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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https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-a-long-lost-indian-disco-record-won-over-crate-diggers-and-cracked-the-youtube-algorithm/
 

How a Long-Lost Indian Disco Record Won Over Crate Diggers and Cracked the YouTube Algorithm

Vrinda JagotaJanuary 22 2020

In 2014, Debayan Sen found a mysterious album inside of a trunk in his mother’s attic, in Kolkata, India. The red-orange record sleeve featured a picture of his mom as a young woman along with her name—Rupa—in big, bold lettering. That was the day Debayan learned about his mother’s past life as a singer.

Suddenly reminded of this discovery last year, Debayan decided to Google the record. The results surprised his family: Rupa’s first and only album, 1982’s Disco Jazz, was selling for hundreds of dollars via sites like Discogs. “The day I found the record my mom said, ‘Throw it away. It is just pointless,’” Debayan remembers. “I said, ‘What the hell, you made this, why would you throw this away?’”

Since then, Disco Jazz has been reissued by Numero Group, the well-established archival label. “Aaj Shanibar,” one of its four tracks, has also started to spread through the strange rabbithole that is YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. The most popular upload of the song now boasts more than 1.5 million views, likely thanks to factors including its eight-minute runtime and its high-energy, ever-shifting instrumentals. It’s another example of what happens when, with the benefit of time and technology, “lost” songs reach a new generation of listeners halfway around the world.

How exactly did this overlooked album surface, nearly 40 years after its original Indian pressing? It helps that the songs could turn up in Balearic disco sets, Indian weddings, or even vibey “studying” playlists. But tracing Disco Jazz’s path to re-emergence shows how roundabout and happenstance the modern rediscovery process for old music can be.

The journey started the old-fashioned way, with a bit of crate-digging. In 2005, Florian Pittner, a Hamburg-based record-seller who runs the Discogs page Hindustani Vinyl, was traveling in Kolkata when he came across Disco Jazz. Pittner recognized the name of the album’s producer and co-arranger, Aashish Khan, and decided to buy several copies. He sold a few on eBay and, in 2010, listed another copy on Discogs. In May 2012, Swedish DJ Albion Venables was searching for disco music when he came across Pittner’s Discogs listing. He took a chance on it, largely based on the album artwork and Hindustani Vinyl’s reputation. “When I heard how Rupa sang, in a really heartfelt way and with this divine voice, I knew the universe would relate to it,” he says.

Venables started playing “Aaj Shanibar” in his sets, one of which was posted in a Facebook group for listeners trying to identify obscure songs based on snippets of audio. That was where Fran Korzatkowski, a music fan based in Albany, New York, first heard “Aaj Shanibar” and became obsessed. After much digging, Korzatkowski identified the track based on its use in Miss Lovely, a 2012 Indian art-house movie. Disco Jazz was selling for about $400 on eBay at the time, so he took the recording from Venables’ mix, adjusted the bass levels a little, and became the first person to upload “Aaj Shanibar” to YouTube, in April 2016.

Months later, Dan Snaith—best known for his roving house project Caribou—was stuck in a YouTube wormhole, skipping through hundreds of songs, when “Aaj Shanibar” stopped him in his tracks. He immediately integrated the song into his live DJ sets and radio broadcasts on NTS and Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide FM. “Juxtaposed against contemporary club music, it’s like a breath of fresh air at the right point in a club night,” Snaith says. “‘Aaj Shanibar’ has the propulsiveness of a great disco track but also an otherworldly, spacey feeling—it floats along allowing people to get lost in the arrangement, the melody and Rupa’s voice. It’s one of those records that gets asked about every time you play it.”

In mid-2017 and then again in early 2018, Korzatkowski started to see a spike in the song’s YouTube views and comments. By the end of 2017, German label Ovular had released a bootleg pressing of Disco Jazz, and people were posting about “Aaj Shanibar” on multiple Reddit forums. The word-of-mouth chatter and DJ sets (not just by Snaith and Venables) almost certainly helped the song spread on YouTube, but there are other factors that likely boosted its chances from there. Longer videos can be favored by YouTube because they offer extra space for ads; at the same time, “Aaj Shanibar” is immediately punchy, encouraging audience retention. But Massimo Airoldi, a professor and digital researcher at Emlyon Business School, suspects something else is at play as well: YouTube has been found to suggest music based on situational qualities, like whether a song would fit on playlists of “study music” or “shower music” (whatever that means). “The atmosphere of the song resonates well with these sort of relaxed forms of listening to music,” he says.

This new mode of categorizing songs online focuses heavily on mood and contemporary listening contexts—factors that remove the music from its original environment and intention. Originally created as its key players shifted between languages, continents, and cultures, Disco Jazz has, quite fittingly, hurdled through time and space.

Rupa Sen (née Biswas) practicing with Pranesh and Aashish Khan during the recording of Disco Jazz. (Provided photo)

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Bollywood films like Disco Dancer and Qurbanimade the glamorous look and sound of disco wildly popular on the Indian subcontinent. The same year Disco Jazz was released—1982—Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” made its way, via partial interpolation, into the high-grossing Indian comedy Namak Halaal. Much of the pop music released in South Asia at the time had some combination of disco’s pulsing synths, cascading keys, and opulent strings mixed with tabla drums and sitar.

What sets Disco Jazz apart from other Indian disco is how it breaks with conventions. These songs feel more spacious than Bollywood music of the era—they take their time unwinding and pass through unexpected influences. While the tangy lute sound of Indian sarod drives some tracks, extended Western funk guitar solos overtake others. There are even touches of what would now be considered Balearic beat music, with its expansive and hypnotic musical interludes. And the lyrics are in a mixture of Hindi and Bengali, a rarity among Bollywood songs of the era, which were largely sung in Hindi only.

The record’s myriad influences can be attributed in part to Aashish Khan, the musician whose name caught Florian Pittner’s eye. Khan is a known figure in Indian classical music. His father was the renowned sarod player Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. His grandfather, Allauddin Khan, taught South Asian household names like sitar player Ravi Shankar and Pannalal Ghosh, who helped popularize the flute in Indian classical music. Aashish began learning sarod from his grandfather at the age of 5 and by the time he was 13, the two were performing publicly together.

In his late 20s, Khan moved to California to help his father run a music school. He ended up working on songs with George Harrison (including some for the 1968 cult film Wonderwall), forming the Indian-American fusion band Shanti, and moving to Calgary, Alberta to found another music school with his brother, Pranesh. In Calgary, the Khans found a tight-knit community of musicians, some of whom were interested in learning about traditional Indian instruments. Aashish and his friend Don Pope started composing the music that became Disco Jazz, while Aashish and his wife wrote the lyrics.

Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Rupa Biswas was a recent graduate of Calcutta University and a singer at All India Radio, the national public broadcast station. She flew to Calgary in 1981 to visit her older brother and while there, she put on a three-hour performance at the University of Calgary. The show impressed Khan, who was a friend of Rupa’s brother. He asked her to perform on a TV program he ran, then recruited her to record the vocals for Disco Jazz.

Once the album was complete, Khan went to India to arrange for its release. He chose Megaphone Company, but he says the record label didn’t promote Disco Jazz nearly enough. Rupa recalls it selling only a few thousand copies.

“When the record came out, I went to the stores and stood in front of the cassettes and hoped that someone would recognize me,” she says, with her son acting as her translator. “Unfortunately, nothing happened. I got very irritated and bought my own cassettes and gave them to my family. After that, I decided not to dwell. I completed my Master’s in music, worked for a local newspaper, and performed shows for a few years.”

Now Rupa is receiving proceeds from the Numero Group reissue and corresponding with fans around the world. She’s practicing every day to get her voice in shape and feeling optimistic about her future as a singer. “It’s almost impossible for me to explain why this is happening,” she says. “I think of it as a blessing from God that after so many years, I’m finally getting recognition.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/business/media/harry-harrison-dead.html?action=click
 

Harry Harrison, ‘Good Guy’ Radio D.J., Is Dead at 89

By Sam Roberts

Jan. 29, 2020

As the ‘Morning Mayor of New York’ from 1959 to 2003, he hosted shows on WMCA, WABC and WCBS-FM, a singular trifecta.

Harry Harrison, a fixture on New York morning music radio, would wake his listeners “as gently as a whiff of fresh-brewed coffee,” one entertainment writer said.WCBS

Harry Harrison, the homey disc jockey who awakened radio listeners and accompanied them on their morning commute with a deep, mellow voice as the “Morning Mayor of New York” for more than four decades, died on Tuesday at his home in Westwood, N.J. He was 89.

The cause was a combination of multiple health problems, his daughter, Patti, said.

Mr. Harrison’s first radio program had played so well in Peoria, Ill., that in 1958, when he was still in his 20s, WMCA brought him to New York. He went on to become the only D.J. to broadcast, in succession, on three of the top music stations in the city. He was a WMCA Good Guy and a WABC All-American — the clubby team names adopted by the stations to brand their announcers — and a morning drive-time host for WCBS, 101.1 FM, until he retired from full-time broadcasting in 2003. (His death certificate said he died at 1:01 p.m.)

While some of his contemporaries harangued or interrupted guests or gratingly volunteered their opinions, Mr. Harrison would wake New Yorkers “as gently as a whiff of fresh-brewed coffee,” the entertainment reporter David Hinckley wrote on medium.com.

What distinguished Mr. Harrison in the highly competitive New York metropolitan market — even before the advent of shock jocks — was his folksy Midwest patter.

He would eclectically intersperse Beatles tracks with birthday greetings and listeners’ nominations for a “Housewife Hall of Fame.” He would deliver bromides like, “Stay well, stay happy, stay right there’” and “Every day should be unwrapped like a precious gift … that’s why they call it the Present.” As his signoff he would say, “Wishing you the best — that’s exactly what you do deserve.”

Mr. Harrison conveyed an authenticity, which, friends and colleagues insisted, was authentic.

“He was actually corny, and it came across on the air,” Vincent A. Gardino, a former colleague at WABC, said in a phone interview.

Mr. Harrison lived in the New York metropolitan area for most of his life and un-self-consciously characterized himself as “like most of the New Yorkers.” What differentiated him from fellow broadcasters, he unabashedly acknowledged, was his conventionality.

“I think the secret is that I come across as an ordinary guy, which I am,” he said. “I stayed myself on the radio, and my audience saw that I was like them and so a part of their family.”

Harry Harrison Jr. was born on Sept. 20, 1930, in Chicago to Harry Sr. and Mary (McKenna) Harrison.

In addition to his daughter, Patti, he is survived by his son, Patrick. His wife, Patricia (Kelly) Harrison, died in 2003. Two other children, Brian Joseph and Michael, died in 1996 and 2017, respectively.

Harry attended a seminary, intending to become a priest. But he decided to make broadcasting his career after spending nearly a year as a teenager glued to the radio while bedridden with rheumatic fever.

Once he recovered, he job-hunted from station to station until he landed a summer intern stint at WCFL in Chicago. He remained there eight months. In 1954, he joined WPEO in Peoria, where he became program director, hosted a show in which he began his morning routine, and transformed the station into the top rated in its market.

Word of Mr. Harrison’s success spread to WMCA, the David going up against the WABC Goliath, and the station lured him to New York, adding him to a lineup of self-styled Good Guys that included Dan Daniel and Jack Spector.

Recruited to WABC by the pioneering program director Rick Sklar, he transplanted his show there in 1968, filling the 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. slot. His fellow broadcasters included Johnny Donovan, Charlie Greer, Dan Ingram, Ron Lundy, Bruce Morrow and Scott Muni. Mr. Harrison left in 1979 after a management change.

After several months, he joined WCBS, where he remained, playing oldies, until 2003. He then hosted a weekend program featuring music by the Beatles until he retired in 2005.

On April 25, 1997, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani proclaimed “Harry Harrison Day” in his honor. In November, Mr. Harrison was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame.

Every holiday season, he would recite his own version of “May You Always,” a Top-20 hit written by Larry Marks and Dick Charles and recorded by the McGuire Sisters. Mr. Harrison’s version ended with his signature sanguinity:

And sometime soon, may you be waved to by a celebrity,

Wagged at by a puppy,

Run to by a happy child,

And counted on by someone you love.

More than this, no one can wish you.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/nyregion/wbgo-newark-jazz.html?fbclid=IwAR3IBCJNZKHTlbGJCTTfKtRBEi55Y0yKhOMv_-FdFAhVQFUDy-EsRcmg0Do
 

Behind the Racial Uproar at One of the World’s Best Jazz Stations

By Tammy La Gorce

Published Jan. 29, 2020

Keanna Faircloth, the new host of “Afternoon Jazz” at WBGO.Anna Watts for The New York Times

WBGO seems to be distancing itself from the community that built it. There have been repercussions.

Keanna Faircloth, the new host of “Afternoon Jazz” at WBGO.Anna Watts for The New York Times

For almost 40 years, Dorthaan Kirk, the widow of the great jazz saxophonistRahsaan Roland Kirk, was a fixture at WBGO, Newark’s public jazz station.

Considered the city’s “first lady of jazz,” Ms. Kirk organized jazz brunches and persuaded famous musicians like Regina Carter to perform at children’s concerts. Her parties at the station celebrating the art exhibitions she curated, like one featuring vintage boomboxes, were always open to the public.

In 2018, Ms. Kirk retired, just shy of her 80th birthday.

Things at WBGO quickly changed after that. The station ended the exhibitions and the parties. Then management stopped allowing the public into the building, citing security concerns. The community, it seemed, was no longer welcome at the station it helped to create.

Dorthaan Kirk and Bill Daughtry were longtime employees of WBGO.Anna Watts for The New York Times

This development did not sit well. WBGO is arguably the best jazz station in the world, and its fate speaks to the broader challenges facing the popularity of jazz, that uniquely American idiom.

What WBGO offers is rare and culturally significant: an ongoing, ever-changing audio library of jazz, both old and new. The fact that its headquarters are in Newark, a center of black culture and activism, as well as the home of musicians like Sarah Vaughan and the saxophonists James Moody and Wayne Shorter, is no accident.

Not surprisingly, the situation became contentious. WBGO stalwarts rallied around a batch of perceived slights. Grievances cited in a petition, signed by the singer Cassandra Wilson and the pianist Ellis Marsalis Jr., pointed out the racial imbalance in WBGO’s leadershipand hiring decisions that marginalized veteran employees and the community at large. An op-ed published in Novemberalluded to a “perceived stench of racism on the part of WBGO.”

At the center of it all was Amy Niles, the station’s innovative yet divisive president and chief executive, who was once its chief operating officer. This week, after a tense board meeting and the firing of a black employee who refused to take part in an internal investigation out of fear of being fired, Ms. Niles resigned.

Upon learning the news, Ms. Kirk was sympathetic, pointing out that Ms. Niles’s previous position as C.O.O. was never filled. “She took on too much, and that’s when WBGO started deteriorating,” she said. 

But the conflict ran much deeper than management style. The problem facing WBGO, really, is nothing less than honoring the roots of jazz while staying afloat financially.

In 2014, Ms. Niles, a hardworking executive with a background in radio marketing, was brought in to modernize and expand the reach of WBGO.

This is something that most would agree, needed to happen. In the last two decades, social media, streaming and podcasts had reshaped the radio business, forcing old-school stations to rethink how and where they distribute and market their music.

But the way this new reality was enforced was heavily resisted at WBGO, where announcers are considered community elders and storytellers.

Ms. Niles seemed to understand this. In an interview earlier this month, she championed the creative license given to the station’s on-air personalities, citing the example of Bob Porter, the host of three WBGO shows and a 40-year veteran of the station, who “not only played the record you just heard, he produced it or he was there for the recording session. The stories he’s telling, he’s telling firsthand.”

But those stories were not being told in a vacuum. They issued from Newark, a city that, in the 1960s and ’70s, saw its mostly black residents’ fight for social justice, especially during the race riots of 1967, channel the spirit of jazz.

Whether Ms. Niles, her management team and the station’s board of trustees were paying adequate respect to WBGO’s legacy was at the heart of the conflict. “People who have a conception of what WBGO was in the ’70s and ’80s may need to rethink some of that in the 2020s,” said Tom Thomas, co-chief executive of the Station Resource Group, a national alliance of public radio stations.

WBGO, which has an annual budget of about $5 million, recently focused on expanding the station’s editorial content. Nate Chinen, a former jazz critic for The New York Times, was hired by Ms. Niles in 2017 to be the head writer.

“One thing I give Amy a lot of credit for is really insisting on an ideal that, in the 21st century, BGO needs to be considered and to consider itself a media organization rather than strictly a radio station,” Mr. Chinen said.

The criticisms from the community, though, were less about the product and more about workplace culture and the role of the station in Newark.

In the op-ed from November, the community activist Ronald Glover raised concerns that the station’s board and management were elitist and disproportionately white. 

He wrote that as a contributing member to the station, he was surprised not to be invited to WBGO’s 40th anniversary gala, which was held in New York City and not in Newark last year. “Is it because I am not a ‘high-end donor’?” he wrote, adding that he knew of several black WBGO staffers who either had not been invited or had been excluded because of the $1,200 ticket.

“The intentional exclusion of these employees is emblematic of deeper issues,” he wrote.

WBGO was founded in 1979, a dozen years after the Newark riots, when the black writer and activist Amiri Baraka, a resident and the father of Newark’s current mayor, Ras Baraka, had inspired a new freedom of self-expression and activism.

“The music of WBGO was an indelible part of my childhood,” Mayor Baraka wrote in a letter to the chairman of the WBGO board this week, urging structural change. “My parents played the station from morning to night. It was the background music, and the sound of jazz that permeated through my home.”

Gary Walker, WBGO’s longtime music director, remembers job titles being fluid in the early days. “We would all answer the phone,” he said. “Sometimes, the general manager would call me at 7 a.m. and say, ‘Gary, what are you doing?’ I would say, ‘Bob, I’m on the air.’ And he’d say, ‘During the news, can you go out front and throw some salt on the sidewalk? It’s snowing.’”

Nationwide, the health of jazz on public radio is less than robust, according to Mr. Thomas. There are only 42 stations devoted to jazz in the country. WBGO, which has nearly 300,000 regular broadcast listeners and a sizable streaming audience outside the local market, is one of the two most successful in the country, Mr. Thomas said. The other is KKJZ Los Angeles.

But for Mr. Thomas, the distinction between the two stations is clear. KKJZ skews more contemporary, with heavier representation of West Coast artists like Pancho Sanchez and Herb Alpert. “WBGO,” he said, “worships at the altar of Coltrane.”

There are also demographic differences. WBGO’s audience has been 47 percent black, 11 percent Hispanic and 44 percent “other” over the past decade, said Mr. Thomas. Only 11 percent of the listeners for KKJZ, the Los Angeles station, are black, and 22 percent Hispanic.

Ms. Kirk’s departure roughly coincided with other beloved personalities leaving the station: “Midday Jazz” host Rhonda Hamilton left in 2019 after 40 years and moved to California, where she is now an on-air host at SiriusXM’s “Real Jazz.”

Bill Daughtry, host of “Afternoon Jazz,” also retired in 2019. But not because he was relocating.

“I retired because I knew a palace revolt wouldn’t be far away,” Mr. Daughtry said. “People are very unhappy there. There’s no vision.” By contrast, he said, the local vision that launched WBGO was vivid. “Legends like Miles Davis came to Newark because it was the second-biggest jazz society in the country,” he said. “What are we now? We’re underrepresented.”

Not everyone saw it that way. WBGO, like all public radio stations, is fueled by donations. The station currently has 17,000 members. In 2019, only 220 of them lived in Newark.

This is, understandably, what led WBGO executives to woo donors outside of Newark, including the decision to hold the anniversary party in Manhattan last year, with little attention paid to local celebrations. “There was gross disappointment over the lack of 40th anniversary events” in Newark, Mr. Daughtry said.

After Mr. Glover’s op-ed, the station issued a statement to employees. An internal review was conducted, the results of which were released this week. They led to Ms. Niles’s resignation and obligatory workplace discrimination training. Robert G. Ottenhoff, a founding member of WBGO, was appointed as the station’s interim chief executive.

Keanna Faircloth arrived at WBGO last fall as the new host of “Afternoon Jazz.” She had spent 16 years at WPFW, a Washington, D.C., station with the tagline “devoted to jazz and justice.” The divisiveness at the Newark station, where she has been winning praise for her social-media savvy and her fresh take on modern jazz artists like Makaya McCraven and Robert Glasper, has been palpable for her.

“I think the station has been sort of cagey and protective,” Ms. Faircloth said. “When a family fights, they don’t necessarily want the world to know about it. That has been the feeling here.”

When she was still in Washington, Ms. Faircloth thought of WBGO as “the mecca for jazz, this beacon on top of the hill,” she said.

Although she is honored to be a part of it now, she has not been able to avoid a sense of disillusionment. She recently compared the situation at the station to the end of the film “The Wiz.”

“In the movie, they went behind this wall and they found out the Wiz was just this old, disenchanted guy who was on a mike the entire time,” she said. “He didn’t have that big, booming voice they thought he had.”

At WBGO these days, she is experiencing a similar reality check.

“I feel a little like Dorothy,” she said. “I’m like, Oh, wow — this isn’t necessarily what I thought it was. I’m still excited to be here. But I see we have a lot of work to do.”

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A tip of the hat to Ed Scarvalone for sharing this.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/27/arts/music/bob-shane-kingston-trio-dies.html?action=click
 

Bob Shane, Last of the Original Kingston Trio, Dies at 85

By Peter Applebome

Updated Jan. 28, 2020, 2:05 p.m. ET

The group spearheaded a commercially successful folk revival in the late 1950s and early ’60s, with Mr. Shane singing lead most of the time.

Bob Shane, left, with other members of the Kingston Trio — John Stewart, center, and Nick Reynolds — in Hollywood in 1967. The group spearheaded a folk revival in the late 1950s. Mr. Shane, Mr. Reynolds and Dave Guard were the original members; Mr. Stewart replaced Mr. Guard in 1961.Associated Press

Bob Shane, the last surviving original member of the Kingston Trio, whose smooth close harmonies helped transform folk music from a dusty niche genre into a dominant brand of pop music in the 1950s and ’60s, died on Sunday in Phoenix. He was 85.

Craig Hankenson, his longtime agent, confirmed the death, in a hospice facility.

Mr. Shane, whose whiskey baritone was the group’s most identifiable voice on hits like “Tom Dooley” and “Scotch and Soda,” sang lead on more than 80 percent of the Kingston Trio’s songs.

He didn’t just outlast the other original members, Dave Guard, who died in 1991, and Nick Reynolds, who died in 2008; he also eventually took ownership of the group’s name and devoted his life to various incarnations of the trio, from its founding in 1957 to 2004, when a heart attack forced him to stop touring.

Along the way, the trio spearheaded a reinvention of folk as a youthful mass-media phenomenon; at its peak, in 1959, the group put four albums in the Top 10 at the same time. Touring into the 21st century, the Kingston Trio remained a nostalgic presence for its fans, drawing many to its annual Trio Fantasy Camp in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Mr. Shane was born Robert Castle Schoen on Feb. 1, 1934, in Hilo, Hawaii, to Arthur Castle Schoen and Margaret (Schaufelberger) Schoen. His father, whose German ancestors had settled in Hawaii in the 1890s, was a successful wholesale distributor of toys and sporting goods. His mother, from Salt Lake City, met her future husband when both were students at Stanford University in the 1920s.

In Hilo, Mr. Shane’s father had planned for Bob to take over the family business. But at the private Punahou School in Honolulu, Bob learned the ukulele and songs of the Polynesian Islands and met Mr. Guard, with whom he formed a duet.

After high school, Mr. Shane, Mr. Reynolds and Mr. Guard occasionally played together while attending college in Northern California — Mr. Shane and Mr. Reynolds at Menlo College, and Mr. Guard nearby at Stanford.

After graduating in 1956, Mr. Shane returned to Hawaii to learn the family business, but he found himself more drawn to music. As he told it, he performed as “the first-ever Elvis impersonator” and counted Hawaiian music, Hank Williams, Harry Belafonte and the Weavers among his influences.

A year later, when Mr. Guard and Mr. Reynolds decided to make a go of a professional music career, Mr. Shane joined them and returned to California, where the Kingston Trio was born, in 1957. The name, a reference to Kingston, Jamaica, was meant to evoke calypso music, which was popular then. The members exuded a youthful, clean-cut collegiate style, exemplified by their signature look: colorful, vertically striped Oxford shirts.

A year after that, the trio’s first album, on Capitol Records, included a jaunty version of a ballad based on the 1866 murder of a North Carolina woman and the hanging of a poor former Confederate soldier for the crime. The song, “Tom Dooley,” rose to No. 1 on the singles charts, selling three million copies and earning the trio a Grammy Award for best country and western performance. (There was no Grammy category for folk at the time.)

From its founding to 1965, the group had 14 albums in Billboard’s Top 10, five of which reached No. 1. It inspired scores of imitators and, for a time, was probably the most popular music group in the world. John Stewart replaced Mr. Guard in 1961. (Mr. Stewart died in 2008.)

The Kingston Trio’s critical reception did not match its popular success. To many folk purists, the trio was selling a watered-down mix of folk and pop that commercialized the authentic folk music of countless unknown Appalachian pickers. And mindful of the way that folk musicians like Pete Seeger had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era, others complained that the trio’s upbeat, anodyne brand of folk betrayed the leftist, populist music of pioneers like Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston.

Members of the trio said they had consciously steered clear of political material as a way to maintain mainstream acceptance. Besides, Mr. Shane said, the folk purists were using the wrong yardstick.

“To call the Kingston Trio folk singers was kind of stupid in the first place,” he said. “We never called ourselves folk singers.” He added, “We did folk-oriented material, but we did it amid all kinds of other stuff.”

Indeed, some of Mr. Shane’s finest moments, like the smoky cocktail-hour ballad “Scotch and Soda,” had nothing to do with folk. In 1961, Ervin Drake wrote “It Was a Very Good Year” for Mr. Shane. He sang it with the trio long before Frank Sinatra made it one of his classic recordings.

Still, more than any group of its time, the Kingston Trio captured the youthful optimism of the Kennedy years. The title song of a 1962 album was “The New Frontier,” echoing President John F. Kennedy’s own phrase and alluding to his inaugural address with the lyrics “Let the word go forth from this day on/A new generation has been born.”

About the same time, the trio had an unlikely hit with the kind of material it had avoided: Mr. Seeger’s antiwar song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”

But by then the trio was on the verge of being supplanted as the face of folk by a new generation of harder-edged singers like Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez, and by hipper ones like Peter, Paul and Mary. Then the coming of the British invasion and the rise of rock utterly marginalized the group.

Over time, others, including Mr. Dylan and Ms. Baez, have given the group more credit for popularizing folk music and for serving as a bridge to the more adventurous folk, folk-rock and rock of the 1960s.

As Ms. Baez wrote in her memoir “And a Voice to Sing With” (1987): “Before I turned into a snob and learned to look down upon all commercial folk music as bastardized and unholy, I loved the Kingston Trio. When I became one of the leading practitioners of ‘pure folk,’ I still loved them.”

Mr. Shane’s admirers said his talents were never fully recognized.

“Bob Shane was, in my opinion, one of the most underrated singers in American musical history,” George Grove, a trio member since 1976, said in an email in 2015. “His voice was the voice, not only of the Kingston Trio but of an era of musical story telling.”

The group disbanded in 1967, but after a brief stint as a solo artist Mr. Shane returned, first with what was billed as the New Kingston Trio, then with various Kingston Trio lineups.

Mr. Shane, even by the group’s wholesome standards, stood out and was billed, half seriously, as the trio’s sex symbol. Over the years his hair went from frat-boy neat to a snowy mane, but he remained congenitally upbeat, like a gambler accustomed to drawing winning hands.

After retiring, Mr. Shane lived in Phoenix in a home full of gold records and Kingston Trio memorabilia. Fond of cars and dirt bikes, he also collected Martin guitars and art.

He is survived by his wife, Bobbi (Childress) Shane; five children from an earlier marriage, to Louise Brandon: Jody Shane Beale, Susan Shane Gleeson, Inman Brandon Shane, Robin Castle Shane and Jason McCall Shane; and eight grandchildren.

“The thing I’m most proud of next to my kids is that I have played live to over 10,000,000 people,” he said on the group’s website.

Even after his retirement, he still found ways to perform.

“Occasionally someone will call me and ask me to go onstage, and I pack a couple of oxygen tanks and go,” he said in a 2011 interview. “I always tell people I intend to live forever. So far, so good.”

William McDonald contributed reporting.

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https://www.lilypadinman.com/
 

Bob Gullotti, 1949 – 2020

We are deeply saddened to learn that Bob Gullotti died last night, January 25, 2020. 
 

Bob Gollotti was a founding member of the Fringe, a groundbreaking free jazz band that has performed nearly every Monday at the Lilypad for over a decade.
 

Bob was a brilliant, innovative, and shockingly original drummer that has inspired generations of musicians and listeners. 
 

A Professor of Percussion at the Berklee College of Music, Bob was an exceptional educator. Every Monday without fail, Bob’s students would come to the Lilypad to see him perform, full of admiration and awe. 

Bob was a warm and caring person who will be deeply missed by his family, friends, and the community.
 

Thank you Bob,

-The Lilypad

–

Information about memorial services will be forthcoming.

–

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https://pitchfork.com/news/grammys-winners-2020-the-full-list/
 

Best Latin Jazz Album
Chick Corea & the Spanish Heart Band – Antidote

Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
Brian Lynch Big Band – The Omni-american Book Club

Best Jazz Instrumental Album
Brad Mehldau – Finding Gabriel

Best Jazz Vocal Album
Esperanza Spalding – 12 Little Spells

Best Improvised Jazz Solo
Randy Brecker – “Sozinho”

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This came out of a massive vinyl collection we purchased over the holiday’s

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-jazz/2020/01/23/72dba37e-3e0b-11ea-8872-5df698785a4e_story.html
 

Five myths about jazz

No, it isn’t dead, and its purveyors aren’t all hopped up on drugs.

Natalie Weiner

If you’re not already a fan, your vision of jazz might contain a guy (always a guy) in a fedora playing tenor saxophone in a smoky bar. Or a self-satisfied aficionado waxing poetic about a rare free-jazz LP, acting as though he’s the only one capable of decoding its knotty melodies as he pushes his glasses up his nose. Yes, jazz has an image problem: More than a century after its genesis, the genre remains shrouded in many of the same erroneous cliches that initially made it so controversial — as well as a slew of newer ones. The trouble comes when that mystique looms large enough to keep people from ever exploring the music.

Jazz is more serious than other genres.

“People, when they say that they ‘hate jazz,’ they just don’t have context — they don’t know where it comes from,” explains the exasperated protagonist of the 2016 hit musical “La La Land.” Ryan Gosling’s character is the exact kind of straw man that often represents jazz in popular culture, arguing that what makes the music good is an intrinsic complexity and importance that requires great intellectual rigor to comprehend. Whether in “Jerry Maguire,” “The Office” or “Veep,” jazz’s self-serious reputation has turned it into shorthand for snobbish orthodoxy. Even participants promulgate this notion. “The greatness of jazz lies not only in its emotion but also in its deliberate artifice,” wrote Wynton Marsalis in a 1988 New York Times essay.

In fact, jazz requires exactly as much or as little expertise to listen to and appreciate as anything else. Understanding the music’s history can certainly inform the listening experience — as with music from any genre — but all you really need to appreciate jazz are open ears. Reverence and study are not prerequisites: After all, many of the most canonical jazz records were meant to be danced to.

Jazz was born in New Orleans.

One oft-cited, very easy history of jazz begins with the relative musical liberation of New Orleans’s Congo Square, continues with cornetist Buddy Bolden and pianist Jelly Roll Morton (who played in Storyville, the city’s red-light district), and moves with Louis Armstrong up the Mississippi on the paddle wheel boats to Chicago. New Orleans was the most cosmopolitan city of its time, a place where African Americans had many more opportunities to participate in public life. This is the way Ken Burns tells it in his massively popular documentary “Jazz,” and the way it was told for decades prior by everyone from renowned jazz historians like Marshall Stearns to the National Park Service.

But the trouble with this story is that jazz had no Big Bang. Its roots involve so many different kinds of music: blues, spirituals, West African rhythms as they had been reimagined in the Caribbean, European classical music and more. Those sources informed musicians around the country. As a result, music we would now identify as jazz emerged almost simultaneously in a number of different communities from Jacksonville to Kansas City around the turn of the century. Unfortunately, the documentation of jazz’s earliest days is so poor that it might be impossible to ever truly understand them.

Jazz must swing.

“Most jazz is very rhythmic [and] has a forward momentum called ‘swing,’ ” explains the website for the National Museum of American History. (Now, name a music that is not “very rhythmic.”) Swing is a way of playing eighth notes unevenly to produce a shuffle effect. It was one of the initial innovations of jazz and quickly became one of its distinguishing features. “Swing” and “jazz” are often treated as interchangeable terms because of the assumption that swing is one of jazz’s essential qualities: Jazz at Lincoln Center’s education program, for example, is called Swing University.

But “straight” eighth notes have been integral to jazz from the start, especially in jazz from the Caribbean and South America, such as mambo or bossa nova. Dave Brubeck combined “straight” eighth notes and swing to monumental effect on “Blue Rondo a la Turk” in 1959, and playing “straight” has become popular among contemporary jazz artists — who, like Brubeck, are also prone to experimenting with unusual time signatures. Those experiments tend to be a little simpler rhythmically when musicians aren’t trying to swing as well.

Jazz musicians were (or are) on drugs.

“Charlie Parker’s heroin addiction helped make him a genius,” argued the New York Post in a recent article, just one of the countless places where jazz musicians’ habits — not their work — are featured front and center. (Parker, like a number of jazz musicians, was a user; he died at 34 because of complications from drug use.) It’s a sensationalized, romantic vision of the music, one that reinforces an imagined connection between addiction and superlative creativity. And it’s not new: Since the days of “Reefer Madness” (1936) and “The Man With the Golden Arm” (1955), jazz music and its practitioners have been linked in popular culture with illicit drug use.

But the majority of jazz musicians did not regularly use intravenous drugs, according to an anonymous survey conducted by Nat Hentoff in the late 1950s — even though heroin was in vogue while the music was most popular. Instead, the cliche plays into a long, racist history of disproportionately prosecuting black drug users. The now-humorous cannabis euphemism “jazz cigarette” has its roots in early propaganda designed to paint black communities (and their artists) as dens of iniquity — and create reasons to arrest them. After various drug prohibition laws went into effect, they were enforced against black artists to seize their cabaret cards and thus keep them from performing. The notion lingers despite the fact that hard-drug users account for an even smaller proportion of jazz musicians today.

Jazz is dead.

Jazz accounts for 1 percent of music consumption — album sales and streaming — in America, according to Nielsen. The Michigan Daily recently described jazz as “a genre considered to be ‘dying,’ if not dead already.” Who can blame the student journalists, when outlets like CNN still grapple with the question: “What was the cause of death, and when did it pass away?” it asked in 2016.

But people have said jazz is dead since Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk had the moldy figs aghast with their audacious bebop in the 1940s. Though there are real questions about whether the term “jazz” is useful, the music it describes has always been diversifying and regenerating. If anything, streaming technology presents unprecedented opportunities for music makers and fans to learn more about jazz’s history, as well as the wide range of artists active today. It’s integral to hip-hop (just listen to A Tribe Called Quest or Kendrick Lamar) — now the dominant form of pop music — and vibrant jazz scenes in Los Angeles, Chicago and London speak to a new generation of artists committed to live, local music. Physical album sales are growing incrementally thanks to the vinyl renaissance, and festivals remain generally well attended. In many ways, the music is healthier than it’s been in decades.

Twitter: @natalieweiner

Five myths is a weekly feature challenging everything you think you know. You can check out previous myths, read more from Outlook or follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

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https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/jan/25/100-years-ago-in-spokane/
 

100 years ago in Spokane: Bandleader praises jazz as ‘really and truly melodious’

Published: Jan. 25, 2020, midnight

Jazz music was here to stay.

That was the message delivered by Spokane band leader Charles “Chuck” Whitehead, the Spokane Daily Chronicle reported. 

Whitehead said it was time for musical “highbrows” to face facts. Jazz had become overwhelmingly popular with the larger American public; it was spreading to Europe and other foreign lands; and “it was “really and truly melodious” when not overdone.

Whitehead said some people continued to turn up “disdainful noses” at jazz. But orchestra leaders knew that people applaud only “perfunctorily” when presented with “heavy” classical music. But when presented with lighter, popular jazz, they become “sincerely enthusiastic.”

The telltale sign, he said, was the tap-tap-tapping of toes in the audience.

Whitehead said that when jazz first arrived, it depended on “extremely syncopated” music and on the “acrobatics of the drummer.” But now, in 1920, the term jazz had been extended to include nearly all of popular music.

“The public demands melody, tunes which stick in the memory and may be whistled and hummed at home and on the street,” he said. 

Jazz delivers those qualities and “lightens burdens, eases cares and makes folks happier,” he believed.

It should come as no surprise that Whitehead’s orchestra was known throughout the Northwest as a “super-exponent of real jazz music.” 

The young Bing Crosby, destined to be a world-famous jazz singer, was a Whitehead fan.

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https://www.wbgo.org/post/brooklyn-fire-claimed-two-lives-has-also-stopped-music-emerging-jazz-club#stream/0
 

Brooklyn Fire That Claimed Two Lives Has Also Stopped the Music at an Emerging Jazz Club

By Nate Chinen • 5 hours ago

Made in NY Jazz Café & Bar had already closed for the night when tragedy struck, in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

The club, which opened several months ago, inhabits the ground floor of a four-story building on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. At around 2 a.m., a fire broke out in an apartment on the fourth floor, trapping two people inside. The couple — Steven Munoz and Destiny Marmolejo, both 22 — were found unconscious in the apartment and rushed to a nearby hospital, where they were eventually pronounced dead.

For Michael Brovkine, co-owner of Made in NY Jazz, this information arrived in piecemeal fashion.

“At 2 in the morning, I got a call from my partner saying there was a fire in the building, but it wasn’t coming from the club,” he says. “We didn’t know the details.”

Reached by phone on Friday, Brovkine first stated the obvious: that the loss of life was a tragedy, by far the gravest consequence of the fire. But he also spoke about the implications for his club, which has been a welcome addition to the Brooklyn jazz landscape since opening last fall. A formal assessment is forthcoming, but it’s clear that there was major water damage from the effort to extinguish the blaze.

“First of all, the firefighters vacated the entire building, because it’s closed for their investigation,” he says. “We checked the office, but they said not to touch anything.”

He adds: “Second, the equipment is ruined, completely. So we need to rebuild the stage and work on the acoustics again. And third, some professionals, who build houses after fire, said that we will probably have to tear the walls down because of the smoke. So honestly I don’t even know what to answer.”

A notice on the club website explains that it is closed until further notice, with all shows canceled. (The Dan Aran Trio had been booked for this weekend.)

Made in NY Jazz opened last year in a space that formerly housed the well-regarded Uzbek restaurant Nargis Bar & Grill. The chef-owner of Nargis, Boris Bangiyev, became Brovkine’s partner in the new club, which has been a home to the swinging modern-jazz mainstream — a noteworthy departure from the more eclectic sensibilities of Park Slope standby Barbès, or the Gowanus outpost ShapeShifter Lab.

The club’s official kickoff was a late-October engagement by pianist Cyrus Chestnut, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Lenny White. Earlier this month, White returned to preside over his own 70th birthday celebration, leading a trio with pianist Christian Sands and bassist Christian McBride. Made in NY Jazz had also featured groups led by drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, trumpeter Valery Ponomarev and singers Charenée Wade and Allan Harris, among others.

“It felt like a Manhattan space – like the kind of jazz clubs you find in the West Village, with a cover charge and a two-drink minimum,” says Mike Rubin, a veteran music journalist who lives on the same block, and noted the smell of smoke and flashing lights early Wednesday morning.

With a main room designed to seat 50 patrons and an adjoining bar with space for 20 more, Made in NY Jazz opened with the intention of featuring music five nights a week, Wednesday through Sunday. That schedule was recently reduced to Fridays and Saturdays only.

An email from Brovkine to the club’s mailing list on Jan. 13 announced some new plans: “We have made a decision to relocate! We hope it will happen fast, but for now, we will be only keeping 2 days with live music at the current location.”

Brovkine, who grew up studying classical piano in Siberia, also runs the online Made in NY Jazz Competition, which he founded in 2013. A longtime resident of the Midwood section of Brooklyn, he now resides on Staten Island, though he still harbors fond memories of bygone Brooklyn jazz clubs like Pumpkins, in Flatbush. “To build a club in Brooklyn was pretty tough,” he says, alluding to both financial and bureaucratic hurdles, as well as the need to draw a consistent audience.

Made in NY Jazz will hold its seventh annual gala at TriBeCa Performing Arts Center on May 16. “We’re going to concentrate on that,” Brovkine says, “and on our sixth anniversary festival in Montenegro, which is in June this year. So I guess I’ll switch my focus until I hear more about this place. We will look around also in the neighborhood to check some other locations.”

On Friday night, Rubin paused to take some pictures of the storefront at 155 Fifth Avenue, where candles and flowers had been arranged in a makeshift memorial for Marmolejo and Munoz.

He also took an image of a Vacate Order posted by order of the city on Thursday. “The Department of Buildings Has Determined That Conditions in This Premises Are Imminently Perilous to Life,” the notice reads. “This Premises Has Been Vacated and Reentry is Prohibited Until Such Conditions Have Been Eliminated to the Satisfaction of the Department.”

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Services for CLAUDIO RODITI
Saturday February 1st, 2 – 6 pm
Jacob A. Holle Funeral Home 

2122 Millburn Ave, Maplewood NJ 07040

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/arts/music/claudio-roditi-dead.html
 

Claudio Roditi, Lyrical Jazz Trumpeter, Is Dead at 73

By Peter Keepnews

Jan. 24, 2020, 2:26 p.m. ET

The Brazilian-born Mr. Roditi’s playing fused the gentle lilt of samba with the drive of the post-bop trumpet tradition.

Claudio Roditi in performance at the 2014 International Jazz Day Global Concert in Osaka, Japan. He was a force on the New York jazz scene almost from the moment he arrived in 1976. Keith Tsuji/Getty Images

Claudio Roditi, a Brazilian-born jazz trumpeter celebrated for his impeccable technique, warm sound and lyrical playing, died on Jan. 17 at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 73.

His wife and only immediate survivor, Kristen Park, said the cause was prostate cancer.

Mr. Roditi was a force on the New York jazz scene almost from the moment he arrived in 1976. He worked with top musicians like the pianist McCoy Tyner, the flutist Herbie Mann and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, one of his earliest influences. He was for many years a featured member of Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra, a big band comprising musicians from the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil, and he continued to perform with what was billed as the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band after Gillespie’s death in 1993.

He also led his own bands and recorded more than 20 albums as a leader, most recently for the Resonance label.

Mr. Roditi’s playing was a seamless fusion of Brazilian music and jazz, combining the gentle lilt of samba with the drive of the post-bop trumpet tradition.

“I am a Gemini,” he once said. “I was born in one country and live in another, but I love them both — and both kinds of music, too.”

The dual nature of his approach was reflected in album titles like “Samba Manhattan Style” (1995), “Jazz Turns Samba” (1996) and “Brazilliance x 4” (2009). The “Brazilliance” album, on which he was accompanied by an all-Brazilian rhythm section, garnered him his first and only Grammy Award nomination, in the Latin jazz category.

Mr. Roditi also had an affinity for Afro-Cuban music, as heard most notably in his work with the Cuban expatriate saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, with whom he performed and recorded on and off for more than three decades.

In an interview with the Newark jazz radio station WBGO shortly after Mr. Roditi’s death, Mr. D’Rivera called him a “very special” musician who was “original without really trying.”

Claudio Braga Roditi was born in Rio de Janeiro on May 28, 1946, the only child of Alberto and Deise (de Braga) Roditi. His father was a coffee buyer, and the family had homes in both Rio and the town of Varginha, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, a center of coffee production.

Interested in music from an early age, he began taking piano lessons at age 6 and playing trumpet in his school’s marching band shortly after that. When he was 9, his father bought him his first trumpet; frustrated at the limitations of his playing, Ms. Park said, he destroyed the instrument in anger — but his father bought him a new one the next day.

Mr. Roditi’s interest in jazz, especially the modern kind as played by Gillespie and Charlie Parker, was sparked by an uncle who, he later recalled, “must have had the best jazz record collection in the whole of Brazil.” In 1966 he reached the finals of an international jazz competition in Vienna organized by the pianist Friedrich Gulda. One of the judges of that contest, the trumpeter and fluegelhornist Art Farmer, became a friend and mentor and encouraged him to pursue jazz as a career.

He moved to Boston in 1970 to study at the Berklee College of Music and was soon a fixture of the local scene. After relocating to New York six years later, he found work with Brazilian and Afro-Cuban bands as well as jazz ensembles.

Critics took note. Reviewing a performance by the saxophonist Charlie Rouse’s band in 1977, Robert Palmer of The New York Times praised Mr. Roditi’s “swaggering work” on both trumpet and valve trombone. (He also played fluegelhorn, although trumpet was always his primary instrument.)

He recorded his first album as a leader, “Red on Red,” in 1984. Among the more unusual items in his discography is “Symphonic Bossa Nova” (1994), on which the conductor Ettore Stratta led the Royal Philharmonic in orchestral arrangements of compositions by Antonio Carlos Jobim and others. Mr. Roditi most recently recorded as a guest soloist with the all-female Diva Jazz Orchestra on the album “Diva & the Boys,” released last year.

“Over the years,” Ms. Park said in a statement, “many reviewers of his performances have noted Claudio’s ‘selflessness’ onstage, how he happily shared any limelight with his band mates. He was completely inspired by the communication he felt on the bandstand. He actually felt happiest in that type of musical sharing.”

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Services for CLAUDIO RODITI
Saturday February 1st, 2 – 6 pm
Jacob A. Holle Funeral Home 

2122 Millburn Ave, Maplewood NJ 07040

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/arts/music/claudio-roditi-dead.html
 

Claudio Roditi, Lyrical Jazz Trumpeter, Is Dead at 73

By Peter Keepnews

Jan. 24, 2020, 2:26 p.m. ET

The Brazilian-born Mr. Roditi’s playing fused the gentle lilt of samba with the drive of the post-bop trumpet tradition.

Claudio Roditi in performance at the 2014 International Jazz Day Global Concert in Osaka, Japan. He was a force on the New York jazz scene almost from the moment he arrived in 1976. Keith Tsuji/Getty Images

Claudio Roditi, a Brazilian-born jazz trumpeter celebrated for his impeccable technique, warm sound and lyrical playing, died on Jan. 17 at his home in South Orange, N.J. He was 73.

His wife and only immediate survivor, Kristen Park, said the cause was prostate cancer.

Mr. Roditi was a force on the New York jazz scene almost from the moment he arrived in 1976. He worked with top musicians like the pianist McCoy Tyner, the flutist Herbie Mann and the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, one of his earliest influences. He was for many years a featured member of Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra, a big band comprising musicians from the United States, the Caribbean and Brazil, and he continued to perform with what was billed as the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band after Gillespie’s death in 1993.

He also led his own bands and recorded more than 20 albums as a leader, most recently for the Resonance label.

Mr. Roditi’s playing was a seamless fusion of Brazilian music and jazz, combining the gentle lilt of samba with the drive of the post-bop trumpet tradition.

“I am a Gemini,” he once said. “I was born in one country and live in another, but I love them both — and both kinds of music, too.”

The dual nature of his approach was reflected in album titles like “Samba Manhattan Style” (1995), “Jazz Turns Samba” (1996) and “Brazilliance x 4” (2009). The “Brazilliance” album, on which he was accompanied by an all-Brazilian rhythm section, garnered him his first and only Grammy Award nomination, in the Latin jazz category.

Mr. Roditi also had an affinity for Afro-Cuban music, as heard most notably in his work with the Cuban expatriate saxophonist and clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera, with whom he performed and recorded on and off for more than three decades.

In an interview with the Newark jazz radio station WBGO shortly after Mr. Roditi’s death, Mr. D’Rivera called him a “very special” musician who was “original without really trying.”

Claudio Braga Roditi was born in Rio de Janeiro on May 28, 1946, the only child of Alberto and Deise (de Braga) Roditi. His father was a coffee buyer, and the family had homes in both Rio and the town of Varginha, in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, a center of coffee production.

Interested in music from an early age, he began taking piano lessons at age 6 and playing trumpet in his school’s marching band shortly after that. When he was 9, his father bought him his first trumpet; frustrated at the limitations of his playing, Ms. Park said, he destroyed the instrument in anger — but his father bought him a new one the next day.

Mr. Roditi’s interest in jazz, especially the modern kind as played by Gillespie and Charlie Parker, was sparked by an uncle who, he later recalled, “must have had the best jazz record collection in the whole of Brazil.” In 1966 he reached the finals of an international jazz competition in Vienna organized by the pianist Friedrich Gulda. One of the judges of that contest, the trumpeter and fluegelhornist Art Farmer, became a friend and mentor and encouraged him to pursue jazz as a career.

He moved to Boston in 1970 to study at the Berklee College of Music and was soon a fixture of the local scene. After relocating to New York six years later, he found work with Brazilian and Afro-Cuban bands as well as jazz ensembles.

Critics took note. Reviewing a performance by the saxophonist Charlie Rouse’s band in 1977, Robert Palmer of The New York Times praised Mr. Roditi’s “swaggering work” on both trumpet and valve trombone. (He also played fluegelhorn, although trumpet was always his primary instrument.)

He recorded his first album as a leader, “Red on Red,” in 1984. Among the more unusual items in his discography is “Symphonic Bossa Nova” (1994), on which the conductor Ettore Stratta led the Royal Philharmonic in orchestral arrangements of compositions by Antonio Carlos Jobim and others. Mr. Roditi most recently recorded as a guest soloist with the all-female Diva Jazz Orchestra on the album “Diva & the Boys,” released last year.

“Over the years,” Ms. Park said in a statement, “many reviewers of his performances have noted Claudio’s ‘selflessness’ onstage, how he happily shared any limelight with his band mates. He was completely inspired by the communication he felt on the bandstand. He actually felt happiest in that type of musical sharing.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD9-6iRxJLA

previously “lost” video content from an early 1970 PBS TV broadcast of “Just Jazz” from WTTW/Chicago. This is the only known TV appearance of Gene Ammons. This broadcast was produced by NEA Jazz Master Dan Morgenstern, and was discovered among over 60 boxes of Morgenstern’s memorabilia at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. see https://bit.ly/30IslzT Gene Ammons Tenor Sax, King Kolax Trumpet, George Freeman Guitar, Wallace Burton Piano, Chester Williamson Bass, Bob Guthrie Drums

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https://www.wsmv.com/news/davidson_county/national-museum-of-african-american-music-sign-lit-up-for/article_f5f322a0-3c0d-11ea-8252-abf4315e1b1f.html

National Museum of African American Music sign lit up for first time

• WSMV Digital Staff
•  
  • Updated Jan 22, 2020 | Posted on Jan 20, 2020 
  • 0

NASHVILLE, TN (WSMV) – A big milestone was celebrated Monday at the National Museum of African American Music, which is under construction along Broadway in downtown.

Crews lit up the building’s new digital sign, located above the future museum’s main entrance.

The sign will be used to showcase the artists and displays being featured in the museum once it opens later this year.

Museum officials said things are gradually coming together.

“You see the shape to the building. If you were to go inside, you’d see the inside of the building taking shape as well,’ said Henry Hicks, President and CEO of the National Museum of African American Music. “There’s a museum in there. We haven’t put it all quiet together yet, but we’re getting close, and this sign is one more step along that path.”

The museum is set to open this summer. Officials said it will be the only museum dedicated to celebrating African American music and the influence of African Americans on music. The museum is part of the Fifth and Broadway development across from Bridgestone Arena and the Ryman Auditorium.

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https://www.billboard.com/articles/deep-dive/the-new-las-vegas-music-market/8548612/rebirth-las-vegas-residencies?utm_source=Sailthru
 

Rat Pack to Fame Monster: The Rise, Fall and Lucrative Rebirth of the Las Vegas Residency

In 2003, Céline Dion ushered in a new age of residencies that, with arrival of Britney Spears, Jennifer Lopez and more recently Lady Gaga, Aerosmith and Lil Jon have tripled business in the last five years, according to one industry veteran

With 5,200 seats, the Park MGM’s Park Theater is a fraction of the size of the arenas and stadiums that Aerosmith has been playing for decades — and that’s exactly the point.

In early April 2019, the rockers, who this year are celebrating 50 years as a band, launched Deuces Are Wild, their first Las Vegas residency. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry — alongside Brad Whitford, Joey Kramer and Tom Hamilton — took the stage beneath a giant reproduction of their winged logo. Tyler, 71, and Perry, 69, who were long ago dubbed the “Toxic Twins” due to their former drug use (both are now sober), headed to the front of the stage where they proceeded to scream and shred through “Mama Kin” and other Aerosmith classics.

Once the hum of Perry’s guitar faded on “Sweet Emotion,” the band broke out a pair of deep cuts, the bluesy murder ballad “Hangman Jury” and the bleak “Seasons of Wither.” Tyler, holding a harmonica, and Perry, with an acoustic guitar, eased into chairs set on a platform that jutted out from center stage. Hands from the front rows grabbed for the scarves trailing Tyler’s microphone. The rockers hadn’t been this close to their fans since the band’s earliest shows in dank Boston clubs, and, according to Perry, reestablishing that intimacy without sacrificing the pomp and power of an arena tour was exactly why the band had come to Vegas for a 50-show run that has been extended through June 2020.

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“It was important to us to maintain the hardcore, garage band feel of what Aerosmith is while bringing in the big show element of a Las Vegas production,” Perry told Billboard before a Deuces Are Wild performance. “When you move closer to the Strip and its flavor, it’s a world of its own. Over the last few years, we’ve talked about coming in and doing some kind of residency, and then we were hearing about the pop acts doing it. It got to a point where we didn’t feel like doing another album, and we wanted to do something different. This seemed like the natural thing. We said, ‘Look: if we’re going to do it, let’s do it in a way no one has for a rock band.”

Aerosmith

Katarina Benzova

What Aerosmith has done, with the guidance of creative director Amy Tinkhim, producer Steve Dixon and Academy Award-winning design firm Pixomondo, is create an aural and visual retrospective of its five-decade history. In addition to a hit-laden live concert, Deuces Are Wild includes a half-hour video presentation that features clips of early performances and never-before-seen backstage photos and other memorabilia. Inflatable versions of the stuffed animals and playthings depicted on the cover of the band’s 1975 breakthrough album, Toys in the Attic, descend from the ceiling at one point. The stage show features dancers in surreal costumes that take a page from the visual style of Vegas staple Cirque du Soleil.

“You’re immersed in Aerosmith’s world when you come to this show,” says Perry.

Aerosmith is one of the latest acts in a growing group of legacy and contemporary artists seeking to mine the Strip’s potential as a magnet for music fans. One industry executive who’s involved in the residency business (and requested anonymity) estimates that it has tripled in the past five years, and other data indicates that Vegas is thriving as a market for live music. In 2018, 58% of the city’s 42 million annual visitors — a total that’s roughly 14 times its actual population — attended a show of some kind. Of that number, the average tourist caught 1.3 DJ sets during her stay, which translates to approximately 25 million people dancing to Calvin Harris at OMNIA, Zedd at Hakkasan, The Chainsmokers at Encore Beach Club and other stars of the EDM scene.

And those are just the DJs. On any given evening in Vegas, a patron can hit three residency shows (or more, if they’re ambitious), sometimes without even leaving their block on the Strip. Aerosmith shares the Park Theater with Janet Jackson’s song-and-dance retrospective, Metamorphosis, and Lady Gaga’s two residencies, her set of Great American Songbook standards, Jazz & Piano, and her cosmos-themed celebration of her biggest hits, Enigma. The 14 residencies that mounted 10 or more performances in 2019 — which include Mariah Carey’s Butterfly Returns, Gwen Stefani’s Just a Girl and Diana Ross’ Extraordinary Evening — grossed a combined $195 million and each sold in excess of 10,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore. Gaga sold over 150,000 tickets during the course of 28 shows in 2019 — about 7.5% of the 2 million tickets that Live Nation Las Vegas president Kurt Melien estimates his division sold in 2019. (Live Nation is co-producing and co-promoting Gaga’s residencies with MGM Resorts International.)

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Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson, Sting, Keith Urban David Lee Roth, Def Leppard, Robbie Williams, Cher and living Vegas legend Wayne Newton are among the pop, rock and Vegas stalwarts with 2020 residencies. Hip-hop fans can check out Lil Jon, Drake, Tyga, Gucci Mane, 2 Chainz and more.

The artists are coming for big paydays, certainly: According to Billboard Boxscore, Céline Dion, who had the two highest-grossing residencies of all time, A New Day (2003-07) and Celine (2011-19), grossed over $630 million; Gaga’s Enigma and Jazz & Piano grossed $48.4 million in 2019; Aerosmith’sDeuces Are Wild, also at the Park, grossed $37.5 million in the same year; Jennifer Lopez’s All I Have (2016-18) at the Zappos Theater at Planet Hollywood took in $101.9 million.

But there are other key factors as well. With a typical tour, the artists are the ones passing through town, but in Vegas, the world comes to see them. Sets can be more ambitious because they don’t have to be pulled down in tight windows of time, and the artists aren’t subjected to the grind of being on the road. Los Angeles-based artists merely have to take a 45-minute flight to Vegas (and then a 10-minute drive to the Strip from the airport). Or an act can simply make a beeline from the hotel suite to the stage. Perry says that for the first few shows of Aerosmith’s residency, he didn’t leave his hotel when there wasn’t a show or production refinements on the agenda. As Deuces Are Wild producer Steve Dixon puts it, “If [the artists] have a better quality of life, it allows them to put on a better show.”

Still, a residency isn’t necessarily a sure bet — even with big investments in talent, tech and spectacle. Six months after A-list DJ-producer Marshmellobegan what was supposed to be a two-year, $60 million residency in the brand-new KAOS nightclub at the Palms Resort Casino, the commitment was canceled and the club was closed after losing $13.2 million in 2019, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The executive team that brokered the deal has also since departed the Palms, and the debacle now serves as a cautionary tale for those in the Vegas nightlife industry.

And yet, the artists keep coming.

Wayne Newton

Erik Kabik

The golden figurehead of Cleopatra’s Barge looms a few slot machines down from the lobby at Caesars Palace. Behind her, Wayne Newton waits. The floating lounge’s stage is just big enough to fit a drum kit, a few sidemen in tuxedos and Newton, who spent 2019 celebrating 60 years of performing in Las Vegas with his latest (of many) residencies on the Strip, Up Close & Personal. As soon as the lights go down, Newton pops up in the back of the venue, his broad grin and sequined tux glinting as he snakes through the crowded cocktail tables to the stage. As he moves among the audience, he shakes hands and poses for photos without missing a line of his opening number, “Viva Las Vegas,” from the Elvis Presley movie of the same name.

The audience, especially a young, wide-eyed couple visiting from England, revels in Newton’s campy bravura performance. It is one of his first nights back at work after an emergency spinal procedure forced him to cancel a run of shows in April 2019, but save for a reference he makes in a joke at the top of the show, he betrays no sign of his ordeal.

“Years ago, I was with [show-business legend] Danny Thomas on his television show,” he says backstage after a Wednesday night set. “We went out to lunch on one of the breaks, and he said, ‘You feeling OK?’ I said, ‘I just got a little bit of a cold.’ He said, ‘You don’t tell your audience that, do you?’ I said, ‘No! I don’t, why?’ He said, ‘Because they don’t deserve to hear it. They’re there to forget their problems, not hear about yours.’ That is a rule that I’ve truly lived by my entire career.”

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Mr. Las Vegas, as Newton has been called for ages, arrived there as a teenager from Phoenix with his brother, Jerry, in 1959. His rise to lounge regular corresponded with the ascent of the Rat Pack and Presley, who would electrify Vegas audiences 10 years later during a four-week engagement at the International Hotel. Up Close & Personal serves as both a retrospective of Newton’s work and a condensed lesson in Vegas entertainment history, with his own career-defining single, “Danke Schoen,” featured among a set list of Presley and Frank Sinatra favorites.

Newton has witnessed Vegas’ tremendous evolution over his six decades there. He has long been known as a cheerleader for the town, and, as such, says he’s frustrated by the lingering misconception that, despite the influx of such contemporary music stars as Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez and Kelly Clarkson, the city is still largely a place where dinosaurs of the entertainment industry roam.

“So many acts that I ran into on the road [would] say, ‘I would never play that town,’” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Well, it’s the image…’” Newton is referring to the elements of seediness, such as prostitution and mob corruption, that led to Vegas’ “Sin City” nickname. “I said, ‘Do yourself a favor,’” says Newton. “‘Quit reading the news, quit watching television, come to town and take a look.’”

“The term ‘residency’ has been beat up pretty good,” says Chris Baldizan, senior vp entertainment and development at MGM Resorts International (which includes the Park Theater, T-Mobile Arena and other venues). But, he adds, it’s now viewed as a “model for artists to do something besides touring. That whole stigma around Las Vegas being where you go to die or whatever, that’s long gone. Now, the artist has to be right, and it has to be the right time in their career.” For Baldizan, Lady Gaga is an excellent example of this serendipity. “The only place you can see [Lady Gaga] right now is in Las Vegas,” he says. “One of the things that struck me when we sat down to talk to her was that she’s in the prime of her career. I think she already has changed the landscape of Las Vegas and the entertainment scene, and we’re only in year one of the two years we know we’re doing for sure.”

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Which Countries Shell Out the Biggest Bucks for Vegas Residencies?

In the 1950s, casino tycoons, hoping to coax visitors to their budding desert oasis, booked star entertainers — Liberace, Sinatra, Dean Martin, Don Rickles, Buddy Hackett and Sammy Davis Jr. — into their lounges and ballrooms. The Rat Pack, with Sinatra, Martin and Davis at its core, turned the Copa Room at the Sands into a destination and drew foot traffic to the casino floor in the process. The Rat Pack’s popularity swelled into the ’60s, as did Vegas’ reputation as a place where entertainers aspired to perform because of its high standard of talent.

Although Elvis’ first Vegas two-week run in 1956 was panned as a “jug of corn liquor at a champagne party” by a Newsweek critic, his return to the town in 1969 was a triumph that led to a long stretch at the International. Presley earned $100,000 a week there when he played the Showroom — by comparison, Lady Gaga is guaranteed a little over $1 million per show for her residencies — and continued to perform there through 1976, the year before he died. As Presley morphed into a bloated caricature of himself, Vegas declined with him, and residencies there became associated with relics running on the fumes of nostalgia.

In the 1980s and ’90s, casinos sought to overcome the stigma by investing in nonmusical ventures. “We went through the white tiger syndrome with Siegfried & Roy — and every hotel had a magic act with a white tiger,” says Newton. “Then we went through the impersonators — show after show after show,” followed by what Newton calls “the Cirque syndrome,” a reference to Cirque du Soleil’s ubiquity in the city. There are currently seven ongoing Cirque productions in Vegas, including The Beatles LOVE, a tribute to the Fab Four musically directed by late Beatles producer George Martin and his son, Giles Martin. (The elder Martin died 10 years after the show’s premiere in 2016.)

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Newton says Vegas is now in the midst of an entertainment renaissance. “We’ve moved into a very diverse show policy, which is wonderful, because no matter what people’s preferences are in music or entertainment, there’s something here for you,” he says.

He and other Vegas insiders agree that, in terms of live music, the resurgence began in 2003 when Céline Dion’s A New Day opened at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. Caesars built the venue for the residency at a cost of almost $100 million with AEG Live (now AEG Presents) and its Concert Wests division agreeing to pay for the production and guaranteed performance fees. Concerts West then operated the Colosseum and produced all of the residencies there until last year.

“For Céline’s first residency, the investment in the production was really as much as the cost of building the theater itself, but it turned out to be a wise investment because people kept coming for all those years,” says AEG Presents/Concerts West senior vp John Nelson, who assisted Concerts West president/co-CEO John Meglen in bringing Dion’s first residency to fruition. “The economics of a resident show in Vegas are such that these super-large production budgets can be amortized over a number of years, over a lot of performances.”

Celine Dion

Denise Truscello

A New Day, which ran until 2007, remains the highest-grossing Las Vegas residency of all time, according to Billboard Boxscore. Dion’s second residency, Celine, which ran from 2011 to 2019, ranks second. Combined, they sold nearly 4.6 million tickets and grossed over $630 million. The latter, which boasted a full orchestra, a company of dancers and a water curtain that swirled around Dion as she sang the final bridge of “My Heart Will Go On,” set a new standard for production values in Vegas without sacrificing intimacy. With just 4,300 seats, the Colosseum gave Dion the opportunity to banter with fans and interact with those in the coveted first row.

“We learned from Celine that there are key characteristics of successful residencies today,” says Jason Gastwirth, president of entertainment at Caesars Palace. “When you were in that theater, you felt like you were getting to know her; that you were spending the evening with her. Those who have successful headliner residencies have understood that in this more intimate environment, you need to engage with the audience in that way.”

Dion benefited from more than box-office grosses and the adoration of her fans. The residency kept her off the road, allowing her to spend more time with her twins, Nelson and Eddy, who were born in 2010, and to care for her husband-manager, Rene Angélil, during his long battle with throat cancer, from 2013 to his death in 2016, in Vegas, from a heart attack at the age of 73. When Celine closed in 2019, the twins, now 10, and her 18-year-old son, René-Charles, joined her onstage for the show’s finale: Dion sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” while a slideshow flashed personal photos, including one of her holding hands with René-Charles as a toddler backstage at the then newly built Colosseum.

Where the members of the Rat Pack had availed themselves of the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas nightlife during their heyday, Dion had taken advantage of the stability that a residency offers. And so it’s no surprise that other artists raising young children, including Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson and Mariah Carey, are gravitating to the format.

Dion’s success signaled a shift in the allure that Vegas held for tourists. “The casinos used to use performers to bring in people to gamble,” says Newton. “Frank, Dean, Sammy, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop were doing two shows a night at the Sands, and the cover, with dinner, was $5.95.” Today, he says, “People come to town and gaming is their third choice; shopping is second. Entertainment is their first.”

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Larry Rudolph, who manages Britney Spears, Aerosmith and Pitbull, noticed this development as well. “I saw a change in the demographic very clearly,” he says. “Instead of middle-aged couples coming in, grabbing dinner and a show, gambling and going to sleep, there were these 21-, 25-, 30-year-old people coming, and they had a different agenda. They didn’t care about gambling. They were there for the entertainment and the nightlife and everything related to it.”

Rudolph saw an opportunity to fill the entertainment gap that, he says, existed between the residencies that appealed to an older early-bird demographic, such as Newton and Donny and Marie Osmond, and the late-night EDM- and hip-hop-centric clubs run by the Wynn and Hakkasan groups that attracted more of a millennial crowd.

The latter group was “underserved,” says Rudolph. “There was an open space for a pregame show, where that audience, instead of going to a 7 or 8 o’clock show as the older crowd wanted, had an opportunity to attend one that started at 9:30 and ended at 11, where people could come, drink, have fun and get pumped up for the club.” And Rudolph was confident he had the ideal artist to do that show: Britney Spears.

Britney Spears

Marco Piraccini\Mondadori via Getty Images

Spears opened her Piece of Me residency across the street from the Colosseum at Planet Hollywood’s Axis Theater in 2013 (since rebranded as the Zappos Theater), and demand extended its original slate of 96 performances to 250. The residency grossed $138 million before its final show in 2017. A number of Spears’ pop peers then followed in the same venue, including the Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Stefani and, most recently, her fellow Mickey Mouse Clubalum Christina Aguilera.

Although Rudolph looks like a genius now, he says he was initially met with a lot of resistance from those with a vested interest in Spears’ success. “When I first announced the show, I almost got death threats from various people,” says Rudolph. “The president of her record company at the time called me and said, ‘What are you doing?! You’re going to kill her career!’ I said, ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Vegas. I understand the market. Watch what’s going to happen: Britney’s going to come in, she’s going to slay it, and every other pop artist is going to want a Vegas residency.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Rudolph has since installed Aerosmith at the Park; secondary-market tickets to the Live Nation-produced Lady Gaga shows have set a record on StubHub, and it seems like every month another major artist announces a Vegas residency. But there have been unsettling developments as well. The abrupt cancellation of Marshmello’s residency and the shuttering of KAOS has some Vegas nightlife insiders concerned that the DJ market has peaked, and in February 2019, Spears canceled a second planned residency at the Park, Domination, because, she said then, she wanted to spend time with her ailing father. Subsequent reports, however, indicated that ticket sales were soft.

Asked if there is concern about residency saturation, Live Nation’s Melien says, “We’re not even close,” adding, “There’s so much growth ahead for us — for the whole pie.”

Rudolph agrees. “Vegas isn’t the place where artists go to die — it has been proven,” he says. “Vegas is the place where artists go to thrive.”

Additional reporting by Joe Lynch and Dave Brooks.

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https://chicago.cbslocal.com/2019/11/18/ken-nordine-edgewater-mansion/
 

Preservationists Lobby City To Save Ken Nordine’s Edgewater Mansion – CBS Chicago

CHICAGO (CBS) — Ken Nordine was known internationally as a jazz poet, and now, preservationists are rushing to save his Edgewater mansion from the wrecking ball.

Nordine’s 7,300 square-foot mansion at 6106 N. Kenmore Ave., just north of Glenlake Avenue, was recently listed for $2 million.

It is the last single-family home on the block, just a few blocks south of the Loyola University Lake Shore Campus. And it was marketed for medium- or high-rise development.

Preservationists are lobbying the city, saying the Nordine mansion meets the requirements for historic landmark status.

“People say: ‘Oh, it’s a great place to live! We love Edgewater! We love all the history! And then people come in and start tearing buildings down,” said Bob Remer of the Edgewater Historical Society, “and we’re trying to prevent that.”

The Chicago historic survey already has the mansion orange-rated, requiring 90 days’ public notice before it could be torn down.

Nordine died in February at the age of 98.

He was well-known stream-of-consciousness, free-association poetry that he read aloud under jazz music backgrounds. First working in radio beginning in the 1940s, Nordine went on to release the albums “Word Jazz” in 1957, “Son of Word Jazz” in 1958, and “Word Jazz Vol. 2” in 1960.

Nordine was hired in 1966 to write and record 10 poems giving quirky personalities to 10 paint colors for a series of advertisements for the Fuller Paint Company, according to AllMusic.com. That project led to the celebrated 1966 album “Colors.”

Nordine’s syndicated radio show, also called “Word Jazz,” ran for more than 40 years – appearing every Sunday night at midnight on WBEZ for generations of creative-minded night owls.

Nordine also worked with members of the Grateful Dead in the 1990s and appeared at the High Line Festival curated by David Bowie in 2007, according to AllMusic.

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https://news.hamlethub.com/wilton/events/49836-remembering-dave-a-brubeck-family-album-at-wilton-historical-society
 

Remembering Dave: A Brubeck Family Album at Wilton Historical Society

President Barack Obama stated, “In order to understand America, you have to understand jazz, and in order to understand jazz, you have to understand Dave Brubeck” when he bestowed upon him the prestigious Kennedy Center Honor at the White House in 2009. As a pianist, bandleader and composer, Dave Brubeck (1920-2012) is widely acknowledged as one of America’s most significant post-swing era jazz musicians, creating a body of music that was bold and accessible. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of jazz legend – and Wilton’s own — Dave Brubeck, the Wilton Historical Society will present Remembering Dave: A Brubeck Family Album. All are invited to the opening reception 4 – 6 on Friday, February 21, 2020 (no charge). The exhibition incorporates material from the Dave Brubeck: Jazz Ambassador show which detailed his illustrious 70-year career and was presented at Jazz at Lincoln Center soon after Brubeck’s death, and highlights other facets of his life such as his impact as a composer, a performer, a civil rights activist and as family man. Remembering Dave: A Brubeck Family Album exhibition presents additional material that speaks to Dave’s life in Wilton with his wife Iola, and six kids, including musicians Darius, Chris and Dan. Growing up on a vast ranch in California, he learned to ride, how to be a cowboy; visitors will be able to see a Western-style saddle that belonged to his father, as well as Dave’s cowboy hat. A highlight of the exhibition is the opportunity to see a new short film produced by the Brubeck family which contains rare footage of “Cowboy Dave.” Another section of the film shows Wilton composer, lyricist, pianist, and educator Eugenie Rocherolle interviewing fellow musician Dave Brubeck. The exhibition will run through April 18, 2020. Free for Wilton Historical Society members; $10 entrance fee for non-member adults, free for under 18.

Dave Brubeck 100 is the world-wide celebration of the 100th birthday of Dave Brubeck, the jazz composer, pianist, cultural ambassador, and visionary musician, which will take place on December 6, 2020.

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https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/music/story/2020-01-18/grammys-dugan-portnow-step-up-recording-academy?mc_cid=76dc064a8e
 

3 CEOs in 6 months: How the Grammys went from ‘step up’ to meltdown

The press room backstage at the Grammy Awards is a bunker-like space beneath Staples Center sports arena, a nondescript room that isn’t typically a beehive of activity, much less a frequent source of breaking news.

The biggest names in pop music typically skip it after they’ve won awards or completed performances on the star-studded telecast. It tends to be a hangout for first-time winners or stiff-upper-lip also-ran nominees on what’s branded “music’s biggest night” by CBS-TV and the Recording Academy, which collaborate on the annual ceremony.

So when the academy’s then-President Neil Portnow stepped in front of reporters following the Feb. 18, 2018, Grammy Awards, the expectation was that he would deliver less-than-memorable bromides about the academy’s pride in all nominees and winners, and its overarching mission to promote music as a universal language.

Former Recording Academy chief executive Neil Portnow speaking at his final Grammy Awards in 2019.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

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Instead, when a reporter tossed him a question about the evening’s male-heavy winners’ circle — best new artist winner Alessia Cara was the only woman presented an award during the televised part of the ceremony — Portnow said the time had come for female artists “to step up because I think they would be welcome.”

The next day, the remark went viral. After pop star Pink and a raft of musicians and others called for him to step down, Portnow tried to walk back his statement.

The quote was “taken out of context,” said the career bass guitarist who worked his way up through the ranks of the music business to his post leading the industry’s primary advocacy organization, which he held for 17 years. He insisted he never intended to imply it was somehow women’s fault for their poor showing at the Grammys.

“I don’t have personal experience of those kinds of brick walls that you face,” he said, “but I think it’s upon us — us as an industry — to make the welcome mat very obvious, breeding opportunities for all people who want to be creative and paying it forward and creating that next generation of artists.”

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But the damage was done.

Within weeks, the Recording Academy announced the formation of a blue-ribbon task force to examine “conscious and unconscious bias” in the music industry and at the academy. It was charged with making recommendations about the roadblocks hampering women from being equally represented among Grammy winners and nominees, as well as in the halls of record companies, recording studios, management offices and music venues.

Tina Tchen, former chief of staff for First Lady Michelle Obama, was the high-profile choice to lead the task force. She assembled a 15-woman, three-man team from the entertainment industry and academia to take a serious look at the factors holding women, people of color and those in the LGBTQ community back in the music business.

Recording Academy president and CEO Deborah Dugan was placed on administrative leave on Thursday, just 10 days before the Grammy Awards.

(ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Portnow’s comment was ground zero for what was intended to be a hard reevaluation at the Recording Academy. That led to the selection last spring of a new president and chief executive, Deborah Dugan, who took the reins on Aug. 1, a day after Portnow’s contract came to an end.

Her appointment by the academy’s board of trustees was greeted enthusiastically in most quarters as a pivotal step forward: A woman at the top of the nonprofit organization heralded real and necessary change.

On Thursday, however, just 10 days before the 2020 Grammy Awards ceremony will take place at Staples Center in Los Angeles, the rosy glow became a raging inferno.

Shock waves rippled through the academy and the music industry at large after Dugan was suddenly placed on “administrative leave” by the academy’s board and accused of misconduct stemming from what was described in a public statement as a complaint from “a senior female member of the Recording Academy team.” The statement added that “The Board has also retained two independent third-party investigators to conduct independent investigations of the allegations.”

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The nature of the complaint was not detailed and academy representatives declined to offer additional information. A New York Times report said the academy employee’s complaint involved “bullying.” The employee, who took a leave of absence after filing her complaint, is widely believed to be Claudine Little, Portnow’s former assistant.

Dugan, through lawyer Bryan Freedman, quickly issued a heated statement of her own: “What has been reported is not nearly the story that needs to be told. When our ability to speak is not restrained by a 28-page contract and legal threats, we will expose what happens when you ‘step up’ at the Recording Academy, a public nonprofit.”

Dugan is said to have filed a memo weeks ago with the academy’s human resources department outlining concerns she’d developed over voting irregularities, financial mismanagement, “exorbitant and unnecessary” legal fees and “conflicts of interest involving members of the academy’s board, executive committee and outside lawyers.”

On Friday, musicians, record producers, label execs and others expressed their shock at the meltdown between Dugan and the academy. But on reflection, many expressed empathy for Dugan, talking of the academy as an “old boys’ club” in which many veterans were dead set against the kind of changes her hiring portended.

Others criticized her as an outsider who didn’t understand or seem to care to learn about the nuanced workings of the 62-year-old academy and its symbiotic relationship with artists, record labels and various constituencies.

She came to the post from heading (Red), the AIDS nonprofit formed in 2006 by U2 singer Bono, and previously held top posts at Disney Publishing Worldwide and EMI/Capitol Records.

“In fairness, she didn’t have the qualities or experience to run the organization,” a source familiar with the academy’s leadership said, asking not to be identified. “She felt she was hired to restructure the Grammys. Somehow she got the message that’s what she was there for. But she never stopped to learn how things work.”

Even in the short five and a half months she’d been at the helm, Dugan, who was recommended to the academy by executive recruitment firm Korn Ferry, drew comparisons with Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Dawn Hudson and her tumultuous eight-year tenure at the top.

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What Hudson said about the film academy in a recent interview could double as a comment about the music industry and the Grammy Awards: “The academy grew up around a cozy club that was the center of the universe, and it was wonderful — if you were part of that club. We are still an exclusive club,” she said, “we’re just not an exclusionary club.”

The Grammys wrestled in recent years with exclusion by gender. A USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study issued just before the 2018 Grammy ceremony showed that more than 90% of awards in five top categories over the previous five years — record, album, song, new artist and producer — went to men, and just 9.3% to female recipients, a statistic that framed the tone-deaf quality of Portnow’s “step up” comment.

One significant effect of what the task force labeled “a public relations crisis” over Portnow’s remark was a precipitous drop in contributions to MusiCares, the philanthropic wing that provides aid to musicians in need, according to a lawsuit filed last year by longtime MusiCares Vice President Dana Tomarken, who was fired in 2018 after 25 years with the academy.

Her wrongful termination suit alleged that support for MusiCares fell from $5 million in 2017 to barely $1 million in 2018. The suit also alleged financial mismanagement surrounding the Grammys’ 60th anniversary event in New York, which incurred significantly increased costs over the expense of staging it in Los Angeles, where it traditionally has been held in recent decades.

The suit was settled through arbitration in November, with both parties agreeing not to disclose details of the settlement.

The biases affecting women, people of color and LGBTQ creators in the music business are deeply ingrained, the task force concluded in the 47-page final report issued in December. It contained 18 specific recommendations to address the various ways such biases play out. The academy has adopted and begun implementing some of those recommendations; others are still awaiting action.

Most notably, the task force discovered early on that the academy’s 25,000-strong membership, of which about 13,000 are voting members who decide on the Grammy Awards, is overwhelmingly white and male.

So is the academy’s 40-member board of trustees, which has averaged 68% male and 69% Caucasian since 2012. (An academy representative pointed out this week that the eight-person executive committee that elected to put Dugan on leave is 50-50 female-male.) 

The same biases were found of the select nomination review committees that winnow down submitted recordings each year to five or, in the case of record, album, song and new artist, eight nominees for final selection by the voting members.

Interim Recording Academy President Harvey Mason Jr.

(Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

Tchen’s task force recommended quickly revamping the review committees to make them demographically in step with the general population. That resulted in selection groups that were 50-50 male-female as well as more racially diverse.

Some of those with knowledge of the task force’s operations told The Times last week that they encountered significant resistance to many of their recommendations for change, with men as well as women suggesting that old practices and old thinking were still deeply entrenched at the academy.

“I was one of a handful of people who came in to try to help Neil when the whole thing started imploding, said another industry veteran, also on condition of anonymity, who was not on the task force but was familiar with its proceedings. “It was such a rude awakening to learn how deeply and structurally flawed the organization was. It really is an old white boys club. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but it’s made up of a lot of guys late in their careers for whom this was the biggest platform they’ve ever had and they were going to do anything they could to hang on to it.”

Dugan’s leave is not expected to have a direct effect on next Sunday’s Grammy show, which is being assembled at Staples through the week, with artist rehearsals kicking into high gear as of mid-week. While the independent investigations are carried out, Board chairman Harvey Mason Jr. is serving as interim president of the academy.

Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys is returning as host after making a well-received first appearance as emcee last year. Emerging artists Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X are among the field-leading nominees this year — they received a combined 20 nominations — and will be among dozens of musicians performing during a telecast.

To hear it from those directly involved, the behind-the-scenes drama hasn’t dulled the shine that is part and parcel of a Grammy win. A music industry veteran who also asked not to be identified said, “The interesting thing is, to most artists, winning a Grammy is still incredibly important.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/19/obituaries/jimmy-heath-dead.html
 

Jimmy Heath, 93, Jazz Saxophonist and Composer, Is Dead

By Giovanni Russonello

Updated Jan. 20, 2020, 1:13 p.m. ET

Mr. Heath, whose compositions became part of the midcentury jazz canon, found new prominence in middle age as a co-leader of a band with his two brothers.

Jimmy Heath at the NEA Jazz Masters Awards ceremony in Manhattan in 2013. Besides performing, he was also known for his abilities as a composer and arranger.Joshua Bright for The New York Times

Jimmy Heath, a tenor saxophonist whose sharp and lively compositions became part of the midcentury jazz canon — and who found new prominence in middle age as a co-leader of a popular band with his two brothers — died on Sunday at his home in Loganville, Ga. He was 93.

His grandson Fa Mtume confirmed his death.

Mr. Heath’s saxophone sound was spare but playful, with a beaming tone that exuded both joy and command. But his reputation rested equally on his abilities as a composer and arranger for large ensembles, interpolating bebop’s crosshatched rhythms and extended improvisations into lush tapestries.

He was a teenager touring the Midwestern dance circuit with the Nat Towles Orchestra in the 1940s when he became enamored with arranging. At first he could hardly read music, but he proved a quick study.

When a particular harmony struck him, he hounded his fellow horn players to tell him what notes they were playing, then pieced together the chords on sheet music. Before long he was writing for a 16-piece band of his own, whose lineup included the future saxophone luminaries John Coltrane and Benny Golson.

His career in many ways tracked the life cycle of postwar jazz in the United States. After touring with dance bands, he moved on to the fresher, more cosmopolitan bebop style, playing in groups led by the trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis.

Originally an alto saxophonist, he earned the nickname Little Bird for his ability to emulate the fleet playing of the bebop pioneer Charlie Parker, known as Bird. He soon switched to the tenor, partly to skirt the comparisons, and established himself as a central figure on the New York scene.

In the mid-1970s, when R&B and rock had eclipsed jazz’s popularity, he founded the Heath Brothers with his older brother, Percy, a bassist, and his younger brother, Albert, known as Tootie, a drummer. That band welcomed the electric instruments and strutting rhythms of a younger generation into its own distinctive style, which hopscotched between straight-ahead jazz and soulful fusion.

And when jazz began its ascent into the academy, Mr. Heath was among the veterans who shepherded the transition. In 1964 he became a founding faculty member at Jazzmobile, an organization that presented concerts and classes to young people in Harlem. Decades later he helped forge Queens College’s jazz studies program.

An avid communicator, Mr. Heath was particularly wily with wordplay. He called the trumpeter Roy Hargrove “Roy Hardgroove.” The drummer Grady Tate became “Gravy Taker” because he snatched up so many good-paying gigs.

Mr. Heath titled his autobiography, written with Joseph McLarin and published in 2010, “I Walked With Giants,” a playful reference to his 5-foot-3 stature as well as to the fact that he spent much of his life working alongside the most lauded names in jazz.

Reflecting on his long career, Mr. Heath often said that although he never achieved as much renown as some of his contemporaries, he was satisfied. “You become an icon when you’re dead,” he told NPR Music in 2014. “I always say I’d rather be an acorn, and be alive.”

Yet from the 1990s on, he did enjoy recognition as a jazz eminence. In 2003, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master.

To his students, Mr. Heath was an ambassador from an earlier time who never lost his hunger for fresh inspiration. He often said most of his songs were inspired by the people he met. One song was named simply “Nice People.”

James Edward Heath was born in Philadelphia on Oct. 25, 1926. His father, Percy, was a mechanic and laborer who played clarinet in the local Elks Club band; his mother, Arlethia, sang in their church’s choir. Jimmy moved to New York at 22, eventually landing a spot alongside his brother Percy in Gillespie’s pioneering bebop big band. Gillespie became Mr. Heath’s primary mentor.

Around this time, Mr. Heath’s life off the bandstand took a turn. After the breakup of his first marriage, he sought solace in heroin, which was then prevalent on the jazz scene. Even as gigs with the likes of Miles Davis and Clifford Brown raised his standing, his habit overtook him.

In 1955 he was imprisoned on drug charges. He kicked his addiction in prison, and as leader of the penitentiary’s big band he spent much of his time writing tunes and arrangements, as well as learning the flute.

He would sometimes smuggle out compositions and arrangements by giving them to his brother Tootie during family visits. The charts quickly made their way onto a few popular records, including Chet Baker and Art Pepper’s 1956 album “Playboys,” which included mostly Mr. Heath’s tunes and was later reissued as “Picture of Heath.”

Mr. Heath returned to Philadelphia drug-free in 1959, but the terms of his probation prevented him from touring. He was forced to pass up a spot as Coltrane’s replacement in the Miles Davis sextet that recorded the celebrated album “Kind of Blue.”

So he made his own way, mostly in the studio. He released a string of well-received albums for Riverside Records, featuring compositions like “Gingerbread Boy” and “For Minors Only” that would become staples of the jazz repertoire. Even when he recorded with just a sextet, his crafty arrangements gave the sense of a chattering, wall-to-wall conversation among bandmates.

He also found freelance arranging work, writing charts for Ray Charles and others. Eventually he became a staff arranger at Riverside.

On the day he left prison, Mr. Heath met Mona Brown, a visual artist, whom he married the next year.She was white, and her parents refused to attend the couple’s wedding; after the marriage, they stopped speaking to her. Eventually she and Mr. Heath moved to an apartment in Corona, Queens, where they would live for more than 50 years. She survives him.

In addition to her and his grandson Fa Mtume, he is survived by their daughter, Roslyn Heath-Cammorto; a son from his first marriage, James Mtume, a percussionist, vocalist and songwriter with whom he occasionally collaborated; his brother Tootie; six other grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. Another son, Jeffrey, died in 2010. Percy Heath died in 2005.

Jimmy Heath and his wife had moved to Georgia three years ago.

At Town Hall in 1976, Mr. Heath presented the premiere of his first long-form piece, “The Afro-American Suite of Evolution.” John S. Wilson of The New York Times called it “an illustrative survey for which Mr. Heath showed his versatility by composing segments that caught the spirit of the various periods.” Mr. Heath considered the concert to be a turning point in his career.

The Heath Brothers released their debut album, “Marchin’ On,” that same year. The group featured Percy, who had become one of the world’s best-known bassists through his work with the Modern Jazz Quartet; Tootie, who had recently worked with Herbie Hancock; and the pianist Stanley Cowell. The album included Jimmy’s four-part “Smiling Billy Suite” (dedicated to the drummer Billy Higgins), which laced saxophone, flute and the Central African mbira, or thumb piano, into a viscous groove.

“It was a time of transition in the jazz world,” Mr. Heath wrote in his autobiography. “I was trying to evolve and create music that was acceptable to the generation of the ’60s and ’70s. In fact, I’ve been told by certain people that they started listening to jazz as a result of what the Heath Brothers were recording.”

The band went through a series of personnel changes; Tootie left after two albums and a guitarist, Tony Purrone, came on board, as did Mtume, Mr. Heath’s son, on percussion and vocals. The Heath Brothers’ Columbia album “Live at the Public Theater,” released in 1980, was nominated for a Grammy.

The group went on hiatus in the mid-1980s, after Percy Heath joined a reunited Modern Jazz Quartet, but the three brothers came together again in the late 1990s. Tootie and Jimmy continued to record and perform after Percy’s death.

Mr. Heath took over the fledgling jazz program at Queens College in 1986, helping to create its master’s curriculum. His 10 years there were his most fertile period as a composer of large-scale works.

In 1993, his Verve album “Little Man, Big Band” was nominated for a Grammy. Also that year, he jammed with President Bill Clinton at a White House jazz concert produced by the Thelonious Monk Institute, where he served on the board of advisers.

Mr. Clinton borrowed Mr. Heath’s saxophone to play on a blues number and, with Mr. Heath’s help, found the right key. As Mr. Heath recalled in his book, “He stumbled, but he landed on his feet.”

Mariel Padilla contributed reporting.

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http://www.offbeat.com/news/robert-parker-obit/
 

Singer-Songwriter Robert Parker Of ‘Barefootin’ Fame Has Died

January 20, 2020 by: Rachel Michel

Celebrated New Orleans singer-songwriter and saxophonist Robert Parker, writer of the 1960s smash-hit “Barefootin’,” has passed away at the age of 89. 

In a one-sheet promo, Jerry Reuss shared details of Parker’s life and career. Parker was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on October 14, 1930. When he was a teenager, he began playing saxophone and soon was playing behind local legend Professor Longhair. Parker began playing at the Tijuana Club in the 40s and 50s which introduced him to booking agent Percy Stovall as well as encouraged Parker to start his own band, Robert Parker and the Royals, who toured around the southern US. Parker was highly sought-after for session recording. New Orleans artists such as Jimmy Clanton, Ernie K-Doe, Fats Domino, Frankie Ford, Irma Thomas and Huey “Piano” Smith all hired him to play on their recordings, earning him high respect and regard around the city. During his tenure with the Tijuana Club house band, he shared the stage with icons including Ray Charles and Little Richard.

In the late 50s and early 60s, Parker worked as a solo act under a few local labels; however, nothing garnered major success. After the collapse of the music industry economy in 1963, Parker began working a day job at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, though still continued to work with his booking agency. Despite the challenge Parker faced, he continued to focus on his music and maintained the hope that he would be able to return to the music industry. 

In 1999, Parker’s agent booked him a gig at Tuskegee University in Alabama. It was there that he received inspiration for the song that would become “Barefootin’”: “The girls took their shoes off and piled them in front of the bandstand before they danced. That stayed with me,” Parker once said. In other instance, Parker played a show in Miami with a comedian who came on stage and said “Everybody get on your feet, you make me nervous when you’re in your seat,” which became the opening line of “Barefootin’.” 

After going back and forth with labels, NOLA Records eventually pressed a couple of boxes of records of the single, which sold right away. This prompted one of NOLA Records owners, Ulis Gaines, to take the record to local stations which caused the single to take off. “Barefootin’” peaked at the number-two spot on the R&B charts and remained on the charts for 17 weeks.

The legacy of “Barefootin’” still remains alive in New Orleans, with the song used in commercials for radio and television, and it’s likely one can hear the song while walking down the streets of New Orleans. In a 2006 article on“Classic Songs of Louisiana” for OffBeat, Jeff Hannusch wrote of “Barefootin,’” “[It] was irresistible because it combined the old New Orleans syncopated beat with contemporary soul. Along with ‘Tell It Like It Is,’ it briefly lifted the New Orleans recording scene out of the mid to 1960s doldrums. ‘Barefootin’ missed topping the charts by one place and reached number seven in the pop charts in the U.S.A. It was a huge international hit as well, even reaching the U.K. charts for the second time in 1987.”

In 2012 Robert Parker received OffBeat’s Best of the Beat Lifetime Achievement in Music along with Jean Knight, The Dixie Cups, Frankie Ford, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson and Ernie Vincent. The tribute band was lead by Ernie Vincent with each recipient performing their hit song. Looking frail, Robert Parker managed to get on stage, but when the music played he was transformed into a younger version of himself, wowing the audience.

The Parker family says funeral arrangements are pending.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJsg2X_Do-M

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ1zEpTK-M4

Jimmy Heath, Percy Heath, Freddie Hendrix, Jeb Patton, David Wong
Newport July 29, 2016

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Every now and then you’re in the right place at the right time.

I was lucky to snap this pic at the Highlights in Jazz 33^rd Anniversary show soundcheck Feb. 9, 2006.

It was a double bill featuring the BILL CHARLAP TRIO With Kenny Washington & Peter Washington + LIVING JAZZ LEGENDS Slide Hampton & Jimmy Heath.

Here’s Jimmy Heath at the piano and Bill Charlap discussing the music before the show.

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Nice little snapshot of how the jazz scene was covered in NYC back when.

Thank God Jack Kleinsinger is a pack rat for jazz.

His entire 47 year archive is online thanks to drummer Danny Gottlied and the jazz dept at UNF.

Check it out here:

https://digitalcommons.unf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1137&context=kleinsinger

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January 19, 2020

Dear Family and Friends around the World,

It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of my beloved husband, Claudio Roditi, late Friday evening, January 17, 2020. He was a loving husband and best friend to me for 45 years, although I never lost sight of the beautiful fact that music, particularly jazz, was his very first love!

I’m sure most of you know that in the past three years Claudio was dealing with cancer. He didn’t like the concept of “battling” or “fighting” cancer. He accepted it and felt it was more like something that he was just trying to live with. His optimistic and courageous attitude stayed with him throughout his journey with this illness ‒ right through the very end, which was at home, with me, and very peaceful. It was a relaxed release.

Claudio’s accepting approach was fundamental to his nature. He was a loving, kind and peaceful person, who thrived on the feeling of unity among people. He always had a knack for creating a good feeling among people. Claudio loved getting people together whom he felt might have common interests and would enjoy each other’s company. “A good hang,” he’d call it.

His entire life was geared to enjoyment: of Life and living it, of great music, of good food, traveling around the world playing his beloved rotary horns, meeting interesting and talented people, making new friends and visiting the longstanding ones, and maintaining his ready sense of humor. Claudio loved to laugh! He always saw the humor in situations, and frequently we were doubled over laughing about something or other.

Over the years, many reviewers of his performances have noted Claudio’s “selflessness” on stage, how he happily shared any limelight with his band mates.. He was completely inspired by the communication he felt on the bandstand. He actually felt happiest in that type of musical sharing. Perhaps it stemmed from the fact that he was an only child. He was always looking for brothers and sisters! I know many of you who are musicians could feel that deep bond with him.

Claudio’s father, Alberto Roditi, bought young Claudio his first trumpet, which Claudio destroyed in a fit because he couldn’t play it! Alberto bought him another one the next day and drove him around to see big bands (like Cab Calloway’s) that appeared in Brazil in the 1950s. As a teen, he was more widely exposed to jazz through an American Uncle, nicknamed “Tax” (his name was Harold Taxman), who moved his monster jazz LP collection from Chicago to Rio when he married Claudio’s Aunt Cida. 

Claudio came to the Unites States in 1970 with a true passion for jazz. He initially moved to Boston, where we met, to study and learn to play jazz. This fire for jazz (and Brazilian music) never left him! In his last weeks he was blowing on his mouthpiece and listening to music, to the latest CD he was on: “Diva and the Boys” by The Diva Jazz Orchestra, which has been number 1 on the jazz charts recently.

It feels like it will be difficult to move through life without him, doesn’t it? I know that so many of you knew and loved him, each in your own special way. He loved you, too. He was so humbled and full of gratitude for all the caring and support all of you showed him, especially over the past few years. It made an enormous difference to him. You should know that for sure. 

So how will we manage without him? I would say that one hundred percent of Claudio Roditi is in every piece of his music. Put on a CD, lay back and listen ‒ he’s there, his beautiful spirit is right there, and it’s bound to make you smile at some point.

From the core of my heart, I truly thank you all for loving Claudio and being so kind to him. I plan to create a legacy of his music (he wrote over 200 songs), his vintage performance videos and DVDs, his writings, and the like. It’s hoped that this legacy, Claudio’s enduring legacy, can serve to light a passion and nurture it for young musicians inspired by this miraculous art form called jazz.

Sending you love,
Kristen Park

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIGLFKxrUO4

• Alto Saxophone – Gary Bartz (tracks: B5) 
• Arranged By, Trombone – Melba Liston (tracks: A1, B2, B3), Tom McIntosh (tracks: A2 to A6, B1, B4) 
• Bass – Reggie Johnson (tracks: A2 to A6, B1 to B4), Victor Sproles (tracks: B5) 
• Congas – John Rodriguez* (tracks: A2 to A6, B1 to B4) 
• Design – Okamoto* 
• Drums – Art Blakey
• Guitar – Grant Green
• Liner Notes – Dom Cerulli
• Organ – Malcom Bass (tracks: A2 to A6, B1 to B4) 
• Piano – John Hicks (tracks: B5) 
• Producer – Jack Tracy, Luchi DeJesus
• Tenor Saxophone – Frank Mitchell (tracks: A2 to A6, B1 to B4) 
• Trombone – Garnett Brown (tracks: A1, A2, A4 to A6, B2, B3) 
• Trumpet – Charles Mangione* (tracks: A2 to A6, B1 to B4), Freddie Hubbard (tracks: B5), Lee Morgan(tracks: B5)

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https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2020/01/19/535609079/jazz-saxophone-legend-jimmy-heath-has-died
 

Jazz Saxophone Legend Jimmy Heath Has Died

Tom Vitale 

January 19, 202012:59 PM ET

Saxophonist, composer and arranger Jimmy Heath.

Lonnie Timmons III/Getty Images

Jimmy Heath, a prolific saxophonist, composer and bandleader who played alongside some of the biggest names of jazz, including Miles Davis and John Coltrane, has died.

Heath died Sunday morning in Loganville, Georgia of natural causes, his grandson told NPR. He was 93 years old. His family was at his side, including his wife of 60 years, Mona Heath, his children Mtume and Rozie, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and his brother, drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath.

In a career that spanned seven decades, Heath brought the bebop he loved to big bands — and into the 21st century.

Heath is best known as a saxophonist, but he wrote and arranged music throughout his life. In 2013, when he was 87 years old, he told NPR it was important to be a complete musician. “Not just to stand up and improvise,” he stressed. “You know, you got to compose. I want to be a person who can compose, and leave something here for posterity.”

Jazz Legacy Films YouTube

Heath left hundreds of compositions that were performed by his own bands, and others.

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Phil Schaap is a curator of Jazz at Lincoln Center. He says that one of Jimmy Heath’s most important contributions was bringing the bebop revolution of the 1940s to succeeding generations.

“Moses is dead. The tablets are still here,” Schaap declares. “Well, Jimmy Heath read the commandments of jazz, and he got the tablets from the great prophets. And he used it his way to great benefit, and he even fed it back towards the prophets. You know, Miles Davis used his stuff. Charlie Parker used his stuff. And John Coltrane was nurtured by Jimmy Heath.”

YouTube

James Edward Heath was born October 25, 1926, in Philadelphia. His sister Elizabeth played piano; his older brother Percy played violin and bass; and his younger brother Tootie played the drums.

“My father played the clarinet,” recalled Jimmy Heath. “He was an auto mechanic for a living, but he played the clarinet on the weekends. He’d get it out of the pawn shop and play in a marching band in Philadelphia. But my mother sang in a church choir. But we were privy to have all these great recordings in our home at that time. We heard all the bands. The big bands were prominent at that time.”

Jimmy Heath developed a big sound on his saxophone. But he was a little man — 5’3″. For most of his life, his colleagues on the bandstand called him “Shorty” and “Little Bird” (a reference to saxophonist Charlie Parker, who was nicknamed “Bird”).

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“My father told me about that. He was a small guy,” Heath said. “He says, ‘Jimmy, you just got to work harder as a little person. Because the big guys get all of the girls, and all of the gigs. They get everything. But if you pursue your profession, and music, like I do, every day, just like before you came in here, I was practicing. And things like that, you can overcome these myths.'”

Jimmy Heath had to overcome more than myths. He beat a very real heroin habit, and went on to perform and record for more than half a century. He also taught for 20 years at Queens College in New York. Heath said the reason he was able to do all that was simple. 

“I’m going to do this until I leave. This is all I love. It’s a matter of love. If you love what you do, and you can make a living at it, What’s better?”

And Jimmy Heath was one of the best.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/17/arts/music/norma-tanega-dead.html?action=click
 

Norma Tanega, Who Sang About a Cat Named Dog, Dies at 80

By Richard Sandomir

Jan. 17, 2020

She had only one hit record, but it was a memorable one: a quirkily titled song about freedom, dreaming and her cat, who really was named Dog.

Norma Tanega on the British television show “Ready Steady Go!” in 1966, the year her song “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” was a hit.Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

In 1966, when Norma Tanega released her first single, rock fans were becoming used to unusual lyrics. But as it turned out, that song, “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog,” wasn’t as quirky as the title suggested: The song was inspired by her cat, whose name was indeed Dog.

“I had always wanted a dog, but because of my living situation, I could only have a cat,” she said on her website. “I named my cat Dog and wrote a song about my dilemma.”

She turned that situation into a lilting song about freedom, “perpetual dreamin’” and “walkin’ high against the fog” around town with Dog (whom in real life she really did walk).

Accompanying herself on guitar and also playing harmonica, she sang, in a low voice: “Dog is a good old cat/People what you think of that?/That’s where I’m at, that’s where I’m at.”

The song reached No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and quickly assumed a life of its own, covered by various artists, including Barry McGuire, whose apocalyptic “Eve of Destruction” had reached No. 1 a year earlier, as well as jazz artists like the drummer Art Blakey and the Jazz Crusaders. Decades later, versions of the song were recorded by Yo La Tengo and They Might Be Giants.

But she would never have another hit.

Ms. Tanega died on Dec. 29 at her home in Claremont, Calif., about 30 miles east of Los Angeles. She was 80. Her lawyer, Alfred Shine, said the cause was colon cancer.

Soon after the release of her hit song, Ms. Tanega was part of a nationwide tour with Gene Pitney, Chad & Jeremy and many other artists. Later in 1966 she performed in England, where she met Dusty Springfield, the British pop star.

The meeting led Ms. Tanega to write or co-write songs for Ms. Springfield, including “No Stranger Am I,” “The Colour of Your Eyes” and “Earthbound Gypsy.” They also had a romantic relationship for several years, during which Ms. Tanega wrote a song called “Dusty Springfield” with Jim Council and the jazz pianist and vocalist Blossom Dearie, who sang it on her 1970 album, “That’s Just the Way I Want to Be.”

“Dusty Springfield, that’s a pretty name,” the song starts. “It even sounds like a game/In a green field, hobby horses play the dusty game/When it’s May.”

Recalling her chemistry with Ms. Springfield in an interview with the Southern California newspaper The Daily Bulletin in 2019, Ms. Tanega closed her eyes and said, “She heard me.”

While in England, Ms. Tanega recorded her second — and last — solo album, “I Don’t Think It Will Hurt If You Smile” (1971). When her relationship with Ms. Springfield ended, she returned to the United States, settling in Claremont.

Norma Cecilia Tanega was born on Nov. 30, 1939, in Vallejo, Calif., and grew up in Long Beach. Her father, Tomas, was a Navy bandmaster and musician. Her mother, Otilda (Ramirez) Tanega, was a homemaker.

As a teenager, Norma painted, and gave classical piano recitals and taught herself the guitar. After graduating from Scripps College in Claremont and earning a master’s in fine arts from Claremont Graduate School, she moved to Manhattan to join the folk music scene.

“I just want to sing for people,” Ms. Tanega said. “You might say it’s mass love.”

A job singing in a summer camp in the Catskills brought Ms. Tanega to the attention of a producer, Herb Bernstein, and to Bob Crewe, the songwriter and producer behind many of the Four Seasons’ hits, who signed her to his New Voice record label in 1965. “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” came out early the next year.

During a stopover on her nationwide tour, Ms. Tanega told The Detroit Free Press that she wasn’t sure what genre to put herself in.

“The folkies don’t like me and the rock ’n’ rollies don’t like me,” she said. She nonetheless enjoyed performing, she said: “I just want to sing for people. You might say it’s mass love.”

After her second album and her return to Claremont, she began a long teaching career. She was an adjunct professor of art at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and taught music, art and English as a second language in Claremont public schools.

She also focused on her art, which culminated in an exhibition of her landscapes and abstract paintings last year at Claremont Heritage, a historic preservation center. In comments published for the show, David Shearer, the executive director of the center and the curator of the exhibition, compared some of her work to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Robert Rauschenberg.

She never gave up music. Over the years, she played earthenware instruments in the Brian Ransom Ceramic Art Ensemble and performed and recorded with several bands, including Hybrid Vigor, the Latin Lizards and Baboonz.

No immediate family members survive.

Nearly 50 years after the debut of Ms. Tanega’s first album, its opening track, “You’re Dead,” was used as the theme song for “What We Do in the Shadows” (2015), an acclaimed mockumentary by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi about a group of vampires living in present-day New Zealand. (The movie spawned a TV series on the FX network that is heading into its second season.)

“Don’t sing if you want to live long,” she sang. “They have no use for your song./You’re dead, you’re dead, you’re dead/You’re dead and outta this world.”

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https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-a-revitalized-recording-studio-is-bringing-georgias-macon-into-the-spotlight

How a revitalized recording studio is bringing Georgia’s Macon into the spotlight

Jeffrey BrownJan 17, 2020 6:25 PM EST

Many a masterpiece has been recorded at Capricorn Sound Studios in Macon, Georgia. Otis Redding’s manager, Phil Walden, co-founded the label, and Capricorn went on to produce a decade of southern rock hits. But as the music industry changed, Capricorn went bankrupt and fell into disrepair — until a recent revival lifted the studio, and the city, back into the limelight. Jeffrey Brown reports.

Read the Full Transcript

• Judy Woodruff:

  Now celebrating the sound of Southern rock and a new effort to restore the place that helped create it.

  Jeffrey Brown visits Macon, Georgia, for our “American Creators” series, and part of our ongoing arts and culture coverage, Canvas.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  “Dreams,” a classic song of the rock era. It was made famous by the Allman Brothers Band and performed on a recent night at Macon City Auditorium by musicians from then and now, as part of a celebration that looked both to the past and future.

  Keyboard player Chuck Leavell helped put together the concert. He’s been travelling the world for decades as music director for the Rolling Stones. But he lives on a tree farm near here and, back in the day, was a member of the Allman Brothers Band.

• Chuck Leavell:

  It’s intimate, and it reminded me that that was one of the cool things about it, because you were tight, you were right there together with your fellow musicians when you were working.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  He often recorded here at Macon’s famed Capricorn sound studios, newly restored to its former glory.

• Chuck Leavell:

  My memories are so strong of making great music in this room. And so many other musicians would tell you the same thing.

  It’s just such a special feeling. It’s really hard to describe, the magic of music. When you hit the right note, man, that magical feeling that you get when you are cutting a song, that you feel like, wow, this has a chance to be a hit. And we have cut a lot of hits in this room.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  The story actually begins earlier, with a local singer who became an international superstar, Otis Redding. Along with his manager, Phil Walden, Redding dreamed of building a musical hub here in Macon.

• Karla Redding-Andrews:

  I think his sound came from deep within his soul, from what he was taught in the church.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  Daughter Karla Redding-Andrews today runs the Otis Redding Foundation, which offers music education programs to children.

• Karla Redding-Andrews:

  This was going to be where he would be able to be home and record, and be able to go back to his ranch and fish and hunt and swim, and bring other artists to Macon, and really just — just catapult Macon to this sound that’s so special to our community.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  That dream ended when Otis Redding died in a plane crash at age 26 in 1967. But, two years later, Phil Walden and his brother Alan launched Capricorn Records.

  It would become home to a soulful Southern rock, with acts including the Marshall Tucker Band, Bonnie Bramlett, Elvin Bishop, and many others. There were 10 years of hits. but the music industry changed. Capricorn ended up in bankruptcy, the studio building was abandoned, and eventually fell into disrepair.

  Now it’s back, with a performance by Jimmy Hall, former singer for Wet Willie, another Capricorn band, and a grand opening in December, where the public had a chance to check out the facilities.

  A developer had bought the buildings as part of a growing downtown renaissance here, including new loft apartments, and then donated the studio buildings to Macon-based Mercer University.

  With outside funders, including the Knight Foundation, for the record, a “NewsHour” underwriter, Mercer has turned the space, now called Mercer Music at Capricorn, into a nonprofit incubator for local musicians, along with a small museum celebrating the history.

• William Underwood:

  This project will propel the renaissance.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  Mercer president Bill Underwood says he grew up loving Southern rock, but this is about something else.

  What does Mercer get out of this?

• William Underwood:

  Mercer gets a vibrant community. One thing I have learned is that dying, decaying communities are not attractive to people.

  The more vibrant, interesting and exciting your community is, the better able you are to attract talented faculty, talented students and staff. So anything that’s good for this region is good for our university.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  So, five, 10 years down the road, what do you see?

• William Underwood:

  I see lots of creative, talented young people with tattoos and nose rings running all over downtown Macon.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  That sounds good to you?

  (LAUGHTER)

• William Underwood:

  Yes, as long as it’s not my daughter.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  The new dream is that Macon once again becomes a musical hot spot, with the restored studio serving as an anchor.

  That would suit 20-year-old Maggie Renfroe, who grew up here, before moving to Nashville to pursue a music career.

• Maggie Renfroe:

  If the history and the music here in Macon continues to grow, and the next thing we know a label pops up here, I would be the first person to come back here and show Nashville and show L.A. and New York that Macon really could be a spot where it’s a music hub.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  I asked Otis Redding’s daughter Karla what she hopes to see in Macon in the coming years.

• Karla Redding-Andrews:

  The next Otis Redding to come out of here.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  Yes? That’s no little thing, by the way. Right?

• Karla Redding-Andrews:

  But you know what? It’s possible. Because they have everything they need right here to make it happen, great engineer, great recording room. There’s no reason why it can’t happen.

• Jeffrey Brown:

  And why not? All it takes is some hard work, commitment and support, and, as the great Otis Redding song tells us, sung on this night by Taj Mahal, a little respect.

  For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Macon, Georgia.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Some great news for that Southern city.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/the-pleasure-and-pain-of-being-cole-porter
 

The Pleasure and Pain of Being Cole Porter

Almost inhumanly prolific, the songwriter produced a new kind of American lyric—and language.

Adam GopnikJanuary 20, 2020 Issue

The artist’s genial and productive surface masked turbulent waters.

Photograph by Horst P. Horst

Back in 1976, the incomparable drama critic Kenneth Tynan wondered in his diary when someone was “going to take a deep breath and declare that, at some time in the thirties, the serious music tradition finally withered, curled up and died of sterility and malnutrition; and that the greatest composers of the twentieth century are Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Kern, Gershwin, et al.” This view, bold enough at the time to be fit only for a diary, has by now become commonplace. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, you had to haunt London record shops to find Ella Fitzgerald’s Gershwin or Cole Porter albums. Now those recordings, and the songs they illuminate, are everywhere. Prompted, perhaps, by the publication, in the early seventies, of Alec Wilder’s groundbreaking study, “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950,” the old songwriters have come to have a new presence, and their songs even a collective brand name: the American Songbook. Their music is now taken up routinely by the same rock singers who once seemed to have overshadowed them, with some (Van Morrison singing “A Foggy Day”) oddly good, some (Rod Stewart singing “Someone to Watch Over Me”) oddly bad, and some (Bob Dylan singing “The Night We Called It a Day”) just odd.

Like all victories in art, this one has a double-edged result. On the one hand, the music is, mostly, out there. On the other, the essential work of discrimination is lost in a blanketing cloud of nostalgia. Embattled memory takes things apart; complacent nostalgia squashes them back together. The first wave of rediscovery had ukases and prohibitions—Alec Wilder wrote off essentially all of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and almost everything self-consciously “jazzy” in Gershwin. (He preferred Harold Arlen, who knew jazz inside out, to Gershwin—a shocking view then.) These days, a smiling, everyone-together spirit inflects the appreciative albums and Lincoln Center celebrations; Tynan’s “et al.” covers a lot of talents, big and small. When you are in the middle of a battle, as Wilder was, it is important to sort out the fighters from the freeloaders. Once it has been won, everybody gets a medal.

So, with squads of scholars arriving on the field after the battle, to tend the wounded and bury the dead, we have a renewed chance not just to get the story right but to get the stature right, to figure out who ranks where and why. Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in “The Letters of Cole Porter” (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at King’s College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner’s letters). Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote. The editors have also included some secondary material that is not, strictly speaking, correspondence at all, such as a hair-raising journal of the mid-thirties M-G-M movie project that became the Eleanor Powell vehicle “Born to Dance.”

As an artist’s letters, they are, truth be told, disappointing. There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porter’s writings to friends—for such a famous wit, there is remarkably little wit. The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than in letters-to. Abe Burrows, the great musical “book writer”—what others call a libretto Broadway people call a book, and what others call a book they usually call revenge—contributes several good things. He offers Porter definitive wisdom about making musicals: “Doing a show is not unlike bringing up a child. The child develops a life of its own. The parents do their best but certain things remain immutable, and the child is what he is.” Porter, a great appreciator, tells Burrows that he liked those words enough to paste them in his scrapbook.

Yet a reader, without learning much directly about Porter’s art, comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before. Though he was born into genuine if provincial affluence, with second-tier European royalty filling out the family’s dance card on vacation, he chose to become a working stiff. Reversing the usual American ascent from labor to leisure makes for a more strenuous, and more moving, story. The labor produced a new kind of American lyric, and language.

Porter’s personal tale was well known even when other songwriters’ were not. To get a bio-pic, peers among the great songwriters had to die young, like Gershwin (who got a pretty good movie in “Rhapsody in Blue”) or Lorenz Hart (who got a terrible one in “Words and Music”). But Porter was the subject of two movies, including one, “Night and Day” (1946), made in his lifetime and with his reluctant collaboration, despite the unsayable but far from secret truth that he was gay. In his own social world, he was about as out as a man could be in those days, with a rich repertory of lovers and assignations.

Porter’s story was appealing because it was seemingly so generational—so Fitzgerald-like in its ascension from Midwestern beginnings to East Coast fame. Born in Peru, Indiana, in 1891 to the wealthiest family in town—perhaps the wealthiest in all of Indiana—he went to Yale right before the Great War. (Fitzgerald, four years behind him, at Princeton, regarded Porter’s commercial career a little enviously, as a path not taken.) A precocious though largely untrained musician, Porter wrote what are still among the school’s fight songs. Then came a short period of service in the war, followed by a long holiday in Europe through the early twenties, with a loving but mostly sexless marriage of convenience to Linda Lee Thomas, of the Virginia Lees. It was a perfect Gerald Murphy-style Jazz Age life, disrupted only by Porter’s determination to get to New York and become a successful Broadway songwriter—a very strange, and very “Jewish,” ambition for a young socialite.

Beneath his smooth, genial, almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface, there were turbulent waters. His very name, for all its air of Ivy League ease, represents a burdened legacy. The Porters were his difficult, scapegrace father’s family; the Coles were his mother’s rich and ambitious Indiana family. He was a Porter by birth but, if his mother had anything to do with it, would be a Cole for life.

Privilege has its privileges, and Porter’s queerness, evident in the countless letters in this volume to kindred souls, like Monty Woolley—the once famous character actor, whom he’d met at Yale, the original star of “The Man Who Came to Dinner”—seems never to have tormented him, as it did Hart. Porter, by temperament and entitlement, came of age among the openly bisexual European upper crust. Everyone knew that he was a gay man with a marriage of convenience; everyone agreed to maintain the pretense that he wasn’t. Far from a drama of either repression or subversion, the situation seems like an oddly happy social concord.

His letters to his lovers are in the same register as those of the Oscar Wilde–Robbie Ross circle in London a few decades earlier: chummy more than erotic, with a transparent language of concealment, a more or less open code of intrigue. “Way out here one gets that wicked city idea about New York & all those purlieus,” he writes to the dancer Nelson Barclift, from his cottage in Williamstown. “Have you been in a purlieu tonight? Confess. Say, ‘Guilty.’ But do write me soon that you have reported it all to Ben & Ollie”—gay friends—“for, for some intangible reason, they cleanse the impurity out of what they touch. And they touch plenty.”

It might be argued, and has been, most notably in William McBrien’s 1998 biography, that Porter’s sexuality shaped his sentiments, which burst out in happy one-night-stand songs like “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” with their note of sexual infatuation, cherished but not easily transmuted into domesticity. “I’d sacrifice anything come what might / For the sake of having you near / In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night / And repeats, repeats in my ear” does not lead us neatly to become the folks who live on the hill.

But Frank Sinatra had no trouble applying the songs, or their emotions, to Ava Gardner or her successors. At a time when everyone was chafing against the constraints of bourgeois morality, a sex song like “Let’s Misbehave” spoke as clearly to straying straights as it did to cruising gays. The sport of writing in a tightly organized genre like popular song is not to smuggle in specifically subversive subtext when the censors aren’t looking but to make the subversive emotions universal enough not to need a subtext. Porter was to straight sex in his “affair” songs as his best friend, Irving Berlin, was to Christianity in writing “White Christmas”—the outsider’s triumph was to own the insider’s material. It may be, as some have suggested, that the climactic lines “But if, baby, I’m the bottom / You’re the top” in Porter’s “You’re the Top” already meant in 1936 what they mean in erotic slang now; the point is that, post-Porter, they no longer had to mean only that.

Porter is so famous for his gifts as a lyricist that it might seem mischievous to the point of perversity to suggest that his real greatness resides in his skills as a composer. Yet how many other popular composers have had more hits with instrumental, unsung versions of their work? Artie Shaw’s version of “Begin the Beguine” is the best known, but the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s album of Porter songs, from the mid-sixties, with Paul Desmond’s peerless sax, is just as good. Though rarely overtly jazz in the Arlen-Gershwin manner, his melodies have so much mysterious inner propulsion that, asked to swing, they practically swing themselves.

For all Porter’s aristocratic mien, his tastes were rather plain, as those of the American upper classes usually are—high taste is typically simple taste, as anyone who has eaten at a Wasp club knows. His list of requirements for a hotel room in Philadelphia during a tryout included sliced liverwurst, salami, and bologna, and twenty-four cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Another small but striking social trait that runs through the letters is the preponderance of presents that were incumbent on people in show business then; Porter gives and gets flowers, paintings, wine, books for the smallest of reasons, and then writes at length to thank the present-giver, or to thank the present-recipient for his thanks. People who came of age in Porter’s time took gift-giving as seriously as the Kwakiutls took their potlatches, and for the same reason: coming of age in a culture of surplus, they believed in constant exchanges of the signs of prosperity.

Porter, high-Wasp tastes and all, had to navigate a Broadway and Hollywood world that was astoundingly uniform in its Jewishness. A famous story has Porter confiding in a friend that he was going to write “Jewish tunes,” meaning minor-key pentatonic croonings of the kind that Berlin had mastered in “Blue Skies.” In Mary Martin’s first showstopper song, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” the melisma in the middle section is self-consciously, even uncomfortably, Eastern European-sounding in order to indicate that “Daddy” is Jewish.

The degree of reverse cultural assimilation that this Gentile from the Midwest had to undertake is captured in one of the funniest letters Porter ever wrote, to his (Jewish) agent, Irving Lazar:

Thank you for your letter of Dec. 28 1955. I am not an idiot child. I do not call Sol “Saul” nor do I call Saul “Sol.” These are two different people. There is a producer named Sol Siegel—and an assistant producer named Saul Chaplin. Sol sent Saul to be with me here for ten days while I wrote new material. . . . Since Saul (not Sol) returned to Culver City, I have received charming telephone calls from Sol, and a most enthusiastic letter from Saul.

It’s a Porter lyric in miniature (“Sol Sent Saul to Tell Me All”), and shows what a forest of alien manners, or at least names, a boy from Indiana had to make his way through at a time when all the other great show-tune innovators—Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen—were Jewish. What other kind of tunes could you write?

Porter’s story does have a dramatic climax. In the fall of 1937, when he was forty-six, he endured a horrific accident, in which the horse he was riding fell on him and crushed one of his legs. The injuries led to more than thirty operations in the course of his life, all excruciatingly painful, and a legacy of permanent suffering. Just how agonizing his condition must have been, and what consequences it had for his work, has been a source of much speculation. Wilder, among others, insists that there was minimal good work after the accident. Eisen and McHugh dispute that verdict; certainly, his most successful Broadway shows, including “Kiss Me, Kate,” all happened well afterward. Still more certainly, the letters are heroic in their avoidance of self-pity, though they also reveal for the first time just how bad his injuries were. “When the cast was removed, I shall never forget the first sight of my leg,” he wrote to Monty Woolley from his hospital bed. “I asked ‘What is the jelly it’s covered with?’ And the reply was, ‘That’s not jelly, that’s blebs’ ”—blisters. “It was hard to believe for the whole leg looked like a flowing mass of lava and it sorta made me sick.” Heavily drugged, he managed to write down some of his “craziest illusions”: “My right leg stretches, slanting upwards before me, like the side of the hill, the summit of which is my toes. From the ankle down—and approaching me—any number of small, finely sharply toothed rakes are at work.”

The rakes got only more sharply toothed over time. He managed to persevere, it seems, by a mixture of champagne and stiff-upper-lipness. But not a day of it could have been easy for him. There are long, relatively unrevealing diaries from later trips to the Greek islands and Naples and beyond, and the extent of his activity doesn’t sound at all like that of a crippled man. On the other hand, one of his companions says that he was “inhuman” on these voyages, a comment that seems to refer to the prodigious gifts of concentration necessary to keep out the pain and focus on the pleasures.

Porter writes engagingly, as an artisan, about the business of putting on a show. It is pretty clear that he measured a show’s success simply by the number of hit songs it produced, and he had savvy theories about how long it takes a song to become a hit once it’s out in the world. He writes minimally about his own creative process for the same upper-crust reason that he writes minimally about his suffering—only second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives. Analyzing is the same as complaining, and self-analysis is the twin of self-promotion.

Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface, though. Porter still wrote in a revue style where the characters were hardly worth dramatizing. The producer Cy Feuer, who put on two late Porter shows, says in his memoir that Porter didn’t really care where the songs fit within the story; he was blithely composing numbers for “Can-Can” (1953) while the book writer and the director struggled bitterly with the plotline, and though he threw in new ones as needed, he seems to have stood mostly aside, amused and productive, as the rest of the creative team raged and yelled. In fact, Abe Burrows wrote a couple of deft, diplomatic letters asking Porter to please wait to write the songs until they knew what the story was. Told that the integrity of the show demanded that there must not be any ooh-la-la songs about Paris, Porter airily wrote the most obvious of all such songs, “I Love Paris.” It was too irresistible not to include.

He didn’t need the shows to write drama. The songs were the stories. “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” and “So in Love,” though situated in the plot of “Kiss Me, Kate,” are hardly situational. He constructed songs so that each one is a drama in itself, with an allusive, erudite verse leading to a simpler storytelling refrain. In perhaps his greatest song, “Just One of Those Things,” from 1935—it’s a song that Holden Caulfield, who likes nothing, likes—the verse is an offhand sequence of references that were not quite commonplace then: Dorothy Parker, Heloise and Abelard. The chorus becomes slyly dynamic (“Just one of those crazy flings / One of those bells that now and then rings”), building from kiss-off to remembered kissing. The movement is minimal but emotionally exact (“Our love affair / Was too hot not to cool down”), and describes a journey from mere ruefulness to actual regret, a small but significant emotional arc that requires a great singer to convey.

List songs are anathema to the post-Sondheim sensibility, trained as it is on Oscar Hammerstein’s heightened dramatic style, but Porter’s lists are his poetry. Ring Lardner, in these pages, made fun of the overwrought imagery in Porter’s romantic lyrics; where Porter had “Under the hide of me / There’s an, oh, such a hungry yearning / Burning inside of me,” he offered as an alternative “Night and day, under the rind of me / There’s an Oh, such a zeal for spooning, running the mind of me.” But Porter is never the least bit off when it comes to Americana. He takes pleasure in rhyme for rhyme’s sake, in the play of language, and does so in a way that is, oddly, far more in tune with the main lines of the American avant-garde of his time than operetta style could ever be.

In “You’re the Top,” the collisions of high and low, the mixed vernacular that expects his audience to be equally comfortable at the movies and in the museums, is the purest kind of E. E. Cummings–Stuart Davis thirties pop avant-garde: “You’re the top! / You’re the Colosseum. / You’re the top! / You’re the Louvre Museum. / You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss. / You’re a Bendel bonnet, / A Shakespeare sonnet, / You’re Mickey Mouse.” The beautiful chaos of similes—Cellophane! Botticelli! A Waldorf salad!—captures the hyperkinetic collisions of New York experience as perfectly as Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie.” The wit of the build, leading past Rome and Paris and culminating in high Americana, is complemented by a brilliantly quiet bit of rhyming—had “Mickey Mouse” and “Strauss” been rhymed before? When George and Ira Gershwin wrote their own Strauss tribute, a couple of years later, the waltz “By Strauss,” Ira had to cheat a little and make all the rhymes German, including rhyming “Strauss” with “Fledermaus”—the difference between “Fledermaus” as a rhyme and “Mickey Mouse” being the difference between talent and genius.

While still a very young man, Porter coined the phrase “See America First” (it was the title of his début musical, a George M. Cohan spoof), and that gift for creating idioms may be a clue to the quiddity of his genius. Porter is one of the three great lyricists of invented American speech, with only Chuck Berry in the fifties and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead in the seventies his equal in this respect. Berry constructed a world of fast cars and fried chicken and teen-age back-seat fumblings, with the right jive to cover it all; Hunter, in songs like “Uncle John’s Band” and “Friend of the Devil,” invented a lost nineteenth-century world of runaway trains and pursuing sheriffs and brass bands playing by the riverside which somehow resonated as an available American reservoir of myth. (Of course, people had written songs about cars before Chuck did, but he was the one who had the specific wit to put Maybellene’s Coup de Ville in a contest with his own V-8 Ford. Just as, where the Band wrote about Dixie in the winter of ’65, only Hunter made up Uncle John, who could have been equally at home playing during the Civil War or at Woodstock.)

Hart heard a world; Porter made one up—a New York of penthouses and night clubs and hangovers which still resonates as another kind of American myth. Even phrases now as familiar as “I’ve got you under my skin” and “I get a kick out of you” are not precisely idioms taken directly from American talk, the way that Hart’s “I could write a book” and “I’ve got five dollars” are. No doubt people had long said that a thing got under your skin or that we got a kick out of something else, but no one said exactly those formal sentences; Porter’s special work was in elevating the smallest of small talk into comic poetry. It gave him license to invent a vernacular. “Down in the depths of the ninetieth floor,” “But in the morning, no!,” “I’m always true to you, darling, in my fashion,” even “You’re the top”—none of these things were idiomatic before Porter transformed them from little acorns into mighty jokes. When, in “Blazing Saddles,” the villain quotes “You Do Something to Me” (“Now go do that voodoo that you do so well!”), we know at once that he is quoting Cole Porter.

Porter’s condition worsened—in 1958, the crushed leg would have to be amputated—and though his energy didn’t slacken, the quality of the work did decline. The letters trace his work on one good movie score (“High Society”), a couple of so-so shows (“Silk Stockings” and “Can-Can”), and a promising but too-late-in-the-day collaboration with S. J. Perelman on an Aladdin musical for television. What’s odd is that Porter writes voluminously in the nineteen-fifties without ever mentioning the recordings of his work that would do more than anything to assure his immortality: the Nelson Riddle arrangements of his greatest songs, which Sinatra recorded in the decade beginning in 1953. “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “Just One of Those Things,” “Easy to Love,” “Anything Goes”—these are the high points of Porter interpretation. (Sinatra’s sadly obscure live recording of “Night and Day,” with the Red Norvo vibraphone trio in Australia, is perhaps the best of all.)

As Will Friedwald and James Kaplan have both pointed out, the Riddle-Sinatra “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” was as pivotal a recording in American music as “Like a Rolling Stone” would be a decade later. Before that, Porter is Astaire and elegance; after that, he swings and can become anything more. Although Porter’s biographer Robert Kimball recently assured an audience that Porter had admired Sinatra and befriended him—his slightly dubious evidence being that Sinatra took over Porter’s apartment in the Waldorf after his death, in 1964—that doesn’t show up in the letters, and one wonders if Porter was even fully aware of the Riddle-Sinatra records, beyond the royalties he collected. Yet Porter lives on in such recordings of single songs more than in the spasmodic revival of shows that often need heavy rewriting to exist onstage at all. His dramatic songs are all the dramatic revival we need.

All art aspires to the condition of music, Walter Pater wrote; within music itself, all music dreams of becoming another kind of music. Art songs dream of becoming pop songs and pop songs dream of becoming folk songs, too familiar to need an author. We hear Porter now without knowing that it’s Porter we’re hearing. Like Stephen Foster, he sublimated his suffering into his songs, until the songs are all we have, thereby achieving every artist’s dream, to cease to be a suffering self and become just one of those things we share. ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.”

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https://www.pix11.com/news/morning/next-generation-of-jazz-musicians-performs-at-lincoln-center

MANHATTAN — Witness history in the making at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Jack Rudin Jazz Championship as the next generation of jazz stars from the top university jazz programs compete in front of Wynton Marsalis and a panel of esteemed judges to win the performance of a lifetime.

Todd Stoll, Vice President of Education at Jazz at Lincoln Center, discusses the event, which takes place from Jan. 18 to 19.

For tickets, click here.

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Bill Fay Was a Hidden Gem. One Musician Made Finding Him a Mission.

By Grayson Haver Currin

Jan. 15, 2020

The English singer and songwriter, now 76, has made as many studio albums this decade as in the previous six combined after a producer named Joshua Henry tracked him down.

Bill Fay in 1970, when a Decca imprint released his self-titled debut album.Decca

Joshua Henry never understood why his father owned “Time of the Last Persecution,” an obscure 1971 psychedelic-folk album by the British songwriter Bill Fay.

Henry, a 40-year-old songwriter and producer devoted to old-school analog technology, grew up in the woods at the edge of California’s Sierra Nevada. His father, Jamie, wasn’t a record collector: He reluctantly served in Vietnam before becoming an antiwar activist, then spent his final four decades as a hardscrabble logger. “Last Persecution” was never issued in the United States, and barely caused a blip in England’s very crowded singer-songwriter scene of the early ’70s. After its release, Fay vanished from music.

All his life, Henry remained curious about the Fay LP, with a portrait of a disheveled singer on its stark black cover. When he was caring for his father, who was battling cancer, the album became a lifeline between the two men. They’d listen to Fay, dissecting his peculiar mix of apocalyptic vision and hopeful grit. After his father’s death in the summer of 2010, Henry began trying to make good on a fantasy they had shared: to find Fay and help him make his first record since 1971.

On Friday, Fay will release “Countless Branches,” his third album in the 10 years since Henry tracked him down and urged him to return to the studio. Fay — now 76 and married, almost all he’ll allow about his personal life — has made as many studio albums this decade as in the previous six combined. Like the once-lost rock star Rodriguez or Fay’s fellow British folk singer Vashti Bunyan, he has been given an unlikely second chance in the new century. No one seems more puzzled about that resurgence, or leery of its potential spotlight, than Fay himself.

“When Joshua told me about his dad and that he’d grown up listening to my music, it was real and profound,” Fay said by phone from his North London home. “It felt like the natural path I should follow. But it’s strange.”

Fay stumbled into music in the ’60s. As a college student in Wales, he began to forsake his electronics curriculum for writing songs featuring piano and harmonium. His demos found their way to Terry Noon, briefly Van Morrison’s drummer and a budding music impresario, who helped Fay secure a contract with an imprint of Decca Records and assemble a sharp studio band.

His self-titled 1970 debut featured idealistic odes to friendship, nature and peace swaddled in swooping strings and cascading horns. But only a year later, he’d turned to thorny rock for “Time of the Last Persecution.” Fueled by the horrors of the Vietnam War and the violence of the Jim Crow South, Fay railed against social corruption for 14 fractured songs, framing life as a revolving door of chances to get right with God. Dense and challenging, the album flopped.

Soon after Decca released “Last Persecution,” Fay was, as he says, “deleted.” Labels rejected subsequent demos and his father died from an aneurysm, leaving Fay as his mother’s longtime caretaker. During the next four decades, he raised a family and worked as a groundskeeper in a London park and a fish packer in a supermarket. Still, in a quiet corner of his home, he slowly built a meager recording rig with a cheap eight-track and a little keyboard, shaping full-band arrangements of songs he never intended for anyone to hear.

“I was disappointed,” Fay said, “but music was never my living. And I wasn’t like other people, who had become part of a scene. I went back to what I had always done, which is the gift and blessing of working on music in its own right.”

As a quarter-century passed, both of his albums morphed into critical favorites and collector’s items, fetching hundreds of dollars in record stores and obtaining cult status among indie-rock cognoscenti. In the mid-90s, the songwriter and producer Jim O’Rourke found Fay’s music while researching Ray Russell, the electrifying guitarist on both Decca albums. O’Rourke was captivated by “the very specific way it expressed depression,” he said recently from his home in Japan, and by its blend of Christian imagery and sometimes-outlandish orchestrations.

When a small British label reissued both albums on one CD in 1998, O’Rourke began telling his friends. As O’Rourke worked on Wilco’s “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” he played Fay’s debut for Jeff Tweedy. 

“I was astonished: How have I not heard this? How is this not something that is part of our DNA?” Tweedy said of the first time he listened to Fay, speaking from Wilco’s Chicago studio. “It’s music that sounds like it was designed in a laboratory for me to fall in love with.” 

Wilco began performing Fay’s beatific “Be Not So Fearful” in 2002. At a time when the band seemed to wrestle nightly with newfound popularity, the song’s muted optimism — “When you wake up, you will find you can run” — offered a reassuring benediction. In 2007, after years of Tweedy pleas, Fay stepped onto a stage for the first time in three decades to join Wilco at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire. 

O’Rourke also sent “Last Persecution” to David Tibet, whose wildly experimental group Current 93 had long used Christianity to consider the apocalypse, too. “My mouth opened, and I was thinking that this is my favorite singer-songwriter ever,” Tibet said in a phone interview. “I had never heard anything like it. I had never heard someone convey such profound feelings and power so simply.”

By the late ’90s, Tibet had become a veteran musical sleuth, tracking down forgotten singers he felt never got their due, including Tiny Tim and Shirley Collins. Despite rumors that Fay had absconded to a Christian cult, Tibet began looking for him; within a week, a British journalist connected him with a guitarist who had once played with Fay and became their intermediary. The two became fast friends.

In 2005, Tibet released “Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” an album Fay had made in the late ’70s with a local band but shelved. In early 2010, Tibet also issued a two-disc sampler called “Still Some Light,” culled from decades of Fay’s home recordings.

A year after its release, the liner notes in that set finally gave Henry the lead he needed. He asked Tibet to forward Fay a letter announcing his intention to help him make the record that the music industry had denied him for four decades. Fay just needed to show up and sing.

When Henry began his quest, he wasn’t sure Fay was even alive. When he found him, he learned Fay was hoarding a mountain of cassettes and Minidiscs containing songs he’d worked on a little each day for most of his life: “He started sending demo after demo of mind-blowing songs.”

Henry reached out to 50 labels, sharing his early findings and his vision of strings, background singers and guest stars for Fay’s comeback. The American indie-rock label Dead Oceans finally agreed to invest in Fay the way it would in an acclaimed young band prepared to make its big break. 

“There were some demos, and the songs were as great as ever,” said the label’s owner Phil Waldorf, who originally fell for those first Fay reissues while working at the now-defunct New York record shop Other Music. “But Bill isn’t a traditional touring artist. That allowed us to color between the lines and imagine what working with someone like this means.”

The gamble paid off: Fay’s first two albums for Dead Oceans, “Life Is People” in 2012 and “Who Is the Sender?” in 2015, were both profitable and effective follow-ups to the records he’d made 40 years earlier.

Fay was still writing about his distrust of governments and his belief in the goodness of people. Henry smartly dressed those songs in chamber-pop elegance. Tweedy lent his voice to a jangling tune called “This World,” while Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce added subtle harmonies to “Bring It On Lord,” a paean to valuing the days you have left. Fay’s voice wavered and rasped with age, the seams worn like proud wrinkles of wisdom.

And his songs, new and old, reached wider audiences. Fay made his only live television appearance since the ’70s on Jools Holland’s late-night BBC show in 2012. The New Pornographers singer A.C. Newman covered Fay for the soundtrack of “The Walking Dead,” while the electronic abstractionist Oneohtrix Point Never performed a prismatic interpretation of a somber “Life Is People” tune on tour.

If Fay’s first two albums for Dead Oceans were audacious reintroductions to his legacy, the new “Countless Branches” is his modest statement of being. Fay insists he’s no less appalled at the ways of the world now than he was during the Vietnam War, when he made “Time of the Last Persecution.” But the 10 pieces on “Countless Branches” feel like postcards from a lifetime spent overcoming such despair. “I’m filled with wonder, once again,” he repeats over sparkling piano during the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Filled With Wonder Once Again,” his cracking voice offering a reassurance that, one day, you will be, too. These are calming hymns for another chaotic time.

Despite his late-rising star, Fay has yet to return to the stage, though Tweedy invites him to every edition of Wilco’s music festival. Fay maintains he’s not a recluse; he just believes rehearsing and traveling require too much time. He’s still got lots of “song-finding” to do.

As Fay was recording “Countless Branches,” he signed a contract extension with Dead Oceans, a move that stunned Henry, who assumed he would recede into the shadows after “Life Is People.” But they now seem permanently linked as collaborators and friends, bound by love and trust neither expected. 

“After my parents died, I didn’t have much family left. Bill has been a big part of filling that void,” Henry said. “He’s like a father to me.”

While Henry is anxious to coax Fay into the studio with younger musicians he’s influenced like the War on Drugs or Ben Gibbard, Fay is in no hurry. 

“It’s best I spend my available time doing what I’ve always done,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life — finding songs in the corner of the room.”

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“If You’re in the Song, Keep on Playing”: An Interview With Pharoah Sanders

The legendary saxophonist on buying his first horn, playing with John Coltrane, and searching for the right sound.

Nathaniel Friedman

Jazz musicians have always placed a premium on “saying something.” Technique, training, and theory will only get you so far, and may even lead you in the wrong direction; what matters is the ability to hit on an emotion or an idea that feels at once familiar and revelatory—to speak a common language in a decidedly uncommon way.

From this standpoint, few musicians have said more than the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the son of a school-cafeteria cook and a city employee, Sanders moved to New York in 1962, at the height of jazz’s postwar avant-garde—also known as “free jazz” or “the new thing”—which was spawned by the late-fifties experiments of the saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the pianist Cecil Taylor. Sanders’s début album, recorded in 1964 for the ESP label, garnered little attention, but his playing caught the ear of John Coltrane. Coltrane invited Sanders to join his band in 1965. The following year, Impulse!, the label that had been exhaustively documenting Coltrane’s evolution, gave Sanders another chance to record as a leader. The result was the surging and expansive “Tauhid,” an album that positioned Sanders as both Coltrane’s foremost disciple and an artist with ideas of his own.

Coltrane died in 1967, and Sanders recorded some with his widow, Alice Coltrane, a multi-instrumentalist and composer, before returning to the studio for Impulse! two years later, with his own group. The resulting album, “Karma,” set the template for a remarkable five-year run. While remaining as fiery as ever, Sanders had developed an interest in soaring, magisterial melodies, and the rhythms of his recordings, while dense and multi-layered, often hewed toward a steady groove. He also incorporated unexpected elements: non-Western instruments, yodelling by the sui generis vocalist Leon Thomas. As the title of “Karma” suggests, Sanders, like Coltrane, felt that music had a spiritual dimension. “The whole musical persona of Pharoah Sanders is of a consciousness in conscious search of a higher consciousness,” Amiri Baraka later wrote.

Subsequent Impulse! releases, such as “Jewels of Thought,” “Thembi,” and “Black Unity,” extended a musical quest that has now, in one form of another, lasted more than fifty years. But for someone who has said so much through music, Sanders has said very little to the press, doing only a handful of interviews in the course of his career. I spoke with Sanders earlier this fall, in Los Angeles, where he had just celebrated his seventy-ninth birthday by playing two shows in the area. Sanders still projects a distinctly Southern brand of soft-spokenness, one that’s equal parts humility and aversion to fuss. Although he is an acknowledged master who has been honored at the Kennedy Center, he speaks of himself—and seems to sincerely regard himself—as just another working musician trying to make a living.

We talked about his beginnings as a musician, his approach to recording over the years, and his collaborations with jazz legends. But Sanders was more inclined to reflect on the challenge of finding a good reed than to dilate on his legacy. What really mattered, it seemed, was his feeling that he could never get it right. Over the course of the conversation, it became clear that he wasn’t being compulsively hard on himself or willfully oblivious. Rather, he was still searching, possibly for something that he knew he would never find.

The interview has been edited and condensed.

You just had your seventy-ninth birthday—happy birthday!

Thank you.

What keeps you going, musically? Why are you still out there touring?

Well, I still try to make a living. I haven’t retired. I’m not working that much, but, you know, jobs come through.

What are you trying to accomplish artistically at this point?

Right now, I don’t even know myself!

Your sets these days touch on all the different things you’ve explored in your career. I saw you play in Portland earlier this year, and you played some standards and ballads as well older, more open-ended material, like “The Creator Has a Master Plan,”¹ from “Karma.”

I just play whatever I feel like playing. It’s hard to keep a band together these days, so I never know most of the time who’s going to be in the band. Whoever I decide to use, if I can use them, well, that’s it!

Let’s go back to the beginning. Before you took up the saxophone, you played the clarinet in church?

I started playing drums first.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Then I wanted to play clarinet. I went to church every Sunday, and there was this memo up in church that someone had a metal clarinet. That person just passed away maybe a few days ago. He was about ninety-three or ninety-four. That’s how I got my first instrument. Seventeen dollars!

When did you switch to saxophone?

Well, in high school I was always trying to figure out what I wanted to do as a career. What I really wanted to do was play the saxophone—that was one of the instruments that I really loved. I started playing the alto. It’s similar to the clarinet—if you can play the clarinet, you can play the saxophone.

Why did you switch to tenor from alto? What did you like about the sound?

Tenor was the most popular instrument at that time to get work. I would rent the school saxophone. You could rent it every day if you wanted to. It wasn’t a great horn. It was sort of beat-up and out of condition. I never owned a saxophone until I finished high school and went to Oakland, California. I had a clarinet, and so I traded that for a new silver tenor saxophone, and that got me started playing the tenor. The minute I bought it, I wanted an older horn, so I traded my new horn for an older model.

I read that you went to Oakland because you were studying art and you were going to go to art school.

I was painting all the time, pictures. I got into music very late. I used to do all that kind of work.

Have you painted at all since then?

No, I haven’t done anything for many, many years. I’ve wanted to go back into it, but I just haven’t.

After just a couple of years in Oakland, you moved to New York. Had you decided to focus exclusively on music?

I had to get it all together. I didn’t know enough about lots of things—basic things. I knew I needed to get some studying in, in order to get into playing saxophone, because I wanted to play jazz. So I had to cut out a lot of activities that I was doing and spend more time practicing scales and stuff like that.

Is it true that you were homeless when you first moved to the city?

I didn’t have nowhere to stay. Everybody was talking about, “You should go to New York.” They said, “That’s the place to go!” So that’s the reason I went to New York. I hitchhiked a ride to New York.

What year was this?

1962.

So, when you get there, the avant-garde—or whatever you want to call it—is in full swing. It’s been three years since Ornette Coleman’s residency² at the Five Spot.³ Sun Ra has moved the Arkestra⁴ from Chicago to New York. Were you following all of this?

I didn’t know what was going on. I was trying to survive some kind of way. I used to work a few jobs here and there, earn five dollars, buy some food, buy some pizza. I had no money at all. I used to give blood and make fifteen dollars or ten dollars or whatever. I had to keep eating something.

But you managed to establish yourself as a musician.

I always wanted to work with my own band, so I got some guys together and started working down in New York, in Greenwich Village. I could pick up a few little weekend jobs. You had to do something to survive.

Who was in that band with you, your first band?

I would ask around for some musicians, and we played—I didn’t even hardly know their names.

Was Billy Higgins⁵ in that band? I read that you two knew each other—and that he was homeless, too.

Billy Higgins, he would come around in that location a lot, in the Village. I met him, and I heard him play. On occasion, we kind of talked a little bit about the music, and I found out how great he was. I started listening to some of his recordings. Like I said, all the time, I was still trying to find some type of job or work—it didn’t matter whether it was playing music or whatever it was. There was one time I got a job being a chef, cooking, in order to survive.

You started working with the Arkestra in 1964, and then, in September, 1965, you joined Coltrane’s band.⁶ That was a lot of people’s first exposure to you. Do you know why he chose you?

I don’t even know the reason myself. I don’t feel like he needed me or another horn. I think he just felt like he was going to do something different.

What was it like to work with him? There’s an idea of him as this saint-like figure.

His whole demeanor reminded me of a minister. He didn’t act like a lot of musicians that I’ve met in my life. John, he was always extremely quiet. He didn’t say anything unless you asked him something. I never asked him anything about music.

Really?

Never.

But he was making a conscious choice to work with younger musicians.

He always had some kind of a way of looking to the future, like a kaleidoscope. He saw himself playing something different. And it seemed like he wanted to get to that level of playing—I don’t know if it was a dream that came to him, but that’s what he wanted to do. I couldn’t figure out why he wanted me to play with him, because I didn’t feel like, at the time, that I was ready to play with John Coltrane. Being around him was almost, like, “Well, what do you want me to do? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

He always told me, “Play.” That’s what I did.

What was your relationship with him like?

I loved being around him because I don’t talk that much, either. It was just good vibes between us both. We were just very quiet. All the time that I’d been listening to John, I’m hearing something else, just being around him. He would never start some kind of conversation—he would say something, but it wouldn’t last that long. He never would elaborate, or go deep into it. He said a few words, and that was it.

Was he funny at all? Did he ever joke around?

He had a sense of humor about him, I think. One time, Jimmy Cobb was playing with him, and his stick got loose, and it went across to John and hit him, or something. John said, “Yeah, he’s just trying to get back at me.”

His sense of humor was in his music. Sometimes he’d remind me of Monk.⁷John would play things Monk would play, but it was a little bit different, faster. I’d turn around and look and say, “Oh. O.K.”

Monk’s music is definitely humorous, but I don’t think many people hear that in Coltrane.

He got a lot of stuff from being around Monk. He didn’t sound like Monk, but he understood the humor.

After John passed away, you continued recording with Alice Coltrane.⁸

You know, her playing was amazing. I loved what she was doing. But I always felt like what I was doing wasn’t good enough. Maybe I was playing a little bit more dominant than what she wanted—she seemed more intellectual than I was. But I tried to play something close to the concept that she was doing.

At one point, I had told her, “I don’t know if you like the way I’m playing or not. I don’t know whether this fits, or what.” She said, “You’re doing O.K. Just keep on playing. Keep on blowing.”

Around this time you also start leading your own bands, and you start recording for Impulse! as a leader. Did you feel like you knew what you were doing then?

No, I don’t think I was really ready. But I had to go on anyway, and study while I was trying to get it all together. I knew I had to be better than what I was. I had to keep moving. I learned a lot from John. I remember I used to talk to Philly Joe Jones.⁹ I talked to a lot of different people.

On those Impulse! records, you’re experimenting a lot with non-Western instruments, finding ways to use vocals in a freer context, and getting into more groove-oriented rhythms. Were you thinking through things in advance or just figuring them out in the studio?

We just worked it out while we was there. That kind of spontaneous move.

You started working with some musicians who people didn’t know well at the time, like Leon Thomas,¹⁰ Lonnie Liston Smith,¹¹ Sonny Sharrock.¹²What were you looking for when you heard them?

I was looking for musicians who played with lots of energy. I wanted to be able to play that way myself. In order to do that, I had to find musicians to work with who had that kind of energy.

You were making incredibly intense music during this period, on albums like “Jewels of Thought” and “Thembi.” Was that just where your head was at that time—constantly in a kind of heightened state?

I don’t know. I was still trying to reach for something, I didn’t know what.

Today people call this music “spiritual jazz.” But it wasn’t like anyone sat down at a table and said, “Let’s invent this whole new kind of music.”

It just happened. That’s the way I look at it. It just happened. I was never satisfied with my playing, for a long, long time. Still sort of have problems like that.

Still? Do you feel like you’ve ever had a moment, or a record, where you’ve been, like, “I got this one right”?

No.

Really?

I used to hear other bands, other groups, when they were making a recording. And a lot of musicians I’d hear would be working on one song maybe for, could be a week, or a few weeks. Make sure everything is right.

You, on the other hand, were recording two or three albums a year with Impulse! Was that how often the label wanted you in the studio?

Well, they wanted a certain number of records a year, being signed with somebody. The thing you don’t want to do is make them too close together, playing the same way as you were before. You’ve got to do something fresh. Some people like to wait for that kind of thing to happen.

But that’s not how you approached it.

I just felt like going in there and doing what I wanted to do.

Would the label give you any direction, or were they hands-off?

They tried to let you know how many songs to play. I just kind of ignored it. Sometimes, I would just play one tune for the whole side. I just kept on playing, like it was a suite. Looking from one thing to another. If you’re in the song, keep on playing.

Did you rehearse?

No, we never rehearsed.

Did you ever do more than one take?

Maybe on a few things we did, something where I didn’t really like the way I first got started up and started out playing. But whenever I heard it back, I kind of liked it, so I said, “Well, I should have kept it.” Anyways, it’s too late now.

It kind of taught me something else. It made me think, Why do I have to do it this way? Let’s keep on playing until it all comes together. That’s what we did. That’s what I always do. You know, try to keep on creating.

You’ve mentioned several times now having not liked how your playing sounded—this seems tied into the idea of your always searching for something new. Is there any recording where you’re happy with your sound?

I haven’t made it yet. Sometimes on my horn, a couple of notes, I’m feeling satisfied with it, but the rest of the notes just is not sounding right. So I’m still working on that.

I have a problem with finding the right reeds, and the right mouthpiece, the right horns. I used to buy boxes of reeds, and if they don’t play right I’d just throw them right on the floor, put them in the trash. Maybe a box of threes, or a box of fours. They never sound the same.

Do you think most musicians think this way? Are you all just perfectionists?

I don’t know. I know when I listen to other musicians, they sound beautiful to me. When I hear myself playing, I sound like… They sound beautiful. I just wonder, what are they all using?

What do you listen to these days?

I haven’t been listening to anybody.

Not even older stuff?

I haven’t been listening to anything.

I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t. I listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.

Have you always been listening for sounds like that?

I’ve always been like that, especially when I was small. I used to love hearing old car doors squeaking…. Maybe it’s something you’re really into, then maybe you’ll get a sound like that. I just wondered, Would that be a good sound?

Sometimes, when I’m playing, I want to do something, but I feel like, if I did, it wouldn’t sound right. So I’m always trying to make something that might sound bad sound beautiful in some way. I’m a person who just starts playing anything I want to play, and make it turn out to be maybe some beautiful music.

When you were first in the public eye, with Coltrane, people didn’t get that.

I don’t know if I got it myself.

Do you go back and listen to your recordings?

Yeah, I look at them sometime. I’ll change it up if I’ve been playing something that I’ve maybe played before.

The goal is to never repeat yourself?

I try not to, but it seems like I do at times. Then I stop playing and catch myself and say, “Let me try something else.” It’s almost like I play one idea and then I just try to look at it, like, “O.K., I’m going to try to see if I can play it backward.”

People still associate you with the kind of music you were making in the sixties and seventies. But over the years you started doing a lot more traditional playing.

Well, I was trying to do a lot of things—like ballads. I was playing a lot of those before I came to New York, before I started recording. Maybe I just kind of slowed down a little bit. A whole lot.

What are your favorite ballads to play?

I like “Berkeley Square.”¹³ I feel like I haven’t played enough on it. Every time I play it, I try to play something different.

It makes me think of Coltrane’s “Ballads.” People were surprised by that record, because they didn’t think of him as that kind of player.

John always loved to play ballads. He played some ballads when I was working with him, when he kind of opened up more freely. On some jobs I did with him, he played a ballad every now and then. Then he got back in his spaceship and took off again.

That’s where he was. You never knew what he was going to do next until he did it. He just started playing himself, and we all just start coming in. Whatever time we felt like we were needed, we came in.

Do you still feel like that? Like you have no idea where you’re headed and are just going to see where the music takes you?

A lot of time I don’t know what I want to play. So I just start playing, and try to make it right, and make it join to some other kind of feeling in the music. Like, I play one note, maybe that one note might mean love. And then another note might mean something else. Keep on going like that until it develops into—maybe something beautiful.

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Adela Holzer, Whose Fall From Grace Was Theatrical, Is Dead

By Anita Gates

Jan. 8, 2020

She went from being “Broadway’s hottest producer” to “one of the cleverest and most successful white-collar criminals in the history of this state.”

The Broadway producer Adela Holzer at her arraignment on fraud charges in Manhattan Criminal Court in 1989.The New York Times

In 1975, in the dining room of her East 72nd Street townhouse, Adela Holzer was interviewed by a reporter for The New York Times, who later declared her “Broadway’s hottest producer.” 

The same year, People magazine described her as “a strong-willed 41-year-old Spanish-born redhead” (the age was quite a bit off) who “has what it takes — money, taste and, perhaps most important, a willingness to back new plays to the hilt, take a bath and still try again.”

The theater world was smitten. At a time when almost all producers were men, Ms. Holzer, a shipping magnate’s glamorous, self-possessed European wife, had two hits on Broadway: “All Over Town,” a farce by Murray Schisgal about a psychiatrist, directed by Dustin Hoffman, and “The Ritz,” Terrence McNally’s bathhouse comedy, which brought Rita Moreno a Tony Award. Ms. Holzer was also a producer of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s latest import, “Sherlock Holmes.” 

Determined and confident about working only on worthy productions, she told The Times, “I have three college degrees, and I know if something is good.”

Two years later, Ms. Holzer was bankrupt. Two years after that, she was in prison, convicted of seven counts of grand larceny. 

Over the next three decades, she spent a total of 14 years behind bars for schemes that involved European land deals, oil wells, international car dealerships, immigration scams and an imaginary marriage to a Rockefeller. 

Ms. Holzer died on Sept. 1 in Boca Raton, Fla. She was somewhere between 90 and 95. The death, which was not reported at the time, was confirmed this week by her son Carlos Castresana, with whom she had lived in a suburb of Fort Lauderdale.

The Wall Street Journal once compared Ms. Holzer to Jay Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fictional social climber — mysterious, elegant and doomed. In 1979, a writer for The Washington Post had another author in mind. 

“Adela Holzer might have sprung from a Harold Robbins novel,” he observed. “There is simply no other way to explain her.”

Ms. Holzer with Dustin Hoffman in 1974. She was a producer of “All Over Town,” a farce by Murray Schisgal, which Mr. Hoffman directed.John Soto/The New York Times

In the same article, Mark Tepper, who prosecuted Ms. Holzer’s 1979 case as an assistant New York attorney general, called her “one of the cleverest and most successful white-collar criminals in the history of this state.”

Ms. Holzer’s theater career began when she invested in the Broadway production of “Hair,” the blazingly original counterculture musical that ran for four years after its move from an Off Broadway theater in 1968. Magazine and newspaper articles recounted her good fortune, turning a $57,000 investment into more than $2 million. New York magazine later reported that she had put in only about $7,500 and earned $115,000 or so.

Whatever the exact numbers were, Ms. Holzer was inspired to do more theatrical investing. Her next shows included hits like “Lenny” and “Sleuth.” But she wanted to be a hands-on producer, not just a signer of checks. One of her first efforts, “Dude,” a 1972 musical by two of the creators of “Hair,” bombed with a vengeance, closing after 16 performances. But she persisted.

In 1975, she was riding high. Then she wasn’t. By the next spring, she had produced three new Broadway flops: The Scott Joplin opera “Treemonisha” held on for almost two months, but both “Truckload” and “Me Jack, You Jill” closed in previews. She followed those with “Something Old, Something New,”starring Hans Conried and the Yiddish theater star Molly Picon; it closed on opening night, Jan. 1, 1977.

At that point, theater was the least of Ms. Holzer’s problems. She had declared bankruptcy seven weeks earlier. She had been arrested on fraud charges over the summer and was free on $50,000 bail, awaiting the first of the three criminal trials that would shape the rest of her life.

The indictment, which finally came in 1979, was for a classic Ponzi scheme: paying her earliest victims “profits,” which were really just funds from her next group of investors, and so on. One of those early investors was Jeffrey Picower, who was later implicated in the Bernie Madoff scandal, a much larger Ponzi scheme.

Ms. Holzer was offering shares not in theater productions but in a Toyota dealership in Indonesia and real estate in Spain. At the time, she insisted that she could have cleared things up if she had been allowed to travel to Indonesia. (Her passport had been taken away.)

Ms. Holzer served two years (1981-83) in state prison. Her lawyer was Roy Cohn.

In the late 1980s, she attempted a comeback with “Senator Joe,” a pop opera about Joseph McCarthy. (Mr. Cohn had been his right-hand man in pursuing suspected Communists in government.) But the show never opened, partly because of financial problems. 

She was soon arrested again, on grand larceny charges. It was revealed that she had told numerous associates that their investments — in oil and mineral deals — had been guaranteed by the banker David Rockefeller, to whom she claimed to be secretly married. That lie was bolstered by at least one fake marriage license and by a framed silver photo of him at her bedside. It was later reported that the photo had been clipped from a magazine.

When detectives approached her on East 43rd Street to make the arrest, she ran and had to be caught and pinned on a car hood to be handcuffed. She thought the three detectives were muggers, she said later.

As part of a plea deal, she acknowledged guilt on one count of larceny and was sentenced to four to eight years. She served four (1990-94).

Things had changed in 2001, when she was arrested yet again, this time charged with 39 counts of fraud. At the time, she was using a different surname, Rosian — she was living with a man named Vladimir Rosian on the Upper West Side — and the stakes were much lower. She had been charging immigrants $2,000 to $2,700 each, falsely telling them that she had influence on immigration legislation and could help them gain permanent resident status.

This time she was sentenced to nine to 18 years. When she was released in June 2010, she was in her 80s.

Even behind bars, Ms. Holzer sought the spotlight. In 1981 she acted as a spokeswoman for her cell-block neighbor Jean Harris, who was serving a minimum of 15 years for the murder of her lover, Herman Tarnower, known as the Scarsdale diet doctor. After a review of a book criticizing Ms. Harris appeared in The Times, Ms. Holzer wrote a letter to the editor vouching for Ms. Harris’s character.

Ms. Holzer’s resistance to truth telling apparently knew no boundaries. “If she told me the sun was shining, I’d go out to look — and I’d take an umbrella,” Michael Alpert, who had been her theatrical public relations representative, told Vanity Fair in 1991.

She was born Adela Sánchez (her middle name may have been María; she used it in more than one alias) in Madrid on Dec. 14 — possibly in 1928, although her death certificate said 1923. As New York magazine reported in 1989, her father, Felipe, was an engineer, not a rich industrialist, as she had told her new American friends. Her mother, Beatriz, was not a member of the Guinness brewing family, as Ms. Holzer had claimed.

Ms. Holzer always said that she arrived in the United States in 1954, alone and pregnant, escaping an early marriage, and that was true. Even the details, about having arrived on the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth and traveling first class, are documented. (According to Cunard’s records, she was born in 1926.) The part she didn’t mention was that the marriage — to Juan Castresana, an insurance company executive — had already lasted nine years, and that she was leaving her first three sons behind.

The story she told journalists about her early years in New York was that she had worked as an interpreter at the United Nations and taught Spanish literature at Columbia University, but no records of those jobs could be found. She later began dabbling in commodities — or so she said.

In 1955, according to The Washington Post, she was charged with grand larceny for forging a Spanish notary stamp on a $3,000 note. In 1963, according to Vanity Fair, she was arrested after offering sex to an undercover police officer for $25. The charges were dismissed in both cases.

That was after her second marriage (believed to have begun in 1957), to Walter Jan Duschinsky, a Czech physicist, with whom she had a son. She was widowed in 1961, when he died in an automobile accident. In 1968 she married Peter A. Holzer, president of his family’s shipping business. They divorced in 1979, the year of her first trial.

In addition to her son Mr. Castresana, her survivors include another son, Arnim Holzer.

“I think people care more for me than I care for them,” Ms. Holzer said matter-of-factly during the Vanity Fair interview. “People say I’m cold. I don’t think I’m cold.” She just didn’t let herself “get too close to people,” she said.

Ms. Holzer insisted that she never held grudges and that she had developed thick skin after her many difficulties. Her public behavior suggested otherwise, but it did evolve.

In 1979, at the end of her first trial, reporters mentioned that she was in tears as she was led away. In 2002, at the end of her third trial, The Associated Press reported that as Ms. Holzer left the courtroom she had one final message for the prosecutor: 

“I’ll see you dead, like me.” 

Jack Begg contributed research.

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