Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed

http://www.robertfeder.com/2016/12/14/wfmt-expands-rebrands-jazz-network/
 
WFMT expands, rebrands Jazz Network

Jazz Network hosts John Hill, Neil Tesser, Dee Alexander and Dave Schwan
 
WFMT Radio Network, the global radio syndication division of Chicago-based Window to the World Communications, announced plans this week to launch a new national jazz music network.
Starting January 10, the newly branded Jazz Network will originate from Chicago and feature four new hosts — John Hill, Neil Tesser, Dee Alexander and Dave Schwan. For 63 hours each week, they will showcase a wide range of jazz recordings, “including more new releases, complemented by unique anecdotes and insights into the music,” according to the network.
 
Though carried on more than 300 radio stations in 28 states and in Puerto Rico and China, none of the programming is expected to air on the company’s classical and fine arts station WFMT FM 98.7, according to program director David Polk. Plans for the Jazz Network to be heard locally in Chicago are in development.
 
Since the 1990s WFMT Radio Network has syndicated a jazz format, modeled after its Beethoven Network classical music service, originally produced and hosted from the Bay Area by Bob Parlocha, who died in March 2015.
 
“We are excited to put jazz front-and-center in the WFMT Radio Network’s portfolio of globally syndicated arts radio programs,” Dan Schmidt, CEO of Window to the World Communications, said in a statement.
 
“Chicago is one of the world’s most important jazz cities, from the days when Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines and other jazz greats called the city home almost a century ago to today’s 

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https://www.wired.com/2016/12/shinola-runwell-turntable/
 
Shinola’s Quest to Make the Best Turntable You’ve Ever Heard
any images in the post content will be duplicated here as well

Generated in 0.626 ms David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
If you want to know what’s coming next from Shinola, the hipster-chic brand of watches, bikes, and seemingly all things leather, walk into the company’s store in midtown Detroit. Go through the minimalist cafe; around the table of branded footballs, briefcases, and ping-pong paddles; and past the jewelry case. Then look right, through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass.
That’s where I find Steve Welborn¹, a quiet guy with wispy facial hair and a navy hoodie. He’s standing in front of a jig, a screwdriver in his right hand and about a thousand bucks’ worth of parts in a box. He’s assembling Shinola’s inaugural audio product, the Runwell Turntable, over and over and over again. Someone starts a timer. Welborn grabs four metal feet from the box and screws them into the Runwell’s plinth. Then he installs power transformer and a fist-sized motor, leaving the screws just short of tight so he can easily disassemble it later. The first time he built a Runwell, it took him 20 minutes. This time, he’s trying to beat his record of nine.

Alex Rosson. David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
 
Eventually, turntable assembly will occur at the Henry Ford Academy’s School for Creative Studies, where Shinola’s corporate offices fill the fourth and fifth floors. By then Welborn will have swapped his hoodie for a Shinola smock. For now, he’s working in this fishbowl. Parts arrive daily, from all over the country and world, and there’s only room for one day’s worth of stuff. So every day, everything has to go. The team’s first goal is to build 40 Runwells per day. Soon, it’ll be 60. Then 90, all of them assembled by Welborn and the people watching him rehearse.
Alex Rosson, Shinola’s 37-year-old director of audio products, watches from behind his computer. His long, dark hair is tucked behind his ears, and his tidy beard, glasses, jeans, and white sneakers would fit in at any Silicon Valley startup. Rosson is reviewing plans for the cartridge, the mechanism that turns the needle’s vibrations into an audio signal, that he’s designing from scratch rather than sourcing from elsewhere. He looks up and asks for a time check on the Runwell build. Welborn is five minutes into the job. “Better hurry up,” Rosson says, only half joking.
Shinola planned to make audio gear from the very beginning, and Rosson has dreamed of building turntables since his days as a teenage DJ. The company has spent more than a year enlisting partners, training employees, tweaking designs. This is only the start of Shinola Audio. Rosson came from Audeze, which builds headphones for discerning and deep-pocketed audiophiles. He wants to bring his expertise to a broader audience, and quickly. Shinola built its rep creating factory jobs, and the more products it sells, the more jobs Rosson can bring to Detroit.
But first, he wants to make the best turntable you’ve ever heard, and sell it to you for $2,500.

David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
Detroit-made, sort of
Unless you’re in your 80s or a big fan of the Steve Martin classic The Jerk, you probably don’t know much about the origin of the word Shinola. It was a World War II-era brand of shoe polish perhaps best known for the insult “you don’t know shit from Shinola.” The name struck Tom Kartsotis, the ultra-wealthy founder of Fossil, as he was pondering his next project in 2011. It communicated something rugged and blue-collar, something distinctly American.
As much as Kartsotis wanted Shinola to create stuff, he also wanted it to create jobs. American jobs. American manufacturing jobs, in cities like Detroit, and soon Chicago, and maybe the Bronx after that. Shinola’s building was once a General Motors design studio, and many of its employees once built cars. Now they build watches, bikes, jewelry, notebooks, clocks, and purses that command premium prices because of the whole “made in Detroit” thing.
In theory, it’s a perfect system: Make expensive products for people who want to feel they’re helping rebuild American manufacturing and a once great city. Kartsotis has always framed the idea as part capitalism, part charity. Condescending? Maybe, which explains why critics argue that it’s disingenuous to call Shinola a Detroit company when its owner, Bedrock Manufacturing, and founder are in Texas. They find its use of employees in ads cynical, and decry what Rebekah Modrak of the University of Michigan calls “calculated ‘authenticity.’” Modrak calls Shinola’s stuff “bougie crap” that celebrates the image of the working class at prices only the affluent can afford. It’s hard to argue with her when you realize Shinola charges $95 for an iPhone case, $150 for a football, and $400 for a pocket knife.
This is the same company that, according to lore, found that customers who would pay $5 for a pencil would pay $10 if it was made in America and $15 if it was made in Detroit. Bridget Russo, Shinola’s chief marketing officer, grimaces when I mention this. “It was a focus group in Dallas of a small group of people,” she says. “Yes, that conversation was had, but it wasn’t like we went out and got a research company!” Besides, she says, there’s nothing disingenuous about Shinola’s marketing strategy if it’s truthful. “As long as we continue to walk our talk,” she says, referring to the company’s bringing jobs to Detroit, “which today we absolutely do, I don’t see a problem with it.”
Shinola isn’t alone in selling a story, of course. Nike pays billions to associate itself with elite athletes, PBR bought hipster cred with a massive ad campaign, and the popularity of Beats has little to do with sound quality. “Millennials tend to be more interested in a brand’s story than its quality,” according to a study from public relations firm MMWPR. Or, as Sammer Aboud, managing director at advertising giant Ogilvy and Mather, wrote last year, “the best way to stand out in the crowded, competitive marketplace for luxury experiences and goods is to have the best story.”
The company defined its story and its look from the start. “We put together a room of basically what it looked like, what it smelled like, what products could be like,” says creative director Daniel Caudill. “There was a lot of leather, a lot of wood.” Everything was meant to feel warm, inviting, touchable, and obvious in its craftsmanship. Shinola applies that aesthetic to everything it does, from manufacturing to marketing. It’s all so highly curated. The company worked with esteemed bike designer Sky Yaeger on its line of Runwell bicycles. Pamela Love, a well-known jewelry designer, worked on Shinola’s earrings and bracelets. The respected Swiss watchmaker Ronda provides so many components for Shinola watches that the Federal Trade Commission asked Shinola to stop marketing the watches with the phrase “Where American is Made.” Now the words “Built in Detroit” appear with the addendum, “with Swiss and imported parts.” Russo says customers don’t seem to care about the distinction.
About those customers. The average Shinola buyer is about 35, affluent, and probably male—though that’s changing, Russo says, with the addition of jewelry and other products. Bill Clinton once bragged about buying 14 Shinola watches, and Barack Obama gave one to David Cameron when he was the British prime minister. The company did more than $100 million in revenue last year. isn’t profitable, but it’s constantly opening new stores (it has 19), launching new product lines, and hiring employees. More than 600 people work there, including 380 in Detroit.
Caudill says sees Shinola’s brand as signifying something analog and long-lasting, so don’t expect any smartphones or apps. Audio products always made sense, given Detroit’s deep musical heritage, and a turntable was a natural place to start. They’re timeless, and they’re gorgeous.
It helps that vinyl is hip right now, and Shinola is nothing if not hip. Vinyl represents 12 percent of the physical music business, according to Nielsen. Part of the reason for this resurgence is the Millennial generation’s desire for things they can touch, own, and physically share. “Having the ability to own a higher quality, yet more limited version of something you already love,” says Ross Shotland, founder of the record label Enjoy the Ride Records, “is a really special feeling, which is hard to replicate.” They’re buying records for the same reason they buy iPhone cases or Air Jordans: because their record collection represents them as a person. It tells a story.

David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
Listening party
A few minutes after we meet, Rosson explains how to build a turntable. He walks through the storage area just beyond public view, tearing open boxes of parts and explaining how they go together. Top plates, slip mats, transformers, 130 parts in all. Most come from within the United States, which seems to both please and exhaust Rosson. “The hard part was the coordination,” he says, “not just designing and engineering the thing.” Even now, right before the turntable goes on sale, he’s still working with an outfit in Minnesota, the same one that makes Shinola’s watch boxes, to refine and perfect the wood trim so it’s the same every time. “You’ll get suppliers who send you stuff, and you’re like man, this is perfect. And you say OK, send me 20. And they send you 20 and it’s like, oh, this is a mess.” He decided some things, like the cartridge, were just easier to build himself.
Each Runwell turntable contains about $1,000 in parts alone. Rosson points at each piece on a finished prototype and names its origin. Only a couple of wires and decorative bits come from overseas. By his math, the Runwell Turntable is 86 percent American-made. “We could say it’s made in the USA,” he says, but he’s happy to avoid dealing with the potential headaches from people pointing out the other 14 percent.
The Runwell’s is based on the VPI Classic, a beloved 70s-style turntable from VPI Industries in New Jersey. Harry Weisfeld, VPI’s founder, has been building turntables for decades and says the collaboration was a new experience. “When I began,” he says, “a turntable looked like a turntable. You look at what we’re making now, it’s like the lunar landing module!” He and Rosson wanted to build something modern. Playing to people’s nostalgia works; making something kitschy and retro doesn’t.
The tech underpinning the Runwell is what excites Rosson. Late in our conversation, he seems to decide to tell me something he’d planned to keep hidden, and reaches down and yanks out the tray containing the turntable’s audio jacks. The Runwell, he says, uses modular electronics that he plans to open source. Rosson imagines people adding pre-amps, Sonos and Chromecast support, SD card encoding, even modern DJ tools. “We’re trying to make it flexible so we can talk to audiophiles,” he says, “but my goal is to make something that’s simple, innovative, and has a way to expand on it.” He wants to sell you a turntable that you’ll use for decades, upgrading it as you like.
Aesthetically, Rosson went a slightly more classic route.

David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
The Runwell features domestic white oak and machined aluminum, and weighs 48 pounds—heavy enough that the company is rethinking the packaging, because the heavy load failed FedEx shipping safety tests. It’s belt-driven, because that’s what VPI does. You can get it in black, but Rosson prefers the natural oak. Everything else is chrome and gold. Rosson, of course, has a few concerns, like the rubber pads on the feet. He’d rather they were inset, not glued.
After so many months of designing the product, training the employees, and honing the elaborate supply chain, the turntable is done. Metaphorically, anyway: Welborn and his colleagues in Detroit still have to build them and ship them. But Rosson’s already pondering what’s next. He’s already thinking about a direct-drive, DJ-focused turntable, though that’s a couple of years out. “I’m done with turntables for a while.”
Before I leave, he returns to his computer and shows me what’s coming sooner: he has sketches of headphones, earbuds, speakers, and more. Some will be a few hundred dollars, some a few thousand. The more products he can make, Rosson reckons, the more products Shinola can sell, and the more jobs it can create. There’s that virtuous cycle again.
¹ UPDATE: Corrected to the proper spelling of Steve Welborn’s name.
 

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https://www.wired.com/2016/12/shinola-runwell-turntable/
 
Shinola’s Quest to Make the Best Turntable You’ve Ever Heard
any images in the post content will be duplicated here as well

Generated in 0.626 ms David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
If you want to know what’s coming next from Shinola, the hipster-chic brand of watches, bikes, and seemingly all things leather, walk into the company’s store in midtown Detroit. Go through the minimalist cafe; around the table of branded footballs, briefcases, and ping-pong paddles; and past the jewelry case. Then look right, through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass.
That’s where I find Steve Welborn¹, a quiet guy with wispy facial hair and a navy hoodie. He’s standing in front of a jig, a screwdriver in his right hand and about a thousand bucks’ worth of parts in a box. He’s assembling Shinola’s inaugural audio product, the Runwell Turntable, over and over and over again. Someone starts a timer. Welborn grabs four metal feet from the box and screws them into the Runwell’s plinth. Then he installs power transformer and a fist-sized motor, leaving the screws just short of tight so he can easily disassemble it later. The first time he built a Runwell, it took him 20 minutes. This time, he’s trying to beat his record of nine.

Alex Rosson. David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
 
Eventually, turntable assembly will occur at the Henry Ford Academy’s School for Creative Studies, where Shinola’s corporate offices fill the fourth and fifth floors. By then Welborn will have swapped his hoodie for a Shinola smock. For now, he’s working in this fishbowl. Parts arrive daily, from all over the country and world, and there’s only room for one day’s worth of stuff. So every day, everything has to go. The team’s first goal is to build 40 Runwells per day. Soon, it’ll be 60. Then 90, all of them assembled by Welborn and the people watching him rehearse.
Alex Rosson, Shinola’s 37-year-old director of audio products, watches from behind his computer. His long, dark hair is tucked behind his ears, and his tidy beard, glasses, jeans, and white sneakers would fit in at any Silicon Valley startup. Rosson is reviewing plans for the cartridge, the mechanism that turns the needle’s vibrations into an audio signal, that he’s designing from scratch rather than sourcing from elsewhere. He looks up and asks for a time check on the Runwell build. Welborn is five minutes into the job. “Better hurry up,” Rosson says, only half joking.
Shinola planned to make audio gear from the very beginning, and Rosson has dreamed of building turntables since his days as a teenage DJ. The company has spent more than a year enlisting partners, training employees, tweaking designs. This is only the start of Shinola Audio. Rosson came from Audeze, which builds headphones for discerning and deep-pocketed audiophiles. He wants to bring his expertise to a broader audience, and quickly. Shinola built its rep creating factory jobs, and the more products it sells, the more jobs Rosson can bring to Detroit.
But first, he wants to make the best turntable you’ve ever heard, and sell it to you for $2,500.

David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
Detroit-made, sort of
Unless you’re in your 80s or a big fan of the Steve Martin classic The Jerk, you probably don’t know much about the origin of the word Shinola. It was a World War II-era brand of shoe polish perhaps best known for the insult “you don’t know shit from Shinola.” The name struck Tom Kartsotis, the ultra-wealthy founder of Fossil, as he was pondering his next project in 2011. It communicated something rugged and blue-collar, something distinctly American.
As much as Kartsotis wanted Shinola to create stuff, he also wanted it to create jobs. American jobs. American manufacturing jobs, in cities like Detroit, and soon Chicago, and maybe the Bronx after that. Shinola’s building was once a General Motors design studio, and many of its employees once built cars. Now they build watches, bikes, jewelry, notebooks, clocks, and purses that command premium prices because of the whole “made in Detroit” thing.
In theory, it’s a perfect system: Make expensive products for people who want to feel they’re helping rebuild American manufacturing and a once great city. Kartsotis has always framed the idea as part capitalism, part charity. Condescending? Maybe, which explains why critics argue that it’s disingenuous to call Shinola a Detroit company when its owner, Bedrock Manufacturing, and founder are in Texas. They find its use of employees in ads cynical, and decry what Rebekah Modrak of the University of Michigan calls “calculated ‘authenticity.’” Modrak calls Shinola’s stuff “bougie crap” that celebrates the image of the working class at prices only the affluent can afford. It’s hard to argue with her when you realize Shinola charges $95 for an iPhone case, $150 for a football, and $400 for a pocket knife.
This is the same company that, according to lore, found that customers who would pay $5 for a pencil would pay $10 if it was made in America and $15 if it was made in Detroit. Bridget Russo, Shinola’s chief marketing officer, grimaces when I mention this. “It was a focus group in Dallas of a small group of people,” she says. “Yes, that conversation was had, but it wasn’t like we went out and got a research company!” Besides, she says, there’s nothing disingenuous about Shinola’s marketing strategy if it’s truthful. “As long as we continue to walk our talk,” she says, referring to the company’s bringing jobs to Detroit, “which today we absolutely do, I don’t see a problem with it.”
Shinola isn’t alone in selling a story, of course. Nike pays billions to associate itself with elite athletes, PBR bought hipster cred with a massive ad campaign, and the popularity of Beats has little to do with sound quality. “Millennials tend to be more interested in a brand’s story than its quality,” according to a study from public relations firm MMWPR. Or, as Sammer Aboud, managing director at advertising giant Ogilvy and Mather, wrote last year, “the best way to stand out in the crowded, competitive marketplace for luxury experiences and goods is to have the best story.”
The company defined its story and its look from the start. “We put together a room of basically what it looked like, what it smelled like, what products could be like,” says creative director Daniel Caudill. “There was a lot of leather, a lot of wood.” Everything was meant to feel warm, inviting, touchable, and obvious in its craftsmanship. Shinola applies that aesthetic to everything it does, from manufacturing to marketing. It’s all so highly curated. The company worked with esteemed bike designer Sky Yaeger on its line of Runwell bicycles. Pamela Love, a well-known jewelry designer, worked on Shinola’s earrings and bracelets. The respected Swiss watchmaker Ronda provides so many components for Shinola watches that the Federal Trade Commission asked Shinola to stop marketing the watches with the phrase “Where American is Made.” Now the words “Built in Detroit” appear with the addendum, “with Swiss and imported parts.” Russo says customers don’t seem to care about the distinction.
About those customers. The average Shinola buyer is about 35, affluent, and probably male—though that’s changing, Russo says, with the addition of jewelry and other products. Bill Clinton once bragged about buying 14 Shinola watches, and Barack Obama gave one to David Cameron when he was the British prime minister. The company did more than $100 million in revenue last year. isn’t profitable, but it’s constantly opening new stores (it has 19), launching new product lines, and hiring employees. More than 600 people work there, including 380 in Detroit.
Caudill says sees Shinola’s brand as signifying something analog and long-lasting, so don’t expect any smartphones or apps. Audio products always made sense, given Detroit’s deep musical heritage, and a turntable was a natural place to start. They’re timeless, and they’re gorgeous.
It helps that vinyl is hip right now, and Shinola is nothing if not hip. Vinyl represents 12 percent of the physical music business, according to Nielsen. Part of the reason for this resurgence is the Millennial generation’s desire for things they can touch, own, and physically share. “Having the ability to own a higher quality, yet more limited version of something you already love,” says Ross Shotland, founder of the record label Enjoy the Ride Records, “is a really special feeling, which is hard to replicate.” They’re buying records for the same reason they buy iPhone cases or Air Jordans: because their record collection represents them as a person. It tells a story.

David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
Listening party
A few minutes after we meet, Rosson explains how to build a turntable. He walks through the storage area just beyond public view, tearing open boxes of parts and explaining how they go together. Top plates, slip mats, transformers, 130 parts in all. Most come from within the United States, which seems to both please and exhaust Rosson. “The hard part was the coordination,” he says, “not just designing and engineering the thing.” Even now, right before the turntable goes on sale, he’s still working with an outfit in Minnesota, the same one that makes Shinola’s watch boxes, to refine and perfect the wood trim so it’s the same every time. “You’ll get suppliers who send you stuff, and you’re like man, this is perfect. And you say OK, send me 20. And they send you 20 and it’s like, oh, this is a mess.” He decided some things, like the cartridge, were just easier to build himself.
Each Runwell turntable contains about $1,000 in parts alone. Rosson points at each piece on a finished prototype and names its origin. Only a couple of wires and decorative bits come from overseas. By his math, the Runwell Turntable is 86 percent American-made. “We could say it’s made in the USA,” he says, but he’s happy to avoid dealing with the potential headaches from people pointing out the other 14 percent.
The Runwell’s is based on the VPI Classic, a beloved 70s-style turntable from VPI Industries in New Jersey. Harry Weisfeld, VPI’s founder, has been building turntables for decades and says the collaboration was a new experience. “When I began,” he says, “a turntable looked like a turntable. You look at what we’re making now, it’s like the lunar landing module!” He and Rosson wanted to build something modern. Playing to people’s nostalgia works; making something kitschy and retro doesn’t.
The tech underpinning the Runwell is what excites Rosson. Late in our conversation, he seems to decide to tell me something he’d planned to keep hidden, and reaches down and yanks out the tray containing the turntable’s audio jacks. The Runwell, he says, uses modular electronics that he plans to open source. Rosson imagines people adding pre-amps, Sonos and Chromecast support, SD card encoding, even modern DJ tools. “We’re trying to make it flexible so we can talk to audiophiles,” he says, “but my goal is to make something that’s simple, innovative, and has a way to expand on it.” He wants to sell you a turntable that you’ll use for decades, upgrading it as you like.
Aesthetically, Rosson went a slightly more classic route.

David Brandon Geeting for WIRED
The Runwell features domestic white oak and machined aluminum, and weighs 48 pounds—heavy enough that the company is rethinking the packaging, because the heavy load failed FedEx shipping safety tests. It’s belt-driven, because that’s what VPI does. You can get it in black, but Rosson prefers the natural oak. Everything else is chrome and gold. Rosson, of course, has a few concerns, like the rubber pads on the feet. He’d rather they were inset, not glued.
After so many months of designing the product, training the employees, and honing the elaborate supply chain, the turntable is done. Metaphorically, anyway: Welborn and his colleagues in Detroit still have to build them and ship them. But Rosson’s already pondering what’s next. He’s already thinking about a direct-drive, DJ-focused turntable, though that’s a couple of years out. “I’m done with turntables for a while.”
Before I leave, he returns to his computer and shows me what’s coming sooner: he has sketches of headphones, earbuds, speakers, and more. Some will be a few hundred dollars, some a few thousand. The more products he can make, Rosson reckons, the more products Shinola can sell, and the more jobs it can create. There’s that virtuous cycle again.
¹ UPDATE: Corrected to the proper spelling of Steve Welborn’s name.
 

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

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/music/jazz-elders-best-of-2016.html?emc=edit_tnt_20161214
 
In Jazz, Listen to the Timeless Elders
By NATE CHINENDEC. 14, 2016
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The Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés is among the many jazz elders who are still very active. Chad Batka for The New York Times
Among the things often said of Ron Carter — that he’s one of the most influential and widely recorded bassists in history, a distinguished professor of music, a multiple Grammy winner and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master — there’s one that may not be said often enough. The man knows how to wear a suit.
Mr. Carter, 79, recently confirmed this fact in the holiday issue of GQ Style, appearing in a fashion spread along with peers like the pianists McCoy Tyner, 78, and Herbie Hancock, 76. The images, dramatic and au courant, underscore a long-held truth that bears repeating: In jazz, it’s standard practice not only to survive but to thrive, with style, in the late phases of a career. In many cases it’s possible to access deeper currents of poise and insight, creating work that couldn’t have happened without such a wealth of experience.
This year was especially full of vital, often magisterial statements by jazz musicians of a certain age. One of the finest jazz albums of 2016 was “The Declaration of Independence,” a culmination and an advance for the drummer Andrew Cyrille, who is now 77. The most transfixing performance I saw was by one of Mr. Cyrille’s former associates, the 87-year-old pianist and free-jazz lodestar Cecil Taylor, as part of his residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Also in an avant-garde vein, the alto saxophonist, flutist and composer Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize for music in the spring, the same month that he released a stern but enveloping new album, “Old Locks and Irregular Verbs.” Anthony Braxton, another saxophonist and composer in his early 70s, was an eminent draw at the Big Ears Festival.
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Big Ears attendees also got to see the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by the nonagenarian saxophonist Marshall Allen, and a set by the trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith drawing from one of his two superserious recent albums. (He turns 75 this month.) Meanwhile, the composer, pianist and arranger Carla Bley, 80, shepherded the release of both her own refined trio album and a posthumous grace note by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, which she leads in his memory. (The pianist Geri Allen will fill in as its conductor at NYC Winter Jazzfest, on Jan. 10 at Le Poisson Rouge.)

 
The alto saxophonist, flutist and composer Henry Threadgill. John Rogers
At the same time, there were strong, unassuming albums rooted in a consensus modern-jazz language, notably from the tenor saxophonists Benny Golson, 87, and George Coleman, 81. The pianist Randy Weston, at 90, had his archives acquired by Harvard, even as he released a grand new suite. And the honest work continued for bebop sages like the pianist Barry Harris, who just turned 87, the singer Sheila Jordan, 88, and the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who celebrated 90 in the fall.
Jazz is an art of living traditions and accumulated wisdom, so it’s only natural that its elders remain central to the conversation. Extolling their ongoing relevance doesn’t take anything away from younger musicians. Instead, it emphasizes continuity, one of the most important values in what we call the jazz tradition. There is still no way to become a serious jazz artist without some formative contact across generations: It’s how the language best survives, even in an age of encyclopedic access.

 
The keyboardist Herbie Hancock. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
At least in this regard, there’s reason to draw a contrast between jazz and other genres, some of which have strained to accommodate the aging of its artists and audience. You can be a young rapper on the rise without a deep and obsessive knowledge of the hip-hop pantheon. (It’s probably helpful not to have it, actually.) What it means to be a hip-hop elder statesman, meanwhile, is still open to review. Emeritus status and crossover celebrity, as embodied by Ice-T? Genial avuncularity, as embodied by Snoop Dogg? Torchbearing rectitude, as practiced by Rakim and others, who have found traction as oldies acts?
Rakim is 48, a year older than Jay Z, whose most visible recent turn in the spotlight was as the offending catalyst for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” The ruthless cycle of obsolescence in hip-hop is all the more reason to marvel at this year’s great comeback album, “We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service” by A Tribe Called Quest.
At once an urgent political broadside and a memorial to one of its own (the rapper Phife Dawg, who died in March), it’s an album that refuses nostalgia without revoking a well-defined group identity. It seems pertinent that Q-Tip, Tribe’s incisive frontman and chief producer, has long had an available model for how to stay fresh in the face of artistic maturity: seasoned jazz musicians like Mr. Carter, who played a bass line on A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 breakthrough, “The Low End Theory.”
Tangibly, the Rolling Stones recently rediscovered a similar liberation in the blues. Their loose but committed new album, “Blue & Lonesome,” is a fascinating study, the product of a bunch of old guys catching up to the cranky enthusiasms of their youth. The Stones also played Desert Trip, the music festival and demographic ritual known as “Oldchella.” Their fellow headliners, also in their 70s, included Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters and a new Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan.

 
The pianist Eddie Palmieri. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Most of these aging rock lions have stayed active, on tour if not in the studio. Another, Paul Simon, released a frisky, inventive new album this year, hinting it might be his last. Still, with the dignified exception of Leonard Cohen, who wrote his own epitaph, none of these boomer heroes have been doing work comparable to that in their primes. Given the choice, any Oldchella ticket-holder would have swapped out the roster for previous versions of the same, beamed in from the early ’70s.
Fans of Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson would probably make that trade, too, though Nashville will always profess at least a ceremonial respect for its elders and saints. “My Church,” a tune by this year’s anointed upstart, Maren Morris, makes that point explicit, calling out Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Some jazz musicians have been known to celebrate those same heroes: The guitarist John Scofield, 64, just received a Grammy nomination for his album “Country for Old Men.”

 
The pianist, composer and arranger Carla Bley. Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times
Jazz culture is often accused of fixating on the past. Most of its venerable figures have yielded to those pressures, engaging in re-enactments and tributes. The pianist Eddie Palmieri did one of these around his 1971 album “Harlem River Drive,” this spring, when he was still 79. Another pianist, Chick Corea, evoked moments from his past during an eight-week stand at the Blue Note Jazz Club, for his 75th birthday.
But Mr. Palmieri has also kept his fires burning in a present tense, much like the great Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés, who is 75. And Mr. Corea crowded his club residency with springboards for discovery, mobilizing both longtime associates, like the vibraphonist Gary Burton, and newer ones, like the drummer Marcus Gilmore.

 
The free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
The sly magic of someone like Mr. Corea — or Mr. Valdés, or Mr. Hancock, who this summer gave a tantalizing taste of Afro-futurist fusions to come — is that his powers are undiminished even as the years tick by. What keeps any jazz players of this stature from slipping into irrelevance is a convergence of lived experience and energetic dialogue with their inheritors. This is true of the drummer Jack DeJohnette, the saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd, the trumpeter Tom Harrell and the pianist Kenny Barron, who all released fine albums of intergenerational reach. It’s also true of the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who was a guest of honor, with his younger rhythm team, on the new album by Norah Jones.
And of course it’s true of Mr. Carter, who played on albums in 2016 with a soulful peer, the tenor saxophonist Houston Person, as well as artists who grew up listening to him, like the pianist Ethan Iverson and the trumpeter Jeremy Pelt. Hearing their efforts, the urge is to applaud their devotion to the art form. But you could also imagine how they’ll pose for their photo shoot in 30 years.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/music/jazz-elders-best-of-2016.html?emc=edit_tnt_20161214
 
In Jazz, Listen to the Timeless Elders
By NATE CHINENDEC. 14, 2016
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The Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés is among the many jazz elders who are still very active. Chad Batka for The New York Times
Among the things often said of Ron Carter — that he’s one of the most influential and widely recorded bassists in history, a distinguished professor of music, a multiple Grammy winner and a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master — there’s one that may not be said often enough. The man knows how to wear a suit.
Mr. Carter, 79, recently confirmed this fact in the holiday issue of GQ Style, appearing in a fashion spread along with peers like the pianists McCoy Tyner, 78, and Herbie Hancock, 76. The images, dramatic and au courant, underscore a long-held truth that bears repeating: In jazz, it’s standard practice not only to survive but to thrive, with style, in the late phases of a career. In many cases it’s possible to access deeper currents of poise and insight, creating work that couldn’t have happened without such a wealth of experience.
This year was especially full of vital, often magisterial statements by jazz musicians of a certain age. One of the finest jazz albums of 2016 was “The Declaration of Independence,” a culmination and an advance for the drummer Andrew Cyrille, who is now 77. The most transfixing performance I saw was by one of Mr. Cyrille’s former associates, the 87-year-old pianist and free-jazz lodestar Cecil Taylor, as part of his residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Also in an avant-garde vein, the alto saxophonist, flutist and composer Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize for music in the spring, the same month that he released a stern but enveloping new album, “Old Locks and Irregular Verbs.” Anthony Braxton, another saxophonist and composer in his early 70s, was an eminent draw at the Big Ears Festival.
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Big Ears attendees also got to see the Sun Ra Arkestra, led by the nonagenarian saxophonist Marshall Allen, and a set by the trumpeter-composer Wadada Leo Smith drawing from one of his two superserious recent albums. (He turns 75 this month.) Meanwhile, the composer, pianist and arranger Carla Bley, 80, shepherded the release of both her own refined trio album and a posthumous grace note by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, which she leads in his memory. (The pianist Geri Allen will fill in as its conductor at NYC Winter Jazzfest, on Jan. 10 at Le Poisson Rouge.)

 
The alto saxophonist, flutist and composer Henry Threadgill. John Rogers
At the same time, there were strong, unassuming albums rooted in a consensus modern-jazz language, notably from the tenor saxophonists Benny Golson, 87, and George Coleman, 81. The pianist Randy Weston, at 90, had his archives acquired by Harvard, even as he released a grand new suite. And the honest work continued for bebop sages like the pianist Barry Harris, who just turned 87, the singer Sheila Jordan, 88, and the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who celebrated 90 in the fall.
Jazz is an art of living traditions and accumulated wisdom, so it’s only natural that its elders remain central to the conversation. Extolling their ongoing relevance doesn’t take anything away from younger musicians. Instead, it emphasizes continuity, one of the most important values in what we call the jazz tradition. There is still no way to become a serious jazz artist without some formative contact across generations: It’s how the language best survives, even in an age of encyclopedic access.

 
The keyboardist Herbie Hancock. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
At least in this regard, there’s reason to draw a contrast between jazz and other genres, some of which have strained to accommodate the aging of its artists and audience. You can be a young rapper on the rise without a deep and obsessive knowledge of the hip-hop pantheon. (It’s probably helpful not to have it, actually.) What it means to be a hip-hop elder statesman, meanwhile, is still open to review. Emeritus status and crossover celebrity, as embodied by Ice-T? Genial avuncularity, as embodied by Snoop Dogg? Torchbearing rectitude, as practiced by Rakim and others, who have found traction as oldies acts?
Rakim is 48, a year older than Jay Z, whose most visible recent turn in the spotlight was as the offending catalyst for Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” The ruthless cycle of obsolescence in hip-hop is all the more reason to marvel at this year’s great comeback album, “We Got It From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service” by A Tribe Called Quest.
At once an urgent political broadside and a memorial to one of its own (the rapper Phife Dawg, who died in March), it’s an album that refuses nostalgia without revoking a well-defined group identity. It seems pertinent that Q-Tip, Tribe’s incisive frontman and chief producer, has long had an available model for how to stay fresh in the face of artistic maturity: seasoned jazz musicians like Mr. Carter, who played a bass line on A Tribe Called Quest’s 1991 breakthrough, “The Low End Theory.”
Tangibly, the Rolling Stones recently rediscovered a similar liberation in the blues. Their loose but committed new album, “Blue & Lonesome,” is a fascinating study, the product of a bunch of old guys catching up to the cranky enthusiasms of their youth. The Stones also played Desert Trip, the music festival and demographic ritual known as “Oldchella.” Their fellow headliners, also in their 70s, included Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Roger Waters and a new Nobel laureate, Bob Dylan.

 
The pianist Eddie Palmieri. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
Most of these aging rock lions have stayed active, on tour if not in the studio. Another, Paul Simon, released a frisky, inventive new album this year, hinting it might be his last. Still, with the dignified exception of Leonard Cohen, who wrote his own epitaph, none of these boomer heroes have been doing work comparable to that in their primes. Given the choice, any Oldchella ticket-holder would have swapped out the roster for previous versions of the same, beamed in from the early ’70s.
Fans of Loretta Lynn and Willie Nelson would probably make that trade, too, though Nashville will always profess at least a ceremonial respect for its elders and saints. “My Church,” a tune by this year’s anointed upstart, Maren Morris, makes that point explicit, calling out Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Some jazz musicians have been known to celebrate those same heroes: The guitarist John Scofield, 64, just received a Grammy nomination for his album “Country for Old Men.”

 
The pianist, composer and arranger Carla Bley. Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times
Jazz culture is often accused of fixating on the past. Most of its venerable figures have yielded to those pressures, engaging in re-enactments and tributes. The pianist Eddie Palmieri did one of these around his 1971 album “Harlem River Drive,” this spring, when he was still 79. Another pianist, Chick Corea, evoked moments from his past during an eight-week stand at the Blue Note Jazz Club, for his 75th birthday.
But Mr. Palmieri has also kept his fires burning in a present tense, much like the great Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés, who is 75. And Mr. Corea crowded his club residency with springboards for discovery, mobilizing both longtime associates, like the vibraphonist Gary Burton, and newer ones, like the drummer Marcus Gilmore.

 
The free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
The sly magic of someone like Mr. Corea — or Mr. Valdés, or Mr. Hancock, who this summer gave a tantalizing taste of Afro-futurist fusions to come — is that his powers are undiminished even as the years tick by. What keeps any jazz players of this stature from slipping into irrelevance is a convergence of lived experience and energetic dialogue with their inheritors. This is true of the drummer Jack DeJohnette, the saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd, the trumpeter Tom Harrell and the pianist Kenny Barron, who all released fine albums of intergenerational reach. It’s also true of the saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who was a guest of honor, with his younger rhythm team, on the new album by Norah Jones.
And of course it’s true of Mr. Carter, who played on albums in 2016 with a soulful peer, the tenor saxophonist Houston Person, as well as artists who grew up listening to him, like the pianist Ethan Iverson and the trumpeter Jeremy Pelt. Hearing their efforts, the urge is to applaud their devotion to the art form. But you could also imagine how they’ll pose for their photo shoot in 30 years.

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Tammy Grimes, 1934-2016
 
Tammy Grimes died at the end of October, many years after her celebrity had faded. If you went to the theatre in New York in the sixties you knew who she was: the ineffable sprite with the gingery brandy-snap contralto and the slightly preposterous bohemian hauteur who was born to play high comedy. The English-accented voice was her own invention – she was born in Lynn, Massachusetts – and if you listen to the original cast album of The Littlest Revue (1956), the first show in which she was featured (she had understudied Kim Stanley’s Cherie in Bus Stop on Broadway the year before), you can hear her trying it out: tentatively on her first solo, “Madly in Love,” more confidently on her second, “I’m Glad I’m Not a Man.” She was a cabaret singer as well as an actress; Noël Coward discovered her at Julius Monk’s Downstairs and nabbed her for his play Look After Lulu!, in which she played the first of several notable Coward heroines – she was Elvira in High Spirits, the 1964 musical of Blithe Spirit, and Amanda in a Broadway revival of Private Lives six years later. Strangely, though, her breakthrough role was that of the indomitable Colorado millionairess, raised in rural poverty and later one of the survivors of the Titanic, in Meredith Willson’s 1960 The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I saw her in it and was delighted by her performance; at ten it didn’t occur to me to wonder where a Colorado mountain gal acquired so cultivated a vocal effect. She book-ended the decade with Tony Awards for it and for Private Lives, in a part that surely suited her better. Due to a weird glitch in the rules (since modified), the first of these awards was for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, even though she played the title character in Molly Brown and was rarely off the stage during its running time. At the time only actors billed above the title were eligible for a leading actor or actress nod and, since Grimes was not considered a star in 1960, her name appeared below the title.
 
The Private Lives she performed opposite Brian Bedford was played at breakneck speed; I saw it in its Boston tryout and I remember clearly that it clocked in at almost exactly half an hour for each of the three acts. And though it lacked the depth I found in later productions – especially the one Robin Phillips staged in Stratford, Ontario with Bedford and Maggie Smith – it was uproarious. But the Grimes I had already fallen in love with was the co-star (with Edward Woodward, Beatrice Lillie and Louise Troy) of High Spirits. She was both buoyant and elegant as the insistent, mischievous ghost who sees her husband’s current wife as a rival and plots to reclaim him by tinkering with his automobile. One of my friends points out that though the material is heartless, the musical softens it, and that may explain why I’ve never much enjoyed Blithe Spirit, yet I still enjoy listening to the cast album of High Spirits. Grimes was magical in it (so was Bea Lillie as the medium), and you can hear that magic on the album in her renditions of “You’d Better Love Me,” “Something Tells Me,” “Faster Than Sound,” “Home, Sweet Heaven” and (with Woodward) “I Know Your Heart.” So many songs! (There’s also a trio, “What in the World Did You Want?,” with Woodward and Troy.) Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray must have cherished the opportunity to write for her.
 
After Private Lives Grimes didn’t get a lot of showcase roles, but she did continue to appear on stage, on TV and occasionally in movies. She’s the only actor worth looking at in Stephen Porter’s lethal production of Molière’s Tartuffe, which was televised on Theater in America in 1978 (she played Elmire). And in Peter Hall’s noisy, overwrought mounting of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending on Broadway in 1989, with Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson in the leads, once again she was the sole grounded actor in the company, playing the character of Vee Talbot as a spooked pixie. It was the last time I saw her live. But some part of her lives on in her daughter (by Christopher Plummer), Amanda Plummer, a wildly unconventional actress with a gift for portraying women of frightening intensity – and with a voice that sounds like her mother’s, minus the aristocratic lilt. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but it picked up a little grit on the way. Watching Plummer act is, among other things, a touching way to remember Tammy Grimes. 
 
By
 Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
 
 
 

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Tammy Grimes, 1934-2016
 
Tammy Grimes died at the end of October, many years after her celebrity had faded. If you went to the theatre in New York in the sixties you knew who she was: the ineffable sprite with the gingery brandy-snap contralto and the slightly preposterous bohemian hauteur who was born to play high comedy. The English-accented voice was her own invention – she was born in Lynn, Massachusetts – and if you listen to the original cast album of The Littlest Revue (1956), the first show in which she was featured (she had understudied Kim Stanley’s Cherie in Bus Stop on Broadway the year before), you can hear her trying it out: tentatively on her first solo, “Madly in Love,” more confidently on her second, “I’m Glad I’m Not a Man.” She was a cabaret singer as well as an actress; Noël Coward discovered her at Julius Monk’s Downstairs and nabbed her for his play Look After Lulu!, in which she played the first of several notable Coward heroines – she was Elvira in High Spirits, the 1964 musical of Blithe Spirit, and Amanda in a Broadway revival of Private Lives six years later. Strangely, though, her breakthrough role was that of the indomitable Colorado millionairess, raised in rural poverty and later one of the survivors of the Titanic, in Meredith Willson’s 1960 The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I saw her in it and was delighted by her performance; at ten it didn’t occur to me to wonder where a Colorado mountain gal acquired so cultivated a vocal effect. She book-ended the decade with Tony Awards for it and for Private Lives, in a part that surely suited her better. Due to a weird glitch in the rules (since modified), the first of these awards was for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, even though she played the title character in Molly Brown and was rarely off the stage during its running time. At the time only actors billed above the title were eligible for a leading actor or actress nod and, since Grimes was not considered a star in 1960, her name appeared below the title.
 
The Private Lives she performed opposite Brian Bedford was played at breakneck speed; I saw it in its Boston tryout and I remember clearly that it clocked in at almost exactly half an hour for each of the three acts. And though it lacked the depth I found in later productions – especially the one Robin Phillips staged in Stratford, Ontario with Bedford and Maggie Smith – it was uproarious. But the Grimes I had already fallen in love with was the co-star (with Edward Woodward, Beatrice Lillie and Louise Troy) of High Spirits. She was both buoyant and elegant as the insistent, mischievous ghost who sees her husband’s current wife as a rival and plots to reclaim him by tinkering with his automobile. One of my friends points out that though the material is heartless, the musical softens it, and that may explain why I’ve never much enjoyed Blithe Spirit, yet I still enjoy listening to the cast album of High Spirits. Grimes was magical in it (so was Bea Lillie as the medium), and you can hear that magic on the album in her renditions of “You’d Better Love Me,” “Something Tells Me,” “Faster Than Sound,” “Home, Sweet Heaven” and (with Woodward) “I Know Your Heart.” So many songs! (There’s also a trio, “What in the World Did You Want?,” with Woodward and Troy.) Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray must have cherished the opportunity to write for her.
 
After Private Lives Grimes didn’t get a lot of showcase roles, but she did continue to appear on stage, on TV and occasionally in movies. She’s the only actor worth looking at in Stephen Porter’s lethal production of Molière’s Tartuffe, which was televised on Theater in America in 1978 (she played Elmire). And in Peter Hall’s noisy, overwrought mounting of Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending on Broadway in 1989, with Vanessa Redgrave and Kevin Anderson in the leads, once again she was the sole grounded actor in the company, playing the character of Vee Talbot as a spooked pixie. It was the last time I saw her live. But some part of her lives on in her daughter (by Christopher Plummer), Amanda Plummer, a wildly unconventional actress with a gift for portraying women of frightening intensity – and with a voice that sounds like her mother’s, minus the aristocratic lilt. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but it picked up a little grit on the way. Watching Plummer act is, among other things, a touching way to remember Tammy Grimes. 
 
By
 Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.
 
 
 

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http://www.soultracks.com/story-joe-ligon-mighty-clouds-dies
 
Mighty Clouds of Joy lead singer Joe Ligon dies at age 80
 
(December 11, 2016) We are sad to inform SoulTrackers of the death, at age 80, of legendary Gospel great, Joe Ligon, founder and lead singer of The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Under Ligon’s leadership, The Mighty Clouds took Gospel music to a new level of popularity and accessibility, incorporating R&B musical influences and delivering a more contemporary style that allowed the group to reach incredible heights of popularity, while also spreading the Word
The following statement was issued this evening on the Mighty Clouds of Joy Facebook Page:
We are heartbroken to share the news that the World’s Greatest Male Gospel Singer – Willie Joe Ligon, Founder and Lead Singer of the three time Grammy Award winning group – The Mighty Clouds of Joy of Los Angeles, California passed away today Sunday, December 11, 2016.
Joe was a loving Husband, Father, Grandfather, Brother, Cousin, Uncle, Mentor, and Friend to so many who loved him dearly.
As much as Joe cherished his privacy, he always appreciated the expressions of good will from people around the world and from all walks of life.
While we mourn the loss of a very good and humble man, we also celebrate his remarkable life as one of the most successful artists in Gospel Music History and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
For those who may ask what they can do to honor Joe, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a stormy day think of Joe and get comfort in knowing that he is no longer in the storm.
Additional information about the final arrangements will be released to the General Public pending Mr. Ligon’s Family’s approval.
We kindly ask everyone to please respect the Family’s privacy during this time of bereavement.
Thank you!
Best regards,
Pastor Isaac Lindsey
Manager 
Joe Ligon & The Mighty Clouds of Joy
The Alabama-born Ligon traveled to Los Angeles as a teen and ultimately teamed with an immensely talented group of singers to create The Mighty Clouds of Joy in 1960. Included in the original lineup were Ligon, Johnny Martin, Ermant Franklin Jr., Artis Turnbough, Elmo Franklin, Richard Wallace, Leon Polk and David Walker. 
Beginning with their 1960 hit “Steal Away to Jesus,” the Mighty Clouds blazed a trail that few before them had, especially stylistically. They began as a Gospel act only, and they charted more than two dozen albums on the Gospel charts, most hitting the Top 10. But the Mighty Clouds took their expansive sound to chart on the Pop, Soul and Disco charts. Among their biggest hits were “Time,” and “Mighty Cloud of Joy,” and “Ride the Mighty High.” In the process, they broke down barrier after barrier that had limited what faith-filled music could be. And, whatever the style, the songs were made that much better by Joe Ligon’s incredibly powerful lead vocals.
Many of Gospels all-time great groups, from the Winans to Commissioned, were aided by the barriers broken down by Joe Ligon and the Mighty Clouds in the 1970s, and both Soul and Gospel music have been incredibly influenced and blessed by Joe Ligon’s pioneering work. He will be missed and he will be celebrated for years to come.
 
 
The Mighty Clouds of Joy – Time (Vinyl 1974)
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqYl76TKac” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
 
 
I Know I’ve Been Changed – Joe Ligon & The Mighty Clouds of Joy “Live In Charleston” album
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cof02iMfVk” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
 
 

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http://www.soultracks.com/story-joe-ligon-mighty-clouds-dies
 
Mighty Clouds of Joy lead singer Joe Ligon dies at age 80
 
(December 11, 2016) We are sad to inform SoulTrackers of the death, at age 80, of legendary Gospel great, Joe Ligon, founder and lead singer of The Mighty Clouds of Joy. Under Ligon’s leadership, The Mighty Clouds took Gospel music to a new level of popularity and accessibility, incorporating R&B musical influences and delivering a more contemporary style that allowed the group to reach incredible heights of popularity, while also spreading the Word
The following statement was issued this evening on the Mighty Clouds of Joy Facebook Page:
We are heartbroken to share the news that the World’s Greatest Male Gospel Singer – Willie Joe Ligon, Founder and Lead Singer of the three time Grammy Award winning group – The Mighty Clouds of Joy of Los Angeles, California passed away today Sunday, December 11, 2016.
Joe was a loving Husband, Father, Grandfather, Brother, Cousin, Uncle, Mentor, and Friend to so many who loved him dearly.
As much as Joe cherished his privacy, he always appreciated the expressions of good will from people around the world and from all walks of life.
While we mourn the loss of a very good and humble man, we also celebrate his remarkable life as one of the most successful artists in Gospel Music History and hope that it serves as an example to young people around the world to work hard to make their dreams come true, to be willing to explore and push the limits, and to selflessly serve a cause greater than themselves.
For those who may ask what they can do to honor Joe, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a stormy day think of Joe and get comfort in knowing that he is no longer in the storm.
Additional information about the final arrangements will be released to the General Public pending Mr. Ligon’s Family’s approval.
We kindly ask everyone to please respect the Family’s privacy during this time of bereavement.
Thank you!
Best regards,
Pastor Isaac Lindsey
Manager 
Joe Ligon & The Mighty Clouds of Joy
The Alabama-born Ligon traveled to Los Angeles as a teen and ultimately teamed with an immensely talented group of singers to create The Mighty Clouds of Joy in 1960. Included in the original lineup were Ligon, Johnny Martin, Ermant Franklin Jr., Artis Turnbough, Elmo Franklin, Richard Wallace, Leon Polk and David Walker. 
Beginning with their 1960 hit “Steal Away to Jesus,” the Mighty Clouds blazed a trail that few before them had, especially stylistically. They began as a Gospel act only, and they charted more than two dozen albums on the Gospel charts, most hitting the Top 10. But the Mighty Clouds took their expansive sound to chart on the Pop, Soul and Disco charts. Among their biggest hits were “Time,” and “Mighty Cloud of Joy,” and “Ride the Mighty High.” In the process, they broke down barrier after barrier that had limited what faith-filled music could be. And, whatever the style, the songs were made that much better by Joe Ligon’s incredibly powerful lead vocals.
Many of Gospels all-time great groups, from the Winans to Commissioned, were aided by the barriers broken down by Joe Ligon and the Mighty Clouds in the 1970s, and both Soul and Gospel music have been incredibly influenced and blessed by Joe Ligon’s pioneering work. He will be missed and he will be celebrated for years to come.
 
 
The Mighty Clouds of Joy – Time (Vinyl 1974)
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqYl76TKac” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
 
 
I Know I’ve Been Changed – Joe Ligon & The Mighty Clouds of Joy “Live In Charleston” album
 
 
 
 
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http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a51400/la-la-land-review/?src=nl
 
La La Land Is the Best Movie Musical in Decades
Director Damien Chazelle breathes fresh life into a much-maligned genre by focusing on the visuals first, the song and dance second.
?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ standalone=”no”? Author Created with Sketch. Dec 9, 2016
 

The movie musical is in a sorry shape these days. Think back a bit. Name me good recent live-action musical. Don’t you dare name Les Misérables. Once came out almost ten years ago, and that one tried its best to not be a regular song-and-dance showcase. I will grant you Hairspray, which was not exactly good, but it was kind of great if only for James Marsden’s amazing facial expressions and a fun final set piece. The truth is, looking back, there probably hasn’t been a great non-animated, honest-to-god movie musical since Little Shop of Horrors, and that was 30 years ago!
Enter: La La Land.
 
 
La La Land (2016 Movie) Official Trailer – ‘Dreamers’
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pdqf4P9MB8″ target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
Director Damien Chazelle, hot off his uniquely tense jazz drumming thriller Whiplash, has paired together two of Hollywood’s most charming actors, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, for real damn musical. La La Land opens with a giant musical sequence set on a stretch of elevated Los Angeles highway and goes from there, telling the story of two young artists striving to make it big while maintaining their artistic integrity and holding together a relationship. It’s got songs and dance numbers aplenty, but it also has something too many musicals in the last 30 years have lacked: strong visuals.
Musicals rely on song, of course, for their draw, but the fact remains: Film is a visual medium. No amount of great songs will make a musical great on screen. Just ask anyone who saw Dreamgirls. The best movie musicals are often the best displays of visual inventiveness and composure. They breathe life into the music through smart shot choices and editing, through vivacious color palettes and staging. It’s hard to think of anything more depressing on screen than a great song blandly staged, or brilliant choreography edited half to death so you can’t even see the performers’ legs.

La La Land is practically an experiment in making a musical work almost entirely through smart visual filmmaking. The songs are good, but not great. The choreography is fine, but Gosling and Stone aren’t exactly the best dancers in the world. Their singing leaves something to be desired. None of this should add up to a good movie, except that the moviemaking is of the highest order. Chazelle brings the talent he displayed in Whiplash to bear on an entirely different kind of movie, enlisting American Hustle and Joy cinematographer Linus Sandgren, and frequent Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino production designer David Wasco, to craft a musical that intends to sear every shot in your mind.
Many big name directors have talked about how they’ve always wanted to make a musical, but Chazelle went and did it.
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
They mostly succeed, too, and it’s a testament to the supreme power of the image on screen that the movie is a great as it is. Many big name directors have talked about how they’ve always wanted to make a musical, but Chazelle went and did it. What he proves is that the endeavor is a tricky one. It requires a sense for the interplay between image and sound, but also how to exaggerate the image, and when to maximize impact. It requires knowing when to pull back a bit, to let the actors and their movement speak for itself. It requires knowing exactly how many cuts a musical number can withstand before it loses all its verve.

La La Land is pretty blatantly inspired by a lot of different films, including the Hollywood musicals of the ’40s and Jacques Demy’s musicals of the ’60s. That doesn’t stop the film from being modern in its filmmaking, but Chazelle takes from them the elements that work. The heightened colors, and romance of the framing. The bold, brash dance numbers. And most importantly, the willingness to let a sequence play out so the audience can see it. The more we see, the more we feel.
Chazelle also knows that some of the very best sequences feature no singing at all. The somewhat surreal Broadway Melody sequence from Singin’ in the Rain informs a lot about La La Land‘s own flights of fancy. The staging of the Mambo sequence in West Side Story, with its incredible reds and use of 65mm photography to make a small space feel huge, informs the way Chazelle plants his stars within the frame and makes them pop with color.
If you think back to the most memorable musical sequences in film history, the image will often come before the music. The music is nothing without a strong visual to anchor it. In the 30 years since Little Shop, the movie that came closest to achieving the necessary synthesis of image and music was Moulin Rouge!, Baz Luhrmann’s manic jukebox musical. The film, particularly in its first act, practically bursts with visual energy. It’s dazzling to the point of garishness, riding a line between too much of a good thing and way too much of a good thing. It’s a style that can’t sustain itself as the film pushes toward its more darkly emotional third act, but for a good chunk of the movie, Moulin Rouge! offers a new way forward for making a musical work on screen, with unconventional camera angles and an overload of visual effects magic.
La La Land takes a more conservative approach, and is far less likely to alienate certain audiences. It’s also able to sustain its own whimsy for far longer by being less brash. But it’s not staid either. The film is about as lively a visual experience as you’ll find at the cinema. There are images that won’t leave your head, even well after seeing it. Well after much of the music from the film begins to escape your recollection, in fact. But when you think about it, what more could you possibly want in a musical? Soundtracks are for listening to. A musical is for watching. La La Land is the first musical in a very long time to understand that fact.
More from Esquire:

How Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone Can Save the Much-Maligned Movie Musical

If You Don’t Enjoy ‘La La Land,’ You Probably Don’t Deserve to be Happy

Why Does This New ‘Planet of the Apes’ Movie Look So Damn Good?

Here’s 15 Extremely Hype Seconds of the New ‘Fast and the Furious’

Thank God ‘Spider-Man Homecoming’ Doesn’t Look Like Another Gritty Superhero Movie

T.J. Miller Doesn’t Need any Gifts Because He Already Owns All This Weird Sh*t

Johnny Depp Is Officially the Most Overpaid Actor in Hollywood

The First ‘Baywatch’ Trailer Doesn’t Miss an Opportunity for Seductive Slo-Mo

Kate McKinnon Will Star In Her Own Movie for the First Time

Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford’s ‘Star Wars’ Affair Was News to Mark Hamill

‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Makes It Clear Who Rey’s Parents Are, Apparently

What Movies Do People Turn to After Finishing a Netflix Binge?
 

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

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http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a51400/la-la-land-review/?src=nl
 
La La Land Is the Best Movie Musical in Decades
Director Damien Chazelle breathes fresh life into a much-maligned genre by focusing on the visuals first, the song and dance second.
?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″ standalone=”no”? Author Created with Sketch. Dec 9, 2016
 

The movie musical is in a sorry shape these days. Think back a bit. Name me good recent live-action musical. Don’t you dare name Les Misérables. Once came out almost ten years ago, and that one tried its best to not be a regular song-and-dance showcase. I will grant you Hairspray, which was not exactly good, but it was kind of great if only for James Marsden’s amazing facial expressions and a fun final set piece. The truth is, looking back, there probably hasn’t been a great non-animated, honest-to-god movie musical since Little Shop of Horrors, and that was 30 years ago!
Enter: La La Land.
 
 
La La Land (2016 Movie) Official Trailer – ‘Dreamers’
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pdqf4P9MB8″ target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
Director Damien Chazelle, hot off his uniquely tense jazz drumming thriller Whiplash, has paired together two of Hollywood’s most charming actors, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, for real damn musical. La La Land opens with a giant musical sequence set on a stretch of elevated Los Angeles highway and goes from there, telling the story of two young artists striving to make it big while maintaining their artistic integrity and holding together a relationship. It’s got songs and dance numbers aplenty, but it also has something too many musicals in the last 30 years have lacked: strong visuals.
Musicals rely on song, of course, for their draw, but the fact remains: Film is a visual medium. No amount of great songs will make a musical great on screen. Just ask anyone who saw Dreamgirls. The best movie musicals are often the best displays of visual inventiveness and composure. They breathe life into the music through smart shot choices and editing, through vivacious color palettes and staging. It’s hard to think of anything more depressing on screen than a great song blandly staged, or brilliant choreography edited half to death so you can’t even see the performers’ legs.

La La Land is practically an experiment in making a musical work almost entirely through smart visual filmmaking. The songs are good, but not great. The choreography is fine, but Gosling and Stone aren’t exactly the best dancers in the world. Their singing leaves something to be desired. None of this should add up to a good movie, except that the moviemaking is of the highest order. Chazelle brings the talent he displayed in Whiplash to bear on an entirely different kind of movie, enlisting American Hustle and Joy cinematographer Linus Sandgren, and frequent Wes Anderson and Quentin Tarantino production designer David Wasco, to craft a musical that intends to sear every shot in your mind.
Many big name directors have talked about how they’ve always wanted to make a musical, but Chazelle went and did it.
Advertisement – Continue Reading Below
They mostly succeed, too, and it’s a testament to the supreme power of the image on screen that the movie is a great as it is. Many big name directors have talked about how they’ve always wanted to make a musical, but Chazelle went and did it. What he proves is that the endeavor is a tricky one. It requires a sense for the interplay between image and sound, but also how to exaggerate the image, and when to maximize impact. It requires knowing when to pull back a bit, to let the actors and their movement speak for itself. It requires knowing exactly how many cuts a musical number can withstand before it loses all its verve.

La La Land is pretty blatantly inspired by a lot of different films, including the Hollywood musicals of the ’40s and Jacques Demy’s musicals of the ’60s. That doesn’t stop the film from being modern in its filmmaking, but Chazelle takes from them the elements that work. The heightened colors, and romance of the framing. The bold, brash dance numbers. And most importantly, the willingness to let a sequence play out so the audience can see it. The more we see, the more we feel.
Chazelle also knows that some of the very best sequences feature no singing at all. The somewhat surreal Broadway Melody sequence from Singin’ in the Rain informs a lot about La La Land‘s own flights of fancy. The staging of the Mambo sequence in West Side Story, with its incredible reds and use of 65mm photography to make a small space feel huge, informs the way Chazelle plants his stars within the frame and makes them pop with color.
If you think back to the most memorable musical sequences in film history, the image will often come before the music. The music is nothing without a strong visual to anchor it. In the 30 years since Little Shop, the movie that came closest to achieving the necessary synthesis of image and music was Moulin Rouge!, Baz Luhrmann’s manic jukebox musical. The film, particularly in its first act, practically bursts with visual energy. It’s dazzling to the point of garishness, riding a line between too much of a good thing and way too much of a good thing. It’s a style that can’t sustain itself as the film pushes toward its more darkly emotional third act, but for a good chunk of the movie, Moulin Rouge! offers a new way forward for making a musical work on screen, with unconventional camera angles and an overload of visual effects magic.
La La Land takes a more conservative approach, and is far less likely to alienate certain audiences. It’s also able to sustain its own whimsy for far longer by being less brash. But it’s not staid either. The film is about as lively a visual experience as you’ll find at the cinema. There are images that won’t leave your head, even well after seeing it. Well after much of the music from the film begins to escape your recollection, in fact. But when you think about it, what more could you possibly want in a musical? Soundtracks are for listening to. A musical is for watching. La La Land is the first musical in a very long time to understand that fact.
More from Esquire:

How Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone Can Save the Much-Maligned Movie Musical

If You Don’t Enjoy ‘La La Land,’ You Probably Don’t Deserve to be Happy

Why Does This New ‘Planet of the Apes’ Movie Look So Damn Good?

Here’s 15 Extremely Hype Seconds of the New ‘Fast and the Furious’

Thank God ‘Spider-Man Homecoming’ Doesn’t Look Like Another Gritty Superhero Movie

T.J. Miller Doesn’t Need any Gifts Because He Already Owns All This Weird Sh*t

Johnny Depp Is Officially the Most Overpaid Actor in Hollywood

The First ‘Baywatch’ Trailer Doesn’t Miss an Opportunity for Seductive Slo-Mo

Kate McKinnon Will Star In Her Own Movie for the First Time

Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford’s ‘Star Wars’ Affair Was News to Mark Hamill

‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Makes It Clear Who Rey’s Parents Are, Apparently

What Movies Do People Turn to After Finishing a Netflix Binge?
 

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

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http://www.npr.org/2016/12/10/505004096/the-life-of-danny-barker-who-saw-jazz-as-a-ride-on-a-royal-camel
 
The Life Of Danny Barker, Who Saw Jazz As ‘A Ride On A Royal Camel’

 
Sporting a plastic cigar in his mouth, Danny Barker leads the Onward Brass Band in a parade at the 1974 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Michael P. Smith/The Historic New Orleans Collection
Danny Barker died in 1994, but he’s having a bang-up December. The New Yorker is running a story online about the long and eventful life of the New Orleans banjo player and guitarist — and the Historic New Orleans Collection has just re-issued his memoir, A Life in Jazz.
Danny Barker came up in New Orleans at a time when jazz was just getting started. Over the course of a more than 70-year career, he played with Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Wynton Marsalis and Dr. John. In his later years, Barker started a youth band in New Orleans that would help bring the brass band tradition into the 21st century.
Gwen Thompkins hosts the public radio show Music Inside Out. She wrote the New Yorker story, as well as the introduction to the new edition of Barker’s memoir. She joined NPR’s Scott Simon to talk about the man and his music; hear their conversation at the audio link, and read an edited version below.
Scott Simon: So, Danny Barker was born in 1909. How did he find a life in jazz?
Gwen Thompkins: He came from one of the great musical clans of New Orleans, the Barbarin family. His grandfather played in a brass band with some of the early greats of jazz: King Oliver, Louis Armstrong. And then also, Danny Barker’s uncle, Paul Barbarin, he played with Armstrong as well as Henry “Red” Allen.
 
So, Danny Barker tells this really terrific story: His family went up to see Paul Barbarin in Chicago when Danny Barker was about 10 years old — that’s around 1919, right? He and his little relative, a 12-year-old, they’re walking around one morning on the South Side of Chicago. They’re peering into clubs, and they see a bunch of men and women kissing and canoodling on the dance floor of this club. And so once this 10-year-old Danny sees this sight — lovers on the dance floor — and he sees this band, he’s like, “I want to be a musician. I want to do this full time.” [laughs]
Barker brought his banjo up from New Orleans, and then within just a few weeks that banjo was stolen. And that was kind of the best thing that ever happened to Danny Barker, because at that time, at the beginning of the 1930s, banjo was out in the big bands. And so guitar came in. He learned to play the guitar lickety split. And then he was able to compete with some of the great rhythm guitarists of that era.
Danny Barker was also a songwriter. Tell me about the song “Save the Bones for Henry Jones.”
 
 
NAT KING COLE SHOW – Save the Bones for Henry Jones (((GREAT QUALITY))))
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2eusOFmOg8″ target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
YouTube
“Save the Bones for Henry Jones” was probably his best known, because it was recorded by Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer. But you know, Danny Barker was the king of the double entendre, if not the triple entendre, in music. And he wrote a lot of novelty songs, particularly for his wife, who was a blues singer called Blue Lu Barker. She wasn’t big star, but she was very good at what she did, which were sort of very naughty blues songs.
Why did it take so long for Danny Barker’s memoir, A Life in Jazz, to get published?
When he began peddling this memoir — this is back in the ’40s — there weren’t an awful lot of African-American jazz musicians who were getting book deals. Even though Barker had more than just his life to talk about — he had done all kinds of research on the early days of jazz, looking up and interviewing older musicians, people who predated Louis Armstrong, for instance. As far as Barker was concerned, jazz was sort of a noble calling. And he wanted people to understand that. He wanted people in New Orleans to understand that this was our birthright; he wanted people around the world to understand that this is a marvelous gift of music from the United States.
One of the fellas I interviewed is a trumpet player called Greg Stafford. And he told me that Barker once told him, “Playing this music is like taking a ride on a royal camel. That’s a great ride, to be riding on a royal camel with the kings and queens. That’s what it’s like when you learn this music.”
 

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

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http://www.npr.org/2016/12/10/505004096/the-life-of-danny-barker-who-saw-jazz-as-a-ride-on-a-royal-camel
 
The Life Of Danny Barker, Who Saw Jazz As ‘A Ride On A Royal Camel’

 
Sporting a plastic cigar in his mouth, Danny Barker leads the Onward Brass Band in a parade at the 1974 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
Michael P. Smith/The Historic New Orleans Collection
Danny Barker died in 1994, but he’s having a bang-up December. The New Yorker is running a story online about the long and eventful life of the New Orleans banjo player and guitarist — and the Historic New Orleans Collection has just re-issued his memoir, A Life in Jazz.
Danny Barker came up in New Orleans at a time when jazz was just getting started. Over the course of a more than 70-year career, he played with Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Wynton Marsalis and Dr. John. In his later years, Barker started a youth band in New Orleans that would help bring the brass band tradition into the 21st century.
Gwen Thompkins hosts the public radio show Music Inside Out. She wrote the New Yorker story, as well as the introduction to the new edition of Barker’s memoir. She joined NPR’s Scott Simon to talk about the man and his music; hear their conversation at the audio link, and read an edited version below.
Scott Simon: So, Danny Barker was born in 1909. How did he find a life in jazz?
Gwen Thompkins: He came from one of the great musical clans of New Orleans, the Barbarin family. His grandfather played in a brass band with some of the early greats of jazz: King Oliver, Louis Armstrong. And then also, Danny Barker’s uncle, Paul Barbarin, he played with Armstrong as well as Henry “Red” Allen.
 
So, Danny Barker tells this really terrific story: His family went up to see Paul Barbarin in Chicago when Danny Barker was about 10 years old — that’s around 1919, right? He and his little relative, a 12-year-old, they’re walking around one morning on the South Side of Chicago. They’re peering into clubs, and they see a bunch of men and women kissing and canoodling on the dance floor of this club. And so once this 10-year-old Danny sees this sight — lovers on the dance floor — and he sees this band, he’s like, “I want to be a musician. I want to do this full time.” [laughs]
Barker brought his banjo up from New Orleans, and then within just a few weeks that banjo was stolen. And that was kind of the best thing that ever happened to Danny Barker, because at that time, at the beginning of the 1930s, banjo was out in the big bands. And so guitar came in. He learned to play the guitar lickety split. And then he was able to compete with some of the great rhythm guitarists of that era.
Danny Barker was also a songwriter. Tell me about the song “Save the Bones for Henry Jones.”
 
 
NAT KING COLE SHOW – Save the Bones for Henry Jones (((GREAT QUALITY))))
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2eusOFmOg8″ target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
YouTube
“Save the Bones for Henry Jones” was probably his best known, because it was recorded by Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer. But you know, Danny Barker was the king of the double entendre, if not the triple entendre, in music. And he wrote a lot of novelty songs, particularly for his wife, who was a blues singer called Blue Lu Barker. She wasn’t big star, but she was very good at what she did, which were sort of very naughty blues songs.
Why did it take so long for Danny Barker’s memoir, A Life in Jazz, to get published?
When he began peddling this memoir — this is back in the ’40s — there weren’t an awful lot of African-American jazz musicians who were getting book deals. Even though Barker had more than just his life to talk about — he had done all kinds of research on the early days of jazz, looking up and interviewing older musicians, people who predated Louis Armstrong, for instance. As far as Barker was concerned, jazz was sort of a noble calling. And he wanted people to understand that. He wanted people in New Orleans to understand that this was our birthright; he wanted people around the world to understand that this is a marvelous gift of music from the United States.
One of the fellas I interviewed is a trumpet player called Greg Stafford. And he told me that Barker once told him, “Playing this music is like taking a ride on a royal camel. That’s a great ride, to be riding on a royal camel with the kings and queens. That’s what it’s like when you learn this music.”
 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScOBXDzApp4
PATTIE MARIE JAY, HAL BRADLEY ORCHESTRA – SPACE AGE SANTA CLAUS

 
 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScOBXDzApp4
PATTIE MARIE JAY, HAL BRADLEY ORCHESTRA – SPACE AGE SANTA CLAUS

 
 

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 http://www.vinylrecordingbooth.com
 
Introducing the YouThere Vinyl Recording Booth! 
Co-create an audio guestbook, get out of the photobooth rut, and preserve the sound of your special day direct to vinyl. 

 

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 http://www.vinylrecordingbooth.com
 
Introducing the YouThere Vinyl Recording Booth! 
Co-create an audio guestbook, get out of the photobooth rut, and preserve the sound of your special day direct to vinyl. 

 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/arts/music/greg-lake-dies.html?_r=0
 
Greg Lake, of King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Dies at 69
By WILLIAM GRIMESDEC. 8, 2016

Greg Lake in concert with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Redferns
Greg Lake, a singer, guitarist and songwriter who was a founding member of the 1970s progressive-rock bands King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, died on Wednesday in London. He was 69.
The cause was cancer, his longtime manager, Stewart Young, wrote in a post on Mr. Lake’s Facebook page. His death came nine months after Mr. Lake’s former bandmate, Keith Emerson, committed suicide.
Mr. Lake was a seminal figure in the movement to Europeanize rock ’n’ roll by blending it with classical music and presenting it with symphonic grandeur. “In the Court of the Crimson King,” the first King Crimson album, has often been cited as the first progressive rock album and the model for the others that followed.
The movement reached its swelling, grandiose climax in the work of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, whose adaptations of classical compositions and lengthy tracks, given operatic expression in lavish stage shows, epitomized the vaulting ambition of a style that was vehemently repudiated with the rise of punk in the late 1970s.
“I know people think we’re pretentious, but it’s really a product of sophistication,” Mr. Lake told New Musical Express in 1973. “To judge pretentiousness, I think you must look at the people behind it and their motives. As a band we’re into trying to advance our instruments — sometimes to a bizarre degree — which obviously puts some people off.”

 
From left, Greg Lake, Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer in 1972 in London after an awards ceremony. Press Association, via Associated Press
Mr. Lake sang lead and played bass and guitar with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. He also produced several of the group’s enormously successful albums, contributed most of the lyrics and, with Mr. Emerson, wrote the music for many of the songs.
“Greg’s soaring voice and skill as a musician will be remembered by all who knew his music,” Carl Palmer, the group’s drummer, wrote on his website.
Gregory Stewart Lake was born on Nov. 10, 1947, in Poole, a seaside town in Dorset, England, to Harry and Pearl Lake, and grew up in nearby Oakdale. His mother gave him a guitar when he was 12, and within a year he had written “Lucky Man,” a folky ballad later pressed into service when Emerson, Lake and Palmer needed one more track for their first album.
King Crimson was formed when Robert Fripp, a childhood friend whom Mr. Lake had met when both took lessons from the same guitar teacher, asked him to play bass and sing with a group he was trying to put together from the remnants of the failed trio Giles, Giles and Fripp. The group, whose orchestral sound incorporated a wide variety of styles, scored an immediate publicity coup by performing on a bill with the Rolling Stones in a free concert in Hyde Park in London in July 1969 with some 400,000 people in attendance.
When King Crimson performed at the Fillmore West in San Francisco in 1969, Mr. Lake began talking to Mr. Emerson, the keyboardist for the band the Nice, which was also on the bill. Both men, it transpired, were ready to make fresh starts.
In a lull before one of the shows, they traded riffs. “Greg was moving a bass line and I played the piano in back, and zap! It was there,” Mr. Emerson told the magazine Classic Rock in 2002. Mr. Palmer, formerly with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster, joined them on drums.
“I think the fundamental thing was that Keith Emerson and myself had this shared belief that too much rock ’n’ roll music had been based on the blues, Motown, gospel, country and western — all American-influenced,” Mr. Lake told Newsweek in July.
The group started with a bang, appearing with the Who and Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1970 and signing immediately after with Atlantic Records. Its albums “Emerson, Lake and Palmer,” “Tarkus,” “Trilogy” and “Brain Salad Surgery” all went platinum.
“There were members of the press that didn’t love us,” Mr. Lake told Rolling Stone in 2013, “but the public loved us.”
Mr. Lake had a hit single apart from Emerson, Lake and Palmer in 1975 with “I Believe in Father Christmas,” written with Peter Sinfield, a former member of King Crimson.
After Emerson, Lake and Palmer broke up in 1979, Mr. Lake recorded the solo albums “Greg Lake” (1981) and “Manoeuvres” (1983). He performed briefly with Asia, a progressive-rock supergroup, and with Mr. Emerson and the drummer Cozy Powell in the short-lived Emerson, Lake and Powell.
He reunited with his old bandmates to record the album “Black Moon” in 1992, but friction among the members made reunion tours and concerts difficult to organize. The group performed for the last time at the High Voltage Rock Festival in London in 2010.
Mr. Lake is survived by his wife, Regina; a daughter, Natasha Atkins; and a grandson. He had recently completed a memoir, “Lucky Man,” to be published in Britain next year.
Mr. Emerson was found dead in March in his home in Santa Monica, Calif., with a gunshot wound that was self-inflicted. He was 71.
Mr. Lake never cared for the “progressive” label, which, he told Newsweek, “sounded elitist and smartass.” He added: “That wasn’t what we were trying to do. We were just trying to be different, really.”
 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/arts/music/greg-lake-dies.html?_r=0
 
Greg Lake, of King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Dies at 69
By WILLIAM GRIMESDEC. 8, 2016

Greg Lake in concert with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Redferns
Greg Lake, a singer, guitarist and songwriter who was a founding member of the 1970s progressive-rock bands King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, died on Wednesday in London. He was 69.
The cause was cancer, his longtime manager, Stewart Young, wrote in a post on Mr. Lake’s Facebook page. His death came nine months after Mr. Lake’s former bandmate, Keith Emerson, committed suicide.
Mr. Lake was a seminal figure in the movement to Europeanize rock ’n’ roll by blending it with classical music and presenting it with symphonic grandeur. “In the Court of the Crimson King,” the first King Crimson album, has often been cited as the first progressive rock album and the model for the others that followed.
The movement reached its swelling, grandiose climax in the work of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, whose adaptations of classical compositions and lengthy tracks, given operatic expression in lavish stage shows, epitomized the vaulting ambition of a style that was vehemently repudiated with the rise of punk in the late 1970s.
“I know people think we’re pretentious, but it’s really a product of sophistication,” Mr. Lake told New Musical Express in 1973. “To judge pretentiousness, I think you must look at the people behind it and their motives. As a band we’re into trying to advance our instruments — sometimes to a bizarre degree — which obviously puts some people off.”

 
From left, Greg Lake, Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer in 1972 in London after an awards ceremony. Press Association, via Associated Press
Mr. Lake sang lead and played bass and guitar with Emerson, Lake and Palmer. He also produced several of the group’s enormously successful albums, contributed most of the lyrics and, with Mr. Emerson, wrote the music for many of the songs.
“Greg’s soaring voice and skill as a musician will be remembered by all who knew his music,” Carl Palmer, the group’s drummer, wrote on his website.
Gregory Stewart Lake was born on Nov. 10, 1947, in Poole, a seaside town in Dorset, England, to Harry and Pearl Lake, and grew up in nearby Oakdale. His mother gave him a guitar when he was 12, and within a year he had written “Lucky Man,” a folky ballad later pressed into service when Emerson, Lake and Palmer needed one more track for their first album.
King Crimson was formed when Robert Fripp, a childhood friend whom Mr. Lake had met when both took lessons from the same guitar teacher, asked him to play bass and sing with a group he was trying to put together from the remnants of the failed trio Giles, Giles and Fripp. The group, whose orchestral sound incorporated a wide variety of styles, scored an immediate publicity coup by performing on a bill with the Rolling Stones in a free concert in Hyde Park in London in July 1969 with some 400,000 people in attendance.
When King Crimson performed at the Fillmore West in San Francisco in 1969, Mr. Lake began talking to Mr. Emerson, the keyboardist for the band the Nice, which was also on the bill. Both men, it transpired, were ready to make fresh starts.
In a lull before one of the shows, they traded riffs. “Greg was moving a bass line and I played the piano in back, and zap! It was there,” Mr. Emerson told the magazine Classic Rock in 2002. Mr. Palmer, formerly with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Atomic Rooster, joined them on drums.
“I think the fundamental thing was that Keith Emerson and myself had this shared belief that too much rock ’n’ roll music had been based on the blues, Motown, gospel, country and western — all American-influenced,” Mr. Lake told Newsweek in July.
The group started with a bang, appearing with the Who and Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight Festival in August 1970 and signing immediately after with Atlantic Records. Its albums “Emerson, Lake and Palmer,” “Tarkus,” “Trilogy” and “Brain Salad Surgery” all went platinum.
“There were members of the press that didn’t love us,” Mr. Lake told Rolling Stone in 2013, “but the public loved us.”
Mr. Lake had a hit single apart from Emerson, Lake and Palmer in 1975 with “I Believe in Father Christmas,” written with Peter Sinfield, a former member of King Crimson.
After Emerson, Lake and Palmer broke up in 1979, Mr. Lake recorded the solo albums “Greg Lake” (1981) and “Manoeuvres” (1983). He performed briefly with Asia, a progressive-rock supergroup, and with Mr. Emerson and the drummer Cozy Powell in the short-lived Emerson, Lake and Powell.
He reunited with his old bandmates to record the album “Black Moon” in 1992, but friction among the members made reunion tours and concerts difficult to organize. The group performed for the last time at the High Voltage Rock Festival in London in 2010.
Mr. Lake is survived by his wife, Regina; a daughter, Natasha Atkins; and a grandson. He had recently completed a memoir, “Lucky Man,” to be published in Britain next year.
Mr. Emerson was found dead in March in his home in Santa Monica, Calif., with a gunshot wound that was self-inflicted. He was 71.
Mr. Lake never cared for the “progressive” label, which, he told Newsweek, “sounded elitist and smartass.” He added: “That wasn’t what we were trying to do. We were just trying to be different, really.”
 

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http://www.villagevoice.com/music/sun-ras-sunset-9429236?utm_source=Newsletters
 
Sun Ra’s Sunset
By Michael J. Agovino
 

If there’s an overused word of the day, it’s “genius.” Everyone’s a genius: overlooked, mad, Mac — or, if they’re legitimate and lucky, MacArthur.
And then there’s Sun Ra. Born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, he absorbed the big-band sounds of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson (whom he would later join) but spun their influences into something entirely new and bold to become a singular American figure — even if he maintained that he was from Saturn.
Now, with Sun Ra and his Arkestra: At Inter-Media Arts, April 1991 (Modern Harmonic), a 25-year-old concert just released on double-CD and triple-vinyl, the bandleader’s — yes — genius is on full display yet again. If Other Music on East 4th Street, a virtual shrine to the iconoclast, hadn’t sadly closed earlier this year, they might’ve thrown a record-release party on account of this.
 
The stirring performance was recorded at the now shuttered Huntington, New York, nonprofit arts center — a blue dot in a red county in the Bush Sr. era. Ra was two years from his death at 79 and, unbelievably, according to Howard Mandel’s valuable liner notes, recovering from a stroke just two months earlier. Ra’s piano playing — chameleon, off-kilter — is on fine display, even more surprising since, according to his biographer John Szwed, his left hand was at least partially paralyzed by that stroke.
 
The two-hour set opens with a version of the Sun Ra–penned “Springtime Again,” both hopeful and, in June Tyson’s vocal rendition, mournful. (As Mandel reveals in the liner notes, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer and would succumb to it less than two years later.) If you didn’t know what you were listening to, you might mistake it for Kamasi Washington’s own triple album from last year, the through-line clear.
 
Tyson, like the rest of the Arkestra — on this night, eighteen strong, and many living together in a house in Philadelphia — has been perennially underrated. Ra’s band was not “tight” in the conventional sense; rather, they were so well schooled, disciplined, technically gifted, and versatile that their imprecision was in fact precise.
 
The set varies between the traditional — after all, Sun Ra was steeped in black musical tradition — and the outlandish; kitsch and edge. “Hocus Pocus” is a swing number that shows off the superlative talent of John Gilmore, but on clarinet, not his usual tenor saxophone. “The Mayan Temples” thrashes and crashes with percussion on top of percussion and not one but two improvising flautists. (Who has two flautists in his band?) Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” in the Arkestra’s hands, turns into honking avant-balladry.
 
After the intermission, it’s more swirling tempest and drive (“Planet Earth Day” and “Carefree,” Sun Ra breaking out the synthesizer on both) alternating with woozy sweetness (as on Johnny Mercer’s “Early Autumn”) as well as the downright goofy, like “East of the Sun,” a tune written in the 1930s for a Princeton University a cappella group.
 
This irreverence, the hallmark of Ra’s radical career, was a blessing and a curse. He was allergic to trends and movements — to a fault, commercially. But he became a pillar of Afrofuturism, a proto-fusionist, a precursor to free jazz. He anticipated r&b and funk. He did everything, and often before anyone else. (He used an electric piano, for instance, more than ten years before Miles Davis.) He was outré, even in the freewheeling jazz world, which often shunned him. His influence can be seen in musicians as varied as Anthony Braxton and George Clinton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Maurice White. He wrote poetry and recited it to music — maybe he was the first MC — and was political in those words, and in stance and gesture.
 
This 1991 set was Sun Ra, late-career but at his finest, traversing his interests and time itself. It was neither his last concert nor his best. It was simply a riveting two-hour performance from a man, and his collective, who never compromised, never pandered, was always fresh, exacting, and revelatory. There’s a word for that.
 

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http://www.villagevoice.com/music/sun-ras-sunset-9429236?utm_source=Newsletters
 
Sun Ra’s Sunset
By Michael J. Agovino
 

If there’s an overused word of the day, it’s “genius.” Everyone’s a genius: overlooked, mad, Mac — or, if they’re legitimate and lucky, MacArthur.
And then there’s Sun Ra. Born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, in 1914, he absorbed the big-band sounds of Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson (whom he would later join) but spun their influences into something entirely new and bold to become a singular American figure — even if he maintained that he was from Saturn.
Now, with Sun Ra and his Arkestra: At Inter-Media Arts, April 1991 (Modern Harmonic), a 25-year-old concert just released on double-CD and triple-vinyl, the bandleader’s — yes — genius is on full display yet again. If Other Music on East 4th Street, a virtual shrine to the iconoclast, hadn’t sadly closed earlier this year, they might’ve thrown a record-release party on account of this.
 
The stirring performance was recorded at the now shuttered Huntington, New York, nonprofit arts center — a blue dot in a red county in the Bush Sr. era. Ra was two years from his death at 79 and, unbelievably, according to Howard Mandel’s valuable liner notes, recovering from a stroke just two months earlier. Ra’s piano playing — chameleon, off-kilter — is on fine display, even more surprising since, according to his biographer John Szwed, his left hand was at least partially paralyzed by that stroke.
 
The two-hour set opens with a version of the Sun Ra–penned “Springtime Again,” both hopeful and, in June Tyson’s vocal rendition, mournful. (As Mandel reveals in the liner notes, she had recently been diagnosed with cancer and would succumb to it less than two years later.) If you didn’t know what you were listening to, you might mistake it for Kamasi Washington’s own triple album from last year, the through-line clear.
 
Tyson, like the rest of the Arkestra — on this night, eighteen strong, and many living together in a house in Philadelphia — has been perennially underrated. Ra’s band was not “tight” in the conventional sense; rather, they were so well schooled, disciplined, technically gifted, and versatile that their imprecision was in fact precise.
 
The set varies between the traditional — after all, Sun Ra was steeped in black musical tradition — and the outlandish; kitsch and edge. “Hocus Pocus” is a swing number that shows off the superlative talent of John Gilmore, but on clarinet, not his usual tenor saxophone. “The Mayan Temples” thrashes and crashes with percussion on top of percussion and not one but two improvising flautists. (Who has two flautists in his band?) Ellington’s “Prelude to a Kiss,” in the Arkestra’s hands, turns into honking avant-balladry.
 
After the intermission, it’s more swirling tempest and drive (“Planet Earth Day” and “Carefree,” Sun Ra breaking out the synthesizer on both) alternating with woozy sweetness (as on Johnny Mercer’s “Early Autumn”) as well as the downright goofy, like “East of the Sun,” a tune written in the 1930s for a Princeton University a cappella group.
 
This irreverence, the hallmark of Ra’s radical career, was a blessing and a curse. He was allergic to trends and movements — to a fault, commercially. But he became a pillar of Afrofuturism, a proto-fusionist, a precursor to free jazz. He anticipated r&b and funk. He did everything, and often before anyone else. (He used an electric piano, for instance, more than ten years before Miles Davis.) He was outré, even in the freewheeling jazz world, which often shunned him. His influence can be seen in musicians as varied as Anthony Braxton and George Clinton, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Maurice White. He wrote poetry and recited it to music — maybe he was the first MC — and was political in those words, and in stance and gesture.
 
This 1991 set was Sun Ra, late-career but at his finest, traversing his interests and time itself. It was neither his last concert nor his best. It was simply a riveting two-hour performance from a man, and his collective, who never compromised, never pandered, was always fresh, exacting, and revelatory. There’s a word for that.
 

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http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/12/07/rokblok-record-player/
 
Want to Play Your Favorite Records? Just Attach Wheels to a Wooden Block
December 7, 2016

Who needs a large vinyl record player when you’ve got a RokBlok?
Kickstarter is known for offering products not generally seen in the mainstream. But, what about this portable vinyl record player?
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Introducing RokBlok. RokBlok bills itself as the “world’s smallest record player.” According to the product description, this block plays your records by lightly spinning on top of them. There are also built-in speakers, as well as Bluetooth wireless connectivity. The product description says,
“RokBlok was designed for current vinyl lovers, and those new to records alike. If you love vinyl, have ever been remotely interested in buying a record or two, or would just like the ability to listen to records outside of your living room, RokBlok is for you.”

Image by Pink Donut
So, how exactly does RokBlok work? According to a video, you simply place it on top of your record. Pull the level, and the product will start playing your tunes. It will simply drive around the record surface in circles. If you want to stop, just hold your hand above the moving record player. According to the creator, the product features smooth rubber wheels that won’t hurt your record.
 
 
Introducing RokBlok
 
 
 
 
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Wireless works within a range of 30 feet, so don’t stray too far. RokBlok sends the music straight to your speakers or headphones.
In order to RokBlok to work, you’ll have to place a record on a flat surface. The product description reads,
“Want to listen to Dylan in your bedroom? No problem. Wanna share your favorite Gil Scott Heron press with some friends at a park? Go for it. With it’s tiny profile, you can listen to your favorite records anywhere you can find a flat surface…yes, anywhere. ”

<img class=”size-full wp-image-77947″ src=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2.png” alt=”Image by Pink Donut” width=”680″ height=”382″ srcset=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2.png 680w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2-65×37.png 65w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2-300×169.png 300w” sizes=”(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px” />
Image by Pink Donut
The product can play 45 and 33 1/3 records. The product only weighs 3.2 ounces. It also features a rechargeable battery that allows up to 4 hours of music playback. The disadvantage? You’ll have to charge the device for 2 hours.
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/* Revive Adserver Javascript Tag v3.0.2 */ /* * The backup image section of this tag has been generated for use on a * non-SSL page. If this tag is to be placed on an SSL page, change the * ‘http://72.52.81.231/revive/www/delivery/…’ * to * ‘https://72.52.81.231/revive/www/delivery/…’ * * This noscript section of this tag only shows image banners. There * is no width or height in these banners, so if you want these tags to * allocate space for the ad before it shows, you will need to add this * information to the <img> tag. * * If you do not want to deal with the intricities of the noscript * section, delete the tag (from <noscript>… to </noscript>). On * average, the noscript tag is called from less than 1% of internet * users. */ +Learn How You Could Be Protecting Your Music From Copyright Infringement  
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<img class=”size-full wp-image-77948″ src=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3.png” alt=”Image by Pink Donut” width=”680″ height=”405″ srcset=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3.png 680w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3-65×39.png 65w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3-300×179.png 300w” sizes=”(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px” />
Image by Pink Donut
Currently, the product has reached its $50,000 goal, with just 657 backers. Funding will end in 47 days. You can purchase a RokBlok with a $59 donation. The product will ship next September.
 

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

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http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/12/07/rokblok-record-player/
 
Want to Play Your Favorite Records? Just Attach Wheels to a Wooden Block
December 7, 2016

Who needs a large vinyl record player when you’ve got a RokBlok?
Kickstarter is known for offering products not generally seen in the mainstream. But, what about this portable vinyl record player?
START-WP-ADS-ID: 5 END-WP-ADS-PRIO
Introducing RokBlok. RokBlok bills itself as the “world’s smallest record player.” According to the product description, this block plays your records by lightly spinning on top of them. There are also built-in speakers, as well as Bluetooth wireless connectivity. The product description says,
“RokBlok was designed for current vinyl lovers, and those new to records alike. If you love vinyl, have ever been remotely interested in buying a record or two, or would just like the ability to listen to records outside of your living room, RokBlok is for you.”

Image by Pink Donut
So, how exactly does RokBlok work? According to a video, you simply place it on top of your record. Pull the level, and the product will start playing your tunes. It will simply drive around the record surface in circles. If you want to stop, just hold your hand above the moving record player. According to the creator, the product features smooth rubber wheels that won’t hurt your record.
 
 
Introducing RokBlok
 
 
 
 
<div class=”player-unavailable”><h1 class=”message”>An error occurred.</h1><div class=”submessage”><a href=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tfhs-pujQk” target=”_blank”>Try watching this video on www.youtube.com</a>, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.</div></div>
START-WP-ADS-ID: 3 END-WP-ADS-PRIO
Wireless works within a range of 30 feet, so don’t stray too far. RokBlok sends the music straight to your speakers or headphones.
In order to RokBlok to work, you’ll have to place a record on a flat surface. The product description reads,
“Want to listen to Dylan in your bedroom? No problem. Wanna share your favorite Gil Scott Heron press with some friends at a park? Go for it. With it’s tiny profile, you can listen to your favorite records anywhere you can find a flat surface…yes, anywhere. ”

<img class=”size-full wp-image-77947″ src=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2.png” alt=”Image by Pink Donut” width=”680″ height=”382″ srcset=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2.png 680w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2-65×37.png 65w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-2-300×169.png 300w” sizes=”(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px” />
Image by Pink Donut
The product can play 45 and 33 1/3 records. The product only weighs 3.2 ounces. It also features a rechargeable battery that allows up to 4 hours of music playback. The disadvantage? You’ll have to charge the device for 2 hours.
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/* Revive Adserver Javascript Tag v3.0.2 */ /* * The backup image section of this tag has been generated for use on a * non-SSL page. If this tag is to be placed on an SSL page, change the * ‘http://72.52.81.231/revive/www/delivery/…’ * to * ‘https://72.52.81.231/revive/www/delivery/…’ * * This noscript section of this tag only shows image banners. There * is no width or height in these banners, so if you want these tags to * allocate space for the ad before it shows, you will need to add this * information to the <img> tag. * * If you do not want to deal with the intricities of the noscript * section, delete the tag (from <noscript>… to </noscript>). On * average, the noscript tag is called from less than 1% of internet * users. */ +Learn How You Could Be Protecting Your Music From Copyright Infringement  
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<img class=”size-full wp-image-77948″ src=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3.png” alt=”Image by Pink Donut” width=”680″ height=”405″ srcset=”http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3.png 680w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3-65×39.png 65w, http://4dpavshx5ly3quwy2v9yv83i.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rokblok-prototype-3-300×179.png 300w” sizes=”(max-width: 680px) 100vw, 680px” />
Image by Pink Donut
Currently, the product has reached its $50,000 goal, with just 657 backers. Funding will end in 47 days. You can purchase a RokBlok with a $59 donation. The product will ship next September.
 

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

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/books/review/anatomy-of-a-song-marc-myers.html
 
45 Pop Music Hits, in the Words of Their Creators
 
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS DEC. 2, 2016

ANATOMY OF A SONG
The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop
By Marc Myers
Illustrated. 323 pp. Grove Press. $26.
 
I once asked the Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora if, after hundreds, perhaps thousands of performances, he ever got tired of playing the band’s much-loved hit “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
“You ever get tired of getting laid?” he replied.
 
Apart from being a spectacular comeback, Sambora’s quip gets at how rewarding creating a song that people respond to wholeheartedly night after night, year after year can be. That same spirit informs Marc Myers’s “Anatomy of a Song,” a collection of 45 samples from the popular column of the same name that he writes for The Wall Street Journal. In these pieces, many expanded from their original versions, songwriters and performers speak in their own voices, edited from interviews with Myers, about one of their signature songs. Because of Myers’s skill as an interviewer, their pride and enthusiasm come blasting through. Each story is a pleasure to read and will deepen your listening experience.
 
Which is saying something. If you’re a serious music fan — and who else would be reading this book? — you might initially wonder what’s left for you to learn about such chestnuts as the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” or Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” Turns out to be plenty — not so much in terms of eye-popping new information (though there’s some of that), but in the depth and feeling of the tales of artistic inspiration. Even though, like every subtitle these days, the one for this book oversells its claims, Myers bears down hard on these songs, and the artists rise to the standard he sets.
 
Each of the book’s chapters begins with a brief introductory essay that provides context for the songs. These are dutiful more than revelatory; still, they serve as effective opening acts for the headliners. The magic happens when the artists themselves speak, and they deftly — and movingly — cover a range of issues, from the technical to the emotional. For Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” for example, the engineers Eddie Kramer and George Chkiantz discuss how microphone placement helped create the song’s booming sound, while the guitarist Jimmy Page describes its overpowering riff as “addictive, like a forbidden thing.” Joni Mitchell recalls the intense love affair in Crete that generated her song “Carey,” but in a brilliant stroke, Myers tracks down the real-life Cary (Mitchell misspelled his name) for his side of the story. The “mean old daddy” Mitchell describes sheds his defensiveness and admits, “The truth is I was in love with Joni and missed her.”
 
It’s thrilling when the artist’s experience so closely mirrors our own, as when Stevie Wonder speaks about the joy he felt completing his gorgeous “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” “But hearing the song back in the studio also hurt,” he says, “because it was so emotional. It’s still emotional for me.” You can also imagine the R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck rolling his eyes when he mentions the band’s excitement that Prince might stop by while the band was mixing its album “Out of Time,” including the single “Losing My Religion,” at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios. The group was informed that “if Prince showed up, we weren’t to look at him or talk to him.”
 
“Losing My Religion,” which came out in 1991, is the book’s last entry; Lloyd Price’s delicious “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” from 1952, is its first. More contemporary selections would have added texture to this book, but that’s just a thought for Myers’s ongoing column — or, perhaps, for what would be a welcome second collection.

What can make me feel this way?
Photograph by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
 
 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/books/review/anatomy-of-a-song-marc-myers.html
 
45 Pop Music Hits, in the Words of Their Creators
 
By ANTHONY DeCURTIS DEC. 2, 2016

ANATOMY OF A SONG
The Oral History of 45 Iconic Hits That Changed Rock, R&B and Pop
By Marc Myers
Illustrated. 323 pp. Grove Press. $26.
 
I once asked the Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora if, after hundreds, perhaps thousands of performances, he ever got tired of playing the band’s much-loved hit “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
“You ever get tired of getting laid?” he replied.
 
Apart from being a spectacular comeback, Sambora’s quip gets at how rewarding creating a song that people respond to wholeheartedly night after night, year after year can be. That same spirit informs Marc Myers’s “Anatomy of a Song,” a collection of 45 samples from the popular column of the same name that he writes for The Wall Street Journal. In these pieces, many expanded from their original versions, songwriters and performers speak in their own voices, edited from interviews with Myers, about one of their signature songs. Because of Myers’s skill as an interviewer, their pride and enthusiasm come blasting through. Each story is a pleasure to read and will deepen your listening experience.
 
Which is saying something. If you’re a serious music fan — and who else would be reading this book? — you might initially wonder what’s left for you to learn about such chestnuts as the Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” the Allman Brothers’ “Ramblin’ Man” or Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” Turns out to be plenty — not so much in terms of eye-popping new information (though there’s some of that), but in the depth and feeling of the tales of artistic inspiration. Even though, like every subtitle these days, the one for this book oversells its claims, Myers bears down hard on these songs, and the artists rise to the standard he sets.
 
Each of the book’s chapters begins with a brief introductory essay that provides context for the songs. These are dutiful more than revelatory; still, they serve as effective opening acts for the headliners. The magic happens when the artists themselves speak, and they deftly — and movingly — cover a range of issues, from the technical to the emotional. For Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” for example, the engineers Eddie Kramer and George Chkiantz discuss how microphone placement helped create the song’s booming sound, while the guitarist Jimmy Page describes its overpowering riff as “addictive, like a forbidden thing.” Joni Mitchell recalls the intense love affair in Crete that generated her song “Carey,” but in a brilliant stroke, Myers tracks down the real-life Cary (Mitchell misspelled his name) for his side of the story. The “mean old daddy” Mitchell describes sheds his defensiveness and admits, “The truth is I was in love with Joni and missed her.”
 
It’s thrilling when the artist’s experience so closely mirrors our own, as when Stevie Wonder speaks about the joy he felt completing his gorgeous “Love’s in Need of Love Today.” “But hearing the song back in the studio also hurt,” he says, “because it was so emotional. It’s still emotional for me.” You can also imagine the R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck rolling his eyes when he mentions the band’s excitement that Prince might stop by while the band was mixing its album “Out of Time,” including the single “Losing My Religion,” at Prince’s Paisley Park Studios. The group was informed that “if Prince showed up, we weren’t to look at him or talk to him.”
 
“Losing My Religion,” which came out in 1991, is the book’s last entry; Lloyd Price’s delicious “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” from 1952, is its first. More contemporary selections would have added texture to this book, but that’s just a thought for Myers’s ongoing column — or, perhaps, for what would be a welcome second collection.

What can make me feel this way?
Photograph by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post, via Getty Images
 
 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/books/revenge-of-analog-david-sax.html?_r=1
 
‘The Revenge of Analog’: See It. Feel It. Touch It. (Don’t Click)
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI DEC. 5, 2016

Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again,” Stephen King once wrote — an observation that’s never been truer than today. Far from being dead, vinyl records sales rose to $416 million last year, the highest since 1988, and artists like the Black Keys, Lana Del Rey and Beck are eagerly embracing the format. Instant Polaroid-like cameras have caught on among millennials and their younger siblings. A new Pew survey shows that print books remain much more popular than books in digital formats. Old-school paper notebooks and erasable whiteboards are the go-to technology among many Silicon Valley types, and even typewriters are enjoying a renaissance in today’s post-Snowden, surveillance-conscious era.
In his captivating new book, “The Revenge of Analog,” the reporter David Sax provides an insightful and entertaining account of this phenomenon, creating a powerful counternarrative to the techno-utopian belief that we would live in an ever-improving, all-digital world. Mr. Sax argues that analog isn’t going anywhere, but is experiencing a bracing revival that is not just a case of nostalgia or hipster street cred, but something more complex.
“Analog experiences can provide us with the kind of real-world pleasures and rewards digital ones cannot,” he writes, and “sometimes analog simply outperforms digital as the best solution.” Pen and paper can give writers and designers a direct means of sketching out their ideas without the complicating biases of software, while whiteboards can bring engineers “out from behind their screens” and entice them “to take risks and share ideas with others.”
“The choice we face isn’t between digital and analog,” Mr. Sax asserts. “That simplistic duality is actually the language that digital has conditioned us to: a false binary choice between 1 and 0, black and white, Samsung and Apple. The real world isn’t black or white. It is not even gray. Reality is multicolored, infinitely textured, and emotionally layered.” And it’s often analog — perhaps less efficient, less perfect, less speedy — which best captures those human imperfections, creating a tactile interface with the world.
A growing number of artists have noticed that music made on old tape machines and vintage studio equipment sounds different — “more heartfelt, raw, and organic,” in Mr. Sax’s words — than music made with the latest, most sophisticated technology. Listeners, too, as the musician Jack White has observed, find that vinyl has a romance, a magic that doesn’t come with the click of a mouse: “With vinyl, you’re on your knees.” He continued: “You’re at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spin and it’s like you’re sitting around a campfire. It’s hypnotic.”

David Sax Christopher Farber
In these pages, Mr. Sax takes us on a spirited tour of the resurgent analog universe. He takes us to United Record Pressing, a vinyl plant in Nashville that’s churning out 40,000 records a day, with a staff that’s tripled since 2010. He takes us to Book Culture, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one of the many indie bookstores to open in New York and around the country in recent years. And he takes us to Snakes & Lattes, a board-game cafe in Toronto, where customers can play not only familiar childhood games but also more obscure selections from a 3,000-odd collection. There are even “game gurus” to dispense advice — a decidedly more social experience than the solitary world of many video gamers.
This desire for human interaction — and a sense of community and place — is one of the magnets that draw people to neighborhood bookstores, where readers can get expert recommendations (from a person, not an algorithm), and attend readings and discussion groups. The more time we spend in the digital world of clicks and taps and swipes, Mr. Sax writes, the more people have begun to recognize the value of face-to-face interactions. So much so that work spaces (most notably, at tech companies) are being configured to promote productive meetings and serendipitous exchanges. “The whole point of all these spaces,” says Primo Orpilla, a co-founder of a firm that designs offices for digital technology companies, “is to get you to put down your device and read inflections, read body language, and have meaningful conversations.”
In an increasingly digital world where physical objects and experiences are being replaced by virtual ones, Mr. Sax concludes, “analog gives us the joy of creating and possessing real, tangible things”: the hectic scratch of a fountain pen on the smooth, lined pages of a notebook; the slow magic of a Polaroid photo developing in front of our eyes; the satisfying snap of a newspaper page being turned and folded back; the moment of silence as the arm of an old turntable descends toward a shiny new vinyl disk and the music begins to play.
In reporting this book, Mr. Sax says he found that it was less a case of older generations reaching back to familiar formats from their youth than teenagers and 20-somethings discovering turntables and LPs, paperback novels and film cameras. “The younger someone was, the more digitally exposed their generation was,” he writes near the end of this book, “the less I found them enamored by digital technology, and the more they were wary of its effects.” These kids were falling in love with analog.
 

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/05/books/revenge-of-analog-david-sax.html?_r=1
 
‘The Revenge of Analog’: See It. Feel It. Touch It. (Don’t Click)
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI DEC. 5, 2016

Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“Sooner or later, everything old is new again,” Stephen King once wrote — an observation that’s never been truer than today. Far from being dead, vinyl records sales rose to $416 million last year, the highest since 1988, and artists like the Black Keys, Lana Del Rey and Beck are eagerly embracing the format. Instant Polaroid-like cameras have caught on among millennials and their younger siblings. A new Pew survey shows that print books remain much more popular than books in digital formats. Old-school paper notebooks and erasable whiteboards are the go-to technology among many Silicon Valley types, and even typewriters are enjoying a renaissance in today’s post-Snowden, surveillance-conscious era.
In his captivating new book, “The Revenge of Analog,” the reporter David Sax provides an insightful and entertaining account of this phenomenon, creating a powerful counternarrative to the techno-utopian belief that we would live in an ever-improving, all-digital world. Mr. Sax argues that analog isn’t going anywhere, but is experiencing a bracing revival that is not just a case of nostalgia or hipster street cred, but something more complex.
“Analog experiences can provide us with the kind of real-world pleasures and rewards digital ones cannot,” he writes, and “sometimes analog simply outperforms digital as the best solution.” Pen and paper can give writers and designers a direct means of sketching out their ideas without the complicating biases of software, while whiteboards can bring engineers “out from behind their screens” and entice them “to take risks and share ideas with others.”
“The choice we face isn’t between digital and analog,” Mr. Sax asserts. “That simplistic duality is actually the language that digital has conditioned us to: a false binary choice between 1 and 0, black and white, Samsung and Apple. The real world isn’t black or white. It is not even gray. Reality is multicolored, infinitely textured, and emotionally layered.” And it’s often analog — perhaps less efficient, less perfect, less speedy — which best captures those human imperfections, creating a tactile interface with the world.
A growing number of artists have noticed that music made on old tape machines and vintage studio equipment sounds different — “more heartfelt, raw, and organic,” in Mr. Sax’s words — than music made with the latest, most sophisticated technology. Listeners, too, as the musician Jack White has observed, find that vinyl has a romance, a magic that doesn’t come with the click of a mouse: “With vinyl, you’re on your knees.” He continued: “You’re at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spin and it’s like you’re sitting around a campfire. It’s hypnotic.”

David Sax Christopher Farber
In these pages, Mr. Sax takes us on a spirited tour of the resurgent analog universe. He takes us to United Record Pressing, a vinyl plant in Nashville that’s churning out 40,000 records a day, with a staff that’s tripled since 2010. He takes us to Book Culture, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, one of the many indie bookstores to open in New York and around the country in recent years. And he takes us to Snakes & Lattes, a board-game cafe in Toronto, where customers can play not only familiar childhood games but also more obscure selections from a 3,000-odd collection. There are even “game gurus” to dispense advice — a decidedly more social experience than the solitary world of many video gamers.
This desire for human interaction — and a sense of community and place — is one of the magnets that draw people to neighborhood bookstores, where readers can get expert recommendations (from a person, not an algorithm), and attend readings and discussion groups. The more time we spend in the digital world of clicks and taps and swipes, Mr. Sax writes, the more people have begun to recognize the value of face-to-face interactions. So much so that work spaces (most notably, at tech companies) are being configured to promote productive meetings and serendipitous exchanges. “The whole point of all these spaces,” says Primo Orpilla, a co-founder of a firm that designs offices for digital technology companies, “is to get you to put down your device and read inflections, read body language, and have meaningful conversations.”
In an increasingly digital world where physical objects and experiences are being replaced by virtual ones, Mr. Sax concludes, “analog gives us the joy of creating and possessing real, tangible things”: the hectic scratch of a fountain pen on the smooth, lined pages of a notebook; the slow magic of a Polaroid photo developing in front of our eyes; the satisfying snap of a newspaper page being turned and folded back; the moment of silence as the arm of an old turntable descends toward a shiny new vinyl disk and the music begins to play.
In reporting this book, Mr. Sax says he found that it was less a case of older generations reaching back to familiar formats from their youth than teenagers and 20-somethings discovering turntables and LPs, paperback novels and film cameras. “The younger someone was, the more digitally exposed their generation was,” he writes near the end of this book, “the less I found them enamored by digital technology, and the more they were wary of its effects.” These kids were falling in love with analog.
 

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Rare, historical, and mythic clip of George Benson, Jo Jones (the amazing and magical drummer who played 14 years in Count Basie’s great orchestra), the organizst Milt Bucker, and the tap dancer Jimmy Slyde. A 4 minute extract from Louis Panassié’s “L’aventure du jazz” (1972, 2h30).

 

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjCg7o1quAQ
 
Rare, historical, and mythic clip of George Benson, Jo Jones (the amazing and magical drummer who played 14 years in Count Basie’s great orchestra), the organizst Milt Bucker, and the tap dancer Jimmy Slyde. A 4 minute extract from Louis Panassié’s “L’aventure du jazz” (1972, 2h30).

 

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http://www.gq.com/story/living-legends-of-jazz
 
These 10 Living Legends of Jazz Prove Nobody Can Out-Dress the OGs
a day ago

Coat $2,490 Ermenegildo Zegna Couture, sweater $345 Sandro, sunglasses Krewe, fez from Nigeria
Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, Roy Ayers, and more jazz giants show you how to dress for winter.
Using nothing more than simple instruments and an audacious will to improvise, these ten giants of jazz have taken us places no man has gone before. And they’re still here, still playing—and always dressed to kill. What a time to be alive.
Pharoah Sanders (above)
Age:
76
Musical lane:
A freethinking astral traveler and spiritual gangster, he’s the official saxophonist of your soul’s awakening. His definitive song may be “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” a 32-minute vision quest that journeys from moments of pastoral beauty to demon-purging squall—just like life itself.
The look:
“I got tired of wearing suits and ties,” he says. “I decided I would look another kind of way.”
 
Ron Carter
Age:
79
Life on a string:
A graduate of the Miles Davis Sideman University, Carter still tours and gigs around the world, leading his bands on the same upright bass he’s been using since 1960. “It’s on all these records,” he says. “I maintain it. It’s like having a Bentley.”
That herringbone suit:
It was designed by his wife, the former model Quintell Williams-Carter.
“I wouldn’t go to work without a suit. It sets the whole tone for me.”—Ron Carter
Charles Lloyd
Age:
78
His sound:
Between 1989 and 2015, Lloyd recorded his beautiful and painterly playing for art-music label ECM. But he’ll always be best known as one of the first jazz artists to sell a million copies, with the 1967 live set Forest Flower.
Modeling side hustle:
“Yohji Yamamoto has made a lot of clothes for me and invited me to model in Paris and in Tokyo. We share an aesthetic sensibility.”
“I think style is an innate thing. Some people have it—or not.”—Charles Lloyd
Wayne Shorter
Age:
83
Legacy:
The sax he played in his mid-1960s prime was as elegant and cutting as a samurai sword. The work included a torrent of solo material (Shorter recorded at least six albums between 1964 and ’65) and a coveted position in Miles Davis’s block-rocking “second great quintet” (with his buddy Herbie on piano).
On sight:
“Miles used to say, ‘I can tell whether somebody can play or not by what they wear and how they move in it.’”
 
Herbie Hancock
Age:
76
Greatest Hits:
He was a key figure in jazz’s midcentury heyday, then went platinum with the 1973 fusion record Head Hunters, then embraced hip-hop on the smash 1983 single “Rockit,” and then won the Album of the Year Grammy in 2008 for a set of Joni Mitchell covers (with his buddy Wayne on sax).
Shop hard:
“I don’t go shopping that often,” he says. “When I go out, I will get a lot of stuff ’cause I know I’m not gonna do this again for another year and a half. So I will just get everything that I could conceivably want. Spend that fortune!”
Chick Corea
Age:
75
A little bit of everything:
Nominated for a staggering 64 Grammys, Corea has embraced the possibilities of both acoustic and electric piano, dabbled in children’s and Latin and classical music, and even recorded a Christmas song with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
Fitter, Happier:
“About five years ago I went on a plant-based diet, and I took off a hundred pounds. You can probably find pictures on the Internet of me when I was 250—I’m now down to 140. I came down from a 44 waist to a 33 waist. None of my clothes fit me anymore; I had to get rid of them all. It felt so good.”
 
Roy Ayers
Age:
76
Mr. Smooth:
Credit Ayers with putting the vibes in vibraphone. Mashing together jazz, funk, and disco boogie, he’s the master of 1970s-bachelor-pad grooviness that holds its edge.
Career highlight:
Ayers still believes his slinky hit “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is the best thing he’s ever done—and Dr. Dre apparently agrees. The song made the soundtrack to last year’s Straight Outta Compton biopic.
“I’m just a traveling musician enjoying the good road.”—Roy Ayers
McCoy Tyner
Age:
77
Legacy:
A heartbreaking balladeer who defines sophistication on the piano, he also spent years as a sideman to the adventurous John Coltrane, playing on My FavoriteThings and Trane’s transcendent masterpiece, A Love Supreme.
 
Cecil Taylor
Age:
87
Playing style:
Taylor approaches the piano the way Jackson Pollock approached a canvas: with a wild sense of improvisational abandon that borders on violence.
Music (and fashion) as art:
Never mind that he’s pushing 90. When Taylor performed this year at the Whitney Museum, he wore a chocolate beanie, ivory shoes, and a satin jacket printed with swirls of regal purple and gold.
 
Roy Haynes
Age:
91
Played with:
Everyone you’ve ever heard of. For starters: Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, and Sarah Vaughan.
One of one:
“I was having my clothes made at a young age,” says Haynes, who also drummed with saxophone godhead Charlie Parker back in the 1940s. “Even before I had a good gig, I was having stuff made. Some people would come to my gig to see what I was wearing—to see what the little M.F. was wearing.”
 

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http://www.gq.com/story/living-legends-of-jazz
 
These 10 Living Legends of Jazz Prove Nobody Can Out-Dress the OGs
a day ago

Coat $2,490 Ermenegildo Zegna Couture, sweater $345 Sandro, sunglasses Krewe, fez from Nigeria
Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders, Roy Ayers, and more jazz giants show you how to dress for winter.
Using nothing more than simple instruments and an audacious will to improvise, these ten giants of jazz have taken us places no man has gone before. And they’re still here, still playing—and always dressed to kill. What a time to be alive.
Pharoah Sanders (above)
Age:
76
Musical lane:
A freethinking astral traveler and spiritual gangster, he’s the official saxophonist of your soul’s awakening. His definitive song may be “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” a 32-minute vision quest that journeys from moments of pastoral beauty to demon-purging squall—just like life itself.
The look:
“I got tired of wearing suits and ties,” he says. “I decided I would look another kind of way.”
 
Ron Carter
Age:
79
Life on a string:
A graduate of the Miles Davis Sideman University, Carter still tours and gigs around the world, leading his bands on the same upright bass he’s been using since 1960. “It’s on all these records,” he says. “I maintain it. It’s like having a Bentley.”
That herringbone suit:
It was designed by his wife, the former model Quintell Williams-Carter.
“I wouldn’t go to work without a suit. It sets the whole tone for me.”—Ron Carter
Charles Lloyd
Age:
78
His sound:
Between 1989 and 2015, Lloyd recorded his beautiful and painterly playing for art-music label ECM. But he’ll always be best known as one of the first jazz artists to sell a million copies, with the 1967 live set Forest Flower.
Modeling side hustle:
“Yohji Yamamoto has made a lot of clothes for me and invited me to model in Paris and in Tokyo. We share an aesthetic sensibility.”
“I think style is an innate thing. Some people have it—or not.”—Charles Lloyd
Wayne Shorter
Age:
83
Legacy:
The sax he played in his mid-1960s prime was as elegant and cutting as a samurai sword. The work included a torrent of solo material (Shorter recorded at least six albums between 1964 and ’65) and a coveted position in Miles Davis’s block-rocking “second great quintet” (with his buddy Herbie on piano).
On sight:
“Miles used to say, ‘I can tell whether somebody can play or not by what they wear and how they move in it.’”
 
Herbie Hancock
Age:
76
Greatest Hits:
He was a key figure in jazz’s midcentury heyday, then went platinum with the 1973 fusion record Head Hunters, then embraced hip-hop on the smash 1983 single “Rockit,” and then won the Album of the Year Grammy in 2008 for a set of Joni Mitchell covers (with his buddy Wayne on sax).
Shop hard:
“I don’t go shopping that often,” he says. “When I go out, I will get a lot of stuff ’cause I know I’m not gonna do this again for another year and a half. So I will just get everything that I could conceivably want. Spend that fortune!”
Chick Corea
Age:
75
A little bit of everything:
Nominated for a staggering 64 Grammys, Corea has embraced the possibilities of both acoustic and electric piano, dabbled in children’s and Latin and classical music, and even recorded a Christmas song with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.
Fitter, Happier:
“About five years ago I went on a plant-based diet, and I took off a hundred pounds. You can probably find pictures on the Internet of me when I was 250—I’m now down to 140. I came down from a 44 waist to a 33 waist. None of my clothes fit me anymore; I had to get rid of them all. It felt so good.”
 
Roy Ayers
Age:
76
Mr. Smooth:
Credit Ayers with putting the vibes in vibraphone. Mashing together jazz, funk, and disco boogie, he’s the master of 1970s-bachelor-pad grooviness that holds its edge.
Career highlight:
Ayers still believes his slinky hit “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” is the best thing he’s ever done—and Dr. Dre apparently agrees. The song made the soundtrack to last year’s Straight Outta Compton biopic.
“I’m just a traveling musician enjoying the good road.”—Roy Ayers
McCoy Tyner
Age:
77
Legacy:
A heartbreaking balladeer who defines sophistication on the piano, he also spent years as a sideman to the adventurous John Coltrane, playing on My FavoriteThings and Trane’s transcendent masterpiece, A Love Supreme.
 
Cecil Taylor
Age:
87
Playing style:
Taylor approaches the piano the way Jackson Pollock approached a canvas: with a wild sense of improvisational abandon that borders on violence.
Music (and fashion) as art:
Never mind that he’s pushing 90. When Taylor performed this year at the Whitney Museum, he wore a chocolate beanie, ivory shoes, and a satin jacket printed with swirls of regal purple and gold.
 
Roy Haynes
Age:
91
Played with:
Everyone you’ve ever heard of. For starters: Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, and Sarah Vaughan.
One of one:
“I was having my clothes made at a young age,” says Haynes, who also drummed with saxophone godhead Charlie Parker back in the 1940s. “Even before I had a good gig, I was having stuff made. Some people would come to my gig to see what I was wearing—to see what the little M.F. was wearing.”
 

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http://wgnradio.com/2016/12/06/sam-lay-in-bluesland-rare-film-from-a-prolific-drummer/
 
Dave Hoekstra visits with Rock and Roll Hall of Fame drummer Sam Lay, director John Anderson, and Nancy Watrous of the Chicago Film Archives to discuss the documentary Sam Lay in Bluesland, screening at the On a Blues Note Benefit Show on December 7 at Savage Smyth, 920 N. Franklin.
 
The film is centered around rare club footage shot by Lay on 8mm film of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, Otis Rush and more.  They talk about the historical significance of Lay’s home movies, Lay’s work with the likes of Wolf and Dylan (and providing the whistle on Highway 61 Revisited), and more.
 
Sam Lay in Bluesland Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVqeJmD9FYI

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO