https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-goes-on-and-8-kindred-spirits-live-from-the-lobero-review-still-pushing-forward-11582141958?emailToken=aef2c315bba2ae8ee41b3c0b73cb8be0unnVbYB6ctYRp6t7BNEf 7JZz64Swn6JxMrWIngRrBMt/4VbagJoA8KX51T87DWErchkOwmMQb02kbsQZlKpWV9f78RS9XLQHO3CiPB/Q2Nd4M84rZcnR9tcCiXBzHO/W0D60Zg /5OmcvnoEIm6KybBYjZ9a16iqeVAwPKFgHI%3D
 

‘Life Goes On’ and ‘8: Kindred Spirits (Live From the Lobero)’ Review: Still Pushing Forward

New releases from Carla Bley and Charles Lloyd find the jazz artists still inventing late into their careers.

By 

Larry Blumenfeld 

Feb. 19, 2020 2:52 pm ET

When Carla Bley and Charles Lloyd were inducted as National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters in 2015, each musician spoke humbly from the podium about beginnings. Ms. Bley recalled her days as a cigarette girl at Birdland, standing close to the stage to study the brilliant concision of Count Basie, who remains her favorite pianist. Mr. Lloyd talked of lying on the lawn in front of the Memphis home of his first mentor, pianist Phineas Newborn Jr., listening to him practice music that sounded both forward-leaning and firmly grounded in “deep blues.”

Ms. Bley and Mr. Lloyd, who are both 81 years old, still channel those early inspirations. Two new releases—“Life Goes On” (ECM), from Ms. Bley’s trio, and Mr. Lloyd’s “8: Kindred Spirits (Live From the Lobero)” (Blue Note, out Feb. 28)—find each musician also pushing forward, deepening legacies that, in contrasting ways, present fascinating blends: of daring and elegance; of structural complexity and unfettered emotion; of accumulated wisdom and wide-eyed wonder. Ms. Bley built her reputation mostly as a composer and arranger, often for big bands, crafting arresting music that has either lent order to jazz’s avant-garde or stretched its mainstream to adventurous extremes. As a tenor saxophonist, flutist, composer and bandleader (he also plays alto sax and other reeds), Mr. Lloyd has crafted a version of modern jazz that is a vehicle for both wide-ranging group improvisations and the intensely personal expressions he calls “tenderness sutras.” 

Ms. Bley has recently stripped her music to its essential core, focusing on her own piano playing in a stately trio with bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Andy Sheppard. The compositions are the real stars here. Their appealing melodies are encased within logic that comes across as surprising yet inevitable; they achieve moments of delicacy or force or humor without breaking an overall spell. That spellbinding quality is abetted by Mr. Sheppard’s pure-toned and agile playing on tenor and soprano saxophones, and by Mr. Swallow, who uses a five-string, hollow-body electric bass with nylon-wrapped strings to achieve a singular tone, both soft-spoken and direct. The two know precisely what Ms. Bley’s music needs and, just as important, what it does not. “We breathe together,” she once told me. That quality becomes palpable as “And Then One Day,” the opening suite’s final movement, winds down, Ms. Bley’s chords chiming ever more slowly while Mr. Sheppard’s phrases dissolve into air.

The album’s 10 tracks form three connected suites. The first begins by tracing a 12-bar-blues. The second, “Beautiful Telephones,” states a gorgeous, if ominously harmonized, melody and, later, quotes slyly from patriotic songs including “The Star-Spangled Banner” (embedded political statements are one of Ms. Bley’s tropes). The final suite, “Copycat,” begins like a ballad and then develops into a call-and-response that sounds halfway between chamber-music fugue and small-group jazz. That’s where this spare yet remarkably full music lives.

If Ms. Bley whittles things down, Mr. Lloyd keeps building them up. He’s long been a magnet for brilliant jazz players (counting just pianists, his bands have included Keith Jarrett, Michel Petrucciani, Geri Allen and Jason Moran ) as well as for musicians from a wider sphere (he has collaborated recently with Greek singer Maria Farantouri, Indian tabla master Zakir Hussain and singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams ). “8: Kindred Spirits (Live From the Lobero)” documents a 2018 80th-birthday concert at Mr. Lloyd’s hometown venue, Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theatre. Mr. Lloyd led a quintet with guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland for the first half; after intermission, on came organist (and fellow Memphis hero) Booker T. Jones, along with bassist (and Blue Note label president) Don Was. 

This exuberant event gets an extravagant package: a limited-edition boxed set (three LPs, two CDs, a DVD of the full performance, and a 96-page book with stunning archival photography created by photographer and filmmaker Dorothy Darr, who is Mr. Lloyd’s wife). The standard CD/LP versions contain just the concert’s first half, which nonetheless forms a satisfyingly complete statement from an octogenarian master, sounding vital as ever, distilling still further the clarity of his music. The quintet begins with “Dream Weaver,” the title track of a 1966 album from Mr. Lloyd’s first great quartet, and ends with “Part 5, Ruminations,” recorded by another stunning Lloyd quartet 51 years later. However, this is no summary statement; within just that latter composition, Mr. Lloyd solos twice, each time as if treading new ground. After intermission, Mr. Rogers moves from acoustic to electric bass. Mr. Jones settles in behind the organ; he and Mr. Lloyd had never played together before, but they find instant communion on the hymn “Abide With Me” and an easily shared, deeply funky groove on Mr. Jones’s signature hit, “Green Onions.” Such is the way with kindred spirits.

—Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz and Afro-Latin music for the Journal.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/t-magazine/louis-armstrong-home-queens.html?action=click
 

Louis Armstrong, the King of Queens

By M.H. Miller

Feb. 20, 2020

The guest room of Louis Armstrong’s home in Corona, Queens, still has its original late 1960s botanical-print wallpaper and matching upholstery; the portrait is of Armstrong’s wife, Lucille.Chris Mottalini

By Design

The jazz musician’s impeccably maintained home in a modest New York City neighborhood is a testament to his — and midcentury design’s — legacy.

The guest room of Louis Armstrong’s home in Corona, Queens, still has its original late 1960s botanical-print wallpaper and matching upholstery; the portrait is of Armstrong’s wife, Lucille.Chris Mottalini

CORONA, QUEENS, is an unassuming New York City neighborhood. Nearby is the stainless steel Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair, and three miles west is Flushing’s Main Street, with its crowded dim sum parlors. Corona, though, feels like a suburb wedged into the city, and it’s here, on a quiet residential block, with modest century-old detached homes with small cement porches and aluminum siding, that you’ll find one of the country’s great unheralded design museums: the jazz trumpeter and bandleader Louis Armstrong’s miraculously preserved house, where he lived from 1943 until his death in 1971, at age 69.

Armstrong was born in New Orleans in 1901, dropped out of school as a child and was a successful touring musician in his early 20s. By 1929, he was living in Harlem, though as one of the most popular recording artists in the country, he traveled about 300 nights a year. In 1939, he met his fourth and final wife, Lucille Wilson, a dancer at Harlem’s Cotton Club. Lucille, who spent part of her childhood in Corona, decided it was time for her husband to settle down in a house, a real house, instead of living out of hotel rooms. (Even their wedding took place on the road, in St. Louis, at the home of the singer Velma Middleton.) One day, when Armstrong was away at a gig, she put a down payment of $8,000 (around $119,000 in today’s money) on 34-56 107th Street. She didn’t tell him she’d done this until eight months later, during which time she made the mortgage payments herself. (Lucille didn’t like being told no; as Hyland Harris, who manages the Louis Armstrong House Museum gift shop, located in what was once the garage — the biggest aberration between the house today and its past incarnations — told me, “There is a reason why she was the last wife.”)

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The Crown stove in the kitchen was custom-made for the couple, and the cabinets were lacquered in a color similar to Lucille’s Cadillac.Chris Mottalini

The reel-to-reel tape machine in Armstrong’s den.Chris Mottalini

From the outside, the two-bedroom, 3,000-square-foot house looks just like any other on the block, which was deliberate. Armstrong often referred to himself as “a salary man” and felt at ease alongside the telephone operators, schoolteachers and janitors of Corona, a neighborhood that, in a testament to how much of his life was spent in jazz clubs, he referred to affectionately as “that good ol’ country life.” One of the earliest integrated areas of New York, Corona was mostly home to middle-class African-Americans and Italian immigrants when the Armstrongs moved in. The demographics would change in the coming decades — Latin Americans began replacing the Italians in the ’60s, and now make up most of the neighborhood — but not much else. There was never a mass wave of gentrification or development here, and Armstrong himself was so concerned with blending in with his working-class neighbors that when his wife decided to give the house a brick facade, Armstrong went door-to-door down the block asking the other residents if they wanted him to pay for their houses to receive the same upgrade. (A few of his neighbors took him upon the offer, which accounts for the scattered presence of brick homes on the street to this day.)

One wouldn’t know from the sidewalk that the interior of the house is a more or less perfect reflection of the Armstrongs’ life circa 1969, when Lucille made her final round of renovations during her husband’s lifetime with the help of her interior decorator, Morris Grossberg. Armstrong’s half-empty bottle of Lanvin cologne still sits on the dresser in the master bedroom; their old Electrolux vacuum cleaner is still stashed in a hallway closet. No two rooms are alike — “I guess ‘Rococo’ is the word I could use without losing my job,” Harris said of the overall aesthetic — though many are surprisingly modest, especially given Armstrong’s larger-than-life presence. He is the only person ever to have hit records in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. He played behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War and in the Democratic Republic of Congo during decolonization in 1960, during which both sides of a civil war called a truce to watch him perform, then picked up fighting again once his plane took off. There are few American figures as legendary and beloved, and yet, as Harris told me, a common reaction people have upon entering his home is, “This reminds me of my grandmother’s house.” Certainly the living room recalls a ’60s vision of Modernism with a vaguely minimalist formality. The gold sconces offer a glimmer of opulence, but the walls themselves are covered in a subdued, cream-colored wallpaper — the same wallpaper that covered them at least 50 years ago. It matches the upright piano standing against one wall, and the two twill couches. There’s also a small TV — one of the first on the block — that sits low to the floor, so that the neighborhood children whom Armstrong would invite over (he never had kids of his own) could sit comfortably on the floor to watch Westerns.

The mirror-walled downstairs bathroom, one of Armstrong’s favorite rooms in the house, includes a marble bathtub, gold-plated swan fixtures and Rococo-inspired sconces above a carved marble sink created from an antique French birdbath.Chris Mottalini

LUCILLE CONSIDERED THIS a starter home and spent several years trying to convince Armstrong to purchase a more lavish property. She would occasionally put down payments on properties in Harlem or on Long Island only for Armstrong to issue stop payments. He liked it in Corona, and after establishing roots for the first time in his life, he wanted to stay. So Lucille instead channeled her energy into frequent renovations: For the first three years they lived there, Lucille’s mother occupied the second floor; after she died, in 1946, the couple took over the whole house.

The most ostentatious room by far is the first-floor bathroom, which is covered in wall-to-wall gold-rimmed mirrors — as Armstrong once wrote, “It’s a pleasure to see yourself wipe your ass from all angles” — with marble floors, a marble bathtub and a marble sink converted from a birdbath. It feels more like something that belongs in a penthouse suite of a ’70s-era Las Vegas hotel; the care lavished upon the space is perhaps expected from a man who emphatically loved using the bathroom. (Armstrong even had a favorite brand of laxatives, Swiss Kriss, an herbal product that he’d mail sample packets of to fans who wrote to him, along with a picture of him sitting on the toilet, holding the laxatives and beaming his famous, enormous grin; his slogan, “Leave It All Behind Ya,” was printed beneath the image.)

No less startling is the kitchen, a room that exemplifies ’60s Futurism and was partially inspired by the space age exhibitions at the 1964 World’s Fair: There are clear acrylic shelving units, a blender installed into a countertop, a can opener built into a wall and a bespoke Crown stove with six burners, two broilers, two ovens and a small gold placard that reads “Custom Made by Crown for Mr. and Mrs. Louis Armstrong.” The cabinets are lacquered a deep blue — a shade that, in a certain light, looks like the color of the Earth as seen from space, a hue similar to Lucille’s beloved Cadillac.

Upstairs — past the master bedroom, where Lucille’s tiny gold slippers still rest on the floor next to the king-size bed, and where the silver wallpaper is so shiny you can actually see your reflection in it — is the most moving room in the house: Armstrong’s personal den. To this day, it houses his liquor cabinet (still stocked as it was at the time of his death, including a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniel’s), his desk and typewriter, his record collection, which included works by more avant-garde jazz masters (Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk) and his reel-to-reel tape machine, a gadget by which he documented his remarkable talent for the spoken word. Armstrong left behind some 700 tapes, from recordings of his favorite interviews to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 funeral. There’s even a tape of him discussing the room itself, which reveals a certain power dynamic in his and Lucille’s relationship: “She gave me a room and made a den out of it,” he says. “You know what I mean? That really knocked me out.” Growing up, he continues, “we couldn’t afford no den . . . we’d rather sleep in that room.”

HOW IS IT possible that this house has remained so perfectly intact? And why is it so little known? (The home, which opened to the public in 2003, gets about 18,000 visitors each year; Elvis Presley’s Graceland in Memphis, by comparison, draws about 600,000 people annually.) The second question can be explained partly by its location in Corona, a neighborhood that, unless you live here, takes some work to get to.

The first question is more complicated. It certainly helped that the Armstrongs had no children, though it’s still remarkable that the house wasn’t completely picked over following Armstrong’s death. (His 1971 funeral, for which Frank Sinatra and Dick Cavett were among the honorary pallbearers, was held in nearby Flushing Cemetery and drew thousands of spectators.) Much of the credit for its preservation is due to Lucille; after her husband died, she abandoned her desires for a fancier home and became the primary caretaker of his legacy. She stayed in the house until her own death in 1983, at age 69, and left it to the city; since 1987, it has been run by Queens College, which also owns Armstrong’s archives. The college had the foresight to put Lucille’s longtime housekeeper, Bessie Williams, whom she hired in 1972, on the payroll, and every couple of weeks, she’d clean the house as she always had; she retired not long before the house opened as a museum.

But the other factor was Armstrong himself, who despite dropping out of school in the fifth grade had a scholar’s proclivity for saving and indexing. His archive houses his trumpets, his library (which includes “War and Peace,” “Of Mice and Men” and the Bible), the original score from the first recording of “What a Wonderful World” in 1967 and also stranger fare: There’s a 1959 manuscript of a treatise on marijuana (“gage, as they so beautifully call it sometimes,” he writes in the opening sentence); boxes of Franz Schuritz lip salve, which he used prolifically enough (the trumpet was hard on Armstrong’s mouth) to receive a lifetime supply from the company; and a personally compiled joke book that includes an extensive index of punch lines (“Them ears,” “Prostate massage” and so on). Ricky Riccardi, who runs the Armstrong archive, said of this penchant for collecting and organizing: “He was very humble, he didn’t have an ego, but he was very self-aware of his accomplishments. He wanted to be the one to tell his own story.” The house, then, became its own archive, a record of his life off the road.

Riccardi recounted a story about how, during the postwar years, Armstrong would visit Chicago for gigs and stay at the Palmer House hotel downtown. When word would get out, as it always did, that Armstrong was in town, a line would form outside his room, and Armstrong would listen to people’s hardships and give them money: $20 here, $50, sometimes as much as $500. When Armstrong’s manager, Joe Glaser, asked why he’d give away money like that, Armstrong responded, “Money? What do I need money for? They’re gonna write about me in the history books one day.”

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https://nypost.com/2020/01/08/guitar-god-james-blood-ulmer-recalls-when-soho-was-a-garment-district/
 

Guitar god James ‘Blood’ Ulmer recalls when Soho was a garment district

By Chuck Arnold

With his freeform mix of jazz, blues and funk James “Blood” Ulmer was once described by Newsweek as “the most original guitarist since Jimi Hendrix and Wes Montgomery.”

The New York guitar god — who has played with such greats as saxophonist Ornette Coleman, while also getting in his licks as a bandleader and solo artist — will flex his skills Saturday at the Sultan Room in Brooklyn as part of this year’s Winter Jazzfest (running through Jan. 18).

Here, the 79-year-old axman spills on how he got his nickname, what instrument he wishes he could play and living in the same place in Soho since 1975.

Where did your nickname “Blood” come from?

Wow, you’re going back a looong time. You’re talking ’bout when I was 18 years old . . . I didn’t like the name that I had when I came to New York, I guess. So when somebody would ask what my name was, I would say “Youngblood.” And then I said “Youngblood” so long that I took off the “Young” and it just was “Blood.”

Which artists did you have in your blood growing up in South Carolina?

Well, when I was coming up, I started in gospel. The groups I liked the best were the Dixie Hummingbirds, the Five Blind Boys of Alabama and the National Clouds of Joy. We had a gospel group [led by Ulmer’s father] called the Southern Sons from when I was 7 years old till I was 13. I was singing in the group until I got good enough on the guitar to play.

How old were you when you started playing the guitar?

My daddy started me off when I was 4 years old. He put me on his lap and wrapped my hand around his fingers playing on the guitar. I don’t think he thought that was gonna [teach] me anything.

If you could go back and play another instrument besides guitar, what would you play?

I wanted to play the saxophone before I played the guitar. My daddy had a guitar in the house, and I didn’t think that should be something you’d wanna take up for a career or anything. I thought the guitar was just a part of the house. I really wanted to play the saxophone ’cause I had a friend who used to come down South to visit his family, and he had this little alto saxophone. I would go to his house, and I would want to play that horn.

Who are some of your favorite guitarists, past or present?

I used to like Wes Montgomery. And I loved Kenny Burrell — in fact, I copied one of his solos and played it for a while when I started. And George Benson is my friend. But I don’t really listen to other guitar players, because I be workin’ on my own guitar.

How has Soho changed over all the years you’ve lived there?

When I moved on this street, Spring Street between Greene and Mercer, they didn’t call it Soho. This was a garment district, and there was nobody living here — only artists coming down here and renting places to paint and play music and stuff like that. It’s really changed. And the prices have changed.

You turn 80 on Feb. 2. Did you ever imagine you’d still be playing music at 80?

Well, I’ve never done anything else. All I did all my life is play music.

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https://bestclassicbands.com/buzzy-linhart-obituary-2-14-20/
 

Buzzy Linhart, Singer-Writer-Musician, Dies at 76

Best Classic Bands Staff

Buzzy Linhart and Carly Simon, in an undated photo from the early 1970s

Singer-songwriter-musician Buzzy Linhart died Thursday night, Feb. 13, according to various comments on his Facebook page. Linhart, 76, had been in ill health since he suffered a heart attack in 2018. He was closely associated with the Greenwich Village folk-rock scene and co-wrote Bette Midler’s single “(You Got to Have) Friends.”

Linhart’s compositions were also recorded by Carly Simon, among others.

On May 29, 2018, Linhart suffered a “heart attack, seizures, and other complications.” He was subsequently hospitalized, then was moved to a nursing home in Berkeley.

According to a 2018 Facebook post from his son, Linhart had been hospitalized in California after experiencing what was described in the post as a “major seizure event.” At the time, he was in the ICU at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley.

Following his May 2018 health issues, Linhart had hoped to return to the concert stage on July 14 to perform at the Art House Gallery & Culture Centerin Berkeley, Calif. Though the event took place, Linhart was not well enough to attend.

Listen to Buzzy Linhart’s own take on “Friends,” from his 1971 album, The Time to Live is Now

William Linhart was born March 3, 1943, in Pittsburgh, Penn. He played several instruments as a youngster and entered the U.S. Navy School of Music at age 18.

After moving to New York City in the early Sixties, he became friends with Sebastian, who went on to form the Lovin’ Spoonful. Linhart became part of the burgeoning Greenwich Village folk music scene. Soon, he was recording on sessions by many prominent singer-songwriters and formed the band The Seventh Sons, while exploring various forms of improvisational music including raga.

“Friends,” co-written with longtime friend and fellow musician Mark “Moogy” Klingman, was included on Midler’s hugely successful 1972 debut studio album, The Divine Miss M.

Listen to Midler’s version, when she was 26 years old

Linhart is credited as a session musician on albums by Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richie Havens, Carly Simon, Cat Mother & the All Night Newsboys, Tim Hardin, Felix Pappalardi, Stephen Stills, John Sebastian and LaBelle, among others, and released albums under his own name since 1969, including titles for the Philips, Kama Sutra and Atco labels, as well as several self-released albums.

His song, “The Love’s Still Growing,” appears on Carly Simon’s 1971 debut LP.

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https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/greg-kot/ct-ent-greg-kot-farewell-column-20200214-24qj6gcbczgjreu7dtbctfsus4-story.htm
 

Greg Kot says farewell to readers, industry folks but most importantly to the thing that made it all matter, the music that sparked so many amazing things

Greg Kot

Chicago Tribune |

Feb 14, 2020 | 2:49 PM 

As a Tribune music critic for the last 30 years, I’ve attended more than 2,000 concerts where pretty much anything could happen, and often has.

While scrawling in my notepad, I’ve been hit by a sod missile thrown by a Guns ‘N Roses fan, punched in the eye by a guy jostling for a better view of Alice in Chains, hit by a gin bottle when the Offspring incited fans to throw garbage at the stage, been caught in no-man’s land when rival gangs started taunting each other at a hip-hop concert, and had three vertebrae damaged by a 250-pound drunk ramming into a crowd at an outdoor festival. 

My job also had a downside.

Dealing with the machinations of the music industry was in many ways counter to the critic’s job of deciphering the language of music in recordings and in concert. Yet it was unavoidable, and was always an essential part of my beat.

U2 singer Bono (R) was one of the many performers who spilled to Greg Kot over a long tenure as Chicago Tribune music critic. (PUNIT PARANJPE/Getty)

I grew to respect many people who worked in the “industry” I covered, but as a journalist I never thought of myself as a part of that industry. Too often the bureaucracy impeded the music: the onerous contracts that denied countless artists their fair share of royalties (or sometimes no royalties at all), the pay-to-play business model of commercial radio conglomerates, the dominance of the concert industry by a handful of corporations (and eventually one corporation: Live Nation) that spiked ticket prices and service fees, the narrow pipeline clogged with middle men who reduced the flow of music between artists and fans to a trickle. My job often required me to be a business reporter as much as an arts critic, because the business often shaped and sometimes distorted the music that we were being sold. 

When a digital-music underground began to emerge in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, most prominently with rogue platforms such as Napster, the hope was that the playing field would be leveled, that artists would be able to go direct-to-fan in delivering their music, and improve their odds of getting heard and possibly even getting paid. It certainly terrified the music industry, which met the new digital era with its usual blunt-force incomprehension and sought at first to ignore this new threat to its monopoly and then to sue it into oblivion. I once received a call in the late ‘90s from a major-label executive who had been reading my reporting on the new digital reality. “What’s an MP3?” he asked. “And how do you find one?” 

Their demise seemed inevitable. But has anything really changed? In the place of the major-label hegemony a new corporate hierarchy – Spotify, Amazon, Google – has emerged that has reduced the value of recorded music to micro-pennies per play. Artists, as always, remain the last to get paid, and now they’re getting a smaller-than-ever slice of the revenue pie for their life’s work.

Yet the music itself somehow remains vital. Artists are making more music available to more people than ever in human history. Critics’ relevance has always been dicey, depending on whom you ask. But from this biased perspective, a smart, endlessly curious critic can continue to play a vital role in the digital world by fishing out the good stuff in an ever-expanding ocean of creativity.

Janelle Monae, one of Greg Kot’s top performers, here during a 2018 show at the Chicago Theatre. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)

I always viewed my writing as a conversation-starter about music that matters, or should matter. And my run at the Tribune might be over, but the conversation will continue. Here are a few parting memories:

The start: In my pre-critic days at the Trib, Eleventh Dream Day was a regular at the now-defunct Batteries Not Included, and because of that band, so was I. After one show I introduced myself to the quartet and asked if I could write about them for the Tribune, and I nailed one of my first bylines. Eleventh Dream Day continues to make inspiring music to this day.

Ice-breakers for potentially daunting interviews with a few late-greats:Address James Brown as “Mr. Brown”; have Lou Reed try to fix your malfunctioning tape recorder; ask John Lee Hooker about baseball. 

Underappreciated: Paul K and the Weathermen, Green, Green Velvet, Local H, Shrimp Boat, All Natural, the Molemen. 

Interview question that evoked the most uncomfortable responses (as posed to Paul McCartney, David Crosby, Mick Jagger, Bono, the Eagles’ Glenn Frey and countless others): Some variation of “You’re charging hundreds of dollars per ticket on this tour, which a lot of your fans can’t afford. Is that something that concerns you?” The answer from most, condensed and paraphrased, after much equivocating: “Not really.”

Paul McCartney, one of the artists made uncomfortable under questioning by Greg Kot. (Chris Sweda / Chicago Tribune)

Best interviews: Public Enemy’s Chuck D; the late, great Chicago house “godfather” Frankie Knuckles; Prince; Iggy Pop; Eddie Vedder; Sinead O’Connor; Patti Smith; Kurt Cobain; Tom Petty; Lupe Fiasco; John Prine; David Bowie; Mavis Staples; Keith Richards. 

Most memorable interview location: After he’d been banished from his major-label deal for his no-punches-pulled protest rap circa 1994, Ice-T invited me to his home in the Hollywood Hills, above the crime-ridden streets of South Central Los Angeles, where he grew up. “I thought I left there,” he said, “but now I realize I never really can.”

Best interview anecdote: John Lee Hooker once told me that Van Morrison used to call him late at night asking for dating advice. 

Most ominous start to an interview: “There’s a dark cloud over us, Greg.” – Bono in 2005.

Funniest message from the office while I was out of town: “There’s a man named ‘Bongo’ that keeps calling for you. He seems upset about something.”

Shortest interview: Johnny Lydon hung up after 30 seconds and two questions, both involving a nostalgia tour his band Public Image Ltd. was doing with former Clash guitarist Mick Jones in Big Audio Dynamite.

Most memorable show: First place tie between Neil Young and Crazy Horse playing through a storm and an electrical outage at the H.O.R.D.E. festival in 1997, Jeff Buckley solo at Uncommon Ground with two dozen people in attendance on a snowed-in night in 1994.

Best then-unknown opening act: The Strokes opening for Guided By Voices at the Empty Bottle in 2001, before their debut album was released. 

Best live performers: Iggy Pop, Prince, Janelle Monae, the Mekons, P.J. Harvey, Nick Cave, Mary J. Blige. Then there’s David Yow, who deserves a category all to himself.

Most insane stage stunt: Yow once poured lighter fluid on his jeans and set himself afire in an early Jesus Lizard show at the Cubby Bear. He survived unscathed. He later explained: “You don’t get burned if your jeans are tight enough.” 

“The Jesus Lizard Book” by The Jesus Lizard features images from the band’s wild concerts. (Pat Graham photo)

My crankiest lead (from 1999, after covering a festival in Tinley Park):“Memo to the Offspring’s Dexter Holland: You are an idiot. Why? Let me count the ways. You urged 30,000 people to reach under their chairs and throw garbage at you. Gutsy move, since you exited the stage two minutes later. Meanwhile, cups, bottles, beer, tin containers, even garbage cans rained down for a quarter hour on concertgoers, including grade-school kids and people in wheelchairs, and delayed the concert considerably. While stage crews cleaned up after your little prank, you were nowhere to be found. … I’ve never witnessed any alleged rock star say anything more stupid from a concert stage, and that’s quite an accomplishment. Congratulations.”

Thanks: To the readers, even those who threw sod or punches, or merely wished me ill will for writing harshly about their favorite bands – I’ll even cherish those multiple “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” goodbyes I’ve gotten in the last few weeks. We’re bound in the understanding that music not only matters, it’s worth discussing, arguing about and even fighting for, preferably not with fists but with words.

Greg Kot has been the pop and rock music critic at the Chicago Tribune since 1990. He co-hosts the nationally syndicated public-radio show “Sound Opinions” and has authored several books, including the Mavis Staples biography “I’ll Take You There”; “Ripped,” about the digital music revolution; and “Wilco: Learning How to Die.”l

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Today’s selection — from Listening for America by Rob Kapilow. George Gershwin, Porgy and Bess, and the controversy surrounding the “white appropriation of black culture”: “[The early twentieth century was] a time when white composers were freely appropriating black music for their own pur­poses — spirituals gave black singers, choirs, and arrangers an opportunity to transmit black music and culture on their own terms. They gave African Americans a place in white concert halls and a chance to perform for white audiences. This widespread exposure to spirituals had a major influence on what white people in general and two white artists in particular — DuBose Heyward and George Gershwin — thought of as an authentic, black musical sound. “It is striking to see how naturally Gershwin’s folk opera, Porgy and Bess, grew out of Dvorak’s idea of an American music founded on its indigenous black music. As early as 1920, Gershwin talked about wanting to write ‘operettas that represent the life and spirit of this country.’ By 1925, a year after Rhapsody in Blue and still ten years before the premiere of Porgy and Bess, this general impulse had become a more specific desire to write an opera for African American singers because ‘[b]lacks sing beautifully. They are always singing; they have it in their blood.’ A year later, during the summer of 1926, Gershwin read DuBose Heyward’s immensely pop­ular 1925 novel, Porgy, supposedly in a single mesmerized sitting, and the desire became concrete: to turn Heyward’s novel into the first American ‘folk opera.’ “Though Gershwin’s vision of an opera based on Heyward’s novel might have coalesced in a single afternoon in 1926, it would take nine difficult years for that vision to become a reality. Gershwin immedi­ately approached Heyward about turning the novel into an opera, but at the time Heyward and his wife, the playwright Dorothy Hartzell Kuhns, were busy turning Porgy into a play that would be produced by the Theatre Guild. The stage version was as successful as the novel, and it launched the career of its innovative Armenian director, Rouben Mamoulian, who would ultimately direct Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess as well. After the play opened, Gershwin and Heyward met in Atlantic City to discuss a collaboration, but Gershwin felt he needed more time and study to prepare himself to write an opera. These preparations involved composing an enormous amount of ‘classical music’ between Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 and Porgy and Bess in 1935, including the Concerto in F (1925), An American in Paris(1928), the Second Rhapsody (1932), the Cuban Overture (1932), and Variations on ‘Got Rhythm’ (1933-34). When the Metropolitan Opera finally got around to commissioning an opera from Gershwin in 1929, he chose to adapt Szymon Ansky’s The Dybbuk rather than Porgy, but after several years, The Dybbuk project fell through because of problems acquiring the rights. At the same time, a plan for Al Jolson to star in a Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein version of Porgy had also fallen apart. “Finally, by the fall of 1933, with the economic pressures of the Depres­sion weighing heavily on Heyward, he struck a deal with Gershwin. Heyward would write the libretto, and Heyward and Ira Gershwin would collaborate on the lyrics. Ira took charge of the up-tempo, Broadway-style numbers, Heyward wrote the more lyrical ones, and the two polished every­thing together. Though Otto Kahn offered Gershwin a $5,000 bonus if he produced the work at the Met, Gershwin declined, claiming that he ‘felt that for the Met to acquire an all-Negro cast to be available six to eight per­formances a season, was not too practical a project.’ Instead, they decided to produce the project on Broadway with the Theatre Guild, the same group who had produced the play Porgy in 1927. Gershwin began sketching the work in February 1934, completed the score eleven months later, and then spent nine months orchestrating the mammoth work in time for its Boston premiere on September 30, 1935. (Its Broadway premiere would follow on October 10, 1935.) “The work was controversial from the moment it opened, and that controversy continues unabated today. In Ellen Noonan’s 2012 book The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera, she examines ‘the opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, cul­ture, and the struggle for equality.’ Given the complexity of the racial, cultural, and musical issues surrounding the work both in its time and ours, we would do well to keep Santayana in mind: ‘We must welcome the future remembering that soon it will be the past and we must respect the past remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible.‘ [emphasis mine]. “No work in this book raises issues of white appropriation of black culture more profoundly than Porgy and Bess. Who owns the cultural heritage of black Americans? Who has the right to tell their stories, and what consti­tutes an authentic telling of those stories? These questions are at the heart of both the underlying controversy surrounding Porgy and Bess and its ongo­ing cultural importance, and to begin to come to terms with them requires an understanding of DuBose Heyward, what he and Gershwin were trying to accomplish, the opera’s place and meaning in the cultural context of the time, and what relationship the fictional world of Catfish Row had to do with the real world of Cabbage Row, the Charleston, South Carolina, neighborhood on which it was based.” Sign Up Here Listening For America  Author: Rob Kapilow Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation Copyright 2019 by Rob Kapilow Pages: 104-106 Buy Now All DelanceyPlace.com proceeds are donated to children’s literacy projects.

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Revisiting the ‘Stank Groove’ of Jimi Hendrix

News The Latest From Around The Music World

By Bill Milkowski   I  Feb. 10, 2020

Jimi Hendrix’s performances on Dec. 31, 1969, and Jan. 1, 1970, at the Fillmore East in New York rank as a unique moment in the guitarist’s career.

(Photo: Allan Herr/MoPOP/Authentic Hendrix, LLC)

For a generation of African-American guitarists growing up in the ’60s, Jimi Hendrix’s was revelatory. The album, which intro-duced the guitarist’s new trio with bassist Billy Cox and drummer Buddy Miles, reached the Top 10 on the Billboard album chart.

Hugely influential for Black Rock Coalition co-founders Greg Tate and Vernon Reid, as well as Parliament/Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel, this intense cauldron of heavy-duty, rolling funk-rock deeply rooted in African-American cultural history—a mix of gospel, spirituals, Delta blues and r&b—also had a significant impact on guitarists like Ernie Isley and Lenny Kravitz. 

Reid, who helped found Living Colour, recently recalled hearing the 1970 album for the first time: “It was a mind-altering experience. Fascinating, terrifying, beautiful, funky, incendiary … it was all these different things. Buddy’s incredible pocket; he’s really holding it down. And the sound of Billy’s bass is so meaty and so crucial to the whole thing working. And what’s amazing is, it’s all happening in real time. Those three guys … they became more than three in that concert.”

The appeal of Band Of Gypsys touched more than just six-stringers. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis called it “earth-shattering,” citing the freedom and imposing groove supplied by Cox and Miles as a compelling factor. “At the time, I didn’t know why it spoke to me, but it did, immediately,” he said. “Now, I dug the [Jimi Hendrix] Experience, believe me. But Band of Gypsys affected me in a much more powerful way. The shit was just funky, the way Led Zeppelin was funky and the way The Beatles had a little groove to their shit, too. But those two groups never could get their bottom to have that funky-ass, stank groove the way the Band of Gypsys did.”

Originally released as a six-song LP on March 25, 1970, Band Of Gypsys was the fourth and final Hendrix album released before his death six months later. The six tracks were culled from performances recorded during two days at promoter Bill Graham’s Manhattan venue, Fillmore East, as New Year’s Eve 1969 turned into New Year’s Day 1970. About 50 years later, Legacy Recordings, in collaboration with Experience Hendrix L.L.C., has released Songs For Groovy Children: The Fillmore East Concerts, which comes in a five-CD or eight-LP package.

It documents all four sets the band played (a total of 43 tracks, presented in chronological order). The compilation includes eight previously unreleased tracks, four songs now presented in a longer, unedited form, and several that are back in print on CD/LP for the first time in a decade.

The collection includes reworked versions of “Foxey Lady,” “Fire,” “Hey Joe” and “Purple Haze”—all from Hendrix’s 1967 studio debut, Are You Experienced—along with two renditions of “Stone Free” and premieres of Band of Gypys tunes like “Who Knows,” “Message To Love,” “Power Of Soul” and the extraordinary Vietnam War protest song “Machine Gun.” 

Songs For Groovy Children also includes freshly written Hendrix originals like “Earth Blues,” “Stepping Stone,” “Ezy Ryder,” “Burning Desire,” “Lover Man” and “Izabella,” as well as a frighteningly intense reading of his Delta blues-flavored “Hear My Train A Comin’,” extended slow blues jams on Elmore James’ “Bleeding Heart” and Jimmy Hughes’ “Steal Away,” plus a dynamic interpretation of Howard Tate’s r&b hit “Stop.” 

“Band Of Gypsys was a strong statement from three brothers,” Miles, who died in 2008, said in an Experience Hendrix video. “Our music was a wide, wide spectrum—you had rockers, you had r&b and you most definitely had blues. When we did ‘Machine Gun,’ it was really taken from Delta blues and rural blues. That particular song was definitely not Chicago blues style; it was from the Deep South.”

But the backstory to the triumphant Fillmore East concerts reveals an artist awash in troubles. By July 1969, the Jimi Hendrix Experience—the guitarist’s trio with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell—had broken up. Redding left the trio, returning to England to front his own group, Fat Mattress, while Mitchell joined Jack Bruce & Friends. 

With a dwindling cash flow and huge bills mounting from the construction of his Electric Lady Studios in the heart of Greenwich Village, Hendrix was feeling a financial squeeze. 

“Jimi’s life had taken him to a place where the studio was a big expenditure,” said Hendrix archivist and author John McDermott, who co-produced Songs For Groovy Children. “Due to litigation he was involved in at the time, his royalties had been frozen both here and abroad. So, when the band stopped touring at the end of June 1969—other than the Woodstock show—there was no money coming in.”

The litigation was the result of a claim made by Ed Chalpin, who was suing Hendrix, Warner-Reprise Records and Jimi’s manager, Michael Jeffery, for breach of contract. Hendrix previously had signed a contract (for $1 and the promise of 1-percent royalties on all records he made) with Chalpin’s PPX Enterprises on Oct. 15, 1965, when the guitarist was a little-known sideman for Chalpin’s client Curtis Knight & The Squires. The contract bound Hendrix “to produce and play and/or sing exclusively for PPX Enterprises” for three years from the date of the signing.

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‘The Whole System Collapsed’: Inside the Music Industry’s Ongoing Distribution Crisis

‘It’s amazing how a company most have never heard of can bring the U.S. music industry to its knees,’ said one label exec struggling to get his artists’ records into stores

Elias Leight February 12, 2020 3:21PM ET

Last April, all three major labels started to use the same distributor for CDs and records. The consolidation has resulted in ‘lost stock, unfilled orders, [and] massive delays in fulfillment.’

Nikolas Joao Kokovlis/Sopa Image/Shutterstock

Last fall, Steve Harkins was conducting a routine check on a shipment of records and CDs at Ingram Entertainment, a wholesale music distributor headquartered in Tennessee. Instead of vinyl, though, Harkins was amused to find that Ingram’s supplier had sent a pallet packed with bottles of windshield-wiper fluid. “I called customer service, they apologized profusely,” he recalls. “I said, ‘The thing that really bothers me is that you didn’t have the courtesy to throw in some car wax.’ ” 

No harm done — until a few weeks later, when Harkins received another surprise that suggested a troubling trend. This time, a shipment that was supposed to contain music came filled with bottles of prescription cough syrup. Other orders of records and CDs arrived damaged or incorrectly packed. “You can’t make this stuff up,” Harkins says. “In all my years of business, I’ve never been able to report that we’ve been missing significant quantities of product, and in its place, prescription cough syrup and carwash fluid.” 

Harkins isn’t alone. In January, a record store owner in Poughkeepsie, New York, got a similar shock. An unscheduled delivery truck pulled into the parking lot of Darkside Records. “The driver says, ‘I got a weird one for you,’ ” remembers Justin Johnson, who owns the store. Johnson went outside to find that an entire freight truck was being used to haul just four records — copies of a 50th-anniversary reissue of the Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed, arriving two and a half months after their street date.

Another record store owner, Terry Currier of Music Millennium in Portland, Oregon, placed an order last year with Universal Music Group: approximately 700 items to ship on October 1st, giving them plenty of time to make it to the store before holiday shopping began. None of the albums showed up until after the Christmas rush.

Episodes like these — nonsensical, maddening, and business-threatening — have become commonplace for CD and record retailers over the past 10 months. Most agree that the inciting incident took place last April, when Warner Records moved its physical distribution to Direct Shot Distributing, a company that was already being used by the other two major labels, Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. A single company was suddenly responsible for sorting and shipping the vast majority of CDs and records sold in the U.S. market. Unfortunately, it seems that Direct Shot was incapable of taking on the additional work, according to interviews with more than 20 managers, retailers, and label executives. “The whole system collapsed,” says David Azzoni, a 15-year veteran of physical retail, illustrating the frailty of a distribution network that had long been taken for granted.  

As a result, many labels, including the majors, are now struggling with what was once the most basic task in the music industry: getting their albums into stores for listeners who want to buy them. Affected titles include catalog classics as well as new releases (store owners interviewed for this story mentioned problems stocking 2019 albums from the Black Keys, Beck, and Cigarettes After Sex). With Record Store Day approaching in April, retailers are scared that they’ll be short of merchandise on the biggest day of the year for physical sales, while independent labels and artists, who are often more dependent on physical sales than the majors, are trying to cope with lost revenue and, in some cases, changing their rollout plans. 

“It has affected us and almost everyone we know,” says an executive at an indie label that relies on Direct Shot. “Lost stock, unfilled orders, massive delays in fulfillment — it’s amazing how a company most have never heard of can bring the U.S. music industry to its knees.” 

For many casual listeners, the convenience and rapid growth of streaming services has turned the physical side of the music business into an afterthought. But despite declining physical sales overall, CDs and vinyl still generated revenues of nearly a billion dollars in this country in 2019, according to Richard Burgess, CEO of the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM).

A whole freight truck was used to ship just four records, according to one record store owner in Poughkeepsie, New York. Courtesy of Justin Johnson

That amounts to roughly one-tenth of the overall music industry in the U.S. — “not peanuts,” as Burgess puts it. And at many independent labels, the physical music business is worth far more: Vinyl and CD sales account for as much as 50 percent of revenue for some members of A2IM. Vinyl in particular has been growing steadily for years now, to the benefit of both major labels — who released many of the most popular records in 2019, according to the analytics company Alpha Data — and indies: “Physical releases are often a key part of their marketing plan,” Burgess says.

Thanks to decades of consolidation in the music business, once Warner moved to Direct Shot, the company became single-handedly responsible for more than 80 percent of the physical music on the market. That chunk includes releases put out by the three major labels — all declined to comment — along with those put out by the many independent labels that have been scooped up by major-label distribution networks over time. 

“Direct Shot is obviously not prepared to handle the volume they took on,” says Andrea Paschal, executive director of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores. “It’s a one-inch pipe with 10 inches of water going through it,” adds Allen Kovac, CEO and founder of the independent label Better Noise Music, which left the Warner-owned Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA) a couple of years ago.  

Direct Shot did not respond to requests for comment. But Kyle Krug, director of marketing and communications for Legacy Supply Chain Services, a warehousing and logistics company that finalized its purchase of Direct Shot last summer, insists that the company has “brought lots of resources to bear” in an effort to retool Direct Shot’s distribution system. 

Krug says Legacy Supply Chain Services’ efforts, which have already cost the company millions of dollars, encompass everything from “making sure a high-volume product is positioned in a spot where it’s easier to pick” to bringing in “high-end supply-chain consultants” to installing a new “tier-one [warehouse] management system.” Was the Direct Shot warehouse unprepared to meet the demands of the modern music landscape? “That’s a fair statement,” Krug says. 

But with Direct Shot still struggling to fulfill its mandate, many in retail doubt the efficacy of Legacy’s “re-engineering.” Michael Kurtz, the co-founder of Record Store Day, believes that “any distribution company that was serious would have the problem fixed in 30 days — 60 days max, and that’s a huge stretch.” 

“They’re not fixing it,” Kurtz adds, “and it’s not gonna be fixed.” 

Unfortunately for the majors, since they all chose to rely on third-party distribution, they don’t have a lot of options at the moment. There are “not a whole lot of Direct Shots out there,” as Krug puts it. “They’re in kind of a niche business.” 

Retailers say Universal temporarily moved some distribution to a separate facility to reduce the Direct Shot logjam. More recently, the three major labels stopped shipping music to small stores as a way of lightening Direct Shot’s load, according to retailers. (Some stores have succeeded in ordering directly from Sony in the past few weeks.) Stores were asked to rely instead on one-stops, basically middleman distributors, but that led to price increases. The major labels attempted “to keep it as cost-neutral as possible,” according to two retailers, by having the one-stops offer discounts to stores that used to order directly from the majors. 

Some in retail have seen an improvement in fulfillment rates and delivery times — though it’s not close to back to normal — while others have seen no change. “I’ve been fond of saying, ‘Putting a Band-Aid on an amputation doesn’t really cut it,’ ” jokes John Kunz of Waterloo Records in Austin. 

Kurtz conducted an informal survey of record store owners in his orbit. “The first four months of 2019, most record stores were up 20 percent over the year before, business-wise,” he says. “Between that time and the end of the year, we went to flat to negative-four percent on the year.” Paschal is sure that “this situation will be the end for some stores.”

Aside from the retailers, the greatest pain is being felt by indie labels and middle-class artists who don’t have massive stream counts. “For working musicians, physical [sales], selling records on the road, getting those records into stores, that’s still a big piece of their economy,” says Tom Grover Biery, who spent 20 years at Warner and became a prominent early advocate of Record Store Day during his time there.

An executive at an indie that goes through ADA says the chaos at Direct Shot has “cost us severe loss of business for almost nine months.” “We started to reschedule releases in the hopes that they would benefit if the situation got better,” he adds. Andy Farrow, who manages the metal band Opeth, says the delays in physical shipping also “impacted our chart position.”

A few indie labels, like XL and 4AD, have managed to extricate themselves from their distribution deals with major-label-owned companies, working instead with the independently owned Redeye Distribution. (A rep for the Beggars Group, which includes both of those labels, declined to comment.) The indie-label executive who is currently struggling with fallout from Direct Shot distribution says, “We’re looking for alternatives.” Krug of Legacy Supply Chain Services calls this “a concerning trend.”

A pallet was delivered to Music Millenium in Portland, Oregon, with one box and one CD in it.
Courtesy of Terry Currier.

Many indie labels that have been affected by the distribution crisis are scared to speak about their experiences. “People are afraid of talking about what really happened because there are people that will hold that against them,” says the executive at an indie label that goes through ADA. “Before indies try to get out of a deal, they’re worried about not getting out if there’s any negative publicity surrounding them,” Burgess explains. “When they get out, they wind up having to sign an N.D.A.” So the situation continues quietly.

As the indie community’s concerns have gone unaddressed month after month, wounds have started to fester, and a conspiracy theory that the major labels are actively trying to eliminate the physical business has gained momentum. “We know the demand is here,” says Johnson, the Poughkeepsie store owner, “but are they gonna kill off the business?” 

Krug has heard this theory, and he calls it “an unfortunate assumption.” “We absolutely recognize the pain that those folks are having,” he continues. “We’re all investing in this business to ensure that the physical music industry maintains itself.” As to when Direct Shot will be running smoothly again, he says “we’re trying not to float specific dates out there,” though “we’ve got a lot of big [changes] that are coming to the end point.”  

Mike Fratt, general manager of Homer’s Music in Omaha, Nebraska, is also aware of the theory that the majors are trying to wash their hands of CDs and vinyl by choking off the supply. But he offers a different explanation. “I don’t think anybody malevolently tried to hurt us,” he says. “It was greed, poor management decisions, and incompetence that brought this about.”

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Jazz Documentary Co-Written and Directed by CCRI Professor to screen at College during Black History Month

February 11, 2020

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Source: CCRI

An award-winning documentary on jazz music in Rhode Island co-written and directed by Community College of Rhode Island Videographer and Film Professor Norm Grant and filmmaker Tom Shaker will be featured as part of the CCRI’s Black History Month festivities at all four campuses.

Grant co-wrote and co-directed “Do It, Man! The Story of The Celebrity Club,” which premiered in 2017, with Shaker, a fellow college professor and author. The film tells the story of Providence’s legendary Celebrity Club, which featured the top national jazz and R&B acts throughout the 1950s and was widely considered the first interracial nightclub in New England.

Owned by local businessman Paul Fillipi, who years later went on to open Ballard’s Beach Resort on Block Island, the Celebrity Club hosted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, uniting people of all cultures through music in what were remembered as turbulent times for race relations in Rhode Island.

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“Do It, Man!” screens for free on the following dates, times and locations during Black History Month: February 19 from 12:30–2 pm at the Liston Campus Auditorium, February 20 from 1–2:30 pm in Room 222 of the Newport County Campus, February 24 from 1–2:30 pm in Room 2344 of the Flanagan Campus, and February 25 from noon–1:30 pm in Room 1130 of the Knight Campus.

The film earned the 2018 Peter C. Rollins Award for Best Documentary Film through the American Popular Culture Association and the 2018 Best Documentary Film award at the Shawna Shea Film Festival. “Do It, Man!” also screened at the 2018 Rhode Island Black Film Festival and the 2018 Miami Independent Film Festival.

“It’s nice to see it screened here,” said Grant, who laid the groundwork for the documentary more than a decade ago with Shaker. “When you look at the news in recent years, race is still a relevant story, so I think this story is still relevant because of that.”

Retired CCRI music professor Lloyd Kaplan approached Grant more than a decade ago about profiling the history of jazz music in Rhode Island. Grant read Who’s Who in Rhode Island Jazz, a book written by Kaplan and Hall of Fame bass player Bob Petteruti, and became fascinated with the section detailing the Celebrity Club, hence the idea to write and produce a documentary on the club’s origins. Grant and Shaker teamed up on the project and began interviewing subjects for the film in 2005, from local musicians to noted historians.

In addition to the music, “Do It, Man!” focuses heavily on Rhode Island’s tempestuous race relations in the ‘50s. Black musicians were often denied access to hotels in order to perform at local venues, Grant said, but Fillipi owned a handful of rooms above the Celebrity Club and would allow visiting performers to stay for a week at a time so they could play each night in front of sold-out crowds. The Celebrity Club, located in the Randall Square section of Providence, closed in the early ‘60s after first opening its doors in 1949, but is often credited for ushering in a wave of social change in Rhode Island.

“If it wasn’t a turning point in race relations in the state,” Grant said, “I think it was at least a significant step forward.”

A former award-winning photojournalist who has had his work published in the New York Daily News, Boston Globe and USA Today, Grant worked in CCRI’s Department of Information Technology before joining the Marketing and Communications Department. He is the college’s chief videographer and currently teaches Foundations of Video and Audio Production, Media and Broadcast History and Documentary Production.

CCRI is at the forefront of improving the ways community college students are prepared to advance their education and career prospects. Last May, the college achieved its highest two- and three-year graduation rates in more than 20 years and awarded more credentials than ever before.  The college expects to have the highest three-year graduation rate of any community college in New England by 2021.

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Jazz Documentary Co-Written and Directed by CCRI Professor to screen at College during Black History Month

February 11, 2020

Become A What’s Up Newp Supporter | Your voluntary contribution helps fund our local, independent journalism, news, and information.

Source: CCRI

An award-winning documentary on jazz music in Rhode Island co-written and directed by Community College of Rhode Island Videographer and Film Professor Norm Grant and filmmaker Tom Shaker will be featured as part of the CCRI’s Black History Month festivities at all four campuses.

Grant co-wrote and co-directed “Do It, Man! The Story of The Celebrity Club,” which premiered in 2017, with Shaker, a fellow college professor and author. The film tells the story of Providence’s legendary Celebrity Club, which featured the top national jazz and R&B acts throughout the 1950s and was widely considered the first interracial nightclub in New England.

Owned by local businessman Paul Fillipi, who years later went on to open Ballard’s Beach Resort on Block Island, the Celebrity Club hosted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington, uniting people of all cultures through music in what were remembered as turbulent times for race relations in Rhode Island.

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“Do It, Man!” screens for free on the following dates, times and locations during Black History Month: February 19 from 12:30–2 pm at the Liston Campus Auditorium, February 20 from 1–2:30 pm in Room 222 of the Newport County Campus, February 24 from 1–2:30 pm in Room 2344 of the Flanagan Campus, and February 25 from noon–1:30 pm in Room 1130 of the Knight Campus.

The film earned the 2018 Peter C. Rollins Award for Best Documentary Film through the American Popular Culture Association and the 2018 Best Documentary Film award at the Shawna Shea Film Festival. “Do It, Man!” also screened at the 2018 Rhode Island Black Film Festival and the 2018 Miami Independent Film Festival.

“It’s nice to see it screened here,” said Grant, who laid the groundwork for the documentary more than a decade ago with Shaker. “When you look at the news in recent years, race is still a relevant story, so I think this story is still relevant because of that.”

Retired CCRI music professor Lloyd Kaplan approached Grant more than a decade ago about profiling the history of jazz music in Rhode Island. Grant read Who’s Who in Rhode Island Jazz, a book written by Kaplan and Hall of Fame bass player Bob Petteruti, and became fascinated with the section detailing the Celebrity Club, hence the idea to write and produce a documentary on the club’s origins. Grant and Shaker teamed up on the project and began interviewing subjects for the film in 2005, from local musicians to noted historians.

In addition to the music, “Do It, Man!” focuses heavily on Rhode Island’s tempestuous race relations in the ‘50s. Black musicians were often denied access to hotels in order to perform at local venues, Grant said, but Fillipi owned a handful of rooms above the Celebrity Club and would allow visiting performers to stay for a week at a time so they could play each night in front of sold-out crowds. The Celebrity Club, located in the Randall Square section of Providence, closed in the early ‘60s after first opening its doors in 1949, but is often credited for ushering in a wave of social change in Rhode Island.

“If it wasn’t a turning point in race relations in the state,” Grant said, “I think it was at least a significant step forward.”

A former award-winning photojournalist who has had his work published in the New York Daily News, Boston Globe and USA Today, Grant worked in CCRI’s Department of Information Technology before joining the Marketing and Communications Department. He is the college’s chief videographer and currently teaches Foundations of Video and Audio Production, Media and Broadcast History and Documentary Production.

CCRI is at the forefront of improving the ways community college students are prepared to advance their education and career prospects. Last May, the college achieved its highest two- and three-year graduation rates in more than 20 years and awarded more credentials than ever before.  The college expects to have the highest three-year graduation rate of any community college in New England by 2021.

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https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2020/02/11/us/ap-us-obit-lyle-mays.html
 

Noted Jazz Keyboardist Lyle Mays Dies at Age 66

By The Associated Press

Feb. 11, 2020

LOS ANGELES — Lyle Mays, a jazz keyboardist whose work, chiefly with the Pat Metheny Group, won nearly a dozen Grammy Awards, died Monday in Los Angeles. He was 66.

Mays had a “long battle with a recurring illness,” according to Pat Metheny’s website.

“Lyle was one of the greatest musicians I have ever known,” Metheny wrote. “Across more than 30 years, every moment we shared in music was special. From the first notes we played together, we had an immediate bond. His broad intelligence and musical wisdom informed every aspect of who he was in every way. I will miss him with all my heart.”

“Lyle was a brilliant musician and person, and a genius in every sense of the word,” said a statement from his niece, composer-vocalist Aubrey Johnson. “He was my dear uncle, mentor, and friend and words cannot express the depth of my grief.”

Born in Wausaukee, Wisconsin, Mays’ mother and father played piano and guitar and he played organ as a youngster. 

He co-founded the group with guitarist Metheny in the 1970s, where he was a performer, composer and arranger. The group’s endlessly innovative fusion style incorporated everything from rock and contemporary jazz to world music.

The group won numerous jazz performance Grammys, and some for best contemporary jazz album, including 2005’s award for “The Way Up.” But the group also scored an award in 1998 for best rock instrumental performance for “The Roots of Coincidence.”

Mays also was a sideman for albums by jazz, rock and pop artists, including Joni Mitchell, Rickie Lee Jones and the group Earth, Wind & Fire.

Mays also helped compose soundtrack music for several movies, including 1985’s “The Falcon and The Snowman.”

Mays, who cherished the technical and analytical aspects of his craft as well as the improvisational part, also was a self-taught computer programmer and architect who designed a house for a relative. 

—-

This story corrects in 6th paragraph that the awards were Grammys, not Emmys.

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https://www.pbs.org/video/late-blossom-blues-ptlsqk/

Born in Mississippi, Leo “Bud” Welch’s recording and touring career begins at the age of 81. With the support of his dedicated manager, veteran Vencie Varnad, Leo’s Blues career takes him to festivals across the South and all the way to Austria. With just a handful of Bluesmen left in the U.S., LATE BLOSSOM BLUES offers a glimpse into the daily life of one of America’s musical treasures.

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https://www.patmetheny.com/news/full_display.cfm?id=137

R.I.P. Lyle Mays (1953-2020)

2.10.2020

It is with great sadness that we have to report the passing of our friend and brother, Lyle Mays (1953-2020). He passed today in Los Angeles after a long battle with a recurring illness, surrounded by loved ones.

 Pat Metheny: “Lyle was one of the greatest musicians I have ever known. Across more than 30 years, every moment we shared in music was special. From the first notes we played together, we had an immediate bond. His broad intelligence and musical wisdom informed every aspect of who he was in every way. I will miss him with all my heart.”

 Steve Rodby: “I had the great privilege of having Lyle in my life for decades, as an inspiration and as my friend. As anyone who knew him and his music will agree, there will only be one Lyle, and we all will continue to appreciate his soulful brilliance, in so many ways.”

 His beloved niece, Aubrey Johnson: “Lyle was a brilliant musician and person, and a genius in every sense of the word. He was my dear uncle, mentor, and friend and words cannot express the depth of my grief.”

 At this time, there are no details regarding a memorial service. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that contributions be made to the Caltech Fund.

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https://www.messynessychic.com/2020/02/06/race-movies-and-the-black-owned-studios-that-ran-parallel-to-mainstream-hollywood/
 

Race Movies and the Black-Owned Studios that Thrived Next to Hollywood

There was another Hollywood that thrived once upon a time. From the 1910s to the 1950s, an independent Black American film industry catered to its own segregated audience, had its own African American directors, stars and studios. The movies they produced, the first alternative American “indie” cinema, are known as “race movies”. Of more than 500 motion pictures made, nearly all have been destroyed or damaged and are now considered to be lost films. 

To understand how race movies came about, we first need to take ourselves to the picture house at the turn of the century. In popular white culture, in the press, in cartoons and now on the silver screen, African American audiences are not only being ignored, but constantly insulted with demeaning images of themselves, portrayed as illiterate and uneducated, having never moved on from the plantations, never having advanced. At best, they are comedians, illiterate and uneducated; their roles serving only to provoke laughter and ridicule certainly not to provoke any kind of serious thought. 

In reality, a sophisticated black middle class had emerged from the previous enslaved generation, one that needed to construct and see a new dignified image for itself that they couldn’t find in the regular cinemas, which were also segregated of course. The demand for a film industry geared to portray black society with affection and pride was brewing. 

“Black Hollywood” found its audience in Chicago, a cultural centre for African Americans in the first two decades of the 20th century. Lincoln Motion Picture Company is considered the first all-black movie production company, and the first to create serious dramatic films. It was founded by an African American actor, Noble Johnson, who got his start in Hollywood playing Native American tribesmen, Egyptian soldiers and “exotic” merchants, but never his own race. 

In 1916, he cast himself in his studio’s first movie as a young black engineer who strikes oil and becomes a millionaire. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambitionbecame the first successful “Class A negro movie” box office hit. Due to segregation laws, Lincoln studio’s films were limited to show in churches, schools, “Colored Only” theaters, or midnight screenings, but they had a highly-professional look to them. 

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company however, was short-lived, and closed in 1921. But not before the studio scouted the man who would become “the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century”. In 1918, Lincoln bid on the rights to adapt the first novel of an unknown rancher-turned-writer, Oscar Micheaux. 

The farmer from South Dakota demanded the right to direct the movie himself. Lincoln resisted, so Micheaux decided to make the movie without them. 

The Homesteader would become the first feature length race movie and Oscar Micheaux would go on to write, direct, produce and distribute more than 44 films over the next three decades. Less than a dozen survive. One of his films thought lost was discovered in a Tennessee garage in 1992. The trailer and fragments from two reels were restored by the George Eastman House and are currently preserved in the Library of Congress. The original film’s running time is unknown. 

His films focused on the need for education and his characters were prosperous, and genteel. Confronting social issues of the day, unafraid of offending the sensibilities of the audience, both white and black, Micheaux hoped to give his audience something to help them “further the race”. 

Finally, black Americans could see themselves as lawyers, cowboys, even royalty, and they weren’t gambling, drinking, stealing chickens, shooting craps or any of the other stereotypes that white Hollywood had chosen for them. If these kinds of stock characters appeared in race movies, they were most often relegated to villainous roles. Meanwhile in mainstream Hollywood, Hattie McDaniel, was awarded an Oscar in 1940 for her performance as “Mammy”, the demeaning dim-witted servant in Gone with the Wind. During the height of their popularity, race films were shown in as many as 1,100 theaters around the country as an antidote to racism and stereotypes in the entertainment industry. 

With the introduction and excitement of sound and talking pictures, race movies tried to duplicate what was becoming Hollywood’s Golden Age of musicals – on a shoestring budget by comparison. Race movie studios looked to Harlem to borrow its theatre stars that had emerged from the 1920s renaissance. Many notable black singers and bands began appearing in lead or supporting roles for the race film industry. When Lena Horne made her debut in a race movies, Hollywood took notice… 

Mainstream studios started to look at race movies as a recruiting source for black talent. White producers also began to produce race movies and dominate the market. Soon enough, race movies were no longer doing their job. The difference between race movies and all-black Hollywood films began to fade and by the late 30s, the industry was forced to adapt to a shrinking market. 

African-American participation in the war contributed to the casting of black actors in lead Hollywood. Names like Ethel Waters, who had got her start in race films, James Edwards and Sidney Poitier began appearing on major billboards. Race movies no longer had a future and after WWII, they had vanished entirely. 

Fewer than one hundred examples of race movies produced have been preserved. Only one reel of footage from Lincoln Pictures, the first all-black movie production company, survives today. 

Having been largely forgotten for decades by film historians, who weren’t looking outside of the Hollywood establishment, it wasn’t until the 1980s that some of the race films resurfaced on the BET cable network. 

An entire industry apart, built and funded by black entrepreneurs who defied convention and acted as forefathers of American indie cinema at the turn of the century – almost wiped out. Almost. And the few films that have survived serve as proof. 

In 2016, a Kickstarter campaign funded the restoration of a special collection of race movies for public release. Martin Scorsese has called them “essential viewing”. 

Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920) and a few others are also available to watch online for free on the Internet Archive.

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https://www.messynessychic.com/2020/02/06/race-movies-and-the-black-owned-studios-that-ran-parallel-to-mainstream-hollywood/
 

Race Movies and the Black-Owned Studios that Thrived Next to Hollywood

There was another Hollywood that thrived once upon a time. From the 1910s to the 1950s, an independent Black American film industry catered to its own segregated audience, had its own African American directors, stars and studios. The movies they produced, the first alternative American “indie” cinema, are known as “race movies”. Of more than 500 motion pictures made, nearly all have been destroyed or damaged and are now considered to be lost films. 

To understand how race movies came about, we first need to take ourselves to the picture house at the turn of the century. In popular white culture, in the press, in cartoons and now on the silver screen, African American audiences are not only being ignored, but constantly insulted with demeaning images of themselves, portrayed as illiterate and uneducated, having never moved on from the plantations, never having advanced. At best, they are comedians, illiterate and uneducated; their roles serving only to provoke laughter and ridicule certainly not to provoke any kind of serious thought. 

In reality, a sophisticated black middle class had emerged from the previous enslaved generation, one that needed to construct and see a new dignified image for itself that they couldn’t find in the regular cinemas, which were also segregated of course. The demand for a film industry geared to portray black society with affection and pride was brewing. 

“Black Hollywood” found its audience in Chicago, a cultural centre for African Americans in the first two decades of the 20th century. Lincoln Motion Picture Company is considered the first all-black movie production company, and the first to create serious dramatic films. It was founded by an African American actor, Noble Johnson, who got his start in Hollywood playing Native American tribesmen, Egyptian soldiers and “exotic” merchants, but never his own race. 

In 1916, he cast himself in his studio’s first movie as a young black engineer who strikes oil and becomes a millionaire. The Realization of a Negro’s Ambitionbecame the first successful “Class A negro movie” box office hit. Due to segregation laws, Lincoln studio’s films were limited to show in churches, schools, “Colored Only” theaters, or midnight screenings, but they had a highly-professional look to them. 

The Lincoln Motion Picture Company however, was short-lived, and closed in 1921. But not before the studio scouted the man who would become “the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century”. In 1918, Lincoln bid on the rights to adapt the first novel of an unknown rancher-turned-writer, Oscar Micheaux. 

The farmer from South Dakota demanded the right to direct the movie himself. Lincoln resisted, so Micheaux decided to make the movie without them. 

The Homesteader would become the first feature length race movie and Oscar Micheaux would go on to write, direct, produce and distribute more than 44 films over the next three decades. Less than a dozen survive. One of his films thought lost was discovered in a Tennessee garage in 1992. The trailer and fragments from two reels were restored by the George Eastman House and are currently preserved in the Library of Congress. The original film’s running time is unknown. 

His films focused on the need for education and his characters were prosperous, and genteel. Confronting social issues of the day, unafraid of offending the sensibilities of the audience, both white and black, Micheaux hoped to give his audience something to help them “further the race”. 

Finally, black Americans could see themselves as lawyers, cowboys, even royalty, and they weren’t gambling, drinking, stealing chickens, shooting craps or any of the other stereotypes that white Hollywood had chosen for them. If these kinds of stock characters appeared in race movies, they were most often relegated to villainous roles. Meanwhile in mainstream Hollywood, Hattie McDaniel, was awarded an Oscar in 1940 for her performance as “Mammy”, the demeaning dim-witted servant in Gone with the Wind. During the height of their popularity, race films were shown in as many as 1,100 theaters around the country as an antidote to racism and stereotypes in the entertainment industry. 

With the introduction and excitement of sound and talking pictures, race movies tried to duplicate what was becoming Hollywood’s Golden Age of musicals – on a shoestring budget by comparison. Race movie studios looked to Harlem to borrow its theatre stars that had emerged from the 1920s renaissance. Many notable black singers and bands began appearing in lead or supporting roles for the race film industry. When Lena Horne made her debut in a race movies, Hollywood took notice… 

Mainstream studios started to look at race movies as a recruiting source for black talent. White producers also began to produce race movies and dominate the market. Soon enough, race movies were no longer doing their job. The difference between race movies and all-black Hollywood films began to fade and by the late 30s, the industry was forced to adapt to a shrinking market. 

African-American participation in the war contributed to the casting of black actors in lead Hollywood. Names like Ethel Waters, who had got her start in race films, James Edwards and Sidney Poitier began appearing on major billboards. Race movies no longer had a future and after WWII, they had vanished entirely. 

Fewer than one hundred examples of race movies produced have been preserved. Only one reel of footage from Lincoln Pictures, the first all-black movie production company, survives today. 

Having been largely forgotten for decades by film historians, who weren’t looking outside of the Hollywood establishment, it wasn’t until the 1980s that some of the race films resurfaced on the BET cable network. 

An entire industry apart, built and funded by black entrepreneurs who defied convention and acted as forefathers of American indie cinema at the turn of the century – almost wiped out. Almost. And the few films that have survived serve as proof. 

In 2016, a Kickstarter campaign funded the restoration of a special collection of race movies for public release. Martin Scorsese has called them “essential viewing”. 

Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1920) and a few others are also available to watch online for free on the Internet Archive.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/adventures-of-a-jazz-age-lawyer-review-the-man-who-fought-pirates-11581032810
 

‘Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer’ Review: The Man Who Fought Pirates

Songwriters and other popular artists saw their interests threatened by technology and thievery. In Nathan Burkan they found a ferocious champion.

By 

Eric Felten 

Feb. 6, 2020 6:46 pm ET

It was front-page news in the Hackensack, N.J., evening paper. The Aug. 18, 1905, headline read: “Couchois Is Again Arrested.” Garrett J. Couchois had been recently hauled into court on charges of selling copies of a Tin Pan Alley tune. Now, a week later, it happened again.

At the turn of the last century, when recorded sound was limited to wax cylinders, songwriters made money with the sale of sheet music. The public sang popular tunes in their own parlors, accompanying themselves on their own pianos. Publishers sold them the printed music they needed to keep up with the new songs “plugged” by performers in music stores and vaudeville shows. Today a music pirate is someone who illegally copies audio files; at the beginning of the 20th century, it was someone who printed words and music on paper.

One such pirate was Garrett Couchois. His copies were so good that only the publishers could tell the difference between their products and his fakes. And he was used to operating with little interference from the law.

Come the summer of 1905, though, Couchois was being arrested every week. His lawyer was so outraged that, in the courtroom, he sputtered to the judge: “How much money have these complainants paid you to look out for their interests?” Couchois kept getting arrested. A Sept. 3, 1905, headline stated: “Couchois in Trouble Again.” This time he stood accused of selling 4,000 illegitimate copies of a sacred song, “The Holy City.”

Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer

By Gary A. Rosen 
California, 398 pages, $29.95

These arrests were the doing, ultimately, of Nathan Burkan, a young Broadway lawyer who, through shrewd litigation and far-sighted institution building, transformed the business of music in America. As Gary A. Rosen shows in his lively and revealing biography “Adventures of a Jazz Age Lawyer,” Couchois’s attorney wasn’t wrong to think that his client was being targeted. As general counsel for the Music Publishers Association, Burkan had been looking for a “showy case.” He had hired private detectives to track the source of the counterfeit sheet music and set about making an example of the pirate.

To do so, Burkan shifted his legal footing. Federal copyright protection was weak—the civil remedies “had proven insufficient,” Mr. Rosen, a lawyer himself, writes—but New York state trademark law was tougher, making it a crime to sell goods labeled with a false source.

“Burkan maximized the impact of the Couchois case,” Mr. Rosen writes, “by getting the district attorney to issue a series of indictments, one for each song he counterfeited.” Burkan then arranged to have Couchois arrested “with great fanfare each time he made bail on the prior charge.” The music publishers eventually took out ads announcing that the pirate was getting jail time—even if just a few months.

This small victory displayed Burkan’s strengths: street smarts, a creative use of the law and a will to win. Burkan would apply those talents to other copyright disputes. Were piano rolls just part of a machine, or did they express a composer’s creative idea? What rights did songwriters have to payment as new technologies used their work?

As Mr. Rosen chronicles, Burkan became a founding member of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, or Ascap, serving as the group’s legal strategist and enforcer. Ascap scrounged royalties wherever possible. Silent pictures were not silent, of course. They were accompanied by music, performed on everything from rickety pianos to mighty Wurlitzers. Burkan fought with film exhibitors—deep-pocketed courtroom rivals—to collect royalties on Ascap-administered songs. Movie moguls realized that, in spite of this music “tax,” anything that strengthened copyright laws was their friend.

Burkan added star talent in Hollywood to his stable of Broadway clients. Representing Charlie Chaplin, he brought actions against the makers of phony Chaplin films, arguing that “Charlie Chaplin” was a trademark. The films were surrendered to U.S. Marshals and destroyed. Burkan also helped negotiate the ground-breaking deals that made Chaplin not only the highest-paid property in tinseltown but also the most artistically independent. “I love him, but am afraid of him,” Mr. Rosen quotes Chaplin writing of Burkan. “His pockets always bulge contracts.”

The most powerful of the new technologies—presenting both opportunities and hazards to Ascap—was radio. Music publishers and composers wanted to be paid for the broadcast of their music; the National Association of Broadcasters argued that it was giving musicians free advertising by playing their songs. In 1924, the conflict came before U.S. congressional committees. One night during the hearings, Ascap put on a show for legislators. Irving Berlin sang, and Victor Herbert played cello. The next day on the Hill, Burkan argued that Ascap was not a ham-fisted “music trust” that needed busting. “The individual composer is helpless,” Burkan declared, unless he joins with his fellow composers to ensure that his rights won’t be “nullified.” The broadcasters didn’t get the legislation they were looking for.

Empowered, Ascap proceeded to earn a fearsome reputation—until 1934, that is, when the Justice Department accused it of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. Burkan’s last two years—he died in 1936, at age 57—were spent trying to save Ascap from legal action. He succeeded, though Ascap is today less of a force than it once was, merely one of several music-royalty societies. But Burkan’s battles go on, as changes in technology inspire fleets of new pirates and modern-day enforcers look for ways to make them pay.

Mr. Felten is a national correspondent at RealClearInvestigations and a columnist at the Washington Examiner.

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https://www.analogplanet.com/content/abbey-road-mastering-engineer-miles-showell-comments-apollotransco-disaster
 

Abbey Road Mastering Engineer Miles Showell Comments on Apollo/Transco Disaster

On Thursday morning (February 6), the Banning, CA building housing Apollo/Transco Masters’ factory and storage space burned. By far the biggest of the world’s two lacquer master disc manufacturers, most of the world’s vinyl mastering facilities (especially smaller ones) relied upon Apollo/Transco blanks, as well as their cutting styli for Westrex cutting heads. Ruled a total loss, 82 firefighters battled the blaze’s toxic fumes; thankfully, there were no injuries (Banning is located in the Southern California desert, approximately 2.5 hours away from Los Angeles).

On their website, Apollo said, “We are uncertain of our future at this point and are evaluating options as we try to work through this difficult time.” Japan’s MDC, now the world’s only remaining lacquer disc factory, told anxious potential customers that due to its low capacity it can’t and won’t accept new customers. European pressing plants and select mastering facilities have DMM-compatible (DMM, or Direct Metal Mastering, allows engineers to cut directly into metal plates rather than onto the disc’s lacquer coating) lathes, although with few exceptions DMM cuts don’t sound as engaging as lacquer masterings. American facilities will have a particularly hard time: only a handful of studios use MDC, and in its short heyday DMM technology saw far greater popularity in Europe.

Because of the now-diminishing lacquer supply, for artists and labels vinyl cutting costs will rise; when that inevitably happens, said costs will reach consumers. Potential higher prices, longer delays, and more common cancelations could, in the worst possible case, crash the vinyl market’s momentum. It’s always possible that new technology could soon be developed to meet and/or replace lacquer demand, but that could take more time than what the industry can afford.

Upon hearing the news, with a few questions about the projected impact of this catastrophe I frantically emailed Abbey Road Studios 1/2 speed mastering engineer Miles Showell. Formerly at Utopia and Metropolis (among others), during his time in Abbey Road’s Room 30 Showell has worked on reissues by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Brian Eno, the Police, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and many others. At 1:30 AM London time, he quickly and kindly responded. Here is the brief interview, edited for clarity:

Malachi Lui: Since with the current supply of Apollo/Transco lacquers there are some recent issues [most notably, a higher noise floor and mysterious “whooshing” sounds], how long do you predict the supply will last once the defective ones are tossed?

Miles Showell: This all depends if Apollo/Transco had any stock elsewhere. I visited the plant in Banning, California in 2017 and 2018. At the time they discussed a plan with their European distributor to keep in a different location 6 months’ worth of stock. However, I have no idea if this plan was ever actioned. As you probably know, 6 months of lacquer stock represents a serious capital outlay.

ML: As Japan’s MDC isn’t big enough to feed the lacquer demand, do you see a) costs in lacquer cutting drastically spiking, and b) DMM cuts becoming more prominent again?

MS: As their market share in Europe is pretty big (some estimates have them at 80% over here), MDC has recently ramped up their production. My guess is they will struggle to keep up with demand in the short term and there will be supply rationing for a while at least. [As mentioned earlier, MDC can’t and won’t accept new customers.] Ideally we need a European manufacturer of lacquers.

ML: The DMM technology left from the 80s isn’t necessarily the most developed because of its landing at the end of the vinyl era. If we have to go back to DMM, do you see the technology being further improved or staying static? Are cutting studios going to invest in adopting DMM now or keep lacquer cuts going as supply diminishes?

MS: I highly doubt there will be any serious development in DMM. All the Neumann engineers who designed and knew about this stuff are dead. All of them. They did not write everything down which will probably make reverse engineering DMM technology prohibitively expensive. Spare parts to convert VMS 80 lathes into DMM-capable VMS 82 lathes are unavailable, and even someone clever like Flo Kaufmann probably couldn’t design and make the parts needed in the short time frame required (although his equipment is very good – exemplary engineering actually – and his heart is totally in the right place). Even if the parts were available, this still leaves everyone with a Scully or a Neumann VMS 70 (or earlier Neumann) unable to cut as these old lathes cannot be converted to DMM. The major pressing plants in Europe all have several DMM lathes so they will keep things going I guess, but the sound might not be to everyone’s taste.

ML: Do you foresee this as having a drastic effect on the general market, ie. fewer vinyl releases, further delays and release cancellations, etc?

MS: Very possibly. No one knows. Abbey Road always keeps a good stock of lacquers and we will hopefully soon get some more. I expect there will be shortages in the short to medium term. Another problem is the cutting styli. Apollo/Transco made these too. There is an excellent Japanese source for styli for Neumann heads (which I have used for years as they are easily the best) but as far as I know, no one else makes the recording styli for Westrex heads.

We greatly appreciate Miles’ replies and if necessary, AnalogPlanet will continue to provide updates about the Apollo/Transco fire.

Firemen work to douse the Apollo/Transco fire. (Photos: Robert Bauer-ribsfitmedia)

(Malachi Lui is an AnalogPlanet contributing editor, music lover, record collector, and opinionated sneaker enthusiast. He feels that currently, the SATURATION I II III CD box is a bit overpriced. Follow him on twitter: @MalachiLui.)

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https://www.allaboutjazz.com/dave-stryker-guitars-organs-and-eight-tracks-dave-stryker
 

Dave Stryker: Guitars, Organs & Eight-Tracks

MARK SULLIVAN February 10, 2020 

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Guitarist Dave Stryker grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and moved to New York City in 1980. His big break came when he joined organist Jack McDuff’s group for two years, from 1984-85. It was through McDuff that Stryker met tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, who would occasionally sit in. After leaving McDuff, Turrentine asked Stryker to join his quintet (1986-1995, then again at the end of Turrentine’s life). Stryker began recording his own albums in 1988, and has also had a long association with saxophonist Steve Slagle, first recording with him as The Stryker/Slagle Band in 2005. The previous All About Jazz interview Dave Stryker: Soulful Sound covers his early career in detail. 

Stryker has recently made a series of albums with the title “Eight Track.” Younger readers may need an explanation of the eight-track format, which is now regarded as an obsolete technology. The format employed a loop of magnetic tape mounted inside a cartridge, eliminating the tape handling and reels used in reel-to-reel tape recordings. Introduced in 1965 for use in cars, it began to fade in popularity in the late 1970s, and was replaced by the compact cassette, which had been introduced in 1963, but did not become popular for music recordings until the addition of noise reduction technology in 1971. 

This interview was conducted in advance of performances at Middle C Jazz in Charlotte, NC. 

AAJ: In the last few years you have returned to the organ format in a big way. Was there a particular group you were modeling for the Eight Track albums? How did you choose the songs to cover? 

Dave Stryker: Some of my first jazz gigs in Omaha were with an organist named John Miller. When I moved to NYC in 1980 I got the gig with Jack McDuff. Two years later I worked with Stanley Turrentine for over 10 years. In all of these groups it was common to take occasional pop tunes and put a jazz spin on them. Stanley did a whole record of Stevie Wonder’s music while I was in the band. 

So the idea of playing pop tunes in a jazz setting was always part of the music for me. I got the idea for Eight Track from seeing the positive connection with the audience when I would throw in a Carpenters tune or something and I would joke on the mic: “That’s from my next record Dave Stryker Plays the Hits of the Eight Track. People would laugh, but then some started coming up to me and saying “hey when is that Eight Track record coming out I want to get that” …well, a light bulb went off and that’s how it came about. 

Since the classic organ trio sound is with tenor I thought it would sound good to play with vibes instead. I was a fan of Grant Green’s record Street of Dreams(Blue Note Records, 1967) with Bobby Hutcherson, Larry Young and Elvin Jonesso I called Stefon Harris and my regular trio of Jared Gold and McClenty Hunter. 

AAJ: How did you choose the Eight Track cover songs? Were there many that were tried and rejected, either by you or the band when you first played them? 

DS: For each album I made a list of songs from the ’70’s (the eight-track era) that I liked. Then I had to narrow them down to songs that I felt I could put my stamp on and that would be good vehicles for improvisation. 

AAJ: You have been producing your own albums, in addition to recent ones by Jared Gold and McClenty Hunter (as well as playing on them). Is producing different when someone else is the leader on the date? 

DS: I try and help whoever I’m producing to be able to play their best without having to worry about all the logistics. Jared and Mac are in my band so that was something I wanted to do to help them get their music out there. 

AAJ: What inspired you to take up jazz guitar, and who have been your main inspirations? 

DS: When I started, I was into rock (Cream, Hendrix) and blues. In high school I went to a jam session at the Union and they were playing [pianist Horace Silver’s] “Song For My Father.” One of the guys told me I shouldn’t be playing those rock licks (haha) so I went to the record store and asked where the Jazz section was. I walked out with a Coltrane and a George Benson and got hooked. Wes, Grant Green, Pat Martino, George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Jim Hall, later Pat Metheny and Scofield. Plus all the greats: Miles, Sonny Rollins, Coltrane, McCoy, Herbie… I loved them all. 

AAJ: For the guitarists: please describe your current guitar, amp and effects setup. How has it changed over the years? 

DS: I’ve played a Gibson ES 347 for many years. I also play Benedettos now as well. I use a Fuchs Jazz Classic live and a Fender Blues DeVille 4×10 in the studio. I also collect Polytones [compact solid state guitar amplifiers which were favored by jazz guitarists, but are no longer manufactured] and have lots of guitars. 

AAJ: Do you use any electronic effects (now or in the past), or have you always stuck to just the guitar and an amp? 

DS: I mostly run directly into the amp. Sometimes I’ll use a delay/reverb pedal. On some projects I’ve used effects if the music called for it but usually not on my records. I feel getting a good tone and sound without effects is longer lasting. 

AAJ: When asked to share his thoughts after the recent passing of guitarist Vic Juris, he provided this edited version of his remarks at Vic’s funeral: 

DS: Well you would hope when you move out to New Jersey that you would be the best guitarist on your block….haha I was lucky to have Vic Juris as a friend for the last 25 years. 

When he and his wife Kate were looking to buy a house I told him about the one across the street from us…and there you go. 

The late great John Abercrombie said it best: “Vic is the best, there are none better.” Vic was New Jersey. But Vic also was the world. All of us knew that this was one of the greatest to ever pick up a guitar. There is not one guitarist alive who doesn’t give it up to Vic Juris. Those of us that play music know the time and dedication it takes to reach that level of artistry. Vic put in the hard work but also had that special magic… 

I feel very fortunate to have been able to spend the last 6 months being a friend to Vic and doing what any friend would do. Mainly just hang out and talk a little and play a few tunes. 

Because of all of the great recordings Vic made and his incredible performances we were lucky to hear over the years, his music will live on. But especially through the hundreds of students he taught over the years at his house and in college. Several of them also stepped up when Vic got sick, by coming over to play and hang. That is where his legacy will live on from having passed his knowledge on so freely. 

Vic really got to feel the love from everyone the last 6 months. When all the incredible donations started pouring in from the Go Fund Me campaign, he was truly touched. Also making the readers poll in Downbeat this year for the first time and by getting some overdue recognition really lifted his spirits. 

We will all miss Vic, but his music lives on. 

Photo Credit: Jim Eigo 

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Edie Falco Can’t Quit CNN, but Jazz and a Dog Park Keep Her Sane

By Kathryn Shattuck

Updated Feb. 6, 2020

The actress, who has returned to television with a CBS police drama, puts CNN, ABC Carpet & Home and her father’s sculptures on her list of essentials.

Kyle Grillot/Reuters

Edie Falco is a master of the tough exterior: The mob boss’s wife in “The Sopranos.” The drug-addicted E.R. nurse in “Nurse Jackie.” And now, in her new CBS series, “Tommy,” the jaw-busting, gay, first female chief of the L.A.P.D.

But in person, Falco comes across as a big softy whose human and fur family — her son, Anderson, 15, daughter, Macy, 11, and two rescue dogs — outranks her Emmy-heavy career. Calling at noon on the dot from her West Village home (“I’m a nerd like that,” she said), Falco rattled off 10 things she can’t fathom living without and pondered a few growing pains. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

1. CNN I turned on CNN on 9/11, and I don’t think I’ve turned it off. I’ve been in some state of high alert internally. The way things are right now, I certainly don’t trust that the government has my back in the way that I used to. So I feel like I just need to stay on top of what’s happening and be sure I’m prepared for storms, missile launches, floods, whatever. They are my celebrities, John Berman, Alisyn Camerota, Jake Tapper. If I saw them on the street, I’d get all googly-eyed.

2. Joni Mitchell I have been listening to her since I was a little kid. My mom [Judith Anderson] used to do community theater, and I used to go with her all the time, and it was tech, and they were setting up the lights, and they were playing Joni Mitchell in the background. And I thought, who the heck can sing like this? And that was the beginning of a lifelong love affair.

3. Elena Ferrante’s Books I became obsessed with “My Brilliant Friend” and all those [other Neapolitan novels]. Female friendships are so interesting and complicated, and she really seemed to get all the complexities of relationships with girls that are fraught and deep and toxic and nourishing. I’d never seen it depicted in a way that I recognized quite as accurately.

4. Washington Square Park Dog Run My first love was my dog Marley, a yellow Lab/white shepherd mix. When I was living on my own and I didn’t have kids, it was just she and I, and she grew up in the dog run. Nobody’s unhappy in there. Everybody’s laughing, smiling and looking at the dogs together. It’s unfettered by the loneliness that people can feel in New York. Now I have two dogs: Sami, a Brussels Griffon who was a mommy in a puppy mill until they busted the puppy mill, and Niko, a Border collie mix, another rescue dog. Rescuing animals is very important to me.

5. Village Vanguard I was very, very close to my dad [Frank Falco]. I lost him a couple of years ago and it’s still not easy. He was a huge jazz fan, and he and I had gone there a bunch of times together, and they are experiences that loom large still. We saw Billy Eckstine there a thousand years ago, and my dad was just in heaven.

6. Outsider Art Fair It’s a little bit like independent films. When it started out, [the artists] were real outsiders. But now as they’ve become more popular, maybe they’re not quite outsiders anymore. Some of them were mentally ill, some of them were incarcerated, and they made art without rules. And I find it profoundly moving. Many years ago, I fell in love with a painting by Terry Turrell, and I bought it. I’m almost embarrassed, but I have probably 15 pieces of art that he’s made. It gets my heart-rate going when I see a new piece of work of his.

7. ABC Carpet & Home Who doesn’t want to live there? It really feels more like a museum than a store. The sensory of the experience of walking through that door, if there was ever a use for the word delightful … because I am just delighted. The colors, the smells, the feel of the fabrics, the crazy design of the place. Every bunch of years I will give myself a little shopping spree to get a new blanket or bedspread or rug. Everything in there is the way I wish my house looked.

8. John Golden Theater My first Broadway show, “Side Man,” was there 150,000 years ago [actually, in 1999], and it holds a very special place. I would walk to work and giggle to myself every frigging day, like, “Are you kidding me?” The excitement of having a career that just felt absolutely unattainable for a lot of years. I will never not be that sort of awkward girl from Long Island wondering what I’m going to do with my life. And I still have moments where I can’t believe that I get to do the stuff that I do.

9. Kadampa Meditation Center I have been a student of Buddhism for about 25 years. And I have had one main teacher, Kadam Morten Clausen, who has run this center for all those years, and a very, very wise man at a time when that’s not easy to come by. Of all the seeking that I’ve done, I landed at Buddhism and I never have stopped being able to feed from it. It helps me enjoy my life, to learn how to live better, how to be kind to other people. These principles, there’s a reason they’ve been around so long.

10. My Dad’s Sculptures They were all around my house growing up. And when he passed away and I started going through the house, there was so much more artwork that I didn’t even know about. He was left-handed, and so he was doing a sculpture of his left hand with his right hand. And then he had it cast in bronze. So I’m sitting next to a sculpture of my dad’s hand, which is very, very meaningful to me.

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Top 10 Cereal Box Records
By Mr Breakfast

In the late 60’s and throughout the 70’s, Rice Krispies wasn’t the only cereal making noise. Cut-out cardboard records called flexi records were a popular cereal premium. The sound quality wasn’t very good and they tended to warp days after they were cut from the cereal box, but little kids didn’t mind. It was a thrill to hear their favorite band or cereal mascot. Often, it was the first record a kid would own.

Most little kids today are unaware that albums and record players ever existed, let alone records that you cut out of your favorite cereal box. Well, believe it kids. Here’s proof.

#10. Life Cereal Rock Music Mysteries
This cut-out record came from Life Cereal. It was part of “a series of three great music mystery games.” To play the music mystery game, you would listen to the record for clues and guess the titles to 4 songs. The side of the cereal box had an entry form for the contest. This is one of the last flexi records to appear on cereal boxes. It’s from 1986.
More information…

#9. Wheaties Mouseketeer Records
From Wheaties in 1956, these are believed to be the first cut-out records to appear on cereal boxes. There were multiple versions including Mickey Mouse singing “The Gadget Tree”, Chip ‘N Dale performing “Ten Little Indians” and Donald Duck crooning “Donald Duck’s Song”. The records were 78 rpm (rotations per minute).
More information…

#8. Honey-Comb Ghost Stories Record
In 1977 (or possibly 1978), Honey-Comb was scaring the cereal out of children with a series of Ghost Story records. Stories included The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Miser’s Gold and The Hitchhiker.

The stories were told by Wade Denning who was a prolific jingle writer at the time. His most famous jingle was a 6-note instrumental piece for Maxwell House Coffee which mimicked the sound of percolating coffee.
More information…

#7. The Toucan Sam Workout
This is one of three Toucan Sam cut-out records that were available on the back of Froot Loops boxes in 1983. The other two were “Toucan Sam Takes You On A Listening Safari” and “Toucan Sam At The Big Race”. According to graphics on this record, the workout consists of putting your hands on your head, touching your toes, a little marching, touching your nose and hopping on one foot.
More information…

#6. Post Cereals Bobby Sherman Records
Bobby Sherman was a teen heartthrob in the late 60’s and early 70’s. In 1970, Post capitalized on his appeal to young people by putting records of his songs on the boxes of multiple cereals, including Honey-Comb and the now-defunct Cinnamon Raisin Bran. There were 4 different records available, each with 5 songs. Some of those songs included “Easy Come Easy Go”, “Hey Mr. Sun, “”La La La”, “July Seventeen”, “Bubblegum and Braces” and “Little Woman”.
More information…

#5. Super Sugar Crisp Archies Record
In 1969, boxes of Super Sugar Crisp featured cut-outs of “The Archies Record” There were multiple versions of “The Archies Record” each with 4 songs. One included the mega-hit “Sugar Sugar.” Another featured “Everything’s Archie”, the theme song for the animated series “The Archie Show”. Archies records could also be found on the back of Alpha Bits cereal.
More information…

#4. Post Monkees Records
In 1970, the Monkees TV series had been finished for 2 years, but repeats of the show were popular as part of Saturday morning programming. Those repeats were sponsored by Post. That same year, the cereal company put cut-out Monkees records on the back of their Rice Krinkles, Alpha Bits and Honey-Comb cereals. There were 3 different records, each with 4 songs. Hits on the records included “The Monkees Theme”, “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”, “Last Train To Clarksville” and “I’m A Believer”.
More information…

#3. Post Cereals Jackson 5 Records
The obvious leader in cereal box records was Post Cereals. In the early 1970’s, they had their highest profile records featuring the wildly popular Motown band The Jackson 5. These records appeared on the back of Alpha Bits, Super Sugar Crisp and Frosted Rice Krinkles Cereals. The cut-outs included some of the Jackson 5’s biggest hits like “ABC”, “I’ll Be There” and “Never Can Say Goodbye.” Post’s association with The Jackson 5 went beyond flexi records. The group appeared in commercials for Alpha Bits.
More information…

#2. Sugar Bears Cut-Out Record
The Sugar Bears were a made-for-cereal pop band. It’s members included Sugar Bear, Shoobee Bear, Doobee Bear and Honey Bear. There were 5 different Sugar Bears records available on the back of select boxes of Super Sugar Crisp. In 1972, the Sugar Bears went ‘outside the box’ to release an actual album, Presenting The Sugar Bears. Kim Carnes, later famous for the song “Bette Davis Eyes” preformed the female vocals.
More information…

#1. The Monsters Go Disco
On this 1979 record, Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Boo Berry are sitting around “frightfully lonely” on a Saturday night when they decide to go disco dancing. In the 4-minute adventure, they eventually win a dance contest and Frankenberry is given the nickname Franken-Boogie.

There were three different Monster Adventure records found in select boxes of Count Chocula, Frankenberry and Boo Berry cereals. The other records were “Count Chocula Goes To Hollywood” and “Monster Adventures In Outer Space.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=sp47uMX7jl4&feature=emb_logo

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Saying goodbye to Rainbo Records — and 80 years of pop culture history

Once upon a time, Rainbo Records manufactured the sound of America.

Ravers and garage rockers, rappers and producers, talentless screamers, kazoo orchestras — anyone who wanted, quite literally, a permanent record of their work — contracted the Canoga Park-based company to make their 45s, flexi discs, albums, 8-track tapes, cassettes and CDs.

When U.S. troops stormed the beaches at Normandy in 1944, the record pressing plant was producing audio letters to soldiers stationed overseas. A decade later the company’s founder, Jack Brown, patented “record-on-a-box” technology and affixed paper-thin records directly onto 30 million cereal packages.

A showcase for compelling storytelling from the Los Angeles Times.
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The company made ready-to-play campaign postcards with candidates’ voices imprinted on them, pre-recorded boot-camp commands for new recruits, miniature records for talking dolls and 78-rpm cardboard picture discs. Walt Disney commissioned Rainbo to manufacture the “Disneyland Talking Map,” a five-record, fold-out cardboard poster sold at the park’s grand opening.

Black Flag’s “TV Party” 7-inch single? Richard Pryor’s first comedy album for Laff Records? Both pressed by Rainbo, as was “Panic Zone,” N.W.A’s 1987 debut 12-inch, Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” Hüsker Dü’s “Zen Arcade” and the Minutemen’s “Double Nickels on the Dime” albums for SST and 2Pac’s “California Love.” The work of contemporary artists as varied as Kacey Musgraves, Kamasi Washington and Childish Gambino has been etched into vinyl at Rainbo.

Manuel Palacios inspects a record label to make sure it is centered properly.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Although the digital revolution has rendered moot the need to own physical albums, the rise of cloud-based music platforms such as Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Music has, ironically, helped propel vinyl back into the mainstream. Deep, intentional listening, analog-heads argue, is more rewarding through turntables and tube amps.

“True fans” buy the vinyl. In 2019, U.S. sales grew by 14.5%, part of a 14-year uptick that has yet to plateau.

Still, the market for vinyl is relatively small. In 2019, the format accounted for just 4% of U.S. music sales, compared with 82% for streaming and the remaining 14% for digital downloads and CD sales. In that same time period, 18.8-million new LPs were sold. By comparison, more than 1 trillion songs were streamed in 2019.

Which is one of the reasons why the era of Rainbo Records is coming to an end.

On Dec. 12, Rainbo’s longtime general manager Steve Sheldon retrieved the last-ever record to be pressed by Rainbo: a blue vinyl reissue of “The Other Side of Life” by the Moody Blues.

“I’m pretty distraught over it,” Sheldon said a few days before production stopped. “Up until the eleventh hour, I thought a white knight was just going to come along.”

Tall and skinny, with pale blue eyes, Sheldon has worked at Rainbo since 1971 and has been its general manager for 34 years. Like many aging lanky guys, the 67-year-old slouches a bit more than he did a few decades ago; at times his posture seems to reflect his current mood.

Were he 20 years younger, Sheldon says, he would have worked to uproot the whole enterprise to Texas or Tennessee, where the cost of doing business is lower. But a move would be pricey — and it’s not his company.

So Sheldon has spent the last several months informing customers of the closure, talking to employees (most of whom have already taken other jobs or have been let go as duties wind down) and asking clients to retrieve their stored assets.

Steve Sheldon, general manager of Rainbo Records, inside the sound-test room.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The phone’s been ringing nonstop as longtime clients commiserate and arrange shipment of their stampers, plates and album art. “It’s amazing how many people you touch over the years,” Sheldon said.

A dozen thick ledgers in a cabinet outside Sheldon’s office prove his point. They log each 33-, 45- and 78-rpm record, CD, cassette, multicolored variant and fish-head-shaped single made at Rainbo. One imposing 300-page book from the mid-1990s, for example, tracks orders from punk labels including Epitaph, SST, Touch and Go, Frontier and In the Red; rap imprints Death Row, Priority, Delicious Vinyl, Cold Chillin’ and Sugar Hill; early dance labels Moonshine, Mushroom and Thump; and Concord Jazz, Rhino, Scotti Bros. and American.

Over the decades Sheldon has had to negotiate with labels and artists fighting over product and has, upon occasion, been paid five-figure invoices with stacks of tattered cash. He’s watched as FBI agents raided the plant in search of bootleg albums. And he’s timed pickups to ensure Crip-connected artists didn’t encounter Blood-affiliated entourages.

“Rainbo kind of became the plant for the rappers,” Sheldon says with classic understatement as he passes a framed display of gold records commemorating sales of Death Row artists 2Pac, Snoop Dogg and Tha Dogg Pound. But as the Rainbo ledgers prove, for every big-league success story there were hundreds of one-and-done independent releases issued by mom-and-pop labels scattered across America. 

Lisa Fancher of the L.A. punk label Frontier relied on Rainbo for nearly 40 years. Her first project with the pressing plant, the 1980 album “Group Sex” by the Circle Jerks, almost didn’t happen. “I had to beg my parents, anybody in the world that would give me some money” to commission 5,000 copies. Frontier has since pressed hundreds of thousands of records by Suicidal Tendencies, Christian Death and more with Rainbo.

Then there were companies like Westwood-born Rhino Records, which transformed the business through its curatorial approach to resurrecting overlooked music.

Maria Amador prepares to place records into their album covers.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

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“If it wasn’t for Rainbo, Rhino wouldn’t have succeeded,” says Brian Schuman, who started his career in the mid-1970s as vice-president of operations for Rhino and is now senior vice-president of operations at longtime Rainbo client Concord Music Group, home of artists including St. Vincent, Elvis Costello, Denzel Curry and Tanya Tucker.

When he was at Rhino, Schuman used to contract with Rainbo to make its oddball mid-’70s records by Wild Man Fischer, the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra and wrestler Fred Blassie. For the label’s novelty single “Fish Heads” by Barnes & Barnes, Rainbo achieved a first: fish-head-shaped picture discs.

“Rainbo kept the doors open and didn’t put us on credit hold when we had trouble paying our bills. It was a relationship that we had with them, and that’s a real rare thing,” Schuman says. He predicts that Rainbo’s demise will make it harder on West Coast artists and indie labels.

‘It was always hard for the little guy to get records made. Now it’s going to be that much harder.’

Brian Schuman

“It was always hard for the little guy to get records made. Now it’s going to be that much harder,” he says.

Stan Schneider, Rainbo’s longtime accountant, says Jack Brown knew the record business “better than anybody in the country.”

“He had a vision,” says Schneider, who was once was singing cowboy Gene Autry’s personal accountant, managed superstar country singer Glen Campbell’s career for five decades and has overseen the Brown estate’s interest in Rainbo since the owner’s death. “He was a very creative guy, and music was his love.”

Brown’s legacy consumes a room near the lobby, where, amid old phonograph players, his Rolodex, prototypes, plaques and press clippings, there are boxes filled with the entrepreneur’s letters. In his 20s, Brown strove to be a writer, and his papers are dense with pitches, short stories and scripts.

Diana Morales, left, and Gina Spaccia in Rainbo’s record-themed lobby floor.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

Those scripts and pitches didn’t sell, so Brown sought a more reliable income and in 1939 incorporated Rainbo as “manufacturers of recording discs” in downtown Los Angeles. One of the company’s first major commissions came via the U.S. Treasury Department: families who purchased war bonds during World War II were given the opportunity to record messages to their sons fighting in Europe.

Brown served in the Navy during the war, and when he returned, he pushed Rainbo into product development. He wanted to patent durable, paper-thin records that could be glued to flat surfaces, and the product he ultimately came up with was a variation on the flexi-disc, which became a ubiquitous presence in music magazines until the advent of the CD.

In 1954, Rainbo teamed with General Mills to sell 30 million Wheaties cereal boxes, each with a record printed on it. A few years later, the Disney contract kept presses active as millions of Disneyland visitors bought a foldout map of the park. Described as “a trip through Disneyland you can see and play whenever you wish,” the Mattel-branded product included five Rainbo-pressed discs that described attractions in Tomorrowland, Frontierland and Fantasyland.

Brown’s shop started to manufacture long-playing albums and 45-rpm singles in the 1950s and ‘60s. When the facility was located on Las Palmas Avenue in Hollywood, it was part of a district housing pressing plants that pumped out millions of records each month.

Rainbo was grossing about $4 million annually when it moved to Santa Monica in 1974 and invested in cassette duplicators, automatic pressing equipment, high-speed plating and shrink-wrap machines to become a one-stop shop. Two dozen presses pushed out Donna Summer and Bee Gees product, easy listening and budget classical recordings, and bawdy comedy releases by Redd Foxx, Slappy White and Skillet & Leroy.

Schneider recalls swinging by the plant just to marvel at the machines at work: “They took a little piece of vinyl — they called it a biscuit — just this blob of vinyl, put it in and all of the sudden you had music. It was magic to me.”

Record department supervisor Jose Ojeda mixes red and white pieces of vinyl to create pink at Rainbo Records in Canoga Park.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

The music industry’s shift to compact discs nearly shuttered the company, but Brown adapted. “I’ve witnessed the move from mono to stereo. Then came 4-track tape, which was bulky,” he said in 1990. “Next came 8-tracks, which were smaller, and cassettes, which were even better.” After buying a CD/DVD manufacturing company in the early ’00s, Rainbo moved to Canoga Park in 2006.

As Rainbo’s accountant, Schneider was at times incredulous at Brown’s investments: “Jack started doing cassettes and I’d think, ‘Oh, my God, you’re spending so much money on concepts like that!’ Then the CD came and he spends a million dollars to build a CD plant!”

But the accountant notes that when Brown died in 2004, “they were making a lot of money for a small company.”

In late December, Rainbo’s manufacturing equipment, including all of its presses, was hauled to Nashville on 14 semi trucks. United Records, which has been in business since 1949, bought it all, including the Rainbo name, client list and a choice selection of memorabilia.

Whether in L.A. or Nashville, the recipe for making vinyl involves a process that’s less alchemy than it is chemistry, and it’s not exactly an environmentally friendly endeavor.

An essential part of the process, nickel plating, creates wastewater, and over the last four years, Rainbo has been repeatedly cited by the EPA for not filing required environmental reports.

The reality, Sheldon says, is that more industry-friendly states offer fewer environmental restrictions and lower minimum wages. “Dealing with state agencies and employee issues — [California] is not a friendly atmosphere for manufacturers.”

The deciding factor in Rainbo’s end, though, was the prospect of a 40% rent hike when the lease came up to renew in 2020. That spelled doom, Schneider says. “We were losing money. We had a nest egg, so we could afford to lose money for a while, hoping that things would turn around. But as good as Steve is, it was just too tough.” Everything has to be cleared out by Jan. 30.

Vinyl created by Rainbo Records. 

(Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

By early January the plant was nearly empty, but bits and pieces of memorabilia still hung on the walls. Aside from the red ledgers, which are headed to Nashville, the GM says the rest of Rainbo’s holdings — Brown’s prototypes, collection of one-off cardboard discs, file cabinets packed with multicolored sample records, the accumulation of phonograph players and a grand mural — are on the way to a warehouse about a mile away. Sheldon is hoping to find a permanent home for it all.

Even if he doesn’t, Rainbo’s legacy will endure in the musical grooves of millions of albums scattered in used record bins around the world. Digital files can be deleted. Spotify remains unprofitable. Apple Music is a loss leader.

Vinyl records, by contrast, will outlive us all, and the secrets they contain will sustain listeners for decades to come.

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https://mailchi.mp/52c4f40fe302/texas-music-2720?e=d832c5210c
 

Scott Joplin in June 1903. This picture also appears on the cover of “The Cascades” from 1904.

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https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/fires/2020/02/06/banning-building-fire-blocks-highway-243-south-interstate-10/4678543002/?utm_source=Duplication.ca Newsletter
 

Apollo Masters has burned to the ground. Heard that everyone got out safely. Apollo supplied 95% of the lacquer blanks to the vinyl industry.

Three-alarm building fire in Banning blocks Highway 243; businesses evacuated due to chemical concerns

Colin AtagiUpdated 1:39 p.m. PT Feb. 6, 2020

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Firefighters are trying to determine what sparked a three-alarm building fire that forced the evacuation of nearby businesses and prevented access to Highway 243 in Banning Thursday morning.

The fire was reported about 8 a.m. in a 15,000-square-foot building at Lincoln Street and San Gorgonio Avenue and it produced a black plume of smoke that was visible in the Coachella Valley.

“There were multiple reports of explosions when the fire started,” Cal Fire Capt. Fernando Herrera said at the scene. “There wasn’t any one spot you could say wasn’t on fire.”

Eighty-two firefighters responded to the blaze and the fire was contained by 10:45 a.m.

The business is Apollo Masters Corp., a decades-old company that produces a lacquer formula for making master discs which are then used to make vinyl records. Employees were inside when the fire began, but Herrera said none of them were injured.

The company could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Riverside County Environmental Health officials will investigate whether the environment was impacted by harmful chemicals used at the facility.

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SR 243 closed south of I-10 due to fire. Use alternate routes. Unknown duration.

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Banning staff said there was no indication the city’s water supply was affected, but fire officials warned of runoff that came from fire hoses and entered drainage that led to a creek bed.  

Authorities cordoned off a 3,000-foot radius and businesses across the street from the fire were evacuated.

Occupants of homes and businesses a block away were ordered to shelter in place. They were allowed to leave their properties, but could not re-entered the closed area.

Banning High School was just outside the closed area and Herrera said students and staff weren’t affected beyond having to go around the closed area once classes let out for the day.

Also impacted were motorists using Highway 243 to and from Idyllwild, since it exits onto San Gorgonio Avenue. All traffic was detoured around the fire scene.

Banning residents said they had no interest in approaching the fire as it burned.

“I could smell the smoke from my living room and it was bad,” said Christina De La Rosa, 49. “I saw it from my window and debated whether I should leave or not. I thought there might be an explosion.”

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Desert Sun reporter Colin Atagi covers crime, public safety and road and highway safety. He can be reached at Colin.Atagi@desertsun.com or follow him at @tdscolinatagi. Support local news, subscribe to The Desert Sun.

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https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/philadelphia-soul-sound-luther-randolph-im-ready-to-learn-hey-there-lonely-girl-record-producer-jazz-organist-20200205.html
 

Luther A. Randolph, jazz organist and producer whose hits helped shape the Philly soul sound, dies at 84

Bonnie L. Cook

Courtesy of the Randolph Family 

Luther Anthony Randolph, 84, of Media, a jazz organist and record producer whose hits “Yes, I’m Ready” and “Hey There Lonely Girl,” helped shape the Philadelphia soul sound of the 1960s, died Monday, Jan. 27, of complications from a series of strokes at Bryn Mawr Terrace.

Mr. Randolph became interested in music at an early age, when he began playing the trumpet and piano. At age 12, he began studying the piano in earnest. He spent so much time practicing that his mother had to chase him off the instrument to do his chores, his family said in a statement.

Mr. Randolph launched his career playing piano for the First Baptist Church of Morton and by 16 was playing R&B and jazz professionally. Fascinated by the artistry of organist Jimmy Smith, Mr. Randolph tackled the jazz organ in 1960 and mastered it. He moved away from the piano in favor of the organ.

In 1962, teaming up with guitarist Johnny Stiles and jazz drummer Norman Connors, Mr. Randolph released the hit record “Cross Roads.” It soared to No. 1 in Philadelphia R&B rankings and enjoyed a strong showing nationally.

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Mr. Randolph joined with Stiles and vocalist Weldon McDougal III to establish Harthon Records, a Philadelphia soul label, in the early 1960s. The company produced records for vocalists including Barbara Mason and Herb Ward.

Mason’s “Yes, I’m Ready” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard R&B charts in 1965. Sharon Stiles, Johnny Stiles’ wife, said the song became a million-dollar seller. Stiles died in 2017.

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“The song that really put Philadelphia soul on the map was Barbara Mason’s ‘Yes, I’m, Ready,’ a pop #5 hit in the spring of 1965,” wrote Peter Shapiro in the 2015 book Turn the Beat Around. The record established the lush tones that would characterize the Philadelphia soul sound, he wrote.

“In a rinky-dink office at 59th and Chestnut Streets in Philadelphia, that’s where the whole thing started,” Sharon Stiles recalled. “Luther and Johnny Stiles had a big part in everything that was done. We were close.”

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The label also produced recording artist Eddie Holman’s 1970 hit single, “Hey There, Lonely Girl,” which placed at No. 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 Pop Chart.

Over the next few decades, Mr. Randolph headlined at the Round Table in West Philadelphia, Bob and Barbara’s Lounge on South Street, and Zanzibar Blue in the Bellevue Stratford. He and Stiles toured the East Coast and played at Atlantic City hotels before the casinos arrived.

Born in Media to the Rev. Fredrick and Emma Randolph, he spent his childhood in Media, where he attended the public schools. Later, he lived in Ridley Township, Sharon Hill, and Philadelphia.

Mr. Randolph believed in education as the key to advancement. He completed a bachelor’s degree at an art college in Philadelphia and a master’s degree in education at Howard University in Washington. After graduating, he joined the Army and was deployed to Germany as a musical ambassador to help improve Cold War relations.

Mr. Randolph and Stiles remained friends through the years. “Luther had an infectious smile,” said Sharon Stiles, who described him as a handsome man with an imposing physical presence and a winning manner. “And he was so nice. He lit up a room because he was always smiling. He was so gentle. He was raised that way.”

While Mr. Randolph pursued a music career, he had a parallel career as a teacher in the Philadelphia School District. Starting in 1966, he taught elementary school and then art and music at Sayre Middle School in West Philadelphia. He retired in the early 1990s.

Mr. Randolph became aware of the civil rights movement and joined its ranks in the late 1950s. He met the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and inspired by his speeches, helped organize sit-ins at the segregated lunch counter at an F.W. Woolworth’s store in Chester.

In retirement, Mr. Randolph took classes in how to trade stocks and securities and shared his knowledge with friends and family.

Mr. Randolph was married to Myrtha Randolph. They divorced; she survives. He married Geraldine E. Randolph, who died in 1993. In 2001, he married Sylvia Hayre.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Coree Cuff Lonergan; stepdaughter Lee Harrison; two sisters; a granddaughter; and many nieces and nephews.

A viewing starting at 9 a.m. Friday, Feb. 7, at the First United Methodist Church, 350 W. State St., Media, will be followed by an 11 a.m. funeral. Interment will be in Rolling Green Memorial Park, West Chester.

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https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/niche-music-streaming-services-jazzed-primephonic-a4355266.html
 

Full stream ahead: new hyper-focused music services to make fans sing

From jazz to classical, the music streaming world has some new competitors

Amelia Heathman6 hours ago

Since the launch of Spotify in 2008, streaming has transformed the musicindustry. A total of 91 billion songs —  1,300 songs per person — were streamed in the UK last year thanks to the Swedish-based company, Apple Music and other platforms, according to the Entertainment Retailers’ Association. 

OC&C Strategy Consultants found that streaming has the potential to be worth £1.6 billion by 2023, if there are a range of new services to target different customers. One way to input innovation is via niche platforms.

Last week a new entrant named jazzed was launched, focused on, you guessed it, jazz music (jazzed.com). Headed by Jonathan Arendt, former CEO of Jazz FM, it will offer audio channels, video content, podcasts and documentaries as well as music.

“Streaming tech gives the ability to experience music and all that surrounds it, in a very different way,” says Arendt. “Jazz has been massively underserved by the mainstream.  It is now possible to create a service that really satisfies the needs of users.”

Compared to Apple Music, which has just a single “Jazz” category, the new platform’s audio channels will focus on the ecosystems of the genre, from the sound of New Orleans to the influence of Polish jazz to Latin jazz and salsa beats. Arendt describes this as taking the very best of radio into the streaming world: “We could only do this within an app — allowing users to switch between moves, grooves and discovery at any time and to dig deep into the artist’s world at will.”

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There’s a freemium version, a premier tier named jazzed+ for £5.99 a month, and a more expensive subscription, jazzed premium, which is set to launch later this year and aims to stream all music in premium HD quality (flac 16-bit — a similar sound quality to CDs).

A focus on music quality is also what helps Primephonic, which specialises in classical music, differentiate itself. With 3.5 million tracks in the library, the platform is the largest collection of classical music in the world. It has 180,000 registered customers and says one-third of its listeners are under 35.

For a platinum subscription of £14.99 a month (primephonic.com) it offers 24-bit sound, a higher resolution than on other platforms. CEO Thomas Steffens says this is needed for classical: “Sometimes there can be 20 instruments at the same time and that gets lost in the data compression.” Yet it’s more expensive for companies to offer, as more server capacity is needed and an audio player had to be developed to handle the higher quality.

Steffens says its worth it. “Classical music is still very much at the root of contemporary music and movies. DJs base their dance tracks on classical music. Movies build tension and suspense based on how operas were composed 150 years ago. We feel it is an art that deserves to be preserved.” 

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NY Times Obit
Kirk Douglas, a Star of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Dies at 103
His rugged good looks and muscular intensity made him a commanding presence in films like “Lust for Life,” “Spartacus” and “Paths of Glory.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/05/movies/kirk-douglas-dead.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6imOyPnHnfY

Doris Day & Kirk Douglas – Young Man with a Horn (1950) – With a Song in my Heart

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3y8dZWx9YY

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Skip to 49:35

Mingus band is Joe Gardner-trumpet, Hamiet Bluiett-baritone sax, John Foster-piano, Roy Brooks-drums, Cat Anderson-trumpet sits in on first tune Perdido by Duke Ellington.

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Skip to 49:35

Mingus band is Joe Gardner-trumpet, Hamiet Bluiett-baritone sax, John Foster-piano, Roy Brooks-drums, Cat Anderson-trumpet sits in on first tune Perdido by Duke Ellington.

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http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/miles-davis-birth-of-the-cool-about/12306/

Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool – Trailer | About

December 10, 2019

American Masters Presents Stanley Nelson’s Grammy-nominated Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool February 25 on PBS in Honor of Black History Month

Features new interviews with Quincy Jones, Carlos Santana, Clive Davis, Wayne Shorter, Marcus Miller, Ron Carter, family members and others

American Masters presents the broadcast premiere of award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s deep dive into the world of a beloved musical giant. American Masters — Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, which earned a Grammy nomination in the “Best Music Film” category, premieres nationwide Tuesday, February 25 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), pbs.org/milesdavis and the PBS Video app in honor of Black History Month.

A visionary known for his restless aesthetic, Davis is widely regarded as one of the most innovative, influential and respected figures in music. With full access to the Miles Davis Estate, the film features never-before-seen footage, including studio outtakes from his recording sessions, rare photos and new interviews. Quincy Jones, Carlos Santana, Clive Davis, Wayne Shorter, Davis’s son Erin Davis and nephew Vince Wilburn, bassist and Davis collaborator Marcus Miller, and Ron Carter are just a few of the luminaries weighing in on the life and career of the cultural icon.

American Masters — Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool takes a hard look at the mythology that surrounds the legend. “The story of Miles Davis — who he was as a man and artist — has often been told as the tale of a drug-addled genius,” said Nelson. “You rarely see a portrait of a man that worked hard at honing his craft, a man who deeply studied all forms of music, from Baroque to classical Indian. An elegant man who could render ballads with such tenderness yet hold rage in his heart from the racism he faced throughout his life. He could be romantic and pursue women relentlessly, yet treat them with cruelty upon winning them over. He could be extremely generous, yet rescind that generosity on a whim.”

The documentary delves into the six-decade career of the musical genius: from his days as a Juilliard student to the development of his signature sound on recordings with his famous quintet, from his collaborations with Gil Evans to his shifts to new musical paradigms in the 70s and 80s. As the film tracks Davis’s boundary-breaking musical triumphs, the meanderings of his complicated personal life are told with intimate reflections from those closest to him. Previously unseen footage and a soundtrack full of Davis’s music are complemented by new interviews with friends, fellow musicians, collaborators and scholars to create a full portrait of the complex man. The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and had a successful limited theatrical run, tells the story of a truly singular talent and unpacks the man behind the horn.

In conjunction with the broadcast premiere of American Masters — Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool in February, Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release “Miles Davis – Music From and Inspired by Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, a Film by Stanley Nelson.”

American Masters, THIRTEEN’s award-winning biography series, celebrates our arts and culture. Launched in 1986, the series set the standard for documentary film profiles, accruing widespread critical acclaim and earning 28 Emmy Awards — including 10 for Outstanding Non-Fiction Series and five for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special — 14 Peabodys, an Oscar, three Grammys, two Producers Guild Awards and many other honors. American Masters is available for streaming simultaneously on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS Video app, which is available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Chromecast. PBS station members can view episodes via Passport (contact your local PBS station for details).

American Masters – Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is a Firelight Media/Eagle Rock Films Production for American Masters Pictures and Eagle Rock Entertainment in association with BBC Music. Produced and directed by Stanley Nelson. Produced by Nicole London. Executive produced by Terry Shand and Geoff Kempin for Eagle Rock Entertainment; Darryl Porter, Erin Davis, Cheryl Davis, and Vince Wilburn for Miles Davis Properties, LLC; and Michael Kantor for American Masters.

Funding for American Masters – Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool is provided by David and Lisa Grain, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Jody and John Arnhold, Pappalardo Family Foundation, and The Leslie and Rosyln Goldstein Foundation.

Major support for American Masters is provided by AARP. Additional support is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Rosalind P. Walter, The Philip and Janice Levin Foundation, Ellen and James S. Marcus, Judith and Burton Resnick, Vital Projects Fund, Cheryl and Philip Milstein Family, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, Lillian Goldman Programming Endowment, and public television viewers.

About WNET

WNET is America’s flagship PBS station: parent company of New York’s THIRTEEN and WLIW21 and operator of NJTV, the statewide public media network in New Jersey. Through its new ALL ARTS multi-platform initiative, its broadcast channels, three cable services (THIRTEEN PBSKids, Create and World) and online streaming sites, WNET brings quality arts, education and public affairs programming to more than five million viewers each month. WNET produces and presents a wide range of acclaimed PBS series, including Nature, Great Performances, American Masters, PBS NewsHour Weekend, and the nightly interview program Amanpour and Company. In addition, WNET produces numerous documentaries, children’s programs, and local news and cultural offerings, as well as multi-platform initiatives addressing poverty and climate. Through THIRTEEN Passport and WLIW Passport, station members can stream new and archival THIRTEEN, WLIW and PBS programming anytime, anywhere.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/eileen-farrell-the-complete-columbia-album-collection-review-she-could-sing-it-all-11580768332?mod=cx_picks
 

‘Eileen Farrell: The Complete Columbia Album Collection’ Review: She Could Sing It All

A 16-CD collection celebrates the great American singer, who was equally comfortable performing standards and opera.

By 

David Mermelstein 

Feb. 3, 2020 5:18 pm ET

Among the great American singers of the second half of the 20th century, the inimitable Eileen Farrell is especially cherished. A child of vaudevillians, she established herself as a radio star long before she ventured onto the concert stage, back when such things could happen. She didn’t sing fully staged opera until 1956, though by late 1960 she was rightly at the Metropolitan in New York. Her sound was both silver and gold—bright and warm—with enough force behind it to impress even the most discerning critics. 

Feb. 13 marks the centenary of her birth, and to honor the occasion Sony Classical has just released “Eileen Farrell: The Complete Columbia Album Collection,” with 16 CDs featuring the singer in an extraordinary assortment of material—everything from Verdi and Puccini arias to Gershwin, Kern and Ellington standards to art songs by Schubert and Poulenc to a Christmas album. Incredibly, nearly all of it was recorded between 1958 and 1962.

The disc “Arias in the Great Tradition,” conducted by Max Rudolf, opens with two Beethoven works by which big soprano voices used to be judged: the concert aria “Ah, perfido!” and the perfervid operatic aria “Abscheulicher!” from “Fidelio.” Farrell provides the expected heft, but also, more gratifyingly, supple phrasing and dynamic flexibility. 

Her album of Puccini arias, also with Rudolf, offers not the most meticulously characterized accounts of chestnuts from “Bohème,” “Butterfly” and “Tosca,” but rather performances of unrivaled vocal plushness. And in the two arias from “Turandot,” she provides an atypical take on the opera’s eponymous princess, one less bloodthirsty but more flesh-and-blood than we usually hear. 

Two Verdi records—one of arias (yet again with the stalwart Rudolf), the other of duets with the beloved tenor Richard Tucker —find Farrell in refulgent voice. The competition in this era was stiff (think Leontyne Price and Zinka Milanov, to name just two), but Farrell was never more in her element, unleashing a precisely modulated yet torrential sound in familiar excerpts from “Aida,” “Un Ballo in Maschera” and “Otello.”

One needs little exposure to Farrell to realize that hers was a voice born for Wagner. Yet she never assumed any of his roles in the opera house. Instead, she sang his music in the concert hall and very occasionally on record. This set’s one example features benchmark accounts of Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from “Götterdämmerung” and the orchestral version of the “Wesendonck” Lieder, both performed with the New York Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein.

Farrell wasn’t much of a new-music paragon on stage or record. But by assuming the role of Marie in what became the premiere recording of Alban Berg’s seminal, atonal opera “Wozzeck,” she cinched a major claim to fame in that arena. Captured live at Carnegie Hall in 1951, with the incomparable Dimitri Mitropoulos conducting, the recording set a new bar for just how far major labels might go in embracing contemporary music. 

But Farrell wasn’t just an operatic powerhouse, and the release, in 1960, of the aptly titled “I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues!” proved it. Supported by a crack orchestra led by the gifted arranger Lester Henderson, this album of standards like Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night” and Kurt Weill’s “September Song” revealed Farrell as a nuanced vocal stylist who could look any pop singer in the eye. Take her novel Sprechstimme account of the Rodgers and Hart gem “Glad to Be Unhappy,” with her native New England twang undampened. No example better demonstrates that opera singers can triumph in other genres when they jettison stuffy mannerisms. (Dismayingly, the disc is filled out with the “Marines’ Hymn” followed by eight sentimental ballads she recorded with Charles Lichter in 1946.)

A year later, Farrell and Henderson followed their success with the album “Here I Go Again,” and a year after that she partnered with Percy Faith in a similar vein. The last of her Columbia pop albums paired her with André Previn at the piano and conducting. Given her abilities in such material and the breadth of the American songbook, it’s hard to know why Columbia stopped making records like this. But Farrell was undeterred and continued laying down tracks of similar material elsewhere well into the 1990s. 

Only two things disappoint in this welcome tribute. Instead of including her complete “Messiah” with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy, portions of it are used to pad the disc containing her short Christmas album. And it would have been nice to find Farrell’s recordings for RCA in this set, as they now belong to Sony Classical.

Farrell, who died in 2002, made worthy records both before and after those contained in this box, but this set provides a marvelous compendium of the soprano at the height of her powers and in a wide and distinctly American range of styles. 

—Mr. Mermelstein writes for the Journal on classical music and film.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/bob-marleys-enduring-mysteries-11580767083
 

Bob Marley’s Enduring Mysteries

The reggae legend would have turned 75 this week; his music still resonates thanks to its multilayered meanings.

By 

Will Friedwald 

Feb. 3, 2020 4:58 pm ET

Reggae legend Bob Marley, who would have turned 75 Thursday had he not died at age 36, wrote some of the most memorable songs in all of music.

Early in the 1984 documentary “Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Bob Marley Story,” a friend of Marley’s known as Sticko points to the house where Marley grew up in the rural Nine Mile parish of Jamaica. “Bob was very different from most of the musicians, because Bob had the country in his life. Most musicians living in the town don’t know about nature.” A little later, we meet a neighbor of Marley’s, identified as Chinaman, who notes that Marley was also different from most everyone he knew because of his father, Norval Marley. “He was an Englishman, a white man,” he says of the father, as if this were all we need to know.

This overlaying of perspectives and racial identities is a big part of Marley’s music, where every number seems to be at least two things at once. His most compassionate love song, “No Woman, No Cry,” is also a protest song; it seems to imply that love is all the more sweet when it blossoms in a veritable urban war zone like Trenchtown in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, where Marley spent the latter part of his youth. “Redemption Song” starts as a narrative about pirates and sailing, but quickly morphs into a prayer for deliverance and freedom. “Three Little Birds” is a simple song with profound spiritual ramifications, an optimistic hymn in which birds deliver the message that “every little thing is gonna be alright.”

Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of Marley’s music is that it never seems, unlike so much pop, a guilty pleasure: He helped perfect the irresistible beat of reggae, a blend of North American-style rhythm-and-blues with more established Caribbean styles like mento, ska and calypso. But while the beat insists that you dance—in a firm yet gentle way—the lyrics never let you forget both the suffering and the salvation of the world. Songs like “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” lament wealth disparity, while at the same time telling us to party. “A hungry mob is a angry mob,” he tells us, even as we’re “chucking” to the music. Dance music, protest music, and something else too. Marley’s songs are never less than completely erotic—with slow, sexy rhythms abetted, in his own recordings, by the crooner’s rough-yet-smooth voice.

And that all may explain why his compositions continue to spread into genres far from their home territory. “I Shot the Sheriff”—originally his conception of a cowboy song—became an international rock hit thanks to Eric Clapton. “Could You Be Loved?” was taken up by R&B singers like Patti Austin as well as rock bands like Toto, and remains the Marley song you’re most likely to hear at a wedding. Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer gave “Redemption Song” a country flavor, and “Waiting in Vain” was cooed by jazz singer Dianne Reeves as a soul jazz ballad—both without any hint of a Jamaican beat. Kingston-born piano giant Monty Alexander has consistently and brilliantly shown how Marley’s music can serve as a foundation for jazz interpretation and improvisation.

It’s not as if some Marley songs are happy and some are sad; they seem, instead, to embrace all the complexities of life: the grim realities of war contrasted with the warm embrace of God’s love. Marley brilliantly conceptualized a city in “Concrete Jungle,” and cited the Old Testament Jews as a spiritual inspiration for present-day Jamaicans in “Exodus.”

Marley, who had already survived an assassination attempt in 1976—despite having been shot in the chest and arm, he performed at a concert two nights later, as a means of uniting warring factions in his home country—died of melanoma in 1981. A friend remembered that, on the way to the funeral, the hearse carrying Marley’s coffin broke down and a spontaneous party and jam session erupted right where they stood. Even from beyond the grave, Marley was telling us that we shouldn’t worry ’bout a thing.

—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/bob-marleys-enduring-mysteries-11580767083
 

Bob Marley’s Enduring Mysteries

The reggae legend would have turned 75 this week; his music still resonates thanks to its multilayered meanings.

By 

Will Friedwald 

Feb. 3, 2020 4:58 pm ET

Reggae legend Bob Marley, who would have turned 75 Thursday had he not died at age 36, wrote some of the most memorable songs in all of music.

Early in the 1984 documentary “Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Bob Marley Story,” a friend of Marley’s known as Sticko points to the house where Marley grew up in the rural Nine Mile parish of Jamaica. “Bob was very different from most of the musicians, because Bob had the country in his life. Most musicians living in the town don’t know about nature.” A little later, we meet a neighbor of Marley’s, identified as Chinaman, who notes that Marley was also different from most everyone he knew because of his father, Norval Marley. “He was an Englishman, a white man,” he says of the father, as if this were all we need to know.

This overlaying of perspectives and racial identities is a big part of Marley’s music, where every number seems to be at least two things at once. His most compassionate love song, “No Woman, No Cry,” is also a protest song; it seems to imply that love is all the more sweet when it blossoms in a veritable urban war zone like Trenchtown in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, where Marley spent the latter part of his youth. “Redemption Song” starts as a narrative about pirates and sailing, but quickly morphs into a prayer for deliverance and freedom. “Three Little Birds” is a simple song with profound spiritual ramifications, an optimistic hymn in which birds deliver the message that “every little thing is gonna be alright.”

Perhaps the most exceptional aspect of Marley’s music is that it never seems, unlike so much pop, a guilty pleasure: He helped perfect the irresistible beat of reggae, a blend of North American-style rhythm-and-blues with more established Caribbean styles like mento, ska and calypso. But while the beat insists that you dance—in a firm yet gentle way—the lyrics never let you forget both the suffering and the salvation of the world. Songs like “Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)” lament wealth disparity, while at the same time telling us to party. “A hungry mob is a angry mob,” he tells us, even as we’re “chucking” to the music. Dance music, protest music, and something else too. Marley’s songs are never less than completely erotic—with slow, sexy rhythms abetted, in his own recordings, by the crooner’s rough-yet-smooth voice.

And that all may explain why his compositions continue to spread into genres far from their home territory. “I Shot the Sheriff”—originally his conception of a cowboy song—became an international rock hit thanks to Eric Clapton. “Could You Be Loved?” was taken up by R&B singers like Patti Austin as well as rock bands like Toto, and remains the Marley song you’re most likely to hear at a wedding. Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer gave “Redemption Song” a country flavor, and “Waiting in Vain” was cooed by jazz singer Dianne Reeves as a soul jazz ballad—both without any hint of a Jamaican beat. Kingston-born piano giant Monty Alexander has consistently and brilliantly shown how Marley’s music can serve as a foundation for jazz interpretation and improvisation.

It’s not as if some Marley songs are happy and some are sad; they seem, instead, to embrace all the complexities of life: the grim realities of war contrasted with the warm embrace of God’s love. Marley brilliantly conceptualized a city in “Concrete Jungle,” and cited the Old Testament Jews as a spiritual inspiration for present-day Jamaicans in “Exodus.”

Marley, who had already survived an assassination attempt in 1976—despite having been shot in the chest and arm, he performed at a concert two nights later, as a means of uniting warring factions in his home country—died of melanoma in 1981. A friend remembered that, on the way to the funeral, the hearse carrying Marley’s coffin broke down and a spontaneous party and jam session erupted right where they stood. Even from beyond the grave, Marley was telling us that we shouldn’t worry ’bout a thing.

—Mr. Friedwald writes about music and popular culture for the Journal.

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https://www.tulsaworld.com/entertainment/noted-musician-and-tulsa-race-massacre-survivor-hal-singer-moves/article_e3cd96eb-53c3-582a-b2a9-2b0156010ba6.htm

• By Randy Krehbiel Tulsa World
•  
• Dec 1, 2019

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lArlette and Hal Singer have been married more than 50 years. Courtesy
 

We are in the quiet coda of Hal Singer’s remarkable life.

He’s past 100 now, living quietly in a Paris suburb with his wife of more than 50 years, Arlette. Singer’s tenor saxophone is silent after a career that spanned more than seven decades. He is mostly silent, too; Arlette says he can no longer talk on the telephone.

“He is very tired,” she said.

Harold Joseph “Cornbread” Singer was born Oct. 8, 1919, in Tulsa’s Greenwood District. Jazz was still spelled “jass.” James Reese Europe and his Harlem Hellfighters had just made their mark on the battlefields of Europe and the concert halls of France and New York, and in so doing changed the way two continents thought of African Americans and their music.

As a boy, Singer would hang out at Tulsa’s railroad depots, looking for the musicians playing dates on both sides of the Frisco tracks, in white Tulsa and black, and he would take them home.

“A lot of the top black bands came by,” said Arlette. “He would wait for them. Since his mom was a good cook he would invite them to dinner with his parents. He told me that when he got to New York he already knew a lot of musicians because they’d been to his house for dinner.”

His mother’s cooking had already shaped young Hal’s life in an unexpected way. She cooked for a white household and in the aftermath of the May 31-June 1, 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Mrs. Singer and 18-month-old Hal were put on a train to Kansas City by her employer until their home could be rebuilt.

He is one of the few survivors of the race massacre still living.

“His father had a good job in a factory making tools for the oil field,” Arlette said, explaining why the Singers remained in Tulsa. “He never had a problem with racism. He said there were many nice people among the whites as well as those who weren’t so nice.”

His first musical instrument was a violin, but he eventually switched to the clarinet and then the tenor sax. At some point he was hired by Tulsa bandmaster Ernie Fields Sr., but that didn’t last.

“They both said they didn’t remember why he was let go,” said Fields’ son, Ernie Fields Jr.

It didn’t seem to hurt Singer’s career. He hooked up with a succession of territory bands, including Tommy Douglas, Lloyd Hunter and Jay McShann, the Muskogee native who became a star of the Kansas City music scene at the height of the big band era.

Singer cashed in his mother’s old meal tickets in 1943, when he moved to New York and began a career as a session musician while playing with several bands, including Hot Lips Page and Duke Ellington.

Then, in 1948, he cut a simple number called “Cornbread” that rocketed to the top of the charts and earned Singer a nickname he is said to have never cared for.

Ernie Fields Jr. said there is a certain irony but also an indication of Singer’s artistry in the number’s success.

“He was a terrific saxophonist but his biggest hit was the simplest thing you could play on a saxophone,” said Fields. “That’s one note.”

A lesser hit, 1948’s “Rock Around the Clock” — not the song of similar title made famous by Bill Haley and His Comets a few years later — is considered an early rock and roll recording. His album “Rent Party,” originally released in the 1950s, remains in circulation on vinyl and CD as well as the internet.

In 1965, Singer went to Paris for a one-month gig, according to Arlette. He’s been there ever since, for years touring Europe and Africa. In 1969, he released an album called “Paris Soul Food.” He and Arlette married, raised two daughters, and settled into a comfortable life.

In the years since, Singer has become something of a celebrity in France. He was made a Chevalier des Arts — Knight of the Arts — in 1992, and has since been promoted to Commandeur, the highest rank of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. That puts him on the same plane as the likes of T.S. Eliot, Stevie Wonder, Audrey Hepburn and Sean Connery.

According to Arlette, Singer continued playing until about five years ago. Video of him performing as recently as 2012 is on the website halsingergroup.com.

But now we are in the final few muted bars of a long life of smoke-filled cafes, open-air festivals and impromptu jam sessions.

“Now he likes it when musician friends come and play live in his room,” said Arlette. “Sometimes we see him moving his fingers like he’s playing the notes. He’s still involved in the music.”

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