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I enjoyed La La Land. As a jazz musician, jazz educator and sometime writer about jazz, I was surprised and compelled by director Damien Chazelle’s ambitious attempt to have a layered discussion about the merits of jazz in today’s pop culture, and the difficulty of trying to be an artist of integrity in the difficult rat race undergirding the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. It’s clear from this movie (as well as his previous critically acclaimed effort, Whiplash) that Chazelle is a big fan of jazz, and he wants others to learn to appreciate this worthy American art form.
I enjoyed the cinematography, the script and the acting, particularly from the amazing Emma Stone, whom I have now forgiven for trying to pass as a Hawaiian-Chinese-American woman in Aloha. (Disclaimer: I am of Hawaiian-Chinese-Japanese ancestry, so there.) I hope she wins an Oscar for her portrayal of Mia, the actress/barista who falls for Sebastian, the intense jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling.
It’s remarkable to see a jazz-centric movie musical become so well-loved and honored by audiences and the film industry, earning $300 million so far at the box office and a record-tying 14 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Music Score. But even as the film has no doubt helped to renew mainstream interest in jazz, many jazz musicians and aficionados have criticized La La Land for its heavy-handed and cliche-ridden portrayal of jazz music, particularly in the score composed by Justin Hurwitz.
Since La La Land ostensibly shines a spotlight on jazz as seen, heard and played by a musician (Gosling’s Seb) who lives in Los Angeles, I reached out to actual jazz musicians who have called L.A. home, to see what they thought of the movie and its portrayal of jazz. Their opinions were, to put it mildly, mixed.
One of the first to publicly rail against the music in the film was noted jazz pianist, organist and composer Larry Goldings. “I want to feel something from songs,” he tells me by phone. “Someone highly skilled in the areas of harmony, melody and orchestration has the power to make people really feel something deep and lasting. Sadly, what we have here is a missed opportunity to really emote with music, due to the composer lacking this skill set.”

EXPAND

Goldings says this with the authority of someone whose own skills in this regard, as heard on his decades of work with jazz and pop artists from John Scofield to James Taylor, are beyond reproach. “I can’t argue with people who were moved by the music [in La La Land]. But we’re living in a culture of severely lowered standards. If people only knew how much deeper the experience could have been for them …”
Bandleader John Daversa, whose recent large-ensemble album Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Music of The Beatles was nominated this year for three Grammy Awards, remarks that the score “sounds like well-produced musical theater music.” When I asked if the music was, to him, representative of jazz, he answered, “Not the music that I heard, no. That’s not what I would think of as music that’s really about purely the art form, the creativity, and the imagination and innovation [of jazz].”
Pianist Josh Nelson, who recently created his own jazz homage to his hometown of Los Angeles with a multimedia project called “The Sky Remains,” took issue with Seb’s proclamation of jazz as a dying art form that needs to be rescued. “Damien Chazelle is obviously a champion of jazz in some form,” Nelson says. “But to go ahead and champion it in a way where it’s held on a pedestal by this frustrated jazz pianist who only sees the purist way of playing of music on a gig, and then alongside that tearing it down with phrases like ‘Jazz is dead’ … I get it, but that statement made me a little angry.”
It’s not clear, however, that the audience is supposed to agree with Seb’s grim “jazz is dead” proclamations. Chazelle himself seems to regard Seb’s uncompromising stance on jazz as a fatal flaw; in a recent interview with Billboard, he called Gosling’s character “kind of a fool” and compares him to “archivist-leaning jazz obsessives I like to make fun of because they think that something like [A Flock of Seagulls’] ‘I Ran’ is a crime against humanity.” Which begs the question: Is this movie that purportedly wants to defend and celebrate classic jazz actually trolling the traditionalists?
Trumpeter Bijon Watson played a significant albeit nonspeaking role in the movie as a jazz musician. He sees the storyline in more universal terms. “It definitely exemplifies the struggle of a jazz musician, but I think the jazz is really just a byproduct of [Seb’s] struggle,” he says. He is thankful for the opportunity he and other L.A. jazz musicians got to represent their music and their city, especially as he and many of his fellow musician-actors in the film also represent the African-American community. This is important in light of the rumblings from critics who would have preferred the lead role to have been played by a person of color. “You know, it’s interesting, not to turn it into a black or white issue — but it was all white musicians who played [on the soundtrack], and in the movie it was all black guys on the stage,” Watson notes. “I’m sure the guys who played on the soundtrack wished that they were featured in the movie.”

Other musicians found positives in La La Land‘s depiction of jazz. “It was good to see that a Thelonious Monk recording was featured in the movie,” notes Daniel Seeff, who is the West Coast director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, and also a successful jazz, rock and hip-hop bassist. In the film’s opening minutes, Seb is trying to learn how to play a difficult piano riff by Monk by incessantly listening to and rewinding the passage on a tape deck in his car while stuck in freeway traffic. Later, when Seb is having one of his “jazz is dead” debates with Keith, a rising jazz/pop crossover star (played convincingly by bona fide pop star John Legend), “Legend’s character mentions that Ryan Gosling’s character is too into Monk and Kenny Clarke,” Seeff notes, approving of the reference to Clarke, the bebop drummer who co-led the historic jam sessions with Monk in the ’40s at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. “At least they mentioned two great jazz musicians.”
“I really love the injection of that conversation, which is of us as musicians, as jazz musicians, as creative musicians,” says Kaveh Rastegar, bassist for the progressive jazz group Kneebody and current bassist for Legend (in real life, as well as acting onscreen in Keith’s band in the movie). “I feel like I’ve had that conversation with so many people.”
Rastegar also appreciated Seb’s inner conflict when he struggles with deciding to play music other than jazz. “My own opinion is that if you want to make anything of yourself as a musician, you’ve got to get over that question pretty quickly,” he said. “You’re going to see people doing something that’s different from you and having success in it, and whether you agree with it or not, [maybe] you choose to participate in it. That so much of what this [professional musician’s] life is.”
Drummer Peter Erskine has performed with a variety of jazz, pop and rock artists, including the legendary bands Weather Report and Steely Dan. He remains active as a jazz musician, recently releasing a new album, Second Opinion, on his own label. He has performed on countless movie soundtracks, including La La Land. Erskine defends the movie on its own merits. “I enjoyed the film. My wife and I enjoyed watching it very much,” he says. “It was a good story.” He says he is happy to have played on the soundtrack and to be part of such a successful film.
As for La La Land composer Hurwitz, Erskine is frank. “I’m sure that Justin would be the first to admit, and he would have to, that he’s not a jazz musician, and the harmonic content of what he wrote betrays that. And so, the assembled musicians did the best we could, in the amount of time we had, to jazz it up a bit.” To illustrate his point, Erskine hums one of the melodies from the soundtrack. “You know, that ain’t bebop.”

EXPAND

Hurwitz has defended attacks on his music by stating he and director Chazelle never wanted the music to be traditional. “Our challenge was to make a movie that didn’t feel old-fashioned or a soundtrack, songs or score that wouldn’t sound like they actually could have been in some of those older movies,” Hurwitz told NPR in a recent interview. That’s a fair argument, and the best-known songs from the score (namely the Oscar-nominated “City of Stars” and “Audition”) are examples of tuneful, contemporary songwriting.
What can’t be ignored, however, is that despite La La Land‘s deliberate attempts to portray music that sounds something like jazz, it falls short, especially when compared with the lofty threshold of “pure jazz” espoused by the film’s protagonist. “He’s a Monk acolyte; he’s crazy about Monk,” Erskine says of Gosling’s character. “There’s not much Monk, or sensibility of Monk [in the soundtrack]. I brought it up in the session. I thought this was supposed to be in the spirit of Monk, and the music didn’t lend itself to that.”
What about the argument that Hurwitz or Chazelle didn’t want something traditional? My opinion is that any of the L.A.-based musicians mentioned in this article could have written something that would have better represented jazz, simultaneously respecting the harmonic knowledge and embrace of tradition favored by Seb, yet refreshed with the more modern aesthetics the filmmakers were apparently seeking.
Musical reservations aside, La La Land is a huge success story, and it will most likely win a ton of Oscars, including one for best score. It has made jazz trendy once again, which is great. But will its newfound popularity cultivate a disconnect between what people who saw the movie think of as jazz, and what those who are jazz’s current keepers want it to be?
There’s a moment in the movie where Seb tells Mia, “This is Hollywood. They worship everything and they value nothing.” That probably applies to Hollywood’s attitude toward jazz, as well.
 

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I enjoyed La La Land. As a jazz musician, jazz educator and sometime writer about jazz, I was surprised and compelled by director Damien Chazelle’s ambitious attempt to have a layered discussion about the merits of jazz in today’s pop culture, and the difficulty of trying to be an artist of integrity in the difficult rat race undergirding the glitz and glamour of Hollywood. It’s clear from this movie (as well as his previous critically acclaimed effort, Whiplash) that Chazelle is a big fan of jazz, and he wants others to learn to appreciate this worthy American art form.
I enjoyed the cinematography, the script and the acting, particularly from the amazing Emma Stone, whom I have now forgiven for trying to pass as a Hawaiian-Chinese-American woman in Aloha. (Disclaimer: I am of Hawaiian-Chinese-Japanese ancestry, so there.) I hope she wins an Oscar for her portrayal of Mia, the actress/barista who falls for Sebastian, the intense jazz pianist played by Ryan Gosling.
It’s remarkable to see a jazz-centric movie musical become so well-loved and honored by audiences and the film industry, earning $300 million so far at the box office and a record-tying 14 Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Original Music Score. But even as the film has no doubt helped to renew mainstream interest in jazz, many jazz musicians and aficionados have criticized La La Land for its heavy-handed and cliche-ridden portrayal of jazz music, particularly in the score composed by Justin Hurwitz.
Since La La Land ostensibly shines a spotlight on jazz as seen, heard and played by a musician (Gosling’s Seb) who lives in Los Angeles, I reached out to actual jazz musicians who have called L.A. home, to see what they thought of the movie and its portrayal of jazz. Their opinions were, to put it mildly, mixed.
One of the first to publicly rail against the music in the film was noted jazz pianist, organist and composer Larry Goldings. “I want to feel something from songs,” he tells me by phone. “Someone highly skilled in the areas of harmony, melody and orchestration has the power to make people really feel something deep and lasting. Sadly, what we have here is a missed opportunity to really emote with music, due to the composer lacking this skill set.”

EXPAND

Goldings says this with the authority of someone whose own skills in this regard, as heard on his decades of work with jazz and pop artists from John Scofield to James Taylor, are beyond reproach. “I can’t argue with people who were moved by the music [in La La Land]. But we’re living in a culture of severely lowered standards. If people only knew how much deeper the experience could have been for them …”
Bandleader John Daversa, whose recent large-ensemble album Kaleidoscope Eyes: The Music of The Beatles was nominated this year for three Grammy Awards, remarks that the score “sounds like well-produced musical theater music.” When I asked if the music was, to him, representative of jazz, he answered, “Not the music that I heard, no. That’s not what I would think of as music that’s really about purely the art form, the creativity, and the imagination and innovation [of jazz].”
Pianist Josh Nelson, who recently created his own jazz homage to his hometown of Los Angeles with a multimedia project called “The Sky Remains,” took issue with Seb’s proclamation of jazz as a dying art form that needs to be rescued. “Damien Chazelle is obviously a champion of jazz in some form,” Nelson says. “But to go ahead and champion it in a way where it’s held on a pedestal by this frustrated jazz pianist who only sees the purist way of playing of music on a gig, and then alongside that tearing it down with phrases like ‘Jazz is dead’ … I get it, but that statement made me a little angry.”
It’s not clear, however, that the audience is supposed to agree with Seb’s grim “jazz is dead” proclamations. Chazelle himself seems to regard Seb’s uncompromising stance on jazz as a fatal flaw; in a recent interview with Billboard, he called Gosling’s character “kind of a fool” and compares him to “archivist-leaning jazz obsessives I like to make fun of because they think that something like [A Flock of Seagulls’] ‘I Ran’ is a crime against humanity.” Which begs the question: Is this movie that purportedly wants to defend and celebrate classic jazz actually trolling the traditionalists?
Trumpeter Bijon Watson played a significant albeit nonspeaking role in the movie as a jazz musician. He sees the storyline in more universal terms. “It definitely exemplifies the struggle of a jazz musician, but I think the jazz is really just a byproduct of [Seb’s] struggle,” he says. He is thankful for the opportunity he and other L.A. jazz musicians got to represent their music and their city, especially as he and many of his fellow musician-actors in the film also represent the African-American community. This is important in light of the rumblings from critics who would have preferred the lead role to have been played by a person of color. “You know, it’s interesting, not to turn it into a black or white issue — but it was all white musicians who played [on the soundtrack], and in the movie it was all black guys on the stage,” Watson notes. “I’m sure the guys who played on the soundtrack wished that they were featured in the movie.”

Other musicians found positives in La La Land‘s depiction of jazz. “It was good to see that a Thelonious Monk recording was featured in the movie,” notes Daniel Seeff, who is the West Coast director of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz at the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA, and also a successful jazz, rock and hip-hop bassist. In the film’s opening minutes, Seb is trying to learn how to play a difficult piano riff by Monk by incessantly listening to and rewinding the passage on a tape deck in his car while stuck in freeway traffic. Later, when Seb is having one of his “jazz is dead” debates with Keith, a rising jazz/pop crossover star (played convincingly by bona fide pop star John Legend), “Legend’s character mentions that Ryan Gosling’s character is too into Monk and Kenny Clarke,” Seeff notes, approving of the reference to Clarke, the bebop drummer who co-led the historic jam sessions with Monk in the ’40s at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem. “At least they mentioned two great jazz musicians.”
“I really love the injection of that conversation, which is of us as musicians, as jazz musicians, as creative musicians,” says Kaveh Rastegar, bassist for the progressive jazz group Kneebody and current bassist for Legend (in real life, as well as acting onscreen in Keith’s band in the movie). “I feel like I’ve had that conversation with so many people.”
Rastegar also appreciated Seb’s inner conflict when he struggles with deciding to play music other than jazz. “My own opinion is that if you want to make anything of yourself as a musician, you’ve got to get over that question pretty quickly,” he said. “You’re going to see people doing something that’s different from you and having success in it, and whether you agree with it or not, [maybe] you choose to participate in it. That so much of what this [professional musician’s] life is.”
Drummer Peter Erskine has performed with a variety of jazz, pop and rock artists, including the legendary bands Weather Report and Steely Dan. He remains active as a jazz musician, recently releasing a new album, Second Opinion, on his own label. He has performed on countless movie soundtracks, including La La Land. Erskine defends the movie on its own merits. “I enjoyed the film. My wife and I enjoyed watching it very much,” he says. “It was a good story.” He says he is happy to have played on the soundtrack and to be part of such a successful film.
As for La La Land composer Hurwitz, Erskine is frank. “I’m sure that Justin would be the first to admit, and he would have to, that he’s not a jazz musician, and the harmonic content of what he wrote betrays that. And so, the assembled musicians did the best we could, in the amount of time we had, to jazz it up a bit.” To illustrate his point, Erskine hums one of the melodies from the soundtrack. “You know, that ain’t bebop.”

EXPAND

Hurwitz has defended attacks on his music by stating he and director Chazelle never wanted the music to be traditional. “Our challenge was to make a movie that didn’t feel old-fashioned or a soundtrack, songs or score that wouldn’t sound like they actually could have been in some of those older movies,” Hurwitz told NPR in a recent interview. That’s a fair argument, and the best-known songs from the score (namely the Oscar-nominated “City of Stars” and “Audition”) are examples of tuneful, contemporary songwriting.
What can’t be ignored, however, is that despite La La Land‘s deliberate attempts to portray music that sounds something like jazz, it falls short, especially when compared with the lofty threshold of “pure jazz” espoused by the film’s protagonist. “He’s a Monk acolyte; he’s crazy about Monk,” Erskine says of Gosling’s character. “There’s not much Monk, or sensibility of Monk [in the soundtrack]. I brought it up in the session. I thought this was supposed to be in the spirit of Monk, and the music didn’t lend itself to that.”
What about the argument that Hurwitz or Chazelle didn’t want something traditional? My opinion is that any of the L.A.-based musicians mentioned in this article could have written something that would have better represented jazz, simultaneously respecting the harmonic knowledge and embrace of tradition favored by Seb, yet refreshed with the more modern aesthetics the filmmakers were apparently seeking.
Musical reservations aside, La La Land is a huge success story, and it will most likely win a ton of Oscars, including one for best score. It has made jazz trendy once again, which is great. But will its newfound popularity cultivate a disconnect between what people who saw the movie think of as jazz, and what those who are jazz’s current keepers want it to be?
There’s a moment in the movie where Seb tells Mia, “This is Hollywood. They worship everything and they value nothing.” That probably applies to Hollywood’s attitude toward jazz, as well.
 

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Larry Coryell performing at the World Trade Center in 1994. Alan Nahigian
 
Larry Coryell, a virtuoso guitarist who in the 1960s was among the first musicians to bring a rock sound and sensibility to jazz, and who continued to blur the lines between genres throughout his career, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 73.
 
The cause was heart failure, a spokesman, John Lappen, said. Mr. Coryell, who lived in Orlando, Fla., had been in New York to perform at the Iridium in Midtown on Friday and Saturday and died in his hotel room.
 
 
Most established jazz musicians regarded rock with suspicion if not hostility when Mr. Coryell arrived in New York from Washington State in 1965. But a younger cohort, steeped in the Beatles as well as bebop, was beginning to explore an approach that bridged the stylistic gap.
Mr. Coryell, who had grown up listening to a wide range of music, became one of the leaders of that cohort.
 
He initially attracted international attention in 1967 with the vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet, which some music historians call the first jazz-rock band. But he had been experimenting with what would soon come to be called fusion even before then.
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
In 1966 he recorded an album with the Free Spirits, a short-lived rock band that mixed radio-friendly melodies with adventurous stretches of instrumental improvisation. Most of the group’s members — including the drummer Bob Moses, who would also join the Burton quartet, and the saxophonist Jim Pepper — had jazz backgrounds.
Mr. Coryell counted Chuck Berry and the country guitarist Chet Atkins among his early inspirations. He also came under the spell of jazz at a young age, teaching himself to play along with records by Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel and other masters.
His round, ringing tone and his propensity for bending notes placed him outside the jazz guitar mainstream, but he was never all that concerned with labels.
 
“If music has something to say to you, whether it’s jazz, country-and-western, Indian music or Asian folk music, go ahead and use it,” Mr. Coryell told an interviewer in 1968.
 
Such a sentiment may seem commonplace today, but it was rare in the mid-1960s, before Miles Davis and other older jazz musicians embraced a similarly eclectic philosophy, as Mr. Coryell himself did throughout his career. Over the years he worked with rock musicians like Jack Bruce and jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins (he also recorded with Davis, although the material from that session remains officially unreleased), as well as with musicians from India, Brazil and elsewhere.
 
Mr. Coryell began performing and recording as a leader in 1968, with a clear idea of what he wanted in a band. “One side of my personality likes the soft stuff, the jazz,” he told The New York Times in 1968. “The other side likes to play hard things, rock, with big amps. I have to get musicians who can go both ways.”
 
On his album “Spaces” (1970), considered a high-water mark of the fusion movement, he was accompanied by leading exemplars of the genre, most notably his fellow guitarist John McLaughlin, with whom he would work off and on throughout his career.
 
The loud side of Mr. Coryell’s personality took center stage in 1972 when he formed the Eleventh House, a seminal fusion band that emphasized complex, thunderous compositions and flashy, rapid-fire solos. (The band’s powerhouse drummer, Alphonse Mouzon, went on to become a star in his own right. He died in December.) After the Eleventh House disbanded in 1975, Mr. Coryell turned off the amps for a while to focus on acoustic guitar.
 
By the 1980s he was again playing an electric instrument, but this time in a straight-ahead jazz context. Reviewing a 1985 performance for The Times, Jon Pareles noted that Mr. Coryell had moved from the “machine-gun scales and riffs” of his early years to “the subtler pleasures of jazz.”
“The slower Larry Coryell plays his guitar,” Mr. Pareles wrote, “the better he gets.”
 
Mr. Coryell toggled between jazz and jazz-rock, electric and acoustic for the rest of his career; he had been scheduled to go on tour with a new version of the Eleventh House in June.
 
Larry Coryell was born Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III in Galveston, Tex., on April 2, 1943. He never knew his biological father, a musician; he was raised by his mother, Cora, who encouraged him to learn piano when he was 4, and his stepfather, Gene Coryell, a chemical engineer. He grew up in the Seattle area, played guitar in local bands as a teenager and, after briefly studying journalism at the University of Washington, moved to New York to pursue a career in music.
 
He is survived by his wife, the former Tracey Piergross; two daughters, Allegra Coryell and Annie White; two sons, Murali and Julian; and six grandchildren. His previous two marriages ended in divorce.
 
Mr. Coryell never stopped looking to expand his musical horizons. In recent years, Mr. Lappen said, he had completed two operas based on works by Tolstoy, and had been working on another, inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” at his death.

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Larry Coryell performing at the World Trade Center in 1994. Alan Nahigian
 
Larry Coryell, a virtuoso guitarist who in the 1960s was among the first musicians to bring a rock sound and sensibility to jazz, and who continued to blur the lines between genres throughout his career, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 73.
 
The cause was heart failure, a spokesman, John Lappen, said. Mr. Coryell, who lived in Orlando, Fla., had been in New York to perform at the Iridium in Midtown on Friday and Saturday and died in his hotel room.
 
 
Most established jazz musicians regarded rock with suspicion if not hostility when Mr. Coryell arrived in New York from Washington State in 1965. But a younger cohort, steeped in the Beatles as well as bebop, was beginning to explore an approach that bridged the stylistic gap.
Mr. Coryell, who had grown up listening to a wide range of music, became one of the leaders of that cohort.
 
He initially attracted international attention in 1967 with the vibraphonist Gary Burton’s quartet, which some music historians call the first jazz-rock band. But he had been experimenting with what would soon come to be called fusion even before then.
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
In 1966 he recorded an album with the Free Spirits, a short-lived rock band that mixed radio-friendly melodies with adventurous stretches of instrumental improvisation. Most of the group’s members — including the drummer Bob Moses, who would also join the Burton quartet, and the saxophonist Jim Pepper — had jazz backgrounds.
Mr. Coryell counted Chuck Berry and the country guitarist Chet Atkins among his early inspirations. He also came under the spell of jazz at a young age, teaching himself to play along with records by Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel and other masters.
His round, ringing tone and his propensity for bending notes placed him outside the jazz guitar mainstream, but he was never all that concerned with labels.
 
“If music has something to say to you, whether it’s jazz, country-and-western, Indian music or Asian folk music, go ahead and use it,” Mr. Coryell told an interviewer in 1968.
 
Such a sentiment may seem commonplace today, but it was rare in the mid-1960s, before Miles Davis and other older jazz musicians embraced a similarly eclectic philosophy, as Mr. Coryell himself did throughout his career. Over the years he worked with rock musicians like Jack Bruce and jazz musicians like Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins (he also recorded with Davis, although the material from that session remains officially unreleased), as well as with musicians from India, Brazil and elsewhere.
 
Mr. Coryell began performing and recording as a leader in 1968, with a clear idea of what he wanted in a band. “One side of my personality likes the soft stuff, the jazz,” he told The New York Times in 1968. “The other side likes to play hard things, rock, with big amps. I have to get musicians who can go both ways.”
 
On his album “Spaces” (1970), considered a high-water mark of the fusion movement, he was accompanied by leading exemplars of the genre, most notably his fellow guitarist John McLaughlin, with whom he would work off and on throughout his career.
 
The loud side of Mr. Coryell’s personality took center stage in 1972 when he formed the Eleventh House, a seminal fusion band that emphasized complex, thunderous compositions and flashy, rapid-fire solos. (The band’s powerhouse drummer, Alphonse Mouzon, went on to become a star in his own right. He died in December.) After the Eleventh House disbanded in 1975, Mr. Coryell turned off the amps for a while to focus on acoustic guitar.
 
By the 1980s he was again playing an electric instrument, but this time in a straight-ahead jazz context. Reviewing a 1985 performance for The Times, Jon Pareles noted that Mr. Coryell had moved from the “machine-gun scales and riffs” of his early years to “the subtler pleasures of jazz.”
“The slower Larry Coryell plays his guitar,” Mr. Pareles wrote, “the better he gets.”
 
Mr. Coryell toggled between jazz and jazz-rock, electric and acoustic for the rest of his career; he had been scheduled to go on tour with a new version of the Eleventh House in June.
 
Larry Coryell was born Lorenz Albert Van DeLinder III in Galveston, Tex., on April 2, 1943. He never knew his biological father, a musician; he was raised by his mother, Cora, who encouraged him to learn piano when he was 4, and his stepfather, Gene Coryell, a chemical engineer. He grew up in the Seattle area, played guitar in local bands as a teenager and, after briefly studying journalism at the University of Washington, moved to New York to pursue a career in music.
 
He is survived by his wife, the former Tracey Piergross; two daughters, Allegra Coryell and Annie White; two sons, Murali and Julian; and six grandchildren. His previous two marriages ended in divorce.
 
Mr. Coryell never stopped looking to expand his musical horizons. In recent years, Mr. Lappen said, he had completed two operas based on works by Tolstoy, and had been working on another, inspired by James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” at his death.

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Skip Bolen/Getty
Bourbon Street essentially became Bourbon Street—the nation’s most famous outdoor mall of drinking and debauchery—fairly quickly and fairly recently. (It’s a story told in colorful detail in Richard Campanella’s 2014 Bourbon Street: A History.) After World War II and up into the 1960s, Bourbon Street was a stable stretch of racy jazz clubs and burlesque joints—places that served as actual destinations: You arrived at a club, you stepped through doors, you were seated at a table, and you watched a show. Like cities everywhere, it was something you might do on a date, and something guys would definitely would do when in town for a convention. (Today, there’s only one spot where you walk into a vestige of that past: Chris Owens Club.) Bourbon Street was full of such places, with doors closed to the street and respectably well-dressed people inside.
Then, like a lumbering, shaggy beast, the 1960s arrived. Now you had two forces that altered the street’s character. First, a generation came up that thought only squares and The Man went to night clubs. Know what was cooler? Getting a drink, smoking some weed, and hanging out on a stoop and watching people walk by.
Another force was local District Attorney Jim Garrison—yes, that Jim Garrison, the one who “solved” the JFK assassination—who felt that Bourbon Street had become a magnet for sketchy activity.
Starting in 1962 he campaigned against prostitution and drinking scams in the fleshpots, peel parlors, and skin mills (all actual words used in the 1960s). When club owners lost these profitable side ventures, they sought to make it up in other ways. Among these was the selling of drinks to stoned hippies and counter culturists walking past the club.
And, rather swiftly, Bourbon Street turned inside out. In 1967, the go-cup first surfaced, which was the chief tool of what was then called “window-hawking.” In 1971, the city decided to close the street to cars in the evenings. And thus Bourbon Street became the place we know today: a place where the borderlands between street and bar were blurred if not eliminated.
If the city’s proposals for getting a grip on the the French Quarter move ahead as planned, this moment could mark the beginning of the inversion of Bourbon St. as several generations have known it.
Closing doors on bars won’t make the city safer or empty the streets. But it will certainly put hedonistic New Orleans another step closer to the rest of puritanical America.
 

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Skip Bolen/Getty
Bourbon Street essentially became Bourbon Street—the nation’s most famous outdoor mall of drinking and debauchery—fairly quickly and fairly recently. (It’s a story told in colorful detail in Richard Campanella’s 2014 Bourbon Street: A History.) After World War II and up into the 1960s, Bourbon Street was a stable stretch of racy jazz clubs and burlesque joints—places that served as actual destinations: You arrived at a club, you stepped through doors, you were seated at a table, and you watched a show. Like cities everywhere, it was something you might do on a date, and something guys would definitely would do when in town for a convention. (Today, there’s only one spot where you walk into a vestige of that past: Chris Owens Club.) Bourbon Street was full of such places, with doors closed to the street and respectably well-dressed people inside.
Then, like a lumbering, shaggy beast, the 1960s arrived. Now you had two forces that altered the street’s character. First, a generation came up that thought only squares and The Man went to night clubs. Know what was cooler? Getting a drink, smoking some weed, and hanging out on a stoop and watching people walk by.
Another force was local District Attorney Jim Garrison—yes, that Jim Garrison, the one who “solved” the JFK assassination—who felt that Bourbon Street had become a magnet for sketchy activity.
Starting in 1962 he campaigned against prostitution and drinking scams in the fleshpots, peel parlors, and skin mills (all actual words used in the 1960s). When club owners lost these profitable side ventures, they sought to make it up in other ways. Among these was the selling of drinks to stoned hippies and counter culturists walking past the club.
And, rather swiftly, Bourbon Street turned inside out. In 1967, the go-cup first surfaced, which was the chief tool of what was then called “window-hawking.” In 1971, the city decided to close the street to cars in the evenings. And thus Bourbon Street became the place we know today: a place where the borderlands between street and bar were blurred if not eliminated.
If the city’s proposals for getting a grip on the the French Quarter move ahead as planned, this moment could mark the beginning of the inversion of Bourbon St. as several generations have known it.
Closing doors on bars won’t make the city safer or empty the streets. But it will certainly put hedonistic New Orleans another step closer to the rest of puritanical America.
 

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Guitarist Larry Coryell recorded or appeared on more than 100 albums during a jazz career that spanned more than 50 years.
Courtesy of 429 Records
 
Larry Coryell, the jazz guitarist known as the “Godfather of Fusion,” died Sunday night at a hotel in New York City, according to his publicist. He was 73.
 
Coryell was still performing more than 50 years after his first recordings. He played at New York jazz club Iridium on Friday and Saturday night, and had plans for a summer tour with his fusion group The Eleventh House.
 
Coryell’s recordings in the late 1960s, first with his band the Free Spirits, then with the Gary Burton Quartet and finally as a bandleader, predicted the rise of jazz-rock fusion and contributed to the sonic evolution the genre. It’s no wonder that snippets of his work were sampled by renowned producers, including J Dilla and DJ Shadow.
 
Hear “Love is Here to Stay” from Larry Coryell’s 2006 Kennedy Center Performance
 
On the NPR program Billy Taylor’s Jazz, Dr. Taylor described Coryell as such: “[Larry] plays all the styles, Latin, jazz-rock, straight ahead jazz, European classical music. You name it, he’s a master of it.”
 
In 1970, after two records under his own name, Coryell recorded the groundbreaking fusion album Spaces. The project featured fellow guitarist John McLaughlin, pianist Chick Corea on keyboards, bassist Miroslav Vitouš on bass and drummer Billy Cobham.
 
Listen To Larry Coryell’s ‘Spaces’
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The guitarist’s ’70s output totaled more than 20 albums as either a leader or co-leader. Coryell briefly worked with McLaughlin in The Guitar Trio in 1979, but was replaced after a year by Al Di Meola due a drug addiction.
 
Despite a decline in critical attention, Coryell remained remarkably productive through the 1980s and beyond. He performed on more than 100 albums, and was due to release an Eleventh House record in June of this year.
 
Coryell leaves behind his wife, Tracey, daughters Annie and Allegra, sons Murali and Julian, and six grandchildren.
 
This is a developing story: We’ll give updates on the situation as we learn more.

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Guitarist Larry Coryell recorded or appeared on more than 100 albums during a jazz career that spanned more than 50 years.
Courtesy of 429 Records
 
Larry Coryell, the jazz guitarist known as the “Godfather of Fusion,” died Sunday night at a hotel in New York City, according to his publicist. He was 73.
 
Coryell was still performing more than 50 years after his first recordings. He played at New York jazz club Iridium on Friday and Saturday night, and had plans for a summer tour with his fusion group The Eleventh House.
 
Coryell’s recordings in the late 1960s, first with his band the Free Spirits, then with the Gary Burton Quartet and finally as a bandleader, predicted the rise of jazz-rock fusion and contributed to the sonic evolution the genre. It’s no wonder that snippets of his work were sampled by renowned producers, including J Dilla and DJ Shadow.
 
Hear “Love is Here to Stay” from Larry Coryell’s 2006 Kennedy Center Performance
 
On the NPR program Billy Taylor’s Jazz, Dr. Taylor described Coryell as such: “[Larry] plays all the styles, Latin, jazz-rock, straight ahead jazz, European classical music. You name it, he’s a master of it.”
 
In 1970, after two records under his own name, Coryell recorded the groundbreaking fusion album Spaces. The project featured fellow guitarist John McLaughlin, pianist Chick Corea on keyboards, bassist Miroslav Vitouš on bass and drummer Billy Cobham.
 
Listen To Larry Coryell’s ‘Spaces’
END ID=”RES516312974″ CLASS=”BUCKETWRAP STATICHTML”
 
END CLASS=”CONTAINER LARGE” ID=”CON516313303″ PREVIEWTITLE=”SPACES”
 
The guitarist’s ’70s output totaled more than 20 albums as either a leader or co-leader. Coryell briefly worked with McLaughlin in The Guitar Trio in 1979, but was replaced after a year by Al Di Meola due a drug addiction.
 
Despite a decline in critical attention, Coryell remained remarkably productive through the 1980s and beyond. He performed on more than 100 albums, and was due to release an Eleventh House record in June of this year.
 
Coryell leaves behind his wife, Tracey, daughters Annie and Allegra, sons Murali and Julian, and six grandchildren.
 
This is a developing story: We’ll give updates on the situation as we learn more.

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However, it wasn’t until three years later after apprenticing on albums by vibraphonist Gary Burton and flutist Herbie Mann and gigging with the likes of Jack Bruce and others that Coryell established his multifarious musical voice, releasing two solo albums (Lady Coryell and Coryell) which mixed jazz, classical and rock ingredients.
 
In late 1969 he recorded Spaces, the album for which he is most noted. It was a guitar blow-out which also included John McLaughlin who was also sitting on the fence between rock and jazz at the time and the cogitative result formed what many aficionados consider to be the embryo from which the fusion jazz movement of the 1970s emerged. It contained insane tempos and fiery guitar exchanges which were often beyond category not to mention some innovating acoustic bass work by Miroslav Vitous and power drumming by Billy Cobham, both of whom were to make contributions to jazz-rock throughout the 70s.
His career as a significant guitar force in the era of late 60s and early 70s music continued to take flight in a time when guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana and many other iconic names also blossomed. His varied musical expression took him on a diverse journey, and though he did not receive the level of commercial fame some of his guitarist contemporaries enjoyed, he was still able to make his timeless mark in music through his highly acclaimed solo work (he released well over 60 solo albums), his performances with powerhouse fusion band The Eleventh House and numerous collaborations with a host of jazz greats including of Miles Davis, Gary Burton, Alphonse Mouzon, Ron Carter, Chet Baker and many other noteworthy artists of all styles.
 
Larry still toured the world right up until his passing and had planned an extensive 2017 summer tour with a reformed The Eleventh House.

His most recent releases are Barefoot Man: Sanpaku, released on October 14, 2016 on Cleopatra Records and an upcoming Eleventh House release, entitled Seven Secrets, which will be released on the Savoy Jazz label on June 2.
His final original works included operas based on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenina and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
 
He is survived by his wife, Tracey, his daughter Annie, his sons Murali and Julian, and his daughter Allegra, as well as six grandchildren.
 
A memorial service is being planned Friday February 24th at the S.G.I-USA Buddhist center at 7 east 15th St. at 7 p.m.
 
 
 

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However, it wasn’t until three years later after apprenticing on albums by vibraphonist Gary Burton and flutist Herbie Mann and gigging with the likes of Jack Bruce and others that Coryell established his multifarious musical voice, releasing two solo albums (Lady Coryell and Coryell) which mixed jazz, classical and rock ingredients.
 
In late 1969 he recorded Spaces, the album for which he is most noted. It was a guitar blow-out which also included John McLaughlin who was also sitting on the fence between rock and jazz at the time and the cogitative result formed what many aficionados consider to be the embryo from which the fusion jazz movement of the 1970s emerged. It contained insane tempos and fiery guitar exchanges which were often beyond category not to mention some innovating acoustic bass work by Miroslav Vitous and power drumming by Billy Cobham, both of whom were to make contributions to jazz-rock throughout the 70s.
His career as a significant guitar force in the era of late 60s and early 70s music continued to take flight in a time when guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana and many other iconic names also blossomed. His varied musical expression took him on a diverse journey, and though he did not receive the level of commercial fame some of his guitarist contemporaries enjoyed, he was still able to make his timeless mark in music through his highly acclaimed solo work (he released well over 60 solo albums), his performances with powerhouse fusion band The Eleventh House and numerous collaborations with a host of jazz greats including of Miles Davis, Gary Burton, Alphonse Mouzon, Ron Carter, Chet Baker and many other noteworthy artists of all styles.
 
Larry still toured the world right up until his passing and had planned an extensive 2017 summer tour with a reformed The Eleventh House.

His most recent releases are Barefoot Man: Sanpaku, released on October 14, 2016 on Cleopatra Records and an upcoming Eleventh House release, entitled Seven Secrets, which will be released on the Savoy Jazz label on June 2.
His final original works included operas based on Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenina and James Joyce’s Ulysses.
 
He is survived by his wife, Tracey, his daughter Annie, his sons Murali and Julian, and his daughter Allegra, as well as six grandchildren.
 
A memorial service is being planned Friday February 24th at the S.G.I-USA Buddhist center at 7 east 15th St. at 7 p.m.
 
 
 

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David Axelrod in an undated photograph. GAB Archive/Redferns 
 
David Axelrod, a producer, arranger and composer who in the 1960s and ’70s was one of the pre-eminent figures bridging and expanding the worlds of jazz and R&B — and whose career was given new life beginning in the ’90s thanks to hip-hop producers who sampled his ornate compositions — died on Feb. 5 in Burbank, Calif. He was 85.
 
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Terri, said.
 
Mr. Axelrod’s signature sound mixed the flexibility of jazz and the lusciousness of soul with the influence of composers like Wagner and Stravinsky and a penchant for psychedelic flights of fancy. His compositions were expansive and majestic, but also a little testy and tense, as if messy eruption were imminent but being held at bay by beauty.
 
David Axelrod was born on April 17, 1931, in the area that became known as South Central Los Angeles, to Morris George Axelrod and the former Pearl Plaskoff. He began frequenting the jazz and R&B clubs on Central Avenue, Los Angeles’s vibrant musical hub, at a young age.
 
“I was raised by blacks,” he told Big Daddy magazine in 2001, discussing his upbringing in a city with fast-changing racial dynamics. “For a while I thought I was black.”
 
He added, “The fact that we had no money meant that we kept moving east during the white flight.”
 
His father, an organizer for the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, died at the cusp of David’s teenage years. He told interviewers stories of teenage street brawls and heroin use. Into his later years he was typically seen in dark sunglasses, the better to mask an eye injury he received when he was a teenage boxer.
 
After short times in New Jersey and New York and also in the Marines, Mr. Axelrod returned to Los Angeles and became enmeshed in the city’s night life and music industry. He spent a couple of years alongside the pianist Gerald Wiggins, who taught him to read music, and before long he took on record promotion jobs and, eventually, production work.
 
His first prominent calling card was the saxophonist Harold Land’s 1960 album “The Fox,” an outstanding example of hard bop from a city not known for it. Not long after that, Mr. Axelrod joined the staff of Capitol Records as an executive focused on developing talent, helping to create what he said was the first black music division at a major label.
 
He shepherded Lou Rawls out of a mainstream pop-jazz sound and into forward-leaning soul, and worked with the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who was familiar with Mr. Axelrod from “The Fox.” He produced Adderley’s biggest hit, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” in 1966, and continued to work with him for a decade. “I could do anything I wanted to do,” he recalled in 2001. “I was rich — making the equivalent of $700,000 a year!”
 
He also produced instrumental albums conducted by David McCallum, the Scottish actor (“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) who in the late 1960s took a pop music detour.
 
Following his success producing for others, Mr. Axelrod put out albums of his own. The first two, his most essential — “Song of Innocence” (1968) and “Songs of Experience” (1969), both inspired by William Blake — helped set the table for the jazz fusion of the 1970s.
 
Narrative and concept were crucial to Axelrod’s productions. His third album, “Earth Rot,” tackled environmental concerns, and a hit he recorded with Mr. McCallum, “The Edge,” was, Mr. Axelrod said, written in response to the extreme poverty he witnessed on a trip to Puerto Rico. For the psych-rock band the Electric Prunes, he produced an album influenced by Gregorian chant.
 
Though Mr. Axelrod was an aesthete, he was also a producer for hire, and before and after his time at Capitol, which he left in the early 1970s, he worked with a wide range of labels, including Decca, Motif, World Pacific and Hi-Fi.
 
In the mid-1970s, pop tastes begin to shift toward disco, a sound Mr. Axelrod had little use for, and he fell out of favor, leading to a lean stretch that included financial struggles and near-homelessness. His wife was involved in a serious car accident in his 1980s, and he devoted himself to managing her care for some time.
She survives him, as do three sons, Michael, Dana and Brian; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. A fourth son, Scott, died in the 1960s.
 
In the 1990s, crate-digging hip-hop producers began unearthing Mr. Axelrod’s productions and sampling them widely, enamored with their thickness and complexity. Axelrod sounds appear on Lauryn Hill’s breakthrough album, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”; DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing …..”; and Dr. Dre’s “2001,” as well as songs by De La Soul, Lil Wayne, Mos Def, Madlib, Kool G Rap and more.
 
During this time, one of Mr. Axelrod’s old managers mailed him an acetate of some unreleased recordings from his prime. With some additional arrangements, they went on to form the basis of a new album, released in 2001 on the British label Mo’Wax, which had sought him out as a progenitor of the lush, trippy sound it was known for.
 
Around the same time, his early music was being anthologized, and in 2004 he conducted a concert of his work at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
 
 

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David Axelrod in an undated photograph. GAB Archive/Redferns 
 
David Axelrod, a producer, arranger and composer who in the 1960s and ’70s was one of the pre-eminent figures bridging and expanding the worlds of jazz and R&B — and whose career was given new life beginning in the ’90s thanks to hip-hop producers who sampled his ornate compositions — died on Feb. 5 in Burbank, Calif. He was 85.
 
The cause was lung cancer, his wife, Terri, said.
 
Mr. Axelrod’s signature sound mixed the flexibility of jazz and the lusciousness of soul with the influence of composers like Wagner and Stravinsky and a penchant for psychedelic flights of fancy. His compositions were expansive and majestic, but also a little testy and tense, as if messy eruption were imminent but being held at bay by beauty.
 
David Axelrod was born on April 17, 1931, in the area that became known as South Central Los Angeles, to Morris George Axelrod and the former Pearl Plaskoff. He began frequenting the jazz and R&B clubs on Central Avenue, Los Angeles’s vibrant musical hub, at a young age.
 
“I was raised by blacks,” he told Big Daddy magazine in 2001, discussing his upbringing in a city with fast-changing racial dynamics. “For a while I thought I was black.”
 
He added, “The fact that we had no money meant that we kept moving east during the white flight.”
 
His father, an organizer for the radical Industrial Workers of the World union, died at the cusp of David’s teenage years. He told interviewers stories of teenage street brawls and heroin use. Into his later years he was typically seen in dark sunglasses, the better to mask an eye injury he received when he was a teenage boxer.
 
After short times in New Jersey and New York and also in the Marines, Mr. Axelrod returned to Los Angeles and became enmeshed in the city’s night life and music industry. He spent a couple of years alongside the pianist Gerald Wiggins, who taught him to read music, and before long he took on record promotion jobs and, eventually, production work.
 
His first prominent calling card was the saxophonist Harold Land’s 1960 album “The Fox,” an outstanding example of hard bop from a city not known for it. Not long after that, Mr. Axelrod joined the staff of Capitol Records as an executive focused on developing talent, helping to create what he said was the first black music division at a major label.
 
He shepherded Lou Rawls out of a mainstream pop-jazz sound and into forward-leaning soul, and worked with the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, who was familiar with Mr. Axelrod from “The Fox.” He produced Adderley’s biggest hit, “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” in 1966, and continued to work with him for a decade. “I could do anything I wanted to do,” he recalled in 2001. “I was rich — making the equivalent of $700,000 a year!”
 
He also produced instrumental albums conducted by David McCallum, the Scottish actor (“The Man From U.N.C.L.E.”) who in the late 1960s took a pop music detour.
 
Following his success producing for others, Mr. Axelrod put out albums of his own. The first two, his most essential — “Song of Innocence” (1968) and “Songs of Experience” (1969), both inspired by William Blake — helped set the table for the jazz fusion of the 1970s.
 
Narrative and concept were crucial to Axelrod’s productions. His third album, “Earth Rot,” tackled environmental concerns, and a hit he recorded with Mr. McCallum, “The Edge,” was, Mr. Axelrod said, written in response to the extreme poverty he witnessed on a trip to Puerto Rico. For the psych-rock band the Electric Prunes, he produced an album influenced by Gregorian chant.
 
Though Mr. Axelrod was an aesthete, he was also a producer for hire, and before and after his time at Capitol, which he left in the early 1970s, he worked with a wide range of labels, including Decca, Motif, World Pacific and Hi-Fi.
 
In the mid-1970s, pop tastes begin to shift toward disco, a sound Mr. Axelrod had little use for, and he fell out of favor, leading to a lean stretch that included financial struggles and near-homelessness. His wife was involved in a serious car accident in his 1980s, and he devoted himself to managing her care for some time.
She survives him, as do three sons, Michael, Dana and Brian; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. A fourth son, Scott, died in the 1960s.
 
In the 1990s, crate-digging hip-hop producers began unearthing Mr. Axelrod’s productions and sampling them widely, enamored with their thickness and complexity. Axelrod sounds appear on Lauryn Hill’s breakthrough album, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”; DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing …..”; and Dr. Dre’s “2001,” as well as songs by De La Soul, Lil Wayne, Mos Def, Madlib, Kool G Rap and more.
 
During this time, one of Mr. Axelrod’s old managers mailed him an acetate of some unreleased recordings from his prime. With some additional arrangements, they went on to form the basis of a new album, released in 2001 on the British label Mo’Wax, which had sought him out as a progenitor of the lush, trippy sound it was known for.
 
Around the same time, his early music was being anthologized, and in 2004 he conducted a concert of his work at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
 
 

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Download the mp3 here
 
There’s a reason jazz musicians call New York City “The Big Apple” and I’d venture to say no one has taken a bigger bite than Jim Eigo.
 
You may know Jim as the mastermind behind JazzPromoServices.com, but that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of his remarkable life in jazz.
 
There was a time when if you bought a jazz record anywhere in the northeastern United States, Jim may well have been part of the chain of events that resulted in getting it into your hands.
 
His stories from the old days of the jazz record trade in New York City will bring a smile to the face of people who lived through those golden years – and amazement to those who missed it.
 
Yes, Cecil Taylor used to come to the store and buy disco records and the stories just get wilder from there.
– Ken McCarthy
 
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
 
Jim Eigo
Jazz Promo Services
272 State Route 94 South #1
Warwick, NY 10990-3363
Ph: 845-986-1677 / Fax: 845-986-1699
Cell / text: 917-755-8960
Skype: jazzpromo
jim@jazzpromoservices.com
www.jazzpromoservices.com
 

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Download the mp3 here
 
There’s a reason jazz musicians call New York City “The Big Apple” and I’d venture to say no one has taken a bigger bite than Jim Eigo.
 
You may know Jim as the mastermind behind JazzPromoServices.com, but that’s not even the tip of the iceberg of his remarkable life in jazz.
 
There was a time when if you bought a jazz record anywhere in the northeastern United States, Jim may well have been part of the chain of events that resulted in getting it into your hands.
 
His stories from the old days of the jazz record trade in New York City will bring a smile to the face of people who lived through those golden years – and amazement to those who missed it.
 
Yes, Cecil Taylor used to come to the store and buy disco records and the stories just get wilder from there.
– Ken McCarthy
 
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
 
Jim Eigo
Jazz Promo Services
272 State Route 94 South #1
Warwick, NY 10990-3363
Ph: 845-986-1677 / Fax: 845-986-1699
Cell / text: 917-755-8960
Skype: jazzpromo
jim@jazzpromoservices.com
www.jazzpromoservices.com
 

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With thanks to Tom Reney for sharing.
 

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With thanks to Tom Reney for sharing.
 

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Barbara Carroll at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2011. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
 
Barbara Carroll, the jazz pianist and singer who for seven decades was a beloved fixture of Manhattan night life, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 92.
 
Her death was announced by her husband, Mark Stroock.
 
A pioneer in a field dominated by men, Ms. Carroll was frequently introduced as “the first lady of jazz piano.” With her bright red hair piled high, she embodied a timeless bohemian elegance and artistic grace.
 
Until December, she had been performing regularly at Birdland in Midtown Manhattan on Saturday afternoons with the bassist and singer Jay Leonhart.
 
These musicales, which encompassed Bach, Ellington, Stephen Sondheim and Thelonious Monk and drew a cosmopolitan audience, represented the ne plus ultra of an all-embracing musical vision that connected and celebrated diverse musical cultures. A typical piece began as a floral spray of notes that led into improvised variations on mostly familiar songs, sometimes arranged as semiclassical pop-jazz suites. No performance was the same.
 
Behind it all was Ms. Carroll’s steady, unfailing sense of swing. Embracing everything from peppy minimalist bebop (she was one of the first female musicians to master that harmonically sophisticated brand of jazz) to Gershwin to a lush Debussy-influenced impressionism, she never forsook her jazz roots, and she maintained a strong attachment to the blues.
 
In midcareer, Ms. Carroll added singing to her repertoire and developed her version of the parlando style associated with Mabel Mercer, which treats lyrics as light verses with personal messages.
 
A devotee of the American songbook, Ms. Carroll seemingly knew every popular standard ever written. She was a major interpreter of Cole Porter and the team of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, whose mischievously sexy come-on “You Fascinate Me So” was one of her signature songs.
 
In her later years, Ms. Carroll became known for her interpretations of Sondheim, putting her stamp on “Old Friends,” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” and “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” from “Anyone Can Whistle” — songs about friendship, love and the passing of time. “With So Little to Be Sure Of” was often directed to Mr. Stroock, her third husband, whom she married in 2011 and who was always at ringside when she performed at Birdland.
In addition to Mr. Stroock, a retired advertising executive, she is survived by a daughter, Suzanne Glatt, and two grandsons by her second husband, Bert Block, an agent and photographer, who died in 1986. Her first husband, Joe Shulman, a bassist who was a member of her trio, died in 1957.
 
Barbara Carole Coppersmith was born on Jan. 25, 1925, in Worcester, Mass., and began playing piano at age 5. Although she studied classical technique, she was irresistibly drawn to jazz on the radio. Her early piano idols included Nat King Cole, Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum.
At 15, she formed her own combo and began playing at local dances; at 17, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston.
 
When she moved to New York in 1947, a friend arranged her first booking under the name Bobbie Carroll, never mentioning her gender until it was too late to get anyone else. An agent was impressed enough to book her into the Downbeat Club and Georgie Auld’s Tin Pan Alley, where the young Tony Bennett was also performing. The two began a lifelong friendship.
 
Another early admirer was the jazz critic Leonard Feather, who called her “the first girl to play bebop piano.” Throughout her career, Ms. Carroll championed other female pianists, helping them to make themselves heard in the male-dominated jazz world.
Ms. Carroll became a fixture on 52nd Street during its final years as a jazz mecca, and over the years played at most major jazz clubs in the United States. At the Embers, on the East Side of Manhattan, she once shared the bill with Tatum, which she likened to playing with God.
She appeared on Broadway with her trio in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Me and Juliet” in 1953.
 
Her first major recordings were for Atlantic in 1951, and she also recorded extensively for RCA and Verve. She appeared often on television, most notably on the “Today” show, where she accompanied Billie Holiday.
 
In 1978, Ms. Carroll began a two-week engagement at Bemelmans Bar in the Hotel Carlyle that ended up lasting for 25 years, during which she became close friends with Bobby Short, who played across the hall at Café Carlyle. When her relationship with the Carlyle ended, she reinvented herself as a jazz-oriented cabaret performer and acquired a growing international following.
 
Her last record, “Barbara Carroll Plays Birdland,” was released in December.
 
“I’ve led a charmed life,” Ms. Carroll said in 

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Barbara Carroll at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2011. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
 
Barbara Carroll, the jazz pianist and singer who for seven decades was a beloved fixture of Manhattan night life, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 92.
 
Her death was announced by her husband, Mark Stroock.
 
A pioneer in a field dominated by men, Ms. Carroll was frequently introduced as “the first lady of jazz piano.” With her bright red hair piled high, she embodied a timeless bohemian elegance and artistic grace.
 
Until December, she had been performing regularly at Birdland in Midtown Manhattan on Saturday afternoons with the bassist and singer Jay Leonhart.
 
These musicales, which encompassed Bach, Ellington, Stephen Sondheim and Thelonious Monk and drew a cosmopolitan audience, represented the ne plus ultra of an all-embracing musical vision that connected and celebrated diverse musical cultures. A typical piece began as a floral spray of notes that led into improvised variations on mostly familiar songs, sometimes arranged as semiclassical pop-jazz suites. No performance was the same.
 
Behind it all was Ms. Carroll’s steady, unfailing sense of swing. Embracing everything from peppy minimalist bebop (she was one of the first female musicians to master that harmonically sophisticated brand of jazz) to Gershwin to a lush Debussy-influenced impressionism, she never forsook her jazz roots, and she maintained a strong attachment to the blues.
 
In midcareer, Ms. Carroll added singing to her repertoire and developed her version of the parlando style associated with Mabel Mercer, which treats lyrics as light verses with personal messages.
 
A devotee of the American songbook, Ms. Carroll seemingly knew every popular standard ever written. She was a major interpreter of Cole Porter and the team of Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh, whose mischievously sexy come-on “You Fascinate Me So” was one of her signature songs.
 
In her later years, Ms. Carroll became known for her interpretations of Sondheim, putting her stamp on “Old Friends,” from “Merrily We Roll Along,” and “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” from “Anyone Can Whistle” — songs about friendship, love and the passing of time. “With So Little to Be Sure Of” was often directed to Mr. Stroock, her third husband, whom she married in 2011 and who was always at ringside when she performed at Birdland.
In addition to Mr. Stroock, a retired advertising executive, she is survived by a daughter, Suzanne Glatt, and two grandsons by her second husband, Bert Block, an agent and photographer, who died in 1986. Her first husband, Joe Shulman, a bassist who was a member of her trio, died in 1957.
 
Barbara Carole Coppersmith was born on Jan. 25, 1925, in Worcester, Mass., and began playing piano at age 5. Although she studied classical technique, she was irresistibly drawn to jazz on the radio. Her early piano idols included Nat King Cole, Teddy Wilson and Art Tatum.
At 15, she formed her own combo and began playing at local dances; at 17, she enrolled at the New England Conservatory in Boston.
 
When she moved to New York in 1947, a friend arranged her first booking under the name Bobbie Carroll, never mentioning her gender until it was too late to get anyone else. An agent was impressed enough to book her into the Downbeat Club and Georgie Auld’s Tin Pan Alley, where the young Tony Bennett was also performing. The two began a lifelong friendship.
 
Another early admirer was the jazz critic Leonard Feather, who called her “the first girl to play bebop piano.” Throughout her career, Ms. Carroll championed other female pianists, helping them to make themselves heard in the male-dominated jazz world.
Ms. Carroll became a fixture on 52nd Street during its final years as a jazz mecca, and over the years played at most major jazz clubs in the United States. At the Embers, on the East Side of Manhattan, she once shared the bill with Tatum, which she likened to playing with God.
She appeared on Broadway with her trio in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Me and Juliet” in 1953.
 
Her first major recordings were for Atlantic in 1951, and she also recorded extensively for RCA and Verve. She appeared often on television, most notably on the “Today” show, where she accompanied Billie Holiday.
 
In 1978, Ms. Carroll began a two-week engagement at Bemelmans Bar in the Hotel Carlyle that ended up lasting for 25 years, during which she became close friends with Bobby Short, who played across the hall at Café Carlyle. When her relationship with the Carlyle ended, she reinvented herself as a jazz-oriented cabaret performer and acquired a growing international following.
 
Her last record, “Barbara Carroll Plays Birdland,” was released in December.
 
“I’ve led a charmed life,” Ms. Carroll said in 

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The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band is composed of jazz veterans rehearsing for the upcoming regular gig in Fort Lee Marko Georgiev/NorthJersey.com

 
(Photo: Marko Georgiev/NorthJersey.com)
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Know jazz? Then you know “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
The classic Billy Strayhorn tune, which the Harlem Blues & Jazz Band is now swatting around like a badminton birdie, from tenor sax to trumpet to keyboards to bass, is as basic to the jazz repertoire as Beethoven’s Fifth is to a symphony orchestra.
Only difference: No one in your local symphony orchestra ever hung out with Beethoven.
“Billy Strayhorn and I were in high school together, graduated the same year, 1933, in Pittsburgh,” says sax man Fred Staton, who will be celebrating his 102nd birthday on Tuesday.
He’s the oldest member of The Harlem Blues & Jazz Band – which was taking the ” ‘A’ Train” out of the railroad yard for a trial run last week at the Holiday Inn GW Bridge in Fort Lee.
“One, two … ” trumpeter Joey Morant counts. The next moment, they’re off – chugging their way merrily along to 125th Street.
This ensemble of veteran sidemen – the youngest is in his 70s – have performed with some of the greatest names in music: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey, among others. The band, put together 44 years ago by Dr. Albert Vollmer, a Westchester orthodontist and jazz enthusiast, launches a regular weekly gig Saturday at the Holiday Inn on Route 4 – a belated Valentine’s Day celebration that will also be a belated birthday party for Staton. They’ll be in residence every Saturday thereafter.
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“This is a part of American musical history,” says Vollmer, 87. “This is the only real art form that has come out of America. Possibly quilting. Maybe bluegrass. But certainly jazz.”
You can hear about jazz from a lot of people. But these gentlemen are – so to speak – the horses’ mouths.
They lived the jazz history that the rest of us know from liner notes and Ken Burns documentaries. They are the last living links to a time when Duke Ellington ruled the Cotton Club and Chick Webb bossed the Savoy Ballroom, when Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong were live acts rather than tracks on an album, when ladies went to Harlem in ermine and pearls (so the song “Lady Is a Tramp” tells us) to catch musicians jamming after hours at clubs like Small’s Paradise and Connie’s Inn. They hung out on 52nd Street when a strange new music – bebop – was dividing the jazz world into “moldy figs” who preferred the old sounds and cool cats like Charlie Parker and Gillespie who were playing what detractors called “Chinese notes.”
When these guys pass into history, so will an era.
What they have to say
“We’re just players that were fortunate enough to be around at this time,” says Reynolds “Zeke” Mullins, 91, keyboards  (he was a member of Hampton’s band). “But after us, the music will move on to younger players.”
So go ahead. Ask drummer Jackie Williams (he played with Earl “Fatha” Hines, Teddy Wilson, Doc Cheatham and Illinois Jacquet) about Charlie Parker.
“I used to see him a lot of times, when I would go to the barber,” says Williams (he’s in his 80s). “He went to the same barber in Harlem. He wasn’t one of those persons who goes, ‘Hey man, how are you doing?’ He seemed a bit of a recluse type. He was very intellectual, very serious, always had a newspaper, a magazine, the Times.”
But could he blow a horn. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Williams, who saw Parker be- and bop many a time.  “How could this man do it? He was so fantastic. It was captivating to me, just to hear him.”
Or ask trumpeter Morant about Count Basie. Not that Morant, in his 70s, didn’t play with lots of other jazz and R&B greats: Henry “Red” Allen, Hampton, Ray Charles, Gillespie, Lloyd Price, James Brown and B.B. King, among others. But Basie was a standout. “I remember the left hand: Thooom thoom thoom,” Morant says. “Strong left hand that set the pace for the band. He sat on the edge of the chair.”
Or get bassist Michael Max Fleming to tell about the career advice proffered by piano great Mary Lou Williams. “She was my musical mother, very concerned about my life,” says Fleming, in his early 70s, who also played with Billy Eckstine, Jimmy Witherspoon and Chet Baker. “Two things she used to say to me: ‘Keep your mind on the music’ and ‘Use your ears.’ That was what she was trying to instill in me. Not running after girls, or getting into the political end of the music – it was very political then.”
But wait – we were talking about Billy Strayhorn. The legendary composer of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Lush Life” and “Chelsea Bridge,” Ellington’s right-hand man was – as noted – a high school classmate of Staton, The Harlem Blues & Jazz Band’s 102-year-old birthday boy.
“He was virtually on another wavelength other than us,” Staton recalls.
Born in 1915, Staton’s life neatly coincides not only with Strayhorn’s (born the same year), but with the whole timeline of jazz. He came into the world just three years after an 11-year-old Louis Armstrong tootled his first cornet notes at the Colored Waifs Home in New Orleans – and two years before the first commercial jazz 78, “Livery Stable Blues,” became the first popular music record to sell a million copies. Moreover, his hometown Pittsburgh has an honored place in jazz history: It produced not just Strayhorn, but also Art Blakey, Eckstine, Erroll Garner, Williams, Lena Horne and his own younger sister, the well-known vocalist Dakota Staton. But even in such surroundings, Strayhorn was a man apart, Staton recalls.
“He was gay,” Staton says. “We didn’t know it. I didn’t know it. All we knew was he was into some music. While he was writing music, we were chasing chicks.”
Strayhorn had the last laugh, though, when Ellington blew through town. “Billy brought some of his music to Duke, to show him what he could do,” Staton recalls. “And Duke was so impressed, he said, ‘You’re gonna hear from me.’ So Duke came back to New York, and he sent for [Strayhorn]. And when he got on the train from Pittsburgh to come to New York he got off the train here and asked someone, ‘How do you get to Harlem?’ And they said, ‘Take the A Train.’ So he took the A Train, and while he was on the A train, the tune came to him. That’s how that song came about.”
The band’s founder
The fact that these guys can tell such firsthand, one-degree-of-separation stories is just one of the reasons Vollmer, creator of the band, finds them – and their world – endlessly fascinating. Born in London, raised in Sweden, Vollmer got the jazz bug in his teens and was a full-out hepcat when he came to America at age 17, seeking the greats he had heard only on record. As soon as he became a successful enough orthodontist, by the late 1960s, he filled his large Tudor house on Long Island Sound full of jazz players. “We had incredible parties,” he says.
The natural next step, in 1973, was to form a band of veteran sidemen. A combo not unlike the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band, created 10 years earlier (though that didn’t inspire him, Vollmer says), but with a distinctly Harlem flavor: Less Louis Armstrong, more Duke Ellington. “Harlem had an incredible input into jazz music and literature,” he says. “Harlem set the tone for a lot of things. I want people to know we have a Harlem sound. It’s not a New Orleans sound.”

The Harlem Blues & Jazz Band, from left: Reynolds “Zeke” Mullins, Fred Staton, Michael Max Fleming, Joey Morant, Jackie Williams. (Photo: Marko Georgiev/NorthJersey.com)
 
Through the years, the band, which has recorded and toured Europe, has had the cream of New York sidemen cycle in and out – saxman George James, bassist Johnny Williams, guitarist Al Casey, drummer Tommy Benford and trombonist Eddie Durham among many others. As older ones left, or passed, new ones came onboard.
“The basic people who have passed through this organization have been the top sidemen,” Vollmer says. “At one point, I had a total orchestra where everybody had played the Savoy Ballroom, but that’s gone.”
And when these guys hang up their hats …?
There are some who will tell you that’s it – these men and women are the last generation of jazz. It was a specific thing, they’ll argue, that was born when Buddy Bolden blasted his first cornet note on the docks of New Orleans in the 1890s, and died – let’s say – when Miles Davis recorded a Cyndi Lauper tune.
These veterans don’t buy it. “It evolves,” Morant says. “It doesn’t have to be now what it is later. Aretha Franklin ain’t Dinah Washington. Dinah Washington ain’t Lady Day. Lady Day ain’t Bessie Smith. They all get their individual credit.”
You might say that jazz is like a tree, Williams says. And trees have been known to live a long, long time. “When you have roots to a tree, the tree keeps on growing, but it changes branches, right?” he says. “Well that’s the way I feel about jazz.”
 

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The Harlem Blues and Jazz Band is composed of jazz veterans rehearsing for the upcoming regular gig in Fort Lee Marko Georgiev/NorthJersey.com

 
(Photo: Marko Georgiev/NorthJersey.com)
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Know jazz? Then you know “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
The classic Billy Strayhorn tune, which the Harlem Blues & Jazz Band is now swatting around like a badminton birdie, from tenor sax to trumpet to keyboards to bass, is as basic to the jazz repertoire as Beethoven’s Fifth is to a symphony orchestra.
Only difference: No one in your local symphony orchestra ever hung out with Beethoven.
“Billy Strayhorn and I were in high school together, graduated the same year, 1933, in Pittsburgh,” says sax man Fred Staton, who will be celebrating his 102nd birthday on Tuesday.
He’s the oldest member of The Harlem Blues & Jazz Band – which was taking the ” ‘A’ Train” out of the railroad yard for a trial run last week at the Holiday Inn GW Bridge in Fort Lee.
“One, two … ” trumpeter Joey Morant counts. The next moment, they’re off – chugging their way merrily along to 125th Street.
This ensemble of veteran sidemen – the youngest is in his 70s – have performed with some of the greatest names in music: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Mary Lou Williams, Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey, among others. The band, put together 44 years ago by Dr. Albert Vollmer, a Westchester orthodontist and jazz enthusiast, launches a regular weekly gig Saturday at the Holiday Inn on Route 4 – a belated Valentine’s Day celebration that will also be a belated birthday party for Staton. They’ll be in residence every Saturday thereafter.
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Steve Hackett’s latest: melodies from a migrant
 
Carlstadt barber releases his 14th book based on the Italian life
 
“This is a part of American musical history,” says Vollmer, 87. “This is the only real art form that has come out of America. Possibly quilting. Maybe bluegrass. But certainly jazz.”
You can hear about jazz from a lot of people. But these gentlemen are – so to speak – the horses’ mouths.
They lived the jazz history that the rest of us know from liner notes and Ken Burns documentaries. They are the last living links to a time when Duke Ellington ruled the Cotton Club and Chick Webb bossed the Savoy Ballroom, when Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong were live acts rather than tracks on an album, when ladies went to Harlem in ermine and pearls (so the song “Lady Is a Tramp” tells us) to catch musicians jamming after hours at clubs like Small’s Paradise and Connie’s Inn. They hung out on 52nd Street when a strange new music – bebop – was dividing the jazz world into “moldy figs” who preferred the old sounds and cool cats like Charlie Parker and Gillespie who were playing what detractors called “Chinese notes.”
When these guys pass into history, so will an era.
What they have to say
“We’re just players that were fortunate enough to be around at this time,” says Reynolds “Zeke” Mullins, 91, keyboards  (he was a member of Hampton’s band). “But after us, the music will move on to younger players.”
So go ahead. Ask drummer Jackie Williams (he played with Earl “Fatha” Hines, Teddy Wilson, Doc Cheatham and Illinois Jacquet) about Charlie Parker.
“I used to see him a lot of times, when I would go to the barber,” says Williams (he’s in his 80s). “He went to the same barber in Harlem. He wasn’t one of those persons who goes, ‘Hey man, how are you doing?’ He seemed a bit of a recluse type. He was very intellectual, very serious, always had a newspaper, a magazine, the Times.”
But could he blow a horn. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Williams, who saw Parker be- and bop many a time.  “How could this man do it? He was so fantastic. It was captivating to me, just to hear him.”
Or ask trumpeter Morant about Count Basie. Not that Morant, in his 70s, didn’t play with lots of other jazz and R&B greats: Henry “Red” Allen, Hampton, Ray Charles, Gillespie, Lloyd Price, James Brown and B.B. King, among others. But Basie was a standout. “I remember the left hand: Thooom thoom thoom,” Morant says. “Strong left hand that set the pace for the band. He sat on the edge of the chair.”
Or get bassist Michael Max Fleming to tell about the career advice proffered by piano great Mary Lou Williams. “She was my musical mother, very concerned about my life,” says Fleming, in his early 70s, who also played with Billy Eckstine, Jimmy Witherspoon and Chet Baker. “Two things she used to say to me: ‘Keep your mind on the music’ and ‘Use your ears.’ That was what she was trying to instill in me. Not running after girls, or getting into the political end of the music – it was very political then.”
But wait – we were talking about Billy Strayhorn. The legendary composer of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Lush Life” and “Chelsea Bridge,” Ellington’s right-hand man was – as noted – a high school classmate of Staton, The Harlem Blues & Jazz Band’s 102-year-old birthday boy.
“He was virtually on another wavelength other than us,” Staton recalls.
Born in 1915, Staton’s life neatly coincides not only with Strayhorn’s (born the same year), but with the whole timeline of jazz. He came into the world just three years after an 11-year-old Louis Armstrong tootled his first cornet notes at the Colored Waifs Home in New Orleans – and two years before the first commercial jazz 78, “Livery Stable Blues,” became the first popular music record to sell a million copies. Moreover, his hometown Pittsburgh has an honored place in jazz history: It produced not just Strayhorn, but also Art Blakey, Eckstine, Erroll Garner, Williams, Lena Horne and his own younger sister, the well-known vocalist Dakota Staton. But even in such surroundings, Strayhorn was a man apart, Staton recalls.
“He was gay,” Staton says. “We didn’t know it. I didn’t know it. All we knew was he was into some music. While he was writing music, we were chasing chicks.”
Strayhorn had the last laugh, though, when Ellington blew through town. “Billy brought some of his music to Duke, to show him what he could do,” Staton recalls. “And Duke was so impressed, he said, ‘You’re gonna hear from me.’ So Duke came back to New York, and he sent for [Strayhorn]. And when he got on the train from Pittsburgh to come to New York he got off the train here and asked someone, ‘How do you get to Harlem?’ And they said, ‘Take the A Train.’ So he took the A Train, and while he was on the A train, the tune came to him. That’s how that song came about.”
The band’s founder
The fact that these guys can tell such firsthand, one-degree-of-separation stories is just one of the reasons Vollmer, creator of the band, finds them – and their world – endlessly fascinating. Born in London, raised in Sweden, Vollmer got the jazz bug in his teens and was a full-out hepcat when he came to America at age 17, seeking the greats he had heard only on record. As soon as he became a successful enough orthodontist, by the late 1960s, he filled his large Tudor house on Long Island Sound full of jazz players. “We had incredible parties,” he says.
The natural next step, in 1973, was to form a band of veteran sidemen. A combo not unlike the New Orleans Preservation Hall Jazz Band, created 10 years earlier (though that didn’t inspire him, Vollmer says), but with a distinctly Harlem flavor: Less Louis Armstrong, more Duke Ellington. “Harlem had an incredible input into jazz music and literature,” he says. “Harlem set the tone for a lot of things. I want people to know we have a Harlem sound. It’s not a New Orleans sound.”

The Harlem Blues & Jazz Band, from left: Reynolds “Zeke” Mullins, Fred Staton, Michael Max Fleming, Joey Morant, Jackie Williams. (Photo: Marko Georgiev/NorthJersey.com)
 
Through the years, the band, which has recorded and toured Europe, has had the cream of New York sidemen cycle in and out – saxman George James, bassist Johnny Williams, guitarist Al Casey, drummer Tommy Benford and trombonist Eddie Durham among many others. As older ones left, or passed, new ones came onboard.
“The basic people who have passed through this organization have been the top sidemen,” Vollmer says. “At one point, I had a total orchestra where everybody had played the Savoy Ballroom, but that’s gone.”
And when these guys hang up their hats …?
There are some who will tell you that’s it – these men and women are the last generation of jazz. It was a specific thing, they’ll argue, that was born when Buddy Bolden blasted his first cornet note on the docks of New Orleans in the 1890s, and died – let’s say – when Miles Davis recorded a Cyndi Lauper tune.
These veterans don’t buy it. “It evolves,” Morant says. “It doesn’t have to be now what it is later. Aretha Franklin ain’t Dinah Washington. Dinah Washington ain’t Lady Day. Lady Day ain’t Bessie Smith. They all get their individual credit.”
You might say that jazz is like a tree, Williams says. And trees have been known to live a long, long time. “When you have roots to a tree, the tree keeps on growing, but it changes branches, right?” he says. “Well that’s the way I feel about jazz.”
 

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Barbara Carroll Joseph Marzullo/WENN
 
Barbara Carroll, the critically acclaimed jazz pianist, singer, and composer, who was born January 25, 1925, in Worcester, Massachusetts, has passed away at age 92, her booking manager confirmed to Playbill.com.
 
Ms. Carroll’s lengthy career began in 1947 when she played her first New York engagement at the Downbeat Club opposite Dizzy Gillespie. Throughout the 1950s, she and her trio, which included Chuck Wayne on guitar and Clyde Lombardi on bass, played venues around the country. She recorded her first album for Atlantic Records in 1951; among her numerous discs are Something to Live For, I Wished on the Moon, One Morning in May, Everything I Love, This Heart of Mine, All in Fun, Old Friends, and more.
 
Her one Broadway outing was in the 1953 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Me & Juliet, playing a rehearsal pianist named Chris.
 
Charlie Byrd eventually replaced Wayne in the Barbara Carroll Trio, and Lombardi was succeeded by Joe Shulman, whom Carroll married in 1954. The marriage was short-lived, as Mr. Shulman died of a heart attack in 1957. Ms. Carroll’s second marriage was to Bert Block; the two would later welcome a daughter, Suzanne. Mr. Block died in 1986 of emphysema.
 
Following the birth of her daughter in 1962, Ms. Carroll left the jazz scene. “I didn’t want to travel,” Carroll told the New York Daily News in an interview in 2011. “That was a period when jazz was not doing that well, after the Beatles came and that kind of music became popular. But jazz always has an audience, a very loyal audience, despite all those claims that it’s dying.”
 
In 1978 she returned to the New York jazz scene and became a regal presence at the Carlyle’s Bemelmans Bar for 25 years. Ms. Carroll shifted to midtown venues in her last years, playing the Oak Room of the Algonquin and, more recently, the jazz venue Birdland, performing regularly with bassist Jay Leonhart.
 
In a July 2016 review of Ms. Carroll’s performance at Birdland, the New York Times’ Stephen Holden said the artist “helped pioneer a spare, agile style of bebop, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory.” He added, “Ms. Carroll plays with an impeccable technique in which harmonies burst into flower. In recent decades she has embraced singing in a parlando style that is witty, literate, discreetly sexy and at times heartbreakingly honest.”
 
In October 2016 singer/pianist Eric Yves Garcia paid tribute to Ms. Carroll, among other piano-playing stars, in his new cabaret show, Keeper of the Keys. At that time Garcia told Playbill.com, “We’ve got a direct Broadway link in the Barbara Carroll segment: in 1953, with The King and I and South Pacificrunning concurrently, Rodgers & Hammerstein debuted Me & Juliet at the Majestic Theatre. It was a backstage musical and, featured in the cast onstage with her trio was Barbara Carroll, in the role of Chris, the rehearsal accompanist. She was given Rodgers’ nod to riff on melodies (which was rare). The show ran about 10 months…and produced the standout song ‘No Other Love.’”
 

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Barbara Carroll Joseph Marzullo/WENN
 
Barbara Carroll, the critically acclaimed jazz pianist, singer, and composer, who was born January 25, 1925, in Worcester, Massachusetts, has passed away at age 92, her booking manager confirmed to Playbill.com.
 
Ms. Carroll’s lengthy career began in 1947 when she played her first New York engagement at the Downbeat Club opposite Dizzy Gillespie. Throughout the 1950s, she and her trio, which included Chuck Wayne on guitar and Clyde Lombardi on bass, played venues around the country. She recorded her first album for Atlantic Records in 1951; among her numerous discs are Something to Live For, I Wished on the Moon, One Morning in May, Everything I Love, This Heart of Mine, All in Fun, Old Friends, and more.
 
Her one Broadway outing was in the 1953 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Me & Juliet, playing a rehearsal pianist named Chris.
 
Charlie Byrd eventually replaced Wayne in the Barbara Carroll Trio, and Lombardi was succeeded by Joe Shulman, whom Carroll married in 1954. The marriage was short-lived, as Mr. Shulman died of a heart attack in 1957. Ms. Carroll’s second marriage was to Bert Block; the two would later welcome a daughter, Suzanne. Mr. Block died in 1986 of emphysema.
 
Following the birth of her daughter in 1962, Ms. Carroll left the jazz scene. “I didn’t want to travel,” Carroll told the New York Daily News in an interview in 2011. “That was a period when jazz was not doing that well, after the Beatles came and that kind of music became popular. But jazz always has an audience, a very loyal audience, despite all those claims that it’s dying.”
 
In 1978 she returned to the New York jazz scene and became a regal presence at the Carlyle’s Bemelmans Bar for 25 years. Ms. Carroll shifted to midtown venues in her last years, playing the Oak Room of the Algonquin and, more recently, the jazz venue Birdland, performing regularly with bassist Jay Leonhart.
 
In a July 2016 review of Ms. Carroll’s performance at Birdland, the New York Times’ Stephen Holden said the artist “helped pioneer a spare, agile style of bebop, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory.” He added, “Ms. Carroll plays with an impeccable technique in which harmonies burst into flower. In recent decades she has embraced singing in a parlando style that is witty, literate, discreetly sexy and at times heartbreakingly honest.”
 
In October 2016 singer/pianist Eric Yves Garcia paid tribute to Ms. Carroll, among other piano-playing stars, in his new cabaret show, Keeper of the Keys. At that time Garcia told Playbill.com, “We’ve got a direct Broadway link in the Barbara Carroll segment: in 1953, with The King and I and South Pacificrunning concurrently, Rodgers & Hammerstein debuted Me & Juliet at the Majestic Theatre. It was a backstage musical and, featured in the cast onstage with her trio was Barbara Carroll, in the role of Chris, the rehearsal accompanist. She was given Rodgers’ nod to riff on melodies (which was rare). The show ran about 10 months…and produced the standout song ‘No Other Love.’”
 

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