devoted 16 hours a day for two years creating four music software programs—Kawasaki Synthesizer, Kawasaki Rhythm Rocker, Kawasaki Magical Musicquill, and Kawasaki MIDI Workstation—distributed by Sight and Sound Music. The first three programs were for school and home use, and the last one was for professional studios. He created an all-synthesized album, Images, in 1987; and the soundtrack, Pleasure Garden, in 1990, for an IMAX film about the preservation of the Earth’s endangered tropical rain forests.

From 1986 to 1990, Kawasaki produced a series of high-charting 12 inch dance singles—”Electric World”, “One Kiss”, “No Expectations”, “Say Baby I Love You”, “Don’t Tell Me”, “Wildest Dreams”, “Life is The Rhythm”, “Pleasure Garden”, and “Acid Heat”—that mixed free-style, house, acid house and ambient sounds. All of the production was done at his home studio, The Satellite Station, and the records were released on his own label, Satellites Records. His band and a dance troupe also performed extensively in New York dance clubs. In addition, for five years (1988 to 1993), Kawasaki was the New York producer and director of two Japanese national weekly music radio programs, The Music Now and Idex Music Jam. In 1991. He also collaborated with Japanese koto master Kicho Takano and produced “Crystallization” in 1986.

1991–2000 (return to jazz guitarist)

Kawasaki’s musical direction took another dramatic turn when he was signed by the new jazz and adult contemporary Japanese label One Voice as an artist and record producer. Kawasaki’s return to jazz, and his first album for the label, was the 1992 acoustic solo guitar album Here, There and Everywhere (released on One Voice in Japan and on Satellites Records in the U.S.). Kawasaki has produced and performed on three albums by Brazilian singer and guitarist Camila Benson for this label. Ryo has continued to release a steady string of albums—the acoustic My Reverie (music from Bill Evans, Debussy, Ravel and Gershwin), the electric jazz guitar-oriented Love Within The Universe (which received considerable airplay across the country), “Remixes Remixes Vol. 1” (also featuring Benson), “Sweet Life” and CD releases of “Mirror of my Mind” (a jazz ensemble recording with Harvey Mason, Michael Brecker, Anthony Jackson, Leon Pendarvis and vocalist Radha Shottam).

His 1999 release Cosmic Rhythm features British singer lyricist Clare Foster along with Kawasaki’s rhythm section Victor Jones on drums, Lincoln Goines on bass. The album also features David Kikoski on piano and Shunzo Ohno on flugelhorn. All the songs were arranged and recorded by Kawasaki including original ten songs by Ro himself.

During 1995–1999, three hip hop artists, Puff Daddy, Kool G Rap, and Keith Murray, recorded Kawasaki’s original composition “Bamboo Child” on their latest albums more than twenty years after its original recording.

Developments in Estonia and beyond (2000–2020)

In 2001, Kawasaki released live a studio trio album “Reval”, recorded in Tallinn, Estonia with Estonian musicians Toivo Unt on bass, Aivar Vassiljev on drums, and Kristi Keel on English horn.

His other projects include being a composer, music director as well as a guitarist for the jazz ballet “Still Point” for the Estonian National Opera House during 2000-2002. This ballet is choreographed by Russell Adamson, a native Jamaican who resides in Helsinki.

Kawasaki released his third acoustic guitar solo album ‘E’ in 2002.

From the year 2000 on, Kawasaki further expanded his live appearances into Russia and Baltic region Jazz Festivals. His quartet has appeared at Rigas Ritmi Jazz Festival in Riga/Latvia, Pori and other jazz festivals in Finland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Saransk Jazz Ark Festival. He also appeared numerous times at Nõmme Jazz Festival in Estonia while assisting the production of this jazz festival.

Kawasaki’s projects during 2005–2008 included guitar trio project with American drummer Brian Melvin and Estonian bassist Toivo Unt under the “Art of Trio” name, performing in a variety of venues in Finland, Sweden, and the Baltic states, and performing with Estonian vocalist Jaanika Ventsel, while also touring and recording in Japan for the duo project with bassist Yoshio ‘Chin’ Suzuki (鈴木良雄), their duo CD “Agana” was released in February 2007.

In 2008, Kawasaki formed jazz ensemble with Estonian pianist/keyboardist Tõnu Naissoo.[1] Also, his second duo CD with Yoshio ‘Chin’ Suzuki (鈴木良雄) and first CD with “Art of Trio” were completed and released during 2009, while his composition “Raisins” was included on the Grand Theft Auto IV radio station Fusion FM in 2008.

From 2009 – 2011, Kawasaki further expanded his performing activities in Lebanon with Syrian bassist, Omar Harb and Lebanese drummer, Fouad Afra. The album “Live in Beirut” which Kawasaki recorded with Lebanese organist, Arthur Satyan and drummer, Fouad Afra was released in 2011.

Overlapping the same time period, beginning in 2007, Kawasaki gradually developed his 4th acoustic guitar solo album “Spain” in Tallinn, Estonia, which was finally released in 2012. In 2014, Ryo discovered a younger generation of Estonian musicians who inspired him to further develop a fusion, jazz-rock sound using his own compositions. Ryo’s attention on these directions had somewhat faded away after their recording and release in the early 1980s with his group “Golden Dragon”. As of spring 2016, Kawasaki has formed a new quartet called, “Level 8” exclusively with Estonian musicians: keyboardist, Raun Juurikas; electric bassist, Kaarel Liiv; and drummer, Eno Kollom. “Level 8” has now finished recording a new self-titled album focusing on Ryo’s compositions both from the past and present utilizing a funk/fusion/jazz-rock sound. The album “Level 8” was released in March 2017.

In April 2016, UK independent label Nunorthernsoul released a vinyl EP titled “Selected Works 1979 to 1983 by Ryo Kawasaki.” A follow-up vinyl EP titled “Selected Works Part 2 – 1976 to 1980 by Ryo Kawasaki” is scheduled to be released in April 2017.

He died in Tallinn, Estonia in April 2020 at the age of 73.

 

 

 

 

Fundraiser by Tane Kawasaki Saavedra : Support Ryo Kawasaki

 

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Ryo Kawasaki death, he died on April 13 at 73: Photos, Videos • JazzBluesNews.com

Ryo Kawasaki death, he died on April 13 at 73: Photos, Videos • JazzBluesNews.com


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FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Lionel Hampton Orchestra Olimpia Music Hall Milano – YouTube

FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Lionel Hampton Orchestra Olimpia Music Hall Milano – YouTube


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A Titan of Tumbao: Remembering Latin Jazz Bassist and Bandleader Andy González | WBGO

A Titan of Tumbao: Remembering Latin Jazz Bassist and Bandleader Andy González | WBGO


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A Titan of Tumbao: Remembering Latin Jazz Bassist and Bandleader Andy González

By  • 14 hours ago

 

Andy González, who died on April 9 in the Bronx, was a bassist who followed in the footsteps of seminal Latin players like Israel “Cachao” López and Bobby Rodriguez, eventually joining their ranks as one of the most important figures on the instrument.

His work in three groups that he co-led — Grupo Folklórico Y Experímental Nuevayorquíno; Conjunto Libre, with percussionist Manny Oquendo; and the Fort Apache Band, with his brother, the late percussionist and trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez — was prolific and historic. Each served as a testament to the musical identity of the Puerto Rican experience in New York City, showing the influence of jazz and Afro-Cuban music in ways that became defined as Nuyorican.

“Grupo Folklórico was started by Andy and Jerry,” says René López, a noted historian, musicologist and producer. “It was game-changing because it broke the barrier in Latin music of older masters playing with younger players. It came from jam sessions (descargas) they would have at their parents’ house at 1963 Gildersleeve Avenue in the Bronx.”

It was through pianist, bandleader and NEA Jazz Master Eddie Palmieri that the González brothers met López, who became a mentor, guide and guru for them and a cadre of other young Nuyorican musicians, who would become major forces in the city’s salsa scene. “I told Andy flat out, you want to learn about this music, see René,” recalls Palmieri. “He has one of the most incredible collections of Cuban music in the world, and he shared his encyclopedic knowledge with them.”

The Cuban trumpeter Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros was among López’s neighbors, and he would visit these weekly listening sessions, along with Latin legends like Machito and Justí Barreto. They all would share inside information about each recording. It was a deep yet informal musical education that shaped the brothers, Andy in particular.

“We had rules,” he said, in an interview conducted by the Smithsonian. “No talking during the playing of the record. We would talk after the record, but while they were being played, no talking. If anybody opened their mouth, we would say, ‘Shut up.’ We really put our minds to listening with more care than usual. It was a casual thing, [but] we were going to school. This was a classroom.”

Andrew González was born in Manhattan on New Year’s Day in 1951, to Geraldo González, a vocalist with the Augie and Moncho Melendez group, and the former Julia Toyos, a secretary.

He was raised in the Bronx, the borough that would help to redefine Cuban music into what today is known as salsa. A budding violinist in grammar school, he made an eventful switch to the bass, taking lessons from fifth to eighth grade with noted jazz bassist Steve Swallow, who prepared him for an audition to the prestigious High School of Music & Art (now LaGuardia).

“Those three years that he studied with Swallow were important,” says guitarist and tres master Benjamin Lapidus, “as he taught Andy the fundamentals of jazz harmony, playing, etc. Steve arranged the Bach Cello Suite in D Minor for him to play for his audition to Music & Art.”

Along with his brother Jerry, his fellow students at M&A included saxophonist René McLean, pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs and vocalist Janis Ian, who was in his homeroom class. He would soon join conguero and future NEA Jazz Master Ray Barretto’s two-trumpet conjunto. Barretto unchained the group from the confines of being just a dance band, treating it like a small jazz combo with the musicians featured as soloists.  

After recording influential albums like Together and Power with Barretto, González joined Palmieri. He was featured on the seminal album Superimposition, which featured Chocolate Armenteros on trumpet and the rhythm section of Nicky Marrero on timbales, Eladio Pérez on congas and Tommy “Choki” López on bongos. “I called them mis diablitos del ritmo, little devils of rhythm,” says Palmieri. “They were all still teenagers. Choki was 13!”

In 1974, González and Oquendo formed the trombone-based ensemble Conjunto Libre, known by most simply as Libre. As Rene López (no relation to Choki) attests: “Along with Latin Boogaloo and Afro-Cuban jazz, the all-trombone sound is NYC’s contribution to Latin music. That group was important because Andy and Manny kept that sound alive for more than 30 years.” 

González’s unique ability to play creatively within the confines of the tumbao — the repetitive patterns played by bass, piano, guitar, tres and cuatro in Cuban and Puerto Rican music — led him to be called for literally hundreds of recording sessions. But he was not limited to salsa-based dates, as he would be called upon by artists including David Byrne, Kip Hanrahan, Dizzy Gillespie and Astor Piazzolla for his expertise on both acoustic and Ampeg baby bass.

Keith Thomas, his roadie and close friend, recalls: “Andy told me he once had an electric bass, but it was stolen. He said, ‘Whoever stole that electric bass from me did me a favor.’”

In 1979, Andy’s brother Jerry formed a group that would redefine Latin jazz, the Fort Apache Band. Originally a collective that would sometimes include up to 16 members, it was eventually codified into a group with a two- or three-horn front line, showcasing Andy on acoustic bass along with Jerry on congas and trumpet.

Fort Apache drew upon the hard-bop and modal jazz innovations of the 1960s while extensively utilizing Afro-Cuban rhythms. The band could switch on a moment’s notice from clave to straight-ahead jazz. It would influence a generation of young jazz musicians to check out Latin rhythms in an authentic context, and also introduce young Latin musicians to the possibilities that could be explored in small-group jazz.

In 2004, complications to an undiagnosed diabetic condition began to take their toll on Andy. He would continue to perform, mentor, and teach just as he was taught. “Andy was a lifelong listener,” says Lapidus. “He was always studying by listening. He was versed in classical, Brazilian, jazz, Cuban, Puerto Rican, etc. His one album as a leader, Entre Colegas (2016 nominated for a Grammy), was his imagining of Django Reinhardt going to Cuba and Puerto Rico. That’s why it’s all string-oriented, featuring electric and acoustic guitar, Cuban tres, Puerto Rican cuatro, and of course him on acoustic bass.”

René López reinforces that thought. “Andy’s legacy lives with all the people he shared his knowledge with, the people he taught.”

González is survived by his brother Arthur and his sister Eileen; his nephew, Agueybana Cemi; and his nieces Xiomara, Marisol and Julia. “I never realized how many people my uncle influenced,” reflects Xiomara Amelia Gonzalez. “Every time I’d meet a musician like Nelson Gonzalez, Herman Olivera, on and on, they would always say to me, ‘I learned how to play this music in the basement of that house on Gildersleeve Avenue.’”

Felipe Luciano, the Original Last Poet and cofounder of the Young Lords, best describes Andy’s importance. “Andy, with his brother Jerry, were the conscious of Latin Music,” he says. “Never compromising, integrating the past and present while forging a new future. There’s not one living Latin musician, or jazz musician whoever heard them, who is not influenced by their thought, dedication, their purity of sound. They were priests of a new order, icons from a higher ground. May the NYC sounds of Latin music live, like them, forever.”

Special thanks to Betty Luciano González for biographical information.

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Jymie Merritt, Bassist Who Brought a Rooted Yet Exploratory Spirit to Post-Bop, Dies at 93 | WBGO

Jymie Merritt, Bassist Who Brought a Rooted Yet Exploratory Spirit to Post-Bop, Dies at 93 | WBGO


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Jymie Merritt, Bassist Who Brought a Rooted Yet Exploratory Spirit to Post-Bop, Dies at 93

By  • 21 hours ago

 

Jymie Merritt, a bassist who anchored some of the leading groups of jazz’s postwar era, like Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, before establishing his own sphere of influence as a composer and theorist in Philadelphia, died on Friday. He was 93.

His son Mike Merritt, also an accomplished bassist, said the cause was liver cancer.

Merritt will always be best recognized for his four-year tenure in the Jazz Messengers, which was inaugurated with the 1958 album Moanin’, a hard-bop cornerstone. Along with Blakey’s intensely locomotive drumming, Merritt formed the only constant in the band from the late ‘50s into the early ‘60s, through multiple changes in lineup and direction.

He can be heard on the live albums At the Jazz Corner of the World (1959) and A Night in Tunisia (1960), as well as studio efforts like Mosaic (1962) and Buhaina’s Delight (1963).

Almost all of these albums (a mere sampling of his work with Blakey) were made for Blue Note Records, which will release a previously unreleased album by the band on Aug. 7, featuring Blakey and Merritt alongside pianist Bobby Timmons, saxophonist Hank Mobley and trumpeter Lee Morgan.

Merritt’s deep kinship with Morgan yielded another notable chapter in his career. He was a member of the trumpeter’s final bands, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. This group, which marked Morgan’s return to the spotlight after a difficult period, made a double album called Live at the Lighthouse in 1970. Recorded at the Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach, Calif., the original LP opens with a characteristically intrepid Merritt composition, “Absolutions.”

 

 

Merritt had originally composed “Absolutions” for drummer Max Roach — another important association in the 1960s. After he left the Jazz Messengers, Merritt worked first for a time with Chet Baker, appearing on that trumpeter’s wryly titled The Most Important Jazz Album Of 1964-65. He also worked in that decade with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, joining the bebop paragon on tour.

But his work with Roach stands out because of his contributions as a composer. In addition to “Absolutions,” which appears on the 1968 album Members, Don’t Git Weary, Roach recorded a Merritt tune called “Nommo,” for his 1966 release Drums Unlimited. “Nommo,” whose title is derived from a West African term meaning “the power of the spoken word,” stands as a Merritt trademark, combining elements of hard bop and advanced modal jazz, in a grooving 7/4 meter.

 

 

James Raleigh Merritt was born on May 3, 1926 in Philadelphia. His father, Raleigh, had moved to the city a few years earlier, after graduating from the Tuskegee Institute, where he’d befriended George Washington Carver. In Philadelphia he worked in real estate and helped establish the Vine Memorial Baptist Church.

Jymie’s mother, Agnes, played and taught piano, in addition to teaching elementary school. So he grew up in a musical household, starting out on tenor saxophone and only switching to the bass in his early 20s, after his Army service overseas during World War II.

Though it wasn’t as visible to the public, Merritt led a productive career before his time with Blakey. He started out in rhythm and blues, backing Bull Moose Jackson from 1949-53, and later touring with B.B. King. It was during this period that Merritt became a prominent early adopter of the electric bass; he brought his first Fender electric not long after it went into production in the fall of 1951. 

Similarly, Merritt did extensive work as a bandleader and mentor in Philadelphia, both before and after he had left the national spotlight. His group The Forerunners first took shape in the early 1960s, with members including pianist Colmare Duncan and vocalist September Wrice; they recorded a single called “Sweetest Sound Bossa Nova.”

Later iterations of the band, also known as Forerunner, would include saxophonists Odean Pope, Julian Pressley, Bobby Zankel and Terry Lawson; percussionist Warren McLendon; drummer Alan Nelson; and Mike Merritt, best known for his longtime post in the house bands for late-night host Conan O’Brien.

In addition to Mike, Merritt is survived by his partner of 40 years, Ave Merritt; two older sons, Marlon and Marvon; and two daughters, Mharlyn and Jamie Reese. Another son, Martyn, died in 1989.

In 2016, Jazz Night in America devoted an hourlong episode to Jymie Merritt and Forerunner, featuring a concert at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia.

“Rhythm is very complex, because it’s the basis on which the entire universe is constructed,” Merritt remarks in the program, which also features insights from his son, and several of his devoted band mates. “All life has a pattern, and once you can tap into that pattern, you tap into all aspects of life.”

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For Andy Gonzalez: GRUPO FOLKLORICO Y EXPERIMENTAL NUEVAYORQUINO. (Compilación) – YouTube

For Andy Gonzalez: GRUPO FOLKLORICO Y EXPERIMENTAL NUEVAYORQUINO. (Compilación) – YouTube


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Cristina, Cult Downtown New York Singer, Dies at 64 – The New York Times

Cristina, Cult Downtown New York Singer, Dies at 64 – The New York Times


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Cristina, Cult Downtown New York Singer, Dies at 64

A fixture in New York’s dance-music nightlife of the late ’70s and early ’80s, she gained new attention in 2004 when her albums were reissued.

By Jon Caramanica

Updated April 10, 2020

 

The singer Cristina in 1981. “My strength is not in my voice, nor do I have sexy ankles,” she once said, adding, “I have an analytical brain.” The singer Cristina in 1981. “My strength is not in my voice, nor do I have sexy ankles,” she once said, adding, “I have an analytical brain.”Ebet Roberts

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic.

Cristina, a cult singer who brought avant-garde sensibilities to New York’s dance-music nightlife at the turn of the 1980s, died on March 31 in New York. She was 64.

Her daughter, Lucinda Zilkha Francis, said she had been suffering from several autoimmune disorders, including relapsing polychondritis, for approximately two decades. On Friday, her family learned she had tested positive for the coronavirus. 

In the fertile anything-goes downtown New York of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Cristina cut a unique figure — a hyperliterary, well-to-do, seen-it-all performer who taunted club music culture with songs that could be read as wry parody or progressive updates.

“My strength is not in my voice, nor do I have sexy ankles,” she told the Boston Globe in 1980. “I have an analytical brain, and maybe that’s a liability in rock n’ roll, but if I play it right, it will translate musical principles into theatrical terms, which is what I have to do anyway, given my lack of technical expertise in music.”

Cristina Monet Palaci was born on Jan. 17, 1956, in Manhattan to Dorothy Monet, a writer and illustrator, and Jacques Palaci, a psychoanalyst. She attended Harvard, where she studied playwriting under William Alfred. She took a year off from college and came to New York, where she wrote freelance theater reviews for The Village Voice. It was there that she met Michael Zilkha, who became her boyfriend and, later, the engine behind her music career.

Mr. Zilkha was starting Ze Records with a partner. Cristina, who didn’t have particular aspirations to be a singer, nevertheless became his first artist with the 1978 single “Disco Clone.” Produced by John Cale, it was a deceptively slick dismantling of disco’s sameness, sung in an aspirated and shrill voice: “If you like the way I shake it/And you think you want to make it/There’s 50 just like me.”

“I thought it was so bad that it could be a Brechtian pastiche,” she told Time Out New York in 2004. “It turned out to be an eccentric and funny record — insane, enthusiastic, impassioned, amateurish.” (One version of the song features Kevin Kline on accompanying vocals.)

According to a 1984 New York magazine article, after her first live performance, at the Squat Theater in Chelsea, Cristina’s mother told her, “You were always a brilliant writer. A good artist … a good actress. How could you be so self-destructive as to sing?”

“Disco Clone” was successful enough that Cristina continued recording. Her self-titled debut album, released in 1980, was produced by August Darnell (who performed as Kid Creole), and featured disco paired with heavy Latin percussion. “The first theatrical, cinematic, nostalgic disco record, at a time when there wasn’t a lot of humor in disco,” Cristina said in an early 2000s interview with the zine Festive!

Consistently, Cristina injected a wry, burned-out, misadventuring patrician sensibility into her lyrics and delivery, especially on her rendition, that same year, of the Leiber and Stoller song, “Is That All There Is?” (originally made famous by Peggy Lee).

She tweaked the lyrics, making them both more whimsical and more terrifying: “I remember when I was a little girl, my mother set the house on fire — she was like that.” (Lieber and Stoller protested, and insisted the song be withdrawn from release.)

The Cristina that appeared on records was unfiltered. “It was entirely her, there’s no confection or construction in it all,” Mr. Zilkha said in an interview.

She and Mr. Zilkha married in 1983, and in 1984 she released her second album, “Sleep It Off,” produced by Don Was, with cover design by Jean-Paul Goude. On this album, she leaned into new wave, rendered again with savage satirical energy on songs like the punkish “Don’t Mutilate My Mink” and “What’s a Girl to Do.” (“If you loved the Pulitzer divorce trial, you’ll love this record,” crowed Rolling Stone.)

“The one thing that pop music has lost lately is its sense of irony,” Cristina said when the album was released. “People either write dumb-funny novelty songs or dead-earnest serious songs. There’s nothing around that combines elements of both.”

She and Mr. Zilkha moved to Texas soon after that album’s release, effectively ending her music career. “I believed the idea that Michael had bought me a career to such an extent that I felt sheepish and guilty, which I shouldn’t have been,” she told Time Out New York. After she and Mr. Zilkha divorced in 1990, she returned to New York.

In its day, Cristina’s work was very much a product of its demimonde. But in 2004, her albums were reissued to great acclaim and wide attention. Her only other musical recording was a 2006 collaboration with Ursula 1000, “Urgent/Anxious,” which took advantage of the implied eye-rolling in her voice, which hadn’t diminished at all.

Outside of music, Cristina retained an avid interest in theater and books. She was especially passionate about 19th-century literature. “When I was a child, she would read me Dickens, doing all the voices,” Ms. Francis recalled. She contributed occasional book and film reviews to the Times Literary Supplement, as well as articles to Tatler and London Literary Review.

Her medical conditions were often debilitating: “It’s hard to plan a new album when you don’t know if you will make it down to the end of the street from one day to the next,” she told Time Out New York. But in recent years, she had recovered enough to begin traveling.

In addition to her daughter, Cristina is survived by two granddaughters and her longtime companion, Stephen Graham.

Tune up your Times experience.

Tune up your Times experience.

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Bassist Andy González, Who Brought Bounce To Latin Dance And Jazz, Dies At 69 : NPR

Bassist Andy González, Who Brought Bounce To Latin Dance And Jazz, Dies At 69 : NPR


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Bassist Andy González, Who Brought Bounce To Latin Dance And Jazz, Dies At 69

April 10, 20204:19 PM ET
Courtesy of the artist

Andy González, a New York bassist who both explored and bridged the worlds of Latin music and jazz, has died. The 69-year-old musician died in New York on Thursday night, from complications of a pre-existing illness, according to family members.

Born and bred in the Bronx, Andy González epitomized the fiercely independent Nuyorican attitude through his music — with one foot in Puerto Rican tradition and the other in the cutting-edge jazz of his native New York.

González’s career stretched back decades, and included gigs or recordings with a who’s-who of Latin dance music, including Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri and Ray Barretto. He also played with trumpeter and Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer Dizzy Gillespie while in his twenties, as he explored the rich history of Afro-Caribbean music through books and records.

In the mid-1970s, he and his brother, the trumpet and conga player Jerry González, hosted jam sessions — in the basement of their parents’ home in the Bronx — that explored the folkloric roots of the then-popular salsa movement. The result was an influential album, Concepts In Unity, recorded by the participants of those sessions, who called themselves Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Nuevayorquino.

Toward the end of that decade, the González brothers were part of another fiery collective known as The Fort Apache Band, which performed sporadically and went on to release two acclaimed albums in the ’80s — and continued to release music through the following decades — emphasizing the complex harmonies of jazz with Afro-Caribbean underpinnings. Throughout, Andy was also putting in time with his and Manny Oquendo’s popular dance band, Libre.

A prolific side man, Andy González released his only solo album, Entre Colegas, in 2016, earning a Grammy nomination for Best Latin Jazz Album.

 

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Andy Gonzalez R.I.P.

Andy Gonzalez R.I.P.


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Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Richard Teitelbaum, Experimentalist With An Earth-Spanning Ear, Dead At 80 : NPR

Richard Teitelbaum, Experimentalist With An Earth-Spanning Ear, Dead At 80 : NPR


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https://www.npr.org/2020/04/09/831173527/richard-teitelbaum-experimentalist-with-an-earth-spanning-ear-dead-at-80
 

Richard Teitelbaum, Experimentalist With An Earth-Spanning Ear, Dead At 80

April 9, 20205:01 PM ET


Richard Teitelbaum, photographed performing at the BIMHUIS in Amsterdam on Oct. 18, 1991.

Frans Schellekens/Redferns

Richard Teitelbaum, an electronic artist, keyboardist and composer who combined an interest in non-western musical languages with a focus on experimental practice, died on Thursday at HealthAlliance Hospital in Kingston, N.Y. His wife, the classical pianist Hiroko Sakurazawa, said the cause was a major stroke. He was 80.

Teitelbaum was a pioneer in electronic music: Near the outset of his performing career, in the mid-1960s, he created what became known as “brainwave music,” after pressing inventor Robert Moog to adapt his company’s modular synthesizer to use neural oscillations as control voltages. 

Teitelbaum became the first person to bring a Moog synthesizer to Europe, where he incorporated it into performances with Musica Elettronica Viva, a group he formed with partners including the composer Alvin Curran and the pianist Frederic Rzewski. The ensemble would sometimes use the biofeedback of audience members — not only brainwaves but also electrocardiograms and other signals — to create musical output. 

He made use of the process in a 1968 composition called “Organ Music,” with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and vocalist Irene Aebi. Musica Elettronica Viva incorporated Teitelbaum’s biofeedback techniques around the same time, in a piece called “SpaceCraft.”

 

 

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Teitelbaum was also ahead of the curve as a musical globalist: In 1970, while studying ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, he formed the World Band, an improvising collective of master musicians from the Middle East, the Far East and India, as well as North America. 

Separately, he made a deep study of the shakuhachi, a Japanese bamboo flute; “Blends,” a shakuhachi piece he composed in 1977, finally saw release on an album by that title in 2002. (The Wire put it on that year’s list of the best classical releases.) He also worked extensively with computer-assisted pianos and interactive software, notably on a 2013 album titled Piano Plus, featuring Rzewski, Ursula Oppens and Aki Takahashi as well as himself. 

Improvisation was often at the center of Teitelbaum’s musical output, though he qualified what that term meant: “For many years, my approach to the art of musical improvisation has been concerned with developing and realizing the musical potential of one’s unconscious mind,” he wrote in an academic paper for Contemporary Music Review.

He found common cause with some of the leading composer-improvisers of the post-1960s avant-garde. “I’m not a jazz musician, I have no pretenses about that,” he told me in 2016. “But I’ve played with a lot of jazz musicians — though some of them don’t like to be called that, like Anthony Braxton or Roscoe Mitchell or George Lewis.” 

The three artists he named, prominent members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, share a dedication to original music ungoverned by convention and all-but beyond classification. 

Teitelbaum had the closest association with Braxton, with whom he made a number of albums, beginning with Time Zones in 1977. Among his other improvising partners were violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Joëlle Léandre and pianist Marilyn Crispell. 

“He was very sensitive with electronics,” Crispell tells NPR Music, “particularly in the early days, when a lot of people were just blasting things as loud as they could.” Her 2018 album Dream Libretto, with Tanya Kalmanovitch on violin and Teitelbaum on electronics, is his most recent recording credit.

Teitelbaum also had a long history with master drummer Andrew Cyrille, with whom he recorded a duo album, Double Clutch, in 1981. Cyrille’s 2016 release The Declaration of Musical Independence features guitarist Bill Frisell and bassist Ben Street along with Teitelbaum on acoustic piano and synthesizer. The results, including Teitelbaum’s short piece “Herky Jerky,” suggest a more “inside” track for him, though he sounds entirely like himself. 

Richard Lowe Teitelbaum was born on May 19, 1939 in New York City, to David Teitelbaum and Sylvia Lowe. He took piano lessons from age 6, and heard his share of jazz; in an interview with Kurt Gottschalk for The New York Jazz Record, he recalls sitting in the balcony of a Times Square theater for a Louis Armstrong concert, “and thinking it was the loudest music I’d ever heard.”

Teitelbaum was already enamored of the avant-garde composer and conceptualist John Cage when he enrolled as a music major at Haverford College. There he studied composition with Mel Powell, and music theory with Allen Forte. He also met the towering composer and music theorist Henry Cowell, who sparked his interest in traditional Japanese music. (Teitelbaum would later become an executor of the Cowell estate.) 

In 1964, a Fulbright Fellowship brought Teitelbaum to Italy, where he studied with Goffredo Petrassi; the following year he returned to study with another noted composer, Luigi Nono. Another Fulbright, in 1976, enabled Teitelbaum to travel to Japan, where he studied gagaku, or imperial court music, as well as the shakuhachi. 

Teitelbaum earned a masters in music from Yale, and in 1988 he joined the faculty at Bard College, where he served as Director of the Electronic Music Studio. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition in 2002, using it to create Z’vi, the second in a projected trilogy of operas inspired by Jewish mysticism. Among his other classical works was “Concertino for Piano and Orchestra,” which he composed for Sakurazawa and the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra.

In 2017, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Musica Ellettronica Viva, Teitelbaum joined Rzweski and Alvin Curran in a concert tour that included performances at National Sawdust in Brooklyn and the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tenn. The group also released an album, Symphony No. 106

For all the cerebral dimensions of his music, Teitelbaum kept his work rooted in sensory experience. In a paper titled “In Tune: Some Early Experiments in Biofeedback Music (1966-74),” he recalls the original performance of “Organ Music,” which incorporated Lacy’s brainwaves and Aebi’s heartbeats. 

The concert took place in an auditorium in Milan with speakers surrounding the audience — “so that one felt as if seated in the midst of a shifting storm of bio-electrical activity,” he wrote, “a feeling analogous, perhaps, to being inside a living heart and brain.”

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Chicago jazz musician fights cancer with help – Chicago Tribune

Chicago jazz musician fights cancer with help – Chicago Tribune


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https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/howard-reich/ct-ott-judy-roberts-reich-0410-20200408-2dikkdmmz5drddrrvsu3weuidi-story.html

Chicago jazz singer Judy Roberts battles rare cancer with the help of her husband

Howard Reich

Chicago Tribune |

Apr 08, 2020 | 11:37 AM 

About six months ago, Chicago singer-pianist Judy Roberts was feeling tired and weak and didn’t know why.

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Roberts, who divides her year between residencies in her hometown and in the Phoenix area, noticed swelling in her feet.

So she and her husband, Chicago saxophonist Greg Fishman, went to the ER, then to other doctors and last December received a difficult diagnosis: amyloidosis, which Fishman describes as “similar to multiple myeloma – it’s a blood cancer.”

Roberts played her last gig at Hey Nonny, in Arlington Heights, on Nov. 28. Not long after, she and Fishman headed to their Arizona home, so she could receive treatment nearby at the Mayo Clinic.

“I wanted the absolutely best hospital help for her,” said Fishman, who has “been together” with Roberts since May 23, 1993 and married her on Feb. 2, 2002. 

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“It’s such a rare disease,” he said. “She had already started three rounds of chemotherapy in Chicago, and we continued that here.

“She’s really weak. She plays the piano every day at home for as much as she can, before she gets tired. And she’s on Facebook talking to her friends.

“I’m basically Judy’s caretaker. It’s my whole mission in life to get her through this ordeal and try to get her back to playing gigs again. I’ve never been in this situation before.

“It’s turned into a full-time job, just dealing with nurses and doctors and prescriptions – it’s a massive undertaking. I don’t know how people do it. I certainly have more of an appreciation for people who are caretakers.”

For the past few months, Fishman has been driving Roberts to Mayo for treatment once a week, the only time she leaves home. But Fishman’s and Roberts’ lives aren’t devoted exclusively to fighting the illness. They’re also making time for their art.

“I’ll get my horn out, and we’ll play music,” said Fishman, as they’ve done together for decades in jazz clubs and concert halls around the world.

“My latest plan, when she’s not too tired for it: I want to do a set every day. Just pretend we’re playing a set every day, just to keep our chops up.

“I’m writing original songs, saying we’re going to play these when we get back to doing gigs. I’m trying to really stay positive and keep looking forward to everything.”

In an email, Roberts summed up her daily life this way:

“It’s good to stay connected with my Chicago friends through Facebook,” she said. “People have been so wonderful and supportive, and I’m so grateful. Greg and I are already working on new tunes to play when we come home to Chicago. (Jazz Showcase owner) Wayne Segal stays in touch with us, and we’re looking forward to returning to the Jazz Showcase. We’re also looking forward to our suburban gigs, like Suzette’s in Wheaton and Hey Nonny in Arlington Heights.”

Still, the coronavirus pandemic has not made things easier. Fishman no longer can go to Mayo to pick up his wife’s prescriptions, instead waiting for them to arrive in the mail.

“Judy is most susceptible … she’s immune-compromised right now,” said Fishman. “So I’m very careful. I go out minimally. I try to shop for a week or two and stock up. If I pick up a prescription, I do it through the drive-through window. I sanitize my hands before and after.

“Judy and I fortunately were nuts about hand sanitizers, so we have gallons of the stuff.”

Both musicians are cheered by the support they’ve received from a GoFundMe page. But like most jazz musicians, they’re concerned about the fate of small venues that, even in good times, didn’t turn much of a profit.

“We’re worried about all the clubs where we used to play, and whether they’ll be able to open again after all this,” said Fishman.

Still, he remains hopeful.

“We’re looking forward to getting back to Chicago at some time,” said Fishman, who spends several hours a day teaching lessons to students around the world via Skype.

“God willing, she can get into remission and get back to playing our gigs.

“The one thing we have is the music. We’re in the house here, listening to music, and we’re enjoying it. I’m playing some piano, and Judy is helping me with chord voicings and things like that.

“I can sit there and analyze it and figure it out. She just does it. … It’s just organic for her. I’ve got the greatest piano teacher in the world here.”

Whenever they go to Mayo, they see “a grand piano in the lobby,” added Fishman.

“I always ask her if she feels like playing it, and she says no.

“But I’m praying one day she’s going to play it.”

Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.

hreich@chicagotribune.com

Howard Reich


Howard Reich is the Tribune’s Emmy-winning arts critic; author of six books, including “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel”; and writer-producer of three documentaries. He holds two honorary doctoral degrees and served on the Pulitzer music jury four times, including for the first jazz winner, “Blood on the Fields.”

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic – The New York Times

The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic – The New York Times


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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/magazine/weird-al-yankovic.html?action=click
 

The Weirdly Enduring Appeal of Weird Al Yankovic

National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But — somehow, for some reason — Weird Al keeps rocking.

By Sam Anderson

April 9, 2020

Cinemagraph

Photographs by Art Streiber

Photographs by Art Streiber

Last summer, in the middle of what struck me as an otherwise very full life, I went to my first Weird Al Yankovic concert. Weird Al, for anyone reading this through a golden monocle, is the most renowned comedy musician in the history of the multiverse — a force of irrepressible wackiness who, back in the 1980s, built a preposterous career out of song parodies and then, somehow, never went away. After 40 years, Yankovic is now no longer a novelty, but an institution — a garish bright patch in the middle of America’s pop-cultural wallpaper, a completely ridiculous national treasure, an absurd living legend.

I have spent much of my life chortling, alone in tiny rooms, to Weird Al’s music. (“I churned butter once or twice living in an Amish paradise” — LOL.) And yet somehow it had never occurred to me to go out and see him live. I think this is for roughly the same reason that it has never occurred to me to make my morning commute in a hot-air balloon or to brush my teeth in Niagara Falls. Parody is not the kind of music you go out to see in person — it’s the joke version of that music. A parody concert felt like a category error, like confusing a mirror for a window. To me, Weird Al had always been a fundamentally private pleasure; I was perfectly content to have him living in my headphones and on YouTube and — very occasionally, when I wanted to aggravate my family — out loud on my home speakers.

The show was in New York, at Forest Hills Stadium — a storied outdoor arena that once hosted the U.S. Open, as well as concerts by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. It was late July, the hottest weekend of a punishingly hot summer, and the humidity was so thick it felt as if gravity had doubled. The backs of my knees were sweating onto the fronts of my knees. A performance in this context struck me as a heavy lift, even for a normal rock star. For a parody rock star, it seemed basically impossible. Deep in my brain, a blasphemous little wrinkle kept wondering, secretly, if the concert might even be sad. Weird Al was on the brink of turning 60, and his defining early hits (“Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon”) were several decades old, which means they were made for a version of the culture that is now essentially Paleolithic. Down in my sweaty palm, every 10 seconds, my phone dosed out new shots of racism and bullying and disaster and alarm. I felt exhausted, on every possible level, and I assumed everyone else did, too. Would anyone even show up?

 

Yankovic with 232 fans on January 18, 2020. Yankovic with 232 fans on January 18, 2020. Art Streiber for The New York Times

The answer, to that at least, was yes. Long before showtime, the Weird Al fans started streaming in. The vibe was lighthearted reverence. It was a benevolent Weird Al cosplay cult. There were so many Hawaiian shirts that it felt like an elaborate code, some secret language composed entirely of loud patterns: parrots, hot dogs, palm trees, flowers, cars, accordions, pineapples, whales, bananas, sunsets. Everyone was so floridly mismatched that they seemed, paradoxically, to be matching — a great harmony of clashing. I saw Weird Al T-shirts from 10 tours ago, Weird Al hats covered with Weird Al pins, every possible colorway of checkerboard Vans. Down toward the stage, hard-core fans greeted one another like relatives reunited at a wedding. Ages seemed to range from 80 to 4.

When Weird Al appeared, waggling his arms zanily, long hair flapping in the hot wind, the crowd greeted him with a surge of joy. Yankovic’s Hawaiian shirt was black and gold, traced with a pattern of tropical fronds. He still looked oddly young, as if his face had been locked into place, for copyright reasons, in 1989. Although he no longer sports a mustache or wears glasses — he shaved and got Lasik surgery more than 20 years ago, to the dismay of some fans — the other essentials remain. Weird Al has a face designed for making faces: large nostrils, wide forehead, bendy mouth, chin like a crescent moon. His eyeballs seem somehow double-jointed, able to bulge wide or disappear into a squint. His cheekbones pop like crab apples. He uses that face to mimic music-world clichés: rock-star sneer, boy-band smolder, teen-pop grin, gangsta-rap glower.

A Group Picture That Just Had to Be Weird

All it took to capture the essence of Al Yankovic for a Times Magazine photo shoot was 232 fans in wigs, mustaches, aviator glasses and Hawaiian shirts (accordions optional).

April 9, 2020

Onstage, Weird Al sat on a wooden stool and started to snap like a lounge singer. With an orchestra swelling behind him — the tour was called “Strings Attached” — he kicked into a soulful medley of 1980s parodies. If that does not sound great to you, if it in fact sounds like a very particular flavor of sonic hell, I am here to tell you something. Weird Al was absolutely belting. He was singing the bejesus out of this ridiculous music. I leaned back in my chair, reassessing core assumptions I had made about life. Was this somehow part of the joke — that Weird Al was an amazing singer? His voice was athletic and precise; he was rippling through intricate trills and runs. By the time he reached the medley’s climax — “Like a Surgeon,” his 1985 parody of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” — Yankovic was stretching for high notes and holding them over his head for the crowd to admire, like an Olympic weight lifter who had just snatched 500 pounds.

The show went on for two hot hours. The concrete theater was a convection oven powered by body heat, and Weird Al stomped and strutted and danced through the crowd, occasionally kicking his leg straight up, like actually vertical, 180 degrees. Sometimes he disappeared for 30 seconds and then came bursting back onstage in a costume: Kurt Cobain, Amish rapper, Devo. During “White & Nerdy,” he did doughnuts all over the stage on a Segway. Before long, the masses of Weird Al’s famous curls were stuck to his face, and if you looked closely you could see sweat pouring off his elbows. The parody songs, live, were tight and hard and urgent, supplemented occasionally by video clips, projected onto a giant screen, of Weird Al cameos on “30 Rock” and “The Simpsons” and the old “Naked Gun” movies. It felt less like a traditional concert than a Broadway musical crossed with a comedy film festival crossed with a tent revival.

The crowd was rolling through tantric nerdgasms, sustained explosions of belonging and joy. It felt religious. Near the end of the show, during the chorus of “Amish Paradise,” as the entire stadium started swinging its arms in rhythm, I unexpectedly found myself near tears. Weird Al was dressed in a ridiculous black suit, with a top hat and a long fake beard, and he was rapping about churning butter and raising barns, and everyone was singing along. I could feel deep pools of solitary childhood emotion — loneliness, affection, vulnerability, joy — beginning to stir inside me, beginning to trickle out and flow into this huge common reservoir. All the private love I had ever had for this music, for not only Weird Al’s parodies but for the originals — now it was here, outside, vibrating through the whole crowd. Weird Al had pulled off a strange emotional trick: He had brought the isolated energy of all our tiny rooms into this one big public space. When he left the stage, we stomped for more, and he came back out and played “Yoda,” his classic revision of the Kinks’ “Lola,” and then he left again, and I decided that this was the single best performance of any kind that I had ever seen in my life. Weird Al Yankovic was a full-on rock star, a legitimate performance monster. He was not just a parasite of cultural power but — somehow, improbably — a source of it himself.

 

 

Once upon a time, there was a boy who wet his bed. He wet every kind of bed available: bunk beds, water beds, blowup beds, foldout beds. At sleepovers, he wet sleeping bags. If he didn’t have a bed handy, sometimes he just wet his pants. He was fluent in that terrible feeling: warm relief at the wrong time, in the wrong place, turning into cold shame. So many mornings were so shameful.

This was not the boy’s only problem: He also threw up in cars, sometimes in such pungent floods that it would ruin the upholstery forever. Occasionally he would cry at school, for no obvious reason, baffling his teachers and classmates.

The boy’s family moved a lot, which meant that he wet beds in many different houses, threw up in many different cars and cried in many different school districts. When kids played kiss tag at recess, the boy would not be kissed — if a girl accidentally cornered him, she would realize who it was, then turn and run away. And so the boy spent many recesses alone, on the edge of the playground, picking up trash to earn the whole class bonus points so the teacher would allow them to watch a special movie together at the end of the year. Sometimes he would stand near the play structure, hiding his uncool shoes behind a metal pole, watching the other kids play, and he would repeat a mantra in his head: “I wish I could just be normal.”

The idea of normalcy, to the boy, came mostly from television. It was some vague constellation of money, crowds, hair gel, brand-name jackets and confidence — the kind of glittering ease that animated the great American mainstream, visible in its sitcoms and movies and slow-motion basketball highlights and, perhaps most of all, in its music videos. Weirdness, by contrast, meant everything in his own life: chubbiness, loneliness, boredom, clunky glasses, off-brand clothing, frozen bananas dipped in carob, lawn darts in his grandmother’s backyard.

The bed-wetting boy, dear reader, was me. And I tell you this story not just for sympathy (although there is that) but because it was in this era that I first encountered the music of Weird Al Yankovic.

Weird Al, it seemed to me, had a perfect sense of humor. He shrieked on MTV, squeaked rubber chickens and punctuated his songs with percussive belching. But he was more than just funny. Even as a child, I understood on some intuitive level that Weird Al was not merely the Shakespeare of terrible food puns (“Might as well face it you’re addicted to spuds”) or an icon of anti-style (poodle fro, enormous glasses, questionable mustache, Hawaiian shirts) but a spiritual technician doing important work down in the engine room of the American soul. I could not have said why, but I felt it.

As his name suggested, Weird Al’s comedy operated right at the hot spot of my childhood agonies: weirdness versus normalcy, insider versus outsider. What a Weird Al parody did was enact a tiny revolution. It took the whole glamorous architecture of American mainstream cool — Michael Jackson’s otherworldly moves, Madonna’s sexual taboos — and extracted all of the coolness. Into that void, Weird Al inserted the least cool person in the world: himself. And by proxy, all the rest of us weirdos, along with our uncool lives. “Beat It,” a ubiquitous superhit about avoiding street violence, became “Eat It,” a nasally monologue about picky eating. (“Have a banana, have a whole bunch — it doesn’t matter what you had for lunch. Just eat it.”) “I Love Rock ’n Roll,” a churning anthem of hard living and the devil’s music, became “I Love Rocky Road,” a squawking paean to stuffing your face with ice cream. It is no accident that much of Yankovic’s music was about food — everyone ate food, every day, celebrities and nerds alike. It was the great equalizer.

This switcheroo was, for me, thrilling. I would sit there with my brother in our unglamorous living room, in a town where Michael Jackson would never even consider performing, and I would feel dorkily empowered. Weird Al had flipped the polarities of weirdness and normalcy. We had made it into the TV. We were normal.

Weird Al has now been releasing song parodies for seven presidential administrations. He has outlasted two popes and five Supreme Court justices. He is one of only five artists (along with his early muses, Michael Jackson and Madonna) to have had a Top 40 single in each of the last four decades. Yankovic has turned out to be one of America’s great renewable resources. He is a timeless force that expresses itself through hyperspecific cultural moments, the way heat from the center of the earth manifests, on the surface, through the particularity of geysers. In 1996, after Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” became a national earworm, Weird Al took its thumping beat and its heavenly choir and turned it into “Amish Paradise,” a ridiculous banger about rural chores. When Chamillionaire’s “Ridin.” hit No. 1 in 2006, Weird Al took a rap about driving in a car loaded with drugs and translated it into a monologue about the glories of being a nerd. Whatever is popular at the moment, Yankovic can hack into its source code and reprogram it.

His work has inspired waves of creative nerds. Andy Samberg, the actor and a member of the comedy group the Lonely Island, told me that he grew up having Weird Al dance parties with his family. “Each new generation of younger kids is like, ‘Wait, this can exist?’” Samberg said.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, a Weird Al obsessive, credits Yankovic as an influence on “Hamilton.” Miranda once lip-synced “Taco Grande” (a Mexican-food-themed parody of the 1990 hit “Rico Suave”) in front of his sixth-grade class, He told me that he prefers many Weird Al songs to the originals. “Weird Al is a perfectionist,” Miranda said. “Every bit as much as Michael Jackson or Kurt Cobain or Madonna or any artist he has ever spoofed. So you get the musical power of the original along with this incredible twist of Weird Al’s voice and Weird Al’s brain. The original songs lose none of their power, even when they’re on a polka with burping sound effects in the background. In fact, it accelerates their power. It’s both earnest and a parody.”

Michael Schur, the creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” remembers the force of Weird Al’s 1992 parody of Nirvana.

“ ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ comes out, and it’s like the perfect voice for all the simmering anger of an entire generation of kids,” Schur said. “That song is vicious and angry and aggressive but also laconic and disaffected and scary. And it was immediately a gigantic thing in American culture. Then Weird Al does ‘Smells Like Nirvana’ and completely deflates it — the importance and seriousness and angst. That’s a service he has always provided: to remind people that rock is about grittiness and authenticity and finding your voice and relating to an audience, but it’s also fundamentally absurd. Being a rock star is stupid. We as a culture are genuflecting at the altar of these rock stars, and Weird Al comes out with this crazy curly hair and an accordion, and he just blows it all into smithereens by singing about Spam. It’s wonderful.”

Schur paused. He said there were heated debates, sometimes, in comedy writing rooms, about the merits of Weird Al’s work — some cynics argue that his jokes aren’t actually great, that people overrate them because they’re nostalgic for their childhoods. But Schur insisted that, regardless of what you think about this lyric or that lyric, Weird Al represented the deep egalitarian spirit of our culture.

“It’s a truly American thing, to be like: Get over yourself,” Schur said. “Everybody get over yourselves. Madonna, get over yourself. Kurt Cobain, get over yourself. Eminem, get over yourself. No one gets to be that important in America.”

 

Yankovic performs “Smells Like Nirvana” in a 2019 concert. Yankovic performs “Smells Like Nirvana” in a 2019 concert.Jeff Hahne/Getty Images

Weird Al lives in Los Angeles, up in the Hollywood Hills, in a house that, he was told, once belonged to the rapper Heavy D. The house is clean, minimalist, sophisticated — the opposite of Weird Al’s public persona. There are no Twinkie-shaped lounge chairs or florid shag carpets. It is high-ceilinged, full of gliding California light and beautiful furniture. Imagine a house where successful L.A. rappers would have partied in 1991: This is literally that house. It is so quintessentially L.A. that it has been used for film shoots, which means that sometimes the Yankovics — Weird Al, his wife, Suzanne, and their daughter, Nina — will be watching TV and, out of nowhere, they’ll see their house onscreen: Andy Garcia will be standing in their living room or Eazy-E will be floating in their pool. Yankovic’s friend Joel Miller insists that he has seen pornography set in the Yankovics’ living room. To which Weird Al responds, with polite embarrassment, “I’ll take his word for it.”

The Yankovic family is wonderfully wholesome. Al and Suzanne met fairly late in life, when both were established in their careers. Suzanne was a high-powered marketing executive at 20th Century Fox, and she was skeptical, at first, when a friend tried to set them up. She worried that Weird Al would be wacky, loud, shrill, insufferable, exhausting, always “on.”

He turned out to be the opposite. Offstage, in his civilian life, Yankovic is shy, introverted, extremely private and unfailingly polite. Among the big personalities of the Los Angeles comedy world, his quiet decency is legendary. “He is so, so incredibly nice,” Samberg (among many others) told me. “He is the nicest person you will ever meet, exactly what you’re dreaming he’ll be like.” No one has ever heard Weird Al raise his voice in anger. He doesn’t swear. When a script comes to him with a bad word in it, he politely asks for revisions. Sometimes, experimentally, Suzanne will try to get him to say a curse word at home. “C’mon, honey, it’s just us!” she’ll say. But he refuses.

On a bright Saturday morning, the Yankovics invited me to join them for a family hike. Weird Al wore jeans, a large floppy hat and a muted Lacoste polo. (He avoids Hawaiian shirts in everyday settings, not wanting to draw attention to himself.) Suzanne, an avid photographer, seemed to notice every plant and bird we passed. She and Al are classic opposites: he is internal and unobservant and can disappear into his head for days at a time; Suzanne is chatty and social and hyper-present. Their daughter, Nina, is a precocious 16-year-old who looks uncannily like the actress Ellen Page. She and her father share a talent for math — sometimes he invents trigonometry problems for her — and she also has his sense of humor. (Once, when her school had an ’80s-themed dance, Nina showed up in a pilgrim dress, like someone from the 1680s.) At one point on our hike, Nina scampered off the trail, disappeared behind a tree and returned with a time capsule that she has been stocking and reburying since she was little. Inside was a feather, dried leaves, old Polaroids, a Swiss Army knife and a handwritten note from her dad: “It’s a beautiful day and I’m going for a walk with my wonderful family and our little poodle Sandy. If you find this note, we hope you’re having a lovely day too.” Nina added a rock, then closed it back up and reburied it.

After the hike, the Yankovic family took me to their favorite vegan Mexican restaurant and then drove me around L.A. We passed a man who was trying to attract Instagram followers by playing guitar solos on top of a parked car. When we stopped at a red light, a film crew went rolling by, hauling a vintage car, shooting a driving scene. It occurred to me that Weird Al might be comfortable in Los Angeles because the place is already a self-parody. He is off-duty, liberated.

Back at the house, Yankovic showed me his accordion collection — two large piles of cases — and some old costumes, including the original “Eat It” jacket: red leather, zippers everywhere. It still fit him perfectly. He showed me a walk-in closet that contained more Hawaiian shirts than I have ever seen in one place. (“This represents a very small percentage of them,” Yankovic said.) He showed me the corner where he composes music: a nest of keyboards and computer equipment underneath a wall of gold and platinum records. In the middle of it all, flopped like a beached jellyfish, sat an old Kurt Cobain wig.

When I asked about his writing process, Yankovic took out his laptop, sat down at a big wooden table and told me to pick a song. I chose “White & Nerdy.” It is archetypal Yankovic: a parody rap that captures all the musical energy of the original while nerdifying its lyrics. (“First in my class here at M.I.T./Got skills, I’m a champion at D and D/MC Escher, that’s my favorite MC.”) “White & Nerdy” went viral in 2006, in the early days of YouTube, and drove the album “Straight Outta Lynwood” into the Top 10, rekindling Weird Al’s popularity for the new millennium.

At his dining-room table, Yankovic clicked around on his laptop. He has a file for every song, and each file is many levels deep. At the top stands the finished lyric. Below that, like archaeological layers beneath the surface of an ancient city, descend all the stages of writing it took to get there.

Perhaps you have always imagined that Weird Al tosses off his lyrics while juggling rubber chickens on a unicycle. I mean, this is a man who once recorded a parody of Huey Lewis and the News’ “I Want a New Drug” called “I Want a New Duck,” the first verse of which goes: “I want a new duck/One that won’t try to bite/One that won’t chew a hole in my socks/One that won’t quack all night.” He also converted “She Drives Me Crazy” into “She Drives Like Crazy” and “Addicted to Love” into “Addicted to Spuds” and “I Think We’re Alone Now” into “I Think I’m a Clone Now” and “Zoot Suit Riot” into “Grapefruit Diet” and “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” into “Girls Just Want to Have Lunch” and — honestly, the list could go on forever.

But it turns out that Weird Al approaches the composition of his music with something like the holy passion of Michelangelo painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Looking through the “White & Nerdy” file felt like watching a supercomputer crunch through possible chess moves. Every single variable had to be considered, in every single line. The song begins with a simple sentence — “They see me mowing my front lawn” — and even here Yankovic agonized over “lawn” versus “yard” and “my” versus “the.” He sifted through phrases in gradations so small, they were almost invisible:

Escher’s really still my favorite MC.
Tell ya Escher’s still my favorite MC.
Escher is my favorite MC.
Escher’s still my favorite MC.
MC Escher’s still my favorite MC.
MC Escher is my favorite MC.
Y’know Escher is my favorite MC.
Y’know Escher’s still my favorite MC.

For weeks at a time, Yankovic told me, he goes into a creative trance — what he calls “the zombie phase.” “I walk around the house with a thousand-mile stare,” he said. “My wife asks if I’m OK.”

He’s fine. In fact, in some ways he’s in his favorite place: three leagues deep in his head, building an alternate universe entirely out of jokes. He lines up phrases next to one another — fragments and couplets, nerd brags and white jokes, most of which will never reach the final lyric sheet:

In snowstorms it ain’t easy to be seen.
I know a tangent from a vector. I love mayonnaise, that sweet nectar.
I ate an enormous amount of dairy while I watched “Little House on the Prairie.”
I know all the RadioShack employees by name.
Got an Ethernet jack inside my shower.
I can calculate how much water a sphere displaces.
I know the molecular weight of magnesium.
I know the proper names of all the Smurfs.

He reads these options again and again, agonizing, putting his current preference in bold and then changing his mind and putting something else in bold to see how it feels. He spent a long time, for instance, deciding what book would be funniest for his nerd narrator to brag about having in his library: J.K. Rowling, Douglas Adams, Stephen Hawking or hardbound comics. (He chose Hawking.) He composed whole stand-alone quatrains that were later thrown out:

I’m so white I’m almost translucent
Check out the S.P.F. I’m usin’
In my hooptie I go cruisin’
I find Jay Leno amusin’.

“I could have written a whole second ‘White & Nerdy’ based on the alt lines,” Yankovic said. “I figure I’m going to be living with this song for a long time. We’ll probably be doing it onstage for the rest of my life. It’s got to be right.”

After 10 minutes of staring at this verbal barbed wire, my brain felt as if it were starting to cramp. I told him I didn’t know how much longer I could take it. “We’re not even halfway through,” Yankovic said. We had yet to reach, for instance, his encyclopedic lists of possible rhymes, all categorized by syllable count, running on for page after page like Homer’s list of ships in the “Iliad”: “Polar bear/Voltaire,” “my back is peeling/Darjeeling.” At one point, he lined up 35 potential rhymes for the word “geek.”

Yankovic has done a version of this process for just about every song he has ever written, parody and original, from “Eat It” to today. In the years before computers, he would do everything by hand, sifting and sorting in a binder with color-coded tabs. He used to spend weeks roaming through the West Hollywood Library, compiling facts and keywords about cloning for “I Think I’m a Clone Now” or hospitals for “Like a Surgeon.” Songs that may seem dashed off are in fact the product of months of self-imposed hard labor — lonely, silent, obsessive world-building.

Alfred Matthew Yankovic grew up not in Los Angeles proper but outside of it, near Compton, in the working-class suburb of Lynwood. He was an only child, a miracle baby, born late in his parents’ life near the tail end of the baby boom, in 1959. His father, Nick, was a beefy, goofy man who served as a medic during World War II, where his heroism earned him not only two Purple Hearts but also an appearance in the syndicated newspaper comic “Combat Spotlight.” (“No one dared go for a wounded man left on the field — ‘Hell,’ said Yank, ‘I’ll get him.’ And he did.”) Weird Al’s mother, Mary, was a stenographer from Kentucky. She was quiet, shy and guarded. She made casseroles, had an iron sense of propriety and loved her son nearly to the point of suffocation. She would devote her life to protecting him from all the many dangers of the world, real and imaginary. Although the Yankovics didn’t collect art, they kept a single oil painting hanging in their living room, right above the mantel, like a shrine: a framed portrait of their son.

Alfred was a blend of his parents. He was eccentric like his dad — the two of them used to dig tunnels around the foundation of the house together, just for fun — but he was also painfully shy. He started kindergarten a year early, and at the beginning of second grade his teacher decided he was overqualified and sent him up to third grade. This meant that, for most of his life, he was two years younger than the rest of his classmates. Although Alfred’s grades were perfect, and he could solve any math problem you threw at him, his social life was agonizing. Imagine every nerd cliché: He was scrawny, pale, unathletic, nearsighted, awkward with girls — and his name was Alfred. And that’s all before you even factor in the accordion.

It came from a door-to-door salesman. The man was offering the gift of music, and he gave the Yankovics a simple choice: accordion or guitar. This was 1966, the golden age of rock, the year of the Beatles’ “Revolver” and the Beach Boys’ “Pet Sounds” and Bob Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde.” A guitar was like a magic amulet spraying sexual psychedelic magic all over the world. So Yankovic’s mother chose the accordion. This was at least partly because of a coincidence: Frankie Yankovic, a world-famous polka player, happened to share the family’s last name. No relation. Just a wonderful coincidence that would help to define Alfred’s entire life.

He took his first accordion lesson the day before his 7th birthday and progressed quickly. He had plenty of time to practice. Mary Yankovic was so overprotective that her son spent much of his life alone in his room. He never played at friends’ houses, never had sleepovers, never explored his neighborhood on his bike. The farthest he was allowed to ride was half a block, to his Aunt Dot’s house, and his mother would stand on the lawn and watch. For Alfred’s protection, she would censor the mail, sifting through catalogs page by page with a black marker in hand, scribbling out anything inappropriate: bra ads, pictures of women in bikinis.

Alfred’s bedroom was his own little kingdom, devoted entirely to his enthusiasms. If he wanted to collect and organize dozens of license plates from all over the country — which he absolutely did — there was nothing stopping him. If he wanted to rig a contraption involving pulleys and string so he could flip on the light switch without leaving his bed, he could do that too.

The years passed. Alfred sat in his room, wheezing away on his accordion, diddling its buttons, dutifully memorizing polkas and waltzes and marches and the “Mexican Hat Dance.” All of his classmates hit puberty before he did. He never had a girlfriend, never went to a party or a dance. His parents never taught him about sex. “Stay away from women,” his father once told him. “They have diseases and stuff.” Lynwood High School was directly across the street from the Yankovic home, and when Alfred went there his mom would sometimes watch him during gym class, through binoculars, just to make sure he wasn’t being bullied.

As a teenager, Yankovic’s enthusiasms began to widen. He became obsessed with Elton John. He would grab his accordion and play along with “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” the whole double album, start to finish, memorizing it. He watched Monty Python and amassed stacks of Mad magazines, in which he would read parodies of movies he was not allowed to see. Comedy, for a smart, sheltered kid, was a cheat code — a way to use his intelligence to rearrange the world, to build pleasure out of drudgery. He loved George Carlin’s album “FM & AM” so much that he transcribed it on a manual typewriter.

One night, Alfred’s passion for music and comedy came together in the form of a radio D.J. named Dr. Demento. Every Sunday, Demento played four hours of novelty music, both from absolute comedy legends (Spike Jones, Allan Sherman, Stan Freberg) and from nobodies who sent in unsolicited cassette tapes. Alfred Yankovic wanted, desperately, to escape his room and live in this world. He started writing his own comedy songs. One night his mother overheard the show, decided it was inappropriate and said he couldn’t listen anymore. But this tide was rising too fast for even her to stop. Every week, Alfred would huddle under his blankets and listen to Dr. Demento. And it would not be long before he heard his own voice coming back at him out of the speakers. In 1976, Demento picked out “Belvedere Cruising,” a song Yankovic wrote about his family’s jalopy of a car, and played it on the air.

At 16, Alfred Yankovic graduated high school. He was valedictorian, and his speech at the ceremony was dutiful, serious and formal — except for one passage in which he described the future destruction of the world, how the polar ice caps would melt and civilization would be drowned. As he described this hypothetical apocalypse, his voice rose to a grating shriek, until he was suddenly screaming about humanity’s imminent doom. The crowd roared with laughter, interrupting his speech with a round of applause.

And then Yankovic finally escaped his lonely bedroom: He packed up his things, loaded up the junky old family car and drove off — alone — to start a new life. He would study architecture at California Polytechnic State University, about four hours north of home. As he drove off, Alfred’s parents got in their new car and followed directly behind him. Alfred watched them in his rearview mirror. As soon as he hit the freeway, he gunned the engine and lost them.

The nickname “Weird Al” started as an insult. It happened during his first year of college. This was a fresh start for Alfred — a chance to reinvent himself for a whole new set of people. He had no reputation to live down, no epic humiliations. And so he decided to implement a rebrand: He introduced himself to everyone not as Alfred but as “Al.” Alfred sounded like the kind of kid who might invent his own math problems for fun. Al sounded like the opposite of that: a guy who would hang out with the dudes, eating pizza, casually noodling on an electric guitar, tossing off jokes so unexpectedly hilarious they would send streams of light beer rocketing out of everyone’s noses.

The problem was that, even at college, even under the alias of Al, Yankovic was still himself. He was still, fundamentally, an Alfred. He was, in all kinds of excruciating ways, not your average freshman. He was 16. He wore thick glasses and had a regrettable mustache. He was skinny and pathologically shy. He had the social skills of a ceramic frog. He didn’t drink, smoke, party, date or swear. He still felt most comfortable alone in his tiny room.

The other guys on his dorm floor knew Al Yankovic only as this mysterious oddball haunting the place like Boo Radley. They would all be hanging out, sprawled around in someone’s room, door open, laughter spilling into the hallway — when suddenly this pale kid would come slumping by, off to class or to the library, saying nothing, casting a shy glance in the door. He often wore a variation on the same outfit: a striped shirt, a floppy bucket hat, like Gilligan on “Gilligan’s Island,” and flip-flops even when it was raining outside. The guys would watch him pass, only very slightly interested, like a pack of lions watching a distant ibis, and Al would look in through the open door, and there would be this moment of mutual regard: the in-group and the outcast, staring each other down.

Over time, this silent encounter became a ritual, awkward but familiar. Eventually, Yankovic started to play variations: as he walked by he would stare inside and make a face — screw his eyes up, lower his eyebrows, seriocomically glower. It was the weird guy being weird, silently acknowledging his weirdness, performing it to entertain himself.

Once, in the fateful silence that followed, a guy in the room spoke up.

“Hey,” he said, “It’s [expletive]’ Weird Al!”

This was not meant as a compliment. It was an attempt to return, in words, the strange energy Yankovic was pouring into the room through his eyes. The nickname got repeated every time he went shuffling past — “Hey, Weird Al!” — and so it stuck. And slowly Al began to embrace it, to reclaim the insult as a badge of honor.

It took him a long time to make a real friend. One day, Joel Miller, one of the normal guys in the dorm room Yankovic stared into, walked into the communal bathroom to find a group of kids laughing. He asked them what was up. Turns out they had just pulled a prank on Weird Al: Knowing how cringingly awkward he was, they had sneaked in while he was showering and stolen his clothes. In his panic Weird Al had ripped down the shower curtain, wrapped himself in it, and sprinted off to his room, soaking wet. Miller threatened to bash the guys over the head with a chair, got Weird Al’s clothes and returned them.

This was the beginning of the longest close friendship of Al Yankovic’s life — a friendship that still endures. Miller noticed the accordion in Yankovic’s dorm room and asked if he actually knew how to play. Yankovic said yes — he could play any song anyone wanted to hear. Miller, trying to stump him, said how about Elton John’s “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” an 11-minute piano-rock dirge. Al strapped on his accordion and played the song, note for note, all the way through. This earned Weird Al an invitation to hang out in the dorm room, where he played his accordion for everyone else. Miller grabbed his bongos and the two of them jammed for hours.

If, in the superhero narrative of Weird Al Yankovic, there is a radioactive spider-bite moment, it has to be open-mic night at Cal Poly in 1977. Imagine the scene: a bunch of longhaired idealists with banjos and acoustic guitars, ready to shock the world with the beauty of their fingerpicking. And then Weird Al steps onstage. He brought with him not only his accordion and his large glasses and his little mustache but his whole awkward chaotic energy. Miller set up his bongos, and together the pair launched into the exact opposite of earnest folk music. Yankovic played “Wipeout” and “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and a 10-minute medley that he claimed covered every song ever written in the history of the world.

Before that night, Yankovic’s public performances included childhood accordion competitions and a cousin’s wedding. Now he was sharing his own music, the essence of himself, with a roomful of strangers. The odds were high that he would bomb, then disappear back into his tiny room forever.

Instead, the opposite happened: The crowd went crazy. Weird Al’s ridiculous music got a standing ovation. The applause would not stop. People hollered for more.

For a kid who had spent his whole childhood being either ignored or bullied, that sudden validation was transformative. Miller remembers looking over at his shy friend and seeing Yankovic’s face lit with total joy. “It was glowing,” he once said, “like Chernobyl melting down.”

“I think it was the first time I’d ever had that kind of positive reinforcement,” Yankovic told me. “It probably did flip a switch somewhere in my head.”

That Chernobyl moment changed everything. Yankovic’s schoolwork began to recede. He was on fire with dumb music. Weird Al wrote new songs constantly and played them at every venue that would have him. He and Miller were once heckled at a fraternity barn dance. But success was coming. In 1979, during his junior year, Weird Al stood in a men’s bathroom at Cal Poly (he liked the acoustics of the tile) and recorded a parody of the No. 1 song in America, the Knack’s “My Sharona”: a lusty, humpy, cringe-y ode to seducing a teenage girl. Weird Al’s version was a two-minute romp about lunch meat called “My Bologna.” It had a crazy, D.I.Y., nerd-punk energy — you could hear Yankovic committing every fiber of his lonely soul to the bit, crooning and grunting like a man driven insane with desire. It didn’t matter that the pun was bad, that the singing was raw — all of that was exactly the point. Dr. Demento’s listeners went crazy for it, and radio stations picked it up nationwide, and the lead singer of the Knack urged Capitol Records to release the song as a 45 — and suddenly Weird Al had his first recording contract. To this day, Cal Poly marks that bathroom with a plaque as the birthplace of Weird Al Yankovic’s career.

In underground comedy circles, the legend of Weird Al began to grow. He became a staple on Dr. Demento’s show, answering phone lines and playing his accordion in studio and generally hamming it up. He turned Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” into “Another One Rides the Bus.” By the time Yankovic graduated from college, joke music was all he cared about. He hardly had time for anything else. He moved to Los Angeles, slept on a couch, briefly lived in his car. He got a minimum-wage job in a mailroom. He moved into a tiny apartment with a Murphy bed and a view of the Hollywood sign. He sat there by himself, recording music, building his oeuvre joke by joke. Sometimes he taped silverware all over the walls, just to be weird.

On April Fools’ Day, 1984, MTV did something preposterous. The network, back then, was influential but also desperate for content, and Yankovic’s outsider weirdo shtick killed with its audience, so the network gave Yankovic four hours to fill with whatever he wanted. He created “Al TV,” a parody of MTV. The conceit was that Weird Al had taken over the station with a pirate transmitter. Hour after hour, he made fun of music videos, read fake fan letters, announced fake contests and spliced together footage of celebrities into preposterous fake interviews. (Weird Al: “Mr. George, if you were on an Arctic expedition and you got stranded, who would be the first people you’d eat?” Boy George: “Housewives, young kids.”) This made Weird Al a brand name on the network — a sort of stand-in for the audience itself.

Yankovic used “Al TV” to promote the video for “Eat It” — a nearly shot-for-shot parody of Michael Jackson’s original. The song would make him a true international star. The single reached No. 12 on the Billboard Top 100 and won Yankovic a Grammy. Its album, “‘Weird Al’ Yankovic in 3-D,” went platinum. When the video first aired, Yankovic was out on a very modest tour — he and the band traveled together in a blue station wagon pulling a trailer — and in Virginia they stopped at a fast-food restaurant for lunch, and suddenly Yankovic was mobbed. “You’re the ‘Eat It’ guy!” everyone shouted. It happened just like that, overnight. Weird Al had discovered some secret wormhole in pop-cultural space-time that sent a portion of Jackson’s megafame dumping onto his own dorky head. After the success of “Eat It,” Madonna wondered aloud to a friend when Weird Al would turn “Like a Virgin” into “Like a Surgeon,” and word got back to Weird Al, and he did. In 1988, he turned Michael Jackson’s megahit “Bad” into “Fat.” (Last year, after more public allegations of child sexual abuse against Michael Jackson emerged, Yankovic announced that he would temporarily stop performing his Jackson parodies.)

Weird Al likes to say that every one of his albums is a comeback album. That’s because a parody career is not like a normal career. It has no internal momentum. Everyone always expects you to go away. Yankovic’s lowest point came in the early 1990s: It had been years since his last big song, and his attempt at a movie — 1989’s “UHF” — had bombed, and his phone had stopped ringing. Out of desperation, he decided to settle back into his old shtick, writing a food-based parody of Michael Jackson’s latest hit, the racial-harmony anthem “Black or White.” Yankovic’s version was going to be called — I would prefer not to tell you this, but this is actually what it was going to be called — “Snack All Night.” And it was about — well, it was about snacking all night.

The only thing that saved him was that Jackson, for the first time, said no. (Technically, a parodist does not need permission, but it is a legal gray area, and Weird Al prefers to have every artist in on the joke.) This was a reprieve, because it set up the success of “Smells Like Nirvana.” Weird Al actually loved Nirvana — the music hit him deep in his soul — and before the band performed “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on “Saturday Night Live” in January 1992, Weird Al called the set and managed to get Kurt Cobain on the phone to ask his permission to do a parody. “Is it gonna be about food?” Cobain asked. No, Yankovic said: It was going to be about how no one could understand Nirvana’s lyrics. Cobain thought that was hilarious.

Once more, Weird Al had caught the wind of a new phenomenon, and so his career took back off. He has been around ever since. In 2014, 30 years after “Eat It,” his album “Mandatory Fun” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. National economies collapse; species go extinct; political movements rise and fizzle. But — somehow, for some reason — Weird Al endures.

I am writing this profile, and you are reading it, in an impossible world. Comedy, a disembodied spark between distant people seems more crucial than ever. Over the last several weeks, from his house, Weird Al has been posting jokes online: a video of his (increasingly agitated) face being assaulted by tiny hands; a photo urging people to resist hoarding accordions. He recently performed a song on “The Tonight Show” in his robe. These virtual appearances are funny and sweet — little notes of solace in a wide landscape of devastation. But I keep returning, in my mind to the before times, to the summer when I not only saw Weird Al in concert but joined him on tour for a couple of days. I hung around empty arenas as his crew lugged equipment up ramps and tested lighting rigs and stocked the merch tables: Weird Al lunchboxes, Weird Al stickers, an old Weird Al T-shirt that was suddenly popular again because it had been worn by a character on “Stranger Things.” Sometimes I watched the actual shows from backstage, where I could see spit-mists blowing from Weird Al’s mouth when he hit high notes; other times I watched from so deep in the venue that Weird Al looked like a small particle in a sea of waving arms. Late one night, on the tour bus, I drank from a bottle of Crown Royal that had been signed by the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd (long story) and got into a deep debate with a backup singer about the plausibility of chemtrails. When I finally fell asleep it was inside the bus, in what everyone refers to as a “coffin bunk,” and all night long I could feel the bumps and swells of I-94 as it unspooled a section of the Great Plains beneath us. I woke up in a whole new place, under a whole different sky, and watched the crew set up a fresh stage.

During all of this, I saw almost nothing of Weird Al. He was like a ghost haunting his own tour: There but not there. On the road, Yankovic is reclusive, obsessed with saving his voice and life force for his fans. He spent all his free time holed up in his own small room at the back of the bus, keeping strange private hours — falling asleep at 7 a.m., waking up midafternoon. Seeing him anywhere before showtime felt like seeing a panda out in the wild. He moved in a bubble of hushed, exotic, respectful excitement.

The only real exception to Weird Al’s self-isolation came late at night, after the shows, when he would interact with fans in elaborate V.I.P. sessions: photos, autographs, chats. Yankovic would do basically anything fans wanted. He would mug for the camera or flex like a bodybuilder or sign people’s arms. He signed posters, cassette tapes, action figures, accordions, spatulas, glow-in-the-dark snorkels. I saw him sign a package of bologna and an exact replica of a “Star Wars” storm trooper helmet. These were not autograph hounds but true devotees, exactly the kinds of people Yankovic placed at the center of his songs: nerds, misfits, weirdos. Many fans seemed to have just emerged, for the first time in forever, from tiny rooms of their own. They were less interested in a photo op than in a sort of spiritual transfer.

Most of all, the fans thanked Weird Al. They thanked him for his music, for not dying of heatstroke onstage, for voicing the character Banana Man on the cartoon “Adventure Time,” for helping them survive cancer, for helping them survive their mother’s cancer.

“I got introduced to your music when I was going through — struggles — in my life,” said a young, balding man wearing a brown suit, and the word struggles was surrounded on all sides by an unfathomable gulf of feeling. “You helped me pull through.”

Weird Al listened with deep eye contact. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

“Thank you for all the joy you bring to the world,” said a woman in Minnesota.

“Thank you for making my best times brighter with your songs,” said a young man in North Dakota.

“Thank you for letting us all be ourselves.”

“Thank you for being you.”

Weird Al’s bond with his fans is atomic. He will stop and speak with them anywhere — at airports, outside the tour bus — for so long that it becomes a logistical problem. The fans approach him like a guru, and Weird Al responds with sweet, open, validating energy.

Joel Miller, the friend who defended Yankovic from college bullies, said the relationship between Weird Al and his hard-core fans is deeply personal. “He’s giving them validation,” he told me. “They feel a kindred spirit. When they’re at his concerts, they are in a safe space. They are able to be stupid or outlandish or whatever, exactly as they want. And nobody judges them. In fact, it’s the opposite. People appreciate them for what they are, not for what they aren’t.”

The connection is so deep that it is more like a merging, and after a while it struck me that Weird Al has spent basically his whole life making his music for exactly these people, which is to say for his childhood self. For many decades, he has been trying to delight Alfred Yankovic, the bright, painfully shy kid who grew up alone in his tiny bedroom. For the benefit of that lonely boy, he reshaped the whole world of pop culture. His ridiculous music sent out a pulse, a signal, and these were the people it drew: the odd, the left out. A crowd of friends for that lonely kid. As I watched him with his fans, sometimes I felt as if Weird Al was multiplying all around me, multiplying inside of me. We were one crowd, united in isolation, together in a great collective loneliness that — once you recognized it, once you accepted it — felt right on the brink of being healed.


Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine and the author of “Boom Town,” a book about Oklahoma City. He last wrote a Screenland column about the web video “Hudson Yards Video Game.” Art Streiber is a photographer in Los Angeles. He previously photographed Key and Peele, the women of Hollywood and Pee-wee Herman for the magazine.

 

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Chicago jazz musician fights cancer with help – Chicago Tribune

Chicago jazz musician fights cancer with help – Chicago Tribune


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Jazz Snacks for the Pandemic

Jazz fanatics are particularly egregious eaters-too busy listening to pay much attention to food. I believe this array of sweet treats will satisfy even the most ludicrously undeveloped jazz palates.

Jack the Gummy Bear
Junior Cook Mints 
Chick Webb-lets
Almond Joy Spring
Twix Beiderbecke
Pete Jolly Ranchers
Tootie Heath Bars
James Reese Europe Cups
Bit-O-Honey-In-The-Horn
Bentyne Chewing Gum
Charleston Chew Chasers
Baby Dodds Ruth 
Wee Dots
Good and Plenty o’ Nuthin’
Eddie Lock-Jaw Breakers
Milk Dud Bascombs
Jeepers Creepers Where’d You Get Those Peeps
Pez Prados

So, spin your wax of Bill Evans’ Waltz for Little Debby and Stan Getz’s Hershey Bar and wash it all down with a bottle of Chateau Neuf de Pops-bell shaped tones with a poetic nose and a hint of okra. Next day, don’t forget your dose of Swiss Kriss.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Brilliant Corners: Jazz Snacks for the Pandemic

Brilliant Corners: Jazz Snacks for the Pandemic


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http://brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog.blogspot.com/2020/04/jazz-snacks-for-pandemic.html?utm_source=feedburner
 

Jazz Snacks for the Pandemic

Jazz fanatics are particularly egregious eaters-too busy listening to pay much attention to food. I believe this array of sweet treats will satisfy even the most ludicrously undeveloped jazz palates.

Jack the Gummy Bear
Junior Cook Mints 
Chick Webb-lets
Almond Joy Spring
Twix Beiderbecke
Pete Jolly Ranchers
Tootie Heath Bars
James Reese Europe Cups
Bit-O-Honey-In-The-Horn
Bentyne Chewing Gum
Charleston Chew Chasers
Baby Dodds Ruth 
Wee Dots
Good and Plenty o’ Nuthin’
Eddie Lock-Jaw Breakers
Milk Dud Bascombs
Jeepers Creepers Where’d You Get Those Peeps
Pez Prados

So, spin your wax of Bill Evans’ Waltz for Little Debby and Stan Getz’s Hershey Bar and wash it all down with a bottle of Chateau Neuf de Pops-bell shaped tones with a poetic nose and a hint of okra. Next day, don’t forget your dose of Swiss Kriss.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO
 


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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2020 All rights reserved.

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269 State Route 94 South

Warwick, Ny 10990

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Peter Ecklund R.I.P.

Peter Ecklund R.I.P.


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https://www.facebook.com/peter.ecklund.52

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Willie Smith plays “Sophisticated Lady” with Duke Ellington 1952 – YouTube

FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Willie Smith plays “Sophisticated Lady” with Duke Ellington 1952 – YouTube


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvn5meiOsg

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Willie Smith plays “Sophisticated Lady” with Duke Ellington 1952 – YouTube

FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: Willie Smith plays “Sophisticated Lady” with Duke Ellington 1952 – YouTube


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvn5meiOsg

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Hal Willner, Music Producer Who Melded Styles, Dies at 64 – The New York Times

Hal Willner, Music Producer Who Melded Styles, Dies at 64 – The New York Times


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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/arts/music/hal-willner-dead.html
 

Hal Willner, Music Producer Who Melded Styles, Dies at 64

He was best known for assembling diverse casts of performers to play a slightly off-center body of work, and for obliterating the lines between genres.

By John Leland

April 8, 2020

 

The record and concert producer Hal Willner at his studio in Manhattan in 2017. “All these styles of music, I thought they were different,” a colleague said. “Hal just saw it all as one thing.” The record and concert producer Hal Willner at his studio in Manhattan in 2017. “All these styles of music, I thought they were different,” a colleague said. “Hal just saw it all as one thing.”Andrew White for The New York Times

Hal Willner had a dream of connecting musicians who couldn’t possibly work together to play music that didn’t obviously suit them, and he somehow made it all work, creating albums and concerts that obliterated the lines between rock, jazz, country and soul, or between the mainstream and the avant-garde. And then on Tuesday, the experiment came to an end.

Mr. Willner — matchmaker, yenta, fan, longtime music coordinator for the sketches on “Saturday Night Live” — had symptoms consistent with the coronavirus and died in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived with his wife, Sheila Rogers, a producer of “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” and their 15-year-old son, Arlo. He was 64.

The death was confirmed by a spokesman, Blake Zidell.

Mr. Willner was best known for assembling diverse casts of performers, including Rufus Wainwright and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, to play a slightly off-center body of work, such as the Disney songbook or the music of Nino Rota, who scored Federico Fellini’s movies. The music found a devoted following, but not breakout success.

Maybe you’ve dreamed of hearing U2 with the horn section from Sun Ra’s Arkestra in a one-time-only performance at the Apollo Theater. If so, Hal Willner made your dream come true.

Or Scarlett Johansson performing with Courtney Love? Ditto.

He was obsessed with Soupy Sales and Laurel and Hardy, with old radio broadcasts, with the Holocaust memories of his father. And he jammed these obsessions into a small Midtown Manhattan recording studio stuffed to the rafters with puppets and memorabilia.

“These were his talismans, his vestments, because his heart was like a reliquary,” said Tom Waits, a friend of 45 years.

Lots of people own Popeye dolls. Mr. Willner’s were a gift from the punk-rock progenitor Richard Hell.

Mr. Willner was born on April 6, 1956, in Philadelphia, to Carl and Etta Willner. His father and his uncle ran a delicatessen called Hymie’s. The brothers were the only members of the family to survive the Holocaust, and their experiences became a part of Hal’s childhood.

“It explains everything,” Mr. Willner said. “I just retreated into television and records, and that was reality for me.”

He moved to New York in 1974 to attend New York University, drawn by the sleazy Times Square milieu of “Midnight Cowboy.” New York did not disappoint.

The jazz scene was evolving, punk rock was just coming together, comedy was becoming more experimental, the city was heading toward fiscal crisis. Mr. Willner wanted all of it.

“The city was rough,” he said. “It had a smell to it.” But it was also, he said, “still an era where most people that you’d meet — what’s the line? The people who didn’t fit in anywhere else would move here.”

For Mr. Willner it was home.

He was apprenticed to the record producer Joel Dorn, left college, drove a taxi and got an idea: What if the jazz musicians he loved recorded the music from Fellini movies?

Steven Bernstein, a jazz trumpeter and arranger, remembered discovering the 1981 album that eventually blossomed, “Amarcord Nino Rota.” “This was everything we loved, all in one place,” Mr. Bernstein said. “All these styles of music, I thought they were different. Hal just saw it all as one thing. It was completely revolutionary.”

Mr. Bernstein became a regular in what Mr. Willner called his “renegade band of broken toys.” As their relationship deepened, Mr. Bernstein said, they talked often about people they had lost: Lou ReedLevon Helm of the Band; Robert Altman, on whose film “Kansas City” they had collaborated. “He carried a lot of pain with him,” Mr. Bernstein said.

In 1980 Mr. Willner joined “Saturday Night Live,” where his job choosing recorded music for the sketches gave him a steady income and a chance to bring his esoteric enthusiasms to a large audience.

Albums followed, and concerts reimagining the work of Leonard Cohen, Kurt Weill, Bill Withers and Charles Mingus. He worked with the theater director Robert Wilson, including on a 2010 production in Poland on the 30th anniversary of the Solidarity movement. When Lech Walesa, the movement’s leader, walked onstage, an orchestra of Polish musicians played Sun Ra’s “Watusi.”

Imagine.

The actor and musician Tim Robbins remembered that during a low point in his life, Mr. Willner pushed him to get back into music, recording him with a band and then taking him to see some favorites.

“He curated a trip for me at a time I needed it,” Mr. Robbins said. “We went to Lisbon to see Leonard Cohen, then to another part of Portugal to see Lou Reed, and then to Prague to see Tom Waits. He dreams of creating something that hasn’t been seen before.”

Mr. Willner was both producer and close friend to Mr. Reed, who died of liver disease in 2013. In a statement, Laurie Anderson, who was married to Mr. Reed, called Mr. Willner one of her dearest friends — “hilarious, so tender and compassionate,” and “a soulful prince.”

He wanted to see everything, hear everything and he was devoted to his friends, said David Johansen, a friend and frequent collaborator. Usually someone he knew was performing somewhere in town, Mr. Johansen said, and Mr. Willner was there.

When Mr. Johansen performed at the Café Carlyle in January, filmed by Martin Scorsese, Mr. Willner attended every night. “He complained that he wasn’t seated with the beautiful people,” Mr. Johansen joked.

In recent years, Mr. Willner would accompany his concert performances, reading poems and other Willner-type esoterica, such as a letter that Lenny Bruce wrote to his mother, orating with an impossibly dry sense of humor — a soft man with a crusty affect.

“He was an O.G. hipster,” Mr. Johansen said.

In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Willner is survived by his younger sister, Chari McClary, and his father, who is 95.

He had recently completed work on a tribute album to the British rock star Marc Bolan, featuring a cast of hundreds. He told Mr. Bernstein it was going to be the album that finally made him as a producer.

In his dreams, he still had further to go.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Hal Willner, Music Producer Who Melded Styles, Dies at 64 – The New York Times

Hal Willner, Music Producer Who Melded Styles, Dies at 64 – The New York Times


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https://www.wbgo.org/post/eddy-davis-banjo-virtuoso-who-carried-torch-trad-jazz-dies-covid-19-79#stream/0
 

Eddy Davis, Banjo Virtuoso Who Carried a Torch For Trad Jazz, Dies of COVID-19 at 79

By  • 15 hours ago

 

Eddy Davis, a banjoist and bandleader who enjoyed a sprawling career in traditional jazz, most visibly through a decades-long association with Woody Allen, died on Tuesday at Mount Sinai West hospital in New York City. He was 79.

Conal Fowkes, a pianist who worked closely with Davis, notably as a touring duo, said the cause was complications from the coronavirus.

Fowkes was also a member of The Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band, with which Allen — the prolific, now-polemical filmmaker, who moonlights as a clarinetist ­— has held court in New York for some 35 years. The band was a Monday-night institution at the Café Carlyle, where it first set up shop in 1997, after a long tenure at Michael’s Pub.

That same year, the documentary Wild Man Blues chronicled Allen’s first tour with Davis’ band. (In this clip, Davis begins a solo about a minute into the title song.)

 

 

Davis, who billed himself as The Manhattan Minstrel, led a colorful life in music apart from his affiliation with Allen. Born Eddy Ray Davis on Sept. 26, 1940, in Lafayette, Indiana, he picked up the banjo during his senior year in high school, in order to play Dixieland with a college band called The Salty Dogs. The group, based out of Purdue, played all over the Midwest, opening for the likes of The Four Freshmen and The Kingston Trio.

He too attended Purdue, but only for a year, heeding the call of the nightclub scene in Chicago. He became a fixture at spots like the Gaslight Club and Bourbon Street, often working opposite variety or comedy acts.

He put together acts of that sort himself, with collaborators including the actor David Huddleston. He also performed and helped create a Dixieland revue at Disneyland, and served as musical director for a touring revival of Whoopee!  

He recorded his debut album, Live! At the Old Town Gate, in 1966 with a group he called the Eddy Davis Dixie Jazzmen. Among his later albums were Whiz Bang (1973), a satirical effort with flute and tuba; Plays and Sings Just For Fun (1974), largely devoted to Jelly Roll Morton; and Eddy Davis And The Hot Jazz Orchestra (1983), with clarinetist Jack Maheu, pianist Don Ewell and others.

Davis became a trusted colleague of other leading jazz traditionalists: he played drums in the earliest incarnation of Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks, and conducted and orchestrated a musical by Terry Waldo.  

When conductor Maurice Peress presented a 60th anniversary tribute to Paul Whiteman’s 1924 Aeolian Hall Concert, he enlisted Davis on banjo. By that point he had a regular gig at a club called the Red Blazer Too with fellow banjoist Cynthia Sayer and bassist Pete Compo. In a review for The New York Times, John S. Wilson noted that the band “reflected Mr. Davis’s ebullient, effervescent personality as it explored his broad repertory of early jazz and novelty songs.”

With Sayer, Davis also founded The New York Banjo Ensemble, which recorded an album of Gershwin material in 1984, and a follow-up of rags and other fare in 2005.

For a good stretch in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Davis could be heard every week not only at the Café Carlyle but also at a restaurant called The Cajun, on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. The band he led there would feature Scott Robinson on C-melody saxophone, and it became a regular visit for special guests. This footage, from 2006, features Robinson and Fowkes.

 

 

In a written tribute, Robinson hailed Davis as “a veteran of the old Chicago days when music was hot, joyful, exuberant and unselfconscious.” He added: “Eddy was also what used to be called a ‘character’: affable, opinionated, hilarious, and irascible all in one, and above all highly passionate about music.”

He is survived by his longtime life partner, Ruth Miller, and a daughter from a previous relationship, Lucie Davis.

Davis’ association with Woody Allen ran even deeper than their longstanding Monday-night gig would attest. They first met in Chicago in the 1960s, when Davis was headlining a club on Rush Street, and Allen was doing standup at Mister Kelly’s. (He’d stop by to sit in on clarinet.)

Davis played on the soundtrack to Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days, and he appears onscreen as a band member in Sweet and Lowdown. He received a Grammy Award for his contribution to the soundtrack for Midnight in Paris.

“I have never heard a banjo sound so beautiful,” says Fowkes, who released a live album with Davis in 2011. “He could play sweet ballads, bossa novas, Dixieland tunes — it didn’t matter to him. I think he’s the kind of guy that, whatever instrument he’d picked up as a kid, all that would have come out. It happened to be the banjo.”

 

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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Eddy Davis, Banjo Virtuoso Who Carried a Torch For Trad Jazz, Dies of COVID-19 at 79 | WBGO

Eddy Davis, Banjo Virtuoso Who Carried a Torch For Trad Jazz, Dies of COVID-19 at 79 | WBGO


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https://www.wbgo.org/post/eddy-davis-banjo-virtuoso-who-carried-torch-trad-jazz-dies-covid-19-79#stream/0
 

Eddy Davis, Banjo Virtuoso Who Carried a Torch For Trad Jazz, Dies of COVID-19 at 79

By  • 15 hours ago

 

Eddy Davis, a banjoist and bandleader who enjoyed a sprawling career in traditional jazz, most visibly through a decades-long association with Woody Allen, died on Tuesday at Mount Sinai West hospital in New York City. He was 79.

Conal Fowkes, a pianist who worked closely with Davis, notably as a touring duo, said the cause was complications from the coronavirus.

Fowkes was also a member of The Eddy Davis New Orleans Jazz Band, with which Allen — the prolific, now-polemical filmmaker, who moonlights as a clarinetist ­— has held court in New York for some 35 years. The band was a Monday-night institution at the Café Carlyle, where it first set up shop in 1997, after a long tenure at Michael’s Pub.

That same year, the documentary Wild Man Blues chronicled Allen’s first tour with Davis’ band. (In this clip, Davis begins a solo about a minute into the title song.)

 

 

Davis, who billed himself as The Manhattan Minstrel, led a colorful life in music apart from his affiliation with Allen. Born Eddy Ray Davis on Sept. 26, 1940, in Lafayette, Indiana, he picked up the banjo during his senior year in high school, in order to play Dixieland with a college band called The Salty Dogs. The group, based out of Purdue, played all over the Midwest, opening for the likes of The Four Freshmen and The Kingston Trio.

He too attended Purdue, but only for a year, heeding the call of the nightclub scene in Chicago. He became a fixture at spots like the Gaslight Club and Bourbon Street, often working opposite variety or comedy acts.

He put together acts of that sort himself, with collaborators including the actor David Huddleston. He also performed and helped create a Dixieland revue at Disneyland, and served as musical director for a touring revival of Whoopee!  

He recorded his debut album, Live! At the Old Town Gate, in 1966 with a group he called the Eddy Davis Dixie Jazzmen. Among his later albums were Whiz Bang (1973), a satirical effort with flute and tuba; Plays and Sings Just For Fun (1974), largely devoted to Jelly Roll Morton; and Eddy Davis And The Hot Jazz Orchestra (1983), with clarinetist Jack Maheu, pianist Don Ewell and others.

Davis became a trusted colleague of other leading jazz traditionalists: he played drums in the earliest incarnation of Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks, and conducted and orchestrated a musical by Terry Waldo.  

When conductor Maurice Peress presented a 60th anniversary tribute to Paul Whiteman’s 1924 Aeolian Hall Concert, he enlisted Davis on banjo. By that point he had a regular gig at a club called the Red Blazer Too with fellow banjoist Cynthia Sayer and bassist Pete Compo. In a review for The New York Times, John S. Wilson noted that the band “reflected Mr. Davis’s ebullient, effervescent personality as it explored his broad repertory of early jazz and novelty songs.”

With Sayer, Davis also founded The New York Banjo Ensemble, which recorded an album of Gershwin material in 1984, and a follow-up of rags and other fare in 2005.

For a good stretch in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Davis could be heard every week not only at the Café Carlyle but also at a restaurant called The Cajun, on Eighth Avenue in Chelsea. The band he led there would feature Scott Robinson on C-melody saxophone, and it became a regular visit for special guests. This footage, from 2006, features Robinson and Fowkes.

 

 

In a written tribute, Robinson hailed Davis as “a veteran of the old Chicago days when music was hot, joyful, exuberant and unselfconscious.” He added: “Eddy was also what used to be called a ‘character’: affable, opinionated, hilarious, and irascible all in one, and above all highly passionate about music.”

He is survived by his longtime life partner, Ruth Miller, and a daughter from a previous relationship, Lucie Davis.

Davis’ association with Woody Allen ran even deeper than their longstanding Monday-night gig would attest. They first met in Chicago in the 1960s, when Davis was headlining a club on Rush Street, and Allen was doing standup at Mister Kelly’s. (He’d stop by to sit in on clarinet.)

Davis played on the soundtrack to Allen’s 1987 film Radio Days, and he appears onscreen as a band member in Sweet and Lowdown. He received a Grammy Award for his contribution to the soundtrack for Midnight in Paris.

“I have never heard a banjo sound so beautiful,” says Fowkes, who released a live album with Davis in 2011. “He could play sweet ballads, bossa novas, Dixieland tunes — it didn’t matter to him. I think he’s the kind of guy that, whatever instrument he’d picked up as a kid, all that would have come out. It happened to be the banjo.”

 

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Rebroadcast of Ellis Marsalis’ w/ Lew Tabackin 2006 Jazz Fest Set – 4pm central today

Rebroadcast of Ellis Marsalis’ w/ Lew Tabackin 2006 Jazz Fest Set – 4pm central today


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Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: jim@jazzpromoservices.com
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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

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