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Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/don-friedman-versatile-jazz-pianist-dies-at-81.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81

By NATE CHINEN

Don Friedman, a versatile pianist who moved easily between the modern-jazz mainstream and the more volatile jazz avant-garde, died on June 30 at his home in the Bronx. He was 81.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Marilyn, said.

Mr. Friedman had a crisp, fluid technique and an adventurous approach to harmony, which made him a desirable sideman over a career that lasted more than 60 years. He worked for decades with the trumpeter Clark Terry, a popular emblem of swinging ebullience (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html) , and also commingled with pioneers of free jazz like the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

During the 1960s, when modern jazz was undergoing a seismic upheaval largely instigated by Coleman, Mr. Friedman darted back and forth across the supposed fault line. He played on albums by the trumpeter Booker Little, notably “Out Front,” a landmark of progressive postbop featuring Max Roach on drums and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. He also toured with the uncompromising reed player and composer Jimmy Giuffre (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/arts/music/jimmy-giuffres-music-finds-new-appreciation.html) .

But he also freelanced with jazz traditionalists like the cornetist Bobby Hackett and toured with a popular Latin-jazz group led by the flutist Herbie Mann. In 1964 he appeared on “Discovery!,” the debut album by the tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd.

In an email, Mr. Lloyd praised Mr. Friedman as “a great sage of beauty and grace” with “a modern, lyrical style.”
Mr. Friedman was a prolific solo artist, if relatively unheralded except in Japan, where he had a substantial and loyal following. Several of his early albums received five-star reviews (the magazine’s highest honor) from DownBeat, which also anointed him a New Star in its annual critics’ poll. But the later name for that honor, Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, would be much more apt in describing Mr. Friedman’s career as a leader.

Donald Ernest Friedman was born on May 4, 1935, in San Francisco. His parents, both immigrants — his father, Edward, from Lithuania, and his mother, the former Alma Loew, from Germany — encouraged his interest in classical piano, which he began studying at age 4. When he was 15, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he discovered jazz and quickly began playing it, initially with a style derived from the bebop paragon Bud Powell.
Some of Mr. Friedman’s earliest work came with West Coast jazz stalwarts like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the saxophonist Buddy Collette. He first played in New York in 1956, with the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, and moved there two years later. His debut album, released in 1961 on the Riverside label, was “A Day in the City,” featuring a suite inspired by his brief studies in composition at Los Angeles City College.

Mr. Friedman formed a close musical alliance with the Hungarian jazz guitarist Attila Zoller, featuring him on a pair of critically hailed albums influenced by free improvisation, “Dreams and Explorations” (1964) and “Metamorphosis” (1966).

In addition to his wife, Mr. Friedman is survived by a daughter, Lynn Friedman; a stepson, Rory Friedman; and three grandchildren. Three previous marriages ended in divorce.

In recent years Mr. Friedman worked mainly as a leader, in a crisply swinging style. Among his notable albums are “Piano Works VI: From A to Z,” a solo tribute to Mr. Zoller (2006), and “Waltz for Marilyn,” featuring the guitarist Peter Bernstein (2007). “Nite Lites,” his final trio album, was released last year.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/don-friedman-versatile-jazz-pianist-dies-at-81.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81

By NATE CHINEN

Don Friedman, a versatile pianist who moved easily between the modern-jazz mainstream and the more volatile jazz avant-garde, died on June 30 at his home in the Bronx. He was 81.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Marilyn, said.

Mr. Friedman had a crisp, fluid technique and an adventurous approach to harmony, which made him a desirable sideman over a career that lasted more than 60 years. He worked for decades with the trumpeter Clark Terry, a popular emblem of swinging ebullience (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html) , and also commingled with pioneers of free jazz like the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

During the 1960s, when modern jazz was undergoing a seismic upheaval largely instigated by Coleman, Mr. Friedman darted back and forth across the supposed fault line. He played on albums by the trumpeter Booker Little, notably “Out Front,” a landmark of progressive postbop featuring Max Roach on drums and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. He also toured with the uncompromising reed player and composer Jimmy Giuffre (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/arts/music/jimmy-giuffres-music-finds-new-appreciation.html) .

But he also freelanced with jazz traditionalists like the cornetist Bobby Hackett and toured with a popular Latin-jazz group led by the flutist Herbie Mann. In 1964 he appeared on “Discovery!,” the debut album by the tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd.

In an email, Mr. Lloyd praised Mr. Friedman as “a great sage of beauty and grace” with “a modern, lyrical style.”
Mr. Friedman was a prolific solo artist, if relatively unheralded except in Japan, where he had a substantial and loyal following. Several of his early albums received five-star reviews (the magazine’s highest honor) from DownBeat, which also anointed him a New Star in its annual critics’ poll. But the later name for that honor, Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, would be much more apt in describing Mr. Friedman’s career as a leader.

Donald Ernest Friedman was born on May 4, 1935, in San Francisco. His parents, both immigrants — his father, Edward, from Lithuania, and his mother, the former Alma Loew, from Germany — encouraged his interest in classical piano, which he began studying at age 4. When he was 15, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he discovered jazz and quickly began playing it, initially with a style derived from the bebop paragon Bud Powell.
Some of Mr. Friedman’s earliest work came with West Coast jazz stalwarts like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the saxophonist Buddy Collette. He first played in New York in 1956, with the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, and moved there two years later. His debut album, released in 1961 on the Riverside label, was “A Day in the City,” featuring a suite inspired by his brief studies in composition at Los Angeles City College.

Mr. Friedman formed a close musical alliance with the Hungarian jazz guitarist Attila Zoller, featuring him on a pair of critically hailed albums influenced by free improvisation, “Dreams and Explorations” (1964) and “Metamorphosis” (1966).

In addition to his wife, Mr. Friedman is survived by a daughter, Lynn Friedman; a stepson, Rory Friedman; and three grandchildren. Three previous marriages ended in divorce.

In recent years Mr. Friedman worked mainly as a leader, in a crisply swinging style. Among his notable albums are “Piano Works VI: From A to Z,” a solo tribute to Mr. Zoller (2006), and “Waltz for Marilyn,” featuring the guitarist Peter Bernstein (2007). “Nite Lites,” his final trio album, was released last year.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/don-friedman-versatile-jazz-pianist-dies-at-81.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81

By NATE CHINEN

Don Friedman, a versatile pianist who moved easily between the modern-jazz mainstream and the more volatile jazz avant-garde, died on June 30 at his home in the Bronx. He was 81.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Marilyn, said.

Mr. Friedman had a crisp, fluid technique and an adventurous approach to harmony, which made him a desirable sideman over a career that lasted more than 60 years. He worked for decades with the trumpeter Clark Terry, a popular emblem of swinging ebullience (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html) , and also commingled with pioneers of free jazz like the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

During the 1960s, when modern jazz was undergoing a seismic upheaval largely instigated by Coleman, Mr. Friedman darted back and forth across the supposed fault line. He played on albums by the trumpeter Booker Little, notably “Out Front,” a landmark of progressive postbop featuring Max Roach on drums and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. He also toured with the uncompromising reed player and composer Jimmy Giuffre (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/arts/music/jimmy-giuffres-music-finds-new-appreciation.html) .

But he also freelanced with jazz traditionalists like the cornetist Bobby Hackett and toured with a popular Latin-jazz group led by the flutist Herbie Mann. In 1964 he appeared on “Discovery!,” the debut album by the tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd.

In an email, Mr. Lloyd praised Mr. Friedman as “a great sage of beauty and grace” with “a modern, lyrical style.”
Mr. Friedman was a prolific solo artist, if relatively unheralded except in Japan, where he had a substantial and loyal following. Several of his early albums received five-star reviews (the magazine’s highest honor) from DownBeat, which also anointed him a New Star in its annual critics’ poll. But the later name for that honor, Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, would be much more apt in describing Mr. Friedman’s career as a leader.

Donald Ernest Friedman was born on May 4, 1935, in San Francisco. His parents, both immigrants — his father, Edward, from Lithuania, and his mother, the former Alma Loew, from Germany — encouraged his interest in classical piano, which he began studying at age 4. When he was 15, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he discovered jazz and quickly began playing it, initially with a style derived from the bebop paragon Bud Powell.
Some of Mr. Friedman’s earliest work came with West Coast jazz stalwarts like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the saxophonist Buddy Collette. He first played in New York in 1956, with the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, and moved there two years later. His debut album, released in 1961 on the Riverside label, was “A Day in the City,” featuring a suite inspired by his brief studies in composition at Los Angeles City College.

Mr. Friedman formed a close musical alliance with the Hungarian jazz guitarist Attila Zoller, featuring him on a pair of critically hailed albums influenced by free improvisation, “Dreams and Explorations” (1964) and “Metamorphosis” (1966).

In addition to his wife, Mr. Friedman is survived by a daughter, Lynn Friedman; a stepson, Rory Friedman; and three grandchildren. Three previous marriages ended in divorce.

In recent years Mr. Friedman worked mainly as a leader, in a crisply swinging style. Among his notable albums are “Piano Works VI: From A to Z,” a solo tribute to Mr. Zoller (2006), and “Waltz for Marilyn,” featuring the guitarist Peter Bernstein (2007). “Nite Lites,” his final trio album, was released last year.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d3ae1513a4) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d3ae1513a4&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/don-friedman-versatile-jazz-pianist-dies-at-81.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Don Friedman, Versatile Jazz Pianist, Dies at 81

By NATE CHINEN

Don Friedman, a versatile pianist who moved easily between the modern-jazz mainstream and the more volatile jazz avant-garde, died on June 30 at his home in the Bronx. He was 81.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, his wife, Marilyn, said.

Mr. Friedman had a crisp, fluid technique and an adventurous approach to harmony, which made him a desirable sideman over a career that lasted more than 60 years. He worked for decades with the trumpeter Clark Terry, a popular emblem of swinging ebullience (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/23/arts/music/clark-terry-influential-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-94.html) , and also commingled with pioneers of free jazz like the alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman.

During the 1960s, when modern jazz was undergoing a seismic upheaval largely instigated by Coleman, Mr. Friedman darted back and forth across the supposed fault line. He played on albums by the trumpeter Booker Little, notably “Out Front,” a landmark of progressive postbop featuring Max Roach on drums and Eric Dolphy on alto saxophone, flute and bass clarinet. He also toured with the uncompromising reed player and composer Jimmy Giuffre (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/arts/music/jimmy-giuffres-music-finds-new-appreciation.html) .

But he also freelanced with jazz traditionalists like the cornetist Bobby Hackett and toured with a popular Latin-jazz group led by the flutist Herbie Mann. In 1964 he appeared on “Discovery!,” the debut album by the tenor saxophonist and flutist Charles Lloyd.

In an email, Mr. Lloyd praised Mr. Friedman as “a great sage of beauty and grace” with “a modern, lyrical style.”
Mr. Friedman was a prolific solo artist, if relatively unheralded except in Japan, where he had a substantial and loyal following. Several of his early albums received five-star reviews (the magazine’s highest honor) from DownBeat, which also anointed him a New Star in its annual critics’ poll. But the later name for that honor, Talent Deserving Wider Recognition, would be much more apt in describing Mr. Friedman’s career as a leader.

Donald Ernest Friedman was born on May 4, 1935, in San Francisco. His parents, both immigrants — his father, Edward, from Lithuania, and his mother, the former Alma Loew, from Germany — encouraged his interest in classical piano, which he began studying at age 4. When he was 15, his family moved to Los Angeles, where he discovered jazz and quickly began playing it, initially with a style derived from the bebop paragon Bud Powell.
Some of Mr. Friedman’s earliest work came with West Coast jazz stalwarts like the trumpeter Shorty Rogers and the saxophonist Buddy Collette. He first played in New York in 1956, with the clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, and moved there two years later. His debut album, released in 1961 on the Riverside label, was “A Day in the City,” featuring a suite inspired by his brief studies in composition at Los Angeles City College.

Mr. Friedman formed a close musical alliance with the Hungarian jazz guitarist Attila Zoller, featuring him on a pair of critically hailed albums influenced by free improvisation, “Dreams and Explorations” (1964) and “Metamorphosis” (1966).

In addition to his wife, Mr. Friedman is survived by a daughter, Lynn Friedman; a stepson, Rory Friedman; and three grandchildren. Three previous marriages ended in divorce.

In recent years Mr. Friedman worked mainly as a leader, in a crisply swinging style. Among his notable albums are “Piano Works VI: From A to Z,” a solo tribute to Mr. Zoller (2006), and “Waltz for Marilyn,” featuring the guitarist Peter Bernstein (2007). “Nite Lites,” his final trio album, was released last year.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d3ae1513a4) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d3ae1513a4&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/review-barbara-carroll-sustains-a-profound-jazz-symbiosis.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis

Barbara Carroll, who has been performing since the late 1940s, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. Santiago Mejia/The New York Times

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Jazz may not be the ideal forum for conveying a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. But for Barbara Carroll, nicknamed the first lady of jazz piano, it is a kind of philosophical scripture that balances improvisation and playful invention with a classical sense of order. Her collaboration with her longtime bassist, Jay Leonhart, is a musical friendship that grows deeper and more touching as each year passes.

There are no shortcuts to this kind of artistic rapport, which suggests the marriage of a couple who know each other so well they can finish each other’s sentences. It allows them to play sophisticated games of follow-the-leader and to end musical sentences with simultaneous exclamations. At their friskiest they convey a pure, childlike pleasure.
Ms. Carroll (http://www.wbgo.org/internal/mediaplayer/?podcastID=1365) , who has been performing since the late 1940s, when she helped pioneer a spare, agile style of bebop, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. The songs of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk sit comfortably beside those of Cy Coleman and Stephen Sondheim. Her normally calm, demure deportment doesn’t preclude from swinging with a moderate pace. And at 91, Ms. Carroll plays with an impeccable technique in which harmonies burst into flower. In recent decades she has embraced singing in a parlando style that is witty, literate, discreetly sexy and at times heartbreakingly honest.

Saturday’s performance included an extended Ellington medley that demonstrated Ms. Carroll’s gift at stringing songs into streams of consciousness as fluid and changeable as the weather. In the slower numbers, she and Mr. Leonhart, 75, explored the spaces between phrases, building an emotional suspense that left you hanging on every syllable and vocal inflection.

An instrumental version of the great jazz ballad “Midnight Sun” was treated as the entranced contemplation of a spellbound dreamer gazing at shooting stars in the summer sky. Mr. Leonhart’s gently bowed bass served as an anchor for Ms. Carroll’s soaring and dipping pianism, which with its rich clustered harmonies and Ms. Carroll’s delicate touch suggested Debussy with a jazz pulse.

Most remarkable was her rendition of her latter-day signature song, the Sondheim ballad “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” which she played and sang with eyes closed. Watching this elegant woman with towering red hair and head held high was to be gently reminded of life’s deepest mysteries.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1091996612) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1091996612&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/review-barbara-carroll-sustains-a-profound-jazz-symbiosis.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis

Barbara Carroll, who has been performing since the late 1940s, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. Santiago Mejia/The New York Times

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Jazz may not be the ideal forum for conveying a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. But for Barbara Carroll, nicknamed the first lady of jazz piano, it is a kind of philosophical scripture that balances improvisation and playful invention with a classical sense of order. Her collaboration with her longtime bassist, Jay Leonhart, is a musical friendship that grows deeper and more touching as each year passes.

There are no shortcuts to this kind of artistic rapport, which suggests the marriage of a couple who know each other so well they can finish each other’s sentences. It allows them to play sophisticated games of follow-the-leader and to end musical sentences with simultaneous exclamations. At their friskiest they convey a pure, childlike pleasure.
Ms. Carroll (http://www.wbgo.org/internal/mediaplayer/?podcastID=1365) , who has been performing since the late 1940s, when she helped pioneer a spare, agile style of bebop, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. The songs of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk sit comfortably beside those of Cy Coleman and Stephen Sondheim. Her normally calm, demure deportment doesn’t preclude from swinging with a moderate pace. And at 91, Ms. Carroll plays with an impeccable technique in which harmonies burst into flower. In recent decades she has embraced singing in a parlando style that is witty, literate, discreetly sexy and at times heartbreakingly honest.

Saturday’s performance included an extended Ellington medley that demonstrated Ms. Carroll’s gift at stringing songs into streams of consciousness as fluid and changeable as the weather. In the slower numbers, she and Mr. Leonhart, 75, explored the spaces between phrases, building an emotional suspense that left you hanging on every syllable and vocal inflection.

An instrumental version of the great jazz ballad “Midnight Sun” was treated as the entranced contemplation of a spellbound dreamer gazing at shooting stars in the summer sky. Mr. Leonhart’s gently bowed bass served as an anchor for Ms. Carroll’s soaring and dipping pianism, which with its rich clustered harmonies and Ms. Carroll’s delicate touch suggested Debussy with a jazz pulse.

Most remarkable was her rendition of her latter-day signature song, the Sondheim ballad “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” which she played and sang with eyes closed. Watching this elegant woman with towering red hair and head held high was to be gently reminded of life’s deepest mysteries.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/review-barbara-carroll-sustains-a-profound-jazz-symbiosis.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis

Barbara Carroll, who has been performing since the late 1940s, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. Santiago Mejia/The New York Times

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Jazz may not be the ideal forum for conveying a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. But for Barbara Carroll, nicknamed the first lady of jazz piano, it is a kind of philosophical scripture that balances improvisation and playful invention with a classical sense of order. Her collaboration with her longtime bassist, Jay Leonhart, is a musical friendship that grows deeper and more touching as each year passes.

There are no shortcuts to this kind of artistic rapport, which suggests the marriage of a couple who know each other so well they can finish each other’s sentences. It allows them to play sophisticated games of follow-the-leader and to end musical sentences with simultaneous exclamations. At their friskiest they convey a pure, childlike pleasure.
Ms. Carroll (http://www.wbgo.org/internal/mediaplayer/?podcastID=1365) , who has been performing since the late 1940s, when she helped pioneer a spare, agile style of bebop, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. The songs of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk sit comfortably beside those of Cy Coleman and Stephen Sondheim. Her normally calm, demure deportment doesn’t preclude from swinging with a moderate pace. And at 91, Ms. Carroll plays with an impeccable technique in which harmonies burst into flower. In recent decades she has embraced singing in a parlando style that is witty, literate, discreetly sexy and at times heartbreakingly honest.

Saturday’s performance included an extended Ellington medley that demonstrated Ms. Carroll’s gift at stringing songs into streams of consciousness as fluid and changeable as the weather. In the slower numbers, she and Mr. Leonhart, 75, explored the spaces between phrases, building an emotional suspense that left you hanging on every syllable and vocal inflection.

An instrumental version of the great jazz ballad “Midnight Sun” was treated as the entranced contemplation of a spellbound dreamer gazing at shooting stars in the summer sky. Mr. Leonhart’s gently bowed bass served as an anchor for Ms. Carroll’s soaring and dipping pianism, which with its rich clustered harmonies and Ms. Carroll’s delicate touch suggested Debussy with a jazz pulse.

Most remarkable was her rendition of her latter-day signature song, the Sondheim ballad “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” which she played and sang with eyes closed. Watching this elegant woman with towering red hair and head held high was to be gently reminded of life’s deepest mysteries.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1091996612) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1091996612&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/arts/music/review-barbara-carroll-sustains-a-profound-jazz-symbiosis.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160707

Review: Barbara Carroll Sustains a Profound Jazz Symbiosis

Barbara Carroll, who has been performing since the late 1940s, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. Santiago Mejia/The New York Times

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

Jazz may not be the ideal forum for conveying a lifetime’s accumulated wisdom. But for Barbara Carroll, nicknamed the first lady of jazz piano, it is a kind of philosophical scripture that balances improvisation and playful invention with a classical sense of order. Her collaboration with her longtime bassist, Jay Leonhart, is a musical friendship that grows deeper and more touching as each year passes.

There are no shortcuts to this kind of artistic rapport, which suggests the marriage of a couple who know each other so well they can finish each other’s sentences. It allows them to play sophisticated games of follow-the-leader and to end musical sentences with simultaneous exclamations. At their friskiest they convey a pure, childlike pleasure.
Ms. Carroll (http://www.wbgo.org/internal/mediaplayer/?podcastID=1365) , who has been performing since the late 1940s, when she helped pioneer a spare, agile style of bebop, knows practically every jazz and popular standard in the repertory. The songs of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk sit comfortably beside those of Cy Coleman and Stephen Sondheim. Her normally calm, demure deportment doesn’t preclude from swinging with a moderate pace. And at 91, Ms. Carroll plays with an impeccable technique in which harmonies burst into flower. In recent decades she has embraced singing in a parlando style that is witty, literate, discreetly sexy and at times heartbreakingly honest.

Saturday’s performance included an extended Ellington medley that demonstrated Ms. Carroll’s gift at stringing songs into streams of consciousness as fluid and changeable as the weather. In the slower numbers, she and Mr. Leonhart, 75, explored the spaces between phrases, building an emotional suspense that left you hanging on every syllable and vocal inflection.

An instrumental version of the great jazz ballad “Midnight Sun” was treated as the entranced contemplation of a spellbound dreamer gazing at shooting stars in the summer sky. Mr. Leonhart’s gently bowed bass served as an anchor for Ms. Carroll’s soaring and dipping pianism, which with its rich clustered harmonies and Ms. Carroll’s delicate touch suggested Debussy with a jazz pulse.

Most remarkable was her rendition of her latter-day signature song, the Sondheim ballad “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” which she played and sang with eyes closed. Watching this elegant woman with towering red hair and head held high was to be gently reminded of life’s deepest mysteries.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1091996612) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1091996612&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz By PETER KEEPNEWS NY Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
2016-07-06T07:06:25-04:00 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
July 6, 2016 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
Was Louis Armstrong (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) the world’s most beloved entertainer, or was he the single most important musician in the history of jazz?
The answer is yes.
To millions, Armstrong, who died 45 years ago today, was the human ray of sunshine with the mile-wide smile, the gravelly voice and the peerless way with a song — the man whose joyous rendition of “Hello, Dolly!,” recorded when he was in his 60s, momentarily ended the Beatles’ three-month reign at the top of the singles chart.

An error occurred.

[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

To jazz aficionados, he was also something more: the trumpet virtuoso with the boundless musical imagination who almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to individual expression — the man whose playing on the remarkable Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SebmIELnZoQ) , recorded when he was in his 20s, virtually defined the art of the jazz solo.
Miles Davis said it was impossible to play anything on a horn that Armstrong hadn’t already played.
Dizzy Gillespie put it this way: “His style was equally copied by saxophonists, trumpet players, pianists and all of the instrumentalists who make up the jazz picture.”
The New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson wrote in 1971 that Armstrong was “the root source that moved jazz onto the path along which it has developed for more than 45 years.”
There was nothing in Armstrong’s early years to suggest that he was destined for greatness. Born into poverty in New Orleans, he sang on street corners as a child and studied music while confined to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys.
He learned fast. Before he was out of his teens, he was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene; a few years later he moved to Chicago, where he made the records that changed jazz history. In due time he became the first jazz superstar, embraced by the world for his bravura playing, his ebullient singing and his larger-than-life personality.
Louis Armstrong died at his home in Queens on July 6, 1971. His front-page Times obituary (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) noted that “he had observed his 71st birthday on Sunday,” just two days earlier. That this quintessential American success story was born on July 4, 1900, always seemed too perfect to be true. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t true: According to later research, he had actually been born on Aug. 4, 1901.
Call it poetic license. The date he (and everyone else) celebrated was, as the old saying goes, close enough for jazz.
Read the obituary “Louis Armstrong, Jazz Trumpeter and Singer, Dies” (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/07/07/79675134.html?pageNumber=1=1&rpm=true)
— PETER KEEPNEWS

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=5909b48b84) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=5909b48b84&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

References

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7N2wssse14

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz By PETER KEEPNEWS NY Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
2016-07-06T07:06:25-04:00 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
July 6, 2016 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
Was Louis Armstrong (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) the world’s most beloved entertainer, or was he the single most important musician in the history of jazz?
The answer is yes.
To millions, Armstrong, who died 45 years ago today, was the human ray of sunshine with the mile-wide smile, the gravelly voice and the peerless way with a song — the man whose joyous rendition of “Hello, Dolly!,” recorded when he was in his 60s, momentarily ended the Beatles’ three-month reign at the top of the singles chart.

An error occurred.

[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

To jazz aficionados, he was also something more: the trumpet virtuoso with the boundless musical imagination who almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to individual expression — the man whose playing on the remarkable Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SebmIELnZoQ) , recorded when he was in his 20s, virtually defined the art of the jazz solo.
Miles Davis said it was impossible to play anything on a horn that Armstrong hadn’t already played.
Dizzy Gillespie put it this way: “His style was equally copied by saxophonists, trumpet players, pianists and all of the instrumentalists who make up the jazz picture.”
The New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson wrote in 1971 that Armstrong was “the root source that moved jazz onto the path along which it has developed for more than 45 years.”
There was nothing in Armstrong’s early years to suggest that he was destined for greatness. Born into poverty in New Orleans, he sang on street corners as a child and studied music while confined to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys.
He learned fast. Before he was out of his teens, he was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene; a few years later he moved to Chicago, where he made the records that changed jazz history. In due time he became the first jazz superstar, embraced by the world for his bravura playing, his ebullient singing and his larger-than-life personality.
Louis Armstrong died at his home in Queens on July 6, 1971. His front-page Times obituary (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) noted that “he had observed his 71st birthday on Sunday,” just two days earlier. That this quintessential American success story was born on July 4, 1900, always seemed too perfect to be true. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t true: According to later research, he had actually been born on Aug. 4, 1901.
Call it poetic license. The date he (and everyone else) celebrated was, as the old saying goes, close enough for jazz.
Read the obituary “Louis Armstrong, Jazz Trumpeter and Singer, Dies” (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/07/07/79675134.html?pageNumber=1=1&rpm=true)
— PETER KEEPNEWS

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=5909b48b84) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=5909b48b84&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

References

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7N2wssse14

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz By PETER KEEPNEWS NY Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
2016-07-06T07:06:25-04:00 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
July 6, 2016 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
Was Louis Armstrong (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) the world’s most beloved entertainer, or was he the single most important musician in the history of jazz?
The answer is yes.
To millions, Armstrong, who died 45 years ago today, was the human ray of sunshine with the mile-wide smile, the gravelly voice and the peerless way with a song — the man whose joyous rendition of “Hello, Dolly!,” recorded when he was in his 60s, momentarily ended the Beatles’ three-month reign at the top of the singles chart.

An error occurred.

[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

To jazz aficionados, he was also something more: the trumpet virtuoso with the boundless musical imagination who almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to individual expression — the man whose playing on the remarkable Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SebmIELnZoQ) , recorded when he was in his 20s, virtually defined the art of the jazz solo.
Miles Davis said it was impossible to play anything on a horn that Armstrong hadn’t already played.
Dizzy Gillespie put it this way: “His style was equally copied by saxophonists, trumpet players, pianists and all of the instrumentalists who make up the jazz picture.”
The New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson wrote in 1971 that Armstrong was “the root source that moved jazz onto the path along which it has developed for more than 45 years.”
There was nothing in Armstrong’s early years to suggest that he was destined for greatness. Born into poverty in New Orleans, he sang on street corners as a child and studied music while confined to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys.
He learned fast. Before he was out of his teens, he was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene; a few years later he moved to Chicago, where he made the records that changed jazz history. In due time he became the first jazz superstar, embraced by the world for his bravura playing, his ebullient singing and his larger-than-life personality.
Louis Armstrong died at his home in Queens on July 6, 1971. His front-page Times obituary (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) noted that “he had observed his 71st birthday on Sunday,” just two days earlier. That this quintessential American success story was born on July 4, 1900, always seemed too perfect to be true. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t true: According to later research, he had actually been born on Aug. 4, 1901.
Call it poetic license. The date he (and everyone else) celebrated was, as the old saying goes, close enough for jazz.
Read the obituary “Louis Armstrong, Jazz Trumpeter and Singer, Dies” (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/07/07/79675134.html?pageNumber=1=1&rpm=true)
— PETER KEEPNEWS

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=5909b48b84) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=5909b48b84&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

References

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7N2wssse14

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz By PETER KEEPNEWS NY Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong

Louis Armstrong, the Entertainer Who Epitomized Jazz (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
2016-07-06T07:06:25-04:00 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
July 6, 2016 (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/obituaries/archives/louis-armstrong?module=ConversationPieces&region=Body&action=click&pgtype=article)
Was Louis Armstrong (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) the world’s most beloved entertainer, or was he the single most important musician in the history of jazz?
The answer is yes.
To millions, Armstrong, who died 45 years ago today, was the human ray of sunshine with the mile-wide smile, the gravelly voice and the peerless way with a song — the man whose joyous rendition of “Hello, Dolly!,” recorded when he was in his 60s, momentarily ended the Beatles’ three-month reign at the top of the singles chart.

An error occurred.

[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

To jazz aficionados, he was also something more: the trumpet virtuoso with the boundless musical imagination who almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of jazz from collective improvisation to individual expression — the man whose playing on the remarkable Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SebmIELnZoQ) , recorded when he was in his 20s, virtually defined the art of the jazz solo.
Miles Davis said it was impossible to play anything on a horn that Armstrong hadn’t already played.
Dizzy Gillespie put it this way: “His style was equally copied by saxophonists, trumpet players, pianists and all of the instrumentalists who make up the jazz picture.”
The New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson wrote in 1971 that Armstrong was “the root source that moved jazz onto the path along which it has developed for more than 45 years.”
There was nothing in Armstrong’s early years to suggest that he was destined for greatness. Born into poverty in New Orleans, he sang on street corners as a child and studied music while confined to the Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys.
He learned fast. Before he was out of his teens, he was a fixture on the New Orleans music scene; a few years later he moved to Chicago, where he made the records that changed jazz history. In due time he became the first jazz superstar, embraced by the world for his bravura playing, his ebullient singing and his larger-than-life personality.
Louis Armstrong died at his home in Queens on July 6, 1971. His front-page Times obituary (http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9806E6DA113FEF34BC4F53DFB166838A669EDE) noted that “he had observed his 71st birthday on Sunday,” just two days earlier. That this quintessential American success story was born on July 4, 1900, always seemed too perfect to be true. And, as it turned out, it wasn’t true: According to later research, he had actually been born on Aug. 4, 1901.
Call it poetic license. The date he (and everyone else) celebrated was, as the old saying goes, close enough for jazz.
Read the obituary “Louis Armstrong, Jazz Trumpeter and Singer, Dies” (http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1971/07/07/79675134.html?pageNumber=1=1&rpm=true)
— PETER KEEPNEWS

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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References

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7N2wssse14

Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered – The Daily Beast

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/03/jazz-legend-charlie-parker-s-mystery-music-uncovered.html

NEW TROVE07.03.16 12:15 AM ET
Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered

61 years after jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker died, a new album of hitherto unheard recordings is being released, and yet no one will say where they came from.

When new works by dead artists are discovered, the first question asked is, Where have they been hiding all these years? Perhaps a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank? Or maybe a warehouse in a broken down industrial neighborhood? Or did a lucky collector pick it up at a garage sale?

Last November, a lost cantata by Mozart came to light in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music—its origins long unrecognized because the composer’s name was written in a code. A few months earlier, a missing score by Stravinsky was discovered in a dusty pile of manuscripts, untouched for decades, in a storage area of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. If the room hadn’t been emptied for repairs, the music might never have been found.

So when the Verve label announced a few months ago the impending release of Unheard Bird, a double album of unreleased music by legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/01/31/the-stacks-charlie-parker-s-revolutionary-junkie-jazz-alchemy.html) , fans wondered where this music had been hiding in the 64 years since it was recorded.

After all, Verve had already released various “complete” sets of Parker’s music. Scholars have studied Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/09/23/what-made-charlie-parker-great-reviewing-stanley-crouch-s-biography-on-bird.html) , often called by his nickname Bird, and his recorded output with scrupulous care. Many biographies have been published and discographies compiled. Yet two hours of music—a significant addition to Parker’s legacy—shows up and, until recently, none of the experts even knew it existed!

I am happy to report that the music is outstanding, but the mystery remains. If there’s a story behind these tracks—and there must be, no?—Verve isn’t telling it.

Phil Schaap, a leading expert on Parker’s recording sessions, co-produced the release of this music. He is the perfect person for this project. When David Remnick wrote a profile of Schaap for The New Yorker in 2008, the article’s subhead was, “Thinking About Charlie Parker Every Day.” In the piece, Remnick compared Schaap’s interest in Bird to the obsessions of a “mad Talmudic scholar.”
Yet in his detailed liner notes to Unheard Bird, Schaap says little about the source of these finds, except to note that the music comes from the “camp”of Norman Granz, the founder of Verve who produced Bird’s work for the label. In a follow-up communication, Schaap tells me that he has had “no contact” with the party who discovered these tracks. Schaap didn’t even get access to the original recordings, but worked from digital transfers.

I will offer some personal speculations, for what they are worth. I’ve heard rumors that a former business associate (not a family member) of Norman Granz has put historical materials related to the record producer up for sale via a dealer. It seems likely that the new Parker music comes from that source—but I couldn’t find anyone willing to talk on the record about this unusual situation.
I note that Granz sold Verve, and its Charlie Parker recordings, to MGM in 1961. He held on to some archival jazz material, and brought it to his new label, Pablo, which he sold to Fantasy Records in 1987. Whatever recordings he still had left at that juncture would almost certainly have passed on to his family upon his death in 2001. The new recordings apparently escaped these transactions—and we can only speculate why the “owner” does not want to get credit for the find.

Yet what a treasure trove here! “These previously unknown takes are a blockbuster,” Phil Schaap declares, and I concur with his judgment. Unheard Bird includes 58 previously unknown takes recorded between 1949 and 1952. Given the paucity of Parker’s commercial work—you could listen to his entire output of studio recordings in a single day—this represents a substantial addition to his corpus.

No one did more than Charlie Parker to establish the modern jazz sound of the ’40s. He reinvented the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of the music, and served as the leading role model for improvisers during the next half-century. He never achieved the name recognition of a Miles Davis (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/12/08/classic-miles-davis-recordings-reveal-new-beauty-in-their-classic-mono-format.html) or a John Coltrane. But make no mistake, without Charlie Parker, we may never have heard of these later stars. Miles only came to the attention of jazz fans after Parker hired him, and Coltrane’s first recordings reveal his slavish imitation of Bird’s work.

The music in Unheard Bird covers a wide range of settings and material. We get to hear new takes from Parker’s South of the Border Latin jazz project. We are treated to never-before-heard music with a big band from the recording sessions for Parker’s album of Cole Porter songs. New takes from the celebrated 1950 quintet session with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk are included, as well as quartet music alongside Buddy Rich, Ray Brown, and Hank Jones. We also get a snippet of music from Bird’s work with string orchestra, as well as combo performances with Kenny Dorham and Max Roach.

Bird lovers will find no shocks or surprises here. The songs themselves will be familiar from previously released material, but the improvisations are different, and Parker plays at a very high level throughout. In some instances, a new take offers different insights on the saxophonist’s mindset. For example, a previously unheard version of “Fiesta” is taken at a slower tempo from the released master, and Bird plays with an uncharacteristically warm and romantic tone—almost as if he is crafting a track for radio airplay. Listeners who only know the more intense version released in the ’50s will find this alternate approach a revelation.

In other instances, the interpretation is unchanged, but the addition of new takes gives us more to savor. What a joy to have several new versions of Parker’s romp through a fast blues, or an alternative take of his performance of “What Is This Thing Called Love” with a big band. In each instance, Verve also includes the previously released master for comparison—a smart move that will help new fans appreciate the significance of the recent discoveries.

These tracks may represent the last major addition to Charlie Parker’s legacy of recorded work. Schaap previously assisted in the 1990 release of the famous Dean Benedetti recordings of Charlie Parker—seven hours of music captured on a portable device by a rabid fan. But many listeners were disappointed by the poor sound quality of those tracks. Unheard Bird, in contrast, includes high quality studio recordings made with audio fidelity as good as anything Parker ever recorded.

The Verve label has had a tumultuous history since founder Granz sold it more than a half century ago. In recent years, Verve has struggled to find a new identity, sometimes keeping to its jazz roots, in other instances releasing music by aging pop stars such as Donny Osmond and Barry Manilow. The recent appointment of Danny Bennett, son of iconic singer Tony Bennett, as its new president and CEO was a promising move, and this stellar release gives fans some hope that the label is again on an upswing.
Are there other undiscovered masterworks out there waiting for discovery? I can hope, though I doubt any more Parker material of this range and caliber will come our way. But Norman Granz recorded many other legendary artists—including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps this mysterious new source of old music will give us unexpected offerings from the other stars of the Verve catalog.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=2414a85e36) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=2414a85e36&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

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Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered – The Daily Beast

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/03/jazz-legend-charlie-parker-s-mystery-music-uncovered.html

NEW TROVE07.03.16 12:15 AM ET
Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered

61 years after jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker died, a new album of hitherto unheard recordings is being released, and yet no one will say where they came from.

When new works by dead artists are discovered, the first question asked is, Where have they been hiding all these years? Perhaps a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank? Or maybe a warehouse in a broken down industrial neighborhood? Or did a lucky collector pick it up at a garage sale?

Last November, a lost cantata by Mozart came to light in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music—its origins long unrecognized because the composer’s name was written in a code. A few months earlier, a missing score by Stravinsky was discovered in a dusty pile of manuscripts, untouched for decades, in a storage area of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. If the room hadn’t been emptied for repairs, the music might never have been found.

So when the Verve label announced a few months ago the impending release of Unheard Bird, a double album of unreleased music by legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/01/31/the-stacks-charlie-parker-s-revolutionary-junkie-jazz-alchemy.html) , fans wondered where this music had been hiding in the 64 years since it was recorded.

After all, Verve had already released various “complete” sets of Parker’s music. Scholars have studied Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/09/23/what-made-charlie-parker-great-reviewing-stanley-crouch-s-biography-on-bird.html) , often called by his nickname Bird, and his recorded output with scrupulous care. Many biographies have been published and discographies compiled. Yet two hours of music—a significant addition to Parker’s legacy—shows up and, until recently, none of the experts even knew it existed!

I am happy to report that the music is outstanding, but the mystery remains. If there’s a story behind these tracks—and there must be, no?—Verve isn’t telling it.

Phil Schaap, a leading expert on Parker’s recording sessions, co-produced the release of this music. He is the perfect person for this project. When David Remnick wrote a profile of Schaap for The New Yorker in 2008, the article’s subhead was, “Thinking About Charlie Parker Every Day.” In the piece, Remnick compared Schaap’s interest in Bird to the obsessions of a “mad Talmudic scholar.”
Yet in his detailed liner notes to Unheard Bird, Schaap says little about the source of these finds, except to note that the music comes from the “camp”of Norman Granz, the founder of Verve who produced Bird’s work for the label. In a follow-up communication, Schaap tells me that he has had “no contact” with the party who discovered these tracks. Schaap didn’t even get access to the original recordings, but worked from digital transfers.

I will offer some personal speculations, for what they are worth. I’ve heard rumors that a former business associate (not a family member) of Norman Granz has put historical materials related to the record producer up for sale via a dealer. It seems likely that the new Parker music comes from that source—but I couldn’t find anyone willing to talk on the record about this unusual situation.
I note that Granz sold Verve, and its Charlie Parker recordings, to MGM in 1961. He held on to some archival jazz material, and brought it to his new label, Pablo, which he sold to Fantasy Records in 1987. Whatever recordings he still had left at that juncture would almost certainly have passed on to his family upon his death in 2001. The new recordings apparently escaped these transactions—and we can only speculate why the “owner” does not want to get credit for the find.

Yet what a treasure trove here! “These previously unknown takes are a blockbuster,” Phil Schaap declares, and I concur with his judgment. Unheard Bird includes 58 previously unknown takes recorded between 1949 and 1952. Given the paucity of Parker’s commercial work—you could listen to his entire output of studio recordings in a single day—this represents a substantial addition to his corpus.

No one did more than Charlie Parker to establish the modern jazz sound of the ’40s. He reinvented the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of the music, and served as the leading role model for improvisers during the next half-century. He never achieved the name recognition of a Miles Davis (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/12/08/classic-miles-davis-recordings-reveal-new-beauty-in-their-classic-mono-format.html) or a John Coltrane. But make no mistake, without Charlie Parker, we may never have heard of these later stars. Miles only came to the attention of jazz fans after Parker hired him, and Coltrane’s first recordings reveal his slavish imitation of Bird’s work.

The music in Unheard Bird covers a wide range of settings and material. We get to hear new takes from Parker’s South of the Border Latin jazz project. We are treated to never-before-heard music with a big band from the recording sessions for Parker’s album of Cole Porter songs. New takes from the celebrated 1950 quintet session with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk are included, as well as quartet music alongside Buddy Rich, Ray Brown, and Hank Jones. We also get a snippet of music from Bird’s work with string orchestra, as well as combo performances with Kenny Dorham and Max Roach.

Bird lovers will find no shocks or surprises here. The songs themselves will be familiar from previously released material, but the improvisations are different, and Parker plays at a very high level throughout. In some instances, a new take offers different insights on the saxophonist’s mindset. For example, a previously unheard version of “Fiesta” is taken at a slower tempo from the released master, and Bird plays with an uncharacteristically warm and romantic tone—almost as if he is crafting a track for radio airplay. Listeners who only know the more intense version released in the ’50s will find this alternate approach a revelation.

In other instances, the interpretation is unchanged, but the addition of new takes gives us more to savor. What a joy to have several new versions of Parker’s romp through a fast blues, or an alternative take of his performance of “What Is This Thing Called Love” with a big band. In each instance, Verve also includes the previously released master for comparison—a smart move that will help new fans appreciate the significance of the recent discoveries.

These tracks may represent the last major addition to Charlie Parker’s legacy of recorded work. Schaap previously assisted in the 1990 release of the famous Dean Benedetti recordings of Charlie Parker—seven hours of music captured on a portable device by a rabid fan. But many listeners were disappointed by the poor sound quality of those tracks. Unheard Bird, in contrast, includes high quality studio recordings made with audio fidelity as good as anything Parker ever recorded.

The Verve label has had a tumultuous history since founder Granz sold it more than a half century ago. In recent years, Verve has struggled to find a new identity, sometimes keeping to its jazz roots, in other instances releasing music by aging pop stars such as Donny Osmond and Barry Manilow. The recent appointment of Danny Bennett, son of iconic singer Tony Bennett, as its new president and CEO was a promising move, and this stellar release gives fans some hope that the label is again on an upswing.
Are there other undiscovered masterworks out there waiting for discovery? I can hope, though I doubt any more Parker material of this range and caliber will come our way. But Norman Granz recorded many other legendary artists—including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps this mysterious new source of old music will give us unexpected offerings from the other stars of the Verve catalog.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=2414a85e36) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=2414a85e36&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered – The Daily Beast

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/03/jazz-legend-charlie-parker-s-mystery-music-uncovered.html

NEW TROVE07.03.16 12:15 AM ET
Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered

61 years after jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker died, a new album of hitherto unheard recordings is being released, and yet no one will say where they came from.

When new works by dead artists are discovered, the first question asked is, Where have they been hiding all these years? Perhaps a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank? Or maybe a warehouse in a broken down industrial neighborhood? Or did a lucky collector pick it up at a garage sale?

Last November, a lost cantata by Mozart came to light in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music—its origins long unrecognized because the composer’s name was written in a code. A few months earlier, a missing score by Stravinsky was discovered in a dusty pile of manuscripts, untouched for decades, in a storage area of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. If the room hadn’t been emptied for repairs, the music might never have been found.

So when the Verve label announced a few months ago the impending release of Unheard Bird, a double album of unreleased music by legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/01/31/the-stacks-charlie-parker-s-revolutionary-junkie-jazz-alchemy.html) , fans wondered where this music had been hiding in the 64 years since it was recorded.

After all, Verve had already released various “complete” sets of Parker’s music. Scholars have studied Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/09/23/what-made-charlie-parker-great-reviewing-stanley-crouch-s-biography-on-bird.html) , often called by his nickname Bird, and his recorded output with scrupulous care. Many biographies have been published and discographies compiled. Yet two hours of music—a significant addition to Parker’s legacy—shows up and, until recently, none of the experts even knew it existed!

I am happy to report that the music is outstanding, but the mystery remains. If there’s a story behind these tracks—and there must be, no?—Verve isn’t telling it.

Phil Schaap, a leading expert on Parker’s recording sessions, co-produced the release of this music. He is the perfect person for this project. When David Remnick wrote a profile of Schaap for The New Yorker in 2008, the article’s subhead was, “Thinking About Charlie Parker Every Day.” In the piece, Remnick compared Schaap’s interest in Bird to the obsessions of a “mad Talmudic scholar.”
Yet in his detailed liner notes to Unheard Bird, Schaap says little about the source of these finds, except to note that the music comes from the “camp”of Norman Granz, the founder of Verve who produced Bird’s work for the label. In a follow-up communication, Schaap tells me that he has had “no contact” with the party who discovered these tracks. Schaap didn’t even get access to the original recordings, but worked from digital transfers.

I will offer some personal speculations, for what they are worth. I’ve heard rumors that a former business associate (not a family member) of Norman Granz has put historical materials related to the record producer up for sale via a dealer. It seems likely that the new Parker music comes from that source—but I couldn’t find anyone willing to talk on the record about this unusual situation.
I note that Granz sold Verve, and its Charlie Parker recordings, to MGM in 1961. He held on to some archival jazz material, and brought it to his new label, Pablo, which he sold to Fantasy Records in 1987. Whatever recordings he still had left at that juncture would almost certainly have passed on to his family upon his death in 2001. The new recordings apparently escaped these transactions—and we can only speculate why the “owner” does not want to get credit for the find.

Yet what a treasure trove here! “These previously unknown takes are a blockbuster,” Phil Schaap declares, and I concur with his judgment. Unheard Bird includes 58 previously unknown takes recorded between 1949 and 1952. Given the paucity of Parker’s commercial work—you could listen to his entire output of studio recordings in a single day—this represents a substantial addition to his corpus.

No one did more than Charlie Parker to establish the modern jazz sound of the ’40s. He reinvented the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of the music, and served as the leading role model for improvisers during the next half-century. He never achieved the name recognition of a Miles Davis (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/12/08/classic-miles-davis-recordings-reveal-new-beauty-in-their-classic-mono-format.html) or a John Coltrane. But make no mistake, without Charlie Parker, we may never have heard of these later stars. Miles only came to the attention of jazz fans after Parker hired him, and Coltrane’s first recordings reveal his slavish imitation of Bird’s work.

The music in Unheard Bird covers a wide range of settings and material. We get to hear new takes from Parker’s South of the Border Latin jazz project. We are treated to never-before-heard music with a big band from the recording sessions for Parker’s album of Cole Porter songs. New takes from the celebrated 1950 quintet session with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk are included, as well as quartet music alongside Buddy Rich, Ray Brown, and Hank Jones. We also get a snippet of music from Bird’s work with string orchestra, as well as combo performances with Kenny Dorham and Max Roach.

Bird lovers will find no shocks or surprises here. The songs themselves will be familiar from previously released material, but the improvisations are different, and Parker plays at a very high level throughout. In some instances, a new take offers different insights on the saxophonist’s mindset. For example, a previously unheard version of “Fiesta” is taken at a slower tempo from the released master, and Bird plays with an uncharacteristically warm and romantic tone—almost as if he is crafting a track for radio airplay. Listeners who only know the more intense version released in the ’50s will find this alternate approach a revelation.

In other instances, the interpretation is unchanged, but the addition of new takes gives us more to savor. What a joy to have several new versions of Parker’s romp through a fast blues, or an alternative take of his performance of “What Is This Thing Called Love” with a big band. In each instance, Verve also includes the previously released master for comparison—a smart move that will help new fans appreciate the significance of the recent discoveries.

These tracks may represent the last major addition to Charlie Parker’s legacy of recorded work. Schaap previously assisted in the 1990 release of the famous Dean Benedetti recordings of Charlie Parker—seven hours of music captured on a portable device by a rabid fan. But many listeners were disappointed by the poor sound quality of those tracks. Unheard Bird, in contrast, includes high quality studio recordings made with audio fidelity as good as anything Parker ever recorded.

The Verve label has had a tumultuous history since founder Granz sold it more than a half century ago. In recent years, Verve has struggled to find a new identity, sometimes keeping to its jazz roots, in other instances releasing music by aging pop stars such as Donny Osmond and Barry Manilow. The recent appointment of Danny Bennett, son of iconic singer Tony Bennett, as its new president and CEO was a promising move, and this stellar release gives fans some hope that the label is again on an upswing.
Are there other undiscovered masterworks out there waiting for discovery? I can hope, though I doubt any more Parker material of this range and caliber will come our way. But Norman Granz recorded many other legendary artists—including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps this mysterious new source of old music will give us unexpected offerings from the other stars of the Verve catalog.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=2414a85e36) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=2414a85e36&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered – The Daily Beast

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/07/03/jazz-legend-charlie-parker-s-mystery-music-uncovered.html

NEW TROVE07.03.16 12:15 AM ET
Jazz Legend Charlie Parker’s Mystery Music Uncovered

61 years after jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker died, a new album of hitherto unheard recordings is being released, and yet no one will say where they came from.

When new works by dead artists are discovered, the first question asked is, Where have they been hiding all these years? Perhaps a safe deposit box in a Swiss bank? Or maybe a warehouse in a broken down industrial neighborhood? Or did a lucky collector pick it up at a garage sale?

Last November, a lost cantata by Mozart came to light in the archives of the Czech Museum of Music—its origins long unrecognized because the composer’s name was written in a code. A few months earlier, a missing score by Stravinsky was discovered in a dusty pile of manuscripts, untouched for decades, in a storage area of the St Petersburg Conservatoire. If the room hadn’t been emptied for repairs, the music might never have been found.

So when the Verve label announced a few months ago the impending release of Unheard Bird, a double album of unreleased music by legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2016/01/31/the-stacks-charlie-parker-s-revolutionary-junkie-jazz-alchemy.html) , fans wondered where this music had been hiding in the 64 years since it was recorded.

After all, Verve had already released various “complete” sets of Parker’s music. Scholars have studied Parker (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/09/23/what-made-charlie-parker-great-reviewing-stanley-crouch-s-biography-on-bird.html) , often called by his nickname Bird, and his recorded output with scrupulous care. Many biographies have been published and discographies compiled. Yet two hours of music—a significant addition to Parker’s legacy—shows up and, until recently, none of the experts even knew it existed!

I am happy to report that the music is outstanding, but the mystery remains. If there’s a story behind these tracks—and there must be, no?—Verve isn’t telling it.

Phil Schaap, a leading expert on Parker’s recording sessions, co-produced the release of this music. He is the perfect person for this project. When David Remnick wrote a profile of Schaap for The New Yorker in 2008, the article’s subhead was, “Thinking About Charlie Parker Every Day.” In the piece, Remnick compared Schaap’s interest in Bird to the obsessions of a “mad Talmudic scholar.”
Yet in his detailed liner notes to Unheard Bird, Schaap says little about the source of these finds, except to note that the music comes from the “camp”of Norman Granz, the founder of Verve who produced Bird’s work for the label. In a follow-up communication, Schaap tells me that he has had “no contact” with the party who discovered these tracks. Schaap didn’t even get access to the original recordings, but worked from digital transfers.

I will offer some personal speculations, for what they are worth. I’ve heard rumors that a former business associate (not a family member) of Norman Granz has put historical materials related to the record producer up for sale via a dealer. It seems likely that the new Parker music comes from that source—but I couldn’t find anyone willing to talk on the record about this unusual situation.
I note that Granz sold Verve, and its Charlie Parker recordings, to MGM in 1961. He held on to some archival jazz material, and brought it to his new label, Pablo, which he sold to Fantasy Records in 1987. Whatever recordings he still had left at that juncture would almost certainly have passed on to his family upon his death in 2001. The new recordings apparently escaped these transactions—and we can only speculate why the “owner” does not want to get credit for the find.

Yet what a treasure trove here! “These previously unknown takes are a blockbuster,” Phil Schaap declares, and I concur with his judgment. Unheard Bird includes 58 previously unknown takes recorded between 1949 and 1952. Given the paucity of Parker’s commercial work—you could listen to his entire output of studio recordings in a single day—this represents a substantial addition to his corpus.

No one did more than Charlie Parker to establish the modern jazz sound of the ’40s. He reinvented the melodic and rhythmic vocabulary of the music, and served as the leading role model for improvisers during the next half-century. He never achieved the name recognition of a Miles Davis (http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2013/12/08/classic-miles-davis-recordings-reveal-new-beauty-in-their-classic-mono-format.html) or a John Coltrane. But make no mistake, without Charlie Parker, we may never have heard of these later stars. Miles only came to the attention of jazz fans after Parker hired him, and Coltrane’s first recordings reveal his slavish imitation of Bird’s work.

The music in Unheard Bird covers a wide range of settings and material. We get to hear new takes from Parker’s South of the Border Latin jazz project. We are treated to never-before-heard music with a big band from the recording sessions for Parker’s album of Cole Porter songs. New takes from the celebrated 1950 quintet session with Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk are included, as well as quartet music alongside Buddy Rich, Ray Brown, and Hank Jones. We also get a snippet of music from Bird’s work with string orchestra, as well as combo performances with Kenny Dorham and Max Roach.

Bird lovers will find no shocks or surprises here. The songs themselves will be familiar from previously released material, but the improvisations are different, and Parker plays at a very high level throughout. In some instances, a new take offers different insights on the saxophonist’s mindset. For example, a previously unheard version of “Fiesta” is taken at a slower tempo from the released master, and Bird plays with an uncharacteristically warm and romantic tone—almost as if he is crafting a track for radio airplay. Listeners who only know the more intense version released in the ’50s will find this alternate approach a revelation.

In other instances, the interpretation is unchanged, but the addition of new takes gives us more to savor. What a joy to have several new versions of Parker’s romp through a fast blues, or an alternative take of his performance of “What Is This Thing Called Love” with a big band. In each instance, Verve also includes the previously released master for comparison—a smart move that will help new fans appreciate the significance of the recent discoveries.

These tracks may represent the last major addition to Charlie Parker’s legacy of recorded work. Schaap previously assisted in the 1990 release of the famous Dean Benedetti recordings of Charlie Parker—seven hours of music captured on a portable device by a rabid fan. But many listeners were disappointed by the poor sound quality of those tracks. Unheard Bird, in contrast, includes high quality studio recordings made with audio fidelity as good as anything Parker ever recorded.

The Verve label has had a tumultuous history since founder Granz sold it more than a half century ago. In recent years, Verve has struggled to find a new identity, sometimes keeping to its jazz roots, in other instances releasing music by aging pop stars such as Donny Osmond and Barry Manilow. The recent appointment of Danny Bennett, son of iconic singer Tony Bennett, as its new president and CEO was a promising move, and this stellar release gives fans some hope that the label is again on an upswing.
Are there other undiscovered masterworks out there waiting for discovery? I can hope, though I doubt any more Parker material of this range and caliber will come our way. But Norman Granz recorded many other legendary artists—including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, and Dizzy Gillespie. Perhaps this mysterious new source of old music will give us unexpected offerings from the other stars of the Verve catalog.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday : Jazz Flashes

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Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JazzFlashes/~3/J5B9icbUzgI/svend-asmussens-100th-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 02 Jul 2016 05:35 AM PDT
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0qTUSWoSJ90/V3VC3lO87MI/AAAAAAAAC10/y05Fm5JkZygPYQsSn2Zz_7XtgPG1hK7KwCLcB/s1600/asmussen.png
On June 28 my daughter turned three years old, and on that same day legendary Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen celebrated 100 years on earth, a whole century devoted to his first love—jazz, particularly of the swing variety. Though not very well known in the U.S., Asmussen, who was born in Copenhagen into a wealthy family in 1916, is one of a handful of stellar jazz violinists, a group that also includes Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith, and Stephane Grappelli (incidentally, Asmussen recorded with the latter two). Perhaps one of the reasons why Asmussen is largely overlooked this side of the pond is that he didn’t appear in the States too often, but even so, he did earn the respect and admiration of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, John Lewis, and Benny Goodman, with all of whom he worked at some point in his long career. Asmussen showed an interest in music as a kid, and Venuti was actually an early influence on the violin. Yet a career in show business wasn’t what his affluent
parents had planned for him; however, the lure of the stage was too strong, and Asmussen decided to quit the dentistry degree he’d half-heartedly begun in order to concentrate on playing jazz professionally. He made his first recordings in the 1930s, and in the sixty years that followed, he never looked back, recording regularly and steadily until health problems related to his advanced age forced him into retirement early in the new century.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ObusA4lqmog/V3VC8OSWGCI/AAAAAAAAC18/9LH20DwxZQQGZfNZiCmeJ3-0zWgxBJc7QCLcB/s1600/asmussencover.jpg
To commemorate his 100th anniversary, Storyville Records has just released a 5-CD box set entitled The Incomparable Fiddler Svend Asmussen: 100 Years, which offers a panoramic view of his astounding career, from his earliest sides of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to recordings he made in 1996 in a quartet setting. The set showcases Asmussen’s dazzling virtuosity on the violin, his unique sense of swing, and his elegant delivery, and finds him in the company of talented confrères like Ulrik Neumann, Svend Hauberg, Georges Arvanitas, and of course, Stuff and Stephane. The 1964-65 sessions with Grappelli are among the many highlights of the box, and four rare recordings with Smith from 1966 show the two of them jamming together and really having a blast. Also included is a DVD that features a 1986 live date at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre with Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Ed Thigpen on drums, which offers us a chance to see Asmussen in action.
This new box set is definitely the perfect place to get an introduction to the incomparable legacy of Svend Asmussen, a man whose passion—and business, as the title of one of his classic sides (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgImeNTlFc) states—is rhythm. Thanks for all the great music and happy century, Mr. Asmussen!

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday : Jazz Flashes

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Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JazzFlashes/~3/J5B9icbUzgI/svend-asmussens-100th-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 02 Jul 2016 05:35 AM PDT
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0qTUSWoSJ90/V3VC3lO87MI/AAAAAAAAC10/y05Fm5JkZygPYQsSn2Zz_7XtgPG1hK7KwCLcB/s1600/asmussen.png
On June 28 my daughter turned three years old, and on that same day legendary Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen celebrated 100 years on earth, a whole century devoted to his first love—jazz, particularly of the swing variety. Though not very well known in the U.S., Asmussen, who was born in Copenhagen into a wealthy family in 1916, is one of a handful of stellar jazz violinists, a group that also includes Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith, and Stephane Grappelli (incidentally, Asmussen recorded with the latter two). Perhaps one of the reasons why Asmussen is largely overlooked this side of the pond is that he didn’t appear in the States too often, but even so, he did earn the respect and admiration of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, John Lewis, and Benny Goodman, with all of whom he worked at some point in his long career. Asmussen showed an interest in music as a kid, and Venuti was actually an early influence on the violin. Yet a career in show business wasn’t what his affluent
parents had planned for him; however, the lure of the stage was too strong, and Asmussen decided to quit the dentistry degree he’d half-heartedly begun in order to concentrate on playing jazz professionally. He made his first recordings in the 1930s, and in the sixty years that followed, he never looked back, recording regularly and steadily until health problems related to his advanced age forced him into retirement early in the new century.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ObusA4lqmog/V3VC8OSWGCI/AAAAAAAAC18/9LH20DwxZQQGZfNZiCmeJ3-0zWgxBJc7QCLcB/s1600/asmussencover.jpg
To commemorate his 100th anniversary, Storyville Records has just released a 5-CD box set entitled The Incomparable Fiddler Svend Asmussen: 100 Years, which offers a panoramic view of his astounding career, from his earliest sides of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to recordings he made in 1996 in a quartet setting. The set showcases Asmussen’s dazzling virtuosity on the violin, his unique sense of swing, and his elegant delivery, and finds him in the company of talented confrères like Ulrik Neumann, Svend Hauberg, Georges Arvanitas, and of course, Stuff and Stephane. The 1964-65 sessions with Grappelli are among the many highlights of the box, and four rare recordings with Smith from 1966 show the two of them jamming together and really having a blast. Also included is a DVD that features a 1986 live date at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre with Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Ed Thigpen on drums, which offers us a chance to see Asmussen in action.
This new box set is definitely the perfect place to get an introduction to the incomparable legacy of Svend Asmussen, a man whose passion—and business, as the title of one of his classic sides (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgImeNTlFc) states—is rhythm. Thanks for all the great music and happy century, Mr. Asmussen!

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1234957df3) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1234957df3&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday : Jazz Flashes

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Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JazzFlashes/~3/J5B9icbUzgI/svend-asmussens-100th-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 02 Jul 2016 05:35 AM PDT
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On June 28 my daughter turned three years old, and on that same day legendary Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen celebrated 100 years on earth, a whole century devoted to his first love—jazz, particularly of the swing variety. Though not very well known in the U.S., Asmussen, who was born in Copenhagen into a wealthy family in 1916, is one of a handful of stellar jazz violinists, a group that also includes Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith, and Stephane Grappelli (incidentally, Asmussen recorded with the latter two). Perhaps one of the reasons why Asmussen is largely overlooked this side of the pond is that he didn’t appear in the States too often, but even so, he did earn the respect and admiration of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, John Lewis, and Benny Goodman, with all of whom he worked at some point in his long career. Asmussen showed an interest in music as a kid, and Venuti was actually an early influence on the violin. Yet a career in show business wasn’t what his affluent
parents had planned for him; however, the lure of the stage was too strong, and Asmussen decided to quit the dentistry degree he’d half-heartedly begun in order to concentrate on playing jazz professionally. He made his first recordings in the 1930s, and in the sixty years that followed, he never looked back, recording regularly and steadily until health problems related to his advanced age forced him into retirement early in the new century.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ObusA4lqmog/V3VC8OSWGCI/AAAAAAAAC18/9LH20DwxZQQGZfNZiCmeJ3-0zWgxBJc7QCLcB/s1600/asmussencover.jpg
To commemorate his 100th anniversary, Storyville Records has just released a 5-CD box set entitled The Incomparable Fiddler Svend Asmussen: 100 Years, which offers a panoramic view of his astounding career, from his earliest sides of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to recordings he made in 1996 in a quartet setting. The set showcases Asmussen’s dazzling virtuosity on the violin, his unique sense of swing, and his elegant delivery, and finds him in the company of talented confrères like Ulrik Neumann, Svend Hauberg, Georges Arvanitas, and of course, Stuff and Stephane. The 1964-65 sessions with Grappelli are among the many highlights of the box, and four rare recordings with Smith from 1966 show the two of them jamming together and really having a blast. Also included is a DVD that features a 1986 live date at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre with Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Ed Thigpen on drums, which offers us a chance to see Asmussen in action.
This new box set is definitely the perfect place to get an introduction to the incomparable legacy of Svend Asmussen, a man whose passion—and business, as the title of one of his classic sides (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgImeNTlFc) states—is rhythm. Thanks for all the great music and happy century, Mr. Asmussen!

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=1234957df3) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=1234957df3&e=[UNIQID])

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday : Jazz Flashes

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Svend Asmussen’s 100th Birthday (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JazzFlashes/~3/J5B9icbUzgI/svend-asmussens-100th-birthday.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email)
Posted: 02 Jul 2016 05:35 AM PDT
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On June 28 my daughter turned three years old, and on that same day legendary Danish jazz violinist Svend Asmussen celebrated 100 years on earth, a whole century devoted to his first love—jazz, particularly of the swing variety. Though not very well known in the U.S., Asmussen, who was born in Copenhagen into a wealthy family in 1916, is one of a handful of stellar jazz violinists, a group that also includes Joe Venuti, Stuff Smith, and Stephane Grappelli (incidentally, Asmussen recorded with the latter two). Perhaps one of the reasons why Asmussen is largely overlooked this side of the pond is that he didn’t appear in the States too often, but even so, he did earn the respect and admiration of jazz greats like Duke Ellington, John Lewis, and Benny Goodman, with all of whom he worked at some point in his long career. Asmussen showed an interest in music as a kid, and Venuti was actually an early influence on the violin. Yet a career in show business wasn’t what his affluent
parents had planned for him; however, the lure of the stage was too strong, and Asmussen decided to quit the dentistry degree he’d half-heartedly begun in order to concentrate on playing jazz professionally. He made his first recordings in the 1930s, and in the sixty years that followed, he never looked back, recording regularly and steadily until health problems related to his advanced age forced him into retirement early in the new century.

https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ObusA4lqmog/V3VC8OSWGCI/AAAAAAAAC18/9LH20DwxZQQGZfNZiCmeJ3-0zWgxBJc7QCLcB/s1600/asmussencover.jpg
To commemorate his 100th anniversary, Storyville Records has just released a 5-CD box set entitled The Incomparable Fiddler Svend Asmussen: 100 Years, which offers a panoramic view of his astounding career, from his earliest sides of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s to recordings he made in 1996 in a quartet setting. The set showcases Asmussen’s dazzling virtuosity on the violin, his unique sense of swing, and his elegant delivery, and finds him in the company of talented confrères like Ulrik Neumann, Svend Hauberg, Georges Arvanitas, and of course, Stuff and Stephane. The 1964-65 sessions with Grappelli are among the many highlights of the box, and four rare recordings with Smith from 1966 show the two of them jamming together and really having a blast. Also included is a DVD that features a 1986 live date at Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre with Kenny Drew on piano, Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass, and Ed Thigpen on drums, which offers us a chance to see Asmussen in action.
This new box set is definitely the perfect place to get an introduction to the incomparable legacy of Svend Asmussen, a man whose passion—and business, as the title of one of his classic sides (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgImeNTlFc) states—is rhythm. Thanks for all the great music and happy century, Mr. Asmussen!

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Don Friedman (1935-2016) – JazzWax

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http://www.jazzwax.com/2016/07/don-friedman-1935-2016.html?utm_source=feedblitz

Don Friedman (1935-2016)

Don Friedman, a jazz pianist with enormous sensitivity and avant-garde curiosity who shared an introspective style similar to Bill Evans but tended to be more experimental and jagged with shades of Bud Powell, died June 30. He was 81.

Don grew up in San Francisco and studied formally starting at age 4. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 15, fully expecting to become a classical pianist. But the following year, after being exposed to big bands at the Hollywood Palladium in 1951, he fell in love with jazz. His earliest gigs in Hollywood were with West Coast jazz musicians including Chet Baker and Shorty Rogers. His sensitive touch developed as a sideman on recordings by trumpeters Jack Millman and Hank DeMano. Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco hired Don for a tour in 1956 that included extended stays at clubs in New York. Two years later, Don relocated to the city, where he teamed up with bassist Scott LaFaro. His earliest leadership albums were for Riverside. As jazz opportunities dried up in the 1960s, Don began teaching at New York University and gigged routinely in the city as recently as last year.
In 2009, I interviewed Don and posted in two installments. Here’s that interview combined:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767b56970b-popup

JazzWax: You were born in San Francisco. Did you grow up there?
Don Friedman: I was born there, but when I was 15, my family moved to Southern California. Around 1950, my father decided to go into business with his brother-in-law. They opened a grocery in Hollywood. What I loved most about the move down there was the weather [laughs].

JW: Did you continue taking piano lessons in Los Angeles?
DF: Actually, I stopped taking lessons. In San Francisco, I began playing at age 4 and had one teacher for the next 10 years. She was special. When we moved, she recommended someone, but I didn’t like that teacher.
JW: How did you become fond of jazz?
DF: Both of my parents adored classical music, so that’s all I had listened to and played. But in Los Angeles, I met a guy who wanted to be a bass player, and he turned me on to this teenage big band. I became the band’s piano player. The band featured a brother and sister whose father was a drummer and wrote note-for-note arrangements of famous big band charts.

JW: What did the girl and boy play?
DF: The girl played the clarinet and the boy played trumpet. One tune was Artie Shaw’s Frenesi, and she’d play Shaw’s solo exactly as it was on the record. In Van Nuys, there was a place called The Dry Nightclub. It was a club that showcased teenage bands. We’d play there on the weekends. That was my first exposure to jazz.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767b96970b-popup

JW: This would be the early 1950s. Did you listen to West Coast jazz then?
DF: Yes. I also started to go to the Hollywood Palladium where I heard all the great bands. The one that impressed me most was Stan Kenton’s orchestra, with Conte Candoli, Shorty Rogers and Frank Rosolino. In fact, I first saw bassist Scott LaFaro when he came through the Palladium with Buddy Morrow’s band. [Photo above of Stan Kenton in 1953]

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004d6d970c-popup

JW: When did you first actually meet LaFaro?
DF: We met up at [alto saxophonist] Herb Geller’s house. Herb was a mainstay on the jazz scene in L.A. then and had a nice home with his wife Lorraine in the Hollywood Hills. Guys were always going up there to play, like Scott, alto saxophonist Joe Maini, trumpeter Jack Sheldon and others. Around this time, I started going to Los Angeles City College to study music, but I got disgusted and quit. [Photo above of Herb Geller]

JW: Your parents didn’t mind?
DF: My parents left me alone when I was 16 or 17 years old. I was an only child, and they were plenty controlling up until then [laughs].

JW: Did you know what you wanted to do, career-wise, by then?
DF: Yes, I was going to be a jazz pianist. I began taking lessons from Sam Sacks, who had taught Hampton Hawes. He taught me chord changes. I also began learning a great deal from records. I had a good ear.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fe6f970d-popup

JW: Meaning you could hear something once and play it?
DF: Pretty much. I had studied piano for 10 years and was fairly talented as a classical player. I could always improvise but I couldn’t do it in the jazz sense. When I learned the basics, jazz improvisation came easy to me. Considering I had never even heard jazz or knew anything about pop music until I was 16 or 17, I was a quick study. By the time I was 21 in 1956, I was touring with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco (above).

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JW: What was the West Coast jazz scene like when you were playing with artists like Chet Baker, Buddy Collette and others?
DF: The scene was one of the reasons I moved to New York in 1958 [laughs]. [Early photo above of Don Friedman, courtesy of Fresh Sound]

JW: Why?
DF: The scene was too laid back. There was no intensity. In New York there were always guys getting together and going to lofts to play. In Los Angeles, guys would say, “I can’t make the rehearsal or gig today. I’m going to the beach or the pool.” Even now, when I go out there, you sense it’s more laid back. I think it was partly the car culture. Everyone was spread out, so they drove everywhere. Everything took time. In New York, there was a greater sense of urgency and immediacy.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fe8d970d-popup

JW: When did you move to New York?
DF: I first came to New York in 1956 with Buddy DeFranco. We were in New York for quite a few months. Then I went back to California in 1957. But later that year I realized I had to move to New York. I had already met a lot of musicians when I had played Basin Street and Café Bohemia with Buddy. When I arrived in New York, I worked with bassist Teddy Kotick, who had a steady gig on Staten Island. My big break came a few years later, when I was signed to Riverside Records in 1961.

JW: After you arrived in New York in 1957, you shared an apartment with Scott LaFaro?
DF: Yes. Actually, it was my apartment. The guys I had roomed with had moved out. It was on 80th St. and York Ave. Rent was only $18 a month then [laughs]. Scotty was there only for a few months. He soon moved down to the Lower East Side with Gloria, his girlfriend. They never married. Gloria was a lovely girl and a dancer. She and Scotty remained together until his fatal car accident in early July 1961.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004dbc970c-popup

JW: LaFaro’s Gloria’s Step was named for her, yes?
DF: Yes, but the song’s name originated because he knew the sound of Gloria’s footsteps when she came up the stairs to their apartment, not because she was a dancer. [Photo above of Scott LaFaro]

JW: Is LaFaro justifiably praised as a revolutionary bass player?
DF: In my opinion, Scotty never received as much credit as he should have been given. He developed his own way of playing. He practiced 12 hours a day. I never saw anyone work as hard. He didn’t go to a music conservatory to learn correct fingering.

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JW: Did he take lessons?
DF: He took some lessons in bowing while growing up in Geneva, N.Y., and studied the clarinet and sax. When he practiced the bass, he used a clarinet book. He developed incredible chops. He was the fastest player I had ever heard. With Bill [Evans] and Paul Motian, he was a solo instrument. They were really the first working trio that got into this with a bass player. [Photo above, from left, Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans and Paul Motian, on a break at the Village Vanguard in June 1961]

JW: You recorded just five tracks with Scott in 1961. Do you recall the session?
DF: I don’t. I remember that the three of us—me, Scott and Pete LaRoca—were in a recording studio. I don’t know why. Maybe rehearsing. At any rate, the engineer who was there was the engineer who was at Riverside Records at the time. He liked what we were playing and said, “Why don’t you guys play and I’ll record you.” So we did.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c66970b-popup

JW: You recorded with LaFaro at the same time as Bill Evans.
DF: Scotty and I used to play together even when he was playing with Bill. He’d sit down at my piano in my apartment and try to write something. When he and Gloria lived on the Lower East Side, we’d hang out. We also worked together with singer Dick Haymes at a club called The Living Room on the East Side. Then we went out on the road with Haymes.
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JW: Did you and Evans ever meet?
DF: I used to go to the Village Vanguard to hear Bill, Scotty and Paul [Motian]. Bill was a nice guy, very quiet. We didn’t have a lot to say, though. One night I subbed for him. His trio was playing at the Jazz Gallery in the East Village. Scott called me to come in and sub because Bill had gotten sick a couple of nights.

JW: What did you think of Evans?
DF: I admired his playing. He had a great harmonic sense and his voicings were beautiful. But his right-hand lines weren’t that interesting to me.

JW: How is your right hand different?
DF: I stretch the notes. Bill played more within the chords. I find he’s more conservative and I take more chances. But I always loved his chordal stuff. I tried to copy what he was doing there and include it in some of my playing. In fact, I changed some of my playing in my left hand when I first heard him.

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JW: How so?
DF: When I started playing, I listened to Bud Powell (above). He had a root-oriented left hand, using a lot of inversions when voicing chords. Bill was doing things that were completely different, building drama rather than just keeping time.

JW: As someone who has worked with many bassists, what’s your take on LaFaro?
DF: Scotty was able to relate to what I was doing. Many bass players did not listen as carefully as he did. Jazz is ear music—more than any other form. You have to hear what the other players are doing. In most cases you don’t have written notes to play. You just have sounds. If you’re a classical musician, you’re playing notes that were written for you. Of course, you have to listen. But with jazz, you have to hear what you and what other guys are doing. Your ears have to be wide open. I felt that Scott had those kinds of ears, more so than most other bassists.

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JW: Do you know anything about LaFaro’s auto accident in upstate New York on July 6, 1961?
DF: Nothing more than what has been written. But having driven many times with Scotty, I know that he liked to put the pedal to the metal. He was young and liked speed, and there were no seat belts back in those days. He had gone to a party up in Geneva, N.Y., and lost control of the car and crashed, killing himself and a friend who was in the car with him. So sad. [Photo above of Scott LaFaro’s car following his fatal accident]

JW: What was Evans’s bond with LaFaro?
DF: Bill was tremendously impressed with Scotty. Bill tended to have a depressed personality. Scotty was the total opposite. He was so full of joie de vivre. He lived life to the hilt. He was Mr. Positive about everything. Scott also knew how to take control of a situation. Since he was a positive person, he had a strong personality. I think Bill felt emotionally dependent on him.

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JW: Was LaFaro blunt with Evans?
DF: Scotty had no fear or hesitation to tell Bill that he was a jerk for getting hooked on drugs. They had a lot of fights about that.

JW: Do you miss LaFaro?
DF: When I think about Scotty disappearing so early, it’s a terrible tragedy. It’s all so long ago. What I wish is that Scott were around today so we could play together now. I feel I’ve come a long way in 50 years. Or I’d like to think so [laughs].

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JW: How did your first Riverside album, A Day in the City, come about?
DF: I was studying composition around that time. I wanted to learn to compose. One of the class assignments was to write a theme and variations on a folk song. So I did. I composed a piece for piano. Around the same time, I was friends with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Joe Hunt. We used to get together at my apartment to jam. Joe was recording with George Russell at the time and knew producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside. Joe told Orrin about me. Orrin was looking for a pianist with original material.

JW: How was Orrin to work with?
DF: Orrin knew his stuff, but I never felt completely comfortable around him. He wasn’t very encouraging and never really made me feel qualified to be there. But in all fairness, it was probably my own insecurity. Back then, if I didn’t get complete confirmation of my abilities, I felt uncomfortable. He also was a brusque guy, which could be tough. We did make four albums together, and all received high praise from Down Beat. My relationship with Riverside fizzled when the label started to go under in the mid-1960s.

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JW: You recorded free jazz with guitarist Attila Zoller starting in 1964, yes?
DF: Zoller was a close friend of mine. We had first met in 1959. We started playing together with Herbie Mann. We started experimenting with free jazz and soon recorded Dreams and Explorations in 1964 for Riverside.

JW: Where did your interest in free jazz come from?
DF: I was very interested in free playing when I studied composition in contemporary classical music. I loved the atonal sounds that I had heard. In free jazz, you can emulate those sounds. You can’t do that when playing chord changes. With free jazz, you don’t have to worry about the key or a steady beat. That’s what drew me to it.

JW: But from the listener’s standpoint, that can sound a little self-centered.
DF: That’s probably true [laughs]. But so is jazz in general for people who don’t know anything about the music. Some free jazz is fascinating, but I’ve heard plenty that’s total garbage.

JW: How would one tell the difference?
DF: [Laughs] Very funny. That’s a good question. If you hear jazz musicians who have a background in traditional jazz play free jazz, you’ll hear that they approach it in a different way. You can hear the difference, just as you can see the difference between someone just throwing paint at a canvas and Jackson Pollock, for example. Someone who has studied can’t help but deliver form, content and composition, even in free jazz. Today, I find much of free jazz to be solely percussive.

JW: Looking back, how do you view free jazz now?
DF: It still has a lot of value. The problem for me now is that I don’t have someone I can work with in the free-jazz space. I could get into it again if I had the right person. Attila was really into that. The way we performed the music was free, but we wrote pieces and improvised off of them. We played off of each other.
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JW: What’s your favorite Don Friedman album?
DF: Probably Waltz for Marilyn. I love how it came together.

JW: Looking back on your career, anything you’d do different?
DF: I don’t know. I’ve been tremendously fortunate. I’ve had great experiences and met all kinds of people. I’ve always done something that I love to do, which is play piano and jazz. At this point in my life, in the last several years, I think I’ve been the best I’ve ever been.
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JazzWax tracks: My favorite Don Friedman albums are A Day in the City, Circle Waltz, Flashback, Days of Wine and Roses and Waltz for Marilyn. The first three are musts. If you want to hear Don with Scott LaFaro, you’ll find LaFaro’s Pieces of Jade (Resonance) here (https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Jade-Scott-LaFaro/dp/B002JIH8I8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467415341&sr=8-1&keywords=scott+lafaro+%2B+pieces+of+jade) . The five tracks they recorded together with drummer Pete LaRoca are I Hear a Rhapsody, Don’s Sacre Bleu (take 1), Green Dolphin Street, Sacre Bleu (take 2) and Woody ‘n’ You. These tracks are absolutely superb, with Green Dolphin Street a complete knockout.
JazzWax clips: Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNe5Fqu-GeI&list=PLhpXz_EC2kDt9kwt0FlLEORsu81YQjz5H) Don’s A Day in the City…

1/6
Dawn (Instrumental) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLhpXz_EC2kDt9kwt0FlLEORsu81YQjz5H&v=bNe5Fqu-GeI)

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[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c) Don with Scott LaFaro and Pete LaRoca on I Hear a Rhapsody…

Scott LaFaro – I Hear A Rhapsody (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c)

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[2]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

And here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M) Don live in 2011…

Don Friedman – JazzBaltica 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M)

An error occurred.

[3]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

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Don Friedman (1935-2016) – JazzWax

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http://www.jazzwax.com/2016/07/don-friedman-1935-2016.html?utm_source=feedblitz

Don Friedman (1935-2016)

Don Friedman, a jazz pianist with enormous sensitivity and avant-garde curiosity who shared an introspective style similar to Bill Evans but tended to be more experimental and jagged with shades of Bud Powell, died June 30. He was 81.

Don grew up in San Francisco and studied formally starting at age 4. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 15, fully expecting to become a classical pianist. But the following year, after being exposed to big bands at the Hollywood Palladium in 1951, he fell in love with jazz. His earliest gigs in Hollywood were with West Coast jazz musicians including Chet Baker and Shorty Rogers. His sensitive touch developed as a sideman on recordings by trumpeters Jack Millman and Hank DeMano. Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco hired Don for a tour in 1956 that included extended stays at clubs in New York. Two years later, Don relocated to the city, where he teamed up with bassist Scott LaFaro. His earliest leadership albums were for Riverside. As jazz opportunities dried up in the 1960s, Don began teaching at New York University and gigged routinely in the city as recently as last year.
In 2009, I interviewed Don and posted in two installments. Here’s that interview combined:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767b56970b-popup

JazzWax: You were born in San Francisco. Did you grow up there?
Don Friedman: I was born there, but when I was 15, my family moved to Southern California. Around 1950, my father decided to go into business with his brother-in-law. They opened a grocery in Hollywood. What I loved most about the move down there was the weather [laughs].

JW: Did you continue taking piano lessons in Los Angeles?
DF: Actually, I stopped taking lessons. In San Francisco, I began playing at age 4 and had one teacher for the next 10 years. She was special. When we moved, she recommended someone, but I didn’t like that teacher.
JW: How did you become fond of jazz?
DF: Both of my parents adored classical music, so that’s all I had listened to and played. But in Los Angeles, I met a guy who wanted to be a bass player, and he turned me on to this teenage big band. I became the band’s piano player. The band featured a brother and sister whose father was a drummer and wrote note-for-note arrangements of famous big band charts.

JW: What did the girl and boy play?
DF: The girl played the clarinet and the boy played trumpet. One tune was Artie Shaw’s Frenesi, and she’d play Shaw’s solo exactly as it was on the record. In Van Nuys, there was a place called The Dry Nightclub. It was a club that showcased teenage bands. We’d play there on the weekends. That was my first exposure to jazz.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767b96970b-popup

JW: This would be the early 1950s. Did you listen to West Coast jazz then?
DF: Yes. I also started to go to the Hollywood Palladium where I heard all the great bands. The one that impressed me most was Stan Kenton’s orchestra, with Conte Candoli, Shorty Rogers and Frank Rosolino. In fact, I first saw bassist Scott LaFaro when he came through the Palladium with Buddy Morrow’s band. [Photo above of Stan Kenton in 1953]

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004d6d970c-popup

JW: When did you first actually meet LaFaro?
DF: We met up at [alto saxophonist] Herb Geller’s house. Herb was a mainstay on the jazz scene in L.A. then and had a nice home with his wife Lorraine in the Hollywood Hills. Guys were always going up there to play, like Scott, alto saxophonist Joe Maini, trumpeter Jack Sheldon and others. Around this time, I started going to Los Angeles City College to study music, but I got disgusted and quit. [Photo above of Herb Geller]

JW: Your parents didn’t mind?
DF: My parents left me alone when I was 16 or 17 years old. I was an only child, and they were plenty controlling up until then [laughs].

JW: Did you know what you wanted to do, career-wise, by then?
DF: Yes, I was going to be a jazz pianist. I began taking lessons from Sam Sacks, who had taught Hampton Hawes. He taught me chord changes. I also began learning a great deal from records. I had a good ear.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fe6f970d-popup

JW: Meaning you could hear something once and play it?
DF: Pretty much. I had studied piano for 10 years and was fairly talented as a classical player. I could always improvise but I couldn’t do it in the jazz sense. When I learned the basics, jazz improvisation came easy to me. Considering I had never even heard jazz or knew anything about pop music until I was 16 or 17, I was a quick study. By the time I was 21 in 1956, I was touring with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco (above).

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767d92970b-popup

JW: What was the West Coast jazz scene like when you were playing with artists like Chet Baker, Buddy Collette and others?
DF: The scene was one of the reasons I moved to New York in 1958 [laughs]. [Early photo above of Don Friedman, courtesy of Fresh Sound]

JW: Why?
DF: The scene was too laid back. There was no intensity. In New York there were always guys getting together and going to lofts to play. In Los Angeles, guys would say, “I can’t make the rehearsal or gig today. I’m going to the beach or the pool.” Even now, when I go out there, you sense it’s more laid back. I think it was partly the car culture. Everyone was spread out, so they drove everywhere. Everything took time. In New York, there was a greater sense of urgency and immediacy.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fe8d970d-popup

JW: When did you move to New York?
DF: I first came to New York in 1956 with Buddy DeFranco. We were in New York for quite a few months. Then I went back to California in 1957. But later that year I realized I had to move to New York. I had already met a lot of musicians when I had played Basin Street and Café Bohemia with Buddy. When I arrived in New York, I worked with bassist Teddy Kotick, who had a steady gig on Staten Island. My big break came a few years later, when I was signed to Riverside Records in 1961.

JW: After you arrived in New York in 1957, you shared an apartment with Scott LaFaro?
DF: Yes. Actually, it was my apartment. The guys I had roomed with had moved out. It was on 80th St. and York Ave. Rent was only $18 a month then [laughs]. Scotty was there only for a few months. He soon moved down to the Lower East Side with Gloria, his girlfriend. They never married. Gloria was a lovely girl and a dancer. She and Scotty remained together until his fatal car accident in early July 1961.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004dbc970c-popup

JW: LaFaro’s Gloria’s Step was named for her, yes?
DF: Yes, but the song’s name originated because he knew the sound of Gloria’s footsteps when she came up the stairs to their apartment, not because she was a dancer. [Photo above of Scott LaFaro]

JW: Is LaFaro justifiably praised as a revolutionary bass player?
DF: In my opinion, Scotty never received as much credit as he should have been given. He developed his own way of playing. He practiced 12 hours a day. I never saw anyone work as hard. He didn’t go to a music conservatory to learn correct fingering.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fead970d-popup

JW: Did he take lessons?
DF: He took some lessons in bowing while growing up in Geneva, N.Y., and studied the clarinet and sax. When he practiced the bass, he used a clarinet book. He developed incredible chops. He was the fastest player I had ever heard. With Bill [Evans] and Paul Motian, he was a solo instrument. They were really the first working trio that got into this with a bass player. [Photo above, from left, Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans and Paul Motian, on a break at the Village Vanguard in June 1961]

JW: You recorded just five tracks with Scott in 1961. Do you recall the session?
DF: I don’t. I remember that the three of us—me, Scott and Pete LaRoca—were in a recording studio. I don’t know why. Maybe rehearsing. At any rate, the engineer who was there was the engineer who was at Riverside Records at the time. He liked what we were playing and said, “Why don’t you guys play and I’ll record you.” So we did.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c66970b-popup

JW: You recorded with LaFaro at the same time as Bill Evans.
DF: Scotty and I used to play together even when he was playing with Bill. He’d sit down at my piano in my apartment and try to write something. When he and Gloria lived on the Lower East Side, we’d hang out. We also worked together with singer Dick Haymes at a club called The Living Room on the East Side. Then we went out on the road with Haymes.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c6e970b-popup

JW: Did you and Evans ever meet?
DF: I used to go to the Village Vanguard to hear Bill, Scotty and Paul [Motian]. Bill was a nice guy, very quiet. We didn’t have a lot to say, though. One night I subbed for him. His trio was playing at the Jazz Gallery in the East Village. Scott called me to come in and sub because Bill had gotten sick a couple of nights.

JW: What did you think of Evans?
DF: I admired his playing. He had a great harmonic sense and his voicings were beautiful. But his right-hand lines weren’t that interesting to me.

JW: How is your right hand different?
DF: I stretch the notes. Bill played more within the chords. I find he’s more conservative and I take more chances. But I always loved his chordal stuff. I tried to copy what he was doing there and include it in some of my playing. In fact, I changed some of my playing in my left hand when I first heard him.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c7b970b-popup

JW: How so?
DF: When I started playing, I listened to Bud Powell (above). He had a root-oriented left hand, using a lot of inversions when voicing chords. Bill was doing things that were completely different, building drama rather than just keeping time.

JW: As someone who has worked with many bassists, what’s your take on LaFaro?
DF: Scotty was able to relate to what I was doing. Many bass players did not listen as carefully as he did. Jazz is ear music—more than any other form. You have to hear what the other players are doing. In most cases you don’t have written notes to play. You just have sounds. If you’re a classical musician, you’re playing notes that were written for you. Of course, you have to listen. But with jazz, you have to hear what you and what other guys are doing. Your ears have to be wide open. I felt that Scott had those kinds of ears, more so than most other bassists.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767ca0970b-popup

JW: Do you know anything about LaFaro’s auto accident in upstate New York on July 6, 1961?
DF: Nothing more than what has been written. But having driven many times with Scotty, I know that he liked to put the pedal to the metal. He was young and liked speed, and there were no seat belts back in those days. He had gone to a party up in Geneva, N.Y., and lost control of the car and crashed, killing himself and a friend who was in the car with him. So sad. [Photo above of Scott LaFaro’s car following his fatal accident]

JW: What was Evans’s bond with LaFaro?
DF: Bill was tremendously impressed with Scotty. Bill tended to have a depressed personality. Scotty was the total opposite. He was so full of joie de vivre. He lived life to the hilt. He was Mr. Positive about everything. Scott also knew how to take control of a situation. Since he was a positive person, he had a strong personality. I think Bill felt emotionally dependent on him.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767cbc970b-popup

JW: Was LaFaro blunt with Evans?
DF: Scotty had no fear or hesitation to tell Bill that he was a jerk for getting hooked on drugs. They had a lot of fights about that.

JW: Do you miss LaFaro?
DF: When I think about Scotty disappearing so early, it’s a terrible tragedy. It’s all so long ago. What I wish is that Scott were around today so we could play together now. I feel I’ve come a long way in 50 years. Or I’d like to think so [laughs].

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004ef8970c-popup

JW: How did your first Riverside album, A Day in the City, come about?
DF: I was studying composition around that time. I wanted to learn to compose. One of the class assignments was to write a theme and variations on a folk song. So I did. I composed a piece for piano. Around the same time, I was friends with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Joe Hunt. We used to get together at my apartment to jam. Joe was recording with George Russell at the time and knew producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside. Joe told Orrin about me. Orrin was looking for a pianist with original material.

JW: How was Orrin to work with?
DF: Orrin knew his stuff, but I never felt completely comfortable around him. He wasn’t very encouraging and never really made me feel qualified to be there. But in all fairness, it was probably my own insecurity. Back then, if I didn’t get complete confirmation of my abilities, I felt uncomfortable. He also was a brusque guy, which could be tough. We did make four albums together, and all received high praise from Down Beat. My relationship with Riverside fizzled when the label started to go under in the mid-1960s.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004f11970c-popup

JW: You recorded free jazz with guitarist Attila Zoller starting in 1964, yes?
DF: Zoller was a close friend of mine. We had first met in 1959. We started playing together with Herbie Mann. We started experimenting with free jazz and soon recorded Dreams and Explorations in 1964 for Riverside.

JW: Where did your interest in free jazz come from?
DF: I was very interested in free playing when I studied composition in contemporary classical music. I loved the atonal sounds that I had heard. In free jazz, you can emulate those sounds. You can’t do that when playing chord changes. With free jazz, you don’t have to worry about the key or a steady beat. That’s what drew me to it.

JW: But from the listener’s standpoint, that can sound a little self-centered.
DF: That’s probably true [laughs]. But so is jazz in general for people who don’t know anything about the music. Some free jazz is fascinating, but I’ve heard plenty that’s total garbage.

JW: How would one tell the difference?
DF: [Laughs] Very funny. That’s a good question. If you hear jazz musicians who have a background in traditional jazz play free jazz, you’ll hear that they approach it in a different way. You can hear the difference, just as you can see the difference between someone just throwing paint at a canvas and Jackson Pollock, for example. Someone who has studied can’t help but deliver form, content and composition, even in free jazz. Today, I find much of free jazz to be solely percussive.

JW: Looking back, how do you view free jazz now?
DF: It still has a lot of value. The problem for me now is that I don’t have someone I can work with in the free-jazz space. I could get into it again if I had the right person. Attila was really into that. The way we performed the music was free, but we wrote pieces and improvised off of them. We played off of each other.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767d67970b-popup

JW: What’s your favorite Don Friedman album?
DF: Probably Waltz for Marilyn. I love how it came together.

JW: Looking back on your career, anything you’d do different?
DF: I don’t know. I’ve been tremendously fortunate. I’ve had great experiences and met all kinds of people. I’ve always done something that I love to do, which is play piano and jazz. At this point in my life, in the last several years, I think I’ve been the best I’ve ever been.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767d8b970b-popup

JazzWax tracks: My favorite Don Friedman albums are A Day in the City, Circle Waltz, Flashback, Days of Wine and Roses and Waltz for Marilyn. The first three are musts. If you want to hear Don with Scott LaFaro, you’ll find LaFaro’s Pieces of Jade (Resonance) here (https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Jade-Scott-LaFaro/dp/B002JIH8I8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467415341&sr=8-1&keywords=scott+lafaro+%2B+pieces+of+jade) . The five tracks they recorded together with drummer Pete LaRoca are I Hear a Rhapsody, Don’s Sacre Bleu (take 1), Green Dolphin Street, Sacre Bleu (take 2) and Woody ‘n’ You. These tracks are absolutely superb, with Green Dolphin Street a complete knockout.
JazzWax clips: Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNe5Fqu-GeI&list=PLhpXz_EC2kDt9kwt0FlLEORsu81YQjz5H) Don’s A Day in the City…

1/6
Dawn (Instrumental) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLhpXz_EC2kDt9kwt0FlLEORsu81YQjz5H&v=bNe5Fqu-GeI)

An error occurred.

[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c) Don with Scott LaFaro and Pete LaRoca on I Hear a Rhapsody…

Scott LaFaro – I Hear A Rhapsody (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c)

An error occurred.

[2]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

And here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M) Don live in 2011…

Don Friedman – JazzBaltica 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M)

An error occurred.

[3]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

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3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M

Don Friedman (1935-2016) – JazzWax

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http://www.jazzwax.com/2016/07/don-friedman-1935-2016.html?utm_source=feedblitz

Don Friedman (1935-2016)

Don Friedman, a jazz pianist with enormous sensitivity and avant-garde curiosity who shared an introspective style similar to Bill Evans but tended to be more experimental and jagged with shades of Bud Powell, died June 30. He was 81.

Don grew up in San Francisco and studied formally starting at age 4. He moved to Los Angeles with his family when he was 15, fully expecting to become a classical pianist. But the following year, after being exposed to big bands at the Hollywood Palladium in 1951, he fell in love with jazz. His earliest gigs in Hollywood were with West Coast jazz musicians including Chet Baker and Shorty Rogers. His sensitive touch developed as a sideman on recordings by trumpeters Jack Millman and Hank DeMano. Clarinetist Buddy DeFranco hired Don for a tour in 1956 that included extended stays at clubs in New York. Two years later, Don relocated to the city, where he teamed up with bassist Scott LaFaro. His earliest leadership albums were for Riverside. As jazz opportunities dried up in the 1960s, Don began teaching at New York University and gigged routinely in the city as recently as last year.
In 2009, I interviewed Don and posted in two installments. Here’s that interview combined:
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767b56970b-popup

JazzWax: You were born in San Francisco. Did you grow up there?
Don Friedman: I was born there, but when I was 15, my family moved to Southern California. Around 1950, my father decided to go into business with his brother-in-law. They opened a grocery in Hollywood. What I loved most about the move down there was the weather [laughs].

JW: Did you continue taking piano lessons in Los Angeles?
DF: Actually, I stopped taking lessons. In San Francisco, I began playing at age 4 and had one teacher for the next 10 years. She was special. When we moved, she recommended someone, but I didn’t like that teacher.
JW: How did you become fond of jazz?
DF: Both of my parents adored classical music, so that’s all I had listened to and played. But in Los Angeles, I met a guy who wanted to be a bass player, and he turned me on to this teenage big band. I became the band’s piano player. The band featured a brother and sister whose father was a drummer and wrote note-for-note arrangements of famous big band charts.

JW: What did the girl and boy play?
DF: The girl played the clarinet and the boy played trumpet. One tune was Artie Shaw’s Frenesi, and she’d play Shaw’s solo exactly as it was on the record. In Van Nuys, there was a place called The Dry Nightclub. It was a club that showcased teenage bands. We’d play there on the weekends. That was my first exposure to jazz.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767b96970b-popup

JW: This would be the early 1950s. Did you listen to West Coast jazz then?
DF: Yes. I also started to go to the Hollywood Palladium where I heard all the great bands. The one that impressed me most was Stan Kenton’s orchestra, with Conte Candoli, Shorty Rogers and Frank Rosolino. In fact, I first saw bassist Scott LaFaro when he came through the Palladium with Buddy Morrow’s band. [Photo above of Stan Kenton in 1953]

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004d6d970c-popup

JW: When did you first actually meet LaFaro?
DF: We met up at [alto saxophonist] Herb Geller’s house. Herb was a mainstay on the jazz scene in L.A. then and had a nice home with his wife Lorraine in the Hollywood Hills. Guys were always going up there to play, like Scott, alto saxophonist Joe Maini, trumpeter Jack Sheldon and others. Around this time, I started going to Los Angeles City College to study music, but I got disgusted and quit. [Photo above of Herb Geller]

JW: Your parents didn’t mind?
DF: My parents left me alone when I was 16 or 17 years old. I was an only child, and they were plenty controlling up until then [laughs].

JW: Did you know what you wanted to do, career-wise, by then?
DF: Yes, I was going to be a jazz pianist. I began taking lessons from Sam Sacks, who had taught Hampton Hawes. He taught me chord changes. I also began learning a great deal from records. I had a good ear.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fe6f970d-popup

JW: Meaning you could hear something once and play it?
DF: Pretty much. I had studied piano for 10 years and was fairly talented as a classical player. I could always improvise but I couldn’t do it in the jazz sense. When I learned the basics, jazz improvisation came easy to me. Considering I had never even heard jazz or knew anything about pop music until I was 16 or 17, I was a quick study. By the time I was 21 in 1956, I was touring with clarinetist Buddy DeFranco (above).

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767d92970b-popup

JW: What was the West Coast jazz scene like when you were playing with artists like Chet Baker, Buddy Collette and others?
DF: The scene was one of the reasons I moved to New York in 1958 [laughs]. [Early photo above of Don Friedman, courtesy of Fresh Sound]

JW: Why?
DF: The scene was too laid back. There was no intensity. In New York there were always guys getting together and going to lofts to play. In Los Angeles, guys would say, “I can’t make the rehearsal or gig today. I’m going to the beach or the pool.” Even now, when I go out there, you sense it’s more laid back. I think it was partly the car culture. Everyone was spread out, so they drove everywhere. Everything took time. In New York, there was a greater sense of urgency and immediacy.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401bb0919fe8d970d-popup

JW: When did you move to New York?
DF: I first came to New York in 1956 with Buddy DeFranco. We were in New York for quite a few months. Then I went back to California in 1957. But later that year I realized I had to move to New York. I had already met a lot of musicians when I had played Basin Street and Café Bohemia with Buddy. When I arrived in New York, I worked with bassist Teddy Kotick, who had a steady gig on Staten Island. My big break came a few years later, when I was signed to Riverside Records in 1961.

JW: After you arrived in New York in 1957, you shared an apartment with Scott LaFaro?
DF: Yes. Actually, it was my apartment. The guys I had roomed with had moved out. It was on 80th St. and York Ave. Rent was only $18 a month then [laughs]. Scotty was there only for a few months. He soon moved down to the Lower East Side with Gloria, his girlfriend. They never married. Gloria was a lovely girl and a dancer. She and Scotty remained together until his fatal car accident in early July 1961.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004dbc970c-popup

JW: LaFaro’s Gloria’s Step was named for her, yes?
DF: Yes, but the song’s name originated because he knew the sound of Gloria’s footsteps when she came up the stairs to their apartment, not because she was a dancer. [Photo above of Scott LaFaro]

JW: Is LaFaro justifiably praised as a revolutionary bass player?
DF: In my opinion, Scotty never received as much credit as he should have been given. He developed his own way of playing. He practiced 12 hours a day. I never saw anyone work as hard. He didn’t go to a music conservatory to learn correct fingering.

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JW: Did he take lessons?
DF: He took some lessons in bowing while growing up in Geneva, N.Y., and studied the clarinet and sax. When he practiced the bass, he used a clarinet book. He developed incredible chops. He was the fastest player I had ever heard. With Bill [Evans] and Paul Motian, he was a solo instrument. They were really the first working trio that got into this with a bass player. [Photo above, from left, Scott LaFaro, Bill Evans and Paul Motian, on a break at the Village Vanguard in June 1961]

JW: You recorded just five tracks with Scott in 1961. Do you recall the session?
DF: I don’t. I remember that the three of us—me, Scott and Pete LaRoca—were in a recording studio. I don’t know why. Maybe rehearsing. At any rate, the engineer who was there was the engineer who was at Riverside Records at the time. He liked what we were playing and said, “Why don’t you guys play and I’ll record you.” So we did.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c66970b-popup

JW: You recorded with LaFaro at the same time as Bill Evans.
DF: Scotty and I used to play together even when he was playing with Bill. He’d sit down at my piano in my apartment and try to write something. When he and Gloria lived on the Lower East Side, we’d hang out. We also worked together with singer Dick Haymes at a club called The Living Room on the East Side. Then we went out on the road with Haymes.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c6e970b-popup

JW: Did you and Evans ever meet?
DF: I used to go to the Village Vanguard to hear Bill, Scotty and Paul [Motian]. Bill was a nice guy, very quiet. We didn’t have a lot to say, though. One night I subbed for him. His trio was playing at the Jazz Gallery in the East Village. Scott called me to come in and sub because Bill had gotten sick a couple of nights.

JW: What did you think of Evans?
DF: I admired his playing. He had a great harmonic sense and his voicings were beautiful. But his right-hand lines weren’t that interesting to me.

JW: How is your right hand different?
DF: I stretch the notes. Bill played more within the chords. I find he’s more conservative and I take more chances. But I always loved his chordal stuff. I tried to copy what he was doing there and include it in some of my playing. In fact, I changed some of my playing in my left hand when I first heard him.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767c7b970b-popup

JW: How so?
DF: When I started playing, I listened to Bud Powell (above). He had a root-oriented left hand, using a lot of inversions when voicing chords. Bill was doing things that were completely different, building drama rather than just keeping time.

JW: As someone who has worked with many bassists, what’s your take on LaFaro?
DF: Scotty was able to relate to what I was doing. Many bass players did not listen as carefully as he did. Jazz is ear music—more than any other form. You have to hear what the other players are doing. In most cases you don’t have written notes to play. You just have sounds. If you’re a classical musician, you’re playing notes that were written for you. Of course, you have to listen. But with jazz, you have to hear what you and what other guys are doing. Your ears have to be wide open. I felt that Scott had those kinds of ears, more so than most other bassists.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767ca0970b-popup

JW: Do you know anything about LaFaro’s auto accident in upstate New York on July 6, 1961?
DF: Nothing more than what has been written. But having driven many times with Scotty, I know that he liked to put the pedal to the metal. He was young and liked speed, and there were no seat belts back in those days. He had gone to a party up in Geneva, N.Y., and lost control of the car and crashed, killing himself and a friend who was in the car with him. So sad. [Photo above of Scott LaFaro’s car following his fatal accident]

JW: What was Evans’s bond with LaFaro?
DF: Bill was tremendously impressed with Scotty. Bill tended to have a depressed personality. Scotty was the total opposite. He was so full of joie de vivre. He lived life to the hilt. He was Mr. Positive about everything. Scott also knew how to take control of a situation. Since he was a positive person, he had a strong personality. I think Bill felt emotionally dependent on him.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767cbc970b-popup

JW: Was LaFaro blunt with Evans?
DF: Scotty had no fear or hesitation to tell Bill that he was a jerk for getting hooked on drugs. They had a lot of fights about that.

JW: Do you miss LaFaro?
DF: When I think about Scotty disappearing so early, it’s a terrible tragedy. It’s all so long ago. What I wish is that Scott were around today so we could play together now. I feel I’ve come a long way in 50 years. Or I’d like to think so [laughs].

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004ef8970c-popup

JW: How did your first Riverside album, A Day in the City, come about?
DF: I was studying composition around that time. I wanted to learn to compose. One of the class assignments was to write a theme and variations on a folk song. So I did. I composed a piece for piano. Around the same time, I was friends with bassist Chuck Israels and drummer Joe Hunt. We used to get together at my apartment to jam. Joe was recording with George Russell at the time and knew producer Orrin Keepnews at Riverside. Joe told Orrin about me. Orrin was looking for a pianist with original material.

JW: How was Orrin to work with?
DF: Orrin knew his stuff, but I never felt completely comfortable around him. He wasn’t very encouraging and never really made me feel qualified to be there. But in all fairness, it was probably my own insecurity. Back then, if I didn’t get complete confirmation of my abilities, I felt uncomfortable. He also was a brusque guy, which could be tough. We did make four albums together, and all received high praise from Down Beat. My relationship with Riverside fizzled when the label started to go under in the mid-1960s.

http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b8d2004f11970c-popup

JW: You recorded free jazz with guitarist Attila Zoller starting in 1964, yes?
DF: Zoller was a close friend of mine. We had first met in 1959. We started playing together with Herbie Mann. We started experimenting with free jazz and soon recorded Dreams and Explorations in 1964 for Riverside.

JW: Where did your interest in free jazz come from?
DF: I was very interested in free playing when I studied composition in contemporary classical music. I loved the atonal sounds that I had heard. In free jazz, you can emulate those sounds. You can’t do that when playing chord changes. With free jazz, you don’t have to worry about the key or a steady beat. That’s what drew me to it.

JW: But from the listener’s standpoint, that can sound a little self-centered.
DF: That’s probably true [laughs]. But so is jazz in general for people who don’t know anything about the music. Some free jazz is fascinating, but I’ve heard plenty that’s total garbage.

JW: How would one tell the difference?
DF: [Laughs] Very funny. That’s a good question. If you hear jazz musicians who have a background in traditional jazz play free jazz, you’ll hear that they approach it in a different way. You can hear the difference, just as you can see the difference between someone just throwing paint at a canvas and Jackson Pollock, for example. Someone who has studied can’t help but deliver form, content and composition, even in free jazz. Today, I find much of free jazz to be solely percussive.

JW: Looking back, how do you view free jazz now?
DF: It still has a lot of value. The problem for me now is that I don’t have someone I can work with in the free-jazz space. I could get into it again if I had the right person. Attila was really into that. The way we performed the music was free, but we wrote pieces and improvised off of them. We played off of each other.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767d67970b-popup

JW: What’s your favorite Don Friedman album?
DF: Probably Waltz for Marilyn. I love how it came together.

JW: Looking back on your career, anything you’d do different?
DF: I don’t know. I’ve been tremendously fortunate. I’ve had great experiences and met all kinds of people. I’ve always done something that I love to do, which is play piano and jazz. At this point in my life, in the last several years, I think I’ve been the best I’ve ever been.
http://marcmyers.typepad.com/.a/6a00e008dca1f0883401b7c8767d8b970b-popup

JazzWax tracks: My favorite Don Friedman albums are A Day in the City, Circle Waltz, Flashback, Days of Wine and Roses and Waltz for Marilyn. The first three are musts. If you want to hear Don with Scott LaFaro, you’ll find LaFaro’s Pieces of Jade (Resonance) here (https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Jade-Scott-LaFaro/dp/B002JIH8I8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1467415341&sr=8-1&keywords=scott+lafaro+%2B+pieces+of+jade) . The five tracks they recorded together with drummer Pete LaRoca are I Hear a Rhapsody, Don’s Sacre Bleu (take 1), Green Dolphin Street, Sacre Bleu (take 2) and Woody ‘n’ You. These tracks are absolutely superb, with Green Dolphin Street a complete knockout.
JazzWax clips: Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNe5Fqu-GeI&list=PLhpXz_EC2kDt9kwt0FlLEORsu81YQjz5H) Don’s A Day in the City…

1/6
Dawn (Instrumental) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLhpXz_EC2kDt9kwt0FlLEORsu81YQjz5H&v=bNe5Fqu-GeI)

An error occurred.

[1]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

Here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c) Don with Scott LaFaro and Pete LaRoca on I Hear a Rhapsody…

Scott LaFaro – I Hear A Rhapsody (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c)

An error occurred.

[2]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

And here’s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M) Don live in 2011…

Don Friedman – JazzBaltica 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M)

An error occurred.

[3]Try watching this video on www.youtube.com, or enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser.

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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References

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNe5Fqu-GeI
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElC0x4OiC-c
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBUOjBX_i6M

Passings: Bassist Rob Wasserman (1952 – 2016) ~ VVN Music

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016.html

Passings: Bassist Rob Wasserman (1952 – 2016) (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016.html)

7:33 PM Bob Weir (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Bob%20Weir) , Passings (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Passings) , RatDog (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/RatDog) , Rob Wasserman (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Rob%20Wasserman) , Rock (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Rock) No comments (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=26817478&postID=6322457315756994922)

by VVN Music

Bassist Rob Wasserman, who has worked with numerous artists but is probably best known for his association with Bob Weir and RatDog, has died.

Weir posted earlier today that Wasserman was hospitalized and facing “a serious struggle”. He followed just before 6:30 PM EDT with the message “One of the world’s most beautiful friends and artists has left us. May Rob’s warmth and music live in your hearts as it always has in mine.”

Wasserman originally played violin before switching to bass in his mid-teens. He was classically trained, attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying with bassists from the San Francisco Symphony.

His early professional career tended towards a more jazz sound, playing with Van Morrison, Dan Hicks, Maria Muldaur and the David Grisman Quartet and, in 1983, he issued his debut album, Solo, which won Downbeat’s Record of the Year. He followed with Duets (1988) and Trios (1994) which included guests such as Ricky Lee Jones, Cheryl Bentyne of the Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello and Brian Wilson.

In the late-80’s, Wasserman teamed up with Bob Weir to tour as Weir/Wasserman, Scaring the Children and under other names. The pair played Woodstock ’94, eventually adding Jay Lane on drums and Matthew Kelly on guitar in 1995. Originally known as Friends of Montezuma, they changed their name to RatDog by the middle of ’95.

Their loan studio album was 2000’s Evening Moods and they followed the next year with the live set Live at Roseland. Even without new music to promote, the band stayed active for years as a popular live act. Weir, Wasserman and Lane also toured in 1999 as RD3.

Later in his career, Wasserman released the space rock themed Space Island (2000) and Cosmic Farm (2005).

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Passings: Bassist Rob Wasserman (1952 – 2016) ~ VVN Music

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016.html

Passings: Bassist Rob Wasserman (1952 – 2016) (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016.html)

7:33 PM Bob Weir (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Bob%20Weir) , Passings (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Passings) , RatDog (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/RatDog) , Rob Wasserman (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Rob%20Wasserman) , Rock (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Rock) No comments (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=26817478&postID=6322457315756994922)

by VVN Music

Bassist Rob Wasserman, who has worked with numerous artists but is probably best known for his association with Bob Weir and RatDog, has died.

Weir posted earlier today that Wasserman was hospitalized and facing “a serious struggle”. He followed just before 6:30 PM EDT with the message “One of the world’s most beautiful friends and artists has left us. May Rob’s warmth and music live in your hearts as it always has in mine.”

Wasserman originally played violin before switching to bass in his mid-teens. He was classically trained, attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying with bassists from the San Francisco Symphony.

His early professional career tended towards a more jazz sound, playing with Van Morrison, Dan Hicks, Maria Muldaur and the David Grisman Quartet and, in 1983, he issued his debut album, Solo, which won Downbeat’s Record of the Year. He followed with Duets (1988) and Trios (1994) which included guests such as Ricky Lee Jones, Cheryl Bentyne of the Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello and Brian Wilson.

In the late-80’s, Wasserman teamed up with Bob Weir to tour as Weir/Wasserman, Scaring the Children and under other names. The pair played Woodstock ’94, eventually adding Jay Lane on drums and Matthew Kelly on guitar in 1995. Originally known as Friends of Montezuma, they changed their name to RatDog by the middle of ’95.

Their loan studio album was 2000’s Evening Moods and they followed the next year with the live set Live at Roseland. Even without new music to promote, the band stayed active for years as a popular live act. Weir, Wasserman and Lane also toured in 1999 as RD3.

Later in his career, Wasserman released the space rock themed Space Island (2000) and Cosmic Farm (2005).

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=49f6b4a418) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=49f6b4a418&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Passings: Bassist Rob Wasserman (1952 – 2016) ~ VVN Music

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016.html

Passings: Bassist Rob Wasserman (1952 – 2016) (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-bassist-rob-wasserman-1952-2016.html)

7:33 PM Bob Weir (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Bob%20Weir) , Passings (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Passings) , RatDog (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/RatDog) , Rob Wasserman (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Rob%20Wasserman) , Rock (http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/search/label/Rock) No comments (https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=26817478&postID=6322457315756994922)

by VVN Music

Bassist Rob Wasserman, who has worked with numerous artists but is probably best known for his association with Bob Weir and RatDog, has died.

Weir posted earlier today that Wasserman was hospitalized and facing “a serious struggle”. He followed just before 6:30 PM EDT with the message “One of the world’s most beautiful friends and artists has left us. May Rob’s warmth and music live in your hearts as it always has in mine.”

Wasserman originally played violin before switching to bass in his mid-teens. He was classically trained, attending the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying with bassists from the San Francisco Symphony.

His early professional career tended towards a more jazz sound, playing with Van Morrison, Dan Hicks, Maria Muldaur and the David Grisman Quartet and, in 1983, he issued his debut album, Solo, which won Downbeat’s Record of the Year. He followed with Duets (1988) and Trios (1994) which included guests such as Ricky Lee Jones, Cheryl Bentyne of the Manhattan Transfer, Bobby McFerrin, Lou Reed, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello and Brian Wilson.

In the late-80’s, Wasserman teamed up with Bob Weir to tour as Weir/Wasserman, Scaring the Children and under other names. The pair played Woodstock ’94, eventually adding Jay Lane on drums and Matthew Kelly on guitar in 1995. Originally known as Friends of Montezuma, they changed their name to RatDog by the middle of ’95.

Their loan studio album was 2000’s Evening Moods and they followed the next year with the live set Live at Roseland. Even without new music to promote, the band stayed active for years as a popular live act. Weir, Wasserman and Lane also toured in 1999 as RD3.

Later in his career, Wasserman released the space rock themed Space Island (2000) and Cosmic Farm (2005).

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

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PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Michael Pedicine, 98, locally popular musician

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/20160629_Michael_Pedicine__98__locally_popular_musician.html

Michael Pedicine, 98, locally popular musician

by Lauren Feiner and Olivia Exstrum, STAFF WRITERS

Michael L. Pedicine, 98, of Ardmore, a popular local musician who placed his family above his career, died of pneumonia Sunday, June 26, at his home.

In the 1950s, his version of “Shake a Hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8) ” became a national hit, but Mr. Pedicine chose to remain where he felt most at home: the Philadelphia area.

Mr. Pedicine started playing the saxophone at age 9, and by 10 was a regular on the local radio show The Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour, playing live every Sunday for eight years, granddaughter Christine Gatta said.
Gatta said that as a young man, Mr. Pedicine played in a band at the Ritz-Carlton behind Frank Sinatra.

But professional success was never as important to Mr. Pedicine as his family.
“My father was without question the happiest, most content, fully adjusted, satisfied, loving, creative human being I have ever met,” his son and fellow musician Michael Pedicin said.

At 80, his son said, Mr. Pedicine retired from the band he had played with since age 18. He gave one of his saxophones to his son and sold the other.

Bewildered, Mr. Pedicin asked his father how he could give up his talent and passion. “I played enough,” he responded.

Even in the midst of his fame, when agents were calling about his gospel-turned-dance song that sold over a million copies, Mr. Pedicine declined to travel far from family, his son said.

“He really never wanted more than to play good music, make a living, and be with his family in the suburbs,” his son said.

Just weeks before his death, Mr. Pedicine was as active and spunky as ever, his son and granddaughter said.
“He was fun,” his son said. “I mean, at 98, you don’t meet many people who are fun.”

He recalled a trip to Italy for Mr. Pedicine’s 80th birthday. They visited a cousin living in a convent attached to the Vatican.

“He had those nuns smiling and singing and dancing with him,” he said.

In addition to his son and granddaughter, Mr. Pedicine is survived by daughter Barbara; four other grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife, Marie.

A viewing was held from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 28, at the Funeral Home of John Stretch, 236 E. Eagle Rd, Havertown. Another will be Wednesday, June 29, from 9 to 9:45 a.m. at St. Colman’s Church, Lancaster Avenue and Simpson Road, Ardmore. A Funeral Mass will follow at 10. Interment will be at St. Denis Cemetery, Havertown.

Donations may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association, 399 Market St., Suite 102, Philadelphia 19106.

lfeiner@philly.com (mailto:lfeiner@philly.com)
215-854-5915 @lauren_feiner

Published: June 29, 2016 — 5:32 AM EDT | Updated: June 29, 2016 — 12:27 PM EDT
The Philadelphia Inquirer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=38c4e06862) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=38c4e06862&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Michael Pedicine, 98, locally popular musician

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/20160629_Michael_Pedicine__98__locally_popular_musician.html

Michael Pedicine, 98, locally popular musician

by Lauren Feiner and Olivia Exstrum, STAFF WRITERS

Michael L. Pedicine, 98, of Ardmore, a popular local musician who placed his family above his career, died of pneumonia Sunday, June 26, at his home.

In the 1950s, his version of “Shake a Hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8) ” became a national hit, but Mr. Pedicine chose to remain where he felt most at home: the Philadelphia area.

Mr. Pedicine started playing the saxophone at age 9, and by 10 was a regular on the local radio show The Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour, playing live every Sunday for eight years, granddaughter Christine Gatta said.
Gatta said that as a young man, Mr. Pedicine played in a band at the Ritz-Carlton behind Frank Sinatra.

But professional success was never as important to Mr. Pedicine as his family.
“My father was without question the happiest, most content, fully adjusted, satisfied, loving, creative human being I have ever met,” his son and fellow musician Michael Pedicin said.

At 80, his son said, Mr. Pedicine retired from the band he had played with since age 18. He gave one of his saxophones to his son and sold the other.

Bewildered, Mr. Pedicin asked his father how he could give up his talent and passion. “I played enough,” he responded.

Even in the midst of his fame, when agents were calling about his gospel-turned-dance song that sold over a million copies, Mr. Pedicine declined to travel far from family, his son said.

“He really never wanted more than to play good music, make a living, and be with his family in the suburbs,” his son said.

Just weeks before his death, Mr. Pedicine was as active and spunky as ever, his son and granddaughter said.
“He was fun,” his son said. “I mean, at 98, you don’t meet many people who are fun.”

He recalled a trip to Italy for Mr. Pedicine’s 80th birthday. They visited a cousin living in a convent attached to the Vatican.

“He had those nuns smiling and singing and dancing with him,” he said.

In addition to his son and granddaughter, Mr. Pedicine is survived by daughter Barbara; four other grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife, Marie.

A viewing was held from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 28, at the Funeral Home of John Stretch, 236 E. Eagle Rd, Havertown. Another will be Wednesday, June 29, from 9 to 9:45 a.m. at St. Colman’s Church, Lancaster Avenue and Simpson Road, Ardmore. A Funeral Mass will follow at 10. Interment will be at St. Denis Cemetery, Havertown.

Donations may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association, 399 Market St., Suite 102, Philadelphia 19106.

lfeiner@philly.com (mailto:lfeiner@philly.com)
215-854-5915 @lauren_feiner

Published: June 29, 2016 — 5:32 AM EDT | Updated: June 29, 2016 — 12:27 PM EDT
The Philadelphia Inquirer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=38c4e06862) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=38c4e06862&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Michael Pedicine, 98, locally popular musician

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.philly.com/philly/obituaries/20160629_Michael_Pedicine__98__locally_popular_musician.html

Michael Pedicine, 98, locally popular musician

by Lauren Feiner and Olivia Exstrum, STAFF WRITERS

Michael L. Pedicine, 98, of Ardmore, a popular local musician who placed his family above his career, died of pneumonia Sunday, June 26, at his home.

In the 1950s, his version of “Shake a Hand (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8) ” became a national hit, but Mr. Pedicine chose to remain where he felt most at home: the Philadelphia area.

Mr. Pedicine started playing the saxophone at age 9, and by 10 was a regular on the local radio show The Horn & Hardart Children’s Hour, playing live every Sunday for eight years, granddaughter Christine Gatta said.
Gatta said that as a young man, Mr. Pedicine played in a band at the Ritz-Carlton behind Frank Sinatra.

But professional success was never as important to Mr. Pedicine as his family.
“My father was without question the happiest, most content, fully adjusted, satisfied, loving, creative human being I have ever met,” his son and fellow musician Michael Pedicin said.

At 80, his son said, Mr. Pedicine retired from the band he had played with since age 18. He gave one of his saxophones to his son and sold the other.

Bewildered, Mr. Pedicin asked his father how he could give up his talent and passion. “I played enough,” he responded.

Even in the midst of his fame, when agents were calling about his gospel-turned-dance song that sold over a million copies, Mr. Pedicine declined to travel far from family, his son said.

“He really never wanted more than to play good music, make a living, and be with his family in the suburbs,” his son said.

Just weeks before his death, Mr. Pedicine was as active and spunky as ever, his son and granddaughter said.
“He was fun,” his son said. “I mean, at 98, you don’t meet many people who are fun.”

He recalled a trip to Italy for Mr. Pedicine’s 80th birthday. They visited a cousin living in a convent attached to the Vatican.

“He had those nuns smiling and singing and dancing with him,” he said.

In addition to his son and granddaughter, Mr. Pedicine is survived by daughter Barbara; four other grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife, Marie.

A viewing was held from 7 to 9 p.m. Tuesday, June 28, at the Funeral Home of John Stretch, 236 E. Eagle Rd, Havertown. Another will be Wednesday, June 29, from 9 to 9:45 a.m. at St. Colman’s Church, Lancaster Avenue and Simpson Road, Ardmore. A Funeral Mass will follow at 10. Interment will be at St. Denis Cemetery, Havertown.

Donations may be made to the Alzheimer’s Association, 399 Market St., Suite 102, Philadelphia 19106.

lfeiner@philly.com (mailto:lfeiner@philly.com)
215-854-5915 @lauren_feiner

Published: June 29, 2016 — 5:32 AM EDT | Updated: June 29, 2016 — 12:27 PM EDT
The Philadelphia Inquirer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUT0CnZRUO8

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Passings: Scotty Moore, Guitarist For Elvis Presley (1931 – 2016) ~ VVN Music

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-scotty-moore-guitarist-for.html

Passings: Scotty Moore, Guitarist For Elvis Presley (1931 – 2016)
by VVN Music

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Scotty Moore, who backed Elvis Presley on many of his biggest hits, died on Tuesday at his home in Nashville at the age of 84.

Matt Ross-Spang of Sun Studios posted the following on Instagram:

Winfield Scott Moore was born on December 27, 1931 near Gadsen, TN where he began playing the guitar at the age of 8.

Early on, Moore was influenced by both jazz and country music and, after a four year stint in the navy, he settled in Memphis and started a group called the Starlite Wranglers which also included bassist Bill Black. Moore and Black eventually started working with Sun Records owner Sam Phillips who paired them up with a young Elvis Presley for his first recording session with the label, backing him on That’s All Right (Mama).

Moore was initially both guitarist for Presley and his manager although that would soon be taken over by Colonel Tom Parker. A third man, drummer D.J. Fontana, was soon added to form what would initially be called the Blue Moon Boys. Elvis and the band toured the south until his discovery and signing by RCA Records.

Moore, along with the rest of the band, were with Elvis for all of the TV appearances that made the singer a phenomenon including the Dorsey Brothers, Milton Berle, Steve Allen and the Ed Sullivan Show.

As far as recording, Moore’s guitar can be heard on such classics as Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and nearly every Presley recording up until he began his Hollywood period in the 60’s. The band also appeared in four of Elvis’ movies.

When Elvis was drafted, Moore began to branch out into other areas of the business including becoming a Vice President of Fernwood Records and producing Thomas Wayne’s 1958 hit Tragedy but, as soon as Presley was discharged, Moore returned to his previous position. Both Moore and Fontana appeared on the welcome home special with Frank Sinatra and went on to play on many more of Elvis’ early-60’s hits like Such a Night, Surrender, Good Luck Charm and (You’re the Devil in Disguise).

Once Elvis was firmly ensconced in his Hollywood career, Moore again branched out, recording his own album, The Guitar That Changed the World. He again returned to Presley’s side for the ’68 Comeback Special.

Moving into the 70’s, Moore started doing more engineering including Ringo Starr’s album Beaucoup of Blues and working at Monument studios. By the middle of the decade, Scotty bought the building where Monument was housed and opened his own tape-duplicating business.

From the mid-70’s to the early-80’s, Moore engineered numerous television programs for Opryland Productions and, in 1989, worked as a consultant on ABC’s mini-series Elvis; however, it wasn’t until 1992, when he once again worked with Carl Perkins, that Scotty actually took once again to the stage. His last performance was the comeback special and now, 24 years later, he went on the road with Perkins, James Burton, D.J. Fontana, Ronnie McDowell and the Jordanaires for a tour of England.

For much of the rest of his life, he made occasional appearances with artists like Lee Rocker, Gary Tallent, Alvin Lee, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and many others.

Moore was a member of the Guitar Center Rockwalk (1997), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2000), the Musicians Hall of Fame (2007) and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2015) along with receiving the Orville H. Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award (2002) and the Memphis Music Heroes Award (2004).

Services for Moore will be on Thursday in Humboldt, TN.

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Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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USA

Passings: Scotty Moore, Guitarist For Elvis Presley (1931 – 2016) ~ VVN Music

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-scotty-moore-guitarist-for.html

Passings: Scotty Moore, Guitarist For Elvis Presley (1931 – 2016)
by VVN Music

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Scotty Moore, who backed Elvis Presley on many of his biggest hits, died on Tuesday at his home in Nashville at the age of 84.

Matt Ross-Spang of Sun Studios posted the following on Instagram:

Winfield Scott Moore was born on December 27, 1931 near Gadsen, TN where he began playing the guitar at the age of 8.

Early on, Moore was influenced by both jazz and country music and, after a four year stint in the navy, he settled in Memphis and started a group called the Starlite Wranglers which also included bassist Bill Black. Moore and Black eventually started working with Sun Records owner Sam Phillips who paired them up with a young Elvis Presley for his first recording session with the label, backing him on That’s All Right (Mama).

Moore was initially both guitarist for Presley and his manager although that would soon be taken over by Colonel Tom Parker. A third man, drummer D.J. Fontana, was soon added to form what would initially be called the Blue Moon Boys. Elvis and the band toured the south until his discovery and signing by RCA Records.

Moore, along with the rest of the band, were with Elvis for all of the TV appearances that made the singer a phenomenon including the Dorsey Brothers, Milton Berle, Steve Allen and the Ed Sullivan Show.

As far as recording, Moore’s guitar can be heard on such classics as Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and nearly every Presley recording up until he began his Hollywood period in the 60’s. The band also appeared in four of Elvis’ movies.

When Elvis was drafted, Moore began to branch out into other areas of the business including becoming a Vice President of Fernwood Records and producing Thomas Wayne’s 1958 hit Tragedy but, as soon as Presley was discharged, Moore returned to his previous position. Both Moore and Fontana appeared on the welcome home special with Frank Sinatra and went on to play on many more of Elvis’ early-60’s hits like Such a Night, Surrender, Good Luck Charm and (You’re the Devil in Disguise).

Once Elvis was firmly ensconced in his Hollywood career, Moore again branched out, recording his own album, The Guitar That Changed the World. He again returned to Presley’s side for the ’68 Comeback Special.

Moving into the 70’s, Moore started doing more engineering including Ringo Starr’s album Beaucoup of Blues and working at Monument studios. By the middle of the decade, Scotty bought the building where Monument was housed and opened his own tape-duplicating business.

From the mid-70’s to the early-80’s, Moore engineered numerous television programs for Opryland Productions and, in 1989, worked as a consultant on ABC’s mini-series Elvis; however, it wasn’t until 1992, when he once again worked with Carl Perkins, that Scotty actually took once again to the stage. His last performance was the comeback special and now, 24 years later, he went on the road with Perkins, James Burton, D.J. Fontana, Ronnie McDowell and the Jordanaires for a tour of England.

For much of the rest of his life, he made occasional appearances with artists like Lee Rocker, Gary Tallent, Alvin Lee, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and many others.

Moore was a member of the Guitar Center Rockwalk (1997), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2000), the Musicians Hall of Fame (2007) and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2015) along with receiving the Orville H. Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award (2002) and the Memphis Music Heroes Award (2004).

Services for Moore will be on Thursday in Humboldt, TN.

Shop Related Products

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Passings: Scotty Moore, Guitarist For Elvis Presley (1931 – 2016) ~ VVN Music

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.vintagevinylnews.com/2016/06/passings-scotty-moore-guitarist-for.html

Passings: Scotty Moore, Guitarist For Elvis Presley (1931 – 2016)
by VVN Music

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Scotty Moore, who backed Elvis Presley on many of his biggest hits, died on Tuesday at his home in Nashville at the age of 84.

Matt Ross-Spang of Sun Studios posted the following on Instagram:

Winfield Scott Moore was born on December 27, 1931 near Gadsen, TN where he began playing the guitar at the age of 8.

Early on, Moore was influenced by both jazz and country music and, after a four year stint in the navy, he settled in Memphis and started a group called the Starlite Wranglers which also included bassist Bill Black. Moore and Black eventually started working with Sun Records owner Sam Phillips who paired them up with a young Elvis Presley for his first recording session with the label, backing him on That’s All Right (Mama).

Moore was initially both guitarist for Presley and his manager although that would soon be taken over by Colonel Tom Parker. A third man, drummer D.J. Fontana, was soon added to form what would initially be called the Blue Moon Boys. Elvis and the band toured the south until his discovery and signing by RCA Records.

Moore, along with the rest of the band, were with Elvis for all of the TV appearances that made the singer a phenomenon including the Dorsey Brothers, Milton Berle, Steve Allen and the Ed Sullivan Show.

As far as recording, Moore’s guitar can be heard on such classics as Heartbreak Hotel, Blue Suede Shoes, Hound Dog, Jailhouse Rock and nearly every Presley recording up until he began his Hollywood period in the 60’s. The band also appeared in four of Elvis’ movies.

When Elvis was drafted, Moore began to branch out into other areas of the business including becoming a Vice President of Fernwood Records and producing Thomas Wayne’s 1958 hit Tragedy but, as soon as Presley was discharged, Moore returned to his previous position. Both Moore and Fontana appeared on the welcome home special with Frank Sinatra and went on to play on many more of Elvis’ early-60’s hits like Such a Night, Surrender, Good Luck Charm and (You’re the Devil in Disguise).

Once Elvis was firmly ensconced in his Hollywood career, Moore again branched out, recording his own album, The Guitar That Changed the World. He again returned to Presley’s side for the ’68 Comeback Special.

Moving into the 70’s, Moore started doing more engineering including Ringo Starr’s album Beaucoup of Blues and working at Monument studios. By the middle of the decade, Scotty bought the building where Monument was housed and opened his own tape-duplicating business.

From the mid-70’s to the early-80’s, Moore engineered numerous television programs for Opryland Productions and, in 1989, worked as a consultant on ABC’s mini-series Elvis; however, it wasn’t until 1992, when he once again worked with Carl Perkins, that Scotty actually took once again to the stage. His last performance was the comeback special and now, 24 years later, he went on the road with Perkins, James Burton, D.J. Fontana, Ronnie McDowell and the Jordanaires for a tour of England.

For much of the rest of his life, he made occasional appearances with artists like Lee Rocker, Gary Tallent, Alvin Lee, Keith Richards, Jeff Beck and many others.

Moore was a member of the Guitar Center Rockwalk (1997), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2000), the Musicians Hall of Fame (2007) and the Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2015) along with receiving the Orville H. Gibson Lifetime Achievement Award (2002) and the Memphis Music Heroes Award (2004).

Services for Moore will be on Thursday in Humboldt, TN.

Shop Related Products

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Book Review BY JONATHAN KARP: Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2144/the-hit-man/

REVIEWS
The Hit Man
By Jonathan Karp (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/author/jonathan-karp) | Summer 2016 (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/archive/issues/summer-2016/)

Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496805704?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1496805704&linkCode=xm2&tag=wwwjewishrevi-20)
by Richard Carlin
University Press of Mississippi, 304 pp., $35

“The ability to wheel and deal are such essential elements of success” in the music industry, wrote the editors of Billboard magazine in November 1988, with Morris Levy in mind, that “the thin line between unscrupulous and criminal behavior is often obscure and hard to pinpoint.” Wherever that line lay, Levy often crossed it. The owner-operator of the world-famous New York jazz club Birdland during the 1950s, the head of the indie label Roulette Records throughout the sixties and seventies, the creator of the retail record store chain Strawberries during the 1980s, and the object of countless lawsuits for copyright infringement and royalty theft during most of his career, Levy was a lifelong associate (or more accurately, employee) of the Mafia, specifically, the Genovese crime family. Only his death of stomach cancer in 1990 at the age of 63 spared him from a 10-year prison sentence for violent extortion.

Left: Logo of Birdland, established 1949, New York City. Right: LP cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky,” produced by Roulette Records, 1966.

Pop music historian Richard Carlin comes not exactly to praise Morris Levy but at least to set the record straight. He aims to rediscover the character in the caricature. Scrupulously even-handed, Carlin eschews the sensational in favor of sober business history, meticulously detailing key aspects of Levy’s 40-year career in a business where, curiously in Carlin’s telling, Levy occupied a position both at the center and on the margins. Carlin reveals that Levy, who is usually dismissed as just a colorful parasite, was a nightclub owner committed to racial integration (of both customers and staff), an innovator in the early promotion of rock and roll concerts (partnering with legendary Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed), an ambitious label owner who once aspired to elevate his company Roulette Records to the status of a major label, and a genuine pioneer of discount music marketing, including his virtual invention of the “golden oldie” compilation. While acknowledging that Levy
had ties to mobsters from the beginning—his start in the business was as a teenage flunky in the nightclubs’ Mob-run coat-check racket—Carlin suggests that Levy remained a semi-legitimate businessman until the middle-late 1960s, when Roulette’s fortunes as a hit factory declined. It was at this point that such lifelong cronies as Genovese family boss Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli and New Jersey mobster Gaetano “Tommy” Vastola virtually moved into the company’s premises, on occasion even commandeering Levy’s office for discreet high-level meetings.
Yet Carlin’s stick-to-business read of Levy’s life constricts the book’s focus almost too tightly. The author tells us that Levy was a notorious womanizer, but we learn next to nothing of his five marriages and three children, although Carlin appears to have interviewed Levy’s son Adam, who became his father’s confidant and inherited many of his many legal entanglements. Levy’s Jewishness is similarly neglected. It is of course never disguised, which would have been absurd. The music business of Levy’s day (and to an extent even today) was a Jewish niche industry; almost everyone Levy worked with who wasn’t an artist or a Mafioso was a Jew. Co-religionists and Italians alike referred to Morris as Moishe. That the Ashkenazi pronunciation was employed and that Levy himself made frequent use of Yiddish, despite the fact that he was the son of Turkish-born Sephardi immigrants, underscores the peculiar ethnic character of the music business subculture. In his 2010 memoir, Me, the
Mob, and the Music, the non-Jewish Midwesterner Tommy James, who, with his group the Shondells, would become Roulette’s most successful hitmaker of the 1960s era, described his introduction to the business as one meeting after another with Jewish moguls: talent agent Chuck Rubin; head of the Kama Sutra label, Artie Ripp; Ron Alexenburg, boss of Epic Records; George Goldner, the pioneering producer of Latin mambo recordings; and Jerry Wexler, co-head of Atlantic Records. By the time James finally made his way to Morris Levy’s cavernous Broadway office, Levy’s promotional director, Red Schwartz, had tipped off his boss to the hit record potential of James’s song “Hanky Panky.” As James later found out, Levy had sent a message to all of these competitors to lay off. “This is my fucking record!” he told them. “Leave it alone.”

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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Book Review BY JONATHAN KARP: Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2144/the-hit-man/

REVIEWS
The Hit Man
By Jonathan Karp (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/author/jonathan-karp) | Summer 2016 (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/archive/issues/summer-2016/)

Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496805704?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1496805704&linkCode=xm2&tag=wwwjewishrevi-20)
by Richard Carlin
University Press of Mississippi, 304 pp., $35

“The ability to wheel and deal are such essential elements of success” in the music industry, wrote the editors of Billboard magazine in November 1988, with Morris Levy in mind, that “the thin line between unscrupulous and criminal behavior is often obscure and hard to pinpoint.” Wherever that line lay, Levy often crossed it. The owner-operator of the world-famous New York jazz club Birdland during the 1950s, the head of the indie label Roulette Records throughout the sixties and seventies, the creator of the retail record store chain Strawberries during the 1980s, and the object of countless lawsuits for copyright infringement and royalty theft during most of his career, Levy was a lifelong associate (or more accurately, employee) of the Mafia, specifically, the Genovese crime family. Only his death of stomach cancer in 1990 at the age of 63 spared him from a 10-year prison sentence for violent extortion.

Left: Logo of Birdland, established 1949, New York City. Right: LP cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky,” produced by Roulette Records, 1966.

Pop music historian Richard Carlin comes not exactly to praise Morris Levy but at least to set the record straight. He aims to rediscover the character in the caricature. Scrupulously even-handed, Carlin eschews the sensational in favor of sober business history, meticulously detailing key aspects of Levy’s 40-year career in a business where, curiously in Carlin’s telling, Levy occupied a position both at the center and on the margins. Carlin reveals that Levy, who is usually dismissed as just a colorful parasite, was a nightclub owner committed to racial integration (of both customers and staff), an innovator in the early promotion of rock and roll concerts (partnering with legendary Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed), an ambitious label owner who once aspired to elevate his company Roulette Records to the status of a major label, and a genuine pioneer of discount music marketing, including his virtual invention of the “golden oldie” compilation. While acknowledging that Levy
had ties to mobsters from the beginning—his start in the business was as a teenage flunky in the nightclubs’ Mob-run coat-check racket—Carlin suggests that Levy remained a semi-legitimate businessman until the middle-late 1960s, when Roulette’s fortunes as a hit factory declined. It was at this point that such lifelong cronies as Genovese family boss Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli and New Jersey mobster Gaetano “Tommy” Vastola virtually moved into the company’s premises, on occasion even commandeering Levy’s office for discreet high-level meetings.
Yet Carlin’s stick-to-business read of Levy’s life constricts the book’s focus almost too tightly. The author tells us that Levy was a notorious womanizer, but we learn next to nothing of his five marriages and three children, although Carlin appears to have interviewed Levy’s son Adam, who became his father’s confidant and inherited many of his many legal entanglements. Levy’s Jewishness is similarly neglected. It is of course never disguised, which would have been absurd. The music business of Levy’s day (and to an extent even today) was a Jewish niche industry; almost everyone Levy worked with who wasn’t an artist or a Mafioso was a Jew. Co-religionists and Italians alike referred to Morris as Moishe. That the Ashkenazi pronunciation was employed and that Levy himself made frequent use of Yiddish, despite the fact that he was the son of Turkish-born Sephardi immigrants, underscores the peculiar ethnic character of the music business subculture. In his 2010 memoir, Me, the
Mob, and the Music, the non-Jewish Midwesterner Tommy James, who, with his group the Shondells, would become Roulette’s most successful hitmaker of the 1960s era, described his introduction to the business as one meeting after another with Jewish moguls: talent agent Chuck Rubin; head of the Kama Sutra label, Artie Ripp; Ron Alexenburg, boss of Epic Records; George Goldner, the pioneering producer of Latin mambo recordings; and Jerry Wexler, co-head of Atlantic Records. By the time James finally made his way to Morris Levy’s cavernous Broadway office, Levy’s promotional director, Red Schwartz, had tipped off his boss to the hit record potential of James’s song “Hanky Panky.” As James later found out, Levy had sent a message to all of these competitors to lay off. “This is my fucking record!” he told them. “Leave it alone.”

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=38e896a1da) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=38e896a1da&e=[UNIQID])

PLEASE NOTE: IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE ON THIS MAILING LIST PLEASE RESPOND WITH ‘REMOVE’ IN THE SUBJECT LINE. IF YOU ARE RECEIVING DUPLICATE EMAILS OUR APOLOGIES, JAZZ PROMO SERVICES ANNOUNCEMENT LIST IS GROWING LARGER EVERY DAY…..PLEASE LET US KNOW AND WE WILL FIX IT IMMEDIATELY!

Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

Book Review BY JONATHAN KARP: Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2144/the-hit-man/

REVIEWS
The Hit Man
By Jonathan Karp (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/author/jonathan-karp) | Summer 2016 (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/archive/issues/summer-2016/)

Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496805704?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1496805704&linkCode=xm2&tag=wwwjewishrevi-20)
by Richard Carlin
University Press of Mississippi, 304 pp., $35

“The ability to wheel and deal are such essential elements of success” in the music industry, wrote the editors of Billboard magazine in November 1988, with Morris Levy in mind, that “the thin line between unscrupulous and criminal behavior is often obscure and hard to pinpoint.” Wherever that line lay, Levy often crossed it. The owner-operator of the world-famous New York jazz club Birdland during the 1950s, the head of the indie label Roulette Records throughout the sixties and seventies, the creator of the retail record store chain Strawberries during the 1980s, and the object of countless lawsuits for copyright infringement and royalty theft during most of his career, Levy was a lifelong associate (or more accurately, employee) of the Mafia, specifically, the Genovese crime family. Only his death of stomach cancer in 1990 at the age of 63 spared him from a 10-year prison sentence for violent extortion.

Left: Logo of Birdland, established 1949, New York City. Right: LP cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky,” produced by Roulette Records, 1966.

Pop music historian Richard Carlin comes not exactly to praise Morris Levy but at least to set the record straight. He aims to rediscover the character in the caricature. Scrupulously even-handed, Carlin eschews the sensational in favor of sober business history, meticulously detailing key aspects of Levy’s 40-year career in a business where, curiously in Carlin’s telling, Levy occupied a position both at the center and on the margins. Carlin reveals that Levy, who is usually dismissed as just a colorful parasite, was a nightclub owner committed to racial integration (of both customers and staff), an innovator in the early promotion of rock and roll concerts (partnering with legendary Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed), an ambitious label owner who once aspired to elevate his company Roulette Records to the status of a major label, and a genuine pioneer of discount music marketing, including his virtual invention of the “golden oldie” compilation. While acknowledging that Levy
had ties to mobsters from the beginning—his start in the business was as a teenage flunky in the nightclubs’ Mob-run coat-check racket—Carlin suggests that Levy remained a semi-legitimate businessman until the middle-late 1960s, when Roulette’s fortunes as a hit factory declined. It was at this point that such lifelong cronies as Genovese family boss Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli and New Jersey mobster Gaetano “Tommy” Vastola virtually moved into the company’s premises, on occasion even commandeering Levy’s office for discreet high-level meetings.
Yet Carlin’s stick-to-business read of Levy’s life constricts the book’s focus almost too tightly. The author tells us that Levy was a notorious womanizer, but we learn next to nothing of his five marriages and three children, although Carlin appears to have interviewed Levy’s son Adam, who became his father’s confidant and inherited many of his many legal entanglements. Levy’s Jewishness is similarly neglected. It is of course never disguised, which would have been absurd. The music business of Levy’s day (and to an extent even today) was a Jewish niche industry; almost everyone Levy worked with who wasn’t an artist or a Mafioso was a Jew. Co-religionists and Italians alike referred to Morris as Moishe. That the Ashkenazi pronunciation was employed and that Levy himself made frequent use of Yiddish, despite the fact that he was the son of Turkish-born Sephardi immigrants, underscores the peculiar ethnic character of the music business subculture. In his 2010 memoir, Me, the
Mob, and the Music, the non-Jewish Midwesterner Tommy James, who, with his group the Shondells, would become Roulette’s most successful hitmaker of the 1960s era, described his introduction to the business as one meeting after another with Jewish moguls: talent agent Chuck Rubin; head of the Kama Sutra label, Artie Ripp; Ron Alexenburg, boss of Epic Records; George Goldner, the pioneering producer of Latin mambo recordings; and Jerry Wexler, co-head of Atlantic Records. By the time James finally made his way to Morris Levy’s cavernous Broadway office, Levy’s promotional director, Red Schwartz, had tipped off his boss to the hit record potential of James’s song “Hanky Panky.” As James later found out, Levy had sent a message to all of these competitors to lay off. “This is my fucking record!” he told them. “Leave it alone.”

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Book Review BY JONATHAN KARP: Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2144/the-hit-man/

REVIEWS
The Hit Man
By Jonathan Karp (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/author/jonathan-karp) | Summer 2016 (http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/archive/issues/summer-2016/)

Godfather of the Music Business: Morris Levy (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1496805704?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creativeASIN=1496805704&linkCode=xm2&tag=wwwjewishrevi-20)
by Richard Carlin
University Press of Mississippi, 304 pp., $35

“The ability to wheel and deal are such essential elements of success” in the music industry, wrote the editors of Billboard magazine in November 1988, with Morris Levy in mind, that “the thin line between unscrupulous and criminal behavior is often obscure and hard to pinpoint.” Wherever that line lay, Levy often crossed it. The owner-operator of the world-famous New York jazz club Birdland during the 1950s, the head of the indie label Roulette Records throughout the sixties and seventies, the creator of the retail record store chain Strawberries during the 1980s, and the object of countless lawsuits for copyright infringement and royalty theft during most of his career, Levy was a lifelong associate (or more accurately, employee) of the Mafia, specifically, the Genovese crime family. Only his death of stomach cancer in 1990 at the age of 63 spared him from a 10-year prison sentence for violent extortion.

Left: Logo of Birdland, established 1949, New York City. Right: LP cover of Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Hanky Panky,” produced by Roulette Records, 1966.

Pop music historian Richard Carlin comes not exactly to praise Morris Levy but at least to set the record straight. He aims to rediscover the character in the caricature. Scrupulously even-handed, Carlin eschews the sensational in favor of sober business history, meticulously detailing key aspects of Levy’s 40-year career in a business where, curiously in Carlin’s telling, Levy occupied a position both at the center and on the margins. Carlin reveals that Levy, who is usually dismissed as just a colorful parasite, was a nightclub owner committed to racial integration (of both customers and staff), an innovator in the early promotion of rock and roll concerts (partnering with legendary Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed), an ambitious label owner who once aspired to elevate his company Roulette Records to the status of a major label, and a genuine pioneer of discount music marketing, including his virtual invention of the “golden oldie” compilation. While acknowledging that Levy
had ties to mobsters from the beginning—his start in the business was as a teenage flunky in the nightclubs’ Mob-run coat-check racket—Carlin suggests that Levy remained a semi-legitimate businessman until the middle-late 1960s, when Roulette’s fortunes as a hit factory declined. It was at this point that such lifelong cronies as Genovese family boss Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli and New Jersey mobster Gaetano “Tommy” Vastola virtually moved into the company’s premises, on occasion even commandeering Levy’s office for discreet high-level meetings.
Yet Carlin’s stick-to-business read of Levy’s life constricts the book’s focus almost too tightly. The author tells us that Levy was a notorious womanizer, but we learn next to nothing of his five marriages and three children, although Carlin appears to have interviewed Levy’s son Adam, who became his father’s confidant and inherited many of his many legal entanglements. Levy’s Jewishness is similarly neglected. It is of course never disguised, which would have been absurd. The music business of Levy’s day (and to an extent even today) was a Jewish niche industry; almost everyone Levy worked with who wasn’t an artist or a Mafioso was a Jew. Co-religionists and Italians alike referred to Morris as Moishe. That the Ashkenazi pronunciation was employed and that Levy himself made frequent use of Yiddish, despite the fact that he was the son of Turkish-born Sephardi immigrants, underscores the peculiar ethnic character of the music business subculture. In his 2010 memoir, Me, the
Mob, and the Music, the non-Jewish Midwesterner Tommy James, who, with his group the Shondells, would become Roulette’s most successful hitmaker of the 1960s era, described his introduction to the business as one meeting after another with Jewish moguls: talent agent Chuck Rubin; head of the Kama Sutra label, Artie Ripp; Ron Alexenburg, boss of Epic Records; George Goldner, the pioneering producer of Latin mambo recordings; and Jerry Wexler, co-head of Atlantic Records. By the time James finally made his way to Morris Levy’s cavernous Broadway office, Levy’s promotional director, Red Schwartz, had tipped off his boss to the hit record potential of James’s song “Hanky Panky.” As James later found out, Levy had sent a message to all of these competitors to lay off. “This is my fucking record!” he told them. “Leave it alone.”

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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

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USA

Ralph Stanley’s Inimitable Voice – The New Yorker

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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ralph-stanleys-inimitable-voice?mc_cid=3c09bd1b3c

RALPH STANLEY’S INIMITABLE VOICE
By David Cantwell (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-cantwell) , JUNE 26, 2016



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http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ralph-Stanley-800.jpg

Ralph Stanley, in 2011.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ED RODE / AP
Barrier Status: ‘none’
The bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/08/20/constant-sorrow) , who died Thursday evening, at the age of eighty-nine, leaves behind an enormously influential—and just plain enormous—body of work. As one half of the Stanley Brothers, a band on the short list of bluegrass originators, he recorded more than three hundred songs over two decades, ending in 1966. In the fifty years after that, working as a solo act in a style he was careful to identify not as bluegrass but as the old-time music that folks today call bluegrass, he recorded about a thousand more songs, spread across some seventy-five albums. That’s all good news.
The bad news is that, when it comes to Ralph Stanley’s voice, there has only ever been the one, and there will be no replacements. Stanley’s voice has been called “a force of nature,” “otherworldly,” “elemental,” “eerie.” Try to describe it and you inevitably tumble into a deep mountain mine of contradictory clichés. Trying to capture its singular tone in a fresh way risks foolishness. (“Like a woodwind crossed with a coonhound, turned up to eleven” is a note I just jotted down, before scratching it out.)
His voice sounded so vital and powerful, and yet at the same time so frail and so very, very old. Stanley recalled more than once that, as a child, he was known in his Primitive Baptist Church community as “the boy with the hundred-year-old voice.” There is a danger, though, in focussing on the strangeness of Stanley’s voice. As with his rendition of “O Death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU) ,” the folk song he sang a cappella for the Coen brothers’ 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” the supposed weirdness of a Stanley vocal performance is easily mistaken for the essence of his art. That something as universal as a man praying for safe passage to another year was deemed exotic and haunting by contemporary audiences, rather than as ordinary and human, says more about us, I think, than it does about Ralph Stanley.
Stanley was born in 1927 in the Clinch Mountains of Dickenson County, Virginia. In his as-told-to autobiography, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” named for the song he continued to consider his signature number (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLKltv26-00) even after “O Death” earned him a Grammy, Stanley presents himself as “a backwards kid who could scarcely hand over a howdy,” who was asthmatic and worried about everything—especially the prospect of a life spent working in the coal mines that dominated the region. He learned to sing at church, and his mother taught him how to play the banjo, clawhammer-style.
Music provided Stanley an alternative to working at a sawmill, like his father, or in the mines, as his stepbrothers did. For Ralph and his brother Carter, a year and a half older and gregarious and jocular where Ralph was anxious and tight-lipped, music wasn’t a path out of the hills; it was a safer and less soul-robbing way of staying put in the place they loved. In honor of that place, Ralph and Carter named their band the Clinch Mountain Boys.
They began their career in 1946, not long after Ralph returned home from serving in occupied Germany. One of Carter’s early songs, “The Little Glass of Wine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1g2_kzkx4Q) ,” popular on the radio program “Farm and Fun Time,” helped the brothers get signed to the tiny Rich-R-Tone label, in 1947. “Glass of Wine” was a poisoned murder ballad performed, like their handful of other early tracks, in the old-time string-band style. The following year they recorded “Molly and Tenbrooks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww137Y37OnA) ,” a Bill Monroe composition that the brothers played, note for note, in the new Bill Monroe style, which, in a few years, people would start calling bluegrass. Ralph plucked his banjo not in the two-finger style he’d grown up with but in the thrilling three-finger fashion of Monroe’s star sideman, Earl Scruggs; the Clinch Mountain Boys’ Pee Wee Lambert sang lead in precise mimicry of Monroe’s piercing falsetto; and the rhythm
swung hard and scooted with driving bluegrass propulsion.
Bluegrass is modern music: rhythm-centric, improvisational, scarcely older than rock and roll. It wasn’t invented until Monroe added the banjoist Scruggs and the guitarist and lead singer Lester Flatt to his band, in the late nineteen-forties. Monroe was not pleased with the Stanleys’ mimicry. When his own label, Columbia Records, signed the Stanley Brothers, in 1950, Monroe promptly left for Decca Records in a huff. But, in a real sense, the Stanleys are the reason that Monroe is remembered today as the father of bluegrass music. Monroe, with key assists from Flatt and Scruggs, invented an exciting sound. As the first to adopt that sound, Ralph and Carter Stanley helped to invent a genre.
Ralph and Carter Stanley began as copycats, but they rapidly became masters of the new sound. Carter Stanley’s songs of earthly separation, such as “The White Dove (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhc0N06bg2g) ” and “The Fields Have Turned Brown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevmoxEsT1g) ,” and randy romancers, such as “How Mountain Girls Can Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrqhZxvsxTs) ,” were the equals of Monroe’s most sublime work. But it was Ralph Stanley, singing harmony with his brother or taking a lead, who truly set them apart. Ralph’s phrasing and attack on a lyric, chipping a line off short or stretching and worrying it to death and back, marked him as a Monroe disciple. The unmistakable tone and texture of Ralph’s high tenor—high and devastatingly lonesome, layered with all manner of meaning—were his alone.
To my ears, the finest music the Stanleys ever recorded was the work they cut between 1958 and 1966, for the Starday and King labels. Improved recording technology makes these sides pop more like a live performance, especially Ralph’s banjo and voice. The addition of hot acoustic-guitar picking was a Stanley innovation that is now the bluegrass standard. The period also included the brothers’ only real radio hit, an updating of “The Arkansas Traveler” called “How Far to Little Rock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOQ_zrG78Vc) ,” which incorporated the vaudevillian humor that was a part of their live sets. Ralph: “Hello, stranger . . . why don’t you cover your house?” Carter: “Well, when it’s raining I can’t, buddy. And when the sun’s a-shinin’ it don’t leak!”
It’s in these years that all those clichés—“force of nature,” “otherworldly”—really attached themselves to Stanley’s voice. On “Rank Stranger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I16YOPmmZbs) ,” the Albert Brumley-penned gospel standard that is among the Stanleys’ most beloved performances, that voice blasts like a siren of alienated misery and end-times devastation. He sings but a single line by himself—“Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger”—but that utterance, just twice repeated, so dominates the record that it’s easy to forget that “Rank Stranger” is formally a Carter lead, with trio chorus.
Carter Stanley died fifty years ago this December, at forty-one, victim to liver disease and alcohol abuse. Bill Monroe, his feud with the brothers long since laid to rest, performed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a cappella, at Carter’s funeral. The inscription that Ralph Stanley chose for his brother’s tombstone read, “Farewell, Carter, for a Little While.”
This past half century, a frequent encore of Ralph Stanley’s live appearances was “The Hills of Home (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZrm0SkwMk4) ,” a recitation in which Ralph pledged continued devotion to his brother, to their music and their audience. Ralph had quickly determined to carry on after Carter’s death, retaining the band, the name, and the sound of the Clinch Mountain Boys. But he also made key changes, which have proved profoundly influential in their own right. He began to add more old-time ballads to his sets and his albums. He continued to emphasize gospel material as well, but he began performing it more often in the a-cappella fashion of the Primitive Baptist Church.
The backwards boy who couldn’t hand over so much as a howdy became a confident front man and a bandleader’s bandleader. The Clinch Mountain Boys launched Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley to country stardom and made bluegrass legends of post-Carter lead singers Larry Sparks and Charlie Sizemore. The recording début of another recently deceased bluegrass singer, James King, was on a 1986 album called “Stanley Brothers Classics with Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and Introducing James King.” That’s a mouthful, but it’s also a pretty concise statement of what Stanley saw as his mission all through his solo years: to continue the pioneering bluegrass sound of the Stanley Brothers, to preserve a related but distinct old-time legacy for himself, and to keep an ear out for talent to carry on the work when he was gone.
He kept on recording, and was particularly prized for star-studded duet albums, such as “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,” in 1993; “Clinch Mountain Country,” five years later; and “Clinch Mountain Sweethearts”—with Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, and Dolly Parton, among others—six years after that. He kept up a furious touring schedule, some two hundred dates a year well into his eighties. New fans, who first encountered him via “O Death” or on the subsequent “Down from the Mountain” tour, could be surprised to discover, at a county fair or classic-bluegrass festival—like the one held each June in Bean Blossom, Indiana—that Stanley was not moralistic or humorless. The Stanley standard “Mountain Dew,” a regular of Clinch Mountain Boys set lists, did not proselytize for sobriety or warn of the dangers of drink. “Love Me Darling Just Tonight” was not about hand-holding. Onstage, Dr. Ralph, as he called himself after being awarded an honorary degree from Tennessee’s Lincoln M
emorial University, could be chatty and corny and even a little blue: “Giving applause to a bluegrass musician is like making love to an old maid,” he liked to tell audiences. “You just can’t hardly overdo it.”
His voice began to weaken as he aged, but somehow this only seemed to treble its power. “I mourn out my songs more than I did as a young man,” he explained in “Man of Constant Sorrow.” “My voice ain’t what it used to be. My tenor has thinned out some. It’s got more cracks in it and it can get mighty rough around the edges and I can’t hit all the high notes anymore. But . . . I know how to use it better. I can put more feeling in now. . . . I can worry those lines like I never could before.”
Like no one ever could before, he might have said. And, now, like no one ever will.
#content
David Cantwell is the author of “Merle Haggard: The Running Kind” and the co-author of “Heartaches by the Number.” MORE (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-cantwell)

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Ralph Stanley’s Inimitable Voice – The New Yorker

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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ralph-stanleys-inimitable-voice?mc_cid=3c09bd1b3c

RALPH STANLEY’S INIMITABLE VOICE
By David Cantwell (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-cantwell) , JUNE 26, 2016



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http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ralph-Stanley-800.jpg

Ralph Stanley, in 2011.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ED RODE / AP
Barrier Status: ‘none’
The bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/08/20/constant-sorrow) , who died Thursday evening, at the age of eighty-nine, leaves behind an enormously influential—and just plain enormous—body of work. As one half of the Stanley Brothers, a band on the short list of bluegrass originators, he recorded more than three hundred songs over two decades, ending in 1966. In the fifty years after that, working as a solo act in a style he was careful to identify not as bluegrass but as the old-time music that folks today call bluegrass, he recorded about a thousand more songs, spread across some seventy-five albums. That’s all good news.
The bad news is that, when it comes to Ralph Stanley’s voice, there has only ever been the one, and there will be no replacements. Stanley’s voice has been called “a force of nature,” “otherworldly,” “elemental,” “eerie.” Try to describe it and you inevitably tumble into a deep mountain mine of contradictory clichés. Trying to capture its singular tone in a fresh way risks foolishness. (“Like a woodwind crossed with a coonhound, turned up to eleven” is a note I just jotted down, before scratching it out.)
His voice sounded so vital and powerful, and yet at the same time so frail and so very, very old. Stanley recalled more than once that, as a child, he was known in his Primitive Baptist Church community as “the boy with the hundred-year-old voice.” There is a danger, though, in focussing on the strangeness of Stanley’s voice. As with his rendition of “O Death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU) ,” the folk song he sang a cappella for the Coen brothers’ 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” the supposed weirdness of a Stanley vocal performance is easily mistaken for the essence of his art. That something as universal as a man praying for safe passage to another year was deemed exotic and haunting by contemporary audiences, rather than as ordinary and human, says more about us, I think, than it does about Ralph Stanley.
Stanley was born in 1927 in the Clinch Mountains of Dickenson County, Virginia. In his as-told-to autobiography, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” named for the song he continued to consider his signature number (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLKltv26-00) even after “O Death” earned him a Grammy, Stanley presents himself as “a backwards kid who could scarcely hand over a howdy,” who was asthmatic and worried about everything—especially the prospect of a life spent working in the coal mines that dominated the region. He learned to sing at church, and his mother taught him how to play the banjo, clawhammer-style.
Music provided Stanley an alternative to working at a sawmill, like his father, or in the mines, as his stepbrothers did. For Ralph and his brother Carter, a year and a half older and gregarious and jocular where Ralph was anxious and tight-lipped, music wasn’t a path out of the hills; it was a safer and less soul-robbing way of staying put in the place they loved. In honor of that place, Ralph and Carter named their band the Clinch Mountain Boys.
They began their career in 1946, not long after Ralph returned home from serving in occupied Germany. One of Carter’s early songs, “The Little Glass of Wine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1g2_kzkx4Q) ,” popular on the radio program “Farm and Fun Time,” helped the brothers get signed to the tiny Rich-R-Tone label, in 1947. “Glass of Wine” was a poisoned murder ballad performed, like their handful of other early tracks, in the old-time string-band style. The following year they recorded “Molly and Tenbrooks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww137Y37OnA) ,” a Bill Monroe composition that the brothers played, note for note, in the new Bill Monroe style, which, in a few years, people would start calling bluegrass. Ralph plucked his banjo not in the two-finger style he’d grown up with but in the thrilling three-finger fashion of Monroe’s star sideman, Earl Scruggs; the Clinch Mountain Boys’ Pee Wee Lambert sang lead in precise mimicry of Monroe’s piercing falsetto; and the rhythm
swung hard and scooted with driving bluegrass propulsion.
Bluegrass is modern music: rhythm-centric, improvisational, scarcely older than rock and roll. It wasn’t invented until Monroe added the banjoist Scruggs and the guitarist and lead singer Lester Flatt to his band, in the late nineteen-forties. Monroe was not pleased with the Stanleys’ mimicry. When his own label, Columbia Records, signed the Stanley Brothers, in 1950, Monroe promptly left for Decca Records in a huff. But, in a real sense, the Stanleys are the reason that Monroe is remembered today as the father of bluegrass music. Monroe, with key assists from Flatt and Scruggs, invented an exciting sound. As the first to adopt that sound, Ralph and Carter Stanley helped to invent a genre.
Ralph and Carter Stanley began as copycats, but they rapidly became masters of the new sound. Carter Stanley’s songs of earthly separation, such as “The White Dove (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhc0N06bg2g) ” and “The Fields Have Turned Brown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevmoxEsT1g) ,” and randy romancers, such as “How Mountain Girls Can Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrqhZxvsxTs) ,” were the equals of Monroe’s most sublime work. But it was Ralph Stanley, singing harmony with his brother or taking a lead, who truly set them apart. Ralph’s phrasing and attack on a lyric, chipping a line off short or stretching and worrying it to death and back, marked him as a Monroe disciple. The unmistakable tone and texture of Ralph’s high tenor—high and devastatingly lonesome, layered with all manner of meaning—were his alone.
To my ears, the finest music the Stanleys ever recorded was the work they cut between 1958 and 1966, for the Starday and King labels. Improved recording technology makes these sides pop more like a live performance, especially Ralph’s banjo and voice. The addition of hot acoustic-guitar picking was a Stanley innovation that is now the bluegrass standard. The period also included the brothers’ only real radio hit, an updating of “The Arkansas Traveler” called “How Far to Little Rock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOQ_zrG78Vc) ,” which incorporated the vaudevillian humor that was a part of their live sets. Ralph: “Hello, stranger . . . why don’t you cover your house?” Carter: “Well, when it’s raining I can’t, buddy. And when the sun’s a-shinin’ it don’t leak!”
It’s in these years that all those clichés—“force of nature,” “otherworldly”—really attached themselves to Stanley’s voice. On “Rank Stranger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I16YOPmmZbs) ,” the Albert Brumley-penned gospel standard that is among the Stanleys’ most beloved performances, that voice blasts like a siren of alienated misery and end-times devastation. He sings but a single line by himself—“Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger”—but that utterance, just twice repeated, so dominates the record that it’s easy to forget that “Rank Stranger” is formally a Carter lead, with trio chorus.
Carter Stanley died fifty years ago this December, at forty-one, victim to liver disease and alcohol abuse. Bill Monroe, his feud with the brothers long since laid to rest, performed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a cappella, at Carter’s funeral. The inscription that Ralph Stanley chose for his brother’s tombstone read, “Farewell, Carter, for a Little While.”
This past half century, a frequent encore of Ralph Stanley’s live appearances was “The Hills of Home (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZrm0SkwMk4) ,” a recitation in which Ralph pledged continued devotion to his brother, to their music and their audience. Ralph had quickly determined to carry on after Carter’s death, retaining the band, the name, and the sound of the Clinch Mountain Boys. But he also made key changes, which have proved profoundly influential in their own right. He began to add more old-time ballads to his sets and his albums. He continued to emphasize gospel material as well, but he began performing it more often in the a-cappella fashion of the Primitive Baptist Church.
The backwards boy who couldn’t hand over so much as a howdy became a confident front man and a bandleader’s bandleader. The Clinch Mountain Boys launched Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley to country stardom and made bluegrass legends of post-Carter lead singers Larry Sparks and Charlie Sizemore. The recording début of another recently deceased bluegrass singer, James King, was on a 1986 album called “Stanley Brothers Classics with Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and Introducing James King.” That’s a mouthful, but it’s also a pretty concise statement of what Stanley saw as his mission all through his solo years: to continue the pioneering bluegrass sound of the Stanley Brothers, to preserve a related but distinct old-time legacy for himself, and to keep an ear out for talent to carry on the work when he was gone.
He kept on recording, and was particularly prized for star-studded duet albums, such as “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,” in 1993; “Clinch Mountain Country,” five years later; and “Clinch Mountain Sweethearts”—with Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, and Dolly Parton, among others—six years after that. He kept up a furious touring schedule, some two hundred dates a year well into his eighties. New fans, who first encountered him via “O Death” or on the subsequent “Down from the Mountain” tour, could be surprised to discover, at a county fair or classic-bluegrass festival—like the one held each June in Bean Blossom, Indiana—that Stanley was not moralistic or humorless. The Stanley standard “Mountain Dew,” a regular of Clinch Mountain Boys set lists, did not proselytize for sobriety or warn of the dangers of drink. “Love Me Darling Just Tonight” was not about hand-holding. Onstage, Dr. Ralph, as he called himself after being awarded an honorary degree from Tennessee’s Lincoln M
emorial University, could be chatty and corny and even a little blue: “Giving applause to a bluegrass musician is like making love to an old maid,” he liked to tell audiences. “You just can’t hardly overdo it.”
His voice began to weaken as he aged, but somehow this only seemed to treble its power. “I mourn out my songs more than I did as a young man,” he explained in “Man of Constant Sorrow.” “My voice ain’t what it used to be. My tenor has thinned out some. It’s got more cracks in it and it can get mighty rough around the edges and I can’t hit all the high notes anymore. But . . . I know how to use it better. I can put more feeling in now. . . . I can worry those lines like I never could before.”
Like no one ever could before, he might have said. And, now, like no one ever will.
#content
David Cantwell is the author of “Merle Haggard: The Running Kind” and the co-author of “Heartaches by the Number.” MORE (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-cantwell)

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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Ralph Stanley’s Inimitable Voice – The New Yorker

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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ralph-stanleys-inimitable-voice?mc_cid=3c09bd1b3c

RALPH STANLEY’S INIMITABLE VOICE
By David Cantwell (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-cantwell) , JUNE 26, 2016



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Ralph Stanley, in 2011.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ED RODE / AP
Barrier Status: ‘none’
The bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/08/20/constant-sorrow) , who died Thursday evening, at the age of eighty-nine, leaves behind an enormously influential—and just plain enormous—body of work. As one half of the Stanley Brothers, a band on the short list of bluegrass originators, he recorded more than three hundred songs over two decades, ending in 1966. In the fifty years after that, working as a solo act in a style he was careful to identify not as bluegrass but as the old-time music that folks today call bluegrass, he recorded about a thousand more songs, spread across some seventy-five albums. That’s all good news.
The bad news is that, when it comes to Ralph Stanley’s voice, there has only ever been the one, and there will be no replacements. Stanley’s voice has been called “a force of nature,” “otherworldly,” “elemental,” “eerie.” Try to describe it and you inevitably tumble into a deep mountain mine of contradictory clichés. Trying to capture its singular tone in a fresh way risks foolishness. (“Like a woodwind crossed with a coonhound, turned up to eleven” is a note I just jotted down, before scratching it out.)
His voice sounded so vital and powerful, and yet at the same time so frail and so very, very old. Stanley recalled more than once that, as a child, he was known in his Primitive Baptist Church community as “the boy with the hundred-year-old voice.” There is a danger, though, in focussing on the strangeness of Stanley’s voice. As with his rendition of “O Death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xmRWj7gJEU) ,” the folk song he sang a cappella for the Coen brothers’ 2000 film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?,” the supposed weirdness of a Stanley vocal performance is easily mistaken for the essence of his art. That something as universal as a man praying for safe passage to another year was deemed exotic and haunting by contemporary audiences, rather than as ordinary and human, says more about us, I think, than it does about Ralph Stanley.
Stanley was born in 1927 in the Clinch Mountains of Dickenson County, Virginia. In his as-told-to autobiography, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” named for the song he continued to consider his signature number (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLKltv26-00) even after “O Death” earned him a Grammy, Stanley presents himself as “a backwards kid who could scarcely hand over a howdy,” who was asthmatic and worried about everything—especially the prospect of a life spent working in the coal mines that dominated the region. He learned to sing at church, and his mother taught him how to play the banjo, clawhammer-style.
Music provided Stanley an alternative to working at a sawmill, like his father, or in the mines, as his stepbrothers did. For Ralph and his brother Carter, a year and a half older and gregarious and jocular where Ralph was anxious and tight-lipped, music wasn’t a path out of the hills; it was a safer and less soul-robbing way of staying put in the place they loved. In honor of that place, Ralph and Carter named their band the Clinch Mountain Boys.
They began their career in 1946, not long after Ralph returned home from serving in occupied Germany. One of Carter’s early songs, “The Little Glass of Wine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1g2_kzkx4Q) ,” popular on the radio program “Farm and Fun Time,” helped the brothers get signed to the tiny Rich-R-Tone label, in 1947. “Glass of Wine” was a poisoned murder ballad performed, like their handful of other early tracks, in the old-time string-band style. The following year they recorded “Molly and Tenbrooks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww137Y37OnA) ,” a Bill Monroe composition that the brothers played, note for note, in the new Bill Monroe style, which, in a few years, people would start calling bluegrass. Ralph plucked his banjo not in the two-finger style he’d grown up with but in the thrilling three-finger fashion of Monroe’s star sideman, Earl Scruggs; the Clinch Mountain Boys’ Pee Wee Lambert sang lead in precise mimicry of Monroe’s piercing falsetto; and the rhythm
swung hard and scooted with driving bluegrass propulsion.
Bluegrass is modern music: rhythm-centric, improvisational, scarcely older than rock and roll. It wasn’t invented until Monroe added the banjoist Scruggs and the guitarist and lead singer Lester Flatt to his band, in the late nineteen-forties. Monroe was not pleased with the Stanleys’ mimicry. When his own label, Columbia Records, signed the Stanley Brothers, in 1950, Monroe promptly left for Decca Records in a huff. But, in a real sense, the Stanleys are the reason that Monroe is remembered today as the father of bluegrass music. Monroe, with key assists from Flatt and Scruggs, invented an exciting sound. As the first to adopt that sound, Ralph and Carter Stanley helped to invent a genre.
Ralph and Carter Stanley began as copycats, but they rapidly became masters of the new sound. Carter Stanley’s songs of earthly separation, such as “The White Dove (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhc0N06bg2g) ” and “The Fields Have Turned Brown (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mevmoxEsT1g) ,” and randy romancers, such as “How Mountain Girls Can Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrqhZxvsxTs) ,” were the equals of Monroe’s most sublime work. But it was Ralph Stanley, singing harmony with his brother or taking a lead, who truly set them apart. Ralph’s phrasing and attack on a lyric, chipping a line off short or stretching and worrying it to death and back, marked him as a Monroe disciple. The unmistakable tone and texture of Ralph’s high tenor—high and devastatingly lonesome, layered with all manner of meaning—were his alone.
To my ears, the finest music the Stanleys ever recorded was the work they cut between 1958 and 1966, for the Starday and King labels. Improved recording technology makes these sides pop more like a live performance, especially Ralph’s banjo and voice. The addition of hot acoustic-guitar picking was a Stanley innovation that is now the bluegrass standard. The period also included the brothers’ only real radio hit, an updating of “The Arkansas Traveler” called “How Far to Little Rock (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOQ_zrG78Vc) ,” which incorporated the vaudevillian humor that was a part of their live sets. Ralph: “Hello, stranger . . . why don’t you cover your house?” Carter: “Well, when it’s raining I can’t, buddy. And when the sun’s a-shinin’ it don’t leak!”
It’s in these years that all those clichés—“force of nature,” “otherworldly”—really attached themselves to Stanley’s voice. On “Rank Stranger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I16YOPmmZbs) ,” the Albert Brumley-penned gospel standard that is among the Stanleys’ most beloved performances, that voice blasts like a siren of alienated misery and end-times devastation. He sings but a single line by himself—“Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger”—but that utterance, just twice repeated, so dominates the record that it’s easy to forget that “Rank Stranger” is formally a Carter lead, with trio chorus.
Carter Stanley died fifty years ago this December, at forty-one, victim to liver disease and alcohol abuse. Bill Monroe, his feud with the brothers long since laid to rest, performed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a cappella, at Carter’s funeral. The inscription that Ralph Stanley chose for his brother’s tombstone read, “Farewell, Carter, for a Little While.”
This past half century, a frequent encore of Ralph Stanley’s live appearances was “The Hills of Home (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZrm0SkwMk4) ,” a recitation in which Ralph pledged continued devotion to his brother, to their music and their audience. Ralph had quickly determined to carry on after Carter’s death, retaining the band, the name, and the sound of the Clinch Mountain Boys. But he also made key changes, which have proved profoundly influential in their own right. He began to add more old-time ballads to his sets and his albums. He continued to emphasize gospel material as well, but he began performing it more often in the a-cappella fashion of the Primitive Baptist Church.
The backwards boy who couldn’t hand over so much as a howdy became a confident front man and a bandleader’s bandleader. The Clinch Mountain Boys launched Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley to country stardom and made bluegrass legends of post-Carter lead singers Larry Sparks and Charlie Sizemore. The recording début of another recently deceased bluegrass singer, James King, was on a 1986 album called “Stanley Brothers Classics with Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys and Introducing James King.” That’s a mouthful, but it’s also a pretty concise statement of what Stanley saw as his mission all through his solo years: to continue the pioneering bluegrass sound of the Stanley Brothers, to preserve a related but distinct old-time legacy for himself, and to keep an ear out for talent to carry on the work when he was gone.
He kept on recording, and was particularly prized for star-studded duet albums, such as “Saturday Night, Sunday Morning,” in 1993; “Clinch Mountain Country,” five years later; and “Clinch Mountain Sweethearts”—with Iris DeMent, Lucinda Williams, and Dolly Parton, among others—six years after that. He kept up a furious touring schedule, some two hundred dates a year well into his eighties. New fans, who first encountered him via “O Death” or on the subsequent “Down from the Mountain” tour, could be surprised to discover, at a county fair or classic-bluegrass festival—like the one held each June in Bean Blossom, Indiana—that Stanley was not moralistic or humorless. The Stanley standard “Mountain Dew,” a regular of Clinch Mountain Boys set lists, did not proselytize for sobriety or warn of the dangers of drink. “Love Me Darling Just Tonight” was not about hand-holding. Onstage, Dr. Ralph, as he called himself after being awarded an honorary degree from Tennessee’s Lincoln M
emorial University, could be chatty and corny and even a little blue: “Giving applause to a bluegrass musician is like making love to an old maid,” he liked to tell audiences. “You just can’t hardly overdo it.”
His voice began to weaken as he aged, but somehow this only seemed to treble its power. “I mourn out my songs more than I did as a young man,” he explained in “Man of Constant Sorrow.” “My voice ain’t what it used to be. My tenor has thinned out some. It’s got more cracks in it and it can get mighty rough around the edges and I can’t hit all the high notes anymore. But . . . I know how to use it better. I can put more feeling in now. . . . I can worry those lines like I never could before.”
Like no one ever could before, he might have said. And, now, like no one ever will.
#content
David Cantwell is the author of “Merle Haggard: The Running Kind” and the co-author of “Heartaches by the Number.” MORE (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/david-cantwell)

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
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HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.

Jazz Promo Services
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Why Record Stores Mattered – The New Yorker

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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/why-record-stores-mattered?mc_cid=719b3aab1a

CULTURAL COMMENT (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment)
WHY RECORD STORES MATTERED
By Amanda Petrusich (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/amanda-petrusich) , JUNE 22, 2016

The actress Chloë Sevigny, in 2011, at the New York record store Other Music, which closes its doors this week.
PHOTOGRAPH BY THOS ROBINSON / WIREIMAGE FOR AMERICAN EXPRESS / GETTY
Barrier Status: ‘none’
This Saturday, Other Music—the tiny, beloved, and outré record shop on East Fourth Street—will cease its retail operations. No longer will sealed Belle and Sebastian or Boards of Canada LPs be tentatively placed on its counter. The headline of a Times article (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/arts/music/other-music-record-store-closing.html?_r=0) last month announcing the store’s finish read, “Other Music Record Shop, Yielding to Trends, Will Close.” What “trends” means in this context is startlingly self-evident. The prevailing trend of our time is, it seems, a disburdening of the past. Things that once appeared immovably vital are now relics to be examined, mourned, and recast as affectations.
Critics can and have read Other Music’s bow-out as representative, in an allegorical way, of any number of bigger Ends: the End of music as a physical medium to be collected and doted over, the End of curated off-line retail, the End of curation, the End of the East Village, the End of New York. Most of those Ends—whether real or imagined—have already been eulogized so aggressively that to revisit them now seems plainly indulgent. In our accelerated culture, collective nostalgia, in which we mourn the freshly antiquated for reasons that are unclear but still enormously potent, is its own cottage industry (especially for culture reporters).
At the store’s inception—and, I’d argue, for most of its lifespan—what distinguished Other Music from other independent record shops, both in this city and beyond it, was the quietly confrontational ethos behind its name. Most people want to believe in their own deep-rooted exceptionality, whether they’re directly reckoning with those feelings or not; Other Music explicitly indulged that desire. In 1999, if you were the type of person who was looking for something a little different (more challenging, more sophisticated, more esoteric) from the schlock being peddled to the herds of dead-eyed automatons browsing the Tower Records up the block, then here was the store for you! Welcome/Not welcome! I was fifteen when the store opened, in 1995, and, of course, I found the whole idea of it equal parts terrifying and aspirational. Other Music: not regular-ass music. Other. The implication was so clear. (When Other Music outlasted both Tower and the Virgin Megastore that eventually
opened ten blocks north, in Union Square, its premise was also vindicated.)
The store’s stock has always tended toward the abstruse. For many years, it was the only place in the city (and maybe on the East Coast) where you could find copies of great but commercially unpopular records: free jazz, certain strains of world music, Krautrock, long forgotten folk balladry. I bought my first albums by otherwise-unclassifiable artists like Arthur Russell and John Fahey at Other Music. I later read from my book about obscure 78 r.p.m. records there. Uncommon but extraordinary records were offered prominent shelf space, and serendipity was always in the air. Station yourself before the bins labelled “Out”—“Out” in the context of Other Music implied either intrepid or foolhardy experimentation, or maybe both—and see what calls to you.
I still don’t know anyone who has ever stepped into Other Music with total confidence. In the nineteen-nineties and well into the aughts, this was an enormous part of the store’s appeal. It was the bungee jump of shopping experiences: did you have the nerve, and could you survive the leap? Certainly, the need for a knowledgeable staff is less urgent these days—a smartphone will instantly tell you anything you want to know, and you don’t have to feel lethally embarrassed if it turns out you are asking a phone a dumb question—but, when I first started buying CDs there, as a teen-ager, it was hard to find a more astute, studied assemblage of music nerds than the crew lounging behind the counter. I found them so formidable as to be frightening. They did not abide musical foolishness, or bad taste.
To anyone born after me, this probably sounds like a hideously snobbish scene. As I’ve learned teaching music criticism to New York University students, subsequent generations have since adopted a lovely “Do you!” magnanimity when it comes to musical taste. Part of this might have to do with their instinctively inclusive temperaments—they have come of age in an era in which intolerance is forcefully policed—and part of it might have to do with the breakdown of genre, at least as it once existed in the record bins. There are no record bins anymore—no little plastic signposts signifying content, broadcasting a set of principles, musical and otherwise. Genre itself—or, more specifically, genre affiliation as a means of self-identification—feels like another End hovering in the atmosphere this week. No one is asked to choose one affiliation at the expense of another. Instead, it is perfectly normal, even expected, that a person might have a little bit of everything stacked up in
her digital library. The idea of “Other Music” as it was conceived in 1995 is unknowable now.

I was not quite so sanguine as a youth. My scramble for self-identity was tied up in records, and Other Music was where I went to get myself sorted out. What did I like? What did I want? Which section did I want to start flipping through first, and what did that say about me? The classification of a person via her cultural preferences and proclivities—maybe that’s something we should be glad to wave goodbye to. One is no longer either a punk or a goth, In or Out; one merely is.
But it’s also why I think of Other Music as an integral player in my making, and why witnessing its end feels especially personal. We all experience some version of this dissociation a million times in a life: a drawbridge being raised behind you. The sense that you couldn’t re-create yourself now if you tried. When I needed it to, Other Music turned the whole notion of “Other” into something prideful—it forced me to make a choice about who I thought I was, or could be—and for that I’ll always be grateful, beholden.
#content

Amanda Petrusich is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” MORE (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/amanda-petrusich)

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