Eric Weissberg, ‘Dueling Banjos’ Musician, Dies at 80
By Bill Friskics-Warren
March 23, 2020
His melodic banjo work on a 1973 hit single (heard in the movie “Deliverance”) helped usher bluegrass music into the cultural mainstream.
Eric Weissberg, right, in about 1970 with his group Deliverance. His recording of “Dueling Banjos” with the guitarist Steve Mandell was a hit in 1973.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Eric Weissberg, a gifted multi-instrumentalist whose melodic banjo work on the 1973 hit single “Dueling Banjos” helped bring bluegrass music into the cultural mainstream, died on Sunday in a nursing home near Detroit. He was 80.
Juliet Weissberg, his wife of 34 years, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Though the theme songs to the film “Bonnie & Clyde” (1967) and the CBS sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies,” both recorded by Flatt and Scruggs, preceded “Dueling Banjos” in exposing wide audiences to bluegrass, neither made it to the pop Top 40. “Dueling Banjos,” which appeared on the soundtrack to the 1972 movie “Deliverance,” fared far better, rising to No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart.
The soundtrack to “Deliverance” was also certified gold, for sales of more than 500,000 copies.
But Mr. Weissberg — who also played fiddle, mandolin and guitar — produced much more than a one-hit wonder. More than a decade before “Dueling Banjos,” he had distinguished himself as a member of two popular folk groups, the Greenbriar Boys and the Tarriers, and as an in-demand session musician in New York.
As a session player he appeared on Judy Collins’s “Fifth Album,” contributing guitar to her 1965 version of “Pack Up Your Sorrows.” He played banjo on John Denver’s 1971 Top 10 pop hit, “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” His fretwork was heard on albums like Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks” (1974), Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) and the Talking Heads’ “Little Creatures” (1985). He collaborated with jazz musicians like Bob James and Herbie Mann as well.
“Dueling Banjos” did not, as the song’s title suggests, involve two banjoists pitting their skills against each other. Instead it showcased Mr. Weissberg’s three-finger Earl Scruggs-style banjo in a sprightly call-and-response — more of a dance than a fight — with the flat-picked acoustic guitar of his collaborator, Steve Mandell.
The song was originally recorded in 1955 as “Feudin’ Banjos” in a version that featured the song’s composer, Arthur Smith (known for “Guitar Boogie“), and Don Reno, both of them on banjo.
When it appeared on the soundtrack for “Deliverance,” a movie based on the James Dickey novel of the same name, it was mistakenly copyrighted to Mr. Weissberg.
A lawsuit was settled in Mr. Smith’s favor. Mr. Weissberg always maintained that Warner Bros. had credited him as the song’s composer without his knowledge or consent.
An inspiration to banjoists who followed in his wake, especially those of a progressive bent like Tony Trischka and Béla Fleck, Mr. Weissberg contributed to a trio of influential early banjo albums: “American Banjo Scruggs Style” (Folkways, 1957), “Folk Banjo Styles” (Elektra, 1961) and “New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass” (Elektra, 1963).
“Here were some early seedings of progressive banjo playing scattered in my fertile mind,” Mr. Trischka said of the “New Dimensions” album in a 2006 edition of Banjo Newsletter. “These tunes set a whole new standard for what could be done with the banjo. All that, plus a generous dose of the early melodic style.”
All but two tracks from “New Dimensions,” recorded with the guitarist Clarence White and the banjoist and Oscar-winning screenwriter Marshall Brickman, were reissued on the soundtrack to “Deliverance.” The Beastie Boys later sampled a snippet of one of the album’s tracks, “Shuckin’ the Corn,” on “5-Piece Chicken Dinner,” from their 1989 touchstone, “Paul’s Boutique.”
Eric Weissberg was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 16, 1939. His father Will, was a publicity photographer for the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Manhattan who loved listening to jazz. His mother, Cecile (Glasberg) Weissberg, was a liquor buyer for the Waldorf Astoria and later for the entire Hilton hotel chain. She often played selections from the “Fireside Book of Folk Songs” on the piano when Eric was young.
Mr. Weissberg grew up in Knickerbocker Village, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and attended elementary school at the Little Red School House, a progressive private school in Greenwich Village, where he began taking violin lessons at the age of 10.
By then Eric was already spending summers at Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, N.Y., near Woodstock, which was run by the father and uncle of Toshi Aline Ohta, the future wife of Pete Seeger, who would give banjo lessons to Eric when he was 8 or 9.
Soon after Mr. Seeger’s folk group the Weavers formed, Mr. Weissberg attended hootenannies in the presence of other luminaries of the era, like Woody Guthrie.
Mr. Weissberg attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1957 before leaving to study at Juilliard. On Sundays afternoons he joined singalongs with the likes of John Herald and Bob Yellin, in Washington Square Park, where public singing was permitted from only 12 to 6 p.m.
After his success with “Dueling Banjos,” which won a Grammy for best country instrumental performance in 1973, Mr. Weissberg formed a group called Deliverance, which toured widely and recorded for Warner Bros.
He continued to do session work, and later played with Tom Paxton and Art Garfunkel, among others, but he became less active as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s. One notable exception was his appearance, in 2009, at the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Gala Concert at Riverside Church in Manhattan, along with, among others, the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College orchestra and chorus.
Mr. Weissberg married Juliet Savage in 1985. In addition to her, he is survived by his son, Will, and two grandchildren.
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Ray Mantilla, a percussionist and bandleader who led a prolific jazz career for more than half a century, died on Saturday, at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. He was 85.
The cause was complications of lymphoma, said his brother, Kermit Mantilla, who was at his bedside when he passed.
Mantilla played on hundreds of recordings, including some that have become important parts of jazz history, like Max Roach’s M’Boom, Herbie Mann’s Flute, Brass, Vibes and Percussion and Charles Mingus’s Cumbia & Jazz Fusion. He was one of the three most recorded conga players in the history of jazz; he held that distinction with Ray Barretto and Cándido Camero.
Like Cándido, one of his heroes, Mantilla championed the use of multiple congas, employing up to four drums at times, each tuned to a specific pitch. Also like Cándido, he championed the performance of solo pieces on congas.
But Mantilla was, as he liked to put it, the complete percussionist — skilled not only on congas but also a range of other instruments. “I loved the way Ray played charanga-style timbales,” Barretto once said. “Remember, you have only one bell to keep time accompanying the flute and violins, and you have to play rock-solid time with swing.”
Mantilla described his own music as “Latin Jazz with authentic Latino rhythms.” He released nine albums as a leader. His first was Mantilla, in 1978, and his most recent was High Voltage, almost 40 years later. He recorded a follow-up, Rebirth, scheduled for release this year on Savant Records.
“It’s a combination of the familiar and the eclectic,” said longtime Mantilla associate Mike Freeman, who plays vibraphone on that album. The title, Rebirth, he explained, “is a reference to Ray surviving cancer two years ago.”
Raymond Mantilla was born in St. Francis Hospital in the South Bronx on June 22, 1934. His father, Carlos Mantilla Ghilardi, was an architect and engineer who was recruited to work on the building of the George Washington Bridge. He then began working for the U.S. Intelligence Services in a branch in Peru, just before the United States’ entry into World War II. Ray’s mother, Ramona Maldonado, hailed from the city of Vega Baja in Puerto Rico, and owned and operated a bodega in the South Bronx.
Ray’s childhood friends included some of the major forces in the Afro-Cuban music scene that became redefined by New York’s City’s Puerto Rican community into what we know as salsa. Among them were timbalero Orlando Marin, percussionist Manny Oquendo, pianist Eddie Palmieri, flutist and percussionist Johnny Pacheco, and percussionist Benny Bonilla.
Bonilla, who played timbales on the seminal Latin Boogaloo hit “I Like It Like That,” met Mantilla at age 15. “He and I would practice our conga beats to 78 vinyl records,” he said. “Ray stressed a steady and good left hand.”
But Mantilla’s closest childhood friend was Barretto, a pioneering conga player who became an NEA Jazz Master in 2006, one month before his death at 76. “Me and Ray were like peas in a pod,” Mantilla once recalled. “He got me into the studios, since he would send me to cover dates he couldn’t do. Between Ray, Johnny Pacheco, Willie Rodriguez, Cándido, and me, we were doing all the Latin percussion work on studio sessions in New York.”
Barretto also made a fateful introduction when he recommended Mantilla to Mann, a flutist leading a widely popular Latin jazz band. Barretto and Mantilla played together on a handful of albums by Mann at the dawn of the ‘60s, including The Common Ground and The Family of Mann — but by the time of Herbie Mann at The Village Gate in ’61, Barretto had moved on, and given Mantilla his blessing.
His work with Mann, and his association with Barretto, brought Mantilla to the attention of prominent jazz bandleaders like Mingus, Roach, Art Blakey and many more. “I always liked the freedom in jazz and I dug the scene as well,” he said. “You could be more creative, looser. After a while I just stopped doing gigs on the Latin scene altogether unless I was called as a guest soloist.”
In 1972, Mantilla was asked to join Roach’s percussion ensemble M’Boom, which had been formed two years earlier. “I was impressed by Ray when I saw him with Art Blakey because I liked the way he navigated his role in the group,” recalls founding member Joe Chambers, who recommended him for the gig. “He demonstrated the drummer’s philosophy as it was taught to me, to accompany. He never overplayed.”
Warren Smith, another member of M’Boom, recalls: “Ray understood the subtle nuances in African, Latin, and jazz-based music and he adapted beautifully. The first time he played with us it was seamless. What also impressed me was the variety of solo contexts he could do. He could play solo on bongos, congas, whatever, and hold the audience. He was also funny as an emcee. When we performed in Barcelona, Max let him speak to the audience in Spanish. He had them in the palm of his hand introducing each one of us with funny quips and jokes.”
For Mantilla, M’Boom was an opportunity to expand his musicianship. “I had to learn to play mallet parts on vibes, xylophone, etc. I had never done that before. It was great. They showed me that and I had a chance to show the guys how to play hand drums and the percussion in an authentic way.”
In 1977, Mantilla also made political history, as part of a group of musicians led by Dizzy Gillespie who became the first to perform in Cuba since the travel embargo of 1962. Their joint concerts with Cuba’s supergroup Irakere and the rúmba percussion ensemble Los Papines would reestablish musical ties with the island.
It was the following year, 1978, that Mantilla really became a bandleader. His group, which he eventually dubbed the Space Station, explored Afro-Cuban-based rhythms but also experimented with expanding the parameters of the music, notably with odd meters. “I was into that when nobody else was, other than people like Don Ellis,” Mantilla said. “That’s why on that album you hear things in seven, etc. Nobody in Latin jazz was doing that at all. That’s why I would call the group Space Station. We were doing things that were out of the norm.”
Trumpter Guido Gonzalez spoke to Mantilla’s style as a bandleader: “In many ways Ray was like Art Blakey. He’d let everyone in the band give their input. He was also funny. The way I got in the band was after I played in a rehearsal, he came up to me and said, ‘Man, your sound doesn’t bother me.’”
Mantilla is survived by his brothers, Kermit and Lisandro Gilberto, and his sisters, Irma Ogden and Sara Kelly, along with extended family. “What I want people to know is that Raymond helped to spread Latin jazz throughout the whole world,” said Kermit. “That is his greatest contribution. Our family is proud of him, as is the entire Peruvian and Puerto Rican community worldwide.”
Over the last few years, as the latest member of M’Boom, I got to know Ray really well on a personal level. The funny anecdotes, deep storytelling, and of course his priceless musicianship (not to mention the bind we had as Bronxites) were all things that I always looked forward to — along with performing, and seeing brothers Warren Smith and Joe Chambers.
But it is the friendship I will always cherish more than anything. Ray was on the Music Board of the Bronx Music Heritage Center, where my wife Elena Martinez and I are Co-Artistic Directors. We always looked forward to our meetings, as Ray and fellow Bronxite Jimmy Owens would hold court with the memories of our beloved borough.
Another S.O.B. (Son of da’ Bronx) has left us embraced by the spirits of ancestors that have contributed mightily and majestically to the history of the music. Rest in power and Aché, Brother Ray.
Special thanks to Chucho Martinez and Kermit Mantilla for providing biographical information.
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Bill Smith, Master of Two Musical Worlds, Is Dead at 93
By Steve Smith
March 21, 2020
As Bill Smith, he was a jazz clarinetist who played with Dave Brubeck. As William O. Smith, he was a composer who pioneered unorthodox techniques for his instrument.
The clarinetist and composer Bill Smith straddled the classical and jazz worlds with ease. One of his longest collaborations was with Dave Brubeck, seen here performing with Mr. Smith in 2004.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
Bill Smith, a clarinetist and composer who forged collaborations with some of the pre-eminent jazz and classical artists of the 20th century, including an especially long and close alliance with the pianist Dave Brubeck, died on Feb. 29 at his home in Seattle. He was 93.
His wife, the painter Virginia Paquette Smith, said the cause was complications of prostate cancer.
When he was a teenager, Mr. Smith both led a jazz ensemble and performed with the Oakland Symphony, an early sign of the double musical life that marked his career.
As William O. Smith, he pioneered unorthodox techniques for his instrument and developed ways to notate them for other players. Composers like Luigi Nono, Pauline Oliveros and Gunther Schuller fashioned works that took advantage of Mr. Smith’s uncommon virtuosity. His own compositions were performed and recorded by eminent artists like Mr. Schuller, André Previn and Marni Nixon.
As Bill Smith, he enjoyed a lively career as a jazz clarinetist. He was admired for his bright tone and buoyant swing, most visibly in bands led by Mr. Brubeck.
In fact, the lines between William and Bill were never sharply drawn. Mr. Smith wrote compositions and arrangements for the novel octet he founded with Mr. Brubeck in 1946, which anticipated the stylistic movement synthesizing classical music and jazz for which Mr. Schuller coined the term “Third Stream”in 1957. Mr. Smith’s pieces for other bandleaders, like Red Norvo (“Divertimento,” 1957) and Shelly Manne (“Concerto for Clarinet and Combo,” 1957), also showed his affinity for the style.
Mr. Smith recorded with the Dave Brubeck Quartet on three albums, for which he also provided all the compositions: “Brubeck à la Mode,” “Near Myth” and “The Riddle.”
In 1966 Mr. Smith joined the faculty of the University of Washington, where he organized an experimental ensemble, the Contemporary Group, with the trombonist Stuart Dempster.
During the 1980s and ’90s he returned to Mr. Brubeck’s quartet, traveling widely, recording regularly and experimenting with electronic effects on his horn.
Dave Brubeck’s son Chris, who played bass and trombone in a later group of his father’s, described Mr. Smith as an avuncular guru of limitless capacity and sly wit.
“I would always hear melodic inventiveness and lyricism,” Mr. Brubeck said of Mr. Smith’s playing in a phone interview. “If he wanted to get from point A, a high note, down to this unbelievable low note in this very wide range, it wouldn’t be a mystery where he would fumble or fake it. He would have an entire chord structure up his sleeve: He knew exactly what he was doing, all the time. His facility was just incredible, and also his sense of adventure.”
That last quality, Mr. Brubeck noted, extended to Mr. Smith’s approach to touring: “Bill was always the first one out of the hotel with guidebooks, and he knew a lot about what he was going to see. He was constantly culturally thirsty.”
Bill Smith was born William Overton on Sept. 22, 1926, in Sacramento, Calif., to Ross Moody Overton, a traveling salesman, and Beatrice (Watson) Overton, who worked as a model and raised her son with help from her mother. After divorcing Mr. Overton, Mr. Smith’s mother married Bob Smith, who adopted him.
William grew up in Oakland and took up the clarinet at 10. After a brief time at the Juilliard School in 1946, he returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud at Mills College in Oakland that same year. He later studied with Roger Sessions at the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music in 1950 and a master’s in composition in 1952.
Mr. Smith’s introduction to Mr. Brubeck, another Mills College student, came at the behest of Milhaud, who encouraged them in their pursuit of an idiom that incorporated classical and jazz techniques.
“I was really impressed with Bill because at such an early age he’d mastered so much of the technique of clarinet, both in classical and in jazz, which is rare,” Dave Brubeck said in a 1989 interview for University of Washington television. “Even older, established players didn’t have as much mastery as Bill had when he was very young.”
In 1957 Mr. Smith was awarded the prestigious Prix de Rome, leading to study there and a lifelong love affair with the city, where he long maintained a second home.
As a composer, he embraced technological innovations; his “Duo for Clarinet and Recorded Clarinet” (1960) is cited in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as the earliest example of a work for clarinet and tape. He combined Third Stream notions and 12-tone technique in “Concerto for Jazz Soloist and Orchestra” (1962).
Mr. Smith and Ms. Paquette Smith were married in 1978 and collaborated on art installations in which, Ms. Paquette Smith said, he would “play” her paintings through improvisation.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Smith is survived by four children from a previous marriage, Mark, Gregory, Matthew and Rebecca Smith, and two grandchildren.
“Bill never stopped playing and composing,” Ms. Paquette Smith said in an email.
“He had major concerts with his friends and students, who continue to perform and compose in the same experimental and fiercely creative mode as Bill,” she added, “combining the jazz and classical modes that Milhaud inspired in him.”
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The autobiography of Mermaid Inn favorite George Grosz, 90, which is “full of sardonic wit with a touch of vaudeville,” was just released by publisher Golden Alley Press on March 4.
by Len Lear and Elizabeth Coady
One of the most popular performers ever to play the Mermaid Inn, Marty Grosz, is celebrating his 90th birthday and his astonishing 70-year career in music with his autobiography, “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.” The memoir, “full of sardonic wit with a touch of vaudeville,” was just released by publisher Golden Alley Press on March 4, the same date that Grosz played a celebratory concert at World Cafe Live, 3025 Walnut St.
Marty has many stories to tell. In his seven-decade career, he has performed with jazz greats such as Herb Ellis, Charlie Byrd, Dick Hyman, Leroy “Slam” Stewart, Bob Wilber, Kenny Davern, etc. Beginning in the 1950s, he became a prominent figure of Chicago’s jazz club scene and toured with the New York Jazz Repertory Orchestra, Soprano Summit, The Classic Jazz Quartet and others. Marty’s lengthy discography ranges from a 1951 recording with veteran New Orleans’ bassist “Pops” Foster to his 2015 CD with The Fat Babies.
But Marty is more than just a great jazz guitarist and singer; he’s a raconteur sharing yarns accumulated over a lifetime between performing classics like “I’m Crazy About My Baby” and “Beale Street Blues.” He’s played in the White House for President Jimmy Carter, toured extensively throughout Europe, Japan and Australia, and strummed behind Woody Allen every Monday night for a year at a pub on New York’s East Side. “He couldn’t play,” Grosz recalled in an earlier interview with the Local, referring to the famous movie director who he says wore the “same dyspeptic look” he does today. “He owned a clarinet.”
In an earlier gig at the Mermaid Inn, two musicians drove down from New York City for the pleasure of playing with Grosz. “He’s a legend,” said Lynn Redmile, a photographer whose trumpeter husband, Danny Tobias, regularly accompanies Grosz on gigs. “Marty is one of the last great rhythm guitar players around,” said Tobias. “It’s a pleasure and a privilege to play with him. He’s really funny on the microphone and completely spontaneous. When he sings, sometimes he’ll just put asides in the music like Fats Waller did … I never pass up a chance to play with Marty.”
Grosz has recorded dozens of albums on his own. Esteemed jazz journalist Scott Yanow touts Grosz as “one of jazz music’s great comedians” and a “brilliant acoustic guitarist.” Grosz was bornFeb. 28, 1930, the youngest son of renowned German Dadaist painter George Grosz, who gained international acclaim for viciously satirizing the corruption and decadence of Berlin society of the early 20th century and later of Hitler’s Nazi regime. “Barbarism prevailed … The times were mad,” the artist wrote of that era in his biography, “A Little Yes and a Big No.”
A Grosz oil on canvas entitled “Wild West” sold for $2.2 million, his highest-priced painting, at an October, 1996, auction at Christie’s in London. A watercolor and pen and India ink over pencil on paper entitled “Der Neue Mensch” (“The New Man”) sold in November, 2009, for $1.3 million at Christie’s auction house in New York.
Grosz the artist drew Jesus hanging on a cross wearing a gas mask and infantry boots; he skewered businessmen, prostitutes and upper class German society with pen-and-ink and oil. “I drew drunkards; puking men; men with clenched fists cursing at the moon … I drew a man, face filled with fright, washing blood from his hands,” Grosz was quoted as saying in “Before the Deluge,” Otto Friedrick’s book on 1920s’ Berlin.
George Grosz was declared public enemy number one by the Nazis for his mocking depictions of soldiers and was prosecuted three times for ”blasphemous art,” according to Christie’s. He fled Germany for America 18 days before Hitler assumed power in 1933.
Only three years old at the time, Marty remembered traveling on the ship S.S. Bremen, which had set the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic two years earlier. “One thing you don’t forget is that they had a catapult plane, a sea plane. And a guy got in the cockpit … catapulted off the Bremen and sailed away into the clouds,” Grosz recalled. “And I remember coming into the New York Harbor.”
“It’s a Sin” also contains interviews that are transcriptions from 11 live interviews between 2015 and 2019. In them, Marty opines on guitar tuning, Eddie Condon, drummers and bassists, Slam Stewart, Mingus, Chet Baker, Hoagy Carmichael, Herb Ellis and more.
For more information, visit martygrosz.com. Len Lear can be reached at lenlear@chestnuthilllocal.com
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For the better part of five decades, he was the baritone saxophonist and linchpin of one of the most idiosyncratic and influential ensembles in jazz.
Danny Roy Thompson, right, and Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra in performance at the New School in New York in 2018.Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Danny Ray Thompson, who spent the better part of five decades as the baritone saxophonist and linchpin of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, one of the most idiosyncratic and influential ensembles in jazz, died on March 12 in Philadelphia. He was 72.
The saxophonist Marshall Allen, the current leader of the Arkestra, confirmed the death, at a hospice center. He did not specify the cause but said that Mr. Thompson had been ill for some time.
Mr. Thompson was barely 20 when Mr. Allen introduced him to Sun Ra in New York in 1967. His first assignment was to watch the band’s house on the Lower East Side every Monday night, while the Arkestra played its weekly gig at Slugs’ Saloon nearby. Eventually he was promoted to band driver, before finally joining the ensemble as a saxophonist and flutist.
He went on to serve for many years as the Arkestra’s manager, responsible for everything from distributing its self-released albums to organizing tours.
“Within a few years Thompson was to become one of the most trusted people in Sun Ra’s entourage, and, some even said, the heir apparent to the leader,” the music historian John Szwed wrote in “Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra” (1997).
Mr. Thompson’s devotion to the group’s music — and its theatrically attired, cosmo-futurist performance ethic — sprang eternal. At one concert, Mr. Szwed related, Mr. Thompson was locked in a three-saxophone melee of free improvisation when two of the keys became dislodged from his baritone saxophone and shot off into the audience. He used his fingers to plug the open holes and kept playing, aggressively. All of a sudden his hand got stuck in the horn, and even after the other saxophonists had grown tired and dropped out, he kept going, not knowing what else to do.
“You need to be creative like that,” Mr. Allen remembered Sun Ra telling him approvingly afterward. “He was so creative he tore the keys off; he was like that little Dutch boy and the dike!”
Danny Ray Thompsonwas born on Oct. 1, 1947, in New York City, to Elgie and Oscar Leonard Thompson. When he was a child his family moved to Los Angeles, where he picked up the nickname Pico, for the boulevard near where he lived. His father, a research scientist, was the first black person to receive a degree from the University of Texas. His mother, an interior designer, encouraged Danny’s interest in both music and acting.
He is survived by a half sister, Dawne Thompson; a son, Darrell Thompson; and two stepchildren, Loren and Gay Ojugbana, whom he helped raise after his marriage to their mother, Marilyn Ojugbana, ended in divorce.
After high school, Mr. Thompson returned to New York and enrolled in night classes at Juilliard.
He played in his first concert in 1966, with the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Through Mr. Allen, another member of Olatunji’s band, he was soon introduced to Sun Ra.
After working his way into the Sun Ra organization, Mr. Thompson made his first major appearance with the Arkestra at Carnegie Hall on April 12 and 13, 1968, just one week after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
At first his role was simply to play bass lines on the baritone saxophone, as the group had recently lost its bassist and already had a capable baritone player in Pat Patrick. But he eventually became the sonic foundation of the group, whose music could range from swing-era revivalism to blistering free jazz.
Sun Ra and much of the band soon moved to Philadelphia, taking over a house owned by Mr. Allen’s father in the Germantown neighborhood. At one point, Mr. Thompson expanded beyond simply managing the band’s affairs; he and his mother opened a grocery store, Pharoah’s Den, which he sought to make not just a moneymaking venture but also a haven for Afrocentric art.
Mr. Thompson left the Arkestra in the 1990s and worked for the Census Bureau and the Transportation Security Administration before moving to Texas for a time. But in the 2000s he returned to Philadelphia and rejoined the band, which had continued after Sun Ra died in 1993.
In recent years it has experienced a resurgence in popularity, particularly around the 2013 centennial of Sun Ra’s birth. The band now performs dozens of shows each year, and still tours internationally.
In his final months, Mr. Thompson was in failing health and in and out of the hospital. But he gathered the strength to participate in a concert at Town Hall in Manhattan on March 4. It was his final public performance.
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Kenny Rogers, a grizzled, raspy-voiced country-pop crooner who specialized in narrative-driven ballads such as “Lucille” and “The Gambler,” the latter of which sent its life-as-a-card-game refrain echoing through popular culture, died March 20 at his home in Sandy Springs, Ga. He was 81.
A representative confirmed the death to the Associated Press but did not cite a cause. Mr. Rogers’s seven-decade career — which included stardom in “The Gambler” TV films and co-ownership of a fast-food chicken franchise — wound down in 2017 as he encountered health problems that included a diagnosis of bladder cancer.
His farewell concerts generated headlines that referred to lyrics from his signature song, about a card player who philosophizes that in life, as in games of chance, “you’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”
A veteran of doo-wop, jazz and folk groups, Mr. Rogers was pushing 30 when he had his first brush with commercial success as part of the pop group the First Edition. The group’s 1967 hit “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” was about a hallucinogenic trip and was later featured in a psychedelic dream sequence in the 1998 Coen Brothers film “The Big Lebowski.”
Kenny Rogers performs at the 2012 CMA Music Festival in Nashville. (Wade Payne/Invision/AP)
The act broke up in the mid-1970s, and Mr. Rogers found himself thrice divorced, $65,000 in debt and hawking the “Quick-Pickin’ ‘N Fun-Strummin’ Home Guitar Course” in TV commercials.
Seeking a change, he found it in Nashville.
“I went to Fan Fair in Nashville at Municipal Auditorium one time,” Mr. Rogers told Billboard, “and there were about 10,000 people in the audience, and they introduced this guy who had had a record back in 1954, and the crowd went crazy. I felt that, with that type of longevity, this is where I needed to be.”
Mr. Rogers and Lionel Richie perform together in 2012. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
Nashville producer Larry Butler engineered Mr. Rogers’s reinvention as a country performer. With his impeccably groomed gray beard and designer western wear, the singer cultivated a romantic but laid-back persona that played off Butler’s careful, hook-laden song choices.
“I’d say, ‘I want to do ballads that say what every man would like to say and every woman would want to hear,’ ” Mr. Rogers told The Washington Post in 2016. “And the reason I did that was then you had both audiences: You had the male and female audiences.”
During the 1970s, Mr. Rogers fine-tuned a middle ground between country and easy listening pop that reaped commercial dividends. Every recording he made between 1976 and 1984 sold more than 500,000 copies, and many sold more than 1 million.
“His roots were in pop and folk music,” country music historian Rich Kienzle said in an interview. “He developed a mellow voice that put him in the vanguard of a type of light, fluffy easy listening country which gained the industry name ‘Urban Cowboy’ after the popularity of the John Travolta film. He had a long career because of his crossover appeal to fans of easy listening pop.”
The love ballads included “You Decorated My Life” and “She Believes in Me,” both from 1979, and a cover the next year of Lionel Richie’s “Lady.” In addition to Don Schlitz’s “The Gambler” (1978), he had hits with “story songs” such as “Lucille” (1977), about a woman leaving her impoverished farmer husband (“You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille”) and “Coward of the County” (1979), the story of a passive man’s bloody revenge against the rapists who attacked his sweetheart. Cumulatively, they established him as a force in country pop.
Some of his notable duets included “Islands in the Stream” with Dolly Parton and “We’ve Got Tonight” with Sheena Easton, both in 1983; “Don’t Fall in Love With a Dreamer” (1980) with Kim Carnes; and “Every Time Two Fools Collide” (1978) with Dottie West. “Make No Mistake, She’s Mine,” Mr. Rogers’s duet with a male singer Ronnie Milsap, won a Grammy for best country duo in 1987.
He won two other competitive Grammys, for “The Gambler” and “Lucille,” and was nominated 19 times. In 2013, he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
In part as a backlash against the crossover style of Mr. Rogers and other pop-driven singers, a number of performers such as Randy Travis and George Strait began in the mid-1980s to reorient the music toward its roots. Mr. Rogers’s chart presence declined, but he remained a constant and instantly recognizable presence on television, hosting music specials and bringing the title character of “The Gambler” to life in a series of made-for-TV westerns. He also starred as a racecar driver in the 1982 family film “Six Pack.”
In 1991, he invested his earnings and name in a chain of fast-food rotisserie chicken restaurants, Kenny Rogers Roasters. The company achieved a publicity coup in 1996 when its signature bright red neon signs became a plot line in the hit sitcom “Seinfeld.”
But the business faced stiff competition from other franchisers, and it filed for bankruptcy in 1998. After several changes in ownership — and the shuttering of its U.S. locations — the company began operating principally in Asia.
Kenneth Ray Rogers was born in Houston on Aug. 21, 1938. He was the fourth of eight children and grew up in a public housing development. He said his father — a carpenter and country fiddler — was an alcoholic who often drank his wages. His mother was a nurse’s assistant.
Inspired by a Ray Charles concert he attended at 12, he decided to pursue a music career — in search, he later said, of acclaim and girls. He formed a Houston doo-wop group and called it the Scholars.
“A misnomer — there wasn’t a C student in the bunch,” he later quipped. They had a regional hit with “That Crazy Feeling” (1958) released under his own name. One of the group’s follow-up recordings was a song, “Kangewah,” written by Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons.
“We figured she’d plug our record in her column,” Mr. Rogers later told People magazine. “It was a great idea but had no relationship to reality. We came home broke.”
After a stint as a bass player in a local jazz trio, he joined the New Christy Minstrels in 1966. But the next year, feeling stifled by the group’s formulaic hootenanny style, Mr. Rogers and three former Minstrels — singer Mike Settle, guitarist Terry Williams and vocalist Thelma Camacho — formed the First Edition. Mickey Jones, a drummer who had toured with Bob Dylan, rounded out the unit.
With Mr. Rogers increasingly featured as the frontman, the group was later billed as Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. The group’s 1969 hit, “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” written by country star Mel Tillis, was about a paralyzed and cuckolded veteran and was perceived as a thinly veiled swipe at the Vietnam War. “Reuben James,” also from 1969, told the story of a black man raising a white child. The band had a syndicated television show — “Rollin’ On The River” (later shortened to “Rollin’”) — which ran from 1971 to 1973.
Mr. Rogers said his ambition and inclination to put work first led to a turbulent personal life. Four of his marriages — to Janice Gordon, Jean Rogers, Margo Anderson and actress Marianne Gordon — ended in divorce. His 1993 divorce settlement with Marianne Gordon, after 16 years of marriage, cost him $60 million.
“She deserves every penny,” he later said, noting that she “stood behind” him in the years he was broke — and before his breakthrough as a major solo performer.
Survivors include his wife of 22 years, Wanda Miller, and several children from that and his earlier marriages. His oldest brother, Lelan Rogers, an independent record producer who died in 2002, produced some of Mr. Roger’s earliest doo-wop songs.
Mr. Rogers remained an enthusiastic performer, still hoping to make new fans, well into the twilight of his career. “I’ve always said I don’t care whether one person walks away saying, ‘He’s the best singer I’ve ever heard,’ ” he once said. “But I want everyone to walk away saying, ‘I enjoyed that.’ ”
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Long before late-night talk show hosts began doing it, he conducted absurd interviews with gullible passersby with his comedic partner, Jim Coyle.
The pranksters Mal Sharpe, center, and Jim Coyle, right, pose as researchers from The Milpitas Physical Fitness Institute in 1963 in San Francisco, where they talk a man into a display of sidewalk gymnastics.John Gorman/San Francisco Examiner
Two strangers approach a man named George on the streets of San Francisco.
“George,” one of them says, “would you yourself participate in a program of inter-protoplasm flow?”
George doesn’t hesitate. “If I needed it, I guess I would,” he says.
One of the strangers, earnestly impressing on George the seriousness of that commitment, elaborates:
“If you knew that you were going to have all of your — let’s face it — your insides taken out or sucked out of you and in return you were going to have the insides of another person placed into the interior of your body, either the insides of one other person or many other people, would you participate in such a program?”
George again affirms, “Yes, if I needed it.” Only when the two try to get him to accompany them to a lab, right then and there, to have the procedure done does George balk.
The two ersatz medical experts were Mal Sharpe and Jim Coyle, and the exchange, immortalized in an audio track, took place in the early 1960s, one of countless pranks the pair sprung on unsuspecting passers-by decades before “Impractical Jokers” and present-day late-night hosts thought of working similar comedic territory.
Mr. Coyle stayed in the punking game only a short while, but Mr. Sharpe made something of a career out of it, influencing the whole field of ambush humor.
“Coyle and Sharpe were pioneers of an entire genre of comedy, the Man on the Street bit,” Charlie Todd, founder of the comedy collective Improv Everywhere, said by email. “Every late-night host and YouTube prankster owes a bit of their act to Coyle and Sharpe.”
Mr. Sharpe, who was well known in the Bay Area for his wacky interviews and also as a jazz trombonist, died on March 10 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 83. His daughter, Jennifer Sharpe, said his health had diminished since he underwent heart surgery three and a half years ago.
Mr. Sharpe first met Mr. Coyle in 1959 when they were bunking at the same San Francisco rooming house. Mr. Coyle asked Mr. Sharpe what he did for a living, and Mr. Sharpe said he specialized in animal-to-human brain transplants and was himself waiting to receive a flamingo brain. Mr. Coyle, in turn, gave Mr. Sharpe his biography: Although he looked 23, he said, he was 80 and had a pension from serving in the Spanish-American War.
With such an introduction the two hit it off and began exchanging comedic ideas. They went their separate ways briefly, but returned to San Francisco in 1961 and began pranking in earnest.
They used a tape recorder hidden in a briefcase to record their absurd encounters. Comedy albums were enjoying a surge of popularity, driven by the enormous success of Bob Newhart’s 1960 record, “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart,” and the pair had hopes of landing a record deal with their recordings. Although the first company they tried rejected them, they were eventually signed by Warner Brothers Records, which in 1963 released “The Absurd Imposters.”
Its track list gives the flavor of the enterprise: “Selling Insects to a Clothing Store” is one; “Carpenter, Give Us Your Lunch” another. And then there was “Mutant Zebra-Eel in a Paint Store,” in which they tried to persuade a merchant to exhibit a new life form in his shop window.
“It’s a cross between a zebra and certain type of sea eel,” one of them explains, “and it’s almost entirely zebralike physically. The eel influence is only in the legs.”
The album didn’t sell all that well, but disc jockeys started playing the cuts, and KGO radio in San Francisco signed the pair to do a show, “Coyle and Sharpe on the Loose.”
“C & S, who had never done radio work before, were suddenly faced with the terror of filling 18 hours of airtime a week,” Jennifer Sharpe wrote in liner notes for a 1995 album drawn from the tapes from this period. To get better audio quality, they abandoned the hidden recorder and went to a straight-on interview method with microphone and recorder in full view.
About a decade ago, Jesse Thorn, founder of the Maximum Fun podcast network, turned some of Coyle & Sharpe’s best material into bite-size podcasts.
“What makes it work so amazingly,” Mr. Thorn said in a phone interview, “is that Jim was a genuine weirdo who was also an actual con man, and Mal was an actual cool guy who could pass for a square.”
The moment — space exploration just beginning; science asserting itself — was also right, since many of the pair’s bits involved concepts that were on the edge of science fiction.
“What you had,” Mr. Thorn said, “was people who were used to living in a world of wonder, and science is the one delivering the wonder.”
Malcolm Sharpe was born on April 2, 1936, in Cambridge, Mass. His father, Ralph, who died when Malcolm was 4, managed a shoe store. His mother, Carolyn (Varnick) Sharpe, worked in a clothing store during World War II.
Mr. Sharpe enrolled in Boston University’s public relations and communication program, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1958. He later pursued a master’s degree in broadcast communications at Michigan State University. His interest in jazz led him to San Francisco, drawn, he said, by an image on the cover of an album by the San Francisco jazz musician Turk Murphy.
He and Mr. Coyle, who died in 1993, called their pranks “terrorizations,” but generally the pranksters and their targets parted as friends thanks to Mr. Sharpe’s genial personality.
Well, except for that time the two got arrested.
“We were interviewing this guy and told him that we wanted to borrow his car for a few hours to go to a restaurant,” Mr. Sharpe related to The New York Times in 2000. “He said, ‘How do I know you’re going to bring it back?’ We said that would be the great thing for him: We would bring it back and then he’d have more trust in human beings. And he called the police.”
The two made a television pilot, but nothing came of it, and in the mid-1960s Mr. Coyle abandoned the partnership. Mr. Sharpe, though, kept doing on-the-street interviews, working in radio and advertising and releasing two albums on his own. In the early 1970s he had a nationally syndicated television show, “Street People.” He worked for several radio stations doing street interviews, and for years he was a host of “Back on Basin Street,” a jazz program on KCSM in the Bay Area. He also had his own jazz band, Big Money in Jazz.
In 1964 Mr. Sharpe married Sandra Lee Wemple; in addition to his daughter, his wife survives him.
The Coyle and Sharpe radio show lasted only two years. Although Mr. Sharpe did plenty of pranking on his own afterward, he told San Francisco Weekly in 1995 that his partnership with Mr. Coyle was in a class by itself.
“You hate to think your best stuff was the first stuff you did, but in a way I’ve always felt that way,” he said. “That stuff was much more artistic, and had more validity and somehow was out there on a level that I really didn’t do again in many ways.”
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Saxophonist Dexter Gordon stars in Bertrand Tavernier’s “‘Round Midnight,” the greatest jazz feature film ever made.(Little Bear)
With clubs and concert halls shut down, our musical needs must be satisfied at home.
And surely one of the best ways is by watching movies devoted to the subject.
With that in mind, here’s one listener’s guide to some of the best and worst movies on jazz:
“’Round Midnight” (1986)
Sometimes it takes an outsider to illuminate what’s happening inside another culture. Certainly that’s the case with “’Round Midnight,” the best feature film ever made about a distinctly American art form. Directed and co-written by the French master Bertrand Tavernier, “’Round Midnight” captures the melancholy of a jazz musician’s life, as well as the joys of making music on the bandstand. Part of the film’s genius lies in its casting, with jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordonplaying the tortured protagonist (loosely modeled on pianist Bud Powell), who battles addiction and other woes. Herbie Hancock won an Oscar for his original score in a film that makes the music a character in itself.
“Young Man with a Horn” (1950)
Kirk Douglas, who died in February at age 103, turned in one of the most convincing and compelling characterizations of a jazz musician ever filmed. You can feel his character’s obsession with the music, and you can witness its terrible cost. He’s surrounded by a comparably effective cast, with Doris Day as the embodiment of hope, Lauren Bacall as the face of cynicism and immortal songwriter-pianist Hoagy Carmichael as the sage who narrates it all. Harry James recorded the trumpet solos that Douglas mimes so beautifully, James’ famously golden sound easy to get lost in. The ending of director Michael Curtiz’s film is not perfect, but just about everything else in it is. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
Can an animated film do justice to the elusive art of jazz? The Oscar-nominated “Chico & Rita” definitively answered that question. Very loosely based on the story of Cuban musician Bebo Valdes, the film shows American jazz and its Cuban counterpart intermingling to brilliant effect. Beyond the vivid animation – which re-creates the likenesses of Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole, Tito Puente, Chano Pozo and others – the music is the star, thanks partly to the contributions of Jimmy Heath, Arturo O’Farrill, and Valdes, who played piano tellingly. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
“Jazz on a Summer’s Day” (1959)
The music never looked more beautiful nor sensuous than in Bert Stern’s classic documentary, which chronicles the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival in ultrapoetic tones. Of course, any film that features live performances by Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Anita O’Day, Thelonious Monk and others already has a great deal going for it. Stern interweaves the concert footage with lush cinematography of the environs, in effect shattering the unfortunate but widely disseminated myth of jazz as an inherently dark and forbidding world.
“Keep on Keepin’ On” (2014)
The jazz world has known few figures more gifted or generous than trumpeter Clark Terry, whose final chapter is lovingly captured here. We see Terry mentoring the young pianist Justin Kauflin, just as Terry had encouraged and influenced future stars such as Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis. When Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra come to play for an ailing Terry, we see – and hear – how jazz musicians connect and how legacies pass through generations. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
Writer-director Damien Chazelle made quite a splash with this feature film, which was so histrionic and exaggerated as to demean both its central characters and the art of jazz itself. For those who believed such hysterical melodrama, please realize this soap opera has nothing to do with how jazz is played or lived. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
You’d think a lifelong jazz lover and advocate such as director Clint Eastwood would have a better understanding of Charlie Parker than he displayed in this starchy biopic. You would be wrong. To Eastwood, Bird was a swooning, drugged-out clown, which made this film a disgrace to Parker’s music, his disease and his legacy. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
It takes real talent to suck the life out of an art form as animated as jazz, but documentary filmmaker Ken Burns managed to do it – and in only 19 hours! Errors, exaggerations and omissions abound in this 10-episode extravaganza of talking heads and precious little music-making. In all, an ideal expression of what jazz is not. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
Director-star Don Cheadle somehow turns Miles Davis, one of the most charismatic figures in jazz history, into a small, petty, ridiculous man. The laughable plot line concerns Davis and a fictional journalist hotly pursuing a stolen tape of the trumpeter’s music, complete with car chase and gunfire. Really. (Available to stream on Amazon Prime)
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
Howard Reich is the Tribune’s Emmy-winning arts critic; author of six books, including “The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel”; and writer-producer of three documentaries. He holds two honorary doctoral degrees and served on the Pulitzer music jury four times, including for the first jazz winner, “Blood on the Fields.”
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The idea of posting this list now is to remind people of what has been lost and hope that it stirs us to preserve what we have left.
Izzy Ort’s bar and Grill.
No one knows how lasting the ramifications of the coronaviris (COVID-19) will be. Physical suffering and mortality are going to increase. And it is certain that the need to decrease the spread of the disease through social isolation will lead to an enormous amount of financial suffering on the part of businesses large and small. No doubt non-profit cultural organizations and venues will be hard-pressed to find the resources needed to survive the loss of revenue. Given their already tight margin, jazz venues will be especially hard hit.
With the help of others, including my good friend Dick Vacca-[The Troy Street Observer]-I’ve compiled a list of venues in Boston that had live jazz, at least for a while. The idea of posting this now is to remind people of what has been lost and hope that it stirs us to preserve what we have left.
1369 Club,
Accurate Records Loft,
Ahmed’s,
Arbor House,
Ark of the Covenant,
Back Bay Hilton,
Backstreet,
Beantown Jazz Festival,
Bebop,
Beehive,
Bella Luna,
Berklee,
Betty’s Rolls Royce,
Boston Arts Festival
Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Boston Globe Jazz Festival,
BPL,
Brothers in Brookline,
CasaBlanca,
CCP Studios,
Charles St. Playhouse,
Choppin Blok,
Club 47
Club Zircon,
Connelly’s,
Copley Plaza Bar,
Costello’s,
Cronins,
Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen,
Debbie’s,
Doyle’s,
Elbow Room,
Ellis Room,
Essex Hotel bar,
Estelle’s,
Fairmount Grille,
Friends of Great Black Music loft,
Gallery East,
Goodlife,
Greene St Grill Cambridge,) Green St,( JP),
Hasty Pudding,
Hi Lo Lounge,
Hotel Avery,
Hyde Park Jazz Festival,
Inn Square Men’s Bar.
Izzy Ort’s
Jazz Workshop/Pall’s Mall,
Joes,
Johnny D’s,
Jonathan Swift’s,
Kresge Auditorium
Lennie’s on the Turnpike,
Les Zygomates,
Liberty Cafe, a basement in Central Sq
Lilypad,
Lizard Lounge,
lue Parrot,
Lulu White’s,
Magnolia Loft.
Merry Go Round at the Copley Plaza,
Michael’s,
Middle East Corner,
Midway,
Modern Theater,
Most of the strip clubs had Hammond Trios,
NEC,
Nightstage,
OCBC,
Outpost 186,
Oxford Ale house,
Paine Hall,
Paris 25,
Parker House,
Performance Center in the Garage,
Playground Series at the loft on Harrison Ave,
Playland,
Plough and Stars,
Pooh’s Pub,
Ramsey/Toy VFW Post, Dorchester,
Real Deal jazz club at the Cambridge Multicultural Center,
Regattabar,
Rise Club
Ryles,
Sandy’s,
Satch’s,
Savoy,
Scotch and Sirloin,
Sculler’s,
Slades,
Space,
Speakeasy,
Starlite Roof,
Stone Soup,
Storyville,
Streetfood,
Studio Red Top,
Sunflower Cafe,
Swifts,
the (old)Winery,
Thelonius Monkfish,
Third Life Studio,
Top of the Hub,
various churches and libraries.
Village Smokehouse in Brookline,
Vouros Bakery
Wally’s,
WBUR,
Western Front,
WGBH,
Willow,
Wurst Haus,
Your Father’s Moustache
Zeitgeist Gallery
From Dick:
These are mainly Boston jazz venues, or suburban spots inside Route 495, in operation from 1972 onward — though there are a few from the ’60s. Individual schools and churches are not included. And there were rock rooms like the Channel and the Paradise that had jazz on occasion, but not often enough to make the list.
Downtown Crossing/State St/Quincy Mkt
Bay Tower Room
Cafe Fleuri, Meridien Hotel
Chez Freddie
City Hall Plaza
Concerts on the Common
Cricket’s
Gallagher’s
Lily’s
Michael’s Waterfront
Sir Harry’s
Theatre District
1-2-3 Lounge
Bradford Hotel Grand Ballroom
Caribe Lounge
Four Corners
Stuart Manor
The Vagabond
Tic Toc
Varty’s Jazz Room
Park Square
Number 3 Lounge
Playboy Club
Saxony
The Other Side
Back Bay
Danny’s
Darbury Room, became The Point After
Hatch Shell
Hotel Eliot Lounge
ICA Theatre
Jason’s
Lenox Hotel
My Apartment Lounge
Office Lounge
Turner Fisheries
Huntington Ave
Club Symphony
Gardner Museum
Museum of Fine Arts
Zachary’s
Roxbury/South End
Desert Lounge
Handy’s Grill
Juice and Jazz
Piano Factory
Pioneer Club
Rainbow Lounge
Savoy on the Hill
The Station
Tinker’s
Dorchester
Playhouse in the Park (Elma Lewis, Franklin Park)
Strand Theatre
Kenmore Square
Kix
Cafe Yana
East Boston
Airport Hilton
P.J.’s Lounge
West of Boston
Bonfire, Westborough
Colonial Inn, Concord
Cottage Crest, Waltham
Decordova Museum, Lincoln
Ephriam’s, Sudbury
Finally Michael’s, Framingham
Matrix, Natick
Piety Corner Gardens, Waltham
Sticky Wicket, Hopkinton
North of Boston
Buddy’s, Revere
Cafe Beaujolais, Gloucester
Club Caravan, Revere
Ebb Tide, Revere Beach
Lakeside, Topsfield
Oceanside Jazz and Big Band Festival, Winthrop
Romie’s, Danvers
Stouffer’s Bedford Glen Hotel, Bedford
The Surf, Revere Beach
Wagon Wheels, West Peabody
South of Boston
Boston Jazz Society’s Jazz BBQ
Joseph’s, Braintree
Great Woods Performance Center
Water Music’s Jazz Boat
Steve Provizer writes on a range of subject, most often the arts. He is a musician and blogs about jazz here.
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Don Burrows, a multi-instrumentalist known largely in Australia, where he spent much of his professional career and where he became a significant jazz performer and recording artist, died on March 12, 2020. He was 91.
Burrows recorded on nearly every reed and woodwind instrument and in many different jazz styles, from Dixieland to fusion. In Australia, he was often called upon to play in orchestras backing marquee pop singers on tour, including Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Cleo Lane. He also performed with touring jazz stars such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nat King Cole and Oscar Peterson.
While hugely popular in Australia, where he became a fixture on televised variety shows and concerts, Burrows was little known in the U.S. That’s largely because his records weren’t widely distributed here, probably because labels required touring to support their release. Burrows didn’t tour much outside of Australia. That decision was likely a practical one, since travel abroad would have taken him away from home for sums that didn’t sufficiently offset the cost or inconvenience.
At home, Burrows was awarded the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1973 and Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1987.
Here’s a sampling of Burrows’ sound on alto saxphone and flute:
Here’s Love Is For The Very Young (also known as The Bad and the Beautiful)…
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Walk into any jazz room, anywhere on Earth, on any night, and you’ll probably hear a keyboardist copping McCoy Tyner’s licks and tricks.
Even though the piano player, who died Friday at 81, played in John Coltrane’s classic quartet—one of the most famous and influential combos in history—his towering legacy was not a foregone conclusion. At the height of Tyner’s career, his playing was sometimes dismissed or overlooked, and he nearly quit music a few years later before regaining his footing. But his sturdy and timeless style was so powerful that it made him one of the most imitated, and admired, pianists in jazz.
Tyner’s great achievement was the creation of a sound rooted in the blues but suited to the avant-garde. Its hallmarks are relatively simple to describe, belying its revolutionary impact: There are the great cascades of left-hand chords, less ludic than Thelonious Monk’s surprise attacks but no less jagged or forceful. There are the trilling flurries of notes in the right hand. And there are the signature open, epic chords. Despite all the imitators, Tyner’s playing is usually instantly recognizable—he was, as his 1967 masterpiece had it, The Real McCoy.
Tyner emerged from a Philadelphia jazz scene overflowing with talent. Among his peers were the trumpeter Lee Morgan and the drummer Tootie Heath. Just a few years older were saxophonists Jimmy Heath (who died in January) and Coltrane. As a teen, Tyner was so obsessed with the bebop-piano progenitors Monk and Bud Powell that his friends called him “Bud Monk.” Tyner became friends with Coltrane when the older man was briefly living at home in Philadelphia in the late 1950s, and when he launched his own band, he invited Tyner to join.
From 1962 to 1965, that group—rounded out by Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass—produced one of the most impressive runs in music history, including classics like Crescent and Impressions, and A Love Supreme, a top contender for the greatest jazz record ever. Aside from Coltrane, Tyner was the pivotal member of the group. “When you are thinking of Coltrane playing ‘My Favorite Things’ or ‘A Love Supreme,’ you may be thinking of the sound of Mr. Tyner almost as much as that of Coltrane’s saxophone,” writes the critic Ben Ratliff.
Coltrane was at the time rewriting not only what a saxophonist could play, but also what any improviser could do, and Tyner’s accompaniment laid a foundation for his boss’s work. “My current pianist, McCoy Tyner, holds down the harmonies, and that allows me to forget them,” Coltrane said in 1961. “He’s sort of the one who gives me wings and lets me take off from the ground from time to time.”
Tyner attributed the band’s success to his and Coltrane’s shared background in R&B music, but Tyner wasn’t just recycling old blues tricks. To hold those harmonies down, he reached for unusual modes—alternatives to the familiar Western scale—and left room for experimentation by using chords with the interval of a fourth (think “Here Comes the Bride”). By sidestepping the third note of the scale, Tyner could make the music seem neither major nor minor. The openness lent itself to sweeping vistas of sound. Meanwhile, Tyner added rhythmic propulsion with his thumping left hand, creating something like a cubist rendition of 1920s stride piano.
As the pianist, composer, and critic Ethan Iverson wrote in a 2018 essay, Tyner didn’t get much critical respect at the time. Write-ups of Coltrane’s band tended to disparage Tyner’s range as limited—though they often ignored him altogether in favor of the saxophonist. But the style he created transformed the way the piano is played in jazz, effectively influencing those who took it up after him. (Tyner’s influence was not limited to jazz. Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead’s innovative rhythm guitarist, has said he learned to accompany Jerry Garcia by imitating Tyner’s backing of Coltrane.)
“No one—not Art Tatum, not Powell, not Monk, not Bill Evans—dropped a bomb on jazz pianists quite like McCoy Tyner,” Iverson wrote. “There was pre-McCoy and post-McCoy, and that was all she [w]rote.”
Tyner’s place in the pantheon would have been secure if he’d never recorded another track after quitting Coltrane’s band, whose sound was, by the mid-’60s, too loud and chaotic for Tyner’s tastes. Tyner struggled to get gigs in the ensuing years, leading to his nearly quitting music. His experience doesn’t speak well for how America treats its greatest artists, though Tyner remembered the period with equanimity. (“Sometimes struggle’s good—it gives you conviction,” he told me in 2006. “You know, you might say caviar is terrible, but you gotta eat that caviar first … Give me a sandwich, I’m fine.”)
But the music Tyner made even in that period was stellar. The Real McCoyburns from top to bottom, applying the new ideas of the Coltrane group to a more conventional jazz quartet. Expansions finds Tyner thriving with a larger ensemble—and what an ensemble it is: the trumpeter Woody Shaw, saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Gary Bartz, and Ron Carter on cello, plus a rhythm section.
Tyner never went electric, which may have inhibited his commercial success in the 1970s jazz-fusion period. But much of his output during those years is both accessible to nonjazz listeners and uncompromising in quality. Work like the indelible 1973 “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” (a mystical ostinato that will get stuck in your head for days) and the string-section-adorned 1976 outing Fly With the Wind don’t just presage the recent crossover success of artists like Kamasi Washington—they also run circles around the modern-day copycats.
If Tyner never fully escaped Coltrane’s shadow, who could blame him? Neither has any other jazz musician since, and Tyner had been integral to the success of the Coltrane quartet. But Tyner was modest about his legacy. When I askedhow he wanted to be described as a player, he eschewed technical language or generic labels and replied, “As a guy who wasn’t afraid to take his chances—and hopefully to come out with something relevant!”
He wasn’t, and what he came out with remains as startlingly relevant as it was 60 years ago.
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Walk into any jazz room, anywhere on Earth, on any night, and you’ll probably hear a keyboardist copping McCoy Tyner’s licks and tricks.
Even though the piano player, who died Friday at 81, played in John Coltrane’s classic quartet—one of the most famous and influential combos in history—his towering legacy was not a foregone conclusion. At the height of Tyner’s career, his playing was sometimes dismissed or overlooked, and he nearly quit music a few years later before regaining his footing. But his sturdy and timeless style was so powerful that it made him one of the most imitated, and admired, pianists in jazz.
Tyner’s great achievement was the creation of a sound rooted in the blues but suited to the avant-garde. Its hallmarks are relatively simple to describe, belying its revolutionary impact: There are the great cascades of left-hand chords, less ludic than Thelonious Monk’s surprise attacks but no less jagged or forceful. There are the trilling flurries of notes in the right hand. And there are the signature open, epic chords. Despite all the imitators, Tyner’s playing is usually instantly recognizable—he was, as his 1967 masterpiece had it, The Real McCoy.
Tyner emerged from a Philadelphia jazz scene overflowing with talent. Among his peers were the trumpeter Lee Morgan and the drummer Tootie Heath. Just a few years older were saxophonists Jimmy Heath (who died in January) and Coltrane. As a teen, Tyner was so obsessed with the bebop-piano progenitors Monk and Bud Powell that his friends called him “Bud Monk.” Tyner became friends with Coltrane when the older man was briefly living at home in Philadelphia in the late 1950s, and when he launched his own band, he invited Tyner to join.
From 1962 to 1965, that group—rounded out by Elvin Jones on drums and Jimmy Garrison on bass—produced one of the most impressive runs in music history, including classics like Crescent and Impressions, and A Love Supreme, a top contender for the greatest jazz record ever. Aside from Coltrane, Tyner was the pivotal member of the group. “When you are thinking of Coltrane playing ‘My Favorite Things’ or ‘A Love Supreme,’ you may be thinking of the sound of Mr. Tyner almost as much as that of Coltrane’s saxophone,” writes the critic Ben Ratliff.
Coltrane was at the time rewriting not only what a saxophonist could play, but also what any improviser could do, and Tyner’s accompaniment laid a foundation for his boss’s work. “My current pianist, McCoy Tyner, holds down the harmonies, and that allows me to forget them,” Coltrane said in 1961. “He’s sort of the one who gives me wings and lets me take off from the ground from time to time.”
Tyner attributed the band’s success to his and Coltrane’s shared background in R&B music, but Tyner wasn’t just recycling old blues tricks. To hold those harmonies down, he reached for unusual modes—alternatives to the familiar Western scale—and left room for experimentation by using chords with the interval of a fourth (think “Here Comes the Bride”). By sidestepping the third note of the scale, Tyner could make the music seem neither major nor minor. The openness lent itself to sweeping vistas of sound. Meanwhile, Tyner added rhythmic propulsion with his thumping left hand, creating something like a cubist rendition of 1920s stride piano.
As the pianist, composer, and critic Ethan Iverson wrote in a 2018 essay, Tyner didn’t get much critical respect at the time. Write-ups of Coltrane’s band tended to disparage Tyner’s range as limited—though they often ignored him altogether in favor of the saxophonist. But the style he created transformed the way the piano is played in jazz, effectively influencing those who took it up after him. (Tyner’s influence was not limited to jazz. Bob Weir, the Grateful Dead’s innovative rhythm guitarist, has said he learned to accompany Jerry Garcia by imitating Tyner’s backing of Coltrane.)
“No one—not Art Tatum, not Powell, not Monk, not Bill Evans—dropped a bomb on jazz pianists quite like McCoy Tyner,” Iverson wrote. “There was pre-McCoy and post-McCoy, and that was all she [w]rote.”
Tyner’s place in the pantheon would have been secure if he’d never recorded another track after quitting Coltrane’s band, whose sound was, by the mid-’60s, too loud and chaotic for Tyner’s tastes. Tyner struggled to get gigs in the ensuing years, leading to his nearly quitting music. His experience doesn’t speak well for how America treats its greatest artists, though Tyner remembered the period with equanimity. (“Sometimes struggle’s good—it gives you conviction,” he told me in 2006. “You know, you might say caviar is terrible, but you gotta eat that caviar first … Give me a sandwich, I’m fine.”)
But the music Tyner made even in that period was stellar. The Real McCoyburns from top to bottom, applying the new ideas of the Coltrane group to a more conventional jazz quartet. Expansions finds Tyner thriving with a larger ensemble—and what an ensemble it is: the trumpeter Woody Shaw, saxophonists Wayne Shorter and Gary Bartz, and Ron Carter on cello, plus a rhythm section.
Tyner never went electric, which may have inhibited his commercial success in the 1970s jazz-fusion period. But much of his output during those years is both accessible to nonjazz listeners and uncompromising in quality. Work like the indelible 1973 “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit” (a mystical ostinato that will get stuck in your head for days) and the string-section-adorned 1976 outing Fly With the Wind don’t just presage the recent crossover success of artists like Kamasi Washington—they also run circles around the modern-day copycats.
If Tyner never fully escaped Coltrane’s shadow, who could blame him? Neither has any other jazz musician since, and Tyner had been integral to the success of the Coltrane quartet. But Tyner was modest about his legacy. When I askedhow he wanted to be described as a player, he eschewed technical language or generic labels and replied, “As a guy who wasn’t afraid to take his chances—and hopefully to come out with something relevant!”
He wasn’t, and what he came out with remains as startlingly relevant as it was 60 years ago.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
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PRESENTATION — Samuel W. Black, director of African American Programs at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, was at the Weirton Area Museum and Cultural Center Saturday to discuss the history of jazz music in Pittsburgh. — Craig Howell
WEIRTON — People may not always think of Pittsburgh when they think of jazz, but hundreds of professional jazz musicians have called the Steel City home during the last century.
Visitors to the Weirton Area Museum and Cultural Center were able to learn Saturday about some of the history of jazz music in Pittsburgh, and its contributions to the nation’s culture.
Samuel W. Black, director of African American Programs at the Senator John Heinz History Center, was on hand to discuss some of his own research into the early Pittsburgh jazz scene.
“When you think of jazz, you don’t necessarily think of Pittsburgh,” Black said.
Through his research, Black has found information on close to 500 jazz musicians who have lived in Pittsburgh, ranging from the 1920s and 1930s to modern day.
This included individuals such as Earl “Fatha” Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Paul Chambers, Billy Eckstine, Grover Mitchell, Roy Eldridge, “Duke” Spaulding and Marva Josie.
Black explained that jazz music has a variety of nuances, depending on where the musician lived and the influences around them. Pittsburgh’s jazz scene has more of a “sophisticated” feel to it, Black said.
“A lot of them studied classical music,” Black explained, noting many musicians started out by learning the piano.
Early lessons often came from home, with parents and other older relatives teaching the children, with some also learning in church.
“It was not so much what we would call formal musical education,” he explained.
In fact, Black said, jazz music, which developed while segregation was still in effect, wasn’t always looked upon as acceptable in the public school system. Those schools which did adopt programs usually did so after students lobbied for it.
That also has led to much of the history of jazz music, in general, being divided or even lost. Mary Lou Williams, he noted, created a Pittsburgh jazz family tree, which now is located at Rutgers University. Earl “Fatha” Hines’ collection is in Oakland, Calif., where Hines died, while Erroll Garner’s collection is at the University of Pittsburgh.
“They weren’t keen on collecting or preserving the material,” he said.
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Mr. Weber and Peter Stampfel were the heart of the Holy Modal Rounders, a group born of the folk revival. It then detoured into a mischievous, “zany” style.
Steve Weber, right, and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders in 1972. They drifted from their folk beginnings into a sometimes warped kind of pop music and made a mark with a song in the movie “Easy Rider.”Henry Horenstein
Steve Weber, the guitarist of the Holy Modal Rounders, a cult psychedelic folk group that grazed the pop-culture mainstream with a song featured in the 1969 film “Easy Rider” and influenced generations of underground musicians, died on Feb. 7 at his home in Mount Clare, W.Va. He was 76.
His death was announced by the Davis Funeral Home in nearby Clarksburg, which did not give a cause.
The Holy Modal Rounders emerged in New York in 1963 as a duo, with Mr. Weber on guitar and Peter Stampfel on fiddle and banjo. Like countless others swept up in the folk revival of the time, they were inspired by the traditional songs in the “Anthology of American Folk Music,” compiled by the filmmaker and historian Harry Smith in 1952.
But while most of their peers approached old material with reverence, Mr. Weber and Mr. Stampfel stood out with their spontaneity and almost boyish mischief. On their first two albums, released by the folk label Prestige in 1964 and 1965, they freely rewrote lyrics to 1920s songs like “Blues in the Bottle” and “Bully of the Town,” and sang gleefully with a peculiar kind of nasal harmony.
Their antics did not endear the band to folk purists, although Mr. Weber, who grew up in rural Bucks County, Pa., was noted for his mastery of traditional guitar styles.
Mr. Weber developed a reputation as a charmed character. Tall, strapping and handsome, he would wander barefoot through the Lower East Side of Manhattan and never seem to step on a shard of glass, said Mr. Stampfel, who described Mr. Weber in those days as looking “like an idealized Li’l Abner.”
The two young men began to drift into ever more radical and warped forms of pop music. In 1965, they played on the first album by the Fugs, whose leaders, the poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg, relished the anarchic and puerile side of rock but had only the most rudimentary skills playing instruments. Mr. Weber wrote one of the group’s most popular numbers, “Boobs a Lot.”
By this time Mr. Stampfel and Mr. Weber had largely ceased playing as the Holy Modal Rounders; Mr. Stampfel said he had grown frustrated with Mr. Weber’s preference not to rehearse.
“I like to keep things fresh and natural,” Mr. Weber said in an interview in “Always in Trouble,” a 2012 book about the underground record label ESP Disk, by Jason Weiss.
The two men reunited for a 1967 album, “Indian War Whoop,” on ESP — this time with the playwright Sam Shepard as their drummer — and then for “The Moray Eels Eat the Holy Modal Rounders,” released by Elektra in 1968. The albums still stand as extreme examples of acid-tinged folk music. “Moray Eels” ends with “The Pledge,” in which Mr. Shepard tries to recite the Pledge of Allegiance but forgets it.
“Moray Eels” opens with “Bird Song,” written by the poet and songwriter known as Antonia; she was a longtime partner of Mr. Stampfel’s and had once dated Mr. Weber. A spacey waltz, the tune caught the ear of Dennis Hopper, who was directing “Easy Rider.” He used it in a scene in which he, on one motorcycle, and Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda on another, ride down the highway, flapping their arms in the wind. The song appeared on the soundtrack as “If You Want to Be a Bird.”
By this point the Rounders had made a television appearance on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” and their work was admired by a small group of musicians who recognized them as innovators. The Lovin’ Spoonful and Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band, for example, recorded versions of the Rounders’ adaptation of “Blues in the Bottle.”
Mr. Shepard soon left the band, which grew to become a large ensemble. But with Mr. Weber and Mr. Stampfel often bickering, it failed to capitalize on the success of “Easy Rider.”
By the early 1970s the pair had parted ways, with Mr. Weber taking the group to Portland, Ore., where it enjoyed years as a hard-rocking bar band. Mr. Stampfel remained in New York. But they gathered for occasional reunions.
Steven P. Weber was born in Philadelphia on June 22, 1943, and grew up with his mother in Buckingham, Pa. There he met Robin Remaily, who would become a longtime member of the Holy Modal Rounders, and Michael Hurley, a singer-songwriter and illustrator who would also have a long association with the group.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
“The Holy Modal Rounders … Bound to Lose,” a 2006 documentary by Sam Wainwright Douglas and Paul Lovelace, portrays Mr. Weber’s time on the West Coast, starting in the early 1970s, as being plagued by drug and alcohol abuse. By the mid-1990s, Mr. Weber said in the film, he had decided to return home to Pennsylvania after waking up to find himself cradling a half-gallon bottle of vodka.
Mr. Weber and Mr. Stampfel performed in 1996 at the Bottom Line in New York, which kicked off a series of reunion appearances and led to a new album, “Too Much Fun,” in 1999. But the film captures the two men still bickering onstage and in strained rehearsals, and it ends with Mr. Weber failing to appear at a 40th-anniversary show in 2003. Mr. Stampfel said he had not spoken to him since.
In “Always in Trouble,” the book about the ESP label, Mr. Weber said he had failed to appear because he had felt deceived by the filmmakers and disappointed that the film paid so little attention to the Portland incarnation of the Holy Modal Rounders that he led starting in the early 1970s.
He was asked what made the Holy Modal Rounders different from other folk groups. He noted that other musicians were interested in singing about social reform.
“We took more of a raucous and zany detour,” he said.
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He Played With Charlie Parker. For $15 He’ll Play With You
By Sheila McClear
March 6, 2020
Barry Harris has been offering a weekly jazz workshop since the 1970s. Everybody’s welcome, but they’d better love bebop.
For 46 years, students have crowded around Dr. Barry Harris for his weekly jazz class.Jonno Rattman for The New York Times
If you want a spot near the maestro at Barry Harris’s jazz workshop, you’re going to have to fight for it.
On a recent Tuesday evening, about 15 minutes before the session was to start, adults of all ages started jostling for the most coveted spot: the seat on the piano next to Dr. Harris, who always plays by example, and always listens.
The others clustered around the piano, many with their own keyboards and guitars. Some focused their cellphones on Dr. Harris in order to preserve every bit of the 90-year-old’s wisdom.
“Small stuff is what you do best,” said Dr. Harris, who is wiry with snow-white hair and glasses, and who wore a black overcoat and natty plaid scarf that night. “Not big stuff.”
The pianist, composer and teacher — he has four honorary Ph.D.s and so prefers to go by “Dr. Harris” — is the last of his breed: an interpreter of bebop in its purest form. Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk — his more famous contemporaries, and his friends, died long ago. And many feelthat bebop — a genre that originated in the 1940s, characterized by a fast tempo as well as chord changes that are equally quick and complex — died with them.
Dr. Harris’s revered jazz workshop, surely the longest-running in New York City, is proof that bebop lives on. And Dr. Harris is eager to share his knowledge with new generations. “I’m just passing everything along,” he said. “I’m just passing on music.”
His collaborators reads like a list of the greatest jazz players of the 20th century. Dr. Harris has worked or played with everyone from Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins to Sonny Stitt; he played with Cannonball Adderley, Dexter Gordon and Yusef Lateef. He sat in with Charlie Parker, his idol. His discography starts in 1958, and his last record was made in 2009.
Even though he has been teaching in New York since the 1960s, Dr. Harris put together what he calls the “big class” in 1974. It began by happy accident: Before teaching the final session of a workshop, Dr. Harris recalled, he was out engaging in one of his few vices — he was at an OTB, betting on horses — when he realized he had lost track of time and was hours late. He jumped into a cab. The students were still waiting for him. “So I said, ‘Look here: since you waited for me, I’m going to have a class forever in New York. And it won’t cost you much.’”
Dr. Harris’s class takes place every Tuesday night at a rehearsal studio in Midtown. It has three segments: piano from 6 to 8, vocals from 8 to 10, and improvisation for all instruments, from 10 to midnight. Everyone is welcome, and the website notes that you don’t even know how to play piano to attend. Six hours of jazz instruction for $15.
“It’s the most beautiful thing you want to hear in your life,” Dr. Harris said of the sound of a musician whose skills improve after working with him.
Originally from Detroit, where he started teaching at age 15 out of his mother’s house, Dr. Harris moved to New York in 1960. He soon became friends with the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a Rothschild scion and jazz patron, who invited him to move into her modern-style house, which had stunning views of the Hudson River, in Weehawken, N.J. And a hundred cats.
Thelonious Monk joined him around 1972, dubbing it the “Cat House” and staying until his death 10 years later. Dr. Harris still lives there today. The baroness died in 1988, and she made arrangements so that Dr. Harris could live there as long as he wanted.
These days, Dr. Harris’s friends drive him into the city for gigs and for the workshop.
The students — who range in age from 20 to 60 and vary widely in experience and ability — sit or stand as close to Dr. Harris as they can, watching intently. The effect is as if he were teaching in a fishbowl. Many have been coming to the workshop for decades. And they know they need to come prepared.
“Come on, man, you think a grown man plays like that?” Dr. Harris shot at a man in his 60s wearing business casual and struggling through a piece. To a guy burning through a Cole Porter improvisation, Dr. Harris shouted, “Hit it!” And this is why his students love him.
“Barry is one of the most important people in my life,” said Robert Nissim, who has been attending the workshop for 27 years. The teacher, he said, “is on a passionate search for beauty, and this he demands from his students.”
Isaac Raz, who has studied with Mr. Harris for eight years, likes the “chaotic nature” of the class. “I thought I knew everything,” he said, referring to his background at Berklee College of Music. “He’s pulling lessons out of his head. You have to be at the top of it to keep up.”
Michael Weiss, a pianist and composer, checks into class “maybe once every two years,” he said. When Mr. Weiss was 20, Dr. Harris offered him a piano lesson. They have been friends and colleagues now for 40 years. In the past, they’ve even exchanged musical ideas over the telephone. “Barry would call me and say: ‘Now just play me an F-major triad in the first inversion, now take it up to C, and move it up a half-step.’”
While Dr. Harris sat in a rehearsal room before that night’s workshop, he recited the names of bebop musicians as if he were repeating the Rosary.
“We believe in Bird, Dizz, Bud. We believe in Art Tatum. We believe in Cole Hawkins,” he said quietly. “These are the people we believe in. Nothing has swayed us.”
It was well after midnight when Mr. Harris left the building, surrounded by students trying to get one more word in and say a final goodbye. One young woman was so nervous that he grasped her wrists with both hands. “You’re shaking!” he said.
Mr. Harris said he felt secure in the knowledge that the people who need to know about his legacy, do. “Most of the musicians know,” he said. “The real musicians, they know. The piano players know. We even got church piano players,” he said, heading for his ride that would take him back to Weehawken. “’Cause they know.”
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William Overton (‘Bill’ to everyone) Smith was not only a clarinettist of distinction in both jazz and ‘straight’ fields, but also a composer of remarkably innovative music, much of it for his own instrument. He single-handedly expanded the capabilities of the clarinet beyond the wildest dreams of other musicians. From the beginning of the 1960s he regularly discovered and explored many new ways of playing the instrument: multiphonics (producing more than one sound at once; playing two clarinets at once – inspired by the ancient Greek double wind pipe the aulos; using a cork mute, and much more. He also composed the first clarinet and tape piece and a 12-tone jazz concerto. Born in California in 1926 he could claim (if modesty allowed) more than most to be dubbed a truly versatile musician. He studied clarinet at Juilliard and the Paris Conservatoire. As Bill Smith the jazz player he was the co-founder, with fellow Darius Milhaud student at Mills College, of the Dave Brubeck Octet in 1946-47, continuing to work frequently with Brubeck. He also studied composition with Roger Sessions at Berkeley, going on to write well over 200 works.
Bill was inquisitive and searching, inventing ways of playing purely for his own interest. I remember sitting on the bed in his hotel room once being shown how he had recently found that one could play the clarinet without a mouthpiece – flute-like, as side-blown instrument. He also explored the use of computers and electronics. He was modest, entertaining, and with an engaging high pitch laugh, carrying a root of ginger in his pocket, from which he’d occasionally slice a piece off to chew to help keep him healthy. He was a special musician and a special person, continuing to play literally throughout his life, playing at a 93rd birthday concert in September 2019. Many will not realise his enormous legacy as one of the most creative musicians of the second half of the twentieth century, as they begin to explore the world of ‘advanced’ techniques for the clarinet. RIP Bill.
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Bob “Protz’’ Protzman, (83), a 40-year, multi-ward winning journalist and highly regarded radio jazz show producer/host, died March 4, 2020 of heart disease. Bob was born in Erie Aug. 25, 1936, son of the late Robert Leroy and Ethel M. (Cleveland) Protzman.
When Bob was 7, TB struck the family with Bob and his sister Carol spending four years in a TB sanatorium. They were in other institutions through high school. Thanks to the late Father William Hastings and the Catholic Diocese, Bob was awarded a scholarship to Erie’s Cathedral Preparatory School, where he often said he spent four of the best years of his life.
He joined the Air Force after graduating from high school in 1954 and ran into his long-time love: jazz. Living on a base 65 miles outside of New York City Bob and his buddies spent weekends in NYC at clubs like the Five Spot and Birdland where they saw jazz greats like Charles Mingus and Art Blakey perform. Backward and forward, inside and out – he learned everything he could about America’s original music form.
After his discharge Bob returned to Erie where the late Erie Morning News city editor/columnist Hugh “Red’ Barr got Bob an interview, and his newspaper career began in December 1959. He worked from 1959-67 for the Morning News, then accepted a post in 1967 at the St. Paul, MN Pioneer Press, where he stayed until retiring in 1998.
As a journalist Bob was proudest of his efforts on behalf of individuals and groups who were treated unfairly or ignored altogether. He was honored with a national award for coverage in the Erie Morning News leading to the establishment of the Office of Public Defender in Erie County to provide legal services for the poor. Bob shared the award with the late Erie Daily Times colleague and friend Garth Minegar.
After an elderly, destitute man was set afire in an Erie apartment house doorway, Bob wrote that story and a series of articles on derelicts and alcoholism. Those efforts resulted in the opening of a halfway house in Erie, and led to the program becoming a model nationally.
At the Pioneer Press, Bob noticed what he felt was a lack of coverage of the black community. He asked the city editor if he could begin to close that coverage gap and he did. When Bob retired from the Pioneer Press, a farewell piece headlined “So Long Protz.’’ credited Bob with leading the way to the paper expanding its coverage of blacks and other minorities throughout the newspaper’s sections.
For his last 20 years in St. Paul, Bob moved from “hard news’’ to covering arts and entertainment as a feature’s writer and rock, pop and jazz critic. Though he reviewed people like Janis Joplin, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, and Prince, his true passion was jazz. Recognizing this, the editors named him a fulltime jazz writer/ critic, one of the few on a U.S. daily newspaper. In that role, Bob interviewed/reviewed many of the most famous musicians/vocalists of the era, including Sonny Rollins, Elvin Jones, Ella Fitzgerald, Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Maynard Ferguson, and Tony Bennett.
Nationally, Bob was known for his articles in Down Beat (generally regarded as jazz’s major publication), JazzEd and Jazz Times magazines. He also was a voting member of the International Jazz Journalists Association (JJA). Bob was inducted into the Minnesota Jazz Hall of Fame – one of only two non-musician members.
In the late ‘80s he began to cover a burgeoning comedy scene in the Twin Cities, interviewing and reviewing many of the big names in comedy, including Jay Leno, Louie Anderson, Jackie Mason, Bill Cosby, Richard Lewis, Roseanne Barr, David Brenner, and many more.
Bob enjoyed a second career as a broadcaster. In Erie radio he did news, produced and hosted a sports show and a nightly jazz show. Bob produced/ hosted a three-hour jazz show from the ‘60s in Erie to the 80s and 90s in St. Paul/Minneapolis, and again in Erie from 2004-13 with an “Everything Jazz’’ program on WQLM-FM and Mercyhurst University’s jazz FM (WMCE-FM). In 2003 Bob joined the Jazz Erie board and helped bring nationally known artists like Joe Lovano, Joey Defrancesco, Bobby Sanaabria, Karrin Allyson, and others to Erie.
Bob was preceded in death by his parents; a brother Donald (in childhood), and sisters Shirley Hawley, Carol Protzman and Patti Pratt, and his first wife Mary Louise Parker.
He is survived by his wife Barbara Freasier McNally; stepson Christopher McNally and wife Corrie; granddaughters Kendall McNally and Kennadi McNally, grandnephew Ryan Todd and grandnieces Victoria Arico and Sarah Christoph; sister-in-law Doretha Christoph; and very good friends Susanne Rohland and Jeff Barr.
The family would like to thank Jackie Marucci and Cindy Travernese for making Bob’s final years better with their extraordinary care, compassion and kindness.
There will be no calling hours. A memorial celebration at the Dakota Bar and Grill (jazz club) in Minneapolis MN will be held for musicians and friends to celebrate his life.
Arrangements entrusted to the Burton Funeral Home & Crematory, Inc. Send condolences at www.Burtonfuneralhome.com.
In lieu of flowers, please make contributions to the American Heart Association, 823 Filmore Ave., Erie, PA 16506.
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Mr. Tyner, who first attracted wide notice as a member of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking quartet, influenced virtually every pianist in jazz.
McCoy Tyner in 2009 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. Nearly every jazz pianist has had to learn his lessons, whether they ultimately discarded them or not.Dominic Favre/European Pressphoto Agency
McCoy Tyner, a cornerstone of John Coltrane’s groundbreaking 1960s quartet and one of the most influential pianists in jazz history, has died. He was 81.
His death was announced on his Facebook page, which gave no further details.
Along with Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and only a few others, Mr. Tyner was one of the main expressways of modern jazz piano. Nearly every jazz pianist since Mr. Tyner’s years with Coltrane has had to learn his lessons, whether they ultimately discarded them or not.
Mr. Tyner’s manner was modest, but his sound was rich, percussive and serious, his lyrical improvisations centered by powerful left-hand chords marking the first beat of the bar and the tonal center of the music.
That sound helped create the atmosphere of Coltrane’s music and, to some extent, all jazz in the 1960s. (When you are thinking of Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things” or “A Love Supreme,” you may be thinking of the sound of Mr. Tyner almost as much as that of Coltrane’s saxophone.)
To a great extent he was a grounding force for Coltrane. In a 1961 interview, about a year and a half after hiring Mr. Tyner, Coltrane said: “My current pianist, McCoy Tyner, holds down the harmonies, and that allows me to forget them. He’s sort of the one who gives me wings and lets me take off from the ground from time to time.”
Mr. Tyner did not find immediate success after leaving Coltrane in 1965. But within a decade his fame had caught up with his influence, and he remained one of the leading bandleaders in jazz as well as one of the most revered pianists for the rest of his life.
Alfred McCoy Tyner was born in Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 1938. Both his parents came from North Carolina; his father, Jarvis, sang in a church quartet and worked for a company that made medicated cream, and his mother, Beatrice, was a beautician. Mr. Tyner started taking piano lessons at 13, and a year later his mother bought him his first piano, setting it up in her beauty shop.
He grew up during a spectacular period for jazz in Philadelphia: Among the local musicians who would go on to national prominence were the organist Jimmy Smith, the trumpeter Lee Morgan and the pianists Red Garland, Kenny Barron, Ray Bryant and Richie Powell, who lived in an apartment around the corner from the Tyner family house, and whose brother was the pianist Bud Powell, Mr. Tyner’s idol. (Mr. Tyner recalled that once, as a teenager, while practicing in the beauty shop, he looked out the window and saw Bud Powell listening; eventually he invited the master inside to play.)
While still in high school he began taking music theory lessons at the Granoff School of Music; at 16 he was playing professionally, with a rhythm-and-blues band, at house parties around Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
In 1957, while in a band led by the trumpeter Cal Massey, Mr. Tyner met John Coltrane, at a Philadelphia club called the Red Rooster. At that time Coltrane, who grew up in Philadelphia but had left in 1955 to join Miles Davis’s quintet, was back in town, between tenures with the Davis band.
The two musicians struck up a friendship. Coltrane was living at his mother’s house, and Mr. Tyner would visit him there to sit on the porch and talk. He would later describe Coltrane as something like an older brother to him.
Like Coltrane, Mr. Tyner was a religious seeker; raised Christian, he became a Muslim at 18.. “My faith,” he said to the journalist Nat Hentoff, “teaches peacefulness, love of God and the unity of mankind.” He added, “This message of unity has been the most important thing in my life, and naturally, it’s affected my music.”
In 1958, Coltrane recorded one of Mr. Tyner’s compositions, “The Believer.”There was an understanding between them that when Coltrane was ready to lead his own group, he would hire Mr. Tyner as his pianist.
For a while Mr. Tyner worked with the Jazztet, a hard-bop sextet led by the saxophonist Benny Golson and the trumpeter Art Farmer. He made his recording debut with the group on the album “Meet the Jazztet” in 1960.
Coltrane did eventually form his own quartet, which opened a long engagement at the Jazz Gallery in Manhattan in May 1960, but with Steve Kuhn as the pianist. A month later, halfway through the engagement, Coltrane made good on his promise, replacing Mr. Kuhn with Mr. Tyner.
That October Mr. Tyner made its first recordings with Coltrane, participating in sessions for Atlantic Records that eventually produced much of the material for the albums “My Favorite Things,” “Coltrane Jazz,” “Coltrane’s Sound” and “Coltrane Plays the Blues.”
Mr. Tyner was 21 when he joined the Coltrane quartet. He would remain — along with the drummer Elvin Jones and, beginning in 1962, the bassist Jimmy Garrison — for the next five years. Through his work with the group, which came to be known as the “classic” Coltrane quartet, he became one of the most widely imitated pianists in jazz.
The percussiveness of his playing may have had to do with the fact that Mr. Tyner took conga lessons as a teenager from the percussionist Garvin Masseaux, and learned informally from the Ghanaian visual artist, singer and instrumentalist Saka Acquaye, who was studying at the time at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
Harmonically, his sound was strongly defined by his use of modes, the old scales that governed a fair amount of the music Mr. Tyner played during his time with Coltrane, and by his chord voicings: He often used intervals of fourths, creating open-sounding chords that created more space for improvisers.
“What you don’t play is sometimes as important as what you do play,” he told his fellow pianist Marian McPartland in an NPR interview. “I would leave space, which wouldn’t identify the chord so definitely to the point that it inhibited your other voicings.”
The Coltrane quartet worked constantly through 1965, reaching one high-water mark for jazz after another on albums like “A Love Supreme,” “Crescent,” “Coltrane Live at Birdland,” “Ballads” and “Impressions,” all recorded for the Impulse label.
Between tours, Mr. Tyner stayed busy in the recording studios. He made his own records, for Impulse, including the acclaimed “Reaching Fourth.” He also recorded as a sideman, particularly after 1963, and among the albums he recorded with other leaders’ bands were minor classics of the era like Joe Henderson’s “Page One,” Wayne Shorter’s “Juju,” Grant Green’s “Matador” and Bobby Hutcherson’s “Stick-Up!,” all for Blue Note.
When Coltrane began to expand his musical vision to include extra horns and percussionists, Mr. Tyner quit the group, at the end of 1965, complaining that the music had grown so loud and unwieldy that he could not hear the piano anymore. He was a member of the drummer Art Blakey’s touring band in 1966 and 1967; otherwise he was a freelancer, living with his wife and three children in Queens.
Just before Coltrane’s death in 1967, Mr. Tyner signed to Blue Note. He quickly delivered “The Real McCoy,” one of his strongest albums, which included his compositions “Passion Dance,” “Search for Peace” and “Blues on the Corner,” all of which he later revisited on record and kept in his live repertoire. He stayed with the label for five years, starting with a fairly familiar quartet sound and progressing to larger ensembles, but these were temporary bands assembled for recording sessions, not working groups. It was a lean time for jazz, and for Mr. Tyner; he was not performing much and, he later said, had considered applying for a license to drive a cab.
He moved to the Milestone label in 1972, an association that continued until 1981 and that brought him a higher profile and much more success. In those years he worked steadily with his own band, including at various times the saxophonists Azar Lawrence and Sonny Fortune and the drummers Alphonse Mouzon and Eric Gravatt.
His Milestone albums with his working group included “Enlightenment” (1973), recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival, which introduced one of his signature compositions, the majestic “Walk Spirit, Talk Spirit.” He also recorded for the label with strings, voices, a big band and guest sidemen including the drummers Elvin Jones, Tony Williams and Jack DeJohnette.
Mr. Tyner did not use electric piano or synthesizers, or play with rock and disco backbeats, as many of the best jazz musicians did at the time; owning one of the strongest and most recognizable keyboard sounds in jazz, he was committed to acoustic instrumentation. His experiments outside the piano ran toward the koto, as heard on the 1972 album “Sahara,” and harpsichord and celeste, on “Trident” (1975).
In 1984 he formed two new working bands: a trio, with the bassist Avery Sharpe and the drummer Aaron Scott, and the McCoy Tyner Big Band. His recordings with the big band included “The Turning Point” (1991) and “Journey” (1993), which earned him two of his five Grammy Awards. He also toured and made one album with the nine-piece McCoy Tyner Latin All-Stars.
He was signed in 1995 to the reactivated Impulse label, and in 1999 to Telarc; from the mid-’90s on he tended to concentrate on small-band and solo recordings.
In 2002 he was named an National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, one of the highest honors for a jazz musician in the United States.
Mr. Tyner resisted analyzing or theorizing about his own work. He tended to talk more in terms of learning and life experience.
“To me,” he told Mr. Hentoff, “living and music are all the same thing. And I keep finding out more about music as I learn more about myself, my environment, about all kinds of different things in life.
“I play what I live. Therefore, just as I can’t predict what kinds of experiences I’m going to have, I can’t predict the directions in which my music will go. I just want to write and play my instrument as I feel.”
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The Archive Of Contemporary Music — And Its 3 Million Recordings — Is Leaving NY
Jon Kalish
The Archive of Contemporary Music in New York, which houses more than three million recordings dating back to the 1920s, is leaving its longtime Manhattan home due to rising rents.
Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
Located in New York, the Archive of Contemporary Music (ARC) has a collection of popular music that rivals that of the Library of Congress, housing more than three million recordings. The archive is independent and gets no money from state or local governments and because of rising rents, it’s being forced to vacate its longtime Manhattan headquarters. News of its predicament brought offers from all over the country, and the archive has just announced that it will be moving to two different locations outside of the city.
“It’s daunting,” says ARC’s founder, Bob George. “It’s going to be a nightmare. We have a lot of boxes we have to buy.”
George founded the archive in 1985 with his own albums — 47,000 of them. His mission was to collect vinyl LPs and 45s, as well as CDs. But when 78s from the 1920s started to roll in along with cassettes and 8-track tapes from the 1970s, George just couldn’t say no.
“We are the dumpster of pop music,” he says. “We like to say we’re like Molly Bloom. We just say ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ to everything.”
Listen to new music, watch the latest Tiny Desk concerts and more, sent weekly.
The donations keep coming. Fred Patterson holds the title of head archivist — he’s also the only archivist.
“We were just about caught up with our CD cataloging when we got this huge collection early last year, maybe 80 huge boxes of CDs,” Patterson says.
The archive once sent two semi-trailers to Boston to retrieve 150,000 LPs trapped in a condemned house that was owned by a collector named Jeep Holland.
“He had a stove — the pilot light was still on — a gas stove, and he had records stored in the oven,” George remembered.
Bob George, the founder and director of the Archive for Contemporary Music.
Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images
George stores the archive’s collection on 10-foot high steel shelves. Wander the rows and you’ll find that, in addition to music, there are thousands of comedy albums, as well as records by ventriloquists and hypnotists. If you’re looking for an obscure recording, chances are it’s in the archive’s shelves.
Take Bill Adler, for example. A veteran of the record industry, Adler has been doing a Christmas mixtape for nearly 40 years. A few years ago, he wanted to include a track from a Christmas album by New Orleans clarinetist Pete Fountain, so he called up Bob George to ask if he had it in the archive.
“And Bob said, ‘Of course we do,’ ” Adler remembered.
Aside from his Christmas project, Adler also worked at Def Jam at its inception and founded his own spoken word label. He says an archive of physical recordings is still important.
“Even though LPs are becoming antiques, it’s still a pretty good way to preserve music. It stays intact,” he says. “So, yes, hold on to a record and hear things now on a record that you still cannot hear on the internet.”
Conversely, you can hear Robert Johnson‘s “Me and the Devil Blues” on the internet but finding an original copy of the 78 is almost impossible. Bob George says Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones created an endowment for the archive to purchase blues records.
“And he bought us one of maybe 10 or 15 [of all the 78s] in the world of Robert Johnson ‘Me and the Devil Blues,’ ” George says. “He made sure that we had enough money to buy it at auction.”
The archive’s other supporters have included the late David Bowie, Nile Rodgers, and Fred Schneider of the B-52‘s. It has also proven to be an important resource for more than just Christmas mixtapes: Movie producers call the archive for soundtrack suggestions. Record companies that have lost a master recording borrow LPs. But George says the city has provided no support to his archive or to other important spaces for music around New York.
“The studios are disappearing,” he says. “The rehearsal spaces are disappearing. The Brill Building is sold for condos. I mean, you have all of this history vanishing without the slightest interest.”
Bob George has always depended on the generosity of private individuals, and that’s who stepped up to rescue the Archive of Contemporary Music. Its primary collection will move to the estate of a wealthy supporter beside the Hudson River and the archive’s duplicates will be sent to a warehouse in LA, provided by another wealthy benefactor.
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How to protect your musical instrument while flying – Los Angeles Times
When Malian master musician Ballaké Sissoko opened the case to his kora, a traditional and delicate 21-string instrument, after an early February flight from New York to Paris, he was devastated by what he found.
“Ballaké Sissoko has just had his cherished, custom-made kora completely destroyed by USA Customs, without any justification,” Lucy Durán, an ethnomusicologist, wrote in a statement on Sissoko’s behalf on his official Facebook account. “In Mali, the jihadists threaten to destroy musical instruments, cut the tongues out of singers, and to silence Mali’s great musical heritage. And yet, ironically, it is the USA Customs that have in their own way managed to do this.”
What happened to Sissoko’s kora is uncertain. (The Transportation Security Administration said in a statement, “It is most unfortunate that Mr. Sissoko’s instrument was damaged in transport, however… TSA did not open the instrument case because it did not trigger an alarm when it was screened for possible explosives”).
Malian musician Ballaké Sissoko and his kora, as he performs with Kasse Mady Diabate’s ensemble at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2015.
(Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images)
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Regardless of how it happened, it is the latest in a long line of incidents in which irreplaceable instruments have been damaged in the course of air travel and TSA inspections. As summer festival season ramps up, many musicians will face the travails of travel to perform: visa issues, lost bags and the challenges of getting their gear across borders. Some countries, like the U.K., are stricter than others when it comes to complicated baggage, said Jess Lewis, an independent tour manager for acts like Run the Jewels, Purity Ring, Iron & Wine and Calexico, but fundamentally, you’re at the mercy of customs and the airlines.
“You can have a bad experience whether flying with it in your hand or freighting. I’ve seen a forklift go right through a guitar case before,” Lewis said. “Airlines should be as explicit as possible on their websites about their policies. But if you’re not a platinum member, don’t expect any special treatment.”
Stories like Sissoko’s are a nightmare scenario for musicians, especially those who use rare or period-specific traditional instruments. It happens with some frequency — in 2015, renowned Chinese pipa player Wu Man‘s instrument was demolished on a US Airways flight (the airline eventually replaced it after a public outcry). In 2018, Myrna Herzog of the Phoenix Early Music Society discovered that her rare 17th century viola da gamba had been damaged on an Alitalia flight (The airline reimbursed her for repairs).
In 2014, Christopher Wilke, a lute player and University of Cincinnati music professor, had his $10,000 instrument destroyed on a Delta flight. Wilke was fastidious with his instrument, even placing a humidifier inside the case to prevent drying. Delta paid for repairs, but he put the blame for these incidents squarely on careless policies from both TSA and the airline.
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“The apathy of the TSA and airlines to protect rare instruments from harm greatly hinders the opportunity for musicians and audiences to connect,” Wilke said. The experience shook him so deeply that, despite recent collaborations with rock and hip-hop artists and offers for national tour dates, he won’t baggage-check his instrument and can’t afford the cost of an extra airplane seat, and therefore doesn’t perform beyond a day’s driving distance from Cincinnati.
“Sadly, until workers in the TSA and airline industry are held personally responsible for negligence or malice, incidents like this are going to keep happening,” he added. As musicians, “we build bridges. It’s ironic that a travel industry would be the one to block those bridges.”
There are, of course, best practices for touring musicians to prevent dings and withering scrutiny from TSA. Lewis said she’s never experienced anything destructive to artists in getting gear over borders, but it still can be a humbling or tense experience.
“Discovering the power of customs is a scary thing. If they want to, they can just hold you there,” she said. A document called a carnet — essentially a global passport for baggage — can help smooth the process, and keeping a detailed manifest of all your gear and extra zip-ties can help inspections move more quickly while keeping cases secure.
Sissoko, obviously well-acquainted with his instrument’s fragility, would have known to take every precaution. But no traveler can account for cultural ignorance or carelessness during the inspection process. That dynamic is compounded when dealing with unfamiliar gear like a kora and may raise the specter of racism.
“It’s connected with a not-so-pleasant image of the U.S. today, and a lot of racist and discriminatory statements made by people in power,” said Cheryl Keyes, a professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA who studies traditional African music. “Maybe whoever looked at it thought it was something else. But it’s connected with Africa, and once you assault something that’s part of a tradition, with so much meaning culturally, it comes off as racist.”
But musicians aren’t totally powerless. While the TSA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection are government agencies that, in the Trump era, are often feared as xenophobic, airlines sometimes respond to commercial pressure.
A decade ago, Canadian singer-songwriter Dave Carroll’s beloved guitar was damaged in transit on a United flight. He wrote a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” about it with his band Sons of Maxwell, and it became one of YouTube’s first viral sensations.
“Music is an extension of how you feel and think and your instrument is your best friend. To lose that is awful,” Carroll said.
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The song cost the airline dearly in reputation. Carroll said, “Ballaké is virtuoso, and no one would say I am,” yet he felt a familiar sting when he heard the story.
Carroll was one of the first musicians to use social media to lambast a careless airline, and he has since made a career as a consumer advocate in the music and travel industries. In 2012, after a decade of pressure from musicians, Congress passed the FAA Modernization and Reform Act, compelling airlines to allow musical instruments on a flight if they fit on the plane. The new regulations went into effect in 2015.
“You can’t deny [the song] had a negative impact on the brand when millions of people used it as a metaphor for bad service,” Carroll said. “Sometimes the conditions aren’t the greatest for people handling bags, but it’s sad that the traveling public bears the brunt of it. There was definitely a disrespect there.”
But for artists like Sissoko, the damage to his kora goes beyond the practical. You can buy another guitar or find a skilled lute repairwoman. What he can’t get back is the spiritual essence of his instrument,and that doesn’t fit so neatly on a complaint form.
“It’s not like you can go to a manufacturer and buy a kora,” Keyes said. “The artisan caste infuses it with protection designed specifically for you. Whoever made it may put the pieces back together, but if you lost a child, you can’t replace that child. Maybe the kora can be put on display to show what happens if you just assume people know the power of your music.”
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From the South Carolina Music Issue Melvin Gibbs explores the singular sound of James “Blood” Ulmer, whose unique approach to guitar tuning creates “the sort of disruptive recombination that is at the heart of African-American innovation.”
Creative destruction is a constant in American music. Genres overtake genres, and popular forms, like clockwork, predictably become obsolete, overtaken by more culturally vital forms in a dance of birth, death, and renewal.
The music scene in New York City in the late seventies and early eighties was a veritable tsunami of simultaneous cultural birth, death, and renewal. Punk rock was renewing the bloated excess of rock & roll. Hip-hop, now the quintessential popular music worldwide, was being born in the ghettos of New York City. And free jazz, exemplified in New York by the DIY “loft jazz” scene, was tearing down walls and testing the boundaries of the form that would soon rebrand itself as “America’s classical music.”
In this milieu, but not of it, the singular guitarist/composer James “Blood” Ulmer made his mark. An embodiment of migration, both “Great” and forced, Blood was born in 1940 in St. Matthew’s, South Carolina, where his innovative music was initially nourished by his family’s gospel tradition. Following a path trod by many African Americans seeking a better life, as a young man he traveled to Detroit. There he played jazz at the same venue where George Clinton was workshopping what would become Parliament-Funkadelic. He then moved to New York, playing with shamanistic organist Larry Young before embracing Harmolodics, a term coined by the person most closely associated with the concept of creative destruction in jazz—Ornette Coleman. Ulmer’s first album, Tales Of Captain Black, produced by Coleman and released on his Artist House Records, is a canonical recording of the genre, a meeting of Texas and South Carolina in the House of Harmolodics.
When asked about Harmolodics, Blood said, “It’s bigger than what one person can say. Harmolodic is not a music it’s a way.” Calling it a “way”—a “Tao”—situates Harmolodics as a contemporary manifestation of the pure energy of innovation, cultural adaptation, and mutation that birthed music in America.
Blood’s Harmolodics puts “the cry” front and center. The cry is the aural exposition of the paradoxical mode of existence that forced the musical innovations made by Africans in America. Born of forced migration, it harkens to an Africa that exists only in the minds of its long-exiled American children. It is closely associated with the blues, but “the blues,” though a convenient signifier, is only one aspect of “the cry.” The totality of the cry is the totality of the emotional conundrum that lies at the bottom of the African-American experience. The Black Lives Matter movement is one example of the energy of “the cry” concretized. The joy in the faces of all the African Americans waiting on line to vote for Obama in 2008, many with their children in tow, was another. The dance of those dueling emotional vectors provides the truth that all the music of the Great Migration seeks to access.
“I’m trying to do music that doesn’t have anything to do with the piano,” Blood said. “More like African music.” To that end, he developed his own unique guitar tunings, which amplify his alternative resonance, allowing him to create a more-like-African dronescape that vibrates across the border separating sound and mood. When Blood altered the resonance pattern of his guitar to make it produce the sound he strove for, he—like John Lee Hooker and Son House before him—performed the sort of disruptive recombination that is at the heart of African-American innovation.
As a follower of a “way,” Blood is part of a tradition of those who built a culture that maintained an internal African logic though the external markers of that culture were taken away. South Carolina outlawed the drum, the quintessential marker of “Africaness,” in its attempt to prevent rebellion. But Africaness was maintained through kinesthetic re-coding and through the voice, through the “shout,” in both the African-American and European senses of the word. Like the blues, the shout is only the most convenient signifier—in this case for a mode of transcendence that exists as “ancestral” memory.
Blood is not bound by musical forms or formats. Traversing genres, Blood’s music ranges from his take on “Black Rock” exemplified by songs like his iconic (and once again timely) “Are You Glad to Be in America?,” to the proto-Americana of his bassless “Odyssey” trio, to his late-career rapprochement with the blues (navigated by Vernon Reid, leader of Living Colour) via his Memphis Blood project, to the haunting and harrowing solo guitar and vocal music captured on his Birthright album, and embracing the free/avant-garde of his Music Revelation Ensemble.
When asked what ties the different strands of his music together, Blood Ulmer, who will soon turn eighty years old, answering in light of a lifetime of making music, waxed aphoristic: “You don’t have to create a language. You just have to play the way you play. I don’t have a name for what I do.”
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Netflix has released a teaser trailer for its limited series The Eddy, which was co-directed by Damien Chazelle. The latter has quickly made a name for himself since he directed his second feature – 2014’s Whiplash, a dramatic thriller (based on Chazelle’s short) starring J.K. Simmons in an Oscar winning role as a perfection-obsessed jazz instructor at a prestigious conservatory. Chazelle would go on to garner even more acclaim – plus a Best Director Oscar – for La La Land, his 2016 musical about the romance between an aspiring actress and jazz pianist in modern-day Los Angeles. Four years later, Chazelle is back with yet another jazz music project in the form of The Eddy.
Created by Jack Thorne (the writer of the BBC and HBO’s His Dark Materials TV series adaptation), The Eddy stars André Holland as a former New York jazz pianist who now owns a struggling club in present-day Paris. Chazelle directed the first two episodes in the eight-part limited series, with Houda Benyamina (Divines), Laïla Marrakchi (Rock the Casbah), and Alan Poul (The Newsroom) helming the additional episodes. You can watch the show’s teaser, below.
The trailer is composed of a single-take shot that follows Holland through the bustling Parisian nightlife as he makes his way to his club, only to encounter his teen daughter, Julie (Amandla Stenberg), waiting for him near the entrance. It’s an excellent tease of what to expect from The Eddy, not only in terms of its style, but the way it promises to bring its multicultural setting to vivid and rhythmic life. In that sense, The Eddy harkens back to Chazelle’s feature debut on the micro-budgeted 2009 black and white musical, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench, and the way it too used jazz to tell a relatable human story. Here’s hoping the actual show is as exciting as it sounds on paper.
Here’s the official synopsis for The Eddy: Once a celebrated jazz pianist in New York, Elliot Udo (Holland) is now the co-owner of struggling club The Eddy, where he manages the house band fronted by lead singer and on-again-off-again girlfriend Maja (Joanna Kulig). As Elliot learns that his business partner Farid (Tahar Rahim) may be involved in some questionable practices at the club, secrets begin to come to light that have also been concealed from Farid’s wife Amira (Leïla Bekhti), and when Elliot’s troubled teenage daughter Julie (Amandla Stenberg) suddenly arrives in Paris to live with him, his personal and professional worlds quickly start to unravel as he confronts his past, fighting to save the club and protect those closest to him.
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Jazz guitarist Coleman Mellett was 34 when he died in the 2009 crash of a Colgan Air plane outside of Buffalo. The recordings he left behind are the subject of a new documentary, “Sing You a Brand New Song.” (David Gruol)
Fifty lives were lost when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed outside of Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009. Among them were two members of Chuck Mangione’s band: saxophonist Gerry Niewood and guitarist Coleman Mellett.
Mellett, a 1992 graduate of DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, left behind hundreds of hours of recordings he’d made in the New Jersey home he shared with his wife, jazz singer Jeanie Bryson.
“He was up there in our studio, banging these things out, year after year,” Bryson said. “They were never completed.”
Suddenly it seemed like they might never be. In some cases the music amounted to snippets: multiple takes of different sections of different songs, some recorded in digital formats that were no longer so easy to access.
The story of the resurrection of the 34-year-old Mellett’s music is detailed in “Sing You a Brand New Song,” a documentary screening Thursday night at the AFI Silver Theatre.
Coleman Mellett with his wife, jazz singer Jeanie Bryson. Bryson worked with a producer, an engineer and some well-known musicians to complete Mellett’s unfinished recordings. (Dana Kershner)
“He was a crazy perfectionist,” Bryson said of the man whose friends and family called “Coley.”
Mellett was a person who knew from an early age how he wanted to spend his life. His younger brother, Zeb Mellett, remembers Coleman proclaiming in the ninth grade he would become a jazz musician.
And he did. Mellett was in ensembles at DeMatha and the youth orchestra at Blues Alley. He took private lessons with Paul Wingo, a respected jazz guitarist in Olney, Md.
Bryson met Mellett when she hired him for a pair of gigs in Washington, at Blues Alley and for BET’s jazz program.
“Our musical partnership started in D.C.,” she said.
Mellett lived the life of a gigging musician, performing at clubs, restaurants, festivals and concert halls, often returning late at night and heading to a converted bedroom in his East Brunswick, N.J., house. Already known for his unerring guitar work, Mellett was stretching himself as a songwriter and singer, laying down vocal tracks in a soundproofed closet.
The sound of that voice could have been painful to a family still in grief, but it had the opposite effect.
“At first when you hear the music, there’s such joy,” Bryson said. “There he is, his voice so present and intimate. Then you remember he’s not there. In order to get to the joy, you have to feel the pain. Otherwise, no one would hear it. I want people to hear it.”
Three weeks after Mellett’s death, Bryson invited producer Barry Miles and audio engineer Ron DiCesare to the house to sift through the recordings. Their job was to make sense of it all, then figure out how to complete the songs.
Bryson described a typical challenge: “Barry had to find the 54th take of an eight-bar guitar solo in this tune then match it up with what Coley had chosen. It was like a technically crazy situation. If Barry Miles wasn’t so musical, and not such a genius, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Mellett had toured with Mangione since 1999, after the fluegelhorn player’s wife, Rosie, caught the guitarist on a New York public access cable TV show and recommended him for a job. Mangione added horn parts to his late bandmate’s song, just one of several high-profile musicians who worked on the project.
Steve Gadd added drums. Larry Goldings played keyboards. James Taylor added vocals to one number. (“Nobody got a dime,” Bryson said.)
The documentary includes scenes of Will Lee, bassist on David Letterman’sshow, laying down tracks in the studio. “I never knew Coleman,” he says, “but you can know somebody through their music.”
That’s what Bryson hopes the documentary — and a companion album to be released in May — will do: allow people to know Coleman Mellett, the man and his music.
That music includes a duet between husband and wife. Jeanie sang with Coley, adding her voice to his composition “You Got Me Too.”
“After I finished, I just collapsed into tears,” she said. “I don’t know if I could have done it again.”
The 51-minute “Sing You a Brand New Song,” directed by C.D. Malloy, screens at 7 p.m. Thursday at the AFI Silver Theatre. The $25 tickets raise funds for scholarships at DeMatha that honor Coleman Mellett. The funds are awarded to DeMatha students who excel in music. For tickets, visit store.dematha.org.
Reuniting
These area high schools are planning upcoming reunions:
Groveton High Class of 1968— April 18. Email mcherkasky@verizon.net or call 202-997-1542.
Wheaton High Class of 1970 — July 17 and 18. Visit whs70.myevent.com or the “Wheaton High School 70” page on Facebook.
Wheaton High Class of 1985 — Oct. 10. Email WHSclassof85@gmail.com.
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The band has tackled the Trump era with an urgent political edge on two recent albums that have surely lost them a share of good ’ole boys who were part of earlier audiences.
Book Review: “Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz” — Prominent from the Start
So we remember him as a composer after all. Surely Leonard Bernstein would be happy about that. Often maligned during his lifetime for his compositional efforts — their eclectic character, in particular, left more than a few heads spinning – Bernstein’s output now stands secure, thirty years after his death, and, it seems, increasingly relevant.
Katherine Baber’s Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz certainly takes that view. A serious, scholarly effort, the book takes a look at Bernstein’s music, generally, and his use of jazz elements, in particular, across much of his half-century-long compositional career.
In it, Baber does not endeavor to argue “any particular inspiration, narrative, or meaning for jazz in Bernstein’s music.” Rather, her aim is to place Bernstein’s use of jazz within larger, constantly shifting musical and social frameworks, and to examine the various ways in which he employed them: thematically, structurally, associatively.
She does that and then some. Perhaps the book’s most impressive accomplishment is to make a kind of systematic case for Bernstein’s larger compositional output. Rooting his music in jazz — a genre of significant professional and personal consequence for Bernstein — and moving outwards from there makes perfect sense, especially given the sheer stylistic breadth of Bernstein’s work.
Indeed, as Baber points out, Bernstein’s compositional voice was rooted in three “major threads” of the composer’s musical philosophy: tonality, communication, and nationality. Largely tonal, directly communicative, and decidedly American, jazz ties them all together.
And it figured prominently in his thinking from the start. In his Harvard thesis, “The Absorption of Race Elements in American Music,” Bernstein identified five key elements of jazz — melodic, rhythmic, coloristic, metric, and contrapuntal aspects – and, while they don’t make for a comprehensive definition, they do serve as a launching pad for Bernstein’s own appropriation of the genre.
Of course, he wasn’t the first composer to draw upon jazz, and Baber goes into some depth in her introductory chapters discussing the influence of both George Gershwin’s and Aaron Copland’s forays into jazz on Bernstein’s own stylistic development. Both elder composers provided alternative models for employing the popular form and Copland’s more abstracted approach held considerable sway with Bernstein (which isn’t surprising, considering the close friendship between the two).
In particular, Baber argues that Copland’s subtle use of the blues provided Bernstein “a model for how to voice private sentiment within earshot of the public,” specifically as it related to issues of identity, sexual and otherwise, in his music.
Bernstein’s close connection to Copland also helps explain some of his apparent ambivalence towards Gershwin’s concert music (though, ironically, Bernstein proved one of Gershwin’s most persuasive concert-hall advocates). Whether the younger composer’s views were shaped by his proximity to one half of the Gershwin-Copland divide of the 1920s and ‘30s isn’t clear: Baber largely avoids the spat.
But she does draw a surprising (and more personal) explanation, understanding the seismic effect of Gershwin’s startling death in 1937 on Bernstein, which coincided with the eighteen-year-old beginning to establish his musical and sexual identities. This confluence, Baber writes, ultimately made for an “uneasy relationship” between Bernstein, Gershwin, and Gershwin’s music. Conjectural? Yes, but, given Bernstein’s obvious attachment to Gershwin’s music (and his subsequent, emotional reactions to recalling the older composer’s death), well-reasoned and plausible.
Throughout the book, Baber’s discussions of Bernstein’s music are well-researched, cogent, and thoughtful, particularly in their discussions of historical context. Indeed, understanding how Bernstein’s music responded to current trends in jazz — including, especially, those with which he didn’t have much personal affinity (like the bebop employed in West Side Story) – and how they were understood by the listening public of the day enriches both one’s understanding of and appreciation for Bernstein’s music.
Leonard Bernstein and members of the New York Philharmonic on stage in Moscow, 1959. Photo: Don Hunstein, courtesy of Sony Classical.
Unsurprisingly, Baber’s analyses mainly delve into Bernstein’s scores from the 1940s and ‘50s, with a penultimate chapter on two big works from the ‘70s. In all of them, she dives into the various ways Bernstein utilized jazz elements: as commentary on race and gender in On the Town; exploring questions of identity in his Symphony no. 2 (particularly Bernstein’s understanding of his Jewish heritage in the immediate context of the founding of the State of Israel); and his adoption of the blues as a form of protest music and a reflection of the black-Jewish relationship in Mass and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, among other uses.
It seems, then, that, much as he did with other musical techniques (like Serialism), Bernstein employed jazz to serve ends that were both musical and associative. That there’s such a consistency within his style isn’t surprising. Rather, it’s a subtle reminder of the integrity of Bernstein’s music and his larger approach to composition.
What’s more, this ties directly into the theme of communication which marked nearly all of Bernstein’s life work. Ultimately, his goal was to impart insights on themes discreet and overt with the widest possible audience. Jazz – and a flexible understanding of what it meant — afforded Bernstein the means to do just that: as Baber notes, “jazz and blues…help[ed Bernstein] to engage with an audience and to take up [the] shared cultural and political concerns” which defined his career.
Given its focus, Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz can’t be (and isn’t) a comprehensive overview of Bernstein’s work. But it does provide a firm foundation on which to further investigate Bernstein’s music and from a variety of angles. In this, it’s a welcome, necessary addition to recent Bernstein scholarship.
Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist who has been active in the greater Boston area since 2004. His music has received numerous awards and been performed by various ensembles, including the American Composers Orchestra, Kiev Philharmonic, Camerata Chicago, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Group. Since receiving his doctorate from Boston University in 2010, Jon has taught at Clark University, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and online for the University of Phoenix, in addition to writing music criticism for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.
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‘Charlie Parker’s Yardbird’ at Seattle Opera offers an unlikely mashup of jazz and opera. How well does it work?
Crystal Paul
Feb. 25, 2020 at 6:00 am Updated Feb. 25, 2020 at 1:00 pm
By
Seattle Times features reporter
Opera review
Outside McCaw Hall, a lone saxophone player serenades arrivals with jazzy tunes. Inside, well-placed display boards boast of “Jazz’s Black History,” “Cultural Appropriation in Jazz” and the roots of jazz legend Charlie Parker’s musical genius.
This careful presentation eases concerns about the unlikely mashup of jazz and opera in Seattle Opera’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.” Suddenly, an opera house seems as likely a place as any to see a musical rendition of the life of one of the originators of bebop.
The basis for the opera is Parker’s own unrealized dream of composing an opera that incorporates jazz and classical elements. Librettist Bridgette A. Wimberly gives Parker the chance to realize these dreams by setting the story in a kind of limbo at the famous jazz bar Birdland, where Parker was a frequent headliner.
The celebrated musician sets out to compose his great masterwork post-mortem as he looks back at his life through the eyes of the women he loved and who loved him.
Frederick Ballentine as Charlie Parker in Seattle Opera’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.” Ballentine alternates with Joshua Stewart in the role. (Sunny Martini)
Telling the story of a jazz legend on stage through opera and classical music is an ambitious, and unexpected, undertaking. Yet with a talented cast, an intriguing premise, a composer — Daniel Schnyder — with a strong background in both jazz and classical music, and a librettist who has a family connection to Parker and a background as a poet, “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird” is certainly poised to deliver on its ambition. However, not all of these elements come together well.
On Saturday night, the orchestra was excellent playing the dazzling score with references to jazz classics. The libretto features strong lyrics like in “Calvary,” in which Parker’s mother, Addie, poetically laments “This land ain’t no place for a Black man child, got dreams.”
Angela Brown as Charlie Parker’s mother, Addie Parker, in Seattle Opera’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.” (Sunny Martini)
At times, the singers seem rhythmically disconnected from the score, which bounces between jazzy quotes and more classical tones. However, Joshua Stewart as Parker (Stewart alternates in the role with Frederick Ballentine) masterfully navigates the challenging score, adapting with jazzier vocals or powerful vibratos.
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As Parker’s contemporary and friend Dizzy Gillespie, Jorell Williams steals the show with his easy charm and stunning vocals that cut through the music that often overpowers the voices of other cast members. During an overpopulated and conflict-burdened funeral scene that otherwise leaves one unmoved, Williams’ “Farewell” is beautifully delivered and draws one back into the gravity of the scene.
Joshua Stewart (Charlie Parker) and Jorell Williams (Dizzy Gillespie) in Seattle Opera’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.” (Sunny Martini)
Although the set changes minimally during the 90-minute opera, its design is brilliant in its simplicity and works beautifully with the lighting to highlight the many different moods and scenarios that the opera moves through.
When taken a la carte, nearly every independent element of the opera is enchanting. However, the opera as a whole lacks cohesion and suffers from a lack of context and a dizzyingly rapid pace that can leave all but the most ardent jazz fans and Parker enthusiasts confused and lost.
Without the context of specific moments in Parker’s biography, many finer points of the opera will be lost on many patrons. For example, when an actor drops a large cymbal onto the stage, it represents the moment when a teenage Parker attended a jam session in which Jo Jones, the drummer for the Count Basie Orchestra, threw a cymbal at Parker’s feet when the young Parker couldn’t keep up. Without that knowledge, the cymbal-ism (ahem) would be lost on most casual observers.
At times, the come-and-go of characters on the set makes the story feel more like a series of loosely related vignettes than a cohesive narrative. Parker marches off the stage after an aria invoking the evils of segregation and lynching, then Addie Parker takes the stage to sing about her pride in her son’s success. Then suddenly Charlie Parker is back on stage, distressed and in his underwear, as his lover Nica tells him that his daughter (who has not previously been mentioned) is dead.
These abrupt transitions can leave the audience emotionally disconnected and maybe even confused at a moment when one would hope to feel the wrenching pain of what Parker is enduring.
That said, the beautifully simple set, lighting and staging for the scene that comes afterward, in which Parker is committed to a mental health institution, slows the pace as principal dancer Mikhail Calliste delivers a powerful performance. (That’s right, there’s dance in this opera, too!)
Frederick Ballentine (Charlie Parker) and Mikhail Calliste (dancer) in Seattle Opera’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird.” (Sunny Martini)
By the last aria, Parker is alone on an empty stage, singing lines from Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s poem “Sympathy” over a minimal score as he walks off into heaven. The simple beauty of this last scene is a relief from all the competing ambitious elements of the opera.
That relief is underscored as we leave the auditorium for the lobby where a jazz ensemble plays Parker’s works, unobscured.
There’s no doubting the talent at work in Seattle Opera’s “Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” but more than anything, it made me want to rush home and put on one of the albums of the Yardbird himself to enjoy, without all the extras.
_____
“Charlie Parker’s Yardbird,” music by Daniel Schnyder, libretto by Bridgette A. Wimberly. Through March 7; Seattle Opera at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle; tickets start at $61; 206-389-7676, seattleopera.org
This review has been updated to omit mention of specific albums that may have been referenced in the score.
Crystal Paul: cpaul@seattletimes.com; on Twitter: @cplhouse. Crystal Paul is a features reporter at The Seattle Times. She is interested in stories about the people, places and histories that capture the soul of their communities.
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The jazz icon Sonny Rollins knows life is a solo trip.
By David MarchesePhotograph by Mamadi Doumbouya
Feb. 21, 2020
Sonny Rollins is, by any reasonable estimation, a genius. He is jazz’s greatest living improviser, able to imbue his solos with wry humor, surprise, brilliant logical form and profound emotion. Time and time again, he created something miraculous out of thin air, and he did it until he could do it no longer. The 89-year-old played his last concert in 2012, and in 2014, he stopped playing saxophone altogether, a result of pulmonary fibrosis. That doesn’t mean we’ll never hear music from him again — Resonance Records will release a set of previously unissued performances this fall — but it does mean that Rollins’s colossal record as a musician is a thing of the past. I wanted to know how a musician whose playing was always attuned to the present has forged a new life in the shadow of that stark fact. “‘Happy’ is not the word,” said Rollins, seated on a couch under a large painting of Buddha at his rambling home in Woodstock, N.Y., “but I am the most content I’ve ever been. I have most things figured out.”
You never made any formal retirement announcement. Did you ever want to say goodbye to the people who made up your audience? Well, no. The reason my retirement happened quietly was because my health problems were gradual. I didn’t expect them. I wasn’t quite sure that I would never be able to play again. It took me a while to realize, Hey, that’s gone now. But the people? I’m glad for their love but I don’t feel that I’m worthy of anyone saying, “Wow, Sonny!” And this is going to sound funny, but my highest place musically was not about playing for a crowd. I played a couple of concerts early on where I was out in the open in the afternoon. I was able to look up in the sky, and I felt a communication; I felt that I was part of something. Not the crowd. Something bigger.
Rollins at age 14 in Harlem. From Sonny Rollins
I only realized when I spoke to you a couple of years ago that you had to give up the saxophone. So much of your life had been about using music to fulfill your potential as a person. Now that you don’t play, is fulfillment still possible? When I had to stop playing it was quite traumatic. But I realized that instead of lamenting and crying, I should be grateful for the fact that I was able to do music all of my life. So I had that realization, plus my spiritual beliefs, which I’ve been cultivating for many years. All that work went into my accepting the fact that I couldn’t play my horn.
Tell me more about that work. I’m working toward why I’m here — what it’s all about. At this point in my life I’m — well, I don’t want to say satisfied, but I feel that I’m closer to an understanding. It’s always been my idea that the golden rule is a good thing, but I wasn’t quite able to understand if the golden rule was possible. If somebody is playing music and I’m playing music and we’re in a saxophone battle, I still have to play my best, regardless of the other guy. It has nothing to do with my trying to make him feel bad because playing music is for a higher cause. So I believe living by the golden rule is possible. Not only possible but the reason we’re here.
Were you playing for a higher cause on something like “The Serpent’s Tooth” with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis? In your solo you quoted the melody of That wasn’t intended as a provocation? If I was so stupid to have to implied that, then I was ignorant. I was in Miles’s band at the time and “Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)” was just one of the riffs that we played. It had nothing to do with my attitude about Charlie Parker. I would never say that to him. But I take your criticism. I might have been a foolish young boy playing that to his guru. If there was a little of that, it was sophomoric. I was ignorant. I am still ignorant about many things.
Rollins, right, and Miles Davis at the New York Jazz Festival in 1957. Bob Parent/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
I’m also thinking about There’s a part of that performance where you guys were trading fours and he played a lick and in response you played the same lick but with the notes reversed. That wasn’t meant as one-upmanship? David, I don’t believe I’ve mentioned this to many people. When I played with Coltrane, I had the impression — and back then it was true — that I was much more popular than him. I remember what Kamasi Washington said about “Tenor Madness”: “Sonny, you weren’t even really playing.” I wasn’t really playing. Coltrane was playing. I was only playing halfway, because I thought that I was the guy and that Coltrane was this young whippersnapper. That was my mind-set. It was immature.
So you were holding back to show your status? Exactly. I don’t want people to think that I’m saying, “Oh, wow, I could have played much better,” but that’s the story of “Tenor Madness.” My attitude on it wasn’t right.
I was poking around and I saw a performance note you wrote for that I thought was interesting. You wrote that when you were playing rubato on a certain song, he shouldn’t look in any direction but yours. Why not? I would’ve said that to him because when I’m playing rubato, which would mean when I’m playing solo, that presents a perfect opportunity for somebody to relax: OK, Sonny’s playing by himself so let me wipe my head or drink water. I wanted the band to be all together even when I was playing by myself because we were all still in the song. People would take their concentration away. I didn’t want that.
I also saw all these very detailed instructional notes you’d written about saxophone technique and harmony. Did you ever consider publishing any of it? I thought about doing things like that but my stuff is unorthodox. I once had a young guy that wanted to study with me. I said, No, man, go to Coltrane. Coltrane will get you on the right course with fingering and technique. All these things that I might have been writing, I didn’t feel they were applicable to other people. So I didn’t pursue them.
One of the most inspiring things about your playing was how alive you were to the possibilities of a given musical moment. Did that openness translate to your life? That’s a very profound question. I can look back and say, “Gee, that was a good solo,” but I don’t know if it had anything to do with a spiritual or ethical thing. I did some bad things when I was playing my horn. We all knew Charlie Parker was using drugs, and we said, “Wow, I’m going to use drugs if I’m going to end up playing like that.” That got and stealing and whatever else drugs made you do. I know great musicians that weren’t trying to be good people. A lot of people wouldn’t think Miles was a very spiritual person — though to me he was — and Coltrane was a very spiritual individual. Does that have to do with their music? Possibly. I don’t want to say that there’s no connection between the way you behave and your music. But it’s something which I haven’t been able to figure out.
Rollins during a “Sonny Rollins Volume II” session at Van Gelder Studio in 1957. Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images
Do you think music has an ethical component? I can hear music that elevates me, but on the other hand there’s martial music that’s made to make people go to war. So music is neutral. It has nothing to do with ethics. Music is not on the same level as trying to understand life. We’re here for 80-something years. One lifetime is not enough to get it right. I’ll be back in another body. I’m not interested in trying to get that technical about that because I don’t need to know. What I need to know is that being a person who understands that giving is better than getting is the proper way to live. Live your life now in a positive way. Help people if you can. Don’t hurt people. That works perfectly for me, man.
Are you ready for your incarnation in this life to be over? You mean do I feel ready to die? Dying, it’s funny. Everybody is afraid to die because it’s the unknown. But my mother died. My father died. My brother died. My sister died. My uncle died. My grandmother died. They’re all great people. If they can die then why can’t I die? I’m better than they are? It’s ridiculous to feel, Oh, gee, Ishouldn’t die. My body is going to turn into dust. But my soul will live forever.
Is there anything you’ll miss about this life? No. There’s a big picture, which is the afterlife, and this life is a little picture. There’s also karma: What you do, you’re going to get it back. So this life is a trip, man, and you’ve got to go through it. I know I’ve done a lot of stupid things and hurt people. I’ve got a lot of stuff that I’m paying for, and I’m trying to get good karma by not trying to hurt somebody or doing things for my own pleasure or aggrandizement.
Does believing in the transience of life mean you’re not nostalgic for jazz’s past? Or your own life in jazz? Wayne Shorter’s still here, but Miles is not here. Max Roach is not here. Trane is not here. Monk is not here. Do I feel nostalgic about that? No. These guys are alive to me. I hear their music. OK, Charlie Parker is not in his body, but everything about Charlie Parker is here to me in spirit. Any time of day, any time of night, I might think of Miles, and the spirit is there. Occasionally I go, Gee, I can’t hang out with Dizzy Gillespie or Clifford Brown after a gig. I think about that, but it’s receding. Those guys — I don’t worry about them not being here in the flesh. I’m not going to be in the flesh, either. You’re not going to be in the flesh, either, David. So what? It’s OK.
Rollins recording at the the Radio House in Copenhagen in 1968. Jan Persson/Getty Images
This is slightly random, but I’ve never seen you talk in much detail about when you played on a How was trying to fit into their music? Mick Jagger, I don’t think he understood what I was doing, and I didn’t understand what he was doing. was the one that persuaded me to do that recording. I said: “Man, the Rolling Stones. I don’t want to do any record with the Rolling Stones.” I’d considered them — and it’s faulty — not on the level of jazz. But my wife said, “No, no, you must do it.” So I said, “OK, let me see if I can relate to what they are doing; let me see if I can make it sound as good as possible.”
Could you? Not really. I know they’re a very popular rock band, but they were derivative of a lot of black bands, right? Isn’t that what they do?
Well, yeah. Right. It might be wrong for me to feel that way because I do like a lot of white artists. I like the Beatles. Paul McCartney is a good tunesmith. But the Rolling Stones, I didn’t relate to them because I thought they were just derivative of black blues. I do remember once I was in the supermarket up in Hudson, New York, and they were playing Top 40 records. I heard this song and thought,Who’s that guy? His playing struck a chord in me. Then I said, “Wait a minute, that’s me!” It was my playing on one of those Rolling Stones records.
Something I’ve heard musicians talk about is losing their sense of self when they’re playing, and how that’s when the best improvisations can happen. What does that say about the true nature of the self? It says that there are divine moments in this world. This world is not what it’s cracked up to be. This world is just a place to pay off our karma. That’s all. There’s something huge happening, and it’s a matter of feeling. It’s different than having book knowledge. The thing I’m talking about is more like intuition. Something is there. I’ve had experiences which have allowed me to know that.
Experiences that happened while you were playing? I’ll tell you one. I was in France playing at a place called Marciac. I was staying at a hotel a little ways out in the country. I liked to stay at nice hotels. The band stayed at another hotel, and if they could afford it, they could stay at this hotel; I’m not trying to be above them. Anyway, the night before the concert I lost I needed it to play. I was very concerned. I didn’t know what to do. I called up the front desk. I said: “Listen, I have a dental partial, which I misplaced. Can you please look through the garbage and find if it’s there?” They said, “We’ll look and see.” So while I was searching, I looked up and I saw a vision of what was like a window opening horizontally. It opened just a bit and there was something I saw; colors behind that little opening. It was such a revelation. I said, “Wow, what was that?” Then I looked down on the floor and there was my partial. I can’t say, “Oh, man, therefore there’s a God.” It’s not about that. But this happened to me and for months, even years, the feeling coming out of my body — I was elevated.
So you took this vision as a confirmation of the existence of something greater? You could call it a confirmation. That was a beautiful thing that happened to me. Something else happened a long time before that, David. When I was about 9 years old I was living up on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. I used to live on the block between 150th and 155th Street. It was one long block of houses and there was a shortcut there from St. Nicholas Place to Edgecombe Avenue. People would walk through the shortcut to get to the subway. So one day I went up on the roof, and there was part of the roof, the mortar, that was loose. I thought it would be a great idea if I dropped the loose part down and scared somebody walking through the shortcut. So I did that and when I dropped it I realized, If this hits somebody, they’re dead — and there was a guy walking through the shortcut. I prayed like I never prayed before. I asked God, Please don’t let it hit this guy. I prayed and I prayed and it didn’t hit him. Somebody could say, “Sonny, you were lucky.” Maybe so. But I knew that I was communicating with something greater and it worked in my favor.
Rollins waiting backstage at the Berkeley Jazz Festival in California in 1979. Ed Perlstein/Redferns/Getty Images
This is a crazy thing to bring up but lately I’ve been listening to your music and associating it with the pharaoh Akhenaten. Maybe it’s just because I wanted to see the Met’s production of Philip Glass’s opera about him and everything has gotten jumbled in my mind. But let me just throw it out there: Is Akhenaten significant to you in any way? Oh, very much so. Years ago, I began reading about Egypt. He was a break from some of the other Egyptian theology. He was a maverick, and I felt sympathetic to that. Akhenaten was a guy that influenced me a lot to be serious.
I’m glad my shot in the dark wasn’t useless. No, not at all. I was very much into Egyptology. That was another thing to learn about life, and learning about Akhenaten’s seriousness is another reason why, in a sense, I hate this world. It’s so inconsequential. Sure, there might be a good movie or this or that but we don’t have time for it. Instead we have to try to get some wisdom.
Does that mean your music was inconsequential too? I didn’t say everything was inconsequential. I can listen to some beautiful music, I can see a beautiful painting, and I wouldn’t dare to say they’re inconsequential. But the majority of what you see out here is inconsequential. Eating ice cream, wanting to have sex with some broad — Oh boy, she’s beautiful and all that stuff — the seven deadly sins. You have to get above that. Because if you don’t do it in this life, it’s like “Pay me now or pay me later.”
Have you made plans for what will happen with your unreleased recordings when you’re not around? After I get out of this planet I’m not going to have any say about what’s going on, so I’m not worried about that. And, boy, I agonize over my music; I won’t have to agonize about it anymore. Thank God.
Do you play any other instruments now that you don’t play the horn? The communion I had with my horn, the things I tried to do, I can’t get otherwise. I do have a Fender Rhodes piano upstairs. In fact, I think I should get a piano, a real piano, and play around. I’d probably get something out of it. But it’s not like it would be a continuation of where I was at with my horn. I feel like that thing is broken.
Is your relationship with silence different these days? That’s an excellent question. I used to look at TV a lot. Then I realized, this is very negative. Images and lies and bad for your eyes: I made sure that mantra got in my head, and I stopped looking at TV. I do listen to the radio. I’m trying to get away from that. Silence to me is meditative. To get into that silent space is a huge thing. But even today I’ve had the radio on so much. It’s something I’m working on.
Do you ever get lonely up here in Woodstock? On occasion. Fortunately not too often. I like being alone, actually. I have my yoga books. I have my Buddha books. I have a lot of spiritual material that I need to get with. At my age, all my friends are gone. At one time I began to lament that and then I said, “No, this is good that I have nobody to call and waste time talking.” Every now and then I do go, “Yeah, man, I’m lonely, let me call somebody up,” but to me that’s a weakness. I have to deal with myself. That’s what it gets down to for each of us. Understanding is up to you. It’s up to me. There’s no escape. I got pains and aches all over but spiritually, man, I feel better than I’ve ever felt. I’m on the right course.
David Marchese is a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
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She was not just a master musician, singer and dancer; she was also a teller of tall tales whose interviews could be as much a performance as her stage act.
Valaida Snow in an undated photo. She was a big name in Europe and Asia as well as in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages.Popperfoto, via Getty Images
Since 1851, many remarkable black men and women did not receive obituaries in The New York Times. This month, with Overlooked, we’re adding their stories to our archives.
A singer, a dancer, an arranger, a master fabulist, a virtuoso trumpeter adept at a half-dozen other instruments, too: Back when being all these things could also mean being a pop star, Valaida Snow was a sensation.
From the age of 5, when she began stealing the show as a member of her father’s performance troupe, Snow lived her life onstage, and on the road. She became a big name in Europe and Asia, just as much as she was in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages.
And she often graced the movie screen, helping to bring black music from the vaudeville stage into the audiovisual age.
African-American newspapers and the international press celebrated Snow both for her immense skill and for her novelty as a female trumpet master. She encouraged that coverage and bent it to her ends, telling tall tales and making her interviews as much a performance as her stage act.
“She pursued her life and career confidently, indomitably and even defiantly,” her biographer, Mark Miller, wrote in “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm: The Life and Music of Valaida Snow” (2007). “In fact and fiction both, it is a life to celebrate.”
Snow was in Denmark during an extended engagement when Nazi Germany stormed across Europe in the early years of World War II. But she refused to decamp for the United States and ended up imprisoned — though it was in a Copenhagen jail, not a German concentration camp as she later claimed.
When she was finally shuttled out of the country, she returned to the United States physically diminished. Though she worked hard to reclaim the spotlight, she died in 1956, at 52, in ill health and relative obscurity.
“The unfortunate thing about her legacy is that she wasn’t recorded as much as many of her peers,” Tammy Kernodle, a musicologist at Miami University in Ohio, said in a phone interview. “But she was a greatly respected musician on the vaudeville circuit, and even amongst male jazz musicians themselves.”
Dashing and charismatic, Snow earned the nicknames Little Louis — a reference to Louis Armstrong’s influence on her — and Queen of the Trumpet, given to her by W.C. Handy, who himself was known as the Father of the Blues. That appellation often appeared below her name on the 78-r.p.m. records she made.
Yet Snow’s stardom appeared to have an implacable ceiling. While many musicians held residencies in New York or Chicago clubs during the 1920s and ’30s, often catapulting to famous recording careers, Snow stayed on the road, possibly because club owners and promoters did not see women as viable bandleaders.
“This conversation about chronicling the evolution and the progression of jazz has always been rooted in recordings,” Dr. Kernodle said. “She spent a lot of time in Europe during a key time when jazz was being documented in recordings — she’s back and forth, and that back-and-forth doesn’t give her an opportunity to amass a catalog in the way that many of her peers did.”
Still, at the height of her success, Snow lived in sumptuous style. She rode in a convertible, often with a chauffeur; had a personal servant; and even acquired a pet monkey. And she kept her coterie coordinated. “The chauffeur, the footman and the monkey were all to dress alike,” the cabaret singer and pianist Bobby Short recalled fondly.
Valada Snow was born in Chattanooga, Tenn., on June 2, 1904, the eldest of four children in a musical family. (She later added an “i” to her name, possibly to clarify its pronunciation.) Her sister Lavada later claimed that their father, John, had been a Russophile, and named his first-born child after the city of Vladivostok.
Valada’s mother, Etta, was a music teacher who had attended Howard University and taught her children to play instruments and sing. John, who went by J.V., was a minister who assembled a troupe of child performers known as the Pickaninny Troubadours, presenting them at black theaters and vaudeville stages across the South.
By the time she was 5, Valada had become the show’s star. By adolescence, she was proficient on nearly a dozen string and wind instruments. Her bailiwick as a child was the violin, but her stage act also included singing, dancing and even an escape-artistry act.
At 15, Snow married Samuel Lewis Lanier, a fellow entertainer, but he was physically abusive, and she soon left him. Her father had recently died and the Troubadours were no more; a period of drifting set in. It wasn’t until 1921, when she joined the popular revue “Holiday in Dixieland,” that she began to make her name on the national stage.
Snow held a long residency the next year at a Harlem cabaret run by the famed proprietor Barron Wilkins, bringing her new levels of attention. Then she set off on the road again.
In 1924, Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle cast her in “In Bamville,” the follow-up to their smash hit musical “Shuffle Along.” It traveled to New York the next year under the name “The Chocolate Dandies,” but received unsympathetic reviews and soon closed. In many of those negative reviews there were two exceptions: Snow and her co-star Josephine Baker, whose own career was just taking off.
Snow mounted a few tours of the United States with small jazz bands, but it was a three-year jaunt across Europe and Asia beginning in 1926, when she was 22, that established her as a star. She traveled to London and Paris with the producer Lew Leslie’s “Blackbirds” revue, and then joined the drummer Jack Carter’s octet on a tour of China and Southeast Asia.
“She is important in terms of helping us gain an understanding of the spread of jazz to Europe, particularly after World War I,” Dr. Kernodle said, adding that Snow helped “shift the context of jazz away from the early Dixieland style.”
Back in the United States, Snow took a prominent role in another musical, “Rhapsody in Black,” which Leslie had built largely to showcase her talents, though Ethel Waters was billed as its star. It gave rise to a long rivalry between the two. Snow directed the production’s 60-person stage band, though it was known as Pike Davis’s Continental Orchestra.
Over the latter half of the 1930s, Snow recorded roughly 40 sides in studios across Europe, including her signature song, “High Hat, Trumpet and Rhythm.” But she never made a commercial recording in the United States as a trumpeter.
In the mid-1930s, Snow met and married Ananias Berry, a 19-year-old dancer who performed with the Berry Brothers, a family troupe; the new couple developed a stage act and toured together. But their age difference drew negative publicity — especially after Samuel Lewis Lanier, Snow’s former husband, took her to court on allegations of bigamy, claiming their long-ago marriage had never been officially annulled.
It all led to tensions between Snow and Berry, and the marriage did not last.
Starting in 1940, while living in Europe, Snow found herself stuck for two years in Nazi-occupied Denmark, staying even after her manager had fled. Mr. Miller’s biography revealed that she had spent only 10 weeks in custody at two Danish prisons. She had developed a dependency on oxycodone and was said to have participated in petty robberies, though no charges were ever filed. Her imprisonment could have been an attempt by the authorities to protect and house her during difficult times, as Mr. Miller surmises, or it could simply have been unlawful.
Snow was able to leave Denmark in the spring of 1942 on an American ship that had come to rescue refugees. Back home — where her return was front-page news in black newspapers — she told stories of having been held at a concentration camp “for eight horrible months,” and sometimes beaten. The Amsterdam News reported that she was “the only colored woman entertainer on record to have been interned in a Nazi concentration camp.”
Whatever the truth, by the time she returned, Snow was worse for the wear. Some reports suggested that her weight was down to 76 pounds. Friends said she carried an air of sadness that would never fully go away.
She married again in 1943; her third husband, Earle Edwards, was a former performer who became her manager. The couple moved to Los Angeles, where she was seen as a mentor and inspiration to the young musicians turning Central Avenue clubs into a hotbed of modern jazz innovation.
In 1949, performing at Town Hall in New York, she received her first and only mention in The New York Times: a paragraph-long review.
Snow died of a brain hemorrhage on May 30, 1956, during an engagement at the Palace Theater in New York. “She was survived,” Mr. Miller wrote in his biography, “by her husband, Earle, her sister Lavada, her brother Arvada and her stepbrother Arthur (Artemus) Bush — as well as a mythology that had taken on a life of its own.”
We handpicked 10 stories for you to enjoy this weekend.
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In all likelihood, you know the voice of Rob Crocker. A steadfast announcer at WBGO for the last two decades, he has history with our station going back nearly to its inception.
This week, Rob received the Roy Wilkins Black History Month Award from the Mid-Manhattan Branch of the NAACP. “They were really gracious,” he says. “I had tremendous appreciation for the honor.”
As noted in the event’s program book and his WBGO bio, Rob “has the singular distinction of being the longest-running disc jockey in the history of jazz radio in New York City.” That tenure includes notable time not only at WBGO but also at WRVR, WBLS and KISS FM.
He began his broadcast career on Radio Free America, in Holland, co-hosting a program called “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.” He spent much of the 1990s in Japan, hosting shows in Tokyo and Yokohama, before returning stateside at the turn of the century.
One of the most gratifying things about the NAACP event, Rob says, was the presence of other African American radio stalwarts. “The fact that I was up there with G. Keith Alexander, from the old days of BLS, and Bob Lee, from BLS. These guys are my peers, even though I’m older than both of them. We all go way back to New York radio in the ‘70s and ’80.”
Bob Lee of WBLS, G.Keith Alexander of HarlemAmerica Talk Radio, WBGO’s Rob Crocker, and Geoffrey Eaton of the NAACP.
CREDIT HUBERT WILLIAMS
“He is the jazz jock,” says WBGO’s Lezlie Harrison, who attended the NAACP event. “Whatever else people say, they all say Rob knows how to swing and his programming is excellent.”
She adds: “He’s certainly someone who’s invested in the music, and the betterment of the music. So not only does he play good music; he also supports the music, in a way that we all need.”
Rob says he embraces his stature as a role model, and a voice of experience. He brings that experience to the balance of material in every shift. “It’s a maturity factor that teaches me how to blend things,” he says. “The old crossover fusion classics, as well as the new things coming out, as well as the classics. I think it’s just an understanding: some people like this, but everybody likes that.”
Hear Rob Crocker on Saturday Evening Jazz and Sunday Afternoon Jazz.
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Ads We Like: Crown Royal highlights a woman keeping jazz alive and thriving in Harlem
Crown Royal is shining a light on Marjorie Eliot, a Harlem, NY legend who has been hosting jazz concerts in her living room every Sunday as a tribute to her late son Phillip and his shared love for music.
A 12-minute documentary, Sundays at the Triple Nickel, made with Stept Studios and directed by Jess Colquhoun, is part of Crown Royal’s push to inspire generosity. It shows how Eliot, after the tragic loss of her son in 1992, arranged a memorial concert, which turned into a weekly apartment concert every Sunday, without fail, for over 25 years and is still going strong.
The film, slightly surreal and grainy, also shows the strength of Eliot to persevere through her losses and continue making music in the Sugar Hill neighborhood in Harlem, in the Triple Nickel building that used to house some jazz legends.
Director Colquhoun discovered Eliot’s story through a story in the New York Times several years ago. She was so captivated that when she returned to New York, she attended the house concert.
“I couldn’t believe the show. It was just incredibly magical. I was engrossed in the concert,” Colquhoun told The Drum. “As soon you get to the apartment, you kind of get taken under this spell for a couple of hours. I was so intrigued by her, the people that were showing up, and her story, her son. I knew there was some kind of film in her story. There had been a couple of news pieces, but nothing told that was really filmic and poetic.”
Colquhoun kept coming back over the next few years, seeing the concert four or five more times. She introduced herself and got to know Eliot and her son Rudy, and built a relationship before filming them.
“They’re incredible creatives themselves, they’re really interested in the creative process and were on board from the beginning and were excited to tell their story in a unique way. So, it was really a collaborative process,” said Colquhoun, who added that the film was shot over three days in Harlem and was produced with a heightened documentary style, stylistic and surreal, that captured what she calls the “other-worldly presence” of her concert and the building itself.
Triple Nickel residents
“The tenants who live there are a huge range of different creatives, from fashion designers to musicians. You walk the corridors and you can hear a saxophone coming from one door, and someone’s playing the piano from another, and the whole building’s just buzzing, it feels so alive. So I wanted to weave that into the narrative, as well as how Marjorie is a huge heartbeat of that building,” she said.
Colquhoun and Stept Studios were inspired by a recent Crown Royal campaign, ‘The Guy Whose Got It All’, directed by Spike Lee and starring Anthony Ramos. They reached out to the brand to help collaborate on Sundays at the Triple Nickel.
The brand, owned by Diageo, stated that it “looks to inspire generosity in all forms, so it was only natural for Crown Royal to collaborate on its first-ever documentary… to shine a light on the exceptional generosity of Marjorie Eliot. This project is an example of Diageo’s continued commitment to supporting talented creatives who seek to tell meaningful and powerful stories.”
The film will be promoted through Crown Royal’s social channels and will have a screening in Harlem to celebrate its release. The brand is taking a year-round grassroots approach to spreading the word about this film, which will include film festival submissions and a series of assets to complement the film that are more brand focused.
“With Marjorie’s story, they’ve been incredible at keeping integrity and authenticity to her story, really just championing who she is. They’ve been a huge part of helping the film come to life,” said Colquhoun, who urges those who see the film to attend one of Eliot’s intimate concerts.
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He has helped me with everything from advertising gigs, setting up ads, contact information, contacting labels and media, producing my own CDs, distribution, and other invaluable advice. His passion for what he does helps keep me on a positive attitude when the business side of things seems bleak at times.
I am quite sure I would not have been able to achieve the success that I have over the last 13 years if it wasn’t for the expertise, hard work, and guidance of Jim Eigo and Jazz Promo Services.
Eric Weissberg, right, in about 1970 with his group Deliverance. His recording of “Dueling Banjos” with the guitarist Steve Mandell was a hit in 1973.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The clarinetist and composer Bill Smith straddled the classical and jazz worlds with ease. One of his longest collaborations was with Dave Brubeck, seen here performing with Mr. Smith in 2004.Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
Danny Roy Thompson, right, and Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra in performance at the New School in New York in 2018.Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Kenny Rogers performs at the 2012 CMA Music Festival in Nashville. (Wade Payne/Invision/AP)
Mr. Rogers and Lionel Richie perform together in 2012. (Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
The pranksters Mal Sharpe, center, and Jim Coyle, right, pose as researchers from The Milpitas Physical Fitness Institute in 1963 in San Francisco, where they talk a man into a display of sidewalk gymnastics.John Gorman/San Francisco Examiner
Steve Weber, right, and Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders in 1972. They drifted from their folk beginnings into a sometimes warped kind of pop music and made a mark with a song in the movie “Easy Rider.”Henry Horenstein
For 46 years, students have crowded around Dr. Barry Harris for his weekly jazz class.Jonno Rattman for The New York Times
Valaida Snow in an undated photo. She was a big name in Europe and Asia as well as in black communities across the United States, often giving some of the first jazz performances on major international stages.Popperfoto, via Getty Images
HUBERT WILLIAMS