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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.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO

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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Beast Fiction
In an excerpt from Jimmy Breslin’s autobiographical novel—his first published work in a decade—the legendary columnist describes his first trumpet lessons, and stumbles upon a scene of heartbreaking beauty.
 
My Aunt Harriet took me up on the bus to the Wurlitzer store on Sutphin Boulevard and bought a used trumpet, which she paid for with bills and change from the grandmother’s purse. Afterwards, each Saturday morning, my mother gave me three dollars for a music lesson and carfare. I took the Q-ll bus to the Jamaica Avenue el and rode it to Kosciusko Street in the Bushwick section. The trumpet teacher, Jack Chernecke, lived one flight over a furniture store. He had pouchy eyes, smoked a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table in an undershirt, black tuxedo pants, and bare feet. His fingers danced nervously on the valves of his brilliant gold-plated horn.
 
On weekend nights, Chernecke played in the Blue Moon, which was under the el, three blocks from his house. Now on a rough, fuzzy Saturday morning after a bust-out night at the Blue Moon, he had me, this Catholic school kid who instinctively blew his notes louder when an el train passed. The only thing you’re learning is to compete with an el, he said. But he had such deplorable personal habits that he needed the three dollars for a lesson so desperately that he began referring to me as Goldman, after Edwin Franko Goldman.
I sure loved playing the trumpet. It was that big heavy object that I needed to keep my hands from shaking when others were looking at me. Chernecke told me that I should pour a cup of hot water through the horn to clean out the valves. I stood at that kitchen sink for hours and poured hot water into that horn until it was too hot to touch. I practiced every day at 4 p.m., which was all right with my grandmother, who usually sat with a cigarette before starting dinner. But if one of the uncles on the police force were in the house asleep there always was a howl. On Saturday and Sunday, I practiced the moment I woke up, and that was as good a torture as you could perform, a trumpet at 8 a.m. in a house where everybody is trying to sleep off the night before. A shout used to come from every corner of the house. Even when I got the sound better and better, the family only screamed more. The worst was when Chernecke, the teacher, told me to try practicing in a closed small room. So I got into the bathroom, locked the door and was blowing as hard as I could, and the whole family was out in the hallway bawling to get in. I could hear them banging on the door all right, but just like Chernecke said, the sound was so great that I didn’t want to stop. I guess my mother hated me fooling around with music, which had to remind her of my father, because she just walked around grumpily and didn’t take my side, when usually she would scream back at them.
 
Chernecke, used to love it when I brought him one of my mother’s personal checks. He would stare at it and say, “Why is food so important?”
 
Chernecke caught a day job, playing with a small band that played live music in the afternoon at a radio station in Woodside. The owner was named Reineke. He was an old German who had been a ship’s radio operator on freighters. One night at sea he read a bulletin about licenses being available and at the next port he sent an application and check for one hundred ten dollars to Washington. Somebody must have been insane in Washington because they sent him a radio station license. He put this high antenna tower in the back yard of his house, which was up the hill from Queens Boulevard. He got a gambling degenerate named Jocko Maxwell to read the race results from a wire service, and he was off. The microphone was in his front room and the walls were soundproofed with blankets to make a studio. Jack Chernecke and five others sat in the small space and played live music. Then the announcer, Jocko Maxwell, would walk in from the dining room, where they had the race wire, and wave his hand and the band would stop playing and he would give the race results. “Fans in the fourth at Havre De Grace, the winner, number six…”
 
I used to sit in the back of the living room and imagine I was part of the band. One day I told my Aunt Harriet that I couldn’t play my horn without valve oil. Which wasn’t true. Chernecke always oiled them for me. But going into a music store in Manhattan would be the same for me as parading around in one of the varsity football parkas, the way I saw older guys who played at John Adams High School. My aunt got me 75 cents from somewhere, and I took the subway over to Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. I went into the Wurlitzer Music Shop and stood there while an emaciated man with a wax face looked over some mutes that he had made special. Listening to the clerk, I found out it was Bunny Berrigan. The clerk asked me what I wanted and I said valve oil and he nodded and put down this little box that cost 49 cents. I reached right past Bunny Berrigan to take the valve oil and pay for it. When I got outside, I decided right away that Bunny Berrigan was my father. The big thing he played was “I Can’t Get Started.” Right there on the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon, I could see myself standing in a room in our house, while my father, Bunny Berrigan, sat and instructed me.
 
I went to the corner of West 54th Street and stayed there for maybe a half hour and Bunny Berrigan came out. He had on a black suit and a dark overcoat with the collar turned up. He walked along the street and a couple of guys said hello to him as he passed. They said, “How is the game?” and he answered, “Same at the half.” I followed him and when I walked by the same men, I said to them, in a grown up voice, “Same at the half.” A few doors down 54th Street he went into a bar called Jim and Andy’s. I looked in the window. He hung up his coat, then he shook his shoulders a little and rubbed his hands and stepped up to the bar. I still can see him. He put his cigarettes down on his left side and the money in the middle and the bartender gave him a big brown drink and he kept that in his right hand. Not for long, because he drained the whole glass and held it out for another. I stood and watched him for a long time and he never changed. Give him a dark brown glass and he emptied it and looked for another.
By now it was getting colder and the sun was gone and I had to go to the bathroom. I stood on the sidewalk outside the saloon for a long time. I was twisting against the pain. I could go on the way home, but I hated the bathroom in the subway. You had to breathe through the mouth and there was always a bum sitting on the toilet. Finally, I had to go so bad that I walked into the bar. If Bunny Berrigan wasn’t really my father sitting in there I never would have had the nerve to walk into the place. “Could I use the bathroom?” I said. Bunny Berrigan wouldn’t even look up. The bartender pointed to the men’s room. “Make it fast.” I went in and took a piss and I was going out, keeping my head down, afraid to look at the men in the bar. But I know I brushed right past Bunny Berrigan and he never looked up from his drink. On the subway back to Queens, I decided that I would never listen to another record by Bunny Berrigan; he wasn’t my father anymore.
 
There was a crowd around the bodega directly underneath Jack Chernecke’s apartment on Halsey Street and Broadway. Out of the window, high and clear, came a trumpet, bip biddibib-bib-ta-taaaaaa. I opened the door and went up to the second floor. Back in the kitchen, with the same yellow linoleum on the floor, and the table the same small white topped, was a young boy with a silver-plated horn. In the corner, with the back of his neck against the old iron window guard, in an undershirt, and tuxedo pants, keeping time with his bare feet, was an old man with a gleaming new horn.
 
The kid finished an exercise and he looked at the man for approval.
 
“You’ll have to do one thing,” he said.
 
“Learn to play out doors.”
 
“Do you know why?” the old man said.
 
“Because I’m going to be giving lessons next to an el pillar account of you coming here with nothing. You might be a good trumpet student but you are a better deadbeat. Did you folks ever hear of paying a bill?”
 
“My mother didn’t have any money for me today,” the kid said.
“Don’t know. He don’t live at home.”
“Only your mother to pay the bills?”
“Then tell your mammy to go out and steal if she wants her son take music lessons.”
He got up and walked barefoot with his horn downstairs to the street and leaned against the el pillar at the corner and looked along Broadway, with the late afternoon summer sun coming through the tracks and placing oblong blocks of light on the sidewalk. And he also looked up Halsey Street, with its three story attached brownstone and frame houses. The kid stood with his silver plated horn and his music book. On the corner was a morgue wagon with two bodies under white sheets in the back.
And now little Xavier, age two, ran down the side street, Halsey Street, past the iron gates in front of the stoops going up to the first floors of the frame and brownstone houses. Ran faster than you can imagine on a glorious late summer afternoon. Ran intoxicated with the freedom of having nobody to hold him or chase him. Ran without knowing it from the body of his brother, Alan, 10, who was dead under a white sheet in the back of the wagon at the corner.
Back in front of the bodega, jumping up and down, jump, jump, jump on this yellow chalk circle on the sidewalk, were two other children, 4 and 3, their small sneakers coming right down on the yellow chalk circles.
The circles told the little kids that they can die.
The circles had been put there by the police to show where the two kids had just been killed. The bodies were under sheets in the back of the morgue wagon at the corner. There never was any reason for chalk circles or chalk outlines of bodies except to follow old custom of police.
But now they had one to mark the spot where Alan Smith, 10, died, and another to show where his older brother, Marvin, 16, also had died.
They had been shot in front of the bodega when Marvin came bounding down the steps from the Halsey Street el station, waving the first paycheck of his life, from an air freight company at Kennedy Airport. To get there, he took two el trains and a bus. When he was down the last step, his little brother came running up to him. Marvin waved the paycheck stub in the air and screamed at his mother, “I got paid.”
“Stop holding it like that. You liable to lose it. You get home here with it,” she said.
“This is just the stub. The man cashed it for me at work. It’s in my pocket.”
“Then you get home here for sure.”
“I just want to buy little Alan a soda.”
The mother waved and stepped back into the house and on the corner in front of the bodega, right at the very entrance, two kids on bikes put their feet to the sidewalk for balance and one of them held out a gun.
“Money, money, money, give it up, give it up.”
Marvin took out a roll of bills and handed them to the kid. The other one started shooting. He hit both brothers in the head. Marvin died right away. Alan flopped on the sidewalk like a flounder on a dock for awhile and then stopped.
In the aftermath of the killing of her two sons, the mother sat in the doorway of her house up the block. A relative held her arm to try and calm her. The big woman’s bare feet began to jiggle on the floor. Her body heaved.
“My pressure, my pressure, my pressure. Make garlic tea and get my pressure down. Calm, calm, calm. Blood clot in my leg. Calm, calm.”
The bare feet started thumping on the floor and she was raising her feet a little more to make them thump louder and now she was raising her feet high and her voice, rising, said, “Pressure, pressure, pressure,” and the relative was trying to bold her arm and a baby on his back on the floor twirled a toy and seemed not to notice this big heaving woman’s body suddenly scream into the hot air:
“Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ! They murder my sons.”
The old man watched with an expressionless face. Then he put the trumpet to his lips and began to play, slow and low, and the notes placed a terrible stillness on everything on the block except the mother screaming.
The old man in his tuxedo pants and bare feet leaned against the el pillar and played “Lush Life.”
“I used to visit all the gay places,
Come-what-may places …”
In the stillness on Broadway, the notes carried for blocks. The B-55 bus stopped in the middle of Broadway, blocking all the traffic and when people tried to honk horns no sound came out.
The J train on the el tracks slipped imperceptibly into the station. The conductor looked out of the top of one of the windows and watched as the old man played.
The morgue driver stuck his arm out the window and dropped the cigarette he was smoking.
The children were still on the yellow chalk circles.
There was only the sound of “Lush Life” with the notes rising over the low endless growl of the mother in agony in her doorway.
Then the old man was through playing. He stood motionless.
 

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Getty
Beast Fiction
In an excerpt from Jimmy Breslin’s autobiographical novel—his first published work in a decade—the legendary columnist describes his first trumpet lessons, and stumbles upon a scene of heartbreaking beauty.
 
My Aunt Harriet took me up on the bus to the Wurlitzer store on Sutphin Boulevard and bought a used trumpet, which she paid for with bills and change from the grandmother’s purse. Afterwards, each Saturday morning, my mother gave me three dollars for a music lesson and carfare. I took the Q-ll bus to the Jamaica Avenue el and rode it to Kosciusko Street in the Bushwick section. The trumpet teacher, Jack Chernecke, lived one flight over a furniture store. He had pouchy eyes, smoked a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table in an undershirt, black tuxedo pants, and bare feet. His fingers danced nervously on the valves of his brilliant gold-plated horn.
 
On weekend nights, Chernecke played in the Blue Moon, which was under the el, three blocks from his house. Now on a rough, fuzzy Saturday morning after a bust-out night at the Blue Moon, he had me, this Catholic school kid who instinctively blew his notes louder when an el train passed. The only thing you’re learning is to compete with an el, he said. But he had such deplorable personal habits that he needed the three dollars for a lesson so desperately that he began referring to me as Goldman, after Edwin Franko Goldman.
I sure loved playing the trumpet. It was that big heavy object that I needed to keep my hands from shaking when others were looking at me. Chernecke told me that I should pour a cup of hot water through the horn to clean out the valves. I stood at that kitchen sink for hours and poured hot water into that horn until it was too hot to touch. I practiced every day at 4 p.m., which was all right with my grandmother, who usually sat with a cigarette before starting dinner. But if one of the uncles on the police force were in the house asleep there always was a howl. On Saturday and Sunday, I practiced the moment I woke up, and that was as good a torture as you could perform, a trumpet at 8 a.m. in a house where everybody is trying to sleep off the night before. A shout used to come from every corner of the house. Even when I got the sound better and better, the family only screamed more. The worst was when Chernecke, the teacher, told me to try practicing in a closed small room. So I got into the bathroom, locked the door and was blowing as hard as I could, and the whole family was out in the hallway bawling to get in. I could hear them banging on the door all right, but just like Chernecke said, the sound was so great that I didn’t want to stop. I guess my mother hated me fooling around with music, which had to remind her of my father, because she just walked around grumpily and didn’t take my side, when usually she would scream back at them.
 
Chernecke, used to love it when I brought him one of my mother’s personal checks. He would stare at it and say, “Why is food so important?”
 
Chernecke caught a day job, playing with a small band that played live music in the afternoon at a radio station in Woodside. The owner was named Reineke. He was an old German who had been a ship’s radio operator on freighters. One night at sea he read a bulletin about licenses being available and at the next port he sent an application and check for one hundred ten dollars to Washington. Somebody must have been insane in Washington because they sent him a radio station license. He put this high antenna tower in the back yard of his house, which was up the hill from Queens Boulevard. He got a gambling degenerate named Jocko Maxwell to read the race results from a wire service, and he was off. The microphone was in his front room and the walls were soundproofed with blankets to make a studio. Jack Chernecke and five others sat in the small space and played live music. Then the announcer, Jocko Maxwell, would walk in from the dining room, where they had the race wire, and wave his hand and the band would stop playing and he would give the race results. “Fans in the fourth at Havre De Grace, the winner, number six…”
 
I used to sit in the back of the living room and imagine I was part of the band. One day I told my Aunt Harriet that I couldn’t play my horn without valve oil. Which wasn’t true. Chernecke always oiled them for me. But going into a music store in Manhattan would be the same for me as parading around in one of the varsity football parkas, the way I saw older guys who played at John Adams High School. My aunt got me 75 cents from somewhere, and I took the subway over to Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. I went into the Wurlitzer Music Shop and stood there while an emaciated man with a wax face looked over some mutes that he had made special. Listening to the clerk, I found out it was Bunny Berrigan. The clerk asked me what I wanted and I said valve oil and he nodded and put down this little box that cost 49 cents. I reached right past Bunny Berrigan to take the valve oil and pay for it. When I got outside, I decided right away that Bunny Berrigan was my father. The big thing he played was “I Can’t Get Started.” Right there on the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon, I could see myself standing in a room in our house, while my father, Bunny Berrigan, sat and instructed me.
 
I went to the corner of West 54th Street and stayed there for maybe a half hour and Bunny Berrigan came out. He had on a black suit and a dark overcoat with the collar turned up. He walked along the street and a couple of guys said hello to him as he passed. They said, “How is the game?” and he answered, “Same at the half.” I followed him and when I walked by the same men, I said to them, in a grown up voice, “Same at the half.” A few doors down 54th Street he went into a bar called Jim and Andy’s. I looked in the window. He hung up his coat, then he shook his shoulders a little and rubbed his hands and stepped up to the bar. I still can see him. He put his cigarettes down on his left side and the money in the middle and the bartender gave him a big brown drink and he kept that in his right hand. Not for long, because he drained the whole glass and held it out for another. I stood and watched him for a long time and he never changed. Give him a dark brown glass and he emptied it and looked for another.
By now it was getting colder and the sun was gone and I had to go to the bathroom. I stood on the sidewalk outside the saloon for a long time. I was twisting against the pain. I could go on the way home, but I hated the bathroom in the subway. You had to breathe through the mouth and there was always a bum sitting on the toilet. Finally, I had to go so bad that I walked into the bar. If Bunny Berrigan wasn’t really my father sitting in there I never would have had the nerve to walk into the place. “Could I use the bathroom?” I said. Bunny Berrigan wouldn’t even look up. The bartender pointed to the men’s room. “Make it fast.” I went in and took a piss and I was going out, keeping my head down, afraid to look at the men in the bar. But I know I brushed right past Bunny Berrigan and he never looked up from his drink. On the subway back to Queens, I decided that I would never listen to another record by Bunny Berrigan; he wasn’t my father anymore.
 
There was a crowd around the bodega directly underneath Jack Chernecke’s apartment on Halsey Street and Broadway. Out of the window, high and clear, came a trumpet, bip biddibib-bib-ta-taaaaaa. I opened the door and went up to the second floor. Back in the kitchen, with the same yellow linoleum on the floor, and the table the same small white topped, was a young boy with a silver-plated horn. In the corner, with the back of his neck against the old iron window guard, in an undershirt, and tuxedo pants, keeping time with his bare feet, was an old man with a gleaming new horn.
 
The kid finished an exercise and he looked at the man for approval.
 
“You’ll have to do one thing,” he said.
 
“Learn to play out doors.”
 
“Do you know why?” the old man said.
 
“Because I’m going to be giving lessons next to an el pillar account of you coming here with nothing. You might be a good trumpet student but you are a better deadbeat. Did you folks ever hear of paying a bill?”
 
“My mother didn’t have any money for me today,” the kid said.
“Don’t know. He don’t live at home.”
“Only your mother to pay the bills?”
“Then tell your mammy to go out and steal if she wants her son take music lessons.”
He got up and walked barefoot with his horn downstairs to the street and leaned against the el pillar at the corner and looked along Broadway, with the late afternoon summer sun coming through the tracks and placing oblong blocks of light on the sidewalk. And he also looked up Halsey Street, with its three story attached brownstone and frame houses. The kid stood with his silver plated horn and his music book. On the corner was a morgue wagon with two bodies under white sheets in the back.
And now little Xavier, age two, ran down the side street, Halsey Street, past the iron gates in front of the stoops going up to the first floors of the frame and brownstone houses. Ran faster than you can imagine on a glorious late summer afternoon. Ran intoxicated with the freedom of having nobody to hold him or chase him. Ran without knowing it from the body of his brother, Alan, 10, who was dead under a white sheet in the back of the wagon at the corner.
Back in front of the bodega, jumping up and down, jump, jump, jump on this yellow chalk circle on the sidewalk, were two other children, 4 and 3, their small sneakers coming right down on the yellow chalk circles.
The circles told the little kids that they can die.
The circles had been put there by the police to show where the two kids had just been killed. The bodies were under sheets in the back of the morgue wagon at the corner. There never was any reason for chalk circles or chalk outlines of bodies except to follow old custom of police.
But now they had one to mark the spot where Alan Smith, 10, died, and another to show where his older brother, Marvin, 16, also had died.
They had been shot in front of the bodega when Marvin came bounding down the steps from the Halsey Street el station, waving the first paycheck of his life, from an air freight company at Kennedy Airport. To get there, he took two el trains and a bus. When he was down the last step, his little brother came running up to him. Marvin waved the paycheck stub in the air and screamed at his mother, “I got paid.”
“Stop holding it like that. You liable to lose it. You get home here with it,” she said.
“This is just the stub. The man cashed it for me at work. It’s in my pocket.”
“Then you get home here for sure.”
“I just want to buy little Alan a soda.”
The mother waved and stepped back into the house and on the corner in front of the bodega, right at the very entrance, two kids on bikes put their feet to the sidewalk for balance and one of them held out a gun.
“Money, money, money, give it up, give it up.”
Marvin took out a roll of bills and handed them to the kid. The other one started shooting. He hit both brothers in the head. Marvin died right away. Alan flopped on the sidewalk like a flounder on a dock for awhile and then stopped.
In the aftermath of the killing of her two sons, the mother sat in the doorway of her house up the block. A relative held her arm to try and calm her. The big woman’s bare feet began to jiggle on the floor. Her body heaved.
“My pressure, my pressure, my pressure. Make garlic tea and get my pressure down. Calm, calm, calm. Blood clot in my leg. Calm, calm.”
The bare feet started thumping on the floor and she was raising her feet a little more to make them thump louder and now she was raising her feet high and her voice, rising, said, “Pressure, pressure, pressure,” and the relative was trying to bold her arm and a baby on his back on the floor twirled a toy and seemed not to notice this big heaving woman’s body suddenly scream into the hot air:
“Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ! They murder my sons.”
The old man watched with an expressionless face. Then he put the trumpet to his lips and began to play, slow and low, and the notes placed a terrible stillness on everything on the block except the mother screaming.
The old man in his tuxedo pants and bare feet leaned against the el pillar and played “Lush Life.”
“I used to visit all the gay places,
Come-what-may places …”
In the stillness on Broadway, the notes carried for blocks. The B-55 bus stopped in the middle of Broadway, blocking all the traffic and when people tried to honk horns no sound came out.
The J train on the el tracks slipped imperceptibly into the station. The conductor looked out of the top of one of the windows and watched as the old man played.
The morgue driver stuck his arm out the window and dropped the cigarette he was smoking.
The children were still on the yellow chalk circles.
There was only the sound of “Lush Life” with the notes rising over the low endless growl of the mother in agony in her doorway.
Then the old man was through playing. He stood motionless.
 

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

Getty
Beast Fiction
In an excerpt from Jimmy Breslin’s autobiographical novel—his first published work in a decade—the legendary columnist describes his first trumpet lessons, and stumbles upon a scene of heartbreaking beauty.
 
My Aunt Harriet took me up on the bus to the Wurlitzer store on Sutphin Boulevard and bought a used trumpet, which she paid for with bills and change from the grandmother’s purse. Afterwards, each Saturday morning, my mother gave me three dollars for a music lesson and carfare. I took the Q-ll bus to the Jamaica Avenue el and rode it to Kosciusko Street in the Bushwick section. The trumpet teacher, Jack Chernecke, lived one flight over a furniture store. He had pouchy eyes, smoked a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table in an undershirt, black tuxedo pants, and bare feet. His fingers danced nervously on the valves of his brilliant gold-plated horn.
 
On weekend nights, Chernecke played in the Blue Moon, which was under the el, three blocks from his house. Now on a rough, fuzzy Saturday morning after a bust-out night at the Blue Moon, he had me, this Catholic school kid who instinctively blew his notes louder when an el train passed. The only thing you’re learning is to compete with an el, he said. But he had such deplorable personal habits that he needed the three dollars for a lesson so desperately that he began referring to me as Goldman, after Edwin Franko Goldman.
I sure loved playing the trumpet. It was that big heavy object that I needed to keep my hands from shaking when others were looking at me. Chernecke told me that I should pour a cup of hot water through the horn to clean out the valves. I stood at that kitchen sink for hours and poured hot water into that horn until it was too hot to touch. I practiced every day at 4 p.m., which was all right with my grandmother, who usually sat with a cigarette before starting dinner. But if one of the uncles on the police force were in the house asleep there always was a howl. On Saturday and Sunday, I practiced the moment I woke up, and that was as good a torture as you could perform, a trumpet at 8 a.m. in a house where everybody is trying to sleep off the night before. A shout used to come from every corner of the house. Even when I got the sound better and better, the family only screamed more. The worst was when Chernecke, the teacher, told me to try practicing in a closed small room. So I got into the bathroom, locked the door and was blowing as hard as I could, and the whole family was out in the hallway bawling to get in. I could hear them banging on the door all right, but just like Chernecke said, the sound was so great that I didn’t want to stop. I guess my mother hated me fooling around with music, which had to remind her of my father, because she just walked around grumpily and didn’t take my side, when usually she would scream back at them.
 
Chernecke, used to love it when I brought him one of my mother’s personal checks. He would stare at it and say, “Why is food so important?”
 
Chernecke caught a day job, playing with a small band that played live music in the afternoon at a radio station in Woodside. The owner was named Reineke. He was an old German who had been a ship’s radio operator on freighters. One night at sea he read a bulletin about licenses being available and at the next port he sent an application and check for one hundred ten dollars to Washington. Somebody must have been insane in Washington because they sent him a radio station license. He put this high antenna tower in the back yard of his house, which was up the hill from Queens Boulevard. He got a gambling degenerate named Jocko Maxwell to read the race results from a wire service, and he was off. The microphone was in his front room and the walls were soundproofed with blankets to make a studio. Jack Chernecke and five others sat in the small space and played live music. Then the announcer, Jocko Maxwell, would walk in from the dining room, where they had the race wire, and wave his hand and the band would stop playing and he would give the race results. “Fans in the fourth at Havre De Grace, the winner, number six…”
 
I used to sit in the back of the living room and imagine I was part of the band. One day I told my Aunt Harriet that I couldn’t play my horn without valve oil. Which wasn’t true. Chernecke always oiled them for me. But going into a music store in Manhattan would be the same for me as parading around in one of the varsity football parkas, the way I saw older guys who played at John Adams High School. My aunt got me 75 cents from somewhere, and I took the subway over to Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. I went into the Wurlitzer Music Shop and stood there while an emaciated man with a wax face looked over some mutes that he had made special. Listening to the clerk, I found out it was Bunny Berrigan. The clerk asked me what I wanted and I said valve oil and he nodded and put down this little box that cost 49 cents. I reached right past Bunny Berrigan to take the valve oil and pay for it. When I got outside, I decided right away that Bunny Berrigan was my father. The big thing he played was “I Can’t Get Started.” Right there on the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue, in the middle of the afternoon, I could see myself standing in a room in our house, while my father, Bunny Berrigan, sat and instructed me.
 
I went to the corner of West 54th Street and stayed there for maybe a half hour and Bunny Berrigan came out. He had on a black suit and a dark overcoat with the collar turned up. He walked along the street and a couple of guys said hello to him as he passed. They said, “How is the game?” and he answered, “Same at the half.” I followed him and when I walked by the same men, I said to them, in a grown up voice, “Same at the half.” A few doors down 54th Street he went into a bar called Jim and Andy’s. I looked in the window. He hung up his coat, then he shook his shoulders a little and rubbed his hands and stepped up to the bar. I still can see him. He put his cigarettes down on his left side and the money in the middle and the bartender gave him a big brown drink and he kept that in his right hand. Not for long, because he drained the whole glass and held it out for another. I stood and watched him for a long time and he never changed. Give him a dark brown glass and he emptied it and looked for another.
By now it was getting colder and the sun was gone and I had to go to the bathroom. I stood on the sidewalk outside the saloon for a long time. I was twisting against the pain. I could go on the way home, but I hated the bathroom in the subway. You had to breathe through the mouth and there was always a bum sitting on the toilet. Finally, I had to go so bad that I walked into the bar. If Bunny Berrigan wasn’t really my father sitting in there I never would have had the nerve to walk into the place. “Could I use the bathroom?” I said. Bunny Berrigan wouldn’t even look up. The bartender pointed to the men’s room. “Make it fast.” I went in and took a piss and I was going out, keeping my head down, afraid to look at the men in the bar. But I know I brushed right past Bunny Berrigan and he never looked up from his drink. On the subway back to Queens, I decided that I would never listen to another record by Bunny Berrigan; he wasn’t my father anymore.
 
There was a crowd around the bodega directly underneath Jack Chernecke’s apartment on Halsey Street and Broadway. Out of the window, high and clear, came a trumpet, bip biddibib-bib-ta-taaaaaa. I opened the door and went up to the second floor. Back in the kitchen, with the same yellow linoleum on the floor, and the table the same small white topped, was a young boy with a silver-plated horn. In the corner, with the back of his neck against the old iron window guard, in an undershirt, and tuxedo pants, keeping time with his bare feet, was an old man with a gleaming new horn.
 
The kid finished an exercise and he looked at the man for approval.
 
“You’ll have to do one thing,” he said.
 
“Learn to play out doors.”
 
“Do you know why?” the old man said.
 
“Because I’m going to be giving lessons next to an el pillar account of you coming here with nothing. You might be a good trumpet student but you are a better deadbeat. Did you folks ever hear of paying a bill?”
 
“My mother didn’t have any money for me today,” the kid said.
“Don’t know. He don’t live at home.”
“Only your mother to pay the bills?”
“Then tell your mammy to go out and steal if she wants her son take music lessons.”
He got up and walked barefoot with his horn downstairs to the street and leaned against the el pillar at the corner and looked along Broadway, with the late afternoon summer sun coming through the tracks and placing oblong blocks of light on the sidewalk. And he also looked up Halsey Street, with its three story attached brownstone and frame houses. The kid stood with his silver plated horn and his music book. On the corner was a morgue wagon with two bodies under white sheets in the back.
And now little Xavier, age two, ran down the side street, Halsey Street, past the iron gates in front of the stoops going up to the first floors of the frame and brownstone houses. Ran faster than you can imagine on a glorious late summer afternoon. Ran intoxicated with the freedom of having nobody to hold him or chase him. Ran without knowing it from the body of his brother, Alan, 10, who was dead under a white sheet in the back of the wagon at the corner.
Back in front of the bodega, jumping up and down, jump, jump, jump on this yellow chalk circle on the sidewalk, were two other children, 4 and 3, their small sneakers coming right down on the yellow chalk circles.
The circles told the little kids that they can die.
The circles had been put there by the police to show where the two kids had just been killed. The bodies were under sheets in the back of the morgue wagon at the corner. There never was any reason for chalk circles or chalk outlines of bodies except to follow old custom of police.
But now they had one to mark the spot where Alan Smith, 10, died, and another to show where his older brother, Marvin, 16, also had died.
They had been shot in front of the bodega when Marvin came bounding down the steps from the Halsey Street el station, waving the first paycheck of his life, from an air freight company at Kennedy Airport. To get there, he took two el trains and a bus. When he was down the last step, his little brother came running up to him. Marvin waved the paycheck stub in the air and screamed at his mother, “I got paid.”
“Stop holding it like that. You liable to lose it. You get home here with it,” she said.
“This is just the stub. The man cashed it for me at work. It’s in my pocket.”
“Then you get home here for sure.”
“I just want to buy little Alan a soda.”
The mother waved and stepped back into the house and on the corner in front of the bodega, right at the very entrance, two kids on bikes put their feet to the sidewalk for balance and one of them held out a gun.
“Money, money, money, give it up, give it up.”
Marvin took out a roll of bills and handed them to the kid. The other one started shooting. He hit both brothers in the head. Marvin died right away. Alan flopped on the sidewalk like a flounder on a dock for awhile and then stopped.
In the aftermath of the killing of her two sons, the mother sat in the doorway of her house up the block. A relative held her arm to try and calm her. The big woman’s bare feet began to jiggle on the floor. Her body heaved.
“My pressure, my pressure, my pressure. Make garlic tea and get my pressure down. Calm, calm, calm. Blood clot in my leg. Calm, calm.”
The bare feet started thumping on the floor and she was raising her feet a little more to make them thump louder and now she was raising her feet high and her voice, rising, said, “Pressure, pressure, pressure,” and the relative was trying to bold her arm and a baby on his back on the floor twirled a toy and seemed not to notice this big heaving woman’s body suddenly scream into the hot air:
“Oh God! Oh Jesus Christ! They murder my sons.”
The old man watched with an expressionless face. Then he put the trumpet to his lips and began to play, slow and low, and the notes placed a terrible stillness on everything on the block except the mother screaming.
The old man in his tuxedo pants and bare feet leaned against the el pillar and played “Lush Life.”
“I used to visit all the gay places,
Come-what-may places …”
In the stillness on Broadway, the notes carried for blocks. The B-55 bus stopped in the middle of Broadway, blocking all the traffic and when people tried to honk horns no sound came out.
The J train on the el tracks slipped imperceptibly into the station. The conductor looked out of the top of one of the windows and watched as the old man played.
The morgue driver stuck his arm out the window and dropped the cigarette he was smoking.
The children were still on the yellow chalk circles.
There was only the sound of “Lush Life” with the notes rising over the low endless growl of the mother in agony in her doorway.
Then the old man was through playing. He stood motionless.
 

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Description:
Let the Good Times Roll is a 1973 rockumentary / concert film directed by Robert Abel and Sidney Levin. It features numerous stars from the American pop and rock music scene of the 1950s.

The film follows a concert in the 1970s, interspersed with footage of the singers from the 1950s. It also includes interviews with the singers.

The film features numerous stars from the 1950s and early 1960s playing as themselves, including Chuck Berry Chubby Checker The Coasters Danny and the Juniors Bo Diddley Fats Domino The Five Satins Bill Haley and the Comets Little Richard The Shirelles

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Description:
Let the Good Times Roll is a 1973 rockumentary / concert film directed by Robert Abel and Sidney Levin. It features numerous stars from the American pop and rock music scene of the 1950s.

The film follows a concert in the 1970s, interspersed with footage of the singers from the 1950s. It also includes interviews with the singers.

The film features numerous stars from the 1950s and early 1960s playing as themselves, including Chuck Berry Chubby Checker The Coasters Danny and the Juniors Bo Diddley Fats Domino The Five Satins Bill Haley and the Comets Little Richard The Shirelles

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Description:
Let the Good Times Roll is a 1973 rockumentary / concert film directed by Robert Abel and Sidney Levin. It features numerous stars from the American pop and rock music scene of the 1950s.

The film follows a concert in the 1970s, interspersed with footage of the singers from the 1950s. It also includes interviews with the singers.

The film features numerous stars from the 1950s and early 1960s playing as themselves, including Chuck Berry Chubby Checker The Coasters Danny and the Juniors Bo Diddley Fats Domino The Five Satins Bill Haley and the Comets Little Richard The Shirelles

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Chuck Berry takes up a lot of square footage in the foundation of rock music. And every musician knows it.PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES / GETTY IMAGES
Barrier Status: ‘none’
Never has the anxiety of influence been captured so openly, and so vividly, as in the standoff between Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, when they rehearsed Berry’s song “Carol” in St. Louis thirty years ago. To watch Berry bully, instruct, and, finally, cajole Richards into getting things right is as unforgettable for the viewer as it was humbling for the veteran of the Rolling Stones. Not that Richards was unaccustomed to the dynamic. Years before, Richards had dared to strum Berry’s guitar—the big Gibson ES-355—when Berry was out of the room. Berry returned and shouted, “No one touches my guitar!” and belted Richards in the mouth. Now Richards was getting the hard-ass treatment, even as he was trying to put together an all-star concert to celebrate Berry’s sixtieth birthday.
 
“Every time him and me got in contact, whether it’s intentional or not, I end up getting wounded,” Richards said. “Chuck has his own way of showing his appreciation.”
 
Berry, who died Saturday, at the age of ninety, was a proud and difficult man. He was also a genius. As a player, as a songwriter, and as a performer, he was a master of invention, transforming the rolling rhythms of Louis Jordan and the guitar figures of T-Bone Walker into the rhythmic foundation of half the rock songs you’ve ever heard. Rooted in the blues and with an ear for American country music, Berry blew things up and out with his first hits; he helped to create another form. Chuck Berry was to rock music what Louis Armstrong was to jazz—a foundational figure; if not quite singular, then as close as it gets.
 
“If you had tried to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon once said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’ ”
 
Lennon—like Richards, like Bob Dylan, like the Beach Boys—was among the countless second-generation white musicians who understood the immensity of their debt to Chuck Berry. Their music would not have been possible without him. When the Beatles were playing in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg, much of their set was filled with Chuck Berry songs. To this day, it’s what any fledgling kid with a guitar wants to learn: “Little Queenie,” “Nadine,” “Jo Jo Gunne,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” He is in everyone’s ear. Berry inflects nearly all of rock and roll. Sometimes the influence was so obvious that it infuriated Berry, a man inclined as much to irritation as to joy—and, at times, to legal action. He sued the Beach Boys for “Surfin’ U.S.A.”; it was just too close to “Sweet Little Sixteen” for his comfort.
 
The reason Mick Jagger and Keith Richards struck up their friendship in the first place was because of a mutual adoration of Berry’s music. When Richards was a teen-ager, he wrote a letter to his Aunt Patty, saying, “You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles. But one mornin’ on Dartford Stn . . . I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y’know came up to me.” Jagger was carrying two records: “The Best of Muddy Waters” and Berry’s “Rockin’ at the Hops.”
Berry developed his act as a kid. He started out on a strange four-string tenor guitar and sang “Confessin’ the Blues” at a high-school talent show. But, unlike the Stones or the Beatles, he had an awful start. When he was eighteen, he was busted for armed robbery and stealing a car, and spent three years in a reformatory, in Jefferson City, where he formed a singing quartet. He worked as a janitor and as a carpenter; he trained to be a hairdresser. Copping some of the riffs and performing moves of T-Bone Walker, he joined various small bands, playing R. & B. songs and even some country.
 
Berry broke through as a star, in 1955, with “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours.” No musician of consequence comes from nowhere, untouched by influence, and Berry had his predecessors: Charlie Christian, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Carl Hogan. “Maybellene” was a reordering of “Ida Red,” a country song made famous by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. But Berry’s sound, backed by Johnnie Johnson on piano and Ebby Hardy on drums, was something new—the sound of wheels on the open road.
Berry wrote “Carol” in 1958, the same year as “It Don’t Take But a Few Minutes,” “Around and Around,” “Blues for Hawaiians,” and the everlasting “Johnny B. Goode.” When Berry and Richards got together in St. Louis, to perform that song and others, they were joined by an astonishing array of players: Johnnie Johnson, on piano; Eric Clapton and Robert Cray, on guitar; Steve Jordan, on drums. Etta James and Linda Ronstadt sang. But in rehearsal, and in the subsequent film by Taylor Hackford, “Hail, Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” it was the brittle dynamic between Berry and Richards that was the whole story. Time and again, Berry stops Richards and makes him play the famous opening riff his way.
 
The reason for the tension is not hard to discern. Richards and Jagger had been making a fortune off of Chuck Berry songs—and songs influenced by Berry, as well as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—for a generation. It’s true that Richards called Berry his “numero uno hero.” And, in 1986, when he spoke at Berry’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—its first year in operation—he said, “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I lifted every lick he ever played. This is the gentleman who started it all, as far as I’m concerned.” Richards, Lennon, and so many other white musicians paid their obeisance to Berry—they paid it loudly and often—but in the end, they collected the gargantuan checks and the worldwide fame, and that always rankled Berry. He was hardly a pauper, but at times he resented the white eclipse of the British invasion.
 
Berry started out in a middle-class family—middle-class black, it is important to remember. Racism touched his life all along the way. He was also no angel. Throughout his career, he sidetracked himself with what he blithely called his “naughties.”
“Every fifteen years, in fact, it seems, I made a big mistake,” he wrote in his autobiography. There was the three-year stint in a reformatory as a teen-ager, for armed robbery and auto theft. Then, in 1962, he was sentenced to three years under the Mann Act; he’d had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl and then transported her across state lines. (At first, the ruling was overturned on appeal for the racist remarks of the judge.) And, in 1979, a few days after playing for Jimmy Carter, at the White House, he was sent to Lompoc Prison Camp, for tax evasion. Berry wrote the bulk of his memoir, “Chuck Berry: The Autobiography,” at Lompoc.
 
It was a complicated life, impossible to capture in brief. Read the book. But first, listen to the songs. They are to rock what Armstrong’s early recordings, the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions, were to jazz. Little Richard, James Brown, Ray Charles—they were there, too, at the start, and not to be trifled with, but Chuck Berry takes up a lot of square footage in the foundation of rock music. And every musician knows it.
 
In the early seventies, Bruce Springsteen was in his twenties and building a reputation with his band, and he got a call from his manager saying that Springsteen was going to open for Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry at a hall in Maryland. By that time, Berry toured on his own, without a band. He showed up at the gig with his Gibson, demanded cash from the promoter, and then played in front of whatever local musicians the promoter had put together. Hearing that, Springsteen said that he and his band would be honored to work behind the great man.
Berry showed up on the appointed night right after Jerry Lee had finished his set, five minutes before he was supposed to go on. He collected eleven thousand dollars—and was obliged to give back a thousand if the band was adequate and the amplifiers worked properly. Meanwhile, Springsteen and his crew sweated through their shirts as they waited for instructions from their idol.
 
“We were really nervous,” Springsteen recalled in Hackford’s film. “There wasn’t supposed to be an extra guitar player, so I came up to him and I said, ‘Gee, is it okay if I play?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you can play.’ And I said, “Well, Chuck . . .’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘What songs are we going to do?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to do some Chuck Berry songs.’ ”
 
And so they did: “Carol,” “Little Queenie,” “Roll Over Beethoven.” The band knew the songs, of course, but not in the keys used by Berry. Most bands play those tunes in easier guitar keys—the key of E, the key of A—but Berry preferred B-flat, E-flat, and you were lost if you didn’t pick up on it right away. Thanks to an astute bass player, they survived. Springsteen & Company made it nearly to the end without incident, and with the crowd in hysterics. Suddenly, things came to an abrupt end.
“I think his amp blew up and he just kind of walked right to the side of the stage, and packed his guitar in front of the entire auditorium,” Springsteen said. “They were going crazy, and we were, I guess, doing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ by now. We were just playing that rhythm. He waved, and that was it. He walked out. Walked back into his car, and he was gone.”

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Chuck Berry takes up a lot of square footage in the foundation of rock music. And every musician knows it.PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES / GETTY IMAGES
Barrier Status: ‘none’
Never has the anxiety of influence been captured so openly, and so vividly, as in the standoff between Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, when they rehearsed Berry’s song “Carol” in St. Louis thirty years ago. To watch Berry bully, instruct, and, finally, cajole Richards into getting things right is as unforgettable for the viewer as it was humbling for the veteran of the Rolling Stones. Not that Richards was unaccustomed to the dynamic. Years before, Richards had dared to strum Berry’s guitar—the big Gibson ES-355—when Berry was out of the room. Berry returned and shouted, “No one touches my guitar!” and belted Richards in the mouth. Now Richards was getting the hard-ass treatment, even as he was trying to put together an all-star concert to celebrate Berry’s sixtieth birthday.
 
“Every time him and me got in contact, whether it’s intentional or not, I end up getting wounded,” Richards said. “Chuck has his own way of showing his appreciation.”
 
Berry, who died Saturday, at the age of ninety, was a proud and difficult man. He was also a genius. As a player, as a songwriter, and as a performer, he was a master of invention, transforming the rolling rhythms of Louis Jordan and the guitar figures of T-Bone Walker into the rhythmic foundation of half the rock songs you’ve ever heard. Rooted in the blues and with an ear for American country music, Berry blew things up and out with his first hits; he helped to create another form. Chuck Berry was to rock music what Louis Armstrong was to jazz—a foundational figure; if not quite singular, then as close as it gets.
 
“If you had tried to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon once said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’ ”
 
Lennon—like Richards, like Bob Dylan, like the Beach Boys—was among the countless second-generation white musicians who understood the immensity of their debt to Chuck Berry. Their music would not have been possible without him. When the Beatles were playing in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg, much of their set was filled with Chuck Berry songs. To this day, it’s what any fledgling kid with a guitar wants to learn: “Little Queenie,” “Nadine,” “Jo Jo Gunne,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” He is in everyone’s ear. Berry inflects nearly all of rock and roll. Sometimes the influence was so obvious that it infuriated Berry, a man inclined as much to irritation as to joy—and, at times, to legal action. He sued the Beach Boys for “Surfin’ U.S.A.”; it was just too close to “Sweet Little Sixteen” for his comfort.
 
The reason Mick Jagger and Keith Richards struck up their friendship in the first place was because of a mutual adoration of Berry’s music. When Richards was a teen-ager, he wrote a letter to his Aunt Patty, saying, “You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles. But one mornin’ on Dartford Stn . . . I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y’know came up to me.” Jagger was carrying two records: “The Best of Muddy Waters” and Berry’s “Rockin’ at the Hops.”
Berry developed his act as a kid. He started out on a strange four-string tenor guitar and sang “Confessin’ the Blues” at a high-school talent show. But, unlike the Stones or the Beatles, he had an awful start. When he was eighteen, he was busted for armed robbery and stealing a car, and spent three years in a reformatory, in Jefferson City, where he formed a singing quartet. He worked as a janitor and as a carpenter; he trained to be a hairdresser. Copping some of the riffs and performing moves of T-Bone Walker, he joined various small bands, playing R. & B. songs and even some country.
 
Berry broke through as a star, in 1955, with “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours.” No musician of consequence comes from nowhere, untouched by influence, and Berry had his predecessors: Charlie Christian, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Carl Hogan. “Maybellene” was a reordering of “Ida Red,” a country song made famous by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. But Berry’s sound, backed by Johnnie Johnson on piano and Ebby Hardy on drums, was something new—the sound of wheels on the open road.
Berry wrote “Carol” in 1958, the same year as “It Don’t Take But a Few Minutes,” “Around and Around,” “Blues for Hawaiians,” and the everlasting “Johnny B. Goode.” When Berry and Richards got together in St. Louis, to perform that song and others, they were joined by an astonishing array of players: Johnnie Johnson, on piano; Eric Clapton and Robert Cray, on guitar; Steve Jordan, on drums. Etta James and Linda Ronstadt sang. But in rehearsal, and in the subsequent film by Taylor Hackford, “Hail, Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” it was the brittle dynamic between Berry and Richards that was the whole story. Time and again, Berry stops Richards and makes him play the famous opening riff his way.
 
The reason for the tension is not hard to discern. Richards and Jagger had been making a fortune off of Chuck Berry songs—and songs influenced by Berry, as well as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—for a generation. It’s true that Richards called Berry his “numero uno hero.” And, in 1986, when he spoke at Berry’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—its first year in operation—he said, “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I lifted every lick he ever played. This is the gentleman who started it all, as far as I’m concerned.” Richards, Lennon, and so many other white musicians paid their obeisance to Berry—they paid it loudly and often—but in the end, they collected the gargantuan checks and the worldwide fame, and that always rankled Berry. He was hardly a pauper, but at times he resented the white eclipse of the British invasion.
 
Berry started out in a middle-class family—middle-class black, it is important to remember. Racism touched his life all along the way. He was also no angel. Throughout his career, he sidetracked himself with what he blithely called his “naughties.”
“Every fifteen years, in fact, it seems, I made a big mistake,” he wrote in his autobiography. There was the three-year stint in a reformatory as a teen-ager, for armed robbery and auto theft. Then, in 1962, he was sentenced to three years under the Mann Act; he’d had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl and then transported her across state lines. (At first, the ruling was overturned on appeal for the racist remarks of the judge.) And, in 1979, a few days after playing for Jimmy Carter, at the White House, he was sent to Lompoc Prison Camp, for tax evasion. Berry wrote the bulk of his memoir, “Chuck Berry: The Autobiography,” at Lompoc.
 
It was a complicated life, impossible to capture in brief. Read the book. But first, listen to the songs. They are to rock what Armstrong’s early recordings, the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions, were to jazz. Little Richard, James Brown, Ray Charles—they were there, too, at the start, and not to be trifled with, but Chuck Berry takes up a lot of square footage in the foundation of rock music. And every musician knows it.
 
In the early seventies, Bruce Springsteen was in his twenties and building a reputation with his band, and he got a call from his manager saying that Springsteen was going to open for Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry at a hall in Maryland. By that time, Berry toured on his own, without a band. He showed up at the gig with his Gibson, demanded cash from the promoter, and then played in front of whatever local musicians the promoter had put together. Hearing that, Springsteen said that he and his band would be honored to work behind the great man.
Berry showed up on the appointed night right after Jerry Lee had finished his set, five minutes before he was supposed to go on. He collected eleven thousand dollars—and was obliged to give back a thousand if the band was adequate and the amplifiers worked properly. Meanwhile, Springsteen and his crew sweated through their shirts as they waited for instructions from their idol.
 
“We were really nervous,” Springsteen recalled in Hackford’s film. “There wasn’t supposed to be an extra guitar player, so I came up to him and I said, ‘Gee, is it okay if I play?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you can play.’ And I said, “Well, Chuck . . .’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘What songs are we going to do?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to do some Chuck Berry songs.’ ”
 
And so they did: “Carol,” “Little Queenie,” “Roll Over Beethoven.” The band knew the songs, of course, but not in the keys used by Berry. Most bands play those tunes in easier guitar keys—the key of E, the key of A—but Berry preferred B-flat, E-flat, and you were lost if you didn’t pick up on it right away. Thanks to an astute bass player, they survived. Springsteen & Company made it nearly to the end without incident, and with the crowd in hysterics. Suddenly, things came to an abrupt end.
“I think his amp blew up and he just kind of walked right to the side of the stage, and packed his guitar in front of the entire auditorium,” Springsteen said. “They were going crazy, and we were, I guess, doing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ by now. We were just playing that rhythm. He waved, and that was it. He walked out. Walked back into his car, and he was gone.”

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Chuck Berry takes up a lot of square footage in the foundation of rock music. And every musician knows it.PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES / GETTY IMAGES
Barrier Status: ‘none’
Never has the anxiety of influence been captured so openly, and so vividly, as in the standoff between Chuck Berry and Keith Richards, when they rehearsed Berry’s song “Carol” in St. Louis thirty years ago. To watch Berry bully, instruct, and, finally, cajole Richards into getting things right is as unforgettable for the viewer as it was humbling for the veteran of the Rolling Stones. Not that Richards was unaccustomed to the dynamic. Years before, Richards had dared to strum Berry’s guitar—the big Gibson ES-355—when Berry was out of the room. Berry returned and shouted, “No one touches my guitar!” and belted Richards in the mouth. Now Richards was getting the hard-ass treatment, even as he was trying to put together an all-star concert to celebrate Berry’s sixtieth birthday.
 
“Every time him and me got in contact, whether it’s intentional or not, I end up getting wounded,” Richards said. “Chuck has his own way of showing his appreciation.”
 
Berry, who died Saturday, at the age of ninety, was a proud and difficult man. He was also a genius. As a player, as a songwriter, and as a performer, he was a master of invention, transforming the rolling rhythms of Louis Jordan and the guitar figures of T-Bone Walker into the rhythmic foundation of half the rock songs you’ve ever heard. Rooted in the blues and with an ear for American country music, Berry blew things up and out with his first hits; he helped to create another form. Chuck Berry was to rock music what Louis Armstrong was to jazz—a foundational figure; if not quite singular, then as close as it gets.
 
“If you had tried to give rock and roll another name,” John Lennon once said, “you might call it ‘Chuck Berry.’ ”
 
Lennon—like Richards, like Bob Dylan, like the Beach Boys—was among the countless second-generation white musicians who understood the immensity of their debt to Chuck Berry. Their music would not have been possible without him. When the Beatles were playing in the clubs of Liverpool and Hamburg, much of their set was filled with Chuck Berry songs. To this day, it’s what any fledgling kid with a guitar wants to learn: “Little Queenie,” “Nadine,” “Jo Jo Gunne,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” He is in everyone’s ear. Berry inflects nearly all of rock and roll. Sometimes the influence was so obvious that it infuriated Berry, a man inclined as much to irritation as to joy—and, at times, to legal action. He sued the Beach Boys for “Surfin’ U.S.A.”; it was just too close to “Sweet Little Sixteen” for his comfort.
 
The reason Mick Jagger and Keith Richards struck up their friendship in the first place was because of a mutual adoration of Berry’s music. When Richards was a teen-ager, he wrote a letter to his Aunt Patty, saying, “You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles. But one mornin’ on Dartford Stn . . . I was holding one of Chuck’s records when a guy I knew at primary school 7-11 yrs y’know came up to me.” Jagger was carrying two records: “The Best of Muddy Waters” and Berry’s “Rockin’ at the Hops.”
Berry developed his act as a kid. He started out on a strange four-string tenor guitar and sang “Confessin’ the Blues” at a high-school talent show. But, unlike the Stones or the Beatles, he had an awful start. When he was eighteen, he was busted for armed robbery and stealing a car, and spent three years in a reformatory, in Jefferson City, where he formed a singing quartet. He worked as a janitor and as a carpenter; he trained to be a hairdresser. Copping some of the riffs and performing moves of T-Bone Walker, he joined various small bands, playing R. & B. songs and even some country.
 
Berry broke through as a star, in 1955, with “Maybellene” and “Wee Wee Hours.” No musician of consequence comes from nowhere, untouched by influence, and Berry had his predecessors: Charlie Christian, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Carl Hogan. “Maybellene” was a reordering of “Ida Red,” a country song made famous by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. But Berry’s sound, backed by Johnnie Johnson on piano and Ebby Hardy on drums, was something new—the sound of wheels on the open road.
Berry wrote “Carol” in 1958, the same year as “It Don’t Take But a Few Minutes,” “Around and Around,” “Blues for Hawaiians,” and the everlasting “Johnny B. Goode.” When Berry and Richards got together in St. Louis, to perform that song and others, they were joined by an astonishing array of players: Johnnie Johnson, on piano; Eric Clapton and Robert Cray, on guitar; Steve Jordan, on drums. Etta James and Linda Ronstadt sang. But in rehearsal, and in the subsequent film by Taylor Hackford, “Hail, Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” it was the brittle dynamic between Berry and Richards that was the whole story. Time and again, Berry stops Richards and makes him play the famous opening riff his way.
 
The reason for the tension is not hard to discern. Richards and Jagger had been making a fortune off of Chuck Berry songs—and songs influenced by Berry, as well as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—for a generation. It’s true that Richards called Berry his “numero uno hero.” And, in 1986, when he spoke at Berry’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—its first year in operation—he said, “It’s very difficult for me to talk about Chuck Berry because I lifted every lick he ever played. This is the gentleman who started it all, as far as I’m concerned.” Richards, Lennon, and so many other white musicians paid their obeisance to Berry—they paid it loudly and often—but in the end, they collected the gargantuan checks and the worldwide fame, and that always rankled Berry. He was hardly a pauper, but at times he resented the white eclipse of the British invasion.
 
Berry started out in a middle-class family—middle-class black, it is important to remember. Racism touched his life all along the way. He was also no angel. Throughout his career, he sidetracked himself with what he blithely called his “naughties.”
“Every fifteen years, in fact, it seems, I made a big mistake,” he wrote in his autobiography. There was the three-year stint in a reformatory as a teen-ager, for armed robbery and auto theft. Then, in 1962, he was sentenced to three years under the Mann Act; he’d had sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old girl and then transported her across state lines. (At first, the ruling was overturned on appeal for the racist remarks of the judge.) And, in 1979, a few days after playing for Jimmy Carter, at the White House, he was sent to Lompoc Prison Camp, for tax evasion. Berry wrote the bulk of his memoir, “Chuck Berry: The Autobiography,” at Lompoc.
 
It was a complicated life, impossible to capture in brief. Read the book. But first, listen to the songs. They are to rock what Armstrong’s early recordings, the Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions, were to jazz. Little Richard, James Brown, Ray Charles—they were there, too, at the start, and not to be trifled with, but Chuck Berry takes up a lot of square footage in the foundation of rock music. And every musician knows it.
 
In the early seventies, Bruce Springsteen was in his twenties and building a reputation with his band, and he got a call from his manager saying that Springsteen was going to open for Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry at a hall in Maryland. By that time, Berry toured on his own, without a band. He showed up at the gig with his Gibson, demanded cash from the promoter, and then played in front of whatever local musicians the promoter had put together. Hearing that, Springsteen said that he and his band would be honored to work behind the great man.
Berry showed up on the appointed night right after Jerry Lee had finished his set, five minutes before he was supposed to go on. He collected eleven thousand dollars—and was obliged to give back a thousand if the band was adequate and the amplifiers worked properly. Meanwhile, Springsteen and his crew sweated through their shirts as they waited for instructions from their idol.
 
“We were really nervous,” Springsteen recalled in Hackford’s film. “There wasn’t supposed to be an extra guitar player, so I came up to him and I said, ‘Gee, is it okay if I play?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you can play.’ And I said, “Well, Chuck . . .’ And he said, ‘What?’ And I said, ‘What songs are we going to do?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to do some Chuck Berry songs.’ ”
 
And so they did: “Carol,” “Little Queenie,” “Roll Over Beethoven.” The band knew the songs, of course, but not in the keys used by Berry. Most bands play those tunes in easier guitar keys—the key of E, the key of A—but Berry preferred B-flat, E-flat, and you were lost if you didn’t pick up on it right away. Thanks to an astute bass player, they survived. Springsteen & Company made it nearly to the end without incident, and with the crowd in hysterics. Suddenly, things came to an abrupt end.
“I think his amp blew up and he just kind of walked right to the side of the stage, and packed his guitar in front of the entire auditorium,” Springsteen said. “They were going crazy, and we were, I guess, doing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ by now. We were just playing that rhythm. He waved, and that was it. He walked out. Walked back into his car, and he was gone.”

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James Cotton, performing around 1967. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
 
James Cotton, a pioneering harmonica player who worked with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and helped establish his instrument as an integral part of modern blues, died on Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was 81.
Marc Lipkin, the director of publicity at Alligator Records, Mr. Cotton’s label, said the cause was pneumonia.
 
Many of Mr. Cotton’s lasting early contributions came during his first tenure with Waters, in Chicago, where from 1954 to 1966 he played in a band that included the guitarist Jimmy Rogers and the pianist Otis Spann.
 
Often heard in close call and response with Waters’s deep, declamatory vocals, Mr. Cotton’s squalling harmonica animated dozens of recordings Waters made for the influential Chess label, including classics like “Got My Mojo Working” and “Rock Me.”
 
 
Curiously enough, though Mr. Cotton was hired in 1954, he did not begin to appear on Waters’s recordings until late 1956. Before that, Waters usually recruited Little Walter Jacobs, Mr. Cotton’s predecessor in his band, to work with him in the studio.
 
“I was there for a couple of years before I got to be on the albums,” Mr. Cotton explained in a 2001 interview for the PBS documentary “American Roots Music.” “Muddy wanted me to be just like Little Walter. I told him, ‘Hey, I’ll never be Little Walter, but I can play your music, so you’ve got to give me a chance.’ I guess he heard that.”
 
Mr. Cotton embarked on a solo career in 1966 when he formed the James Cotton Blues Band. He and his group spent much of the next decade making records of their own and sharing bills with popular rock acts like Janis Joplin and Cream.
 
The Music of James Cotton
Mr. Cotton’s muscular, heavily amplified harmonica — he typically played with a microphone cupped tightly to his instrument — influenced the work of several major blues-rock groups of the era, among them the Allman Brothers, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Electric Flag.
 
Mr. Cotton reunited with Waters on the 1977 album “Hard Again,” which included a raucous remake of Waters’s 1950s classic “Mannish Boy.” Produced by the guitarist Johnny Winter, the album won a Grammy Award for best ethnic or traditional recording and helped Chicago-style blues gain a wider audience.
 
Before his first stint with Waters, Mr. Cotton was one of two harmonica players, along with Little Junior Parker, in the band of Howlin’ Wolf, appearing on some of the recordings he made with Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis in the early 1950s.
 
In 1954, Mr. Cotton also made four recordings under his own name for Sun. “Cotton Crop Blues,” an original that begins with the clarion pledge “I ain’t gonna raise no more cotton,” was the most enduring of these, featuring Mr. Cotton’s rasping vocals and the slashing, distorted guitar of Pat Hare.
 
James Henry Cotton was born on July 1, 1935, in Tunica, Miss., the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. His parents, Hattie and Mose, were sharecroppers who worked on a cotton plantation. His father was also the preacher at the local Baptist church.
 

 
From left, B.B. King, Mr. Cotton and Muddy Waters, at Radio City Music Hall in 1979. Perez/Associated Press
 
Mr. Cotton was inspired to take up the harmonica by his mother, who liked to use the instrument to mimic the squawking of chickens and the whistles of freight trains. Before long he was playing to entertain the other sharecroppers while hauling water to them in the fields; by age 7 he was performing for small change on the streets of nearby towns in the Mississippi Delta.
 
Both of Mr. Cotton’s parents had died by the time he was 9 and an uncle took him to meet the harmonica master Sonny Boy Williamson, a.k.a. Rice Miller, after young James heard his radio show, “King Biscuit Time,” on the Arkansas station KFFA. Williamson immediately took a liking to the boy, embracing him as a member of both his family and his touring group.
 
Though Mr. Cotton was probably most celebrated for his work in the employ of others, his career as a bandleader, and as a dynamic showman known to do back flips onstage, proved to have greater longevity, spanning nearly half a century.
‘
He began to slow down only in the mid-’90s, when doctors found polyps on his vocal cords. The condition forced him to give up singing, though not the harmonica, which he continued to play, in concert and on record, into his 70s.
 
Mr. Cotton, whose prowess on the harmonica earned him the nickname Superharp (the term “harp” is common parlance for the harmonica), released some two dozen albums, with small and larger ensembles, for a variety of labels, including Alligator, Vanguard and Telarc. His “Deep in the Blues” (Verve) won a Grammy for best traditional blues album in 1997. His most recent album, “Cotton Mouth Man,” was released in 2013 and nominated for a Grammy.
 

 
Mr. Cotton performing at the W.C. Handy Blues and Barbecue Festival in Henderson, Ky., in 2014. Darrin Phegley/The Gleaner, via Associated Press
 
Mr. Cotton also won several W. C. Handy International Blues Awards (since 2006 known as the Blues Music Awards) long considered among the highest accolades for musicians working in that idiom. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006.
 
Mr. Cotton is survived by his wife and manager, Jacklyn Hairston Cotton, with whom he moved from Memphis to Austin in 2010. His other survivors include two daughters, Teresa Hampton and Marshall Ann Cotton; a son, James Patrick Cotton; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
 
Mr. Cotton worked with an array of blues and rock luminaries during his seven decades in the music business, but whenever he reflected on his experiences in interviews he cited his childhood apprenticeship with Williamson as the most formative.
 
“I wanted to be just like Sonny Boy,” he recalled in the PBS documentary. “I watched every move he made, every word he said.”
 
“If he played it tonight,” Mr. Cotton added, “I played it tomorrow.”
 

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James Cotton, performing around 1967. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
 
James Cotton, a pioneering harmonica player who worked with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and helped establish his instrument as an integral part of modern blues, died on Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was 81.
Marc Lipkin, the director of publicity at Alligator Records, Mr. Cotton’s label, said the cause was pneumonia.
 
Many of Mr. Cotton’s lasting early contributions came during his first tenure with Waters, in Chicago, where from 1954 to 1966 he played in a band that included the guitarist Jimmy Rogers and the pianist Otis Spann.
 
Often heard in close call and response with Waters’s deep, declamatory vocals, Mr. Cotton’s squalling harmonica animated dozens of recordings Waters made for the influential Chess label, including classics like “Got My Mojo Working” and “Rock Me.”
 
 
Curiously enough, though Mr. Cotton was hired in 1954, he did not begin to appear on Waters’s recordings until late 1956. Before that, Waters usually recruited Little Walter Jacobs, Mr. Cotton’s predecessor in his band, to work with him in the studio.
 
“I was there for a couple of years before I got to be on the albums,” Mr. Cotton explained in a 2001 interview for the PBS documentary “American Roots Music.” “Muddy wanted me to be just like Little Walter. I told him, ‘Hey, I’ll never be Little Walter, but I can play your music, so you’ve got to give me a chance.’ I guess he heard that.”
 
Mr. Cotton embarked on a solo career in 1966 when he formed the James Cotton Blues Band. He and his group spent much of the next decade making records of their own and sharing bills with popular rock acts like Janis Joplin and Cream.
 
The Music of James Cotton
Mr. Cotton’s muscular, heavily amplified harmonica — he typically played with a microphone cupped tightly to his instrument — influenced the work of several major blues-rock groups of the era, among them the Allman Brothers, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Electric Flag.
 
Mr. Cotton reunited with Waters on the 1977 album “Hard Again,” which included a raucous remake of Waters’s 1950s classic “Mannish Boy.” Produced by the guitarist Johnny Winter, the album won a Grammy Award for best ethnic or traditional recording and helped Chicago-style blues gain a wider audience.
 
Before his first stint with Waters, Mr. Cotton was one of two harmonica players, along with Little Junior Parker, in the band of Howlin’ Wolf, appearing on some of the recordings he made with Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis in the early 1950s.
 
In 1954, Mr. Cotton also made four recordings under his own name for Sun. “Cotton Crop Blues,” an original that begins with the clarion pledge “I ain’t gonna raise no more cotton,” was the most enduring of these, featuring Mr. Cotton’s rasping vocals and the slashing, distorted guitar of Pat Hare.
 
James Henry Cotton was born on July 1, 1935, in Tunica, Miss., the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. His parents, Hattie and Mose, were sharecroppers who worked on a cotton plantation. His father was also the preacher at the local Baptist church.
 

 
From left, B.B. King, Mr. Cotton and Muddy Waters, at Radio City Music Hall in 1979. Perez/Associated Press
 
Mr. Cotton was inspired to take up the harmonica by his mother, who liked to use the instrument to mimic the squawking of chickens and the whistles of freight trains. Before long he was playing to entertain the other sharecroppers while hauling water to them in the fields; by age 7 he was performing for small change on the streets of nearby towns in the Mississippi Delta.
 
Both of Mr. Cotton’s parents had died by the time he was 9 and an uncle took him to meet the harmonica master Sonny Boy Williamson, a.k.a. Rice Miller, after young James heard his radio show, “King Biscuit Time,” on the Arkansas station KFFA. Williamson immediately took a liking to the boy, embracing him as a member of both his family and his touring group.
 
Though Mr. Cotton was probably most celebrated for his work in the employ of others, his career as a bandleader, and as a dynamic showman known to do back flips onstage, proved to have greater longevity, spanning nearly half a century.
‘
He began to slow down only in the mid-’90s, when doctors found polyps on his vocal cords. The condition forced him to give up singing, though not the harmonica, which he continued to play, in concert and on record, into his 70s.
 
Mr. Cotton, whose prowess on the harmonica earned him the nickname Superharp (the term “harp” is common parlance for the harmonica), released some two dozen albums, with small and larger ensembles, for a variety of labels, including Alligator, Vanguard and Telarc. His “Deep in the Blues” (Verve) won a Grammy for best traditional blues album in 1997. His most recent album, “Cotton Mouth Man,” was released in 2013 and nominated for a Grammy.
 

 
Mr. Cotton performing at the W.C. Handy Blues and Barbecue Festival in Henderson, Ky., in 2014. Darrin Phegley/The Gleaner, via Associated Press
 
Mr. Cotton also won several W. C. Handy International Blues Awards (since 2006 known as the Blues Music Awards) long considered among the highest accolades for musicians working in that idiom. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006.
 
Mr. Cotton is survived by his wife and manager, Jacklyn Hairston Cotton, with whom he moved from Memphis to Austin in 2010. His other survivors include two daughters, Teresa Hampton and Marshall Ann Cotton; a son, James Patrick Cotton; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
 
Mr. Cotton worked with an array of blues and rock luminaries during his seven decades in the music business, but whenever he reflected on his experiences in interviews he cited his childhood apprenticeship with Williamson as the most formative.
 
“I wanted to be just like Sonny Boy,” he recalled in the PBS documentary. “I watched every move he made, every word he said.”
 
“If he played it tonight,” Mr. Cotton added, “I played it tomorrow.”
 

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James Cotton, performing around 1967. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
 
James Cotton, a pioneering harmonica player who worked with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and helped establish his instrument as an integral part of modern blues, died on Thursday in Austin, Tex. He was 81.
Marc Lipkin, the director of publicity at Alligator Records, Mr. Cotton’s label, said the cause was pneumonia.
 
Many of Mr. Cotton’s lasting early contributions came during his first tenure with Waters, in Chicago, where from 1954 to 1966 he played in a band that included the guitarist Jimmy Rogers and the pianist Otis Spann.
 
Often heard in close call and response with Waters’s deep, declamatory vocals, Mr. Cotton’s squalling harmonica animated dozens of recordings Waters made for the influential Chess label, including classics like “Got My Mojo Working” and “Rock Me.”
 
 
Curiously enough, though Mr. Cotton was hired in 1954, he did not begin to appear on Waters’s recordings until late 1956. Before that, Waters usually recruited Little Walter Jacobs, Mr. Cotton’s predecessor in his band, to work with him in the studio.
 
“I was there for a couple of years before I got to be on the albums,” Mr. Cotton explained in a 2001 interview for the PBS documentary “American Roots Music.” “Muddy wanted me to be just like Little Walter. I told him, ‘Hey, I’ll never be Little Walter, but I can play your music, so you’ve got to give me a chance.’ I guess he heard that.”
 
Mr. Cotton embarked on a solo career in 1966 when he formed the James Cotton Blues Band. He and his group spent much of the next decade making records of their own and sharing bills with popular rock acts like Janis Joplin and Cream.
 
The Music of James Cotton
Mr. Cotton’s muscular, heavily amplified harmonica — he typically played with a microphone cupped tightly to his instrument — influenced the work of several major blues-rock groups of the era, among them the Allman Brothers, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Electric Flag.
 
Mr. Cotton reunited with Waters on the 1977 album “Hard Again,” which included a raucous remake of Waters’s 1950s classic “Mannish Boy.” Produced by the guitarist Johnny Winter, the album won a Grammy Award for best ethnic or traditional recording and helped Chicago-style blues gain a wider audience.
 
Before his first stint with Waters, Mr. Cotton was one of two harmonica players, along with Little Junior Parker, in the band of Howlin’ Wolf, appearing on some of the recordings he made with Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis in the early 1950s.
 
In 1954, Mr. Cotton also made four recordings under his own name for Sun. “Cotton Crop Blues,” an original that begins with the clarion pledge “I ain’t gonna raise no more cotton,” was the most enduring of these, featuring Mr. Cotton’s rasping vocals and the slashing, distorted guitar of Pat Hare.
 
James Henry Cotton was born on July 1, 1935, in Tunica, Miss., the youngest of eight brothers and sisters. His parents, Hattie and Mose, were sharecroppers who worked on a cotton plantation. His father was also the preacher at the local Baptist church.
 

 
From left, B.B. King, Mr. Cotton and Muddy Waters, at Radio City Music Hall in 1979. Perez/Associated Press
 
Mr. Cotton was inspired to take up the harmonica by his mother, who liked to use the instrument to mimic the squawking of chickens and the whistles of freight trains. Before long he was playing to entertain the other sharecroppers while hauling water to them in the fields; by age 7 he was performing for small change on the streets of nearby towns in the Mississippi Delta.
 
Both of Mr. Cotton’s parents had died by the time he was 9 and an uncle took him to meet the harmonica master Sonny Boy Williamson, a.k.a. Rice Miller, after young James heard his radio show, “King Biscuit Time,” on the Arkansas station KFFA. Williamson immediately took a liking to the boy, embracing him as a member of both his family and his touring group.
 
Though Mr. Cotton was probably most celebrated for his work in the employ of others, his career as a bandleader, and as a dynamic showman known to do back flips onstage, proved to have greater longevity, spanning nearly half a century.
‘
He began to slow down only in the mid-’90s, when doctors found polyps on his vocal cords. The condition forced him to give up singing, though not the harmonica, which he continued to play, in concert and on record, into his 70s.
 
Mr. Cotton, whose prowess on the harmonica earned him the nickname Superharp (the term “harp” is common parlance for the harmonica), released some two dozen albums, with small and larger ensembles, for a variety of labels, including Alligator, Vanguard and Telarc. His “Deep in the Blues” (Verve) won a Grammy for best traditional blues album in 1997. His most recent album, “Cotton Mouth Man,” was released in 2013 and nominated for a Grammy.
 

 
Mr. Cotton performing at the W.C. Handy Blues and Barbecue Festival in Henderson, Ky., in 2014. Darrin Phegley/The Gleaner, via Associated Press
 
Mr. Cotton also won several W. C. Handy International Blues Awards (since 2006 known as the Blues Music Awards) long considered among the highest accolades for musicians working in that idiom. He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2006.
 
Mr. Cotton is survived by his wife and manager, Jacklyn Hairston Cotton, with whom he moved from Memphis to Austin in 2010. His other survivors include two daughters, Teresa Hampton and Marshall Ann Cotton; a son, James Patrick Cotton; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
 
Mr. Cotton worked with an array of blues and rock luminaries during his seven decades in the music business, but whenever he reflected on his experiences in interviews he cited his childhood apprenticeship with Williamson as the most formative.
 
“I wanted to be just like Sonny Boy,” he recalled in the PBS documentary. “I watched every move he made, every word he said.”
 
“If he played it tonight,” Mr. Cotton added, “I played it tomorrow.”
 

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Rudy Lawless, the consummate drummer whose definitive style earned him chairs in the bands of such notables as Andy Kirk, Blue Mitchell, Hank Jones and Roy Eldridge, died Feb. 21 in Manhattan at the Bellevue Hospice. He was 84.
 
His boyhood friend and fellow musician, Richard Butts, confirmed his death as a result of assorted health complications. He also confirmed that Lawless was born in Sydenham Hospital in Harlem.
 
“Rudy’s passing is a great loss to the NYC jazz community,” said saxophonist/composer and friend, Rene McLean. “Aside from being a great musician in his own right, he was boyhood friends with of Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and Arthur Taylor, who grew up in the rich cultural environment of Harlem’s Sugar Hill.”
 
Lawless seemed to be committed to the music from the very beginning. While residing in Harlem on 159th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, he was only blocks away from the noted drummers Sid Catlett, Denzel Best and Jimmy Crawford.
 
Lawless was basically a self-taught musician but was afforded the opportunity to be under the tutelage of Best. He and his young drummer friend Ben Riley took lessons from Roy Haynes, when he was not busy on the road.
 
Lawless once stated his idol Art Blakey, who also became a good friend, would stop by on occasion to give him some drumming tips. At 16, he spent a summer touring the U.S. with Eddie Durham’s band.
 
“Living in Harlem, Rudy had seen it all, like the greats James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis,” said saxophonist Bill Saxton. “Rudy didn’t mind sharing his knowledge or experiences with the younger musicians.”
 
Lawless’ soft touch and smooth brushwork made him a regular accompanist with such noted singers as Hazel Scott, Dakota Staton, Etta Jones and Betty Roche during the 1970s.
 
In the early ’60s, he did a three-week stint with Mary Lou Williams at the then famous Hickory House on 52nd Street. He has recorded with pianists Junior Mance (in Tokyo) and Lenore Raphael, and vibraphonist Freddie McCoy.
 
From 1988 to 1990, Lawless took his own group to perform in Tokyo. Through the ’90s until recently, he and his ensembles performed regularly in clubs with vocalists Keisha St. Joan and George Jackson, with whom he also recorded three albums.
 
“I am grateful that Rudy was in my life,” said pianist/composer Danny Mixon. “We are family. I knew him when I was in my twenties. He played on my latest CD ‘Pass It On’ [2015]. At the time his health was declining, but he played anyway and I am forever grateful to him.”
 
When Lawless was not performing, he was giving back to the community by working with various nonprofit organizations. He always said, “I have to give back what was given to me.”
 
For three years, he hosted the weekly jam session at Local 802 for the Jazz Foundation of America. “I worked with Rudy at the jam session,” said singer and songwriter Okaru Lovelace. “He was a good drummer and always had something positive to say.”
 
His memorial will be held May 15, at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan.
 

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Rudy Lawless, the consummate drummer whose definitive style earned him chairs in the bands of such notables as Andy Kirk, Blue Mitchell, Hank Jones and Roy Eldridge, died Feb. 21 in Manhattan at the Bellevue Hospice. He was 84.
 
His boyhood friend and fellow musician, Richard Butts, confirmed his death as a result of assorted health complications. He also confirmed that Lawless was born in Sydenham Hospital in Harlem.
 
“Rudy’s passing is a great loss to the NYC jazz community,” said saxophonist/composer and friend, Rene McLean. “Aside from being a great musician in his own right, he was boyhood friends with of Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and Arthur Taylor, who grew up in the rich cultural environment of Harlem’s Sugar Hill.”
 
Lawless seemed to be committed to the music from the very beginning. While residing in Harlem on 159th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, he was only blocks away from the noted drummers Sid Catlett, Denzel Best and Jimmy Crawford.
 
Lawless was basically a self-taught musician but was afforded the opportunity to be under the tutelage of Best. He and his young drummer friend Ben Riley took lessons from Roy Haynes, when he was not busy on the road.
 
Lawless once stated his idol Art Blakey, who also became a good friend, would stop by on occasion to give him some drumming tips. At 16, he spent a summer touring the U.S. with Eddie Durham’s band.
 
“Living in Harlem, Rudy had seen it all, like the greats James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis,” said saxophonist Bill Saxton. “Rudy didn’t mind sharing his knowledge or experiences with the younger musicians.”
 
Lawless’ soft touch and smooth brushwork made him a regular accompanist with such noted singers as Hazel Scott, Dakota Staton, Etta Jones and Betty Roche during the 1970s.
 
In the early ’60s, he did a three-week stint with Mary Lou Williams at the then famous Hickory House on 52nd Street. He has recorded with pianists Junior Mance (in Tokyo) and Lenore Raphael, and vibraphonist Freddie McCoy.
 
From 1988 to 1990, Lawless took his own group to perform in Tokyo. Through the ’90s until recently, he and his ensembles performed regularly in clubs with vocalists Keisha St. Joan and George Jackson, with whom he also recorded three albums.
 
“I am grateful that Rudy was in my life,” said pianist/composer Danny Mixon. “We are family. I knew him when I was in my twenties. He played on my latest CD ‘Pass It On’ [2015]. At the time his health was declining, but he played anyway and I am forever grateful to him.”
 
When Lawless was not performing, he was giving back to the community by working with various nonprofit organizations. He always said, “I have to give back what was given to me.”
 
For three years, he hosted the weekly jam session at Local 802 for the Jazz Foundation of America. “I worked with Rudy at the jam session,” said singer and songwriter Okaru Lovelace. “He was a good drummer and always had something positive to say.”
 
His memorial will be held May 15, at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan.
 

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Rudy Lawless, the consummate drummer whose definitive style earned him chairs in the bands of such notables as Andy Kirk, Blue Mitchell, Hank Jones and Roy Eldridge, died Feb. 21 in Manhattan at the Bellevue Hospice. He was 84.
 
His boyhood friend and fellow musician, Richard Butts, confirmed his death as a result of assorted health complications. He also confirmed that Lawless was born in Sydenham Hospital in Harlem.
 
“Rudy’s passing is a great loss to the NYC jazz community,” said saxophonist/composer and friend, Rene McLean. “Aside from being a great musician in his own right, he was boyhood friends with of Jackie McLean, Sonny Rollins and Arthur Taylor, who grew up in the rich cultural environment of Harlem’s Sugar Hill.”
 
Lawless seemed to be committed to the music from the very beginning. While residing in Harlem on 159th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, he was only blocks away from the noted drummers Sid Catlett, Denzel Best and Jimmy Crawford.
 
Lawless was basically a self-taught musician but was afforded the opportunity to be under the tutelage of Best. He and his young drummer friend Ben Riley took lessons from Roy Haynes, when he was not busy on the road.
 
Lawless once stated his idol Art Blakey, who also became a good friend, would stop by on occasion to give him some drumming tips. At 16, he spent a summer touring the U.S. with Eddie Durham’s band.
 
“Living in Harlem, Rudy had seen it all, like the greats James P. Johnson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis,” said saxophonist Bill Saxton. “Rudy didn’t mind sharing his knowledge or experiences with the younger musicians.”
 
Lawless’ soft touch and smooth brushwork made him a regular accompanist with such noted singers as Hazel Scott, Dakota Staton, Etta Jones and Betty Roche during the 1970s.
 
In the early ’60s, he did a three-week stint with Mary Lou Williams at the then famous Hickory House on 52nd Street. He has recorded with pianists Junior Mance (in Tokyo) and Lenore Raphael, and vibraphonist Freddie McCoy.
 
From 1988 to 1990, Lawless took his own group to perform in Tokyo. Through the ’90s until recently, he and his ensembles performed regularly in clubs with vocalists Keisha St. Joan and George Jackson, with whom he also recorded three albums.
 
“I am grateful that Rudy was in my life,” said pianist/composer Danny Mixon. “We are family. I knew him when I was in my twenties. He played on my latest CD ‘Pass It On’ [2015]. At the time his health was declining, but he played anyway and I am forever grateful to him.”
 
When Lawless was not performing, he was giving back to the community by working with various nonprofit organizations. He always said, “I have to give back what was given to me.”
 
For three years, he hosted the weekly jam session at Local 802 for the Jazz Foundation of America. “I worked with Rudy at the jam session,” said singer and songwriter Okaru Lovelace. “He was a good drummer and always had something positive to say.”
 
His memorial will be held May 15, at St. Peter’s Church in Manhattan.
 

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Director Kasper Collin discusses his new film, ‘I Called Him Morgan’ after its screening in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the 54th New York Film Festival. 

On the night of February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into the East Village bar Slug’s Saloon with a gun in her handbag. She came to see her common-law husband, the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, whom she had nursed through heroin addiction. They fought, he literally threw her out; then she walked back in and shot him, handed over her gun and waited for the police to arrive. Many years later, Helen was interviewed about her life with the brilliant but erratic musician, and the tapes of that interview are the backbone of this beautifully crafted and deeply affecting film from Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler).

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Director Kasper Collin discusses his new film, ‘I Called Him Morgan’ after its screening in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the 54th New York Film Festival. 

On the night of February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into the East Village bar Slug’s Saloon with a gun in her handbag. She came to see her common-law husband, the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, whom she had nursed through heroin addiction. They fought, he literally threw her out; then she walked back in and shot him, handed over her gun and waited for the police to arrive. Many years later, Helen was interviewed about her life with the brilliant but erratic musician, and the tapes of that interview are the backbone of this beautifully crafted and deeply affecting film from Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler).

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

Director Kasper Collin discusses his new film, ‘I Called Him Morgan’ after its screening in the Spotlight on Documentary section of the 54th New York Film Festival. 

On the night of February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into the East Village bar Slug’s Saloon with a gun in her handbag. She came to see her common-law husband, the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, whom she had nursed through heroin addiction. They fought, he literally threw her out; then she walked back in and shot him, handed over her gun and waited for the police to arrive. Many years later, Helen was interviewed about her life with the brilliant but erratic musician, and the tapes of that interview are the backbone of this beautifully crafted and deeply affecting film from Kasper Collin (My Name Is Albert Ayler).

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

One is a well-established reissue label, known the world over for its completist black boxes filled with beautifully remastered jazz recordings from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The other is a new label that records only new jazz, released in elaborate packages that include a poem and original artwork, not to mention transparent 180gm pressings, tying into the newly fashionable idea of a vinyl lifestyle.
In both cases, hope truly springs eternal. While the larger music business continues to be roiled by changing formats and the impact of streaming, the old and the new labels, Mosaic Records and Newvelle Records, continue to exist, even prosper. Mosaic has hit a new high with the release of Classic 1936–1947 Count Basie and Lester Young Studio Sessions, the first Prez collection to be cross-licensed between the material owned by Sony and Universal Music, and Newvelle has successfully entered its second year of subscription sales.
Mosaic
A longtime favorite of both jazz fans and audiophiles, Mosaic Records, based in Stamford, Connecticut, has been the object of some concern in recent years. There were ever-longer gaps between releases, and if the traffic in my Stereophile e-mail inbox was any indication, readers worried that Mosaic was fading away.
“There were a few fallow periods along the way,” admits Michael Cuscuna, who founded Mosaic in 1983 with Charlie Lourie, then director of marketing for Blue Note Records. “In the ’90s, when the Robert Johnson set came out on Columbia and it really took off, the majors were all suddenly thinking, ‘Oh, boxed sets sell—so maybe we shouldn’t license out stuff.’ For a long while, it was hard to get material. Then there are other times when the economy shrinks. And then weird, random stuff. I mean, at one point Australia used to be maybe 15% of our business, and then the Australian dollar tanked and it all disappeared. So that was kind of a rough spot.”

A lifelong jazz fan who was raised in Connecticut and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Cuscuna worked as a radio deejay and concert promoter in Philadelphia and New York before becoming a freelance producer of jazz and pop records, for Atlantic, Blue Note, Columbia, and other labels. He also wrote about music, for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Down Beat, and Record World. Beginning in 1979, when Down Beat added the category of Producer of the Year to its annual Critics’ Poll, Cuscuna won it three years running. He’s won Grammies for Best Historical Album—in 1992 for The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio (Mosaic), and in 2001 for Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933–1944 (Columbia)—and, in 1988, for Best Liner Notes, for The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965–1968 (Columbia/Mosaic). In 1982, Cuscuna and Lourie developed a plan to reactivate the inactive Blue Note label, whose catalog was then owned by Capitol/EMI.
“One night I was just sitting around with a bottle of wine and noodling with numbers, and I called Charlie at midnight and said, ‘You know, this whole boxed thing could be a business unto itself. I think we have a business . . . that would really appeal to our senses—doing something that was complete and definitive, and going back and re-upping the quality of the sound, and documenting it in fact-rich booklets with research and photos and all that stuff.’ It just suited our mentalities, and after Capitol turned us down, that’s what happened.”
Among the very first Mosaic sets to be issued were The Complete Pacific Jazz Recordings of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, and The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk.
“What I wanted to do was, basically, put out records without being in the record business,” Cuscuna says. “I knew I wanted to avoid distributors and retail, because of returns that would get battered and have to be scrapped and because of unpaid invoices. To make a boxed-set thing work it had to be direct mail, full price goes to us, and inventory very cautiously controlled by us; otherwise, we would have been outta business in the first year. If we made a limited edition of 5000 and it would sell out in two years, we’d make 5000 times $70, or whatever, and we thought that would be great. Well, no—it ended up where we used our savings and credit cards, and we didn’t take a salary for about three-and-a-half years, but we kept it going because we knew it would catch on. It’s just that it built slower than we expected.”
The Mosaic sets released now number over 200, and fetch increasingly steep prices on the secondary market. The sources of the recordings have always been the major record labels. Remastering engineer Andreas Meyer has been with the company from the start, using metal parts, lacquers, tapes, and, if all else fails, original 78rpm discs in the best condition possible. And from the start Mosaic has tempted fate and the wrath of jazz fanatics—who revel in detail as do fans of no other genre—by labeling many of their boxes “Complete.” But before I even ask the question, Cuscuna chuckles.
“In the beginning, we wanted every set to be absolutely perfect, and when it wasn’t, we got very deflated about it. In the early days it broke my heart, but as time wears on you realize that there are things floating around, and that there are discographical errors you may not catch and correct. But you’re human, and the process is varied, and it involves a lot of people and a lot of sources, and it will happen. There will always be someone who has an alternate take that we didn’t find out about. Or we couldn’t find any source but a cracked 78, and someone will eventually say, ‘Oh, I have a mint 78.’ But how do you reach out to those people without knowing who they are? You can’t. That’s life. If we get 99% of the way, we’re happy.”

In the beginning, Mosaic sets were LP only. Then, in the mid-’80s, they began simultaneously issuing sets on CD and LP, a practice that continued until 1997; The Complete Blue Note Horace Parlan Sessions was the last to be issued in both formats.
“I looked at what was wrong with putting out LP counterparts to CD sets, and if you have a six-CD set, you’re looking at a nine- or ten-LP set. And nine or ten 180gm LPs are heavy and expensive, and so we realized that counterparts didn’t work. But when the whole LP thing started to groundswell again, what we did was we created a series of LPs that had nothing to do with our CD sets. They had concepts unto themselves. And they were consciously chosen as sets that would be three to five LPs, which would make it manageable and affordable, and so that’s what we’ve been doing. We have seven- or eight-LP sets out now, and there will be more.”
The biggest-selling Mosaic LP boxes so far have been The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio, The Complete Recordings of T-Bone Walker 1940–1954,
 
The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, and The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions. Typically, Mosaic negotiates reissue licenses with major labels reissue licenses defined by both time and sales numbers; usually, the first condition to expire is how long Mosaic can possess, reproduce, and sell the recordings. Sometimes, extensions are granted. Cuscuna says, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that it took until 1989 for the major labels to grant Mosaic the right to press CDs, because “they were new and were saving the business.”
He’s now facing the same predicament with MP3s and high-resolution downloads. “The majors will never give us rights to downloads. It’s their feeling that they can take a Mosaic set and dump the CDs into iTunes and put up the downloads for themselves. As long as they don’t use the Mosaic name or box it like the Mosaic, they can do whatever they want—it’s their material.”
While digital technology is a godsend for rescuing old or compromised source material, the future of CDs is another matter. Does Cuscuna plan to keep releasing massive CD sets like the eight-CD Classic 1936–1947 Count Basie and Lester Young Studio Sessions? “I think CDs will continue, and will be the last physical way to transport music, to disseminate music. I don’t think that our generation is going to get beyond the CD. And when the CD goes, I don’t think I’ll be around—it will last as long as I do.
 

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

One is a well-established reissue label, known the world over for its completist black boxes filled with beautifully remastered jazz recordings from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The other is a new label that records only new jazz, released in elaborate packages that include a poem and original artwork, not to mention transparent 180gm pressings, tying into the newly fashionable idea of a vinyl lifestyle.
In both cases, hope truly springs eternal. While the larger music business continues to be roiled by changing formats and the impact of streaming, the old and the new labels, Mosaic Records and Newvelle Records, continue to exist, even prosper. Mosaic has hit a new high with the release of Classic 1936–1947 Count Basie and Lester Young Studio Sessions, the first Prez collection to be cross-licensed between the material owned by Sony and Universal Music, and Newvelle has successfully entered its second year of subscription sales.
Mosaic
A longtime favorite of both jazz fans and audiophiles, Mosaic Records, based in Stamford, Connecticut, has been the object of some concern in recent years. There were ever-longer gaps between releases, and if the traffic in my Stereophile e-mail inbox was any indication, readers worried that Mosaic was fading away.
“There were a few fallow periods along the way,” admits Michael Cuscuna, who founded Mosaic in 1983 with Charlie Lourie, then director of marketing for Blue Note Records. “In the ’90s, when the Robert Johnson set came out on Columbia and it really took off, the majors were all suddenly thinking, ‘Oh, boxed sets sell—so maybe we shouldn’t license out stuff.’ For a long while, it was hard to get material. Then there are other times when the economy shrinks. And then weird, random stuff. I mean, at one point Australia used to be maybe 15% of our business, and then the Australian dollar tanked and it all disappeared. So that was kind of a rough spot.”

A lifelong jazz fan who was raised in Connecticut and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Cuscuna worked as a radio deejay and concert promoter in Philadelphia and New York before becoming a freelance producer of jazz and pop records, for Atlantic, Blue Note, Columbia, and other labels. He also wrote about music, for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Down Beat, and Record World. Beginning in 1979, when Down Beat added the category of Producer of the Year to its annual Critics’ Poll, Cuscuna won it three years running. He’s won Grammies for Best Historical Album—in 1992 for The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio (Mosaic), and in 2001 for Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933–1944 (Columbia)—and, in 1988, for Best Liner Notes, for The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965–1968 (Columbia/Mosaic). In 1982, Cuscuna and Lourie developed a plan to reactivate the inactive Blue Note label, whose catalog was then owned by Capitol/EMI.
“One night I was just sitting around with a bottle of wine and noodling with numbers, and I called Charlie at midnight and said, ‘You know, this whole boxed thing could be a business unto itself. I think we have a business . . . that would really appeal to our senses—doing something that was complete and definitive, and going back and re-upping the quality of the sound, and documenting it in fact-rich booklets with research and photos and all that stuff.’ It just suited our mentalities, and after Capitol turned us down, that’s what happened.”
Among the very first Mosaic sets to be issued were The Complete Pacific Jazz Recordings of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, and The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk.
“What I wanted to do was, basically, put out records without being in the record business,” Cuscuna says. “I knew I wanted to avoid distributors and retail, because of returns that would get battered and have to be scrapped and because of unpaid invoices. To make a boxed-set thing work it had to be direct mail, full price goes to us, and inventory very cautiously controlled by us; otherwise, we would have been outta business in the first year. If we made a limited edition of 5000 and it would sell out in two years, we’d make 5000 times $70, or whatever, and we thought that would be great. Well, no—it ended up where we used our savings and credit cards, and we didn’t take a salary for about three-and-a-half years, but we kept it going because we knew it would catch on. It’s just that it built slower than we expected.”
The Mosaic sets released now number over 200, and fetch increasingly steep prices on the secondary market. The sources of the recordings have always been the major record labels. Remastering engineer Andreas Meyer has been with the company from the start, using metal parts, lacquers, tapes, and, if all else fails, original 78rpm discs in the best condition possible. And from the start Mosaic has tempted fate and the wrath of jazz fanatics—who revel in detail as do fans of no other genre—by labeling many of their boxes “Complete.” But before I even ask the question, Cuscuna chuckles.
“In the beginning, we wanted every set to be absolutely perfect, and when it wasn’t, we got very deflated about it. In the early days it broke my heart, but as time wears on you realize that there are things floating around, and that there are discographical errors you may not catch and correct. But you’re human, and the process is varied, and it involves a lot of people and a lot of sources, and it will happen. There will always be someone who has an alternate take that we didn’t find out about. Or we couldn’t find any source but a cracked 78, and someone will eventually say, ‘Oh, I have a mint 78.’ But how do you reach out to those people without knowing who they are? You can’t. That’s life. If we get 99% of the way, we’re happy.”

In the beginning, Mosaic sets were LP only. Then, in the mid-’80s, they began simultaneously issuing sets on CD and LP, a practice that continued until 1997; The Complete Blue Note Horace Parlan Sessions was the last to be issued in both formats.
“I looked at what was wrong with putting out LP counterparts to CD sets, and if you have a six-CD set, you’re looking at a nine- or ten-LP set. And nine or ten 180gm LPs are heavy and expensive, and so we realized that counterparts didn’t work. But when the whole LP thing started to groundswell again, what we did was we created a series of LPs that had nothing to do with our CD sets. They had concepts unto themselves. And they were consciously chosen as sets that would be three to five LPs, which would make it manageable and affordable, and so that’s what we’ve been doing. We have seven- or eight-LP sets out now, and there will be more.”
The biggest-selling Mosaic LP boxes so far have been The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio, The Complete Recordings of T-Bone Walker 1940–1954,
 
The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, and The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions. Typically, Mosaic negotiates reissue licenses with major labels reissue licenses defined by both time and sales numbers; usually, the first condition to expire is how long Mosaic can possess, reproduce, and sell the recordings. Sometimes, extensions are granted. Cuscuna says, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that it took until 1989 for the major labels to grant Mosaic the right to press CDs, because “they were new and were saving the business.”
He’s now facing the same predicament with MP3s and high-resolution downloads. “The majors will never give us rights to downloads. It’s their feeling that they can take a Mosaic set and dump the CDs into iTunes and put up the downloads for themselves. As long as they don’t use the Mosaic name or box it like the Mosaic, they can do whatever they want—it’s their material.”
While digital technology is a godsend for rescuing old or compromised source material, the future of CDs is another matter. Does Cuscuna plan to keep releasing massive CD sets like the eight-CD Classic 1936–1947 Count Basie and Lester Young Studio Sessions? “I think CDs will continue, and will be the last physical way to transport music, to disseminate music. I don’t think that our generation is going to get beyond the CD. And when the CD goes, I don’t think I’ll be around—it will last as long as I do.
 

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

One is a well-established reissue label, known the world over for its completist black boxes filled with beautifully remastered jazz recordings from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The other is a new label that records only new jazz, released in elaborate packages that include a poem and original artwork, not to mention transparent 180gm pressings, tying into the newly fashionable idea of a vinyl lifestyle.
In both cases, hope truly springs eternal. While the larger music business continues to be roiled by changing formats and the impact of streaming, the old and the new labels, Mosaic Records and Newvelle Records, continue to exist, even prosper. Mosaic has hit a new high with the release of Classic 1936–1947 Count Basie and Lester Young Studio Sessions, the first Prez collection to be cross-licensed between the material owned by Sony and Universal Music, and Newvelle has successfully entered its second year of subscription sales.
Mosaic
A longtime favorite of both jazz fans and audiophiles, Mosaic Records, based in Stamford, Connecticut, has been the object of some concern in recent years. There were ever-longer gaps between releases, and if the traffic in my Stereophile e-mail inbox was any indication, readers worried that Mosaic was fading away.
“There were a few fallow periods along the way,” admits Michael Cuscuna, who founded Mosaic in 1983 with Charlie Lourie, then director of marketing for Blue Note Records. “In the ’90s, when the Robert Johnson set came out on Columbia and it really took off, the majors were all suddenly thinking, ‘Oh, boxed sets sell—so maybe we shouldn’t license out stuff.’ For a long while, it was hard to get material. Then there are other times when the economy shrinks. And then weird, random stuff. I mean, at one point Australia used to be maybe 15% of our business, and then the Australian dollar tanked and it all disappeared. So that was kind of a rough spot.”

A lifelong jazz fan who was raised in Connecticut and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, Cuscuna worked as a radio deejay and concert promoter in Philadelphia and New York before becoming a freelance producer of jazz and pop records, for Atlantic, Blue Note, Columbia, and other labels. He also wrote about music, for The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Down Beat, and Record World. Beginning in 1979, when Down Beat added the category of Producer of the Year to its annual Critics’ Poll, Cuscuna won it three years running. He’s won Grammies for Best Historical Album—in 1992 for The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio (Mosaic), and in 2001 for Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia 1933–1944 (Columbia)—and, in 1988, for Best Liner Notes, for The Complete Columbia Studio Recordings of the Miles Davis Quintet 1965–1968 (Columbia/Mosaic). In 1982, Cuscuna and Lourie developed a plan to reactivate the inactive Blue Note label, whose catalog was then owned by Capitol/EMI.
“One night I was just sitting around with a bottle of wine and noodling with numbers, and I called Charlie at midnight and said, ‘You know, this whole boxed thing could be a business unto itself. I think we have a business . . . that would really appeal to our senses—doing something that was complete and definitive, and going back and re-upping the quality of the sound, and documenting it in fact-rich booklets with research and photos and all that stuff.’ It just suited our mentalities, and after Capitol turned us down, that’s what happened.”
Among the very first Mosaic sets to be issued were The Complete Pacific Jazz Recordings of the Gerry Mulligan Quartet with Chet Baker, The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Albert Ammons and Meade Lux Lewis, and The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk.
“What I wanted to do was, basically, put out records without being in the record business,” Cuscuna says. “I knew I wanted to avoid distributors and retail, because of returns that would get battered and have to be scrapped and because of unpaid invoices. To make a boxed-set thing work it had to be direct mail, full price goes to us, and inventory very cautiously controlled by us; otherwise, we would have been outta business in the first year. If we made a limited edition of 5000 and it would sell out in two years, we’d make 5000 times $70, or whatever, and we thought that would be great. Well, no—it ended up where we used our savings and credit cards, and we didn’t take a salary for about three-and-a-half years, but we kept it going because we knew it would catch on. It’s just that it built slower than we expected.”
The Mosaic sets released now number over 200, and fetch increasingly steep prices on the secondary market. The sources of the recordings have always been the major record labels. Remastering engineer Andreas Meyer has been with the company from the start, using metal parts, lacquers, tapes, and, if all else fails, original 78rpm discs in the best condition possible. And from the start Mosaic has tempted fate and the wrath of jazz fanatics—who revel in detail as do fans of no other genre—by labeling many of their boxes “Complete.” But before I even ask the question, Cuscuna chuckles.
“In the beginning, we wanted every set to be absolutely perfect, and when it wasn’t, we got very deflated about it. In the early days it broke my heart, but as time wears on you realize that there are things floating around, and that there are discographical errors you may not catch and correct. But you’re human, and the process is varied, and it involves a lot of people and a lot of sources, and it will happen. There will always be someone who has an alternate take that we didn’t find out about. Or we couldn’t find any source but a cracked 78, and someone will eventually say, ‘Oh, I have a mint 78.’ But how do you reach out to those people without knowing who they are? You can’t. That’s life. If we get 99% of the way, we’re happy.”

In the beginning, Mosaic sets were LP only. Then, in the mid-’80s, they began simultaneously issuing sets on CD and LP, a practice that continued until 1997; The Complete Blue Note Horace Parlan Sessions was the last to be issued in both formats.
“I looked at what was wrong with putting out LP counterparts to CD sets, and if you have a six-CD set, you’re looking at a nine- or ten-LP set. And nine or ten 180gm LPs are heavy and expensive, and so we realized that counterparts didn’t work. But when the whole LP thing started to groundswell again, what we did was we created a series of LPs that had nothing to do with our CD sets. They had concepts unto themselves. And they were consciously chosen as sets that would be three to five LPs, which would make it manageable and affordable, and so that’s what we’ve been doing. We have seven- or eight-LP sets out now, and there will be more.”
The biggest-selling Mosaic LP boxes so far have been The Complete Capitol Recordings of the Nat King Cole Trio, The Complete Recordings of T-Bone Walker 1940–1954,
 
The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Thelonious Monk, and The Complete Verve Gerry Mulligan Concert Band Sessions. Typically, Mosaic negotiates reissue licenses with major labels reissue licenses defined by both time and sales numbers; usually, the first condition to expire is how long Mosaic can possess, reproduce, and sell the recordings. Sometimes, extensions are granted. Cuscuna says, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that it took until 1989 for the major labels to grant Mosaic the right to press CDs, because “they were new and were saving the business.”
He’s now facing the same predicament with MP3s and high-resolution downloads. “The majors will never give us rights to downloads. It’s their feeling that they can take a Mosaic set and dump the CDs into iTunes and put up the downloads for themselves. As long as they don’t use the Mosaic name or box it like the Mosaic, they can do whatever they want—it’s their material.”
While digital technology is a godsend for rescuing old or compromised source material, the future of CDs is another matter. Does Cuscuna plan to keep releasing massive CD sets like the eight-CD Classic 1936–1947 Count Basie and Lester Young Studio Sessions? “I think CDs will continue, and will be the last physical way to transport music, to disseminate music. I don’t think that our generation is going to get beyond the CD. And when the CD goes, I don’t think I’ll be around—it will last as long as I do.
 

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

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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A W.P.A. mural at Harlem Hospital Center, a stop on a walking tour organized by the Cooper Hewitt in tandem with its exhibition “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.” Hilary Swift for The New York Times
To grasp the history behind “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” a new exhibition opening next month at the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, there is far more to study and experience than just the 400 pieces of art, furniture and textiles on view.
There is the museum’s Immersion Room, for example, where vintage wallpaper patterns are digitally projected, floor to ceiling; while there, take in a playlist piped in courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center. If your timing is good, you might catch a spontaneous jazz performance in the galleries by students from the Manhattan School of Music.
Or get out of the museum entirely and take a walking tour of Harlem that highlights the nightclubs where artists and designers of the time mingled and drew inspiration.
Those attractions are part of an overhaul in recent years at the Cooper Hewitt, which its director, Caroline Baumann, describes as a self-conscious effort to shake off its reputation as “an elegant, lovely museum on 91st Street you experience once a year.” Under Ms. Baumann, the institution has become more interactive, more high-tech and more collaborative with other institutions — the kind of ingredients that tend to appeal to younger visitors.
“We have blown the dust off the place,” Ms. Baumann said.
“The Jazz Age” is an example of a classic Cooper Hewitt design exhibition — silk, diamonds, gorgeous furniture — given some new juice. The show, which runs from April 7 through Aug. 20, was organized with the Cleveland Museum of Art and has an extensive complement of public programming both inside and outside the museum, extending the themes beyond the Cooper Hewitt’s walls. The walking tour, planned for May 18, is presented by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, a Smithsonian affiliate.
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
The show itself celebrates the ingenuity of designers and architects during a time of rapid modernization, when technology and a fast-changing popular culture — exemplified by jazz music — were reshaping everyday life. Taking a broad look at design and fashion, “The Jazz Age” encapsulates the changes of the era in jewelry, tableware, furniture, posters and architectural fixtures.

 
Right, detail of a screen depicting a muse with a violin, circa 1930. Left, The “New Yorker” punch bowl from 1931. From left: Rose Iron Works Collections; Smithsonian Institution
Many of the items directly reflect the excitement and novelty of the modern age, like Louis W. Rice’s skyscraper tea service from 1928, with tall, rectangular pots in silver-plated brass. Radios in sleek Bakelite pay tribute to the new medium as a means of instantaneous communication reaching across the planet; one by Raymond Loewy from 1933, called “New World,” is even shaped as a globe.
“The Jazz Age” also looks at developments in manufacturing, when major department stores were studying contemporary trends in European furniture and creating mass-market versions for the rising American middle classes. Those imitations could still be surprisingly avant-garde, like Lord & Taylor’s version of a Jallot dressing table and bench, whose pinched angles make them look like something out of a German Expressionist film set.
“The whole ethos of the 1920s is about innovation,” said Sarah Coffin, the curator of product design and decorative arts at the Cooper Hewitt. “People were using old methodologies and new ones concurrently, to create something new.”
Jazz itself is a loose connecting thread throughout the exhibition. Ms. Coffin said that she chose the Jazz Age as a historical concept tying together trends in art and popular culture from the end of World War I into the 1930s. It was a time when European designers found a new market in the booming 1920s American economy, and black American celebrities like Josephine Baker were likewise finding a new freedom and adoration in Paris. Meanwhile, women were becoming increasingly liberated.
“Jazz is both a metaphor and an actual fact,” said Ms. Coffin, who organized the show with Stephen Harrison of the Cleveland Museum, where it will travel in September.
The metaphor pulsates throughout the show as a kind of new aesthetic rhythm. It turns up in the loose-limbed dancing figures on posters and glass vases, and in the syncopated patterns on textiles like Sonia Delaunay’s “Tissu Simultané́.” Sometimes the influence is explicit, as with Viktor Schreckengost’s “New Yorker” punch bowl from 1931, a riot of cocktails, musical notes and the letters J-A-Z-Z in a turquoise glaze meant to evoke neon lights. (That piece has an appealing origin story: It was ordered by an anonymous client who turned out to be Eleanor Roosevelt.)

 
Right, Hugh Ferriss’s 1922 “Study for Maximum Mass Permitted by the 1916 New York Zoning Law, Stage 4.” Left, A Bakelite radio designed in 1932. Matt Flynn/Smithsonian Institution
The connection to jazz was more literal on the streets of Harlem, whose nightclubs were the chic attraction of the time and had a particular draw on young artists, including both white Americans and European transplants, each curious about African-American culture.
The Harlem walking tour will pass by the sites of several historic music venues, like Smalls Paradise and the Alhambra Ballroom, where Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton performed. Some of the most famous clubs of the time, however, have been lost in the churn of redevelopment; the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom, for instance, were torn down to make way for a housing complex.
In addition to night-life spots, the tour will also take in some of the cultural and architectural highlights, like W. C. Handy’s residence on Striver’s Row, and the Hotel Theresa, a hub of black life in Harlem (and, in 1960, the site of a press bonanza when Fidel Castro stayed there). It will conclude at a current jazz club for a live performance.
Ryan Maloney, the director of education and programming at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said that the tour was intended not as an architectural study but as a way to delve into the history of Harlem culture, which had its impact on the design of the 1920s and continues today.
“It is based around the idea of vibrations,” Mr. Maloney said. “The musical vibrations, the cultural vibrations, the artistic vibrations that were set into motion here in this neighborhood. When we think about music, dance, fashion and the language we have today, so much of that can be traced directly back to Harlem during the era that this exhibit is highlighting.”
Those kinds of connections, between museums and across the city, are the kind of thing that Ms. Baumann said she wanted the Cooper Hewitt to embrace, with “The Jazz Age” as an example.
“I’m doing everything I can,” she said, “to make this much more than just an exhibition.”
 

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A W.P.A. mural at Harlem Hospital Center, a stop on a walking tour organized by the Cooper Hewitt in tandem with its exhibition “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.” Hilary Swift for The New York Times
To grasp the history behind “The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s,” a new exhibition opening next month at the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian’s design museum, there is far more to study and experience than just the 400 pieces of art, furniture and textiles on view.
There is the museum’s Immersion Room, for example, where vintage wallpaper patterns are digitally projected, floor to ceiling; while there, take in a playlist piped in courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center. If your timing is good, you might catch a spontaneous jazz performance in the galleries by students from the Manhattan School of Music.
Or get out of the museum entirely and take a walking tour of Harlem that highlights the nightclubs where artists and designers of the time mingled and drew inspiration.
Those attractions are part of an overhaul in recent years at the Cooper Hewitt, which its director, Caroline Baumann, describes as a self-conscious effort to shake off its reputation as “an elegant, lovely museum on 91st Street you experience once a year.” Under Ms. Baumann, the institution has become more interactive, more high-tech and more collaborative with other institutions — the kind of ingredients that tend to appeal to younger visitors.
“We have blown the dust off the place,” Ms. Baumann said.
“The Jazz Age” is an example of a classic Cooper Hewitt design exhibition — silk, diamonds, gorgeous furniture — given some new juice. The show, which runs from April 7 through Aug. 20, was organized with the Cleveland Museum of Art and has an extensive complement of public programming both inside and outside the museum, extending the themes beyond the Cooper Hewitt’s walls. The walking tour, planned for May 18, is presented by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, a Smithsonian affiliate.
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
The show itself celebrates the ingenuity of designers and architects during a time of rapid modernization, when technology and a fast-changing popular culture — exemplified by jazz music — were reshaping everyday life. Taking a broad look at design and fashion, “The Jazz Age” encapsulates the changes of the era in jewelry, tableware, furniture, posters and architectural fixtures.

 
Right, detail of a screen depicting a muse with a violin, circa 1930. Left, The “New Yorker” punch bowl from 1931. From left: Rose Iron Works Collections; Smithsonian Institution
Many of the items directly reflect the excitement and novelty of the modern age, like Louis W. Rice’s skyscraper tea service from 1928, with tall, rectangular pots in silver-plated brass. Radios in sleek Bakelite pay tribute to the new medium as a means of instantaneous communication reaching across the planet; one by Raymond Loewy from 1933, called “New World,” is even shaped as a globe.
“The Jazz Age” also looks at developments in manufacturing, when major department stores were studying contemporary trends in European furniture and creating mass-market versions for the rising American middle classes. Those imitations could still be surprisingly avant-garde, like Lord & Taylor’s version of a Jallot dressing table and bench, whose pinched angles make them look like something out of a German Expressionist film set.
“The whole ethos of the 1920s is about innovation,” said Sarah Coffin, the curator of product design and decorative arts at the Cooper Hewitt. “People were using old methodologies and new ones concurrently, to create something new.”
Jazz itself is a loose connecting thread throughout the exhibition. Ms. Coffin said that she chose the Jazz Age as a historical concept tying together trends in art and popular culture from the end of World War I into the 1930s. It was a time when European designers found a new market in the booming 1920s American economy, and black American celebrities like Josephine Baker were likewise finding a new freedom and adoration in Paris. Meanwhile, women were becoming increasingly liberated.
“Jazz is both a metaphor and an actual fact,” said Ms. Coffin, who organized the show with Stephen Harrison of the Cleveland Museum, where it will travel in September.
The metaphor pulsates throughout the show as a kind of new aesthetic rhythm. It turns up in the loose-limbed dancing figures on posters and glass vases, and in the syncopated patterns on textiles like Sonia Delaunay’s “Tissu Simultané́.” Sometimes the influence is explicit, as with Viktor Schreckengost’s “New Yorker” punch bowl from 1931, a riot of cocktails, musical notes and the letters J-A-Z-Z in a turquoise glaze meant to evoke neon lights. (That piece has an appealing origin story: It was ordered by an anonymous client who turned out to be Eleanor Roosevelt.)

 
Right, Hugh Ferriss’s 1922 “Study for Maximum Mass Permitted by the 1916 New York Zoning Law, Stage 4.” Left, A Bakelite radio designed in 1932. Matt Flynn/Smithsonian Institution
The connection to jazz was more literal on the streets of Harlem, whose nightclubs were the chic attraction of the time and had a particular draw on young artists, including both white Americans and European transplants, each curious about African-American culture.
The Harlem walking tour will pass by the sites of several historic music venues, like Smalls Paradise and the Alhambra Ballroom, where Bessie Smith and Jelly Roll Morton performed. Some of the most famous clubs of the time, however, have been lost in the churn of redevelopment; the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom, for instance, were torn down to make way for a housing complex.
In addition to night-life spots, the tour will also take in some of the cultural and architectural highlights, like W. C. Handy’s residence on Striver’s Row, and the Hotel Theresa, a hub of black life in Harlem (and, in 1960, the site of a press bonanza when Fidel Castro stayed there). It will conclude at a current jazz club for a live performance.
Ryan Maloney, the director of education and programming at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said that the tour was intended not as an architectural study but as a way to delve into the history of Harlem culture, which had its impact on the design of the 1920s and continues today.
“It is based around the idea of vibrations,” Mr. Maloney said. “The musical vibrations, the cultural vibrations, the artistic vibrations that were set into motion here in this neighborhood. When we think about music, dance, fashion and the language we have today, so much of that can be traced directly back to Harlem during the era that this exhibit is highlighting.”
Those kinds of connections, between museums and across the city, are the kind of thing that Ms. Baumann said she wanted the Cooper Hewitt to embrace, with “The Jazz Age” as an example.
“I’m doing everything I can,” she said, “to make this much more than just an exhibition.”
 

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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Misha Mengelberg performing in 1980 in Amsterdam. Frans Schellekens/Redferns
 
Misha Mengelberg, a Dutch pianist and composer who approached the jazz tradition with an adventurous spirit and an antic sense of humor, died on March 3 in Amsterdam. He was 81.
 
His death was announced by the Instant Composers Pool, the Dutch experimental jazz collective that he helped found in 1967. No cause was given, but Mr. Mengelberg was known to have dementia and had not performed in public for several years.
 
American jazz fans know Mr. Mengelberg best as the pianist on the saxophonist, flutist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy’s album “Last Date,” recorded in concert shortly before Dolphy’s death in 1964. He was much better known in Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, where he was one of the leading figures in a thriving avant-garde jazz scene.
 
Mr. Mengelberg’s dissonant harmonies and unorthodox phrasing were reminiscent of Thelonious Monk, an acknowledged influence. But he also drew inspiration from many other sources, including the composer John Cage and the interdisciplinary art movement known as Fluxus.
His concerts often had the look and feel of performance art, especially when he performed with the drummer Han Bennink, a longtime colleague. In a 2000 duo concert, for example, Mr. Bennink bounced drumsticks off the floor and broke one over his knee while Mr. Mengelberg maintained a straight face as he played soft and hesitant variations on the standard “I’ve Told Every Little Star.”
 
Reviewing the performance, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times described them as “a wild shock-comedy team as much as anything else.”
 
In an online tribute last week, the pianist Ethan Iverson wrote: “What made Mengelberg Mengelberg wasn’t playing with respect for the text or with swinging bass and drums. What made him a force of nature was his fearless and faultless sense of the absurd.”
Misja Mengelberg (he later changed the spelling of his first name) was born into a musical family on June 5, 1935, in Kiev, in what is now Ukraine. His father, Karel, was a conductor; his mother, the former Rahel Draber, was a harpist; a great-uncle was a conductor who had worked with Arturo Toscanini.
 
He began taking piano lessons shortly after the family moved to the Netherlands in the late 1930s. After briefly studying architecture, he attended the Royal Conservatory in The Hague from 1958 to 1964, gradually shifting his focus from classical music to jazz.
In 1963 Mr. Mengelberg formed a quartet, whose members included Mr. Bennink. The next year he, Mr. Bennink and the bassist Jacques Schols accompanied Dolphy at the concert in the Dutch city of Hilversum that would be released as “Last Date.” (The repertoire included an original Mengelberg composition, “Hypochristmutreefuzz.”) In 1966 his quartet performed at the Newport Jazz Festival. The next year he, Mr. Bennink and the saxophonist Willem Breuker formed the Instant Composers Pool.
 
Mr. Breuker left the organization in 1973 to form his own orchestra, the Willem Breuker Kollektief. (He died in 2010.) The ICP Orchestra, an ensemble with shifting personnel under the direction of Mr. Mengelberg and Mr. Bennink, toured Europe regularly and won praise for its unusual blend of anarchic improvisation and straight-ahead swing.
 
Mr. Mengelberg’s survivors include his wife of 52 years, the former Amy Chattelin; a daughter, Andrea; and a brother, Kaspar.
 

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Misha Mengelberg performing in 1980 in Amsterdam. Frans Schellekens/Redferns
 
Misha Mengelberg, a Dutch pianist and composer who approached the jazz tradition with an adventurous spirit and an antic sense of humor, died on March 3 in Amsterdam. He was 81.
 
His death was announced by the Instant Composers Pool, the Dutch experimental jazz collective that he helped found in 1967. No cause was given, but Mr. Mengelberg was known to have dementia and had not performed in public for several years.
 
American jazz fans know Mr. Mengelberg best as the pianist on the saxophonist, flutist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy’s album “Last Date,” recorded in concert shortly before Dolphy’s death in 1964. He was much better known in Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, where he was one of the leading figures in a thriving avant-garde jazz scene.
 
Mr. Mengelberg’s dissonant harmonies and unorthodox phrasing were reminiscent of Thelonious Monk, an acknowledged influence. But he also drew inspiration from many other sources, including the composer John Cage and the interdisciplinary art movement known as Fluxus.
His concerts often had the look and feel of performance art, especially when he performed with the drummer Han Bennink, a longtime colleague. In a 2000 duo concert, for example, Mr. Bennink bounced drumsticks off the floor and broke one over his knee while Mr. Mengelberg maintained a straight face as he played soft and hesitant variations on the standard “I’ve Told Every Little Star.”
 
Reviewing the performance, Ben Ratliff of The New York Times described them as “a wild shock-comedy team as much as anything else.”
 
In an online tribute last week, the pianist Ethan Iverson wrote: “What made Mengelberg Mengelberg wasn’t playing with respect for the text or with swinging bass and drums. What made him a force of nature was his fearless and faultless sense of the absurd.”
Misja Mengelberg (he later changed the spelling of his first name) was born into a musical family on June 5, 1935, in Kiev, in what is now Ukraine. His father, Karel, was a conductor; his mother, the former Rahel Draber, was a harpist; a great-uncle was a conductor who had worked with Arturo Toscanini.
 
He began taking piano lessons shortly after the family moved to the Netherlands in the late 1930s. After briefly studying architecture, he attended the Royal Conservatory in The Hague from 1958 to 1964, gradually shifting his focus from classical music to jazz.
In 1963 Mr. Mengelberg formed a quartet, whose members included Mr. Bennink. The next year he, Mr. Bennink and the bassist Jacques Schols accompanied Dolphy at the concert in the Dutch city of Hilversum that would be released as “Last Date.” (The repertoire included an original Mengelberg composition, “Hypochristmutreefuzz.”) In 1966 his quartet performed at the Newport Jazz Festival. The next year he, Mr. Bennink and the saxophonist Willem Breuker formed the Instant Composers Pool.
 
Mr. Breuker left the organization in 1973 to form his own orchestra, the Willem Breuker Kollektief. (He died in 2010.) The ICP Orchestra, an ensemble with shifting personnel under the direction of Mr. Mengelberg and Mr. Bennink, toured Europe regularly and won praise for its unusual blend of anarchic improvisation and straight-ahead swing.
 
Mr. Mengelberg’s survivors include his wife of 52 years, the former Amy Chattelin; a daughter, Andrea; and a brother, Kaspar.
 

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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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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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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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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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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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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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