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http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/culture/music/csu-professor-explores-musical-bonds-in-jews-and-jazz/article_fb8936ba-d1c5-11e6-83e5-27e4c36bddad.html
 
CSU professor explores musical bonds in ‘Jews and Jazz’
CARLO WOLFF | CONTRIBUTOR cwolff@cjn.org
Writing about Jews and jazz was a natural for Charles Hersch, a political science professor at Cleveland State University. It took him several years to produce “Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity,” a slim but dense work of cultural analysis, but the investment was rewarding, producing the book as well as insights into what it means to be Jewish.
 
In tracing the evolution of that relationship, Hersch’s book suggests ethnic identity may be as mutable as jazz itself.
 
A Chagrin Falls resident who occasionally attends Kol HaLev in Pepper Pike, Hersch has written two other books: “Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan” and “Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans.”
 
In an interview in his office at CSU, where he has taught since 1991, Hersch said his new book reflects ongoing interests.
 
“I just noticed there were so many Jewish jazz musicians, white jazz musicians, so I kind of wondered what it meant,” he said.
 
“Did their Jewish identity play a role in deciding to become a jazz musician, did it affect how they played the music or how they pursued their life as a jazz musician? What did it mean? Did it mean anything? It just seemed an important enough topic that somebody should write a book about it. Given that I spent most of my career writing about politics, ethnicity and music, it seemed like I was the right person to do it. There have been some articles, there have been some kind of journalistic treatments, but nobody had actually written a whole book devoted to Jews and jazz in a serious way.”
 
The book, which costs $44.95, is studded with names of Jewish and African-American musicians. Some of the former are well known, like George Gershwin and Benny Goodman; jazz fans will better know others, like contemporary saxophonist-composer John Zorn, trumpeter Steve Bernstein and saxophonist Paul Shapiro. Yet others, particularly African-American forebears like the bassist Slim Gaillard, the pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith and the trumpet player Red Rodney, will be familiar to jazz historians.
 
Each gets his or her well-deserved moment in Hersch’s spotlight, as does Roz Cron, who had to negotiate particularly slippery slopes.
“Another Jewish musician to ‘play black’ was saxophonist Rosalind ‘Roz’ Cron, who played with the (theoretically) black ‘all girl’ International Sweethearts of Rhythm in the 1940s,” Hersch writes. “Cron’s passing was made easier by the band’s ‘international’ label, which signified that although all members were ‘black’ some were of mixed race and nationality.”
 
The story changed over time, Hersch said. “So in the 1920s and ’30s, when Jews weren’t really considered fully American by many people, people like Gershwin and Benny Goodman used jazz to sort of become more fully American. And then in the postwar period, Jews are accepted in America, but then (they asked themselves), do we want to melt into the melting pot? Some people resisted assimilation, so my argument there is people like (the clarinetist) Mezz Mezzrow and Red Rodney and some others used jazz to sort of, I say somewhat facetiously, become black.
 
“They used it to ‘reminoritize,’ to sort of engage with jazz and then explore relationships with African Americans, to play with a black identity to some degree, (leading to) the whole ‘white negro’ phenomenon. They used jazz to sort of resist assimilation. The third time period is beginning in the 1960s, when you have this sort of push for ethnicity, starting with the ‘black is beautiful’ thing and Jews engage with jazz to explore their Jewishness.
 
“The surprise was that to really understand Jewish engagement with jazz you have to look at the time period. My thesis is that Jews engage with jazz to explore their Jewish identity. They do so differently depending on the era. The 1960s to the present are sort of one era. Becoming American, becoming black and becoming Jewish are the three parts of the book.”
 
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from South Euclid.
 

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http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/news/culture/music/csu-professor-explores-musical-bonds-in-jews-and-jazz/article_fb8936ba-d1c5-11e6-83e5-27e4c36bddad.html
 
CSU professor explores musical bonds in ‘Jews and Jazz’
CARLO WOLFF | CONTRIBUTOR cwolff@cjn.org
Writing about Jews and jazz was a natural for Charles Hersch, a political science professor at Cleveland State University. It took him several years to produce “Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity,” a slim but dense work of cultural analysis, but the investment was rewarding, producing the book as well as insights into what it means to be Jewish.
 
In tracing the evolution of that relationship, Hersch’s book suggests ethnic identity may be as mutable as jazz itself.
 
A Chagrin Falls resident who occasionally attends Kol HaLev in Pepper Pike, Hersch has written two other books: “Democratic Artworks: Politics and the Arts from Trilling to Dylan” and “Subversive Sounds: Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans.”
 
In an interview in his office at CSU, where he has taught since 1991, Hersch said his new book reflects ongoing interests.
 
“I just noticed there were so many Jewish jazz musicians, white jazz musicians, so I kind of wondered what it meant,” he said.
 
“Did their Jewish identity play a role in deciding to become a jazz musician, did it affect how they played the music or how they pursued their life as a jazz musician? What did it mean? Did it mean anything? It just seemed an important enough topic that somebody should write a book about it. Given that I spent most of my career writing about politics, ethnicity and music, it seemed like I was the right person to do it. There have been some articles, there have been some kind of journalistic treatments, but nobody had actually written a whole book devoted to Jews and jazz in a serious way.”
 
The book, which costs $44.95, is studded with names of Jewish and African-American musicians. Some of the former are well known, like George Gershwin and Benny Goodman; jazz fans will better know others, like contemporary saxophonist-composer John Zorn, trumpeter Steve Bernstein and saxophonist Paul Shapiro. Yet others, particularly African-American forebears like the bassist Slim Gaillard, the pianist Willie “The Lion” Smith and the trumpet player Red Rodney, will be familiar to jazz historians.
 
Each gets his or her well-deserved moment in Hersch’s spotlight, as does Roz Cron, who had to negotiate particularly slippery slopes.
“Another Jewish musician to ‘play black’ was saxophonist Rosalind ‘Roz’ Cron, who played with the (theoretically) black ‘all girl’ International Sweethearts of Rhythm in the 1940s,” Hersch writes. “Cron’s passing was made easier by the band’s ‘international’ label, which signified that although all members were ‘black’ some were of mixed race and nationality.”
 
The story changed over time, Hersch said. “So in the 1920s and ’30s, when Jews weren’t really considered fully American by many people, people like Gershwin and Benny Goodman used jazz to sort of become more fully American. And then in the postwar period, Jews are accepted in America, but then (they asked themselves), do we want to melt into the melting pot? Some people resisted assimilation, so my argument there is people like (the clarinetist) Mezz Mezzrow and Red Rodney and some others used jazz to sort of, I say somewhat facetiously, become black.
 
“They used it to ‘reminoritize,’ to sort of engage with jazz and then explore relationships with African Americans, to play with a black identity to some degree, (leading to) the whole ‘white negro’ phenomenon. They used jazz to sort of resist assimilation. The third time period is beginning in the 1960s, when you have this sort of push for ethnicity, starting with the ‘black is beautiful’ thing and Jews engage with jazz to explore their Jewishness.
 
“The surprise was that to really understand Jewish engagement with jazz you have to look at the time period. My thesis is that Jews engage with jazz to explore their Jewish identity. They do so differently depending on the era. The 1960s to the present are sort of one era. Becoming American, becoming black and becoming Jewish are the three parts of the book.”
 
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer from South Euclid.
 

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One of my jazz heroes has passed.
 
His many books, liner notes and writings about jazz inspired me to do what I do.
 
Before ‘I got into the record’ business way back in the early 1970s I worked for the legendary Strand Bookstore.
 
The krew when I was there was quite amazing:
 
Writers, actors, authors, musicians, bibliomaniacs….
 
Craig Anderson, the son of Maxwell Anderson, Dick Komar Jr the son of Dorthory Killgallen and the actor Richard Komar, Tommy Miller aka Tommy Verlaine who founded the band Television to name a few.
 
Patty Smith was there too, just as I was departing.  Her sister worked there too and married the Strand shipping clerk.
 
One of my Strand jobs was to go around to all the critics and magazines and pick up review books and galley’s.  Life magazine was one of my stops.  I’d hit maybe 10 or more different departments from their Sixth Ave headquarters.  My last stop was Loudon S. Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III’s father.   He was the editor for the popular ‘Miscellany’ feature that always closed every issue of Life Magazine.  His office walls were covered with the original photographs they used.  He always gave me a ‘tip’ of free records and books.
 
I also picked up from Nat Hentoff.
 
I’d go to his West 12th St apartment through the service entrance. I could hear him banging away on his manual typewriter.
 
He had books and records piled up outside his service entry door…tons of stuff.
 
After I announced myself he told me to take everything on the left and help myself to whatever records I wanted on the right as a tip.
 
R.I.P. Nat Hentoff
 
Nat Hentoff-George Wein-Tony Scott JJA Awards BB King’s NYC 2003
Photo by Jim Eigo

 

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One of my jazz heroes has passed.
 
His many books, liner notes and writings about jazz inspired me to do what I do.
 
Before ‘I got into the record’ business way back in the early 1970s I worked for the legendary Strand Bookstore.
 
The krew when I was there was quite amazing:
 
Writers, actors, authors, musicians, bibliomaniacs….
 
Craig Anderson, the son of Maxwell Anderson, Dick Komar Jr the son of Dorthory Killgallen and the actor Richard Komar, Tommy Miller aka Tommy Verlaine who founded the band Television to name a few.
 
Patty Smith was there too, just as I was departing.  Her sister worked there too and married the Strand shipping clerk.
 
One of my Strand jobs was to go around to all the critics and magazines and pick up review books and galley’s.  Life magazine was one of my stops.  I’d hit maybe 10 or more different departments from their Sixth Ave headquarters.  My last stop was Loudon S. Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III’s father.   He was the editor for the popular ‘Miscellany’ feature that always closed every issue of Life Magazine.  His office walls were covered with the original photographs they used.  He always gave me a ‘tip’ of free records and books.
 
I also picked up from Nat Hentoff.
 
I’d go to his West 12th St apartment through the service entrance. I could hear him banging away on his manual typewriter.
 
He had books and records piled up outside his service entry door…tons of stuff.
 
After I announced myself he told me to take everything on the left and help myself to whatever records I wanted on the right as a tip.
 
R.I.P. Nat Hentoff
 
Nat Hentoff-George Wein-Tony Scott JJA Awards BB King’s NYC 2003
Photo by Jim Eigo

 

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http://mobile.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/01/07/us/ap-us-obit-hentoff.html?_r=0
 
Columnist Nat Hentoff Dies at 91
 
January 7, 2017
 
NEW YORK — Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91.
His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.
 
Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”
 
He was a bearded, scholarly figure, a kind of secular rabbi, as likely to write a column about fiddler Bob Wills as a dissection of the Patriot Act, to have his name appear in the liberal Village Voice as the far-right WorldNetDaily.com, where his column last appeared in August 2016.
 
Ellington, Charlie Parker, Malcolm X and I.F. Stone were among his friends and acquaintances. He wrote liner notes for records by Aretha Franklin, Max Roach and Ray Charles and was the first non-musician named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts. He also received honors from the American Bar Association, the National Press Foundation, and, because of his opposition to abortion, the Human Life Foundation.
 
Hentoff’s steadiest job was with the Voice, where he worked for 50 years and wrote a popular column. He wrote for years about jazz for DownBeat and had a music column for the Wall Street Journal. His more than 25 books included works on jazz and the First Amendment, the novels “Call the Keeper” and “Blues for Charles Darwin” and the memoirs “Boston Boy” and “Speaking Freely.”
 
The documentary “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff” was released in 2014.
 
Jazz was his first love, but Hentoff was an early admirer of Bob Dylan, first hearing the then-unknown singer at a Greenwich Village club in 1961 and getting on well enough with him to write liner notes two years later for Dylan’s landmark second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
 
“The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear for the way many of us constrict our capacity for living while a few of us don’t,” Hentoff wrote.
 
At a time when the media alternately treated Dylan like a prophet or the latest teen fad, Hentoff asked well-informed questions that were (usually) answered in kind by the cryptic star. Hentoff also was willing to be Dylan’s partner in improvisation. A 1966 Playboy interview, he later revealed, had been made up from scratch after Dylan rejected the first conversation that was supposed to be published by the magazine.
 
As a columnist, Hentoff focused tirelessly on the Constitution and what he saw as a bipartisan mission to undermine it. He tallied the crimes of Richard Nixon and labeled President Clinton’s anti-terrorism legislation “an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights.” He even parted from other First Amendment advocates, quitting the American Civil Liberties Union because of the ACLU’s support for speech codes in schools and workplaces.
 
Left-wing enough to merit an FBI file, an activist from age 15 when he organized a union at a Boston candy chain, Hentoff was deeply opposed to abortion, angering many of his colleagues at the Village Voice and elsewhere. In 2008, he turned against the campaign of Barack Obama over what he regarded as the candidate’s extreme views, including rejection of legislation that would have banned partial birth abortions.
 
Hentoff was born in 1925, the son of a Russian-Jewish haberdasher. Thrown out of Hebrew school, he flaunted his unbelief, even eating a salami sandwich in front of his house on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement. In 1982, his opposition to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to a trio of rabbis declaring he had been excommunicated.
 
“I only wished the three rabbis really had the authority to hold that court,” Hentoff later wrote. “I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew.”
 
He was educated as a boy at Boston’s Latin School, alma mater to Ralph Waldo Emerson among others. But his best lessons were received at a local jazz joint, where Ben Webster and Rex Stewart were among those who took a liking to the teenage fan and became, Hentoff recalled, “my itinerant foster fathers.” Back in the classroom, Hentoff would hide jazz magazines inside his textbooks.
 
In college, Northeastern University, Hentoff found a home at the Savoy Cafe and befriended Ellington, drummer Jo Jones and others. Ellington not only lectured him on music, but enlightened young Hentoff (who eventually married three times) on the loopholes in monogamy. “Nobody likes to be owned,” Ellington told him.
 
After graduating, Hentoff worked as a disc jockey and moved to New York to edit DownBeat, from which he was fired in 1957, because, he alleged, he had attempted to employ an African-American writer. A year later, he joined the Village Voice and remained until he was laid off in December 2008.
 
“I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about,” Hentoff wrote in his final Voice column, published in January 2009. “Over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: ‘He never lost his sense of rage.’ Neither have I.”
 
 

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http://mobile.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/01/07/us/ap-us-obit-hentoff.html?_r=0
 
Columnist Nat Hentoff Dies at 91
 
January 7, 2017
 
NEW YORK — Nat Hentoff, an eclectic columnist, critic, novelist and agitator dedicated to music, free expression and defying the party line, died Saturday at age 91.
His son, Tom Hentoff, said his father died from natural causes at his Manhattan apartment.
 
Schooled in the classics and the stories he heard from Duke Ellington and other jazz greats, Nat Hentoff enjoyed a diverse and iconoclastic career, basking in “the freedom to be infuriating on a myriad of subjects.”
 
He was a bearded, scholarly figure, a kind of secular rabbi, as likely to write a column about fiddler Bob Wills as a dissection of the Patriot Act, to have his name appear in the liberal Village Voice as the far-right WorldNetDaily.com, where his column last appeared in August 2016.
 
Ellington, Charlie Parker, Malcolm X and I.F. Stone were among his friends and acquaintances. He wrote liner notes for records by Aretha Franklin, Max Roach and Ray Charles and was the first non-musician named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts. He also received honors from the American Bar Association, the National Press Foundation, and, because of his opposition to abortion, the Human Life Foundation.
 
Hentoff’s steadiest job was with the Voice, where he worked for 50 years and wrote a popular column. He wrote for years about jazz for DownBeat and had a music column for the Wall Street Journal. His more than 25 books included works on jazz and the First Amendment, the novels “Call the Keeper” and “Blues for Charles Darwin” and the memoirs “Boston Boy” and “Speaking Freely.”
 
The documentary “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Notes on the Life of Nat Hentoff” was released in 2014.
 
Jazz was his first love, but Hentoff was an early admirer of Bob Dylan, first hearing the then-unknown singer at a Greenwich Village club in 1961 and getting on well enough with him to write liner notes two years later for Dylan’s landmark second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.”
 
“The irrepressible reality of Bob Dylan is a compound of spontaneity, candor, slicing wit and an uncommonly perceptive eye and ear for the way many of us constrict our capacity for living while a few of us don’t,” Hentoff wrote.
 
At a time when the media alternately treated Dylan like a prophet or the latest teen fad, Hentoff asked well-informed questions that were (usually) answered in kind by the cryptic star. Hentoff also was willing to be Dylan’s partner in improvisation. A 1966 Playboy interview, he later revealed, had been made up from scratch after Dylan rejected the first conversation that was supposed to be published by the magazine.
 
As a columnist, Hentoff focused tirelessly on the Constitution and what he saw as a bipartisan mission to undermine it. He tallied the crimes of Richard Nixon and labeled President Clinton’s anti-terrorism legislation “an all-out assault on the Bill of Rights.” He even parted from other First Amendment advocates, quitting the American Civil Liberties Union because of the ACLU’s support for speech codes in schools and workplaces.
 
Left-wing enough to merit an FBI file, an activist from age 15 when he organized a union at a Boston candy chain, Hentoff was deeply opposed to abortion, angering many of his colleagues at the Village Voice and elsewhere. In 2008, he turned against the campaign of Barack Obama over what he regarded as the candidate’s extreme views, including rejection of legislation that would have banned partial birth abortions.
 
Hentoff was born in 1925, the son of a Russian-Jewish haberdasher. Thrown out of Hebrew school, he flaunted his unbelief, even eating a salami sandwich in front of his house on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of fasting and atonement. In 1982, his opposition to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon led to a trio of rabbis declaring he had been excommunicated.
 
“I only wished the three rabbis really had the authority to hold that court,” Hentoff later wrote. “I would have told them about my life as a heretic, a tradition I keep precisely because I am a Jew.”
 
He was educated as a boy at Boston’s Latin School, alma mater to Ralph Waldo Emerson among others. But his best lessons were received at a local jazz joint, where Ben Webster and Rex Stewart were among those who took a liking to the teenage fan and became, Hentoff recalled, “my itinerant foster fathers.” Back in the classroom, Hentoff would hide jazz magazines inside his textbooks.
 
In college, Northeastern University, Hentoff found a home at the Savoy Cafe and befriended Ellington, drummer Jo Jones and others. Ellington not only lectured him on music, but enlightened young Hentoff (who eventually married three times) on the loopholes in monogamy. “Nobody likes to be owned,” Ellington told him.
 
After graduating, Hentoff worked as a disc jockey and moved to New York to edit DownBeat, from which he was fired in 1957, because, he alleged, he had attempted to employ an African-American writer. A year later, he joined the Village Voice and remained until he was laid off in December 2008.
 
“I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about,” Hentoff wrote in his final Voice column, published in January 2009. “Over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: ‘He never lost his sense of rage.’ Neither have I.”
 
 

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This past Thursday and Friday I attended the annual Jazz Connect Conference at Saint Peter’s Church.
 
One of the more popular panels at the conference is Jazz Jukebox Jury where a panel of radio program and music directors hear previews of unreleased new jazz recordings and weigh in on whether they would add them to their station’s on-air music rotation.
 
One of the tracks they selected is from the new Howard Johnson CD “Little Black Lucille”.
 
 Johnson plays the pennywhistle and not the tuba for which he is most known.
 
HOWARD JOHNSON & GRAVITY “Testimony” 

Howard Johnson – Tuba; Velvet Brown – Tuba; Dave Bargeron – Tuba; Earl McIntyre – Tuba; Joseph Daley – Tuba; Bob Stewart – Tuba; Carlton Holmes – Piano; Melissa Slocum – Bass; Buddy Williams – Drums)
Special Guests: Nedra Johnson  Vocal (track 2); Joe Exley – CC Tuba (tracks 1, 5, 6, 7, 8); Background Vocals, (track 2) CJ Wright, Butch Watson, and Mem Nahdar
http://www.hojotuba.com
(Tuscarora Records 17001) Street Date: March 3, 2017
 
Howard himself was in attendance and yes, the panel unanimously said they would program this track.

That pennywhistle got me to thinking who else plays jazz on the pennywhistle.
 
Senior moment. 
 
I couldn’t remember.
 
On my drive home it hit me.
 
It’s Les Lieber.

I knew that he was still playing at 100, but lost track so I got in touch with guitarist Bill Wurzel who told me this:
 
I spoke with his wife Edie yesterday.
Les will be 105 in March.
He climbs stairs and plays sax.
I played the Fire Island gig when he was 104 and was asked to pencil in next August.
They’re headed for Florida and possibly a cruise.
 
I believe this makes Les Lieber the oldest living still performing jazz musician (please correct me if I’m wrong).
 
Saxophonist Fred Staton (Dakota’s brother) is 101.
Fred Staton performing at the Hot House Awards 2016
 
Les has lead quite the extraordinary life.
 
I got to meet him a few times over the years.
 
One time he invited me to his living loft on Broadway down by NYU.
 
In addition to his musical accomplishments, finding and recording Django Reinhardt in Paris in 1945, founding Jazz At Noon he was also a journalist who wrote feature stories for one of the big newspapers back in the 50s and 60s.
 
His bathroom walls were covered with them:

Check out Django Reinhardt & Les Lieber
Sweet Sue – Paris, 01.12.1945
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq6pHSwpqxs
 
Franco American Quintett 
Les Lieber (penny-whistle); Larry Mann (p); 
Django Reinhardt (g); Bob Decker (b); Red Lacky (dm) 
1945 December 01 – AFN-Studio, Paris
 
Honeysuckle Rose No.2 – Paris, 01.12.1945
 
Les Lieber: Jazzy “It Had To Be You” on penny whistle 1939 – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8inPXiss5RU
 
In The Pocket: Jazz Penny Whistle Virtuoso Les Lieber
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vuKRiyXdxI&t=7s
Published on Mar 2, 2012
Photojournalist Natalie Keyssar spent a recent afternoon with 99 year old Jazz Saxophonist and Penny Whistle Virtuoso Les Lieber, as he talked about his long life in music and played for us his unusual choice of musical instrument. On March 16, Mr. Lieber turns 100, and will celebrate the occasion with a special edition of his weekly performance series Jazz at Noon, which he has been presenting since 1965.
 
Interview with Les Lieber / Edie Lieber: Getting Your Money’s Worth with Judith West
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZE2SbSP63w
 
Les Lieber, 99 year old saxophonist, credits is wife Edie with his attitude toward living happily into his 90’s. He was the inspiration for the documentary, “Over 90 and Loving It” by Susan Polis Schultz featuring uplifting portraits of nonagenarians and centenarians, currently airing on PBS. Les, who was a foreign correspondent for the NEW YORK TIMES and NEWSWEEK, among others, has played the saxophone as an avocation since he was 12 years old. He has enhanced his longevity by continuing his music. In 1965 he established Jazz at Noon on Fridays in various New York locations, currently at The Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park, S. He talks about enjoying his life with Judith West on Getting Your Money’s Worth.
 
Les Lieber, Billy Taylor and Benny Goodman 1972.

Show Les a little love and give him a Like on his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/LesLieber/
 
Jim Eigo
 

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This past Thursday and Friday I attended the annual Jazz Connect Conference at Saint Peter’s Church.
 
One of the more popular panels at the conference is Jazz Jukebox Jury where a panel of radio program and music directors hear previews of unreleased new jazz recordings and weigh in on whether they would add them to their station’s on-air music rotation.
 
One of the tracks they selected is from the new Howard Johnson CD “Little Black Lucille”.
 
 Johnson plays the pennywhistle and not the tuba for which he is most known.
 
HOWARD JOHNSON & GRAVITY “Testimony” 

Howard Johnson – Tuba; Velvet Brown – Tuba; Dave Bargeron – Tuba; Earl McIntyre – Tuba; Joseph Daley – Tuba; Bob Stewart – Tuba; Carlton Holmes – Piano; Melissa Slocum – Bass; Buddy Williams – Drums)
Special Guests: Nedra Johnson  Vocal (track 2); Joe Exley – CC Tuba (tracks 1, 5, 6, 7, 8); Background Vocals, (track 2) CJ Wright, Butch Watson, and Mem Nahdar
http://www.hojotuba.com
(Tuscarora Records 17001) Street Date: March 3, 2017
 
Howard himself was in attendance and yes, the panel unanimously said they would program this track.

That pennywhistle got me to thinking who else plays jazz on the pennywhistle.
 
Senior moment. 
 
I couldn’t remember.
 
On my drive home it hit me.
 
It’s Les Lieber.

I knew that he was still playing at 100, but lost track so I got in touch with guitarist Bill Wurzel who told me this:
 
I spoke with his wife Edie yesterday.
Les will be 105 in March.
He climbs stairs and plays sax.
I played the Fire Island gig when he was 104 and was asked to pencil in next August.
They’re headed for Florida and possibly a cruise.
 
I believe this makes Les Lieber the oldest living still performing jazz musician (please correct me if I’m wrong).
 
Saxophonist Fred Staton (Dakota’s brother) is 101.
Fred Staton performing at the Hot House Awards 2016
 
Les has lead quite the extraordinary life.
 
I got to meet him a few times over the years.
 
One time he invited me to his living loft on Broadway down by NYU.
 
In addition to his musical accomplishments, finding and recording Django Reinhardt in Paris in 1945, founding Jazz At Noon he was also a journalist who wrote feature stories for one of the big newspapers back in the 50s and 60s.
 
His bathroom walls were covered with them:

Check out Django Reinhardt & Les Lieber
Sweet Sue – Paris, 01.12.1945
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq6pHSwpqxs
 
Franco American Quintett 
Les Lieber (penny-whistle); Larry Mann (p); 
Django Reinhardt (g); Bob Decker (b); Red Lacky (dm) 
1945 December 01 – AFN-Studio, Paris
 
Honeysuckle Rose No.2 – Paris, 01.12.1945
 
Les Lieber: Jazzy “It Had To Be You” on penny whistle 1939 – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8inPXiss5RU
 
In The Pocket: Jazz Penny Whistle Virtuoso Les Lieber
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vuKRiyXdxI&t=7s
Published on Mar 2, 2012
Photojournalist Natalie Keyssar spent a recent afternoon with 99 year old Jazz Saxophonist and Penny Whistle Virtuoso Les Lieber, as he talked about his long life in music and played for us his unusual choice of musical instrument. On March 16, Mr. Lieber turns 100, and will celebrate the occasion with a special edition of his weekly performance series Jazz at Noon, which he has been presenting since 1965.
 
Interview with Les Lieber / Edie Lieber: Getting Your Money’s Worth with Judith West
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZE2SbSP63w
 
Les Lieber, 99 year old saxophonist, credits is wife Edie with his attitude toward living happily into his 90’s. He was the inspiration for the documentary, “Over 90 and Loving It” by Susan Polis Schultz featuring uplifting portraits of nonagenarians and centenarians, currently airing on PBS. Les, who was a foreign correspondent for the NEW YORK TIMES and NEWSWEEK, among others, has played the saxophone as an avocation since he was 12 years old. He has enhanced his longevity by continuing his music. In 1965 he established Jazz at Noon on Fridays in various New York locations, currently at The Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park, S. He talks about enjoying his life with Judith West on Getting Your Money’s Worth.
 
Les Lieber, Billy Taylor and Benny Goodman 1972.

Show Les a little love and give him a Like on his Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/LesLieber/
 
Jim Eigo
 

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https://savingplaces.org/stories/q-and-a-with-judith-rhodes-owner-of-manhattans-charlie-parker-house?utm_medium=email&utm_source=NTHP_newsletter_010517&utm_campaign=NTHP_eNewsletter-FY17_Jan5 – .WG-DP7HMx4Z
 
 
Q&A With Judith Rhodes, Owner of Manhattan’s Charlie Parker House | National Trust for Historic Preservation
 

 
The incomparable jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was just 34 when he died in New York in 1955, but he had already changed the face of modern jazz with his lightning-fast solos and uncompromising artistic vision. During the last four years of his life, he lived in an 1849 brownstone in the city’s East Village with his common-law wife, Chan Richardson, and their two children.
Judith Rhodes, a South Carolina native and a lover of jazz (and Parker in particular), purchased that same house in 1979 and has been working tirelessly to protect and maintain it. She succeeded in getting it listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, and registered as a New York City Landmark in 1999. In addition to its ties to Parker, the house is notable as a rare surviving example of a residential building built in the Gothic Revival style.
Rhodes now lives in the same ground-level apartment that “Bird,” as Parker was affectionately nicknamed, did before his untimely passing. We chatted with her about Parker’s legacy, and what it’s like to live in the same space that the iconic musician once did.
What kind of shape was the house in when you purchased it?
Well, it was in worse shape than I thought that it would be. I thought it was fine, but I’ve done nothing but work on it for all these years.
What work have you done on the house?
I’ve completely redone just about everything—a new roof, a new boiler. Right around the time it was landmarked, I did a lot of work. That was the late ‘90s when I started. Before that it was sort of as-is. I’ve redone all the apartments. The backyard was like pink cement, and now I have a beautiful garden back there with a little koi pond. Not huge, because it’s a brownstone, so it’s not a big lot.
I just had the hall repainted, and for the first time—I’m very excited—I was able to get off all the gunk over the years that they just painted over. I have a really good guy now working here. I was able to have him completely take all the junk off the molding and redo the walls.
 
Rhodes has transformed the back yard of the property into a Zen garden.
Can you tell me about your background with jazz?
Before I moved over here, I started having jazz concerts at the St. Mark’s Church. I was studying African influences and selling Gullah baskets in [a shop that I owned], and I sort of fell into jazz studying African influences. I don’t know what possessed me, but I said “I think I could do concerts on Sunday afternoons.” So I did several there, and then a woman from the Third Street Music School asked me to do the jazz portion of her concert series, which I did for about three years. Then I started booking the musicians from that into places like the Village Vanguard, and then I started photographing.
So I sort of stopped booking and started photographing. I’ve done a major body of work of photographs of musicians in performance. And then mostly a lot of musicians that I loved died, frankly. Jazz musicians back then didn’t live too long, so most of them were dead, and I just sort of gradually stopped working at it.
What’s your favorite thing about living in the house?
It’s very magical because I worked in jazz, and that’s why I bought the house. It had been bombed out over here [in the East Village]. In the ‘70s, the economy just went downhill and this neighborhood was burned out, mainly by landlords who set the houses on fire to collect the insurance.
I had already lived in the neighborhood for 11 years, but bought the house and moved over here with four kids because Bird lived here. And working in jazz, I was well aware of who he was, and how important he was. The group that he worked with, bebop musicians, modernized music from swing to a more modern music where people sat down and listened instead of danced.
Sometimes I forget that he was here. We found the ghost of birdcage wallpaper in the middle room, so I preserved that where you can see the actual birdcage. That’s something that he and his wife put in. I have a big book of pictures, and there’s the kids taking a bath in the tub that’s still here—it’s amazing.
It’s quite a privilege to be here. It’s very intimate, something that nobody else really experiences but me with this amazing musician.
 

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https://savingplaces.org/stories/q-and-a-with-judith-rhodes-owner-of-manhattans-charlie-parker-house?utm_medium=email&utm_source=NTHP_newsletter_010517&utm_campaign=NTHP_eNewsletter-FY17_Jan5 – .WG-DP7HMx4Z
 
 
Q&A With Judith Rhodes, Owner of Manhattan’s Charlie Parker House | National Trust for Historic Preservation
 

 
The incomparable jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was just 34 when he died in New York in 1955, but he had already changed the face of modern jazz with his lightning-fast solos and uncompromising artistic vision. During the last four years of his life, he lived in an 1849 brownstone in the city’s East Village with his common-law wife, Chan Richardson, and their two children.
Judith Rhodes, a South Carolina native and a lover of jazz (and Parker in particular), purchased that same house in 1979 and has been working tirelessly to protect and maintain it. She succeeded in getting it listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1994, and registered as a New York City Landmark in 1999. In addition to its ties to Parker, the house is notable as a rare surviving example of a residential building built in the Gothic Revival style.
Rhodes now lives in the same ground-level apartment that “Bird,” as Parker was affectionately nicknamed, did before his untimely passing. We chatted with her about Parker’s legacy, and what it’s like to live in the same space that the iconic musician once did.
What kind of shape was the house in when you purchased it?
Well, it was in worse shape than I thought that it would be. I thought it was fine, but I’ve done nothing but work on it for all these years.
What work have you done on the house?
I’ve completely redone just about everything—a new roof, a new boiler. Right around the time it was landmarked, I did a lot of work. That was the late ‘90s when I started. Before that it was sort of as-is. I’ve redone all the apartments. The backyard was like pink cement, and now I have a beautiful garden back there with a little koi pond. Not huge, because it’s a brownstone, so it’s not a big lot.
I just had the hall repainted, and for the first time—I’m very excited—I was able to get off all the gunk over the years that they just painted over. I have a really good guy now working here. I was able to have him completely take all the junk off the molding and redo the walls.
 
Rhodes has transformed the back yard of the property into a Zen garden.
Can you tell me about your background with jazz?
Before I moved over here, I started having jazz concerts at the St. Mark’s Church. I was studying African influences and selling Gullah baskets in [a shop that I owned], and I sort of fell into jazz studying African influences. I don’t know what possessed me, but I said “I think I could do concerts on Sunday afternoons.” So I did several there, and then a woman from the Third Street Music School asked me to do the jazz portion of her concert series, which I did for about three years. Then I started booking the musicians from that into places like the Village Vanguard, and then I started photographing.
So I sort of stopped booking and started photographing. I’ve done a major body of work of photographs of musicians in performance. And then mostly a lot of musicians that I loved died, frankly. Jazz musicians back then didn’t live too long, so most of them were dead, and I just sort of gradually stopped working at it.
What’s your favorite thing about living in the house?
It’s very magical because I worked in jazz, and that’s why I bought the house. It had been bombed out over here [in the East Village]. In the ‘70s, the economy just went downhill and this neighborhood was burned out, mainly by landlords who set the houses on fire to collect the insurance.
I had already lived in the neighborhood for 11 years, but bought the house and moved over here with four kids because Bird lived here. And working in jazz, I was well aware of who he was, and how important he was. The group that he worked with, bebop musicians, modernized music from swing to a more modern music where people sat down and listened instead of danced.
Sometimes I forget that he was here. We found the ghost of birdcage wallpaper in the middle room, so I preserved that where you can see the actual birdcage. That’s something that he and his wife put in. I have a big book of pictures, and there’s the kids taking a bath in the tub that’s still here—it’s amazing.
It’s quite a privilege to be here. It’s very intimate, something that nobody else really experiences but me with this amazing musician.
 

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http://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/index.ssf/2016/12/nj_guitar_master_bucky_pizzarelli_turns_back_time_as_he_plays_on.html
 
N.J. guitar master Bucky Pizzarelli turns back time as he plays on

THERE ISN’T MUCH EMPTY SPACE on the walls in the den of Bucky Pizzarelli’s Saddle River home.
Hanging there are his three honorary doctorates and some of the paintings he has created as a hobby. Also, photos taken at various stages of his seven decades as a guitarist, including several of him at the White House, where he played for Presidents Reagan (with Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Benny Goodman) and Clinton (with Claude “Fiddler” Williams).
There is also a photo of him and his son singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli, posing with President Nixon and his wife, Pat, at their Park Ridge home in 1992. The Pizzarellis are wearing tuxedos. But they hadn’t dressed up for the Nixons.
“We knew his bodyguard, and his bodyguard said, ‘It’s his wife’s birthday. Come over and play a couple of tunes,’ ” says Bucky Pizzarelli, who turns 91 on Jan. 9. “We had another gig that night. That’s why we’re dressed up in tuxedos.”
For most of his life, it’s been like that: one concert or nightclub gig or recording session or jam session after another. So many that, from Pizzarelli’s current vantage point, most just blur together.
A lifelong Jersey resident, he was inducted into the state’s Hall of Fame in 2011. The hall’s website describes him as “a legendary jazz guitarist who has collaborated with some of the greatest musicians, including Les Paul, Stephane Grappelli and Benny Goodman.” But that’s just skimming the surface. He also has worked with Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie and Nat King Cole, for starters.
Although he mainly plays jazz, Pizzarelli has done all kinds of session work and played on pop, rock and R&B hits such as Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind,” The Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” and Dion and The Belmonts’ “A Teenager in Love” and “Runaround Sue.” Not to mention Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” and the theme song to television’s “The Odd Couple.”
Pizzarelli also performed on Paul McCartney’s 2012 standards album, “Kisses on the Bottom.”
“That was exciting: the top of the line,” says Pizzarelli. “We did two days out in Hollywood. John did the first day, I did the second day.”
When Pizzarelli turned 90 in early 2016, he wasn’t able to celebrate. A serious bout with pneumonia laid him low from the fall of 2015 to last spring. He was also dealing with complications from a mini stroke that he had suffered earlier but was unaware of. The doctors still can’t say definitively what happened, says Pizzarelli’s other son, bassist Martin Pizzarelli.
Bucky spent time in four hospitals, some of it in intensive care. “I don’t remember any of it,” the elder Pizzarelli says. “I never knew it until it was over.”
For a long time, it was unclear whether he would fully recover. “Sometimes, we’d see him in the hospital bed and say, ‘Jeez, I don’t know if he’s ever going to play again,’ ” says Martin Pizzarelli.
At times, his father could hardly communicate. But even at his worst, there were signs of hope.
“On Thanksgiving Day (2015),” says Martin Pizzarelli, “Russell Malone, the great guitar player, flew in — he had just come off the road in Europe with Ron Carter — and he came right to my dad’s hospital bed, and he and my brother played guitars for my dad for about an hour and a half. My dad was playing air guitar with his hand on the sheet. It was amazing. He could call out tunes and we’d ask, ‘What key?,’ and he’d go, ‘A flat.’ He still knew the keys.”
Near the end of his hospitalization, family members would sometimes bring the guitar master his instrument, so he could practice a little.
Once he got home, he would play more. “(Guitarist) Ed (Laub) would come over, and I would play with him, and he started getting his muscle memory back,” says Martin Pizzarelli.
Soon, Bucky was back playing full shows again.
Laub, who started taking lessons from Pizzarelli when he was in his teens during the late ’60s, now plays with his teacher regularly. He says Pizzarelli is different from most guitar virtuosos in that he doesn’t engage in a lot of “acrobatics.” For most of his career, he’s been an accompanist, not the main attraction, and that has stuck with him.
Laub says that when he started taking lessons, one of first things Pizzarelli said was, “If you’re planning on being a professional musician, you need to understand that your job is to always make the other guy as good as he can possibly sound. It’s not about you.”
Laub says that for Pizzarelli, “It’s about making beautiful music. It’s not about grandstanding. And that’s what his whole personality is about.”
 
* * * 
BUCKY PIZZARELLI WAS BORN in Paterson as John Pizzarelli and got his nickname from his father, who had spent some time in Texas and was enamored of the cowboy lifestyle. He learned guitar from his uncles Bobby and Pete Domenick, who played in big bands, and was a member of Vaughn Monroe’s big band himself by the time he was 17.
He served in the army, in Germany and Austria, toward the end of World War II. “Then the war ended, and they sent me to the Philippine islands for nine months to do nothing,” Pizzarelli says.
That gave him more time to play guitar, though, and once he was discharged, Monroe gave Pizzarelli his seat back in the band.
He and his wife, Ruth, got married in 1953, and moved to Clifton. By 1963, they had settled, for good, in Saddle River, with their four children. Pizzarelli began working on television, in the NBC orchestra, in the ’50s, and joined Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” band in 1966. But when Carson moved the show from New York to Burbank, Ca., in 1972, Pizzarelli didn’t follow.
He often worked in New York, but never moved into the city. “I was driving to New York every day, to do recordings,” he says. “Once they get your phone number, it doesn’t matter where you are. You say yes, and you go.”
A belated 90th-birthday celebration was held at the Morristown Jazz & Blues Festival in August. Pizzarelli, a festival mainstay since its launch in 2011, made his usual low-key appearance, with Martin Pizzarelli, Laub and violinist Aaron Weinstein as back-up. They took the stage with no set list, as they always do, and the songs flowed: “This Nearly Was Mine” from “South Pacific,” George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Was Doing All Right” and Les Paul’s “How High the Moon,” among many others. After their warmly received set, they shared cake with friends and family members backstage.
Pizzarelli’s guitar playing might not have been quite as smooth as it was in years past. But no one in the crowd could have guessed what he had been through just a few months earlier.
“He struggles, and he was struggling a little bit (in Morristown),” Laub says. “It’s a slow process, and when you’re 90, it’s even slower. But he’s coming around, and every day, he gets a little better.”
 
MORE FROM INSIDE JERSEY MAGAZINE
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http://www.nj.com/inside-jersey/index.ssf/2016/12/nj_guitar_master_bucky_pizzarelli_turns_back_time_as_he_plays_on.html
 
N.J. guitar master Bucky Pizzarelli turns back time as he plays on

THERE ISN’T MUCH EMPTY SPACE on the walls in the den of Bucky Pizzarelli’s Saddle River home.
Hanging there are his three honorary doctorates and some of the paintings he has created as a hobby. Also, photos taken at various stages of his seven decades as a guitarist, including several of him at the White House, where he played for Presidents Reagan (with Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and Benny Goodman) and Clinton (with Claude “Fiddler” Williams).
There is also a photo of him and his son singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli, posing with President Nixon and his wife, Pat, at their Park Ridge home in 1992. The Pizzarellis are wearing tuxedos. But they hadn’t dressed up for the Nixons.
“We knew his bodyguard, and his bodyguard said, ‘It’s his wife’s birthday. Come over and play a couple of tunes,’ ” says Bucky Pizzarelli, who turns 91 on Jan. 9. “We had another gig that night. That’s why we’re dressed up in tuxedos.”
For most of his life, it’s been like that: one concert or nightclub gig or recording session or jam session after another. So many that, from Pizzarelli’s current vantage point, most just blur together.
A lifelong Jersey resident, he was inducted into the state’s Hall of Fame in 2011. The hall’s website describes him as “a legendary jazz guitarist who has collaborated with some of the greatest musicians, including Les Paul, Stephane Grappelli and Benny Goodman.” But that’s just skimming the surface. He also has worked with Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Dizzy Gillespie and Nat King Cole, for starters.
Although he mainly plays jazz, Pizzarelli has done all kinds of session work and played on pop, rock and R&B hits such as Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind,” The Drifters’ “This Magic Moment” and “Save the Last Dance for Me,” Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” and Dion and The Belmonts’ “A Teenager in Love” and “Runaround Sue.” Not to mention Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” and the theme song to television’s “The Odd Couple.”
Pizzarelli also performed on Paul McCartney’s 2012 standards album, “Kisses on the Bottom.”
“That was exciting: the top of the line,” says Pizzarelli. “We did two days out in Hollywood. John did the first day, I did the second day.”
When Pizzarelli turned 90 in early 2016, he wasn’t able to celebrate. A serious bout with pneumonia laid him low from the fall of 2015 to last spring. He was also dealing with complications from a mini stroke that he had suffered earlier but was unaware of. The doctors still can’t say definitively what happened, says Pizzarelli’s other son, bassist Martin Pizzarelli.
Bucky spent time in four hospitals, some of it in intensive care. “I don’t remember any of it,” the elder Pizzarelli says. “I never knew it until it was over.”
For a long time, it was unclear whether he would fully recover. “Sometimes, we’d see him in the hospital bed and say, ‘Jeez, I don’t know if he’s ever going to play again,’ ” says Martin Pizzarelli.
At times, his father could hardly communicate. But even at his worst, there were signs of hope.
“On Thanksgiving Day (2015),” says Martin Pizzarelli, “Russell Malone, the great guitar player, flew in — he had just come off the road in Europe with Ron Carter — and he came right to my dad’s hospital bed, and he and my brother played guitars for my dad for about an hour and a half. My dad was playing air guitar with his hand on the sheet. It was amazing. He could call out tunes and we’d ask, ‘What key?,’ and he’d go, ‘A flat.’ He still knew the keys.”
Near the end of his hospitalization, family members would sometimes bring the guitar master his instrument, so he could practice a little.
Once he got home, he would play more. “(Guitarist) Ed (Laub) would come over, and I would play with him, and he started getting his muscle memory back,” says Martin Pizzarelli.
Soon, Bucky was back playing full shows again.
Laub, who started taking lessons from Pizzarelli when he was in his teens during the late ’60s, now plays with his teacher regularly. He says Pizzarelli is different from most guitar virtuosos in that he doesn’t engage in a lot of “acrobatics.” For most of his career, he’s been an accompanist, not the main attraction, and that has stuck with him.
Laub says that when he started taking lessons, one of first things Pizzarelli said was, “If you’re planning on being a professional musician, you need to understand that your job is to always make the other guy as good as he can possibly sound. It’s not about you.”
Laub says that for Pizzarelli, “It’s about making beautiful music. It’s not about grandstanding. And that’s what his whole personality is about.”
 
* * * 
BUCKY PIZZARELLI WAS BORN in Paterson as John Pizzarelli and got his nickname from his father, who had spent some time in Texas and was enamored of the cowboy lifestyle. He learned guitar from his uncles Bobby and Pete Domenick, who played in big bands, and was a member of Vaughn Monroe’s big band himself by the time he was 17.
He served in the army, in Germany and Austria, toward the end of World War II. “Then the war ended, and they sent me to the Philippine islands for nine months to do nothing,” Pizzarelli says.
That gave him more time to play guitar, though, and once he was discharged, Monroe gave Pizzarelli his seat back in the band.
He and his wife, Ruth, got married in 1953, and moved to Clifton. By 1963, they had settled, for good, in Saddle River, with their four children. Pizzarelli began working on television, in the NBC orchestra, in the ’50s, and joined Johnny Carson’s “The Tonight Show” band in 1966. But when Carson moved the show from New York to Burbank, Ca., in 1972, Pizzarelli didn’t follow.
He often worked in New York, but never moved into the city. “I was driving to New York every day, to do recordings,” he says. “Once they get your phone number, it doesn’t matter where you are. You say yes, and you go.”
A belated 90th-birthday celebration was held at the Morristown Jazz & Blues Festival in August. Pizzarelli, a festival mainstay since its launch in 2011, made his usual low-key appearance, with Martin Pizzarelli, Laub and violinist Aaron Weinstein as back-up. They took the stage with no set list, as they always do, and the songs flowed: “This Nearly Was Mine” from “South Pacific,” George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Was Doing All Right” and Les Paul’s “How High the Moon,” among many others. After their warmly received set, they shared cake with friends and family members backstage.
Pizzarelli’s guitar playing might not have been quite as smooth as it was in years past. But no one in the crowd could have guessed what he had been through just a few months earlier.
“He struggles, and he was struggling a little bit (in Morristown),” Laub says. “It’s a slow process, and when you’re 90, it’s even slower. But he’s coming around, and every day, he gets a little better.”
 
MORE FROM INSIDE JERSEY MAGAZINE
Follow Inside Jersey on Twitter. Find Inside Jersey on Facebook and Google+
 

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http://www.oregonlive.com/music/index.ssf/2017/01/owner_of_jimmy_maks_portland_j.html
Owner of Jimmy Mak’s, Portland jazz club, dies after cancer battle
Michael Wilhelm

Jimmy Makarounis, owner of a renowned Portland jazz club, died Monday after a battle with cancer. His namesake venue hosted its final shows on New Year’s Eve.

 
Makarounis owned Jimmy Mak’s, Portland’s only venue devoted solely to jazz music. He was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer about four years ago and got word in November that the disease had returned.   
Makarounis, 53, had plans to move the business from its home on Northwest 10th Avenue in the Pearl District early this year, but halted that process so he could use his energy and funds to fight the cancer.
Apartment developers bought the property for $3 million last spring, records show.
Jimmy Mak’s sold out its final two shows, which featured 12-piece funk and soul band Soul Vaccination and other guest musicians.

Makarounis, his wife and parents opened the club at Northwest 10th Avenue and Everett Street in 1996. He moved the club down 10th Avenue a decade later.
DownBeat magazine has deemed the club one of the best places in the world to hear jazz. Jimmy Mak’s was also a PDX Jazz Festival host site.
The club announced Makarounis’ death on Facebook, saying, in part: “He will be remembered by those who loved and knew him for his kindness, tenacity and unending generosity.”
Oregon Music News first reported his death. 
— Jim Ryan and Robert Ham

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http://www.oregonlive.com/music/index.ssf/2017/01/owner_of_jimmy_maks_portland_j.html
Owner of Jimmy Mak’s, Portland jazz club, dies after cancer battle
Michael Wilhelm

Jimmy Makarounis, owner of a renowned Portland jazz club, died Monday after a battle with cancer. His namesake venue hosted its final shows on New Year’s Eve.

 
Makarounis owned Jimmy Mak’s, Portland’s only venue devoted solely to jazz music. He was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer about four years ago and got word in November that the disease had returned.   
Makarounis, 53, had plans to move the business from its home on Northwest 10th Avenue in the Pearl District early this year, but halted that process so he could use his energy and funds to fight the cancer.
Apartment developers bought the property for $3 million last spring, records show.
Jimmy Mak’s sold out its final two shows, which featured 12-piece funk and soul band Soul Vaccination and other guest musicians.

Makarounis, his wife and parents opened the club at Northwest 10th Avenue and Everett Street in 1996. He moved the club down 10th Avenue a decade later.
DownBeat magazine has deemed the club one of the best places in the world to hear jazz. Jimmy Mak’s was also a PDX Jazz Festival host site.
The club announced Makarounis’ death on Facebook, saying, in part: “He will be remembered by those who loved and knew him for his kindness, tenacity and unending generosity.”
Oregon Music News first reported his death. 
— Jim Ryan and Robert Ham

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http://www.jconline.com/story/entertainment/music/2016/12/26/wbaa-host-celebrates-60-years-air/95440426/
 
WBAA host celebrates 60 years on the air
Domenica Bongiovanni
 

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — As 2016 comes to a close, John Zimbrick can officially say he has broadcasted on the air for six decades.
 
The Purdue University adjunct professor has kept up his self-described second life playing jazz selections since he was in college, a streak only interrupted when his day job became too busy. He is part of Purdue’s School of Health Sciences and a professor emeritus at Colorado State University.
 
Zimbrick has practiced his passion for jazz in many places, including Washington, D.C., and Kansas, and he has interviewed top talent.
 
He plays albums from his own vast collection on his show, “Jazz Cornucopia,” which airs on WBAA from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday on 920 AM, 105.9 FM and WBAA Jazz 101.3 FM HD 2.
Here are excerpts from his interview with the Journal & Courier.
 
On interviewing Duke Ellington.
 
As a student at Carleton College, Zimbrick became heavily involved with the school’s radio station, fitting jazz pieces in between pop songs during his segments on the air.
His first interview? None other than jazz legend Duke Ellington, the radio host said.
 
In 1958, Ellington came to Carleton as part of its jazz series, and after his band finished rehearsing, a young Zimbrick said he asked if the bandleader would accompany him to the radio studio.
Ellington obliged, and Zimbrick remembers the two discussing Ellington’s use of individual soloists and his ability to compose in hotel rooms.
 
Looking back, Zimbrick remembers how nice Ellington was. He also wishes he’d been able to record their conversation.
“We had one tape recorder at the radio station, and it was broken,” Zimbrick said.
 
On why Zimbrick has been able to keep up his passion for 60 years.
 
As a young boy growing up in Killdeer, North Dakota, Zimbrick often tuned into the radio at night.
 
“Jazz was what I picked up on, and … I can’t explain it,” he said. “My parents didn’t listen to it, didn’t care for it that much, but they didn’t stop me.”
 
And something inside him wanted to share his passion with others. He remembers lugging his record player to his father’s department store, placing it on a shelf in the toy department and spinning sounds from there.
Throughout Zimbrick’s life, jazz has been his constant.
 
“That gave me a chance to just completely escape … and just focus on the music, even if it was just for a few hours,” Zimbrick said.
On the best call he’s taken.
 
As a radio host in Washington, D.C., in 1984, Zimbrick was known for playing a wide variety of jazz. But his show didn’t have a name, and a listener suggested that it should, he said.
“It kind of developed in my thinking that it would be fun to run a contest and see what people say the name should be,” Zimbrick said.
 
He remembers making a list of all the recommendations he received. In the end, he settled on “Jazz Cornucopia,” submitted by a caller he remembers as particularly friendly.
And that, Zimbrick said, has been the show’s name ever since.
 
Call J&C reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 765-420-5247. Follow her on Twitter: @DomenicaReports.
 
 

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http://www.jconline.com/story/entertainment/music/2016/12/26/wbaa-host-celebrates-60-years-air/95440426/
 
WBAA host celebrates 60 years on the air
Domenica Bongiovanni
 

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — As 2016 comes to a close, John Zimbrick can officially say he has broadcasted on the air for six decades.
 
The Purdue University adjunct professor has kept up his self-described second life playing jazz selections since he was in college, a streak only interrupted when his day job became too busy. He is part of Purdue’s School of Health Sciences and a professor emeritus at Colorado State University.
 
Zimbrick has practiced his passion for jazz in many places, including Washington, D.C., and Kansas, and he has interviewed top talent.
 
He plays albums from his own vast collection on his show, “Jazz Cornucopia,” which airs on WBAA from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday on 920 AM, 105.9 FM and WBAA Jazz 101.3 FM HD 2.
Here are excerpts from his interview with the Journal & Courier.
 
On interviewing Duke Ellington.
 
As a student at Carleton College, Zimbrick became heavily involved with the school’s radio station, fitting jazz pieces in between pop songs during his segments on the air.
His first interview? None other than jazz legend Duke Ellington, the radio host said.
 
In 1958, Ellington came to Carleton as part of its jazz series, and after his band finished rehearsing, a young Zimbrick said he asked if the bandleader would accompany him to the radio studio.
Ellington obliged, and Zimbrick remembers the two discussing Ellington’s use of individual soloists and his ability to compose in hotel rooms.
 
Looking back, Zimbrick remembers how nice Ellington was. He also wishes he’d been able to record their conversation.
“We had one tape recorder at the radio station, and it was broken,” Zimbrick said.
 
On why Zimbrick has been able to keep up his passion for 60 years.
 
As a young boy growing up in Killdeer, North Dakota, Zimbrick often tuned into the radio at night.
 
“Jazz was what I picked up on, and … I can’t explain it,” he said. “My parents didn’t listen to it, didn’t care for it that much, but they didn’t stop me.”
 
And something inside him wanted to share his passion with others. He remembers lugging his record player to his father’s department store, placing it on a shelf in the toy department and spinning sounds from there.
Throughout Zimbrick’s life, jazz has been his constant.
 
“That gave me a chance to just completely escape … and just focus on the music, even if it was just for a few hours,” Zimbrick said.
On the best call he’s taken.
 
As a radio host in Washington, D.C., in 1984, Zimbrick was known for playing a wide variety of jazz. But his show didn’t have a name, and a listener suggested that it should, he said.
“It kind of developed in my thinking that it would be fun to run a contest and see what people say the name should be,” Zimbrick said.
 
He remembers making a list of all the recommendations he received. In the end, he settled on “Jazz Cornucopia,” submitted by a caller he remembers as particularly friendly.
And that, Zimbrick said, has been the show’s name ever since.
 
Call J&C reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 765-420-5247. Follow her on Twitter: @DomenicaReports.
 
 

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http://www.jondelucia.com/jazz-clubs-map-look-strykers/#comment-110221
 
Jazz Clubs Map: A Look at Strykers
by JON DE LUCIA | OCTOBER 11, 2016
Almost exactly two years ago I published my Google Map of New York’s Historic Jazz Clubs here on the site. In an effort to dig a little deeper I thought I would start a monthly series featuring one of the clubs from the map. I want to start with some of the lesser known clubs that have little to no information about them on the internet. This month: Strykers. There was a nice little feature on Strykers and the UWS jazz scene in the New York Times in 1973. I’m not sure if there has been one since then. The NYT article describes Strykers as “an immaculate little bar with a working brick‐faced fireplace…tucked so unobtrusively into the bottom of brownstone at 103 West 86th Street that new customers are constantly telling Olivia Taylor, the soft‐voiced manager and part‐owner of the room, ‘We live just around the corner, but we didn’t even know you were here.’” The article also mentions that the name Strykers comes from the now forgotten name of the neighborhood around 86th and Columbus, Strykers Bay and opened in 1970. The club was gone by the end of the 1970s and currently houses a spa:

103 W 86th St.
Lee Konitz, who still lives right down the street, was a regular performer here on Wednesday and Thursday nights in the 1970s, as was Chet Baker. Guitarists Joe Puma and Chuck Wayne had a weekly duo engagement. Another listing from New York magazine shows that a Bill Mintz headlined here in 1975. I asked Billy about the club:
It was a small bar, I had a steady Thursday for 2 years with the Eddie Daniels Quartet:
Eddie, me, Rick Laird on bass and Andy Laverne on Fender Rhodes…Then that quartet made a record called Brief Encounters which Rudy Van Gelder engineered. Strykers was a great moment in late 70’s jazz in New York.
 
 
 
Jazz Fusion – Eddie Daniels – Brief Encounter
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znqg8K7HaYg” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
From Bill Crow:
I played there several times with Joe Puma, and once with Joe and Chuck Wayne. I seem to remember it being run by a tough lady with a big dog. I don’t remember when it closed.
Drummer Steve Little also remembers playing there with Joe Puma and Chuck Wayne:
These kids were staring at me while we played. It was the middle of the rock era, and and they had never seen anyone play brushes before!
Ted Brown recalls rehearsing for a gig at Strykers with Lee Konitz around 1976 and showing up only to find that the club had closed. It apparently reopened a little while later but only for a year or so.
Lee himself fondly remembers the club, saying that he “enjoyed playing there in different contexts, finally with a bigger band.”
That bigger band was the Lee Konitz Nonet, a great but short lived band that released a couple of records and in fact recorded one tribute to Strykers, “Strykers Dues.”
 
 
 
Stryker’s Dues
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1RVONkZ0mM” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
 
 
I’m getting the impression that there was no piano in Strykers!
From a 1976 NYT listing:
Stryker’s is a small jazz club whose roster of performers changes frequently during the week. Tonight, the pianist David Lahm, his trio and Janet Lawson, a vocalist, will appear. There is a $2.50 music charge, and beverage.; begin—with beer —at $2. Information: 8748754, and you may have to keep trying.
Lenny Kaye describes seeing Chet Baker there:
In the mid ’70s, I went to a small cellar jazz club on West 86th Street called Stryker’s to see him. There, with a bare minimum of notes, hardly breathing through his horn, he made every inflection count, drawing from his tortured soul the mea culpa of his many transgressions.
Here is an account from drummer Artt Frank’s site:
The following quotes were made by Chet Baker, during an interview I conducted with him at Stryker’s Pub in NYC in 1974: “Artt’s been with me since my comeback in Hollywood in 1968. I love the way he plays, man. ‘Specially the way he plays brushes. Shelly (Manne) was great too… but he didn’t have Artt’s transmission… you know… ? Artt’s the only cat I know who can play brushes at stick level, and at any tempo! Then there’s Harold (Danko), and Cameron (Brown), and those three cats are the most swingin’, sensitive and supportive players I’ve ever worked with. And for the way I play here (Stryker’s pub), in a club format, I like to stretch out and do a lot of burnin’ tempos. And it’s a great comfort to know those three cats are always there. They make it easy for me to respond. It’s real comfortable man, you know….?
I would love to hear more from anyone who remembers Strykers and might possibly even have some pictures as I can’t seem to find any from when it was open. Hopefully this article gives some insight onto what was happening on the UWS in the 1970s jazz scene.
 

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http://www.jondelucia.com/jazz-clubs-map-look-strykers/#comment-110221
 
Jazz Clubs Map: A Look at Strykers
by JON DE LUCIA | OCTOBER 11, 2016
Almost exactly two years ago I published my Google Map of New York’s Historic Jazz Clubs here on the site. In an effort to dig a little deeper I thought I would start a monthly series featuring one of the clubs from the map. I want to start with some of the lesser known clubs that have little to no information about them on the internet. This month: Strykers. There was a nice little feature on Strykers and the UWS jazz scene in the New York Times in 1973. I’m not sure if there has been one since then. The NYT article describes Strykers as “an immaculate little bar with a working brick‐faced fireplace…tucked so unobtrusively into the bottom of brownstone at 103 West 86th Street that new customers are constantly telling Olivia Taylor, the soft‐voiced manager and part‐owner of the room, ‘We live just around the corner, but we didn’t even know you were here.’” The article also mentions that the name Strykers comes from the now forgotten name of the neighborhood around 86th and Columbus, Strykers Bay and opened in 1970. The club was gone by the end of the 1970s and currently houses a spa:

103 W 86th St.
Lee Konitz, who still lives right down the street, was a regular performer here on Wednesday and Thursday nights in the 1970s, as was Chet Baker. Guitarists Joe Puma and Chuck Wayne had a weekly duo engagement. Another listing from New York magazine shows that a Bill Mintz headlined here in 1975. I asked Billy about the club:
It was a small bar, I had a steady Thursday for 2 years with the Eddie Daniels Quartet:
Eddie, me, Rick Laird on bass and Andy Laverne on Fender Rhodes…Then that quartet made a record called Brief Encounters which Rudy Van Gelder engineered. Strykers was a great moment in late 70’s jazz in New York.
 
 
 
Jazz Fusion – Eddie Daniels – Brief Encounter
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Znqg8K7HaYg” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
From Bill Crow:
I played there several times with Joe Puma, and once with Joe and Chuck Wayne. I seem to remember it being run by a tough lady with a big dog. I don’t remember when it closed.
Drummer Steve Little also remembers playing there with Joe Puma and Chuck Wayne:
These kids were staring at me while we played. It was the middle of the rock era, and and they had never seen anyone play brushes before!
Ted Brown recalls rehearsing for a gig at Strykers with Lee Konitz around 1976 and showing up only to find that the club had closed. It apparently reopened a little while later but only for a year or so.
Lee himself fondly remembers the club, saying that he “enjoyed playing there in different contexts, finally with a bigger band.”
That bigger band was the Lee Konitz Nonet, a great but short lived band that released a couple of records and in fact recorded one tribute to Strykers, “Strykers Dues.”
 
 
 
Stryker’s Dues
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1RVONkZ0mM” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
 
 
I’m getting the impression that there was no piano in Strykers!
From a 1976 NYT listing:
Stryker’s is a small jazz club whose roster of performers changes frequently during the week. Tonight, the pianist David Lahm, his trio and Janet Lawson, a vocalist, will appear. There is a $2.50 music charge, and beverage.; begin—with beer —at $2. Information: 8748754, and you may have to keep trying.
Lenny Kaye describes seeing Chet Baker there:
In the mid ’70s, I went to a small cellar jazz club on West 86th Street called Stryker’s to see him. There, with a bare minimum of notes, hardly breathing through his horn, he made every inflection count, drawing from his tortured soul the mea culpa of his many transgressions.
Here is an account from drummer Artt Frank’s site:
The following quotes were made by Chet Baker, during an interview I conducted with him at Stryker’s Pub in NYC in 1974: “Artt’s been with me since my comeback in Hollywood in 1968. I love the way he plays, man. ‘Specially the way he plays brushes. Shelly (Manne) was great too… but he didn’t have Artt’s transmission… you know… ? Artt’s the only cat I know who can play brushes at stick level, and at any tempo! Then there’s Harold (Danko), and Cameron (Brown), and those three cats are the most swingin’, sensitive and supportive players I’ve ever worked with. And for the way I play here (Stryker’s pub), in a club format, I like to stretch out and do a lot of burnin’ tempos. And it’s a great comfort to know those three cats are always there. They make it easy for me to respond. It’s real comfortable man, you know….?
I would love to hear more from anyone who remembers Strykers and might possibly even have some pictures as I can’t seem to find any from when it was open. Hopefully this article gives some insight onto what was happening on the UWS in the 1970s jazz scene.
 

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http://www.columbiatribune.com/arts_life/ovation/despite-obstacles-jazz-retains-staying-power/article_7311114f-6f1d-5a94-89ab-15ab15c5a90e.html
 
NOTES AND TONES
Despite obstacles, jazz retains staying power
 

• Jon W. Poses Jan 1, 2017 0

I never have been a fan of year-end “best of” lists. And even polls, especially readers’ polls that choose the best player on a certain instrument, seem like a pointless exercise at best, a popularity contest at worst.
There are simply too many exceptional players out there, crisscrossing the land moving jazz around the planet, doing so with such vibrancy that it makes the heart sing.
 
As we enter a new year, a year filled with political uncertainty, if not insanity, it gives me pause to reflect upon where jazz fits in and why, to many of us, it continues, as it always has, to play an important cultural role. I don’t believe, as some do, that jazz, America’s gift to the world, is on the downside.
 
I actually prefer the phrase “gift to the world” to calling the genre “America’s classical music.” That’s too Eurocentric, vague, bloated, inconsequential, superficial and, quite honestly, too staid and dated.
 
Such a phrase represents the antithesis of what is so wonderful about jazz and what makes it a special art form: creativity, spontaneity and improvisation.
 
There was a tremendous amount of fantastic jazz produced in 2016, and I’m betting the same will be true in 2017. Judging from what came across my desk, not only was there a great deal of high-quality stuff that hit the market, but there was simply a voluminous amount of music created, much of it self-produced because of the demise of the record industry as we know it.
Sure, some of the music was lousy, formulaic, pretentious, not particularly interesting, etc., but I’m not going to pass judgment. The bottom line is people continue to make jazz at a prodigious rate, reinventing it, almost on the fly, as well as finding new ways to deliver it to the public.
 
To quote my good friend Marty Ashby, executive director of MCG Jazz in Pittsburgh, “Jazz is life.” Around here, we like to say, “jazz never sleeps.”
 
The music always is moving forward, always washed anew; the phrase also refers to our work habits — as if we’re always on the job or there’s no time to rest, because there’s so much to do when it comes to getting the word out about this music.
Jazz has not only survived, but thrived in an American culture that has to a great extent dismissed its significance from the day it surfaced. The extent of that dismissal has fluctuated, but if we stick with what’s going on in today’s information super-highway world, it’s pretty remarkable that it hasn’t been buried altogether.
 
Consider that while there are more quality musicians coming out of more outstanding jazz programs at universities across the country and around the world, there are far fewer places for them to perform. This doesn’t mean jazz is less in demand; it just means there’s a greater supply.
 
As far as I know, the Village Vanguard, that most hallowed of basements on Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village, is now the only club that hosts the same artists six nights a week. That used to be the standard for jazz clubs around the country. Now, performers have two, three and a few four-day runs, but the six-day run is beyond an endangered species.
 
When it comes to jazz on the radio, there have never been fewer stations broadcasting extended hours of music. The last bastion for full-time jazz radio sits within the walls of National Public Radio; however that avenue has dried up considerably of late as NPR stations trend toward more talk, less music and/or a more eclectic approach to music rather than a single format.
What is it about jazz that makes it a significant part of American culture for the past century plus? Here is what Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. said at the opening of the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964:
 
“Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.
 
“Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by jazz musicians.
“Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
 
“And now, jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.
 
“In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”
 
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year — come 2017 and beyond, may the jazz be with you.
 
Jon Poses is executive director of the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series. Reach him at jazznbsbl@socket.net.
 

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http://www.columbiatribune.com/arts_life/ovation/despite-obstacles-jazz-retains-staying-power/article_7311114f-6f1d-5a94-89ab-15ab15c5a90e.html
 
NOTES AND TONES
Despite obstacles, jazz retains staying power
 

• Jon W. Poses Jan 1, 2017 0

I never have been a fan of year-end “best of” lists. And even polls, especially readers’ polls that choose the best player on a certain instrument, seem like a pointless exercise at best, a popularity contest at worst.
There are simply too many exceptional players out there, crisscrossing the land moving jazz around the planet, doing so with such vibrancy that it makes the heart sing.
 
As we enter a new year, a year filled with political uncertainty, if not insanity, it gives me pause to reflect upon where jazz fits in and why, to many of us, it continues, as it always has, to play an important cultural role. I don’t believe, as some do, that jazz, America’s gift to the world, is on the downside.
 
I actually prefer the phrase “gift to the world” to calling the genre “America’s classical music.” That’s too Eurocentric, vague, bloated, inconsequential, superficial and, quite honestly, too staid and dated.
 
Such a phrase represents the antithesis of what is so wonderful about jazz and what makes it a special art form: creativity, spontaneity and improvisation.
 
There was a tremendous amount of fantastic jazz produced in 2016, and I’m betting the same will be true in 2017. Judging from what came across my desk, not only was there a great deal of high-quality stuff that hit the market, but there was simply a voluminous amount of music created, much of it self-produced because of the demise of the record industry as we know it.
Sure, some of the music was lousy, formulaic, pretentious, not particularly interesting, etc., but I’m not going to pass judgment. The bottom line is people continue to make jazz at a prodigious rate, reinventing it, almost on the fly, as well as finding new ways to deliver it to the public.
 
To quote my good friend Marty Ashby, executive director of MCG Jazz in Pittsburgh, “Jazz is life.” Around here, we like to say, “jazz never sleeps.”
 
The music always is moving forward, always washed anew; the phrase also refers to our work habits — as if we’re always on the job or there’s no time to rest, because there’s so much to do when it comes to getting the word out about this music.
Jazz has not only survived, but thrived in an American culture that has to a great extent dismissed its significance from the day it surfaced. The extent of that dismissal has fluctuated, but if we stick with what’s going on in today’s information super-highway world, it’s pretty remarkable that it hasn’t been buried altogether.
 
Consider that while there are more quality musicians coming out of more outstanding jazz programs at universities across the country and around the world, there are far fewer places for them to perform. This doesn’t mean jazz is less in demand; it just means there’s a greater supply.
 
As far as I know, the Village Vanguard, that most hallowed of basements on Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village, is now the only club that hosts the same artists six nights a week. That used to be the standard for jazz clubs around the country. Now, performers have two, three and a few four-day runs, but the six-day run is beyond an endangered species.
 
When it comes to jazz on the radio, there have never been fewer stations broadcasting extended hours of music. The last bastion for full-time jazz radio sits within the walls of National Public Radio; however that avenue has dried up considerably of late as NPR stations trend toward more talk, less music and/or a more eclectic approach to music rather than a single format.
What is it about jazz that makes it a significant part of American culture for the past century plus? Here is what Dr. Marin Luther King Jr. said at the opening of the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1964:
 
“Jazz speaks for life. The blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music.
 
“Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by jazz musicians.
“Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
 
“And now, jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.
 
“In music, especially this broad category called jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”
 
Wishing everyone a Happy New Year — come 2017 and beyond, may the jazz be with you.
 
Jon Poses is executive director of the “We Always Swing” Jazz Series. Reach him at jazznbsbl@socket.net.
 

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http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2017/01/when-legends-gather-887.html?utm_source=feedburner
 
Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton and William Bendix

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http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2017/01/when-legends-gather-887.html?utm_source=feedburner
 
Jimmy Durante, Eddie Cantor, Red Skelton and William Bendix

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George Crater – The Jazz Night Club Scene – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmMKLKHAbSI

 

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George Crater – The Jazz Night Club Scene – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmMKLKHAbSI

 

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/01/hank-williams-tragic-new-year-s-day.html?via=newsletter
 
Hank Williams’ Tragic New Year’s Day
Before the music star left on his fateful road trip, he began to have dark premonitions of death.

Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Hiram “Hank” Williams, old before his time and ill in countless ways, was by all measures in no condition to travel long distances in bone-chilling, rainy, blustery weather. 
He may have wanted to go just as much to get away from the madness in Montgomery, a constant urge whenever he spent any time there. But even if the concert dates over the New Year’s holiday were of critical importance— which they weren’t—looking back, because no one thought to talk him out of that last ride, or at least make sure he wouldn’t be traveling essentially alone in bone-freezing weather, his family and friends did let him down. Indeed, after receiving Toby Marshall’s telegram, Lillie’s only adjustment wasn’t to reconsider her feeling that Hank was well enough to travel alone but rather to give Marshall instructions to be in Charleston with his black bag well stocked.  This despite telling Marshall that Hank recently had a “highly upsetting emotional incident” that sent him back to the bottle.
Hank’s last full day in Montgomery, Monday, December 29, 1952, was especially maudlin. Needing to go to church, an urge he rarely felt, he went to the St. Jude’s Hospital chapel, to pray with the nuns. “Ol’ Hank needs to straighten up some things with the Man,” Billie Jean said he told her. He was even more melancholy when he came into his cousin  Marie  McNeil’s  room  and  handed her forty dollars, which he wanted used to help pay the doctor who would deliver Bobbie Jett’s baby. As he left the room, Marie said, Hank told her, “Ol’ Hank’s not gonna be with you another  Christmas. I’m closer to the Lord than I’ve ever been in my life.” Billie Jean recalled that Hank tossed  and  turned  in  bed  all  that  night, the pain in his back excruciating. At one point, he  leaped out of bed and, she recalled, started shadowboxing, mimicking throwing punches at an invisible target. Startled, she asked, “Hank, what in the world is the matter with you?”
“Every time I close my eyes,” he said, echoing what he’d told newspaperman H. B. Teeter a year before, “I see Jesus comin’ down the road. He’s comin’ after ol’ Hank.”
None of these mawkish expressions seemed to alarm them,  having heard variations of the theme before. The next morning, his travel plans still in limbo, he chartered a flight to Charleston for early afternoon. But because of the horrendous weather—a snow-storm had blanketed Montgomery, one of the few to ever hit the city—he’d had to go about hiring a driver days before. Hank could have pulled out of one or both concerts, but because of his reputation for missing shows he couldn’t afford more bad publicity. He insisted on going, and had convinced Don Helms on the phone to play at both dates. Helms, with Jerry Rivers, was now in Ray Price’s band, and Ray was scheduled to play in Cleveland a day earlier, so Helms signed on to meet up with Hank in Canton, for a $200 pay-day, and would hitch a ride out with Bam Bamford.
Seeking a driver, Hank first asked Brack Schuffert, but Brack couldn’t miss work at Hormel Meats. An old standby in the Driftin’ Cowboys, “Beanpole” Boling, was working at a Montgomery cab company, but he too was busy. He then went over to the Lee Street Taxi storefront and asked the owner, Dan Carr, who’d gotten him drivers before, if he could spare someone. Carr recommended his son, Charles, a thin, sandy-haired, eighteen-year-old freshman at Auburn University who was home for the holidays. He had once driven Hank, who thought Charles rode the gas pedal a little hard, but then that was how Hank himself liked to drive. So Charles Carr it was, at $400 for the four-day round-trip.
Carr backed up Billie Jean when he confirmed she was still indeed in Montgomery and far from being disowned by Hank. Right up until he drove away, Carr said, she was asking Hank if she could go with him, but Hank said no. Billie Jean would recall that farewell with more melancholy:
Hank was in the car. I was back in my room putting my  makeup on. And he came back into the room, came up behind me and kissed me on the cheek. He sat down on the edge of the bed.  He just looked at me, not saying a word. I stood in front of the mirror, my back to him, and to me he looked like he was already dead. And I asked him if somethin’ was botherin’ him. And he said, “No, baby, I just wanted to look at you one more time.”
At around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Hank and Carr loaded up his baby blue ’52 Cadillac convertible. Hank laid his guitar on the back seat and stowed in the trunk a couple of others, along with several stage suits and other things he would need. He was wearing dark blue serge pants and jacket, a white shirt, black tie, navy blue overcoat, white felt cowboy hat, and blue suede shoes. With his pearl-handled .45 tucked in his coat pocket, Hank climbed into his accustomed travel quarters, the well-used back seat of the Caddy. As Carr pulled away, Hank told him to wait and went back in the house, changing into white cowboy boots. Still hoping the plane would be allowed to take off, he had Carr buzz by the airport, but with all flights canceled well into the day, Hank settled in, his back already hurting, for what would be hours on the road.
Before heading out of the city, though, there were some loose ends to tie up. Needing a shot of something for the road, he had Carr stop by a hotel where he’d heard there was a convention of construction contractors going on. Ambling into the ballroom where people stared, their mouths agape, he helped himself to some drinks and left. He then swung by Doc Stokes’s office. He was going to deliver Bobbie’s child, and Hank also gave him forty dollars, then asked Stokes if he could give him a shot of morphine. Stokes, smelling liquor on his breath, refused.
Hank then tried one of the doctors he’d gone to before with Toby Marshall’s card and prescriptions, and the doctor, identified in one account only as a man named Black, shot him up with morphine. Hank walked out, his legs wobbly but feeling fine. He also had several chloral hydrate tables in his pocket, after using the last prescription he had left from Toby Marshall’s stash.
Carr then made two more stops, first at a gas station to change a tire, and even the guy who changed it, Cecil Jackson, would enjoy his fame for entering the coming drama. Hank then stopped at the Hollywood Drive-In diner and bought some sandwiches, coffee, and a six-pack of Falstaff beer. Now he could leave. At around five o’clock, darkness had thrown a veil over the sky and the snow. The Caddy turned onto Highway 31 and headed northbound.
The itinerary was to cover nearly a thousand miles, from Montgomery to Charleston to Canton. Posters were printed for the appearances, the one for the Canton show featuring Hank’s signature saying “If the good Lord’s willing, and the creek don’t rise . . . I’ll see you at Canton Memorial Auditorium New Year’s Day 1953.” As it happened, an Opry troupe was also playing in Canton on New Year’s Day, starring Carl Smith and the Carter Sisters. And Bamford was quite willing to take a few liberties, plastering the poster for Hank’s show with the words ‘Grand Ole Opry presents in person…’ The show would be the same at both engagements, an early set—8 p.m. in Charleston, 3 p.m. in Canton—followed by late shows at 10:30 and 5:30, respectively.
Hank would headline on an “All-Star” bill with the cornpone comedy team Homer and Jethro, the Webb Sisters, Alabama warbler Autry Inman, who had played bass in Cowboy Copas’s band, and Harold Franklin “Hawkshaw” Hawkins. Most of the acts would play behind Hank, with Helms, and be joined by Bill Monroe’s fiddler, Red Taylor.
Because Hank had gotten out of Montgomery late, he decided to stay the night in Birmingham, raising some hell as usual. When Carr parked illegally in front of the posh Tutwiler Hotel, a cop ticketed him and, not moved when Carr told him who was in the back seat, shooed him away. They then booked two rooms at the Redmont, where three women recognized Hank within minutes and spent the next hour in his room. Carr and Hank ordered room service and after a good night’s sleep were off early the next morning, New Year’s Eve day. They made a stop in Fort Payne, where Hank bought a bottle of bourbon, and made it to Chattanooga by lunchtime and ate in a diner. Hank dropped a dime in the box and played Tony Bennett’s cover of “Cold, Cold Heart,” then left a $50 bill for the waitress, saying, “Here’s the biggest tip you ever got.”
By 1 p.m. they were in Knoxville, still three hundred miles from Charleston. He had Carr check on flights. There was one at 3:30 that would get there by 6. Hank bought two tickets, deciding to keep Carr along for company. During the ride up, Hank had gotten along well with the kid; they had sung to keep the boredom away, and he liked the kid’s spunk. The Caddy would be left in the airport parking lot until they came back on the return trip.
With time before the flight, Hank found his way to St. Mary’s Hospital, where, in mysterious circumstances Carr never explained, he was able to have a doctor give him another morphine shot. The plane boarded and took off on time. But the weather was rough, and the plane was ordered to turn back to Knoxville, landing at 6 p.m. By now, as Carr learned when he phoned Lillie, the two Charleston shows had been canceled due to the storm. Most of the performers were able to navigate the icy roads and get to the theater just as it was being boarded up. Bam Bamford, arriving with Don Helms, was particularly peeved, knowing he’d be refunding two sellout houses of 4,000 people. Bam instructed all of them to get going to Canton for the next night’s shows. One other interested party had made it to Charleston as well—Toby Marshall, who called Lillie for his marching orders.
Meanwhile, stuck back in Knoxville, Carr and a dog-tired Hank checked into the Andrew Johnson Hotel. Hank, who had drained the bourbon, could barely stand, and two porters all but carried him to his room. One of them, Emmanuel Martin, recalled that Hank “was very much alive. I talked to him coming in, talked to him coming out, and I remember he made one little statement, ‘When you drink like this, this is the price you gotta pay.’”
Carr ordered two room service steaks, but Hank was laid out on his bed, kept awake only because he developed nagging hiccups that seemed to approach convulsions. Concerned, Carr also called Lillie again, who proceeded to call Marshall to tell him where Hank was. Marshall then phoned Carr with instructions to have the front desk summon a doctor. Minutes later, Dr. Paul Cardwell rushed to the hotel and, possibly having conferred by phone with Marshall, injected Hank with two more morphine shots along with vitamin B-12. Brought up to speed, Marshall informed Carr not to stay overnight at the hotel and to get back on the road to Canton, and whatever he did, keep Hank away from the sauce.
From this point on, mysteries abound that have never been solved, mysteries with plenty of clues but a lot of doubt.  Some have, through the years, advanced the theory that when two porters carted Hank down to the Cadillac at around 10:45 p.m. he was already dead, although the hotel manager would offer later that Hank was still alive albeit looking “groggy.” And Carr, for his part, later noted, “If he was dead, it was a dead man walking around when we stopped later.”
Over the next eight hours, as Hank sat almost silent in the convertible, which even with the heater blasting was as cold as a meat locker, nobody apparently tried to speak with or check on him, nor heard a peep from him in the back seat. Carr would later say Hank had spent time writing songs and chugging some beer, and noted that the last song they sang was Red Foley’s “Midnight,” a song that may have matched the mood he was in as he sang for the last time:
Midnight, I lie in bed awake and stare at nothing at all Wonderin’, wonderin’ why you don’t care, wishing you’d call

Ensuing police reports and investigations only served to sow doubt and confusion, keeping the Hank legend appropriately, and eternally, necromantic, aptly bathed in a dark, cold, pitch-black midnight.
Charles Carr, who should have known all there was to know, didn’t make the enigma any clearer. From what is known, Carr headed through Rutledge Pike toward the West Virginia  border, but just before the new year rang in, exhausted, he nearly collided head-on with a highway patrol car while trying to pass a truck in Blaine, notably the hometown of Roy Acuff and Carl Smith. A rookie cop, Swann H. Kitts, was riding with a veteran sheriff, J. N. Antrican, in the car, and after pulling the Caddy over, Kitts later testified, he saw a lifeless-looking man, his collar and hat covering his face, slumped across the back seat, seemingly asleep, and asked Carr if something was wrong with the passenger.
“No,” he said, acting very nervous, “he’s been drinking six beers and the doctor gave him a sedative to make him sleep.”
“That guy looks dead,” noted Kitts, who later ventured that he thought the “pale and blue looking” man was dead but, inexplicably, did not check his pulse or try to rouse him.
Neither did Carr say who it was, possibly guilty he had not followed Marshall’s orders to keep Hank dry. Even more oddly, the sheriff never got out to add his expertise. Adding to the mystery, Kitts would also recall seeing in the passenger seat a “serviceman” in uniform. Carr disputed this later, as well as the testimony of the manager at the Andrew Johnson, who said that he had arranged for Carr to ride with a relief driver in case he grew too tired, and that the driver wore a chauffeur’s uniform and cap.
Rather than giving him a ticket, Kitts had Carr follow the police car to a magistrate in Rutledge, who fined Carr twenty-five dollars. He paid out of his pocket—even as, incredibly, a man that a police officer believed was dead was simply left in the back seat outside, still unchecked.
By now, it was 1 a.m., the new year having come during this bizarre interlude, which was nowhere near over. In no mood to celebrate, Carr hit Highway 19, crossed into West Virginia, and stopped at a gas station in Bluefield to fill up. It was around 4:30 now. He asked the attendant if he knew where a relief driver could be found and was directed to a diner, the Doughboy Lunch Restaurant. Here, Carr claimed later, Hank got out and stretched his legs. “I asked him if he wanted a sandwich or something,” Carr recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I just want to get some sleep.’ I don’t know if that’s the last thing he said. But it’s the last thing I remember him telling me.”
Carr said Hank did not go in the diner, though waitress Hazel Wells said Hank did come in, said who he was, and also inquired about a relief driver. Carr found a thirty-seven-year-old local cabbie, Don Howard Surface, who was in a booth having breakfast and agreed to take over the driving through the dangerous mountain roads of the Appalachians, in exchange for an unknown sum and bus fare back to Bluefield. Carr would also say that before they left the town, Hank awoke and—contradicting his assertion that Hank had already spoken his last words to him—wanted to find a doctor to give him another shot of morphine, but at that hour it was impossible, and they pushed off again.
Surface was still there when the Caddy stopped for coffee and sandwiches somewhere in Princeton, West Virginia at around 6 a.m. It was still dark and freezing, and Hank was out cold. Carr said Surface left to go back home here, but it was later determined Surface was still at the wheel when they stopped in Oak Hill, in Fayette County, a half hour later to fill up again and get some grub at the Skyline Diner. Only now did Charles Carr think it necessary to pay much attention to the man in the back seat, and only because the blanket Hank had wrapped around himself had fallen off. He was lying still on the seat in a kind of coffin pose, on his back, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed.
As Carr reached back to pull the blanket over him, he touched one of Hank’s hands. It felt cold as a stone and stiff. As Carr would put it, “I felt a little unnatural resistance from his arm.” Panicking, Carr rushed into the restaurant—it’s unknown whether Surface, if he was still there, came inside with him—and came back out with an older man who took a look at Hank and summed up the situation with classic understatement.
“I think you got a problem,” he said.
Police reports would indicate that Carr and Surface, if he was there, knowing they had a famous corpse in the back and needing to get it to a hospital, asked for directions to one at Burdette’s Pure Oil gas station. Carr asked the owner, Peter Burdette, to call the local police station and tell them a dead man had been driven into his place. Within minutes, a police car arrived, and Officer Orris Stamey confirmed Hank was dead. His body was still somewhat warm, but his extremities were numbed by rigor mortis. Stamey then had Carr and Surface follow him to Oak Hill Hospital. Once there, Carr raced into the emergency room. “I ran in and explained my situation to the two interns,” he recalled. “They came out and looked at Hank and said, ‘He’s dead.’ I asked ’em, ‘Can’t you do something to revive him?’ One of them looked at me and said, ‘No, he’s just dead.’”
The orderlies pulled Hank’s body from the car, lifted him by his armpits, and toted him inside. He was laid out on a stretcher, and another intern, Diego Nunnari, listed the time of death at 7 a.m., though Nunnari estimated that Hank had died between two and four hours before that. Carr, walking around in a daze, couldn’t face calling Lillie. Instead, he called his father, who told him he had to call Lillie.
No doubt gulping hard, Carr did, and was floored when her reaction was nothing like a mother’s anguish over losing a son; rather, she was all business. “Don’t let anything happen to the car” were her first words when Carr had finished telling what happened, apparently thinking that if the car was impounded by the authorities, it might never be returned, and possibly could offer incriminating evidence of what Hank was doing to himself, something Lillie wanted never to become public knowledge. Lillie also sent a telegram at 10:33 a.m. to Irene in Virginia, which read perfunctorily, “Come at once. Hank is dead. Mother.”
As it happened, eerily, Irene had had another premonition during the night that her brother was dead, and had even packed a suitcase so she could go to Montgomery for his funeral.
Toby Marshall, after Lillie called him in Charleston, was ashen but probably not completely shocked. He hopped a bus and arrived in Oak Hill early the next day. By then, Hank’s body had been removed to the Tyree Funeral Home. Lillie was already in town, having arrived with Carr’s father, flying to Roanoke because the Charleston airport was still closed, then taking a cab. Lillie didn’t go right to the funeral parlor; instead, she went to the police station to find out what they knew of Hank’s death and the belongings in the car. She was armed with legal papers saying she was his next of kin, and others showing that Billie Jean’s belated divorce from Harrison Eshlimar invalidated her marriage to Hank, and she therefore was not Hank’s next of kin, with no right to his remains and belongings. “Mrs. Stone made all the arrangements,” Joe Tyree, who ran the funeral parlor, said. “She chose a Batesville casket with silver finish and white interior.  She went out to his car and chose one of his white cowboy outfits to bury him in.”
Tyree recalled that she was a “nice, stately-looking woman, very pleasant and composed. She held her grief.”
Excerpted from Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams by Mark Ribowsky. Copyright © 2017 by Mark Ribowsky. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

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Hank Williams’ Tragic New Year’s Day
Before the music star left on his fateful road trip, he began to have dark premonitions of death.

Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo
Hiram “Hank” Williams, old before his time and ill in countless ways, was by all measures in no condition to travel long distances in bone-chilling, rainy, blustery weather. 
He may have wanted to go just as much to get away from the madness in Montgomery, a constant urge whenever he spent any time there. But even if the concert dates over the New Year’s holiday were of critical importance— which they weren’t—looking back, because no one thought to talk him out of that last ride, or at least make sure he wouldn’t be traveling essentially alone in bone-freezing weather, his family and friends did let him down. Indeed, after receiving Toby Marshall’s telegram, Lillie’s only adjustment wasn’t to reconsider her feeling that Hank was well enough to travel alone but rather to give Marshall instructions to be in Charleston with his black bag well stocked.  This despite telling Marshall that Hank recently had a “highly upsetting emotional incident” that sent him back to the bottle.
Hank’s last full day in Montgomery, Monday, December 29, 1952, was especially maudlin. Needing to go to church, an urge he rarely felt, he went to the St. Jude’s Hospital chapel, to pray with the nuns. “Ol’ Hank needs to straighten up some things with the Man,” Billie Jean said he told her. He was even more melancholy when he came into his cousin  Marie  McNeil’s  room  and  handed her forty dollars, which he wanted used to help pay the doctor who would deliver Bobbie Jett’s baby. As he left the room, Marie said, Hank told her, “Ol’ Hank’s not gonna be with you another  Christmas. I’m closer to the Lord than I’ve ever been in my life.” Billie Jean recalled that Hank tossed  and  turned  in  bed  all  that  night, the pain in his back excruciating. At one point, he  leaped out of bed and, she recalled, started shadowboxing, mimicking throwing punches at an invisible target. Startled, she asked, “Hank, what in the world is the matter with you?”
“Every time I close my eyes,” he said, echoing what he’d told newspaperman H. B. Teeter a year before, “I see Jesus comin’ down the road. He’s comin’ after ol’ Hank.”
None of these mawkish expressions seemed to alarm them,  having heard variations of the theme before. The next morning, his travel plans still in limbo, he chartered a flight to Charleston for early afternoon. But because of the horrendous weather—a snow-storm had blanketed Montgomery, one of the few to ever hit the city—he’d had to go about hiring a driver days before. Hank could have pulled out of one or both concerts, but because of his reputation for missing shows he couldn’t afford more bad publicity. He insisted on going, and had convinced Don Helms on the phone to play at both dates. Helms, with Jerry Rivers, was now in Ray Price’s band, and Ray was scheduled to play in Cleveland a day earlier, so Helms signed on to meet up with Hank in Canton, for a $200 pay-day, and would hitch a ride out with Bam Bamford.
Seeking a driver, Hank first asked Brack Schuffert, but Brack couldn’t miss work at Hormel Meats. An old standby in the Driftin’ Cowboys, “Beanpole” Boling, was working at a Montgomery cab company, but he too was busy. He then went over to the Lee Street Taxi storefront and asked the owner, Dan Carr, who’d gotten him drivers before, if he could spare someone. Carr recommended his son, Charles, a thin, sandy-haired, eighteen-year-old freshman at Auburn University who was home for the holidays. He had once driven Hank, who thought Charles rode the gas pedal a little hard, but then that was how Hank himself liked to drive. So Charles Carr it was, at $400 for the four-day round-trip.
Carr backed up Billie Jean when he confirmed she was still indeed in Montgomery and far from being disowned by Hank. Right up until he drove away, Carr said, she was asking Hank if she could go with him, but Hank said no. Billie Jean would recall that farewell with more melancholy:
Hank was in the car. I was back in my room putting my  makeup on. And he came back into the room, came up behind me and kissed me on the cheek. He sat down on the edge of the bed.  He just looked at me, not saying a word. I stood in front of the mirror, my back to him, and to me he looked like he was already dead. And I asked him if somethin’ was botherin’ him. And he said, “No, baby, I just wanted to look at you one more time.”
At around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, Hank and Carr loaded up his baby blue ’52 Cadillac convertible. Hank laid his guitar on the back seat and stowed in the trunk a couple of others, along with several stage suits and other things he would need. He was wearing dark blue serge pants and jacket, a white shirt, black tie, navy blue overcoat, white felt cowboy hat, and blue suede shoes. With his pearl-handled .45 tucked in his coat pocket, Hank climbed into his accustomed travel quarters, the well-used back seat of the Caddy. As Carr pulled away, Hank told him to wait and went back in the house, changing into white cowboy boots. Still hoping the plane would be allowed to take off, he had Carr buzz by the airport, but with all flights canceled well into the day, Hank settled in, his back already hurting, for what would be hours on the road.
Before heading out of the city, though, there were some loose ends to tie up. Needing a shot of something for the road, he had Carr stop by a hotel where he’d heard there was a convention of construction contractors going on. Ambling into the ballroom where people stared, their mouths agape, he helped himself to some drinks and left. He then swung by Doc Stokes’s office. He was going to deliver Bobbie’s child, and Hank also gave him forty dollars, then asked Stokes if he could give him a shot of morphine. Stokes, smelling liquor on his breath, refused.
Hank then tried one of the doctors he’d gone to before with Toby Marshall’s card and prescriptions, and the doctor, identified in one account only as a man named Black, shot him up with morphine. Hank walked out, his legs wobbly but feeling fine. He also had several chloral hydrate tables in his pocket, after using the last prescription he had left from Toby Marshall’s stash.
Carr then made two more stops, first at a gas station to change a tire, and even the guy who changed it, Cecil Jackson, would enjoy his fame for entering the coming drama. Hank then stopped at the Hollywood Drive-In diner and bought some sandwiches, coffee, and a six-pack of Falstaff beer. Now he could leave. At around five o’clock, darkness had thrown a veil over the sky and the snow. The Caddy turned onto Highway 31 and headed northbound.
The itinerary was to cover nearly a thousand miles, from Montgomery to Charleston to Canton. Posters were printed for the appearances, the one for the Canton show featuring Hank’s signature saying “If the good Lord’s willing, and the creek don’t rise . . . I’ll see you at Canton Memorial Auditorium New Year’s Day 1953.” As it happened, an Opry troupe was also playing in Canton on New Year’s Day, starring Carl Smith and the Carter Sisters. And Bamford was quite willing to take a few liberties, plastering the poster for Hank’s show with the words ‘Grand Ole Opry presents in person…’ The show would be the same at both engagements, an early set—8 p.m. in Charleston, 3 p.m. in Canton—followed by late shows at 10:30 and 5:30, respectively.
Hank would headline on an “All-Star” bill with the cornpone comedy team Homer and Jethro, the Webb Sisters, Alabama warbler Autry Inman, who had played bass in Cowboy Copas’s band, and Harold Franklin “Hawkshaw” Hawkins. Most of the acts would play behind Hank, with Helms, and be joined by Bill Monroe’s fiddler, Red Taylor.
Because Hank had gotten out of Montgomery late, he decided to stay the night in Birmingham, raising some hell as usual. When Carr parked illegally in front of the posh Tutwiler Hotel, a cop ticketed him and, not moved when Carr told him who was in the back seat, shooed him away. They then booked two rooms at the Redmont, where three women recognized Hank within minutes and spent the next hour in his room. Carr and Hank ordered room service and after a good night’s sleep were off early the next morning, New Year’s Eve day. They made a stop in Fort Payne, where Hank bought a bottle of bourbon, and made it to Chattanooga by lunchtime and ate in a diner. Hank dropped a dime in the box and played Tony Bennett’s cover of “Cold, Cold Heart,” then left a $50 bill for the waitress, saying, “Here’s the biggest tip you ever got.”
By 1 p.m. they were in Knoxville, still three hundred miles from Charleston. He had Carr check on flights. There was one at 3:30 that would get there by 6. Hank bought two tickets, deciding to keep Carr along for company. During the ride up, Hank had gotten along well with the kid; they had sung to keep the boredom away, and he liked the kid’s spunk. The Caddy would be left in the airport parking lot until they came back on the return trip.
With time before the flight, Hank found his way to St. Mary’s Hospital, where, in mysterious circumstances Carr never explained, he was able to have a doctor give him another morphine shot. The plane boarded and took off on time. But the weather was rough, and the plane was ordered to turn back to Knoxville, landing at 6 p.m. By now, as Carr learned when he phoned Lillie, the two Charleston shows had been canceled due to the storm. Most of the performers were able to navigate the icy roads and get to the theater just as it was being boarded up. Bam Bamford, arriving with Don Helms, was particularly peeved, knowing he’d be refunding two sellout houses of 4,000 people. Bam instructed all of them to get going to Canton for the next night’s shows. One other interested party had made it to Charleston as well—Toby Marshall, who called Lillie for his marching orders.
Meanwhile, stuck back in Knoxville, Carr and a dog-tired Hank checked into the Andrew Johnson Hotel. Hank, who had drained the bourbon, could barely stand, and two porters all but carried him to his room. One of them, Emmanuel Martin, recalled that Hank “was very much alive. I talked to him coming in, talked to him coming out, and I remember he made one little statement, ‘When you drink like this, this is the price you gotta pay.’”
Carr ordered two room service steaks, but Hank was laid out on his bed, kept awake only because he developed nagging hiccups that seemed to approach convulsions. Concerned, Carr also called Lillie again, who proceeded to call Marshall to tell him where Hank was. Marshall then phoned Carr with instructions to have the front desk summon a doctor. Minutes later, Dr. Paul Cardwell rushed to the hotel and, possibly having conferred by phone with Marshall, injected Hank with two more morphine shots along with vitamin B-12. Brought up to speed, Marshall informed Carr not to stay overnight at the hotel and to get back on the road to Canton, and whatever he did, keep Hank away from the sauce.
From this point on, mysteries abound that have never been solved, mysteries with plenty of clues but a lot of doubt.  Some have, through the years, advanced the theory that when two porters carted Hank down to the Cadillac at around 10:45 p.m. he was already dead, although the hotel manager would offer later that Hank was still alive albeit looking “groggy.” And Carr, for his part, later noted, “If he was dead, it was a dead man walking around when we stopped later.”
Over the next eight hours, as Hank sat almost silent in the convertible, which even with the heater blasting was as cold as a meat locker, nobody apparently tried to speak with or check on him, nor heard a peep from him in the back seat. Carr would later say Hank had spent time writing songs and chugging some beer, and noted that the last song they sang was Red Foley’s “Midnight,” a song that may have matched the mood he was in as he sang for the last time:
Midnight, I lie in bed awake and stare at nothing at all Wonderin’, wonderin’ why you don’t care, wishing you’d call

Ensuing police reports and investigations only served to sow doubt and confusion, keeping the Hank legend appropriately, and eternally, necromantic, aptly bathed in a dark, cold, pitch-black midnight.
Charles Carr, who should have known all there was to know, didn’t make the enigma any clearer. From what is known, Carr headed through Rutledge Pike toward the West Virginia  border, but just before the new year rang in, exhausted, he nearly collided head-on with a highway patrol car while trying to pass a truck in Blaine, notably the hometown of Roy Acuff and Carl Smith. A rookie cop, Swann H. Kitts, was riding with a veteran sheriff, J. N. Antrican, in the car, and after pulling the Caddy over, Kitts later testified, he saw a lifeless-looking man, his collar and hat covering his face, slumped across the back seat, seemingly asleep, and asked Carr if something was wrong with the passenger.
“No,” he said, acting very nervous, “he’s been drinking six beers and the doctor gave him a sedative to make him sleep.”
“That guy looks dead,” noted Kitts, who later ventured that he thought the “pale and blue looking” man was dead but, inexplicably, did not check his pulse or try to rouse him.
Neither did Carr say who it was, possibly guilty he had not followed Marshall’s orders to keep Hank dry. Even more oddly, the sheriff never got out to add his expertise. Adding to the mystery, Kitts would also recall seeing in the passenger seat a “serviceman” in uniform. Carr disputed this later, as well as the testimony of the manager at the Andrew Johnson, who said that he had arranged for Carr to ride with a relief driver in case he grew too tired, and that the driver wore a chauffeur’s uniform and cap.
Rather than giving him a ticket, Kitts had Carr follow the police car to a magistrate in Rutledge, who fined Carr twenty-five dollars. He paid out of his pocket—even as, incredibly, a man that a police officer believed was dead was simply left in the back seat outside, still unchecked.
By now, it was 1 a.m., the new year having come during this bizarre interlude, which was nowhere near over. In no mood to celebrate, Carr hit Highway 19, crossed into West Virginia, and stopped at a gas station in Bluefield to fill up. It was around 4:30 now. He asked the attendant if he knew where a relief driver could be found and was directed to a diner, the Doughboy Lunch Restaurant. Here, Carr claimed later, Hank got out and stretched his legs. “I asked him if he wanted a sandwich or something,” Carr recalled. “And he said, ‘No, I just want to get some sleep.’ I don’t know if that’s the last thing he said. But it’s the last thing I remember him telling me.”
Carr said Hank did not go in the diner, though waitress Hazel Wells said Hank did come in, said who he was, and also inquired about a relief driver. Carr found a thirty-seven-year-old local cabbie, Don Howard Surface, who was in a booth having breakfast and agreed to take over the driving through the dangerous mountain roads of the Appalachians, in exchange for an unknown sum and bus fare back to Bluefield. Carr would also say that before they left the town, Hank awoke and—contradicting his assertion that Hank had already spoken his last words to him—wanted to find a doctor to give him another shot of morphine, but at that hour it was impossible, and they pushed off again.
Surface was still there when the Caddy stopped for coffee and sandwiches somewhere in Princeton, West Virginia at around 6 a.m. It was still dark and freezing, and Hank was out cold. Carr said Surface left to go back home here, but it was later determined Surface was still at the wheel when they stopped in Oak Hill, in Fayette County, a half hour later to fill up again and get some grub at the Skyline Diner. Only now did Charles Carr think it necessary to pay much attention to the man in the back seat, and only because the blanket Hank had wrapped around himself had fallen off. He was lying still on the seat in a kind of coffin pose, on his back, arms folded across his chest, eyes closed.
As Carr reached back to pull the blanket over him, he touched one of Hank’s hands. It felt cold as a stone and stiff. As Carr would put it, “I felt a little unnatural resistance from his arm.” Panicking, Carr rushed into the restaurant—it’s unknown whether Surface, if he was still there, came inside with him—and came back out with an older man who took a look at Hank and summed up the situation with classic understatement.
“I think you got a problem,” he said.
Police reports would indicate that Carr and Surface, if he was there, knowing they had a famous corpse in the back and needing to get it to a hospital, asked for directions to one at Burdette’s Pure Oil gas station. Carr asked the owner, Peter Burdette, to call the local police station and tell them a dead man had been driven into his place. Within minutes, a police car arrived, and Officer Orris Stamey confirmed Hank was dead. His body was still somewhat warm, but his extremities were numbed by rigor mortis. Stamey then had Carr and Surface follow him to Oak Hill Hospital. Once there, Carr raced into the emergency room. “I ran in and explained my situation to the two interns,” he recalled. “They came out and looked at Hank and said, ‘He’s dead.’ I asked ’em, ‘Can’t you do something to revive him?’ One of them looked at me and said, ‘No, he’s just dead.’”
The orderlies pulled Hank’s body from the car, lifted him by his armpits, and toted him inside. He was laid out on a stretcher, and another intern, Diego Nunnari, listed the time of death at 7 a.m., though Nunnari estimated that Hank had died between two and four hours before that. Carr, walking around in a daze, couldn’t face calling Lillie. Instead, he called his father, who told him he had to call Lillie.
No doubt gulping hard, Carr did, and was floored when her reaction was nothing like a mother’s anguish over losing a son; rather, she was all business. “Don’t let anything happen to the car” were her first words when Carr had finished telling what happened, apparently thinking that if the car was impounded by the authorities, it might never be returned, and possibly could offer incriminating evidence of what Hank was doing to himself, something Lillie wanted never to become public knowledge. Lillie also sent a telegram at 10:33 a.m. to Irene in Virginia, which read perfunctorily, “Come at once. Hank is dead. Mother.”
As it happened, eerily, Irene had had another premonition during the night that her brother was dead, and had even packed a suitcase so she could go to Montgomery for his funeral.
Toby Marshall, after Lillie called him in Charleston, was ashen but probably not completely shocked. He hopped a bus and arrived in Oak Hill early the next day. By then, Hank’s body had been removed to the Tyree Funeral Home. Lillie was already in town, having arrived with Carr’s father, flying to Roanoke because the Charleston airport was still closed, then taking a cab. Lillie didn’t go right to the funeral parlor; instead, she went to the police station to find out what they knew of Hank’s death and the belongings in the car. She was armed with legal papers saying she was his next of kin, and others showing that Billie Jean’s belated divorce from Harrison Eshlimar invalidated her marriage to Hank, and she therefore was not Hank’s next of kin, with no right to his remains and belongings. “Mrs. Stone made all the arrangements,” Joe Tyree, who ran the funeral parlor, said. “She chose a Batesville casket with silver finish and white interior.  She went out to his car and chose one of his white cowboy outfits to bury him in.”
Tyree recalled that she was a “nice, stately-looking woman, very pleasant and composed. She held her grief.”
Excerpted from Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams by Mark Ribowsky. Copyright © 2017 by Mark Ribowsky. With permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

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http://www.wfuv.org/content/rich-conaty-1954-2016

Rich Conaty in 1973 and 2016 (photo by Gus Philippas).
by
WFUV Staff
 
12.30.16 5:14pm
 
We’re saddened beyond words by the death of our dear friend and colleague, Rich Conaty. Rich was a fixture at WFUV for more than four decades, beginning as a Fordham student. A kid from Queens with a passion for the jazz and popular music of the ‘20s and ‘30s, he chose Fordham because it had a good radio station, and he made it better every day that he was here.
 
Rich took over an existing Sunday night program in early 1973, renamed it The Big Broadcast, and was the host for more than 2200 shows. Each was filled with meticulous salutes to composers, singers, and bandleaders, along with listener requests, all drawn from his voluminous record collection and leavened by his encyclopedic knowledge. Even though Rich hardly ever played a post-World War II recording, the show never felt like a dated museum piece, because of his passion for the music. That passion was infectious, attracting a devoted audience that ranged from 8 to 80 and included a number of well-known writers and musicians.
 
“Rich is gone far too soon, at just 62,” said Chuck Singleton, WFUV’s general manager. “The Big Broadcast was Rich’s life. He was a rare breed: the real deal as a broadcaster, a truly great DJ who was adored by many fans and supporters. Like his fans, we’ll miss his energy, enthusiasm and good nature. He did everything with high standards and an open heart. If there’s any consolation, it’s the thought that Rich might be sharing a ‘Hi De Ho’ with Cab Calloway on some bandstand in the sky.”
 
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, or on the Fans of the WFUV Big Broadcast page on Facebook. We’ll provide an update on services when we have more information.
 

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http://www.wfuv.org/content/rich-conaty-1954-2016

Rich Conaty in 1973 and 2016 (photo by Gus Philippas).
by
WFUV Staff
 
12.30.16 5:14pm
 
We’re saddened beyond words by the death of our dear friend and colleague, Rich Conaty. Rich was a fixture at WFUV for more than four decades, beginning as a Fordham student. A kid from Queens with a passion for the jazz and popular music of the ‘20s and ‘30s, he chose Fordham because it had a good radio station, and he made it better every day that he was here.
 
Rich took over an existing Sunday night program in early 1973, renamed it The Big Broadcast, and was the host for more than 2200 shows. Each was filled with meticulous salutes to composers, singers, and bandleaders, along with listener requests, all drawn from his voluminous record collection and leavened by his encyclopedic knowledge. Even though Rich hardly ever played a post-World War II recording, the show never felt like a dated museum piece, because of his passion for the music. That passion was infectious, attracting a devoted audience that ranged from 8 to 80 and included a number of well-known writers and musicians.
 
“Rich is gone far too soon, at just 62,” said Chuck Singleton, WFUV’s general manager. “The Big Broadcast was Rich’s life. He was a rare breed: the real deal as a broadcaster, a truly great DJ who was adored by many fans and supporters. Like his fans, we’ll miss his energy, enthusiasm and good nature. He did everything with high standards and an open heart. If there’s any consolation, it’s the thought that Rich might be sharing a ‘Hi De Ho’ with Cab Calloway on some bandstand in the sky.”
 
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below, or on the Fans of the WFUV Big Broadcast page on Facebook. We’ll provide an update on services when we have more information.
 

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

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http://www.npr.org/2016/12/30/506450056/toast-of-the-nation-2017?utm_source=npr_newsletter
 

SURAYA MOHAMED
END CLASS=”BUCKETWRAP BYLINE” ID=”RES506460399″ PREVIEWTITLE=”BYLINES”
FROM

END CLASS=”STATION” END CLASS=”STORY-META__TWO”
END ID=”STORY-META” CLASS=”STORY-META HAS-BYLINE HAS-ORG”

 
The Fred Hersch Trio performs at Blue Note Beijing on Oct. 28, 2016.
Zhang Dongdong
The New Year holiday tradition continues with the Toast of the Nation jazz party. Spirited, improvised and swinging, each hour was recorded live at Blue Note venues throughout the country and the world.

A BLOG SUPREME
Toast Of The Nation 2016

With a new format this year, there are no countdowns to midnight. Instead, you can enjoy six solid hours of music, right for any time of the day or night — complete with festive Happy New Year messages throughout. Hosted by Christian McBride, this is the perfect complement to your holiday festivities.
Hear Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau from Blue Note Tokyo, Buika from B.B. King Blues in Times Square, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band from Blue Note Hawaii, the sultry Dee Dee Bridgewater from Blue Note Napa, the Ron Carter Quartet from Blue Note New York and pianist Fred Hersch from Blue Note Beijing.
 

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http://www.npr.org/2016/12/30/506450056/toast-of-the-nation-2017?utm_source=npr_newsletter
 

SURAYA MOHAMED
END CLASS=”BUCKETWRAP BYLINE” ID=”RES506460399″ PREVIEWTITLE=”BYLINES”
FROM

END CLASS=”STATION” END CLASS=”STORY-META__TWO”
END ID=”STORY-META” CLASS=”STORY-META HAS-BYLINE HAS-ORG”

 
The Fred Hersch Trio performs at Blue Note Beijing on Oct. 28, 2016.
Zhang Dongdong
The New Year holiday tradition continues with the Toast of the Nation jazz party. Spirited, improvised and swinging, each hour was recorded live at Blue Note venues throughout the country and the world.

A BLOG SUPREME
Toast Of The Nation 2016

With a new format this year, there are no countdowns to midnight. Instead, you can enjoy six solid hours of music, right for any time of the day or night — complete with festive Happy New Year messages throughout. Hosted by Christian McBride, this is the perfect complement to your holiday festivities.
Hear Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau from Blue Note Tokyo, Buika from B.B. King Blues in Times Square, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band from Blue Note Hawaii, the sultry Dee Dee Bridgewater from Blue Note Napa, the Ron Carter Quartet from Blue Note New York and pianist Fred Hersch from Blue Note Beijing.
 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/arts/digitizing-radio-unnameable-a-free-form-1960s-crossroads.html?mwrsm=Facebook
Digitizing ‘Radio Unnameable,’ a Free-Form 1960s Crossroads
By COLIN MOYNIHANDEC. 28, 2016
close story-meta

Bob Fass in 1972. This image is in the Bob Fass archive, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Donal F. Holway/The New York Times
When the counterculture swept through America in the 1960s, few places were closer to the action than the studios of WBAI in Manhattan, where Bob Fass manned the microphone at midnight for his show, “Radio Unnameable.”
Bob Dylan discussed music there. Abbie Hoffman spoke about “the politics of confrontation.” Hunter S. Thompson described introducing Ken Kesey to the Hells Angels.
Now Columbia University is preparing to inventory some 10,000 hours of recordings from the show that it bought earlier this year to preserve a record of what such musicians, political firebrands and freethinkers were saying at formative points in their careers.
“We have taken on a major audio archive of an outsider figure who was positioned uniquely at a critical moment in American history,” said Sean M. Quimby, the director of Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “At the end of the day, this is a huge corpus of data that will used by historians.”
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
Most of the recordings purchased from Mr. Fass are on fragile quarter-inch acetate or mylar tape that is already deteriorating. Curators at Columbia are planning to transfer the broadcasts to digital files and have started a crowdfunding page to defray that cost.
Mr. Quimby said the show had functioned as “a sort of crossroads” of ideas that anticipated the unscripted communication and immediacy of contemporary social media. Indeed, Mr. Fass’s listeners sometimes turned to the show to spread word of events they had just witnessed or which were about to unfold.
In 1968 callers recounted how police officers swung batons at participants in a springtime celebration organized by the Youth International Party inside Grand Central Terminal. Twenty years later callers described officers assembling at Tompkins Square Park just before a melee with people protesting a curfew there.
Mr. Fass is the longest-serving host on WBAI, which for decades has been known as an outpost for leftist politics as well as a home for a variety of arts programming. His improvisational approach is credited with helping to create free-form radio, and he has said that feeling a connection with his unseen listeners was always important to him.
Each night a steady stream of voices called into the WBAI phone lines from across a largely silent city to ask questions, offer opinions and bear witness to life in New York City. People phoned in to discuss a surprise snowfall or the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. One man called from his apartment to say that he had swallowed pills and was killing himself. Two New York City firefighters, strangely antagonistic fans of the show, called anonymously for years, telling Mr. Fass and his guests to “go back to Cuba.”
Mr. Fass sometimes used the airwaves to rally his listeners to action. One event he organized was a “sweep in” in 1967 to clean trash on the Lower East Side. “Amid chants of ‘Love,’ the clash of cymbals and the throb of bongo drums, about 200 young people plied brooms, mops, dust cloths and shovels yesterday,” The New York Times reported, adding, “One group attacked a large mound of broken wood and plaster in front of a tenement house while astounded men watched from windows of the Department of Welfare shelter across the street.”
Many of the recordings, including one that described the cleanup, were thrown out by WBAI in 1977 after Mr. Fass was banned from the air for five years as a result of an internal dispute of the sort that has periodically convulsed the station. Mr. Fass recovered the recordings from the trash, then stored them in the attic of his house on Staten Island. Later, a friend, Caryl Ratner, arranged for them to be placed in a climate-controlled warehouse. Several years ago two filmmakers, Jessica Wolfson and Paul Lovelace, along with Mitch Blank, a longtime music cataloger, transferred some tapes to a digital format for use in a documentary about Mr. Fass.
That material turned over to Columbia offers a preview of the wider trove. It includes performances by musicians like Muddy Waters and Phil Ochs. There are also conversations with the poet Allen Ginsberg and the boxer Rubin Carter. Some tapes contain Mr. Fass’s reports from the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in which he narrated turbulent conflicts between the police, National Guard troops and protesters in Chicago. “You can hear them — you can hear the reports of the gas grenades all up and down the streets,” he says at one point as booms and shouts echo in the background. “The crowd is being pushed back, and the gas is coming.”
Mr. Fass, 83, has not been inside the WBAI studio recently and now broadcasts the show over the telephone or from a studio inside his home. He still draws callers, though perhaps not at the volume he did several decades ago.
In a phone interview, he said the tapes that went to Columbia included recordings describing the takeover in 1968 of buildings there by students protesting the construction of a school gymnasium in a public park and the school’s affiliation with military researchers. Perhaps, he suggested, those recordings would resonate with contemporary students.
“When history is recovered it has a way of influencing the present,” Mr. Fass said. “I hope students at Columbia are informed by the compassion of what came before them.”
 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/arts/digitizing-radio-unnameable-a-free-form-1960s-crossroads.html?mwrsm=Facebook
Digitizing ‘Radio Unnameable,’ a Free-Form 1960s Crossroads
By COLIN MOYNIHANDEC. 28, 2016
close story-meta

Bob Fass in 1972. This image is in the Bob Fass archive, at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Donal F. Holway/The New York Times
When the counterculture swept through America in the 1960s, few places were closer to the action than the studios of WBAI in Manhattan, where Bob Fass manned the microphone at midnight for his show, “Radio Unnameable.”
Bob Dylan discussed music there. Abbie Hoffman spoke about “the politics of confrontation.” Hunter S. Thompson described introducing Ken Kesey to the Hells Angels.
Now Columbia University is preparing to inventory some 10,000 hours of recordings from the show that it bought earlier this year to preserve a record of what such musicians, political firebrands and freethinkers were saying at formative points in their careers.
“We have taken on a major audio archive of an outsider figure who was positioned uniquely at a critical moment in American history,” said Sean M. Quimby, the director of Columbia’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. “At the end of the day, this is a huge corpus of data that will used by historians.”
close story-body close supplemental
close story-body-supplemental
Most of the recordings purchased from Mr. Fass are on fragile quarter-inch acetate or mylar tape that is already deteriorating. Curators at Columbia are planning to transfer the broadcasts to digital files and have started a crowdfunding page to defray that cost.
Mr. Quimby said the show had functioned as “a sort of crossroads” of ideas that anticipated the unscripted communication and immediacy of contemporary social media. Indeed, Mr. Fass’s listeners sometimes turned to the show to spread word of events they had just witnessed or which were about to unfold.
In 1968 callers recounted how police officers swung batons at participants in a springtime celebration organized by the Youth International Party inside Grand Central Terminal. Twenty years later callers described officers assembling at Tompkins Square Park just before a melee with people protesting a curfew there.
Mr. Fass is the longest-serving host on WBAI, which for decades has been known as an outpost for leftist politics as well as a home for a variety of arts programming. His improvisational approach is credited with helping to create free-form radio, and he has said that feeling a connection with his unseen listeners was always important to him.
Each night a steady stream of voices called into the WBAI phone lines from across a largely silent city to ask questions, offer opinions and bear witness to life in New York City. People phoned in to discuss a surprise snowfall or the resignation of Richard M. Nixon. One man called from his apartment to say that he had swallowed pills and was killing himself. Two New York City firefighters, strangely antagonistic fans of the show, called anonymously for years, telling Mr. Fass and his guests to “go back to Cuba.”
Mr. Fass sometimes used the airwaves to rally his listeners to action. One event he organized was a “sweep in” in 1967 to clean trash on the Lower East Side. “Amid chants of ‘Love,’ the clash of cymbals and the throb of bongo drums, about 200 young people plied brooms, mops, dust cloths and shovels yesterday,” The New York Times reported, adding, “One group attacked a large mound of broken wood and plaster in front of a tenement house while astounded men watched from windows of the Department of Welfare shelter across the street.”
Many of the recordings, including one that described the cleanup, were thrown out by WBAI in 1977 after Mr. Fass was banned from the air for five years as a result of an internal dispute of the sort that has periodically convulsed the station. Mr. Fass recovered the recordings from the trash, then stored them in the attic of his house on Staten Island. Later, a friend, Caryl Ratner, arranged for them to be placed in a climate-controlled warehouse. Several years ago two filmmakers, Jessica Wolfson and Paul Lovelace, along with Mitch Blank, a longtime music cataloger, transferred some tapes to a digital format for use in a documentary about Mr. Fass.
That material turned over to Columbia offers a preview of the wider trove. It includes performances by musicians like Muddy Waters and Phil Ochs. There are also conversations with the poet Allen Ginsberg and the boxer Rubin Carter. Some tapes contain Mr. Fass’s reports from the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in which he narrated turbulent conflicts between the police, National Guard troops and protesters in Chicago. “You can hear them — you can hear the reports of the gas grenades all up and down the streets,” he says at one point as booms and shouts echo in the background. “The crowd is being pushed back, and the gas is coming.”
Mr. Fass, 83, has not been inside the WBAI studio recently and now broadcasts the show over the telephone or from a studio inside his home. He still draws callers, though perhaps not at the volume he did several decades ago.
In a phone interview, he said the tapes that went to Columbia included recordings describing the takeover in 1968 of buildings there by students protesting the construction of a school gymnasium in a public park and the school’s affiliation with military researchers. Perhaps, he suggested, those recordings would resonate with contemporary students.
“When history is recovered it has a way of influencing the present,” Mr. Fass said. “I hope students at Columbia are informed by the compassion of what came before them.”
 

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