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Lonnie Mack, Singer and Guitarist Who Pioneered Blues-Rock, Dies at 74 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/23/arts/music/lonnie-mack-singer-and-guitarist-who-pioneered-blues-rockdies-at-74.html?_r=0
** Lonnie Mack, Singer and Guitarist Who Pioneered Blues-Rock, Dies at 74
————————————————————
By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) APRIL 22, 2016
Lonnie Mack, center, performing in 1985 with Keith Richards, left, and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones at the Lone Star in New York City. Alligator Records
Lonnie Mack, a guitarist and singer whose impassioned, fast-picking style on the early 1960s instrumentals “Memphis” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJo_pkHF-ok) and “Wham!” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ta5T8cg3c0) became a model for the blues-rock lead-guitar style and a seminal influence on a long list of British and American artists, died on Thursday in Nashville. He was 74.
Alligator Records announced his death but did not specify the cause.
Mr. Mack was a country boy from southern Indiana who grew up on the Grand Ole Opry, rhythm and blues radio, and the gospel music he sang at his local church, influences that he blended as both a singer and guitarist.
“Memphis,” his instrumental version of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” was a rockabilly-blues ripsnorter with a scorching 12-bar solo. Released in 1963, it rose to No. 5 on the pop charts, sold more than a million copies and galvanized young guitar players around the world.
The music historian Richard T. Pinnell called “Memphis” “a milestone in early rock guitar” in Guitar World magazine in 1979. Just as influential was “Wham!”, also from 1963, with its flamboyant use of a vibrato bar, a device that became known as a whammy bar.
“Mack took the rough, country-inspired rockabilly style of the ’50s and rocketed it into the future,” the music critic Greg Kot wrote in The Chicago Tribune in 1989. “He played it hot, with screaming single-note sustains and shuddering vibrato, a siren call to a legion of aspiring guitar heroes.”
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The records were studied closely by a long list of British and American guitarists, including Jeff Beck, Duane Allman, Dickey Betts, Jimmy Page and Stevie Ray Vaughan. In 1980, Guitar World placed Mr. Mack’s 1964 album, “The Wham of That Memphis Man!,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAH-G_aXHqY) first on a list of 50 landmark records, ahead of recordings by Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Mr. Beck, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Allman Brothers.
Mr. Mack tended to play down his importance. In a 2005 interview he said, “I was a bridge-over between the standard country licks in early rock ‘n’ roll and the screamin’ kinda stuff that came later.”
Lonnie McIntosh was born on July 18, 1941, in West Harrison, Ind., northwest of Cincinnati, where his parents had moved from southeastern Kentucky. His mother taught him a few chords on an acoustic guitar when he was still a boy.
“I started off in bluegrass, before there was rock and roll,” he said in the 2005 interview. “My family was like a family band. We sang and harmonized, and Dad played banjo. We were playing mostly gospel, bluegrass, and old-style country.”
He dropped out of school in the sixth grade after fighting with a teacher and began playing professionally in local clubs, eventually changing his last name to Mack. His smooth, smoky vocal style, with a slight rasp, was influenced by both the country star George Jones and the blues singer Bobby Bland. As a guitarist he often cited the country musician Merle Travis as an early model, as well as the blues players T-Bone Walker and, later, Robert Ward.
In 1958 he bought a Gibson Flying V electric guitar — No. 7 in the first year’s production run — and used it throughout his career. With a group of musicians sometimes billed as the Twilighters, he played clubs and roadhouses in Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky and did session work at Fraternity, a small Cincinnati label that recorded “Memphis,” “Wham!” and one of Mr. Mack’s compositions, “Chicken Pickin.’”
Several of his instrumentals, as well as the soul vocals “Where There’s a Will,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObSqQ7sA2Aw) “Satisfied” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_AfCgJWLIU) and “Why?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqOLMmNf2ak) were collected on “The Wham of That Memphis Man!” The album was reissued as a collector’s edition, with additional tracks, by the Elektra label in 1969.
In the mid-1960s Mr. Mack and his band members worked as session musicians at King Records in Cincinnati, playing on recordings by the Hank Ballard, James Brown and Freddie King.
Continue reading the main story
A rave review of “The Wham of That Memphis Man!” in Rolling Stone magazine in 1968 led to bookings at the Fillmore East and West and a contract with Elektra, where he recorded three albums and played lead and bass guitar on the song “Roadhouse Blues,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pEMd1SdkAE) by the Doors.
He remained a cult figure, in part because of his distaste for the music business. “Seems like every time I get close to really making it, to climbing to the top of the mountain, that’s when I pull out. I just pull up and run,” he told the music writer Peter Guralnick in Country Music magazine in 1977, shortly after he signed with Capitol records.
Mr. Mack, who lived in Smithville, Tenn., is survived by five children and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In the early 1980s, after moving to Texas at the urging of Mr. Vaughan, Mr. Mack moved closer to the limelight, performing with Mr. Vaughan as a kind of Zen guitar master. Mr. Vaughan said that “Wham!” was the first record he bought. He played it so often, trying to master the guitar licks, that his father destroyed the record.
Alligator Records in Chicago approached Mr. Mack to record an album, “Strike Like Lightning,” which was released in 1985 and led to a tour that became a kind of victory lap, with the rock eminences Keith Richards, Ron Wood and Ry Cooder joining him onstage. It culminated in a guitar super-summit at Carnegie Hall, billed as “American Guitar Heroes,” in which Mr. Mack joined with Albert Collins and Roy Buchanan in a performance that was released as a video documentary, “Further on Down the Road.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc)
He recorded two more albums for Alligator, “Second Sight” (1986) and “Lonnie Mack Live! Attack of the Killer V” (1990). He was inducted into the Guitar Hall of Fame in 2001 and the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 2005.
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R.I.P. Lonnie Mack – Carnegie Hall with Albert Collins & Roy Buchanan Further On Down The Road
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
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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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
R.I.P. Lonnie Mack – Carnegie Hall with Albert Collins & Roy Buchanan Further On Down The Road
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
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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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.
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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
R.I.P. Lonnie Mack – Carnegie Hall with Albert Collins & Roy Buchanan Further On Down The Road
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
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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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
R.I.P. Lonnie Mack – Carnegie Hall with Albert Collins & Roy Buchanan Further On Down The Road
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIeZSUevSuc
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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Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops | Newsday
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http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/record-store-day-to-be-celebrated-at-looney-tunes-more-li-shops-1.11678266
** Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops
————————————————————
By Glenn Gamboa glenn.gamboa@newsday.com (mailto:glenn.gamboa@newsday.com?subject=newsday.com)
Karl Groeger Jr. says it’s time to look at Record Store Day in a different way.
The CEO and president of Looney Tunes in West Babylon says people need to stop talking about the day — created to introduce younger fans to record store culture with special releases on vinyl — as a business comeback or a throwback to the old days of crate-digging.
“Vinyl is already back,” he says. “And we have never been busier.”
Groeger says this year’s Record Store Day, which is Saturday, April 16, will be the biggest sales day for the 45-year-old store. (This year’s Record Store Day, the eighth, is celebrated in 1,400 stores nationally.) And he’s sure of it because the day has broken sales records for the past four years.
Groeger is not alone in seeing this kind of surge. According to Nielsen, nearly 12 million vinyl LPs were sold in 2015, up nearly 30 percent over 2014 sales. Industry analysts say vinyl sales haven’t been this high since 1989, with independent record stores responsible for more than 45 percent of the sales. And according to MusicWatch, 47 percent of vinyl customers are under 25.
EntertainmentBest TV, music, theater coming in 2016 (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/best-tv-music-theater-coming-in-2016-1.11269731)
“There has been a fundamental change,” Groeger says. “If you go back 10 years, everyone was listening to music antisocially, through earbuds and an iPod. They were using only one of their physical senses and at inferior sound quality to boot. Now, they realize that listening to music can be a social experience. With a vinyl record, they can listen to music together. They can touch the album and look at the 12-inch-by-12-inch artwork and liner notes and enjoy a superior sound quality.”
Record Store Day, Groeger says, is now more of a celebration. “We will have people lining up outside the store at 11 p.m. the day before,” he says. “I’ll bring them breakfast — some coffee and bagels — before the store opens. It’s a great time. We’ll have more than 2,000 people come through.”
To continue with the party atmosphere, Looney Tunes will have food trucks in the parking lot selling meals throughout the day and BrickHouse Brewery selling beer, with proceeds going to New York Bully Crew, a Patchogue-based animal rescue organization.
Groeger says Looney Tunes won’t have any bands playing this year, as they have in the past, because the store gets too crowded. Instead, comedian Jim Breuer will perform at 1 p.m. and take questions from shoppers.
Another big change for Groeger this year is that he will be selling vinyl albums on his own label, Brookvale Records, including Soul Asylum’s 1992 album “Grave Dancers Union” on red and green vinyl and the soundtrack to the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
MusicNotable music collaborations (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/notable-duets-and-collaborations-in-music-1.5675775)
Lars Ulrich of Metallica (this year’s Record Store Day ambassadors), says the success of vinyl shows hope for the music industry.
“My 17-year-old asked for a record player for his birthday two years ago, and I have been steadily doing my best due diligence as a parent, feeding him the classics since then,” Ulrich said in a statement. “Maybe it all will work out after all.”
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.
Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
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Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops | Newsday
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/record-store-day-to-be-celebrated-at-looney-tunes-more-li-shops-1.11678266
** Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops
————————————————————
By Glenn Gamboa glenn.gamboa@newsday.com (mailto:glenn.gamboa@newsday.com?subject=newsday.com)
Karl Groeger Jr. says it’s time to look at Record Store Day in a different way.
The CEO and president of Looney Tunes in West Babylon says people need to stop talking about the day — created to introduce younger fans to record store culture with special releases on vinyl — as a business comeback or a throwback to the old days of crate-digging.
“Vinyl is already back,” he says. “And we have never been busier.”
Groeger says this year’s Record Store Day, which is Saturday, April 16, will be the biggest sales day for the 45-year-old store. (This year’s Record Store Day, the eighth, is celebrated in 1,400 stores nationally.) And he’s sure of it because the day has broken sales records for the past four years.
Groeger is not alone in seeing this kind of surge. According to Nielsen, nearly 12 million vinyl LPs were sold in 2015, up nearly 30 percent over 2014 sales. Industry analysts say vinyl sales haven’t been this high since 1989, with independent record stores responsible for more than 45 percent of the sales. And according to MusicWatch, 47 percent of vinyl customers are under 25.
EntertainmentBest TV, music, theater coming in 2016 (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/best-tv-music-theater-coming-in-2016-1.11269731)
“There has been a fundamental change,” Groeger says. “If you go back 10 years, everyone was listening to music antisocially, through earbuds and an iPod. They were using only one of their physical senses and at inferior sound quality to boot. Now, they realize that listening to music can be a social experience. With a vinyl record, they can listen to music together. They can touch the album and look at the 12-inch-by-12-inch artwork and liner notes and enjoy a superior sound quality.”
Record Store Day, Groeger says, is now more of a celebration. “We will have people lining up outside the store at 11 p.m. the day before,” he says. “I’ll bring them breakfast — some coffee and bagels — before the store opens. It’s a great time. We’ll have more than 2,000 people come through.”
To continue with the party atmosphere, Looney Tunes will have food trucks in the parking lot selling meals throughout the day and BrickHouse Brewery selling beer, with proceeds going to New York Bully Crew, a Patchogue-based animal rescue organization.
Groeger says Looney Tunes won’t have any bands playing this year, as they have in the past, because the store gets too crowded. Instead, comedian Jim Breuer will perform at 1 p.m. and take questions from shoppers.
Another big change for Groeger this year is that he will be selling vinyl albums on his own label, Brookvale Records, including Soul Asylum’s 1992 album “Grave Dancers Union” on red and green vinyl and the soundtrack to the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
MusicNotable music collaborations (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/notable-duets-and-collaborations-in-music-1.5675775)
Lars Ulrich of Metallica (this year’s Record Store Day ambassadors), says the success of vinyl shows hope for the music industry.
“My 17-year-old asked for a record player for his birthday two years ago, and I have been steadily doing my best due diligence as a parent, feeding him the classics since then,” Ulrich said in a statement. “Maybe it all will work out after all.”
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=d829776b19) | 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=d829776b19&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
Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops | Newsday
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/record-store-day-to-be-celebrated-at-looney-tunes-more-li-shops-1.11678266
** Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops
————————————————————
By Glenn Gamboa glenn.gamboa@newsday.com (mailto:glenn.gamboa@newsday.com?subject=newsday.com)
Karl Groeger Jr. says it’s time to look at Record Store Day in a different way.
The CEO and president of Looney Tunes in West Babylon says people need to stop talking about the day — created to introduce younger fans to record store culture with special releases on vinyl — as a business comeback or a throwback to the old days of crate-digging.
“Vinyl is already back,” he says. “And we have never been busier.”
Groeger says this year’s Record Store Day, which is Saturday, April 16, will be the biggest sales day for the 45-year-old store. (This year’s Record Store Day, the eighth, is celebrated in 1,400 stores nationally.) And he’s sure of it because the day has broken sales records for the past four years.
Groeger is not alone in seeing this kind of surge. According to Nielsen, nearly 12 million vinyl LPs were sold in 2015, up nearly 30 percent over 2014 sales. Industry analysts say vinyl sales haven’t been this high since 1989, with independent record stores responsible for more than 45 percent of the sales. And according to MusicWatch, 47 percent of vinyl customers are under 25.
EntertainmentBest TV, music, theater coming in 2016 (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/best-tv-music-theater-coming-in-2016-1.11269731)
“There has been a fundamental change,” Groeger says. “If you go back 10 years, everyone was listening to music antisocially, through earbuds and an iPod. They were using only one of their physical senses and at inferior sound quality to boot. Now, they realize that listening to music can be a social experience. With a vinyl record, they can listen to music together. They can touch the album and look at the 12-inch-by-12-inch artwork and liner notes and enjoy a superior sound quality.”
Record Store Day, Groeger says, is now more of a celebration. “We will have people lining up outside the store at 11 p.m. the day before,” he says. “I’ll bring them breakfast — some coffee and bagels — before the store opens. It’s a great time. We’ll have more than 2,000 people come through.”
To continue with the party atmosphere, Looney Tunes will have food trucks in the parking lot selling meals throughout the day and BrickHouse Brewery selling beer, with proceeds going to New York Bully Crew, a Patchogue-based animal rescue organization.
Groeger says Looney Tunes won’t have any bands playing this year, as they have in the past, because the store gets too crowded. Instead, comedian Jim Breuer will perform at 1 p.m. and take questions from shoppers.
Another big change for Groeger this year is that he will be selling vinyl albums on his own label, Brookvale Records, including Soul Asylum’s 1992 album “Grave Dancers Union” on red and green vinyl and the soundtrack to the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
MusicNotable music collaborations (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/notable-duets-and-collaborations-in-music-1.5675775)
Lars Ulrich of Metallica (this year’s Record Store Day ambassadors), says the success of vinyl shows hope for the music industry.
“My 17-year-old asked for a record player for his birthday two years ago, and I have been steadily doing my best due diligence as a parent, feeding him the classics since then,” Ulrich said in a statement. “Maybe it all will work out after all.”
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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Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops | Newsday
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/record-store-day-to-be-celebrated-at-looney-tunes-more-li-shops-1.11678266
** Record Store Day to be celebrated at Looney Tunes, more LI shops
————————————————————
By Glenn Gamboa glenn.gamboa@newsday.com (mailto:glenn.gamboa@newsday.com?subject=newsday.com)
Karl Groeger Jr. says it’s time to look at Record Store Day in a different way.
The CEO and president of Looney Tunes in West Babylon says people need to stop talking about the day — created to introduce younger fans to record store culture with special releases on vinyl — as a business comeback or a throwback to the old days of crate-digging.
“Vinyl is already back,” he says. “And we have never been busier.”
Groeger says this year’s Record Store Day, which is Saturday, April 16, will be the biggest sales day for the 45-year-old store. (This year’s Record Store Day, the eighth, is celebrated in 1,400 stores nationally.) And he’s sure of it because the day has broken sales records for the past four years.
Groeger is not alone in seeing this kind of surge. According to Nielsen, nearly 12 million vinyl LPs were sold in 2015, up nearly 30 percent over 2014 sales. Industry analysts say vinyl sales haven’t been this high since 1989, with independent record stores responsible for more than 45 percent of the sales. And according to MusicWatch, 47 percent of vinyl customers are under 25.
EntertainmentBest TV, music, theater coming in 2016 (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/best-tv-music-theater-coming-in-2016-1.11269731)
“There has been a fundamental change,” Groeger says. “If you go back 10 years, everyone was listening to music antisocially, through earbuds and an iPod. They were using only one of their physical senses and at inferior sound quality to boot. Now, they realize that listening to music can be a social experience. With a vinyl record, they can listen to music together. They can touch the album and look at the 12-inch-by-12-inch artwork and liner notes and enjoy a superior sound quality.”
Record Store Day, Groeger says, is now more of a celebration. “We will have people lining up outside the store at 11 p.m. the day before,” he says. “I’ll bring them breakfast — some coffee and bagels — before the store opens. It’s a great time. We’ll have more than 2,000 people come through.”
To continue with the party atmosphere, Looney Tunes will have food trucks in the parking lot selling meals throughout the day and BrickHouse Brewery selling beer, with proceeds going to New York Bully Crew, a Patchogue-based animal rescue organization.
Groeger says Looney Tunes won’t have any bands playing this year, as they have in the past, because the store gets too crowded. Instead, comedian Jim Breuer will perform at 1 p.m. and take questions from shoppers.
Another big change for Groeger this year is that he will be selling vinyl albums on his own label, Brookvale Records, including Soul Asylum’s 1992 album “Grave Dancers Union” on red and green vinyl and the soundtrack to the 1996 Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez collaboration “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
MusicNotable music collaborations (safari-reader://www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/notable-duets-and-collaborations-in-music-1.5675775)
Lars Ulrich of Metallica (this year’s Record Store Day ambassadors), says the success of vinyl shows hope for the music industry.
“My 17-year-old asked for a record player for his birthday two years ago, and I have been steadily doing my best due diligence as a parent, feeding him the classics since then,” Ulrich said in a statement. “Maybe it all will work out after all.”
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=d829776b19) | 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=d829776b19&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
The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339
** The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old
————————————————————
By ALEX MARSHALLAPRIL 8, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339&mc_eid=74828b872a&_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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John Kenny, a trombonist from Britain, blasting a carnyx on a beach in Tarquinia, Italy. Francesco Marano
LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”
With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.
Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.
He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, (http://www.emaproject.eu/) a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.
** Carnyx and Horn Duet: ‘Liadain and Cuirithir’ by John Kenny 1:000:00
————————————————————
A duet between the Deskford carnyx and the first-century B.C. Loughnashade horn, found in a bog in 1794 in what is today Northern Ireland. The track is named after a doomed love affair between two Irish poets. Delphian Records
The classical record label Delphian (http://www.delphianrecords.co.uk/) is releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.
John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”
Continue reading the main story
“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”
The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic Era to around A.D. 1000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).
Engineers and enthusiasts like Mr. Holmes have been recreating ancient instruments for decades, he noted. His own forays into the area came about because his love of the trumpet led him to trace its origins further and further back until, in 1962, he found himself reconstructing an antecedent to the instrument that had been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.
Peter Holmes working on a recreation of a lur in his workshop in North London. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
“It used to be just a few of us enthusiasts doing it, but now it’s become a lot more professional,” he said. “We’re using high-precision engineering tools, 3-D printers, all sorts of things.”
Mr. Kenny, 59, was introduced to the carnyx in the early 1990s when a Scottish musicologist, knowing of his interest in early music, knocked on his door and told him he was needed to help reconstruct one that had been excavated in 1816 at a farm near Deskford, in northern Scotland, but was languishing in a museum storeroom.
A carnyx towers six feet above the player and is topped by a serpent or boar’s head, with a mouth sometimes able to flap open and closed to mute the sound.
The first reconstruction sounded like flatulence, Mr. Kenny said. “It wasn’t a human instrument,” he added. “It had no inner life, and I was sure that was because we didn’t use the original techniques to make it or the original alloys.”
A second version — which cost 28,000 British pounds to make (about $40,000) and required a craftsman to hand-hammer metal for 400 hours — fortunately soared. Mr. Kenny has (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVAWwWi0DbE) been playing it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auR-lJfzTeY) ever since, on a long-term loan from a charitable trust, even though, he said, he occasionally knocks the head off.
** Barnaby Brown Plays the Vulture Bone Flute 1:900:00
————————————————————
Mr. Brown plays an ancient Scottish tune on a replica of a 30,000-year-old instrument. The wing bone for the four-holed instrument was supplied by a Spanish wildlife protection agency that conducts post-mortems of dead vultures. Delphian Records
The EMAP exhibit will feature the Deskford Carnyx as well as re-creations of others, found at a tomb in France and at sites in the Italian Alps and England. The re-creation of the instrument found in England was made by Mr. Holmes.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Kenny, influenced by that striking head, initially played the carnyx as a war instrument. But he soon realized it “was just like a human.”
“If you shout all the time, you lose your voice,” he said. “So I decided to explore its other voices. And the minute I did, I realized it could produce the most enormous amount of colors — far more than a trumpet or trombone.”
That range is evident on his album for Delphian, due out in September, a record that at some points sounds like a dragon awakening, at others like avant-garde jazz.
Another EMAP member, Barnaby Brown of Cambridge, England, plays reconstructions of the Greco-Roman aulos, a kind of double oboe played by sticking each half in a corner of the mouth, a bit like using chopsticks to impersonate a walrus. Unlike the carnyx’s, its music is only ever soulful and intimate.
** Improvisation on Hornpipe and Drums, by Åke and Jens Egevad 0:240:00
————————————————————
The Swedish instrument maker Åke Egevad plays a replica of a hornpipe — made of a cowhorn with fingerholes — from 1050 A.D. The tune is based on Swedish folk motifs. Delphian Records
It was “the most popular instrument of the Greco-Roman world,” Mr. Brown said. “You couldn’t have a sacrifice without it. You couldn’t have fun without it. You couldn’t have a party, a wedding, a funeral.”
The aulos requires a technique called circular breathing, and when Mr. Brown plays it, his cheeks puff out and his eyes bulge. The goddess Athena was said to have invented the aulos but to have thrown it away when she realized how ghastly she looked playing it.
“It looks far worse than it is,” Mr. Brown said. “The only thing that’s hard about it is, the breathing requires musculature in the lips, and, right now, I can only do it for about six minutes.’’
Continue reading the main story
“In Greco-Roman times they used to play all night and had to wear a leather strap,” called a phorbeia, across the cheeks “so they could keep going,” he added.
Mr. Brown doesn’t see musical archaeology as recreating the music of the past; instead, he said, it is another way of creating new music for today.
“The reason I’m most excited by playing these instruments is I get to compose,” he said, “because the original music doesn’t survive. We have a few bits of Greek music, but that’s it.
“It’s a complete fallacy when people say, ‘You’re hearing the music of the Stone Age,’ ” he continued. “What rubbish! You’re hearing the music of the person playing the instrument. Does that ruin it? No, it makes it even more thrilling.”
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=ab207d6bb5) | 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=ab207d6bb5&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
The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339
** The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old
————————————————————
By ALEX MARSHALLAPRIL 8, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339&mc_eid=74828b872a&_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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John Kenny, a trombonist from Britain, blasting a carnyx on a beach in Tarquinia, Italy. Francesco Marano
LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”
With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.
Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.
He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, (http://www.emaproject.eu/) a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.
** Carnyx and Horn Duet: ‘Liadain and Cuirithir’ by John Kenny 1:000:00
————————————————————
A duet between the Deskford carnyx and the first-century B.C. Loughnashade horn, found in a bog in 1794 in what is today Northern Ireland. The track is named after a doomed love affair between two Irish poets. Delphian Records
The classical record label Delphian (http://www.delphianrecords.co.uk/) is releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.
John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”
Continue reading the main story
“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”
The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic Era to around A.D. 1000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).
Engineers and enthusiasts like Mr. Holmes have been recreating ancient instruments for decades, he noted. His own forays into the area came about because his love of the trumpet led him to trace its origins further and further back until, in 1962, he found himself reconstructing an antecedent to the instrument that had been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.
Peter Holmes working on a recreation of a lur in his workshop in North London. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
“It used to be just a few of us enthusiasts doing it, but now it’s become a lot more professional,” he said. “We’re using high-precision engineering tools, 3-D printers, all sorts of things.”
Mr. Kenny, 59, was introduced to the carnyx in the early 1990s when a Scottish musicologist, knowing of his interest in early music, knocked on his door and told him he was needed to help reconstruct one that had been excavated in 1816 at a farm near Deskford, in northern Scotland, but was languishing in a museum storeroom.
A carnyx towers six feet above the player and is topped by a serpent or boar’s head, with a mouth sometimes able to flap open and closed to mute the sound.
The first reconstruction sounded like flatulence, Mr. Kenny said. “It wasn’t a human instrument,” he added. “It had no inner life, and I was sure that was because we didn’t use the original techniques to make it or the original alloys.”
A second version — which cost 28,000 British pounds to make (about $40,000) and required a craftsman to hand-hammer metal for 400 hours — fortunately soared. Mr. Kenny has (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVAWwWi0DbE) been playing it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auR-lJfzTeY) ever since, on a long-term loan from a charitable trust, even though, he said, he occasionally knocks the head off.
** Barnaby Brown Plays the Vulture Bone Flute 1:900:00
————————————————————
Mr. Brown plays an ancient Scottish tune on a replica of a 30,000-year-old instrument. The wing bone for the four-holed instrument was supplied by a Spanish wildlife protection agency that conducts post-mortems of dead vultures. Delphian Records
The EMAP exhibit will feature the Deskford Carnyx as well as re-creations of others, found at a tomb in France and at sites in the Italian Alps and England. The re-creation of the instrument found in England was made by Mr. Holmes.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Kenny, influenced by that striking head, initially played the carnyx as a war instrument. But he soon realized it “was just like a human.”
“If you shout all the time, you lose your voice,” he said. “So I decided to explore its other voices. And the minute I did, I realized it could produce the most enormous amount of colors — far more than a trumpet or trombone.”
That range is evident on his album for Delphian, due out in September, a record that at some points sounds like a dragon awakening, at others like avant-garde jazz.
Another EMAP member, Barnaby Brown of Cambridge, England, plays reconstructions of the Greco-Roman aulos, a kind of double oboe played by sticking each half in a corner of the mouth, a bit like using chopsticks to impersonate a walrus. Unlike the carnyx’s, its music is only ever soulful and intimate.
** Improvisation on Hornpipe and Drums, by Åke and Jens Egevad 0:240:00
————————————————————
The Swedish instrument maker Åke Egevad plays a replica of a hornpipe — made of a cowhorn with fingerholes — from 1050 A.D. The tune is based on Swedish folk motifs. Delphian Records
It was “the most popular instrument of the Greco-Roman world,” Mr. Brown said. “You couldn’t have a sacrifice without it. You couldn’t have fun without it. You couldn’t have a party, a wedding, a funeral.”
The aulos requires a technique called circular breathing, and when Mr. Brown plays it, his cheeks puff out and his eyes bulge. The goddess Athena was said to have invented the aulos but to have thrown it away when she realized how ghastly she looked playing it.
“It looks far worse than it is,” Mr. Brown said. “The only thing that’s hard about it is, the breathing requires musculature in the lips, and, right now, I can only do it for about six minutes.’’
Continue reading the main story
“In Greco-Roman times they used to play all night and had to wear a leather strap,” called a phorbeia, across the cheeks “so they could keep going,” he added.
Mr. Brown doesn’t see musical archaeology as recreating the music of the past; instead, he said, it is another way of creating new music for today.
“The reason I’m most excited by playing these instruments is I get to compose,” he said, “because the original music doesn’t survive. We have a few bits of Greek music, but that’s it.
“It’s a complete fallacy when people say, ‘You’re hearing the music of the Stone Age,’ ” he continued. “What rubbish! You’re hearing the music of the person playing the instrument. Does that ruin it? No, it makes it even more thrilling.”
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=ab207d6bb5) | 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=ab207d6bb5&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
The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339
** The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old
————————————————————
By ALEX MARSHALLAPRIL 8, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339&mc_eid=74828b872a&_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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John Kenny, a trombonist from Britain, blasting a carnyx on a beach in Tarquinia, Italy. Francesco Marano
LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”
With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.
Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.
He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, (http://www.emaproject.eu/) a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.
** Carnyx and Horn Duet: ‘Liadain and Cuirithir’ by John Kenny 1:000:00
————————————————————
A duet between the Deskford carnyx and the first-century B.C. Loughnashade horn, found in a bog in 1794 in what is today Northern Ireland. The track is named after a doomed love affair between two Irish poets. Delphian Records
The classical record label Delphian (http://www.delphianrecords.co.uk/) is releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.
John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”
Continue reading the main story
“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”
The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic Era to around A.D. 1000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).
Engineers and enthusiasts like Mr. Holmes have been recreating ancient instruments for decades, he noted. His own forays into the area came about because his love of the trumpet led him to trace its origins further and further back until, in 1962, he found himself reconstructing an antecedent to the instrument that had been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.
Peter Holmes working on a recreation of a lur in his workshop in North London. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
“It used to be just a few of us enthusiasts doing it, but now it’s become a lot more professional,” he said. “We’re using high-precision engineering tools, 3-D printers, all sorts of things.”
Mr. Kenny, 59, was introduced to the carnyx in the early 1990s when a Scottish musicologist, knowing of his interest in early music, knocked on his door and told him he was needed to help reconstruct one that had been excavated in 1816 at a farm near Deskford, in northern Scotland, but was languishing in a museum storeroom.
A carnyx towers six feet above the player and is topped by a serpent or boar’s head, with a mouth sometimes able to flap open and closed to mute the sound.
The first reconstruction sounded like flatulence, Mr. Kenny said. “It wasn’t a human instrument,” he added. “It had no inner life, and I was sure that was because we didn’t use the original techniques to make it or the original alloys.”
A second version — which cost 28,000 British pounds to make (about $40,000) and required a craftsman to hand-hammer metal for 400 hours — fortunately soared. Mr. Kenny has (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVAWwWi0DbE) been playing it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auR-lJfzTeY) ever since, on a long-term loan from a charitable trust, even though, he said, he occasionally knocks the head off.
** Barnaby Brown Plays the Vulture Bone Flute 1:900:00
————————————————————
Mr. Brown plays an ancient Scottish tune on a replica of a 30,000-year-old instrument. The wing bone for the four-holed instrument was supplied by a Spanish wildlife protection agency that conducts post-mortems of dead vultures. Delphian Records
The EMAP exhibit will feature the Deskford Carnyx as well as re-creations of others, found at a tomb in France and at sites in the Italian Alps and England. The re-creation of the instrument found in England was made by Mr. Holmes.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Kenny, influenced by that striking head, initially played the carnyx as a war instrument. But he soon realized it “was just like a human.”
“If you shout all the time, you lose your voice,” he said. “So I decided to explore its other voices. And the minute I did, I realized it could produce the most enormous amount of colors — far more than a trumpet or trombone.”
That range is evident on his album for Delphian, due out in September, a record that at some points sounds like a dragon awakening, at others like avant-garde jazz.
Another EMAP member, Barnaby Brown of Cambridge, England, plays reconstructions of the Greco-Roman aulos, a kind of double oboe played by sticking each half in a corner of the mouth, a bit like using chopsticks to impersonate a walrus. Unlike the carnyx’s, its music is only ever soulful and intimate.
** Improvisation on Hornpipe and Drums, by Åke and Jens Egevad 0:240:00
————————————————————
The Swedish instrument maker Åke Egevad plays a replica of a hornpipe — made of a cowhorn with fingerholes — from 1050 A.D. The tune is based on Swedish folk motifs. Delphian Records
It was “the most popular instrument of the Greco-Roman world,” Mr. Brown said. “You couldn’t have a sacrifice without it. You couldn’t have fun without it. You couldn’t have a party, a wedding, a funeral.”
The aulos requires a technique called circular breathing, and when Mr. Brown plays it, his cheeks puff out and his eyes bulge. The goddess Athena was said to have invented the aulos but to have thrown it away when she realized how ghastly she looked playing it.
“It looks far worse than it is,” Mr. Brown said. “The only thing that’s hard about it is, the breathing requires musculature in the lips, and, right now, I can only do it for about six minutes.’’
Continue reading the main story
“In Greco-Roman times they used to play all night and had to wear a leather strap,” called a phorbeia, across the cheeks “so they could keep going,” he added.
Mr. Brown doesn’t see musical archaeology as recreating the music of the past; instead, he said, it is another way of creating new music for today.
“The reason I’m most excited by playing these instruments is I get to compose,” he said, “because the original music doesn’t survive. We have a few bits of Greek music, but that’s it.
“It’s a complete fallacy when people say, ‘You’re hearing the music of the Stone Age,’ ” he continued. “What rubbish! You’re hearing the music of the person playing the instrument. Does that ruin it? No, it makes it even more thrilling.”
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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The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339
** The European Music Archaeology Project Recreates Instruments of Old
————————————————————
By ALEX MARSHALLAPRIL 8, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/international/bringing-ancient-sounds-back-to-life.html?mc_cid=b257c4b339&mc_eid=74828b872a&_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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John Kenny, a trombonist from Britain, blasting a carnyx on a beach in Tarquinia, Italy. Francesco Marano
LONDON — Peter Holmes, a 76-year-old former aircraft engineer, was standing in his tidy living room in North London recently holding a Scandinavian war horn more than four feet long. When asked how the instrument, known as a lur, is played, he said: “I’ve no idea. No one’s played it for 3,000 years.”
With that, Mr. Holmes put the lur to his lips and blew. Rather than an angry bellow that might transport a listener to a lonely fjord among Viking warriors, it sounded more like a bugle played by someone with a lisp.
Mr. Holmes, an expert on ancient music, built the lur and other long-forgotten instruments at the University of Middlesex’s engineering department, where he is designer in residence, and in his cluttered garden shed.
He is also a central figure in the European Music Archaeology Project, or EMAP, (http://www.emaproject.eu/) a 4-million euro (about $4.6 million) effort started in 2013 to recreate the sounds of the ancient world. The project unveils the results of its work this year. It started with a concert in Glasgow on Saturday, to be followed by a touring exhibition that opens on June 6 in Ystad, Sweden.
** Carnyx and Horn Duet: ‘Liadain and Cuirithir’ by John Kenny 1:000:00
————————————————————
A duet between the Deskford carnyx and the first-century B.C. Loughnashade horn, found in a bog in 1794 in what is today Northern Ireland. The track is named after a doomed love affair between two Irish poets. Delphian Records
The classical record label Delphian (http://www.delphianrecords.co.uk/) is releasing a series of albums as a tie-in with the project, beginning with works of ancient Scottish music in May.
John Kenny, a trombonist from Birmingham, England, who also plays the carnyx, an Iron Age horn, said that ancient instruments were important because they offered a different perspective on the past. “I’ve witnessed the most extraordinary skills used to reconstruct buildings, clothes and language, but those don’t put you into the imaginative world people used to live in,” he said. “Only music does that.”
Continue reading the main story
“If you reconstruct a sword,” he added, “no one apart from a homicidal maniac could use it for the purpose intended. But reconstruct an instrument, and anyone can experience it.”
The project, half funded by the European Union, with the rest coming from an assortment of institutions and state agencies, covers the Paleolithic Era to around A.D. 1000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture- bone flutes (although some say those are merely vulture bones that some poor animal chewed holes in).
Engineers and enthusiasts like Mr. Holmes have been recreating ancient instruments for decades, he noted. His own forays into the area came about because his love of the trumpet led him to trace its origins further and further back until, in 1962, he found himself reconstructing an antecedent to the instrument that had been found in Tutankhamen’s tomb in Egypt.
Peter Holmes working on a recreation of a lur in his workshop in North London. Tom Jamieson for The New York Times
“It used to be just a few of us enthusiasts doing it, but now it’s become a lot more professional,” he said. “We’re using high-precision engineering tools, 3-D printers, all sorts of things.”
Mr. Kenny, 59, was introduced to the carnyx in the early 1990s when a Scottish musicologist, knowing of his interest in early music, knocked on his door and told him he was needed to help reconstruct one that had been excavated in 1816 at a farm near Deskford, in northern Scotland, but was languishing in a museum storeroom.
A carnyx towers six feet above the player and is topped by a serpent or boar’s head, with a mouth sometimes able to flap open and closed to mute the sound.
The first reconstruction sounded like flatulence, Mr. Kenny said. “It wasn’t a human instrument,” he added. “It had no inner life, and I was sure that was because we didn’t use the original techniques to make it or the original alloys.”
A second version — which cost 28,000 British pounds to make (about $40,000) and required a craftsman to hand-hammer metal for 400 hours — fortunately soared. Mr. Kenny has (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVAWwWi0DbE) been playing it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auR-lJfzTeY) ever since, on a long-term loan from a charitable trust, even though, he said, he occasionally knocks the head off.
** Barnaby Brown Plays the Vulture Bone Flute 1:900:00
————————————————————
Mr. Brown plays an ancient Scottish tune on a replica of a 30,000-year-old instrument. The wing bone for the four-holed instrument was supplied by a Spanish wildlife protection agency that conducts post-mortems of dead vultures. Delphian Records
The EMAP exhibit will feature the Deskford Carnyx as well as re-creations of others, found at a tomb in France and at sites in the Italian Alps and England. The re-creation of the instrument found in England was made by Mr. Holmes.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Kenny, influenced by that striking head, initially played the carnyx as a war instrument. But he soon realized it “was just like a human.”
“If you shout all the time, you lose your voice,” he said. “So I decided to explore its other voices. And the minute I did, I realized it could produce the most enormous amount of colors — far more than a trumpet or trombone.”
That range is evident on his album for Delphian, due out in September, a record that at some points sounds like a dragon awakening, at others like avant-garde jazz.
Another EMAP member, Barnaby Brown of Cambridge, England, plays reconstructions of the Greco-Roman aulos, a kind of double oboe played by sticking each half in a corner of the mouth, a bit like using chopsticks to impersonate a walrus. Unlike the carnyx’s, its music is only ever soulful and intimate.
** Improvisation on Hornpipe and Drums, by Åke and Jens Egevad 0:240:00
————————————————————
The Swedish instrument maker Åke Egevad plays a replica of a hornpipe — made of a cowhorn with fingerholes — from 1050 A.D. The tune is based on Swedish folk motifs. Delphian Records
It was “the most popular instrument of the Greco-Roman world,” Mr. Brown said. “You couldn’t have a sacrifice without it. You couldn’t have fun without it. You couldn’t have a party, a wedding, a funeral.”
The aulos requires a technique called circular breathing, and when Mr. Brown plays it, his cheeks puff out and his eyes bulge. The goddess Athena was said to have invented the aulos but to have thrown it away when she realized how ghastly she looked playing it.
“It looks far worse than it is,” Mr. Brown said. “The only thing that’s hard about it is, the breathing requires musculature in the lips, and, right now, I can only do it for about six minutes.’’
Continue reading the main story
“In Greco-Roman times they used to play all night and had to wear a leather strap,” called a phorbeia, across the cheeks “so they could keep going,” he added.
Mr. Brown doesn’t see musical archaeology as recreating the music of the past; instead, he said, it is another way of creating new music for today.
“The reason I’m most excited by playing these instruments is I get to compose,” he said, “because the original music doesn’t survive. We have a few bits of Greek music, but that’s it.
“It’s a complete fallacy when people say, ‘You’re hearing the music of the Stone Age,’ ” he continued. “What rubbish! You’re hearing the music of the person playing the instrument. Does that ruin it? No, it makes it even more thrilling.”
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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Oscar Aleman TV Performance – Delicado – YouTube
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCEEo_s2ZrE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCEEo_s2ZrE
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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Copyright (C) 2016 All rights reserved.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Oscar Aleman TV Performance – Delicado – YouTube
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCEEo_s2ZrE
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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)
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Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0
** Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81
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By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) APRIL 11, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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Getatchew Mekurya during a 2008 performance with the punk band the Ex at a Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Getatchew Mekurya, a saxophonist with an ardent, full-throated style who worked predominantly in Ethiopia for decades before being embraced by a worldwide audience, died on April 4 in Addis Ababa. He was 81.
The cause was an infection in his legs as a result of diabetes, said Terrie Hessels, a founding member of the Dutch punk band the Ex (http://www.theex.nl/news.html) , which toured and recorded with Mr. Mekurya over the last dozen years, fueling his late-career renaissance.
Mr. Mekurya (his name is pronounced GET-a-chew Me-KUR-ya) had an imposing sound and presence, blowing in declamatory gusts with a fervent, quavering vibrato. He found renown outside his native country after one of his albums from the early 1970s, “Negus of Ethiopian Sax,” was released on CD in 2003 as part of the popular world-music reissue series “Éthiopiques.”
His rediscovery led to collaborations with musicians from far beyond his home turf, including the saxophonist Russ Gershon and his band, the Either/Orchestra, from Cambridge, Mass. The Ex sought out Mr. Mekurya and invited him to a festival in Amsterdam, where they struck an energetic rapport. They released a collaborative album, “Moa Anbessa,” in 2006.
That album, which set Mr. Mekurya’s fervent cry against churning guitars and bleating horns, led to a spate of concert bookings in more than a dozen countries. A potent follow-up, “Y’Anbessaw Tezeta (https://theex.bandcamp.com/album/yanbessaw-tezeta) ,” was released in 2012, capturing Mr. Mekurya’s road-tested bond with the Ex and bringing vibrant new life to compositions he had originally recorded 40 years earlier.
Getatchew Mekurya was born on March 14, 1935, in Yifat, Ethiopia. As a child he learned to play traditional folk instruments: the kirar, a six-string lyre, and the masenqo, a single-string bowed lute. By his teens he had switched to saxophone and clarinet, instruments popularized in Ethiopia under the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, who had a fondness for military brass bands.
Mr. Mekurya spent his early career as a member of government-sponsored orchestras in Addis Ababa, starting at age 13 with the Municipality Band and continuing with the house band of the Haile Selassie I Theater. Later, as a member of the elite Police Orchestra, he often backed popular singers like Hirut Beqele and Alemayehu Eshete.
Continue reading the main story
As early as the 1950s, Mr. Mekurya was using his tenor saxophone to emulate the Ethiopian chants known as shellela, traditionally shouted by warriors going into battle. His quest for an impassioned, expressly vocal quality on the saxophone yielded a startlingly original sound, though it would later elicit comparisons to the 1960s free-jazz maverick Albert Ayler (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/movies/08ayle.html) , whom he claimed at the time never to have heard.
Mr. Mekurya stood apart from the appealingly sinuous hybrid known as Ethio-jazz, spearheaded by the vibraphonist, pianist and composer Mulatu Astatke. Rather than a cosmopolitan form of jazz with Ethiopian influence, Mr. Mekurya made a music of gruff, earthy incantation, rooted in folkloric custom. He often performed in warrior garb, making the connection explicit.
When “Negus of Ethiopian Sax” was originally released on Philips Ethiopia, it was a showcase for shellela, with Mr. Mekurya’s tenor ululating over electric bass, organ, piano and drums, in hypnotic triplet meter. The music’s brazen assurance still resonated decades later: One track, simply titled “Shellela,” provided the core sample for “I Come Prepared (https://youtu.be/tHtr4eFwOT0) ,” a 2009 single by the rapper K’Naan and the singer Damian Marley.
Mr. Mekurya’s survivors include nine children and numerous grandchildren. His wife, Ayalech, died last year.
Among his memorable public triumphs was a 2008 Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/music/22gold.html) in New York, featuring the Either/Orchestra and Alemayehu Eshete as well as the singer Mahmoud Ahmed. Mr. Mekurya performed with the Ex, but he earned one of the evening’s loudest cheers with a vaulting unaccompanied improvisation.
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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Jazz Promo Services
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Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0
** Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81
————————————————————
By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) APRIL 11, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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Getatchew Mekurya during a 2008 performance with the punk band the Ex at a Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Getatchew Mekurya, a saxophonist with an ardent, full-throated style who worked predominantly in Ethiopia for decades before being embraced by a worldwide audience, died on April 4 in Addis Ababa. He was 81.
The cause was an infection in his legs as a result of diabetes, said Terrie Hessels, a founding member of the Dutch punk band the Ex (http://www.theex.nl/news.html) , which toured and recorded with Mr. Mekurya over the last dozen years, fueling his late-career renaissance.
Mr. Mekurya (his name is pronounced GET-a-chew Me-KUR-ya) had an imposing sound and presence, blowing in declamatory gusts with a fervent, quavering vibrato. He found renown outside his native country after one of his albums from the early 1970s, “Negus of Ethiopian Sax,” was released on CD in 2003 as part of the popular world-music reissue series “Éthiopiques.”
His rediscovery led to collaborations with musicians from far beyond his home turf, including the saxophonist Russ Gershon and his band, the Either/Orchestra, from Cambridge, Mass. The Ex sought out Mr. Mekurya and invited him to a festival in Amsterdam, where they struck an energetic rapport. They released a collaborative album, “Moa Anbessa,” in 2006.
That album, which set Mr. Mekurya’s fervent cry against churning guitars and bleating horns, led to a spate of concert bookings in more than a dozen countries. A potent follow-up, “Y’Anbessaw Tezeta (https://theex.bandcamp.com/album/yanbessaw-tezeta) ,” was released in 2012, capturing Mr. Mekurya’s road-tested bond with the Ex and bringing vibrant new life to compositions he had originally recorded 40 years earlier.
Getatchew Mekurya was born on March 14, 1935, in Yifat, Ethiopia. As a child he learned to play traditional folk instruments: the kirar, a six-string lyre, and the masenqo, a single-string bowed lute. By his teens he had switched to saxophone and clarinet, instruments popularized in Ethiopia under the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, who had a fondness for military brass bands.
Mr. Mekurya spent his early career as a member of government-sponsored orchestras in Addis Ababa, starting at age 13 with the Municipality Band and continuing with the house band of the Haile Selassie I Theater. Later, as a member of the elite Police Orchestra, he often backed popular singers like Hirut Beqele and Alemayehu Eshete.
Continue reading the main story
As early as the 1950s, Mr. Mekurya was using his tenor saxophone to emulate the Ethiopian chants known as shellela, traditionally shouted by warriors going into battle. His quest for an impassioned, expressly vocal quality on the saxophone yielded a startlingly original sound, though it would later elicit comparisons to the 1960s free-jazz maverick Albert Ayler (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/movies/08ayle.html) , whom he claimed at the time never to have heard.
Mr. Mekurya stood apart from the appealingly sinuous hybrid known as Ethio-jazz, spearheaded by the vibraphonist, pianist and composer Mulatu Astatke. Rather than a cosmopolitan form of jazz with Ethiopian influence, Mr. Mekurya made a music of gruff, earthy incantation, rooted in folkloric custom. He often performed in warrior garb, making the connection explicit.
When “Negus of Ethiopian Sax” was originally released on Philips Ethiopia, it was a showcase for shellela, with Mr. Mekurya’s tenor ululating over electric bass, organ, piano and drums, in hypnotic triplet meter. The music’s brazen assurance still resonated decades later: One track, simply titled “Shellela,” provided the core sample for “I Come Prepared (https://youtu.be/tHtr4eFwOT0) ,” a 2009 single by the rapper K’Naan and the singer Damian Marley.
Mr. Mekurya’s survivors include nine children and numerous grandchildren. His wife, Ayalech, died last year.
Among his memorable public triumphs was a 2008 Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/music/22gold.html) in New York, featuring the Either/Orchestra and Alemayehu Eshete as well as the singer Mahmoud Ahmed. Mr. Mekurya performed with the Ex, but he earned one of the evening’s loudest cheers with a vaulting unaccompanied improvisation.
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=f84709ab23) | 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=f84709ab23&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
Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0
** Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81
————————————————————
By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) APRIL 11, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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Getatchew Mekurya during a 2008 performance with the punk band the Ex at a Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Getatchew Mekurya, a saxophonist with an ardent, full-throated style who worked predominantly in Ethiopia for decades before being embraced by a worldwide audience, died on April 4 in Addis Ababa. He was 81.
The cause was an infection in his legs as a result of diabetes, said Terrie Hessels, a founding member of the Dutch punk band the Ex (http://www.theex.nl/news.html) , which toured and recorded with Mr. Mekurya over the last dozen years, fueling his late-career renaissance.
Mr. Mekurya (his name is pronounced GET-a-chew Me-KUR-ya) had an imposing sound and presence, blowing in declamatory gusts with a fervent, quavering vibrato. He found renown outside his native country after one of his albums from the early 1970s, “Negus of Ethiopian Sax,” was released on CD in 2003 as part of the popular world-music reissue series “Éthiopiques.”
His rediscovery led to collaborations with musicians from far beyond his home turf, including the saxophonist Russ Gershon and his band, the Either/Orchestra, from Cambridge, Mass. The Ex sought out Mr. Mekurya and invited him to a festival in Amsterdam, where they struck an energetic rapport. They released a collaborative album, “Moa Anbessa,” in 2006.
That album, which set Mr. Mekurya’s fervent cry against churning guitars and bleating horns, led to a spate of concert bookings in more than a dozen countries. A potent follow-up, “Y’Anbessaw Tezeta (https://theex.bandcamp.com/album/yanbessaw-tezeta) ,” was released in 2012, capturing Mr. Mekurya’s road-tested bond with the Ex and bringing vibrant new life to compositions he had originally recorded 40 years earlier.
Getatchew Mekurya was born on March 14, 1935, in Yifat, Ethiopia. As a child he learned to play traditional folk instruments: the kirar, a six-string lyre, and the masenqo, a single-string bowed lute. By his teens he had switched to saxophone and clarinet, instruments popularized in Ethiopia under the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, who had a fondness for military brass bands.
Mr. Mekurya spent his early career as a member of government-sponsored orchestras in Addis Ababa, starting at age 13 with the Municipality Band and continuing with the house band of the Haile Selassie I Theater. Later, as a member of the elite Police Orchestra, he often backed popular singers like Hirut Beqele and Alemayehu Eshete.
Continue reading the main story
As early as the 1950s, Mr. Mekurya was using his tenor saxophone to emulate the Ethiopian chants known as shellela, traditionally shouted by warriors going into battle. His quest for an impassioned, expressly vocal quality on the saxophone yielded a startlingly original sound, though it would later elicit comparisons to the 1960s free-jazz maverick Albert Ayler (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/movies/08ayle.html) , whom he claimed at the time never to have heard.
Mr. Mekurya stood apart from the appealingly sinuous hybrid known as Ethio-jazz, spearheaded by the vibraphonist, pianist and composer Mulatu Astatke. Rather than a cosmopolitan form of jazz with Ethiopian influence, Mr. Mekurya made a music of gruff, earthy incantation, rooted in folkloric custom. He often performed in warrior garb, making the connection explicit.
When “Negus of Ethiopian Sax” was originally released on Philips Ethiopia, it was a showcase for shellela, with Mr. Mekurya’s tenor ululating over electric bass, organ, piano and drums, in hypnotic triplet meter. The music’s brazen assurance still resonated decades later: One track, simply titled “Shellela,” provided the core sample for “I Come Prepared (https://youtu.be/tHtr4eFwOT0) ,” a 2009 single by the rapper K’Naan and the singer Damian Marley.
Mr. Mekurya’s survivors include nine children and numerous grandchildren. His wife, Ayalech, died last year.
Among his memorable public triumphs was a 2008 Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/music/22gold.html) in New York, featuring the Either/Orchestra and Alemayehu Eshete as well as the singer Mahmoud Ahmed. Mr. Mekurya performed with the Ex, but he earned one of the evening’s loudest cheers with a vaulting unaccompanied improvisation.
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=f84709ab23) | 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=f84709ab23&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
Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81 – The New York Times
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0
** Getatchew Mekurya, Ethiopian Jazz Saxophonist, Dies at 81
————————————————————
By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) APRIL 11, 2016
Continue reading the main story (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/12/arts/music/getatchew-mekurya-ethiopian-jazz-saxophonist-dies-at-81.html?_r=0#story-continues-1) Share This Page
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Getatchew Mekurya during a 2008 performance with the punk band the Ex at a Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
Getatchew Mekurya, a saxophonist with an ardent, full-throated style who worked predominantly in Ethiopia for decades before being embraced by a worldwide audience, died on April 4 in Addis Ababa. He was 81.
The cause was an infection in his legs as a result of diabetes, said Terrie Hessels, a founding member of the Dutch punk band the Ex (http://www.theex.nl/news.html) , which toured and recorded with Mr. Mekurya over the last dozen years, fueling his late-career renaissance.
Mr. Mekurya (his name is pronounced GET-a-chew Me-KUR-ya) had an imposing sound and presence, blowing in declamatory gusts with a fervent, quavering vibrato. He found renown outside his native country after one of his albums from the early 1970s, “Negus of Ethiopian Sax,” was released on CD in 2003 as part of the popular world-music reissue series “Éthiopiques.”
His rediscovery led to collaborations with musicians from far beyond his home turf, including the saxophonist Russ Gershon and his band, the Either/Orchestra, from Cambridge, Mass. The Ex sought out Mr. Mekurya and invited him to a festival in Amsterdam, where they struck an energetic rapport. They released a collaborative album, “Moa Anbessa,” in 2006.
That album, which set Mr. Mekurya’s fervent cry against churning guitars and bleating horns, led to a spate of concert bookings in more than a dozen countries. A potent follow-up, “Y’Anbessaw Tezeta (https://theex.bandcamp.com/album/yanbessaw-tezeta) ,” was released in 2012, capturing Mr. Mekurya’s road-tested bond with the Ex and bringing vibrant new life to compositions he had originally recorded 40 years earlier.
Getatchew Mekurya was born on March 14, 1935, in Yifat, Ethiopia. As a child he learned to play traditional folk instruments: the kirar, a six-string lyre, and the masenqo, a single-string bowed lute. By his teens he had switched to saxophone and clarinet, instruments popularized in Ethiopia under the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, who had a fondness for military brass bands.
Mr. Mekurya spent his early career as a member of government-sponsored orchestras in Addis Ababa, starting at age 13 with the Municipality Band and continuing with the house band of the Haile Selassie I Theater. Later, as a member of the elite Police Orchestra, he often backed popular singers like Hirut Beqele and Alemayehu Eshete.
Continue reading the main story
As early as the 1950s, Mr. Mekurya was using his tenor saxophone to emulate the Ethiopian chants known as shellela, traditionally shouted by warriors going into battle. His quest for an impassioned, expressly vocal quality on the saxophone yielded a startlingly original sound, though it would later elicit comparisons to the 1960s free-jazz maverick Albert Ayler (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/movies/08ayle.html) , whom he claimed at the time never to have heard.
Mr. Mekurya stood apart from the appealingly sinuous hybrid known as Ethio-jazz, spearheaded by the vibraphonist, pianist and composer Mulatu Astatke. Rather than a cosmopolitan form of jazz with Ethiopian influence, Mr. Mekurya made a music of gruff, earthy incantation, rooted in folkloric custom. He often performed in warrior garb, making the connection explicit.
When “Negus of Ethiopian Sax” was originally released on Philips Ethiopia, it was a showcase for shellela, with Mr. Mekurya’s tenor ululating over electric bass, organ, piano and drums, in hypnotic triplet meter. The music’s brazen assurance still resonated decades later: One track, simply titled “Shellela,” provided the core sample for “I Come Prepared (https://youtu.be/tHtr4eFwOT0) ,” a 2009 single by the rapper K’Naan and the singer Damian Marley.
Mr. Mekurya’s survivors include nine children and numerous grandchildren. His wife, Ayalech, died last year.
Among his memorable public triumphs was a 2008 Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/arts/music/22gold.html) in New York, featuring the Either/Orchestra and Alemayehu Eshete as well as the singer Mahmoud Ahmed. Mr. Mekurya performed with the Ex, but he earned one of the evening’s loudest cheers with a vaulting unaccompanied improvisation.
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=f84709ab23) | 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=f84709ab23&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
A Jazz Teacher for the Ages – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-jazz-teacher-for-the-ages-1460411001
** A Jazz Teacher for the Ages
————————————————————
By
John Edward Hasse
April 11, 2016 5:43 p.m. ET
David Baker, who died March 26 at age 84, may not have been a household name, but he did more than anyone to teach students how to play jazz. And he led the way for the acceptance of jazz in American higher education. It wasn’t easy. In the 1950s, music departments were so Eurocentric that at Indiana University, where he was enrolled as a student, he had to keep his interest in jazz under the radar. “If we got caught playing [jazz] in a practice room,” he said, “probably we would lose our practice-room privileges.”
David Baker, who died in March. ENLARGE
David Baker, who died in March. Photo: Courtesy of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
But a decade later, Mr. Baker was back at Indiana, this time to build one of the first jazz programs in an American college or university. As a dynamic classroom teacher at universities and at summer jazz camps for high-school and college students, and as a tireless author—he wrote more than 60 books and hundreds of articles—he attained enormous influence and built a large following.
Inspired by George Russell’s “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization,” Mr. Baker codified an accessible method for learning how to improvise jazz: For every chord in the jazz lexicon, the improviser can choose notes or patterns from one or more specific scales. As his method caught on, light bulbs went off over the heads of thousands of young musicians, even classical players with no prior experience improvising. What had seemed totally baffling—how a musician creates a solo line at the speed of thought—suddenly seemed far less forbidding and mysterious.
With infectious passion, prodigious energy and a challenging standard of excellence, he taught thousands of students to improvise, and also how to analyze and transcribe the music of the masters, how to compose and arrange, and how to grasp the history of the music. His teaching and methods are likely to remain influential for a long time.
“It was David’s attitude, humanity, sense of humor and vast knowledge that made him so special,” saxophonist Dave Liebman recalled in a recent email. “He treated everyone with respect from the beginner to the seasoned pro, all of whom he knew. When he conducted a harmony class, he was a combination of drill sergeant, actor and philosopher, all rolled into one.”
Some of his students went on to attain major jazz careers, including trumpeters Randy Brecker and Chris Botti; saxophonists Jamey Aebersold and Michael Brecker; bassists John Clayton and Robert Hurst; and drummers Jeff Hamilton, Peter Erskine and Shawn Pelton.
As a performer, first on trombone and later on cello—he was one of the few jazz cellists—Mr. Baker made more than 100 recordings. He was also a prodigious composer of jazz, classical and “third stream” music, securing commissions from more than 100 individuals and ensembles, including Josef Gingold, Janos Starker,the Beaux Arts Trio and the New York Philharmonic.
In 1990, when the Smithsonian Institution, where I serve as a curator, secured funding to establish the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, I helped recruit Mr. Baker—with whom I had studied extensively at Indiana University and who became a mentor—to become its musical director. (With typical generosity, he agreed to accept if his mentor, Gunther Schuller, would serve as co-director.) Under Mr. Baker’s musical leadership, the orchestra set a distinguished example, helped train a generation of professional musicians to play earlier styles of jazz, won new fans for the music at every performance, and became a stimulus for other jazz bands to explore the music’s bounteous history.
With generosity of spirit, selflessness, and love and concern for his students, he served as a role model for countless aspiring musicians. “I can’t think of anything much more honorable than teaching young people to be decent, to be successful,” Mr. Baker once told his family. “Teaching is such a sacred act. To show somebody about life . . . I teach under jazz, but what I teach is living.”
Mr. Hasse is curator of American music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and Jazz Appreciation Month. His most recent book is “Discover Jazz.”
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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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
A Jazz Teacher for the Ages – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-jazz-teacher-for-the-ages-1460411001
** A Jazz Teacher for the Ages
————————————————————
By
John Edward Hasse
April 11, 2016 5:43 p.m. ET
David Baker, who died March 26 at age 84, may not have been a household name, but he did more than anyone to teach students how to play jazz. And he led the way for the acceptance of jazz in American higher education. It wasn’t easy. In the 1950s, music departments were so Eurocentric that at Indiana University, where he was enrolled as a student, he had to keep his interest in jazz under the radar. “If we got caught playing [jazz] in a practice room,” he said, “probably we would lose our practice-room privileges.”
David Baker, who died in March. ENLARGE
David Baker, who died in March. Photo: Courtesy of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
But a decade later, Mr. Baker was back at Indiana, this time to build one of the first jazz programs in an American college or university. As a dynamic classroom teacher at universities and at summer jazz camps for high-school and college students, and as a tireless author—he wrote more than 60 books and hundreds of articles—he attained enormous influence and built a large following.
Inspired by George Russell’s “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization,” Mr. Baker codified an accessible method for learning how to improvise jazz: For every chord in the jazz lexicon, the improviser can choose notes or patterns from one or more specific scales. As his method caught on, light bulbs went off over the heads of thousands of young musicians, even classical players with no prior experience improvising. What had seemed totally baffling—how a musician creates a solo line at the speed of thought—suddenly seemed far less forbidding and mysterious.
With infectious passion, prodigious energy and a challenging standard of excellence, he taught thousands of students to improvise, and also how to analyze and transcribe the music of the masters, how to compose and arrange, and how to grasp the history of the music. His teaching and methods are likely to remain influential for a long time.
“It was David’s attitude, humanity, sense of humor and vast knowledge that made him so special,” saxophonist Dave Liebman recalled in a recent email. “He treated everyone with respect from the beginner to the seasoned pro, all of whom he knew. When he conducted a harmony class, he was a combination of drill sergeant, actor and philosopher, all rolled into one.”
Some of his students went on to attain major jazz careers, including trumpeters Randy Brecker and Chris Botti; saxophonists Jamey Aebersold and Michael Brecker; bassists John Clayton and Robert Hurst; and drummers Jeff Hamilton, Peter Erskine and Shawn Pelton.
As a performer, first on trombone and later on cello—he was one of the few jazz cellists—Mr. Baker made more than 100 recordings. He was also a prodigious composer of jazz, classical and “third stream” music, securing commissions from more than 100 individuals and ensembles, including Josef Gingold, Janos Starker,the Beaux Arts Trio and the New York Philharmonic.
In 1990, when the Smithsonian Institution, where I serve as a curator, secured funding to establish the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, I helped recruit Mr. Baker—with whom I had studied extensively at Indiana University and who became a mentor—to become its musical director. (With typical generosity, he agreed to accept if his mentor, Gunther Schuller, would serve as co-director.) Under Mr. Baker’s musical leadership, the orchestra set a distinguished example, helped train a generation of professional musicians to play earlier styles of jazz, won new fans for the music at every performance, and became a stimulus for other jazz bands to explore the music’s bounteous history.
With generosity of spirit, selflessness, and love and concern for his students, he served as a role model for countless aspiring musicians. “I can’t think of anything much more honorable than teaching young people to be decent, to be successful,” Mr. Baker once told his family. “Teaching is such a sacred act. To show somebody about life . . . I teach under jazz, but what I teach is living.”
Mr. Hasse is curator of American music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and Jazz Appreciation Month. His most recent book is “Discover Jazz.”
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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A Jazz Teacher for the Ages – WSJ
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-jazz-teacher-for-the-ages-1460411001
** A Jazz Teacher for the Ages
————————————————————
By
John Edward Hasse
April 11, 2016 5:43 p.m. ET
David Baker, who died March 26 at age 84, may not have been a household name, but he did more than anyone to teach students how to play jazz. And he led the way for the acceptance of jazz in American higher education. It wasn’t easy. In the 1950s, music departments were so Eurocentric that at Indiana University, where he was enrolled as a student, he had to keep his interest in jazz under the radar. “If we got caught playing [jazz] in a practice room,” he said, “probably we would lose our practice-room privileges.”
David Baker, who died in March. ENLARGE
David Baker, who died in March. Photo: Courtesy of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
But a decade later, Mr. Baker was back at Indiana, this time to build one of the first jazz programs in an American college or university. As a dynamic classroom teacher at universities and at summer jazz camps for high-school and college students, and as a tireless author—he wrote more than 60 books and hundreds of articles—he attained enormous influence and built a large following.
Inspired by George Russell’s “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization,” Mr. Baker codified an accessible method for learning how to improvise jazz: For every chord in the jazz lexicon, the improviser can choose notes or patterns from one or more specific scales. As his method caught on, light bulbs went off over the heads of thousands of young musicians, even classical players with no prior experience improvising. What had seemed totally baffling—how a musician creates a solo line at the speed of thought—suddenly seemed far less forbidding and mysterious.
With infectious passion, prodigious energy and a challenging standard of excellence, he taught thousands of students to improvise, and also how to analyze and transcribe the music of the masters, how to compose and arrange, and how to grasp the history of the music. His teaching and methods are likely to remain influential for a long time.
“It was David’s attitude, humanity, sense of humor and vast knowledge that made him so special,” saxophonist Dave Liebman recalled in a recent email. “He treated everyone with respect from the beginner to the seasoned pro, all of whom he knew. When he conducted a harmony class, he was a combination of drill sergeant, actor and philosopher, all rolled into one.”
Some of his students went on to attain major jazz careers, including trumpeters Randy Brecker and Chris Botti; saxophonists Jamey Aebersold and Michael Brecker; bassists John Clayton and Robert Hurst; and drummers Jeff Hamilton, Peter Erskine and Shawn Pelton.
As a performer, first on trombone and later on cello—he was one of the few jazz cellists—Mr. Baker made more than 100 recordings. He was also a prodigious composer of jazz, classical and “third stream” music, securing commissions from more than 100 individuals and ensembles, including Josef Gingold, Janos Starker,the Beaux Arts Trio and the New York Philharmonic.
In 1990, when the Smithsonian Institution, where I serve as a curator, secured funding to establish the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, I helped recruit Mr. Baker—with whom I had studied extensively at Indiana University and who became a mentor—to become its musical director. (With typical generosity, he agreed to accept if his mentor, Gunther Schuller, would serve as co-director.) Under Mr. Baker’s musical leadership, the orchestra set a distinguished example, helped train a generation of professional musicians to play earlier styles of jazz, won new fans for the music at every performance, and became a stimulus for other jazz bands to explore the music’s bounteous history.
With generosity of spirit, selflessness, and love and concern for his students, he served as a role model for countless aspiring musicians. “I can’t think of anything much more honorable than teaching young people to be decent, to be successful,” Mr. Baker once told his family. “Teaching is such a sacred act. To show somebody about life . . . I teach under jazz, but what I teach is living.”
Mr. Hasse is curator of American music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and Jazz Appreciation Month. His most recent book is “Discover Jazz.”
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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A Jazz Teacher for the Ages – WSJ
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-jazz-teacher-for-the-ages-1460411001
** A Jazz Teacher for the Ages
————————————————————
By
John Edward Hasse
April 11, 2016 5:43 p.m. ET
David Baker, who died March 26 at age 84, may not have been a household name, but he did more than anyone to teach students how to play jazz. And he led the way for the acceptance of jazz in American higher education. It wasn’t easy. In the 1950s, music departments were so Eurocentric that at Indiana University, where he was enrolled as a student, he had to keep his interest in jazz under the radar. “If we got caught playing [jazz] in a practice room,” he said, “probably we would lose our practice-room privileges.”
David Baker, who died in March. ENLARGE
David Baker, who died in March. Photo: Courtesy of Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
But a decade later, Mr. Baker was back at Indiana, this time to build one of the first jazz programs in an American college or university. As a dynamic classroom teacher at universities and at summer jazz camps for high-school and college students, and as a tireless author—he wrote more than 60 books and hundreds of articles—he attained enormous influence and built a large following.
Inspired by George Russell’s “Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization,” Mr. Baker codified an accessible method for learning how to improvise jazz: For every chord in the jazz lexicon, the improviser can choose notes or patterns from one or more specific scales. As his method caught on, light bulbs went off over the heads of thousands of young musicians, even classical players with no prior experience improvising. What had seemed totally baffling—how a musician creates a solo line at the speed of thought—suddenly seemed far less forbidding and mysterious.
With infectious passion, prodigious energy and a challenging standard of excellence, he taught thousands of students to improvise, and also how to analyze and transcribe the music of the masters, how to compose and arrange, and how to grasp the history of the music. His teaching and methods are likely to remain influential for a long time.
“It was David’s attitude, humanity, sense of humor and vast knowledge that made him so special,” saxophonist Dave Liebman recalled in a recent email. “He treated everyone with respect from the beginner to the seasoned pro, all of whom he knew. When he conducted a harmony class, he was a combination of drill sergeant, actor and philosopher, all rolled into one.”
Some of his students went on to attain major jazz careers, including trumpeters Randy Brecker and Chris Botti; saxophonists Jamey Aebersold and Michael Brecker; bassists John Clayton and Robert Hurst; and drummers Jeff Hamilton, Peter Erskine and Shawn Pelton.
As a performer, first on trombone and later on cello—he was one of the few jazz cellists—Mr. Baker made more than 100 recordings. He was also a prodigious composer of jazz, classical and “third stream” music, securing commissions from more than 100 individuals and ensembles, including Josef Gingold, Janos Starker,the Beaux Arts Trio and the New York Philharmonic.
In 1990, when the Smithsonian Institution, where I serve as a curator, secured funding to establish the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra, I helped recruit Mr. Baker—with whom I had studied extensively at Indiana University and who became a mentor—to become its musical director. (With typical generosity, he agreed to accept if his mentor, Gunther Schuller, would serve as co-director.) Under Mr. Baker’s musical leadership, the orchestra set a distinguished example, helped train a generation of professional musicians to play earlier styles of jazz, won new fans for the music at every performance, and became a stimulus for other jazz bands to explore the music’s bounteous history.
With generosity of spirit, selflessness, and love and concern for his students, he served as a role model for countless aspiring musicians. “I can’t think of anything much more honorable than teaching young people to be decent, to be successful,” Mr. Baker once told his family. “Teaching is such a sacred act. To show somebody about life . . . I teach under jazz, but what I teach is living.”
Mr. Hasse is curator of American music at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where he founded the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra and Jazz Appreciation Month. His most recent book is “Discover Jazz.”
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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This Will Blow Your Mind| eBay
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Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing – The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/10/maine-born-jazz-guitarist-lenny-breau-continues-to-influence-and-amaze-more-than-30-years-after-his-death/
** Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing
————————————————————
By Ray Routhier Staff Writer
Guitar great Tommy Emmanuel grew up idolizing Chet Atkins, the country legend credited with helping create “The Nashville Sound” of the 1960s.
So Emmanuel did not take it lightly when Atkins told him one day more than 35 years ago, in a Nashville recording studio, that he was about to meet “the greatest guitar player walking the earth today.”
“We went upstairs and I could hear a guitar playing. We opened the door and there was Lenny Breau,” said Emmanuel, 60, Guitar Player magazine’s acoustic player of the year in 2010. “Harmonically, his music was more sophisticated than anything I’d ever heard. He was doing stuff nobody had done yet.”
Breau, who was born in Maine but lived much of his life in Canada, died mysteriously more than 30 years ago at the age of 43. He was found strangled in a Los Angeles swimming pool in 1984, and no one was ever charged. But his legacy continues to grow.
Last year, an album of Breau’s music titled “LA Bootleg 1984” was nominated for best solo jazz album at the Juno Awards, Canada’s version of the Grammys. A restaurant named Lenny’s opened in Westbrook (http://www.pressherald.com/2016/03/25/lennys-a-new-westbrook-eatery-offers-upscale-pub-food-and-music-under-the-iconic-hawkes-plaza-tv-repairman-sign/) in February on the site of the small Event Records label, where Breau once recorded. In the years since Breau’s death, there have been articles and books written about him, as well as documentary films focused on him, plus scores of online videos that have allowed a new generation of musicians around the world to discover Breau’s music.
Breau was never a household name, never a star. His biggest bursts of public fame came during his work on TV shows in Canada in the 1960s and from a couple of albums he recorded for RCA in the late 1960s while working with Atkins. But he remains a legend among guitarists for his ground-breaking style and sense of creativity.
Breau used all five fingers on his right hand to play individual strings, much the way a piano player uses individual fingers to strike single keys, instead of playing one string at a time the way a player using a pick might do. Breau’s style, combined with his mastery of complex chords and harmonics, continues to astonish guitarists around the world.
“He had such interesting chords, over the melody,” Emmanuel said. “Others might have had a similar style, but he was the only one wired the way he was.”
Emmanuel and Atkins are just two of the dozens of guitar greats who have cited the Auburn-born Breau as a singular talent and a major influence on guitar playing over the last 50 years. George Benson, Pat Metheny, Andy Summers of The Police, and Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who are a few others.
Breau played mostly jazz and had a devotion to creativity and innovation that made it impossible for him to happily do anything considered mainstream. Plus, he battled drugs, including heroin, for long stretches of his adult life.
Atkins died in 2001, but in an interview for the 1999 documentary film “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFD1oz4BuY) he said of Breau, “Lenny was one of those guys who was a genius at what he did, but that was all he could do. He could not take care of himself, and we all knew it.”
‘HE HEARD EVERYTHING DIFFERENT’
Breau was born in Auburn into one of Maine’s best-known musical families. His father, Harold Breau, was a country musician and singer who performed under the name Hal Lone Pine. He met and married Breau’s mother, singer Betty Cody, and together they toured New England and played on local radio stations. By the early 1950s, both were signed to RCA and recorded solo songs and duets. A couple of Cody’s songs, “Tom Tom Yodel” and “I Found Out More Than You Ever Knew,” got considerable radio play. Both husband and wife are members of the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame.
By the early 1950s, the young Breau was playing in the family band and was lead guitar by the time he was 14. Long-time Maine country musician Al Hawkes was running a small record label called Event Records at his TV repair shop in Westbrook when he first met Breau. Breau’s parents had come in to record and brought their son with them.
“I was shocked when I heard him play. I said to his mother ‘How old is that boy playing the guitar?’ and she said he was 14,” said Hawkes, 85. “I thought, wow, I’ve got to get him back here. So I started using him as a session musician.”
What made Breau stand out at that age was “his brain,” Hawkes said. “He was always composing, and he heard everything different from everyone else.” When rehearsing a song, Breau would often play a guitar part exactly the way Hawkes wanted it, then play it a completely different way when it came time to record.
Though Breau was later known for playing jazz, with some flamenco guitar influence, as a teen he was playing country and rockabilly. At Event Records, he played on the rockabilly hit “Baby Baby” by Curtis Johnson and also played guitar on early recordings by Dick Curless, a Mainer who went on to have several hit records on the country charts in the 1960s and ’70s.
Breau’s family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada in the late 1950s, performing around the area and on radio. While Breau was playing country music with his family, he was experimenting with jazz and other forms. He was once slapped on stage, by his father, for ending a song with a jazzy flair, said Breau’s younger brother Denny Breau, a professional guitarist who lives in Lewiston.
Breau began playing on his own as a teenager. When his family moved back to Maine, he stayed in Winnipeg, playing in clubs and on Canadian TV shows. He had his own show for a while in the mid-’60s, “The Lenny Breau Show,” which featured singers starting out with a fairly straight cover of a popular song, like “Downtown” by Petula Clark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAJNfL9sFb8) , until Breau took over with his own, barely-recognizable, jazz version of the song.
A recording of Breau on TV from this period made its way into the hands of Atkins, who was vice president of the RCA record label’s Nashville recording division. Breau made two albums at RCA, “Guitar Sounds from Lenny Breau” and “The Velvet Touch of Lenny Breau,” but neither had mainstream appeal. Friends and family say that Breau was driven to create but never driven to make money or achieve fame.
“He was a true Bohemian who just lived his art and seemed disinterested in a lot of other things,” said Breau’s daughter, Emily Hughes (http://www.softandgroovy.com/) , of Calgary, Alberta. “He was mastering his instrument and a lot of other things suffered.”
Hughes was raised by her mother, Canadian singer Judi Singh, and didn’t see Breau much growing up. She said her mother wanted to protect her from the drugs and accompanying havoc that was a strong presence in Breau’s life.
In 1999, Hughes made a documentary film called “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” which featured interviews with Atkins, Benson and many other musicians, and allowed Hughes to learn about her father. She heard several stories that emphasized his singular focus on music, to the detriment of other parts of his life. He rarely drove a car, for example.
“Everybody took care of him and escorted him around,” said Hughes.
In 1973, Breau was arrested for possession of heroin in Winnipeg and was given two years probation. Later in the 1970s, he sought help at a drug rehabilitation facility. He worked in Nashville, Maine and Los Angeles in the 1970s, and released a half dozen albums between 1978 and 1984. He also taught guitar master classes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGCSgWqg0Fg) , but remained largely unknown except to other musicians.
“He was in and out (of periods of drug use) and that’s probably one of the reasons he never really made it,” said his brother, Denny Breau, 63, of Lewiston. “I think the pressure drove him to escape.”
MYSTERIOUS DEATH, LEGEND GROWS
On the morning of Aug. 12, 1984, Breau called his mother in Maine, from Los Angeles, saying he needed to escape a home life that had become unbearable. He had married singer Joanne Glasscock, nicknamed Jewell, in 1980.
In an interview with the Press Herald then, Breau’s mother, who died in 2014, recalled him saying, “I’ve got to get away and make my life over.”
He was found dead later that day in the rooftop swimming pool at the apartment building where he lived, with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, Dawn Rose Marie. A coroner’s report listed the cause of death as strangulation. But police never charged anyone.
No working phone number could be found for Jewell Breau, to seek comment for this story.
Breau’s influence as a musician has seemed to grow over time, thanks largely to the internet. Videos of him playing on Canadian television, or giving master classes, or playing with Atkins live on on YouTube and elsewhere. Hughes says she hears from new Breau fans all over the world. She recently received a Breau tribute CD made by a musician in Paris. An online video clip of Breau playing, posted on her website, got 30,000 hits in Russia in one month. She’s considering another documentary film on her father, focused on his influence on a new generation of musicians and fans.
Denny Breau said what made his brother’s guitar style stand out, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, was that he approached his instrument like a piano. He played individual strings with individual fingers, the way a piano player strikes keys. One of his biggest musical influences was jazz pianist Bill Evans. He was also a student of the percussive flamenco style of guitar playing.
Breau would use his thumb to play a bass line, his first and middle finger to play chords, and his ring finger and little finger to play melody and improvise.
“If you just listen without seeing him, it sounds like two different guys,” said Denny Breau, also a professional guitarist. “The fact that people are still listening to him, studying him, doesn’t surprise me. There’s still nobody even close to him.”
Breau’s music has continued to reach new audiences largely thanks to Bachman, who was a teenager in Winnipeg when he first heard Breau play.
Bachman was 15 and a budding guitarist when he started hanging around with Breau, trying to learn all he could. Bachman would achieve pop music success in the late ’60s and early ’70s as guitarist for the rock band The Guess Who. He wrote or co-wrote several of the band’s hits, including “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “American Woman.” Later in the 1970s, he had more rock hits as a founder of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, including “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
In an interview with the Toronto Star in 2012, Bachman said of his long music career: “I’m just doing what I’ve wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.”
Over the years, Bachman has collected thousands of hours of Breau’s music and has issued some previously unreleased recordings on his Guitarchives label. One of those was an album called “LA Bootleg 1984,” released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 Juno Award. The album includes Breau recordings made at Donte’s, a Hollywood jazz club, in June 1984.
In the 1998 Bachman also released an album called “Lenny Breau: Boy Wonder” which included country-tinged songs recorded by Breau at Event Records in Westbrook, when Breau was just 14 or 15 years old.
Hawkes remembers that when Bachman first called him to buy the recordings, made in the mid-50s, he was hesitant about the price. Bachman hung up without agreeing to anything, then called Hawkes back later that day, saying he just had to have those recordings.
“He was able to get Lenny’s music out to a lot of people, so I give him credit for that,” said Hawkes, sitting in Lenny’s restaurant in March.
The new Lenny’s restaurant, an upscale pub with room for live music in one corner of the room, is in a building on Route 302 that Hawkes once used as a studio and to sell stereo equipment. While playing and recording music for years Hawkes was also an electronics technician and TV repairman, and the 13-foot-tall TV repairman sign he built in 1962 still stands watch over the property.
Hawkes used a building attached to what is now the restaurant as his Event Records studio. That’s where Breau recorded as a teenager. Hawkes sold the buildings a few years ago to Portland entrepreneur and music fan Bill Umbel. When considering names for the new eatery and music venue, Lenny’s struck him. Hawkes provided him with dozens of pictures of Breau, that are scattered through out the restaurant.
There is also text on the wall explaining who Breau was, when he lived, and why his guitar style influenced so many.
“The fact that people here in Maine can come here and find out about Lenny is just great,” said Hawkes, who lives next door to the new restaurant. “I think he deserves the recognition.”
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
Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing – The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/10/maine-born-jazz-guitarist-lenny-breau-continues-to-influence-and-amaze-more-than-30-years-after-his-death/
** Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing
————————————————————
By Ray Routhier Staff Writer
Guitar great Tommy Emmanuel grew up idolizing Chet Atkins, the country legend credited with helping create “The Nashville Sound” of the 1960s.
So Emmanuel did not take it lightly when Atkins told him one day more than 35 years ago, in a Nashville recording studio, that he was about to meet “the greatest guitar player walking the earth today.”
“We went upstairs and I could hear a guitar playing. We opened the door and there was Lenny Breau,” said Emmanuel, 60, Guitar Player magazine’s acoustic player of the year in 2010. “Harmonically, his music was more sophisticated than anything I’d ever heard. He was doing stuff nobody had done yet.”
Breau, who was born in Maine but lived much of his life in Canada, died mysteriously more than 30 years ago at the age of 43. He was found strangled in a Los Angeles swimming pool in 1984, and no one was ever charged. But his legacy continues to grow.
Last year, an album of Breau’s music titled “LA Bootleg 1984” was nominated for best solo jazz album at the Juno Awards, Canada’s version of the Grammys. A restaurant named Lenny’s opened in Westbrook (http://www.pressherald.com/2016/03/25/lennys-a-new-westbrook-eatery-offers-upscale-pub-food-and-music-under-the-iconic-hawkes-plaza-tv-repairman-sign/) in February on the site of the small Event Records label, where Breau once recorded. In the years since Breau’s death, there have been articles and books written about him, as well as documentary films focused on him, plus scores of online videos that have allowed a new generation of musicians around the world to discover Breau’s music.
Breau was never a household name, never a star. His biggest bursts of public fame came during his work on TV shows in Canada in the 1960s and from a couple of albums he recorded for RCA in the late 1960s while working with Atkins. But he remains a legend among guitarists for his ground-breaking style and sense of creativity.
Breau used all five fingers on his right hand to play individual strings, much the way a piano player uses individual fingers to strike single keys, instead of playing one string at a time the way a player using a pick might do. Breau’s style, combined with his mastery of complex chords and harmonics, continues to astonish guitarists around the world.
“He had such interesting chords, over the melody,” Emmanuel said. “Others might have had a similar style, but he was the only one wired the way he was.”
Emmanuel and Atkins are just two of the dozens of guitar greats who have cited the Auburn-born Breau as a singular talent and a major influence on guitar playing over the last 50 years. George Benson, Pat Metheny, Andy Summers of The Police, and Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who are a few others.
Breau played mostly jazz and had a devotion to creativity and innovation that made it impossible for him to happily do anything considered mainstream. Plus, he battled drugs, including heroin, for long stretches of his adult life.
Atkins died in 2001, but in an interview for the 1999 documentary film “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFD1oz4BuY) he said of Breau, “Lenny was one of those guys who was a genius at what he did, but that was all he could do. He could not take care of himself, and we all knew it.”
‘HE HEARD EVERYTHING DIFFERENT’
Breau was born in Auburn into one of Maine’s best-known musical families. His father, Harold Breau, was a country musician and singer who performed under the name Hal Lone Pine. He met and married Breau’s mother, singer Betty Cody, and together they toured New England and played on local radio stations. By the early 1950s, both were signed to RCA and recorded solo songs and duets. A couple of Cody’s songs, “Tom Tom Yodel” and “I Found Out More Than You Ever Knew,” got considerable radio play. Both husband and wife are members of the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame.
By the early 1950s, the young Breau was playing in the family band and was lead guitar by the time he was 14. Long-time Maine country musician Al Hawkes was running a small record label called Event Records at his TV repair shop in Westbrook when he first met Breau. Breau’s parents had come in to record and brought their son with them.
“I was shocked when I heard him play. I said to his mother ‘How old is that boy playing the guitar?’ and she said he was 14,” said Hawkes, 85. “I thought, wow, I’ve got to get him back here. So I started using him as a session musician.”
What made Breau stand out at that age was “his brain,” Hawkes said. “He was always composing, and he heard everything different from everyone else.” When rehearsing a song, Breau would often play a guitar part exactly the way Hawkes wanted it, then play it a completely different way when it came time to record.
Though Breau was later known for playing jazz, with some flamenco guitar influence, as a teen he was playing country and rockabilly. At Event Records, he played on the rockabilly hit “Baby Baby” by Curtis Johnson and also played guitar on early recordings by Dick Curless, a Mainer who went on to have several hit records on the country charts in the 1960s and ’70s.
Breau’s family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada in the late 1950s, performing around the area and on radio. While Breau was playing country music with his family, he was experimenting with jazz and other forms. He was once slapped on stage, by his father, for ending a song with a jazzy flair, said Breau’s younger brother Denny Breau, a professional guitarist who lives in Lewiston.
Breau began playing on his own as a teenager. When his family moved back to Maine, he stayed in Winnipeg, playing in clubs and on Canadian TV shows. He had his own show for a while in the mid-’60s, “The Lenny Breau Show,” which featured singers starting out with a fairly straight cover of a popular song, like “Downtown” by Petula Clark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAJNfL9sFb8) , until Breau took over with his own, barely-recognizable, jazz version of the song.
A recording of Breau on TV from this period made its way into the hands of Atkins, who was vice president of the RCA record label’s Nashville recording division. Breau made two albums at RCA, “Guitar Sounds from Lenny Breau” and “The Velvet Touch of Lenny Breau,” but neither had mainstream appeal. Friends and family say that Breau was driven to create but never driven to make money or achieve fame.
“He was a true Bohemian who just lived his art and seemed disinterested in a lot of other things,” said Breau’s daughter, Emily Hughes (http://www.softandgroovy.com/) , of Calgary, Alberta. “He was mastering his instrument and a lot of other things suffered.”
Hughes was raised by her mother, Canadian singer Judi Singh, and didn’t see Breau much growing up. She said her mother wanted to protect her from the drugs and accompanying havoc that was a strong presence in Breau’s life.
In 1999, Hughes made a documentary film called “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” which featured interviews with Atkins, Benson and many other musicians, and allowed Hughes to learn about her father. She heard several stories that emphasized his singular focus on music, to the detriment of other parts of his life. He rarely drove a car, for example.
“Everybody took care of him and escorted him around,” said Hughes.
In 1973, Breau was arrested for possession of heroin in Winnipeg and was given two years probation. Later in the 1970s, he sought help at a drug rehabilitation facility. He worked in Nashville, Maine and Los Angeles in the 1970s, and released a half dozen albums between 1978 and 1984. He also taught guitar master classes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGCSgWqg0Fg) , but remained largely unknown except to other musicians.
“He was in and out (of periods of drug use) and that’s probably one of the reasons he never really made it,” said his brother, Denny Breau, 63, of Lewiston. “I think the pressure drove him to escape.”
MYSTERIOUS DEATH, LEGEND GROWS
On the morning of Aug. 12, 1984, Breau called his mother in Maine, from Los Angeles, saying he needed to escape a home life that had become unbearable. He had married singer Joanne Glasscock, nicknamed Jewell, in 1980.
In an interview with the Press Herald then, Breau’s mother, who died in 2014, recalled him saying, “I’ve got to get away and make my life over.”
He was found dead later that day in the rooftop swimming pool at the apartment building where he lived, with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, Dawn Rose Marie. A coroner’s report listed the cause of death as strangulation. But police never charged anyone.
No working phone number could be found for Jewell Breau, to seek comment for this story.
Breau’s influence as a musician has seemed to grow over time, thanks largely to the internet. Videos of him playing on Canadian television, or giving master classes, or playing with Atkins live on on YouTube and elsewhere. Hughes says she hears from new Breau fans all over the world. She recently received a Breau tribute CD made by a musician in Paris. An online video clip of Breau playing, posted on her website, got 30,000 hits in Russia in one month. She’s considering another documentary film on her father, focused on his influence on a new generation of musicians and fans.
Denny Breau said what made his brother’s guitar style stand out, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, was that he approached his instrument like a piano. He played individual strings with individual fingers, the way a piano player strikes keys. One of his biggest musical influences was jazz pianist Bill Evans. He was also a student of the percussive flamenco style of guitar playing.
Breau would use his thumb to play a bass line, his first and middle finger to play chords, and his ring finger and little finger to play melody and improvise.
“If you just listen without seeing him, it sounds like two different guys,” said Denny Breau, also a professional guitarist. “The fact that people are still listening to him, studying him, doesn’t surprise me. There’s still nobody even close to him.”
Breau’s music has continued to reach new audiences largely thanks to Bachman, who was a teenager in Winnipeg when he first heard Breau play.
Bachman was 15 and a budding guitarist when he started hanging around with Breau, trying to learn all he could. Bachman would achieve pop music success in the late ’60s and early ’70s as guitarist for the rock band The Guess Who. He wrote or co-wrote several of the band’s hits, including “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “American Woman.” Later in the 1970s, he had more rock hits as a founder of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, including “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
In an interview with the Toronto Star in 2012, Bachman said of his long music career: “I’m just doing what I’ve wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.”
Over the years, Bachman has collected thousands of hours of Breau’s music and has issued some previously unreleased recordings on his Guitarchives label. One of those was an album called “LA Bootleg 1984,” released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 Juno Award. The album includes Breau recordings made at Donte’s, a Hollywood jazz club, in June 1984.
In the 1998 Bachman also released an album called “Lenny Breau: Boy Wonder” which included country-tinged songs recorded by Breau at Event Records in Westbrook, when Breau was just 14 or 15 years old.
Hawkes remembers that when Bachman first called him to buy the recordings, made in the mid-50s, he was hesitant about the price. Bachman hung up without agreeing to anything, then called Hawkes back later that day, saying he just had to have those recordings.
“He was able to get Lenny’s music out to a lot of people, so I give him credit for that,” said Hawkes, sitting in Lenny’s restaurant in March.
The new Lenny’s restaurant, an upscale pub with room for live music in one corner of the room, is in a building on Route 302 that Hawkes once used as a studio and to sell stereo equipment. While playing and recording music for years Hawkes was also an electronics technician and TV repairman, and the 13-foot-tall TV repairman sign he built in 1962 still stands watch over the property.
Hawkes used a building attached to what is now the restaurant as his Event Records studio. That’s where Breau recorded as a teenager. Hawkes sold the buildings a few years ago to Portland entrepreneur and music fan Bill Umbel. When considering names for the new eatery and music venue, Lenny’s struck him. Hawkes provided him with dozens of pictures of Breau, that are scattered through out the restaurant.
There is also text on the wall explaining who Breau was, when he lived, and why his guitar style influenced so many.
“The fact that people here in Maine can come here and find out about Lenny is just great,” said Hawkes, who lives next door to the new restaurant. “I think he deserves the recognition.”
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=082d503df0) | 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=082d503df0&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
Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing – The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/10/maine-born-jazz-guitarist-lenny-breau-continues-to-influence-and-amaze-more-than-30-years-after-his-death/
** Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing
————————————————————
By Ray Routhier Staff Writer
Guitar great Tommy Emmanuel grew up idolizing Chet Atkins, the country legend credited with helping create “The Nashville Sound” of the 1960s.
So Emmanuel did not take it lightly when Atkins told him one day more than 35 years ago, in a Nashville recording studio, that he was about to meet “the greatest guitar player walking the earth today.”
“We went upstairs and I could hear a guitar playing. We opened the door and there was Lenny Breau,” said Emmanuel, 60, Guitar Player magazine’s acoustic player of the year in 2010. “Harmonically, his music was more sophisticated than anything I’d ever heard. He was doing stuff nobody had done yet.”
Breau, who was born in Maine but lived much of his life in Canada, died mysteriously more than 30 years ago at the age of 43. He was found strangled in a Los Angeles swimming pool in 1984, and no one was ever charged. But his legacy continues to grow.
Last year, an album of Breau’s music titled “LA Bootleg 1984” was nominated for best solo jazz album at the Juno Awards, Canada’s version of the Grammys. A restaurant named Lenny’s opened in Westbrook (http://www.pressherald.com/2016/03/25/lennys-a-new-westbrook-eatery-offers-upscale-pub-food-and-music-under-the-iconic-hawkes-plaza-tv-repairman-sign/) in February on the site of the small Event Records label, where Breau once recorded. In the years since Breau’s death, there have been articles and books written about him, as well as documentary films focused on him, plus scores of online videos that have allowed a new generation of musicians around the world to discover Breau’s music.
Breau was never a household name, never a star. His biggest bursts of public fame came during his work on TV shows in Canada in the 1960s and from a couple of albums he recorded for RCA in the late 1960s while working with Atkins. But he remains a legend among guitarists for his ground-breaking style and sense of creativity.
Breau used all five fingers on his right hand to play individual strings, much the way a piano player uses individual fingers to strike single keys, instead of playing one string at a time the way a player using a pick might do. Breau’s style, combined with his mastery of complex chords and harmonics, continues to astonish guitarists around the world.
“He had such interesting chords, over the melody,” Emmanuel said. “Others might have had a similar style, but he was the only one wired the way he was.”
Emmanuel and Atkins are just two of the dozens of guitar greats who have cited the Auburn-born Breau as a singular talent and a major influence on guitar playing over the last 50 years. George Benson, Pat Metheny, Andy Summers of The Police, and Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who are a few others.
Breau played mostly jazz and had a devotion to creativity and innovation that made it impossible for him to happily do anything considered mainstream. Plus, he battled drugs, including heroin, for long stretches of his adult life.
Atkins died in 2001, but in an interview for the 1999 documentary film “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFD1oz4BuY) he said of Breau, “Lenny was one of those guys who was a genius at what he did, but that was all he could do. He could not take care of himself, and we all knew it.”
‘HE HEARD EVERYTHING DIFFERENT’
Breau was born in Auburn into one of Maine’s best-known musical families. His father, Harold Breau, was a country musician and singer who performed under the name Hal Lone Pine. He met and married Breau’s mother, singer Betty Cody, and together they toured New England and played on local radio stations. By the early 1950s, both were signed to RCA and recorded solo songs and duets. A couple of Cody’s songs, “Tom Tom Yodel” and “I Found Out More Than You Ever Knew,” got considerable radio play. Both husband and wife are members of the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame.
By the early 1950s, the young Breau was playing in the family band and was lead guitar by the time he was 14. Long-time Maine country musician Al Hawkes was running a small record label called Event Records at his TV repair shop in Westbrook when he first met Breau. Breau’s parents had come in to record and brought their son with them.
“I was shocked when I heard him play. I said to his mother ‘How old is that boy playing the guitar?’ and she said he was 14,” said Hawkes, 85. “I thought, wow, I’ve got to get him back here. So I started using him as a session musician.”
What made Breau stand out at that age was “his brain,” Hawkes said. “He was always composing, and he heard everything different from everyone else.” When rehearsing a song, Breau would often play a guitar part exactly the way Hawkes wanted it, then play it a completely different way when it came time to record.
Though Breau was later known for playing jazz, with some flamenco guitar influence, as a teen he was playing country and rockabilly. At Event Records, he played on the rockabilly hit “Baby Baby” by Curtis Johnson and also played guitar on early recordings by Dick Curless, a Mainer who went on to have several hit records on the country charts in the 1960s and ’70s.
Breau’s family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada in the late 1950s, performing around the area and on radio. While Breau was playing country music with his family, he was experimenting with jazz and other forms. He was once slapped on stage, by his father, for ending a song with a jazzy flair, said Breau’s younger brother Denny Breau, a professional guitarist who lives in Lewiston.
Breau began playing on his own as a teenager. When his family moved back to Maine, he stayed in Winnipeg, playing in clubs and on Canadian TV shows. He had his own show for a while in the mid-’60s, “The Lenny Breau Show,” which featured singers starting out with a fairly straight cover of a popular song, like “Downtown” by Petula Clark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAJNfL9sFb8) , until Breau took over with his own, barely-recognizable, jazz version of the song.
A recording of Breau on TV from this period made its way into the hands of Atkins, who was vice president of the RCA record label’s Nashville recording division. Breau made two albums at RCA, “Guitar Sounds from Lenny Breau” and “The Velvet Touch of Lenny Breau,” but neither had mainstream appeal. Friends and family say that Breau was driven to create but never driven to make money or achieve fame.
“He was a true Bohemian who just lived his art and seemed disinterested in a lot of other things,” said Breau’s daughter, Emily Hughes (http://www.softandgroovy.com/) , of Calgary, Alberta. “He was mastering his instrument and a lot of other things suffered.”
Hughes was raised by her mother, Canadian singer Judi Singh, and didn’t see Breau much growing up. She said her mother wanted to protect her from the drugs and accompanying havoc that was a strong presence in Breau’s life.
In 1999, Hughes made a documentary film called “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” which featured interviews with Atkins, Benson and many other musicians, and allowed Hughes to learn about her father. She heard several stories that emphasized his singular focus on music, to the detriment of other parts of his life. He rarely drove a car, for example.
“Everybody took care of him and escorted him around,” said Hughes.
In 1973, Breau was arrested for possession of heroin in Winnipeg and was given two years probation. Later in the 1970s, he sought help at a drug rehabilitation facility. He worked in Nashville, Maine and Los Angeles in the 1970s, and released a half dozen albums between 1978 and 1984. He also taught guitar master classes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGCSgWqg0Fg) , but remained largely unknown except to other musicians.
“He was in and out (of periods of drug use) and that’s probably one of the reasons he never really made it,” said his brother, Denny Breau, 63, of Lewiston. “I think the pressure drove him to escape.”
MYSTERIOUS DEATH, LEGEND GROWS
On the morning of Aug. 12, 1984, Breau called his mother in Maine, from Los Angeles, saying he needed to escape a home life that had become unbearable. He had married singer Joanne Glasscock, nicknamed Jewell, in 1980.
In an interview with the Press Herald then, Breau’s mother, who died in 2014, recalled him saying, “I’ve got to get away and make my life over.”
He was found dead later that day in the rooftop swimming pool at the apartment building where he lived, with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, Dawn Rose Marie. A coroner’s report listed the cause of death as strangulation. But police never charged anyone.
No working phone number could be found for Jewell Breau, to seek comment for this story.
Breau’s influence as a musician has seemed to grow over time, thanks largely to the internet. Videos of him playing on Canadian television, or giving master classes, or playing with Atkins live on on YouTube and elsewhere. Hughes says she hears from new Breau fans all over the world. She recently received a Breau tribute CD made by a musician in Paris. An online video clip of Breau playing, posted on her website, got 30,000 hits in Russia in one month. She’s considering another documentary film on her father, focused on his influence on a new generation of musicians and fans.
Denny Breau said what made his brother’s guitar style stand out, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, was that he approached his instrument like a piano. He played individual strings with individual fingers, the way a piano player strikes keys. One of his biggest musical influences was jazz pianist Bill Evans. He was also a student of the percussive flamenco style of guitar playing.
Breau would use his thumb to play a bass line, his first and middle finger to play chords, and his ring finger and little finger to play melody and improvise.
“If you just listen without seeing him, it sounds like two different guys,” said Denny Breau, also a professional guitarist. “The fact that people are still listening to him, studying him, doesn’t surprise me. There’s still nobody even close to him.”
Breau’s music has continued to reach new audiences largely thanks to Bachman, who was a teenager in Winnipeg when he first heard Breau play.
Bachman was 15 and a budding guitarist when he started hanging around with Breau, trying to learn all he could. Bachman would achieve pop music success in the late ’60s and early ’70s as guitarist for the rock band The Guess Who. He wrote or co-wrote several of the band’s hits, including “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “American Woman.” Later in the 1970s, he had more rock hits as a founder of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, including “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
In an interview with the Toronto Star in 2012, Bachman said of his long music career: “I’m just doing what I’ve wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.”
Over the years, Bachman has collected thousands of hours of Breau’s music and has issued some previously unreleased recordings on his Guitarchives label. One of those was an album called “LA Bootleg 1984,” released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 Juno Award. The album includes Breau recordings made at Donte’s, a Hollywood jazz club, in June 1984.
In the 1998 Bachman also released an album called “Lenny Breau: Boy Wonder” which included country-tinged songs recorded by Breau at Event Records in Westbrook, when Breau was just 14 or 15 years old.
Hawkes remembers that when Bachman first called him to buy the recordings, made in the mid-50s, he was hesitant about the price. Bachman hung up without agreeing to anything, then called Hawkes back later that day, saying he just had to have those recordings.
“He was able to get Lenny’s music out to a lot of people, so I give him credit for that,” said Hawkes, sitting in Lenny’s restaurant in March.
The new Lenny’s restaurant, an upscale pub with room for live music in one corner of the room, is in a building on Route 302 that Hawkes once used as a studio and to sell stereo equipment. While playing and recording music for years Hawkes was also an electronics technician and TV repairman, and the 13-foot-tall TV repairman sign he built in 1962 still stands watch over the property.
Hawkes used a building attached to what is now the restaurant as his Event Records studio. That’s where Breau recorded as a teenager. Hawkes sold the buildings a few years ago to Portland entrepreneur and music fan Bill Umbel. When considering names for the new eatery and music venue, Lenny’s struck him. Hawkes provided him with dozens of pictures of Breau, that are scattered through out the restaurant.
There is also text on the wall explaining who Breau was, when he lived, and why his guitar style influenced so many.
“The fact that people here in Maine can come here and find out about Lenny is just great,” said Hawkes, who lives next door to the new restaurant. “I think he deserves the recognition.”
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/)
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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing – The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.pressherald.com/2016/04/10/maine-born-jazz-guitarist-lenny-breau-continues-to-influence-and-amaze-more-than-30-years-after-his-death/
** Maine-born jazz guitarist Lenny Breau remains influential 30 years after his killing
————————————————————
By Ray Routhier Staff Writer
Guitar great Tommy Emmanuel grew up idolizing Chet Atkins, the country legend credited with helping create “The Nashville Sound” of the 1960s.
So Emmanuel did not take it lightly when Atkins told him one day more than 35 years ago, in a Nashville recording studio, that he was about to meet “the greatest guitar player walking the earth today.”
“We went upstairs and I could hear a guitar playing. We opened the door and there was Lenny Breau,” said Emmanuel, 60, Guitar Player magazine’s acoustic player of the year in 2010. “Harmonically, his music was more sophisticated than anything I’d ever heard. He was doing stuff nobody had done yet.”
Breau, who was born in Maine but lived much of his life in Canada, died mysteriously more than 30 years ago at the age of 43. He was found strangled in a Los Angeles swimming pool in 1984, and no one was ever charged. But his legacy continues to grow.
Last year, an album of Breau’s music titled “LA Bootleg 1984” was nominated for best solo jazz album at the Juno Awards, Canada’s version of the Grammys. A restaurant named Lenny’s opened in Westbrook (http://www.pressherald.com/2016/03/25/lennys-a-new-westbrook-eatery-offers-upscale-pub-food-and-music-under-the-iconic-hawkes-plaza-tv-repairman-sign/) in February on the site of the small Event Records label, where Breau once recorded. In the years since Breau’s death, there have been articles and books written about him, as well as documentary films focused on him, plus scores of online videos that have allowed a new generation of musicians around the world to discover Breau’s music.
Breau was never a household name, never a star. His biggest bursts of public fame came during his work on TV shows in Canada in the 1960s and from a couple of albums he recorded for RCA in the late 1960s while working with Atkins. But he remains a legend among guitarists for his ground-breaking style and sense of creativity.
Breau used all five fingers on his right hand to play individual strings, much the way a piano player uses individual fingers to strike single keys, instead of playing one string at a time the way a player using a pick might do. Breau’s style, combined with his mastery of complex chords and harmonics, continues to astonish guitarists around the world.
“He had such interesting chords, over the melody,” Emmanuel said. “Others might have had a similar style, but he was the only one wired the way he was.”
Emmanuel and Atkins are just two of the dozens of guitar greats who have cited the Auburn-born Breau as a singular talent and a major influence on guitar playing over the last 50 years. George Benson, Pat Metheny, Andy Summers of The Police, and Randy Bachman of Bachman-Turner Overdrive and The Guess Who are a few others.
Breau played mostly jazz and had a devotion to creativity and innovation that made it impossible for him to happily do anything considered mainstream. Plus, he battled drugs, including heroin, for long stretches of his adult life.
Atkins died in 2001, but in an interview for the 1999 documentary film “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeFD1oz4BuY) he said of Breau, “Lenny was one of those guys who was a genius at what he did, but that was all he could do. He could not take care of himself, and we all knew it.”
‘HE HEARD EVERYTHING DIFFERENT’
Breau was born in Auburn into one of Maine’s best-known musical families. His father, Harold Breau, was a country musician and singer who performed under the name Hal Lone Pine. He met and married Breau’s mother, singer Betty Cody, and together they toured New England and played on local radio stations. By the early 1950s, both were signed to RCA and recorded solo songs and duets. A couple of Cody’s songs, “Tom Tom Yodel” and “I Found Out More Than You Ever Knew,” got considerable radio play. Both husband and wife are members of the Maine Country Music Hall of Fame.
By the early 1950s, the young Breau was playing in the family band and was lead guitar by the time he was 14. Long-time Maine country musician Al Hawkes was running a small record label called Event Records at his TV repair shop in Westbrook when he first met Breau. Breau’s parents had come in to record and brought their son with them.
“I was shocked when I heard him play. I said to his mother ‘How old is that boy playing the guitar?’ and she said he was 14,” said Hawkes, 85. “I thought, wow, I’ve got to get him back here. So I started using him as a session musician.”
What made Breau stand out at that age was “his brain,” Hawkes said. “He was always composing, and he heard everything different from everyone else.” When rehearsing a song, Breau would often play a guitar part exactly the way Hawkes wanted it, then play it a completely different way when it came time to record.
Though Breau was later known for playing jazz, with some flamenco guitar influence, as a teen he was playing country and rockabilly. At Event Records, he played on the rockabilly hit “Baby Baby” by Curtis Johnson and also played guitar on early recordings by Dick Curless, a Mainer who went on to have several hit records on the country charts in the 1960s and ’70s.
Breau’s family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada in the late 1950s, performing around the area and on radio. While Breau was playing country music with his family, he was experimenting with jazz and other forms. He was once slapped on stage, by his father, for ending a song with a jazzy flair, said Breau’s younger brother Denny Breau, a professional guitarist who lives in Lewiston.
Breau began playing on his own as a teenager. When his family moved back to Maine, he stayed in Winnipeg, playing in clubs and on Canadian TV shows. He had his own show for a while in the mid-’60s, “The Lenny Breau Show,” which featured singers starting out with a fairly straight cover of a popular song, like “Downtown” by Petula Clark (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAJNfL9sFb8) , until Breau took over with his own, barely-recognizable, jazz version of the song.
A recording of Breau on TV from this period made its way into the hands of Atkins, who was vice president of the RCA record label’s Nashville recording division. Breau made two albums at RCA, “Guitar Sounds from Lenny Breau” and “The Velvet Touch of Lenny Breau,” but neither had mainstream appeal. Friends and family say that Breau was driven to create but never driven to make money or achieve fame.
“He was a true Bohemian who just lived his art and seemed disinterested in a lot of other things,” said Breau’s daughter, Emily Hughes (http://www.softandgroovy.com/) , of Calgary, Alberta. “He was mastering his instrument and a lot of other things suffered.”
Hughes was raised by her mother, Canadian singer Judi Singh, and didn’t see Breau much growing up. She said her mother wanted to protect her from the drugs and accompanying havoc that was a strong presence in Breau’s life.
In 1999, Hughes made a documentary film called “The Genius of Lenny Breau,” which featured interviews with Atkins, Benson and many other musicians, and allowed Hughes to learn about her father. She heard several stories that emphasized his singular focus on music, to the detriment of other parts of his life. He rarely drove a car, for example.
“Everybody took care of him and escorted him around,” said Hughes.
In 1973, Breau was arrested for possession of heroin in Winnipeg and was given two years probation. Later in the 1970s, he sought help at a drug rehabilitation facility. He worked in Nashville, Maine and Los Angeles in the 1970s, and released a half dozen albums between 1978 and 1984. He also taught guitar master classes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGCSgWqg0Fg) , but remained largely unknown except to other musicians.
“He was in and out (of periods of drug use) and that’s probably one of the reasons he never really made it,” said his brother, Denny Breau, 63, of Lewiston. “I think the pressure drove him to escape.”
MYSTERIOUS DEATH, LEGEND GROWS
On the morning of Aug. 12, 1984, Breau called his mother in Maine, from Los Angeles, saying he needed to escape a home life that had become unbearable. He had married singer Joanne Glasscock, nicknamed Jewell, in 1980.
In an interview with the Press Herald then, Breau’s mother, who died in 2014, recalled him saying, “I’ve got to get away and make my life over.”
He was found dead later that day in the rooftop swimming pool at the apartment building where he lived, with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, Dawn Rose Marie. A coroner’s report listed the cause of death as strangulation. But police never charged anyone.
No working phone number could be found for Jewell Breau, to seek comment for this story.
Breau’s influence as a musician has seemed to grow over time, thanks largely to the internet. Videos of him playing on Canadian television, or giving master classes, or playing with Atkins live on on YouTube and elsewhere. Hughes says she hears from new Breau fans all over the world. She recently received a Breau tribute CD made by a musician in Paris. An online video clip of Breau playing, posted on her website, got 30,000 hits in Russia in one month. She’s considering another documentary film on her father, focused on his influence on a new generation of musicians and fans.
Denny Breau said what made his brother’s guitar style stand out, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, was that he approached his instrument like a piano. He played individual strings with individual fingers, the way a piano player strikes keys. One of his biggest musical influences was jazz pianist Bill Evans. He was also a student of the percussive flamenco style of guitar playing.
Breau would use his thumb to play a bass line, his first and middle finger to play chords, and his ring finger and little finger to play melody and improvise.
“If you just listen without seeing him, it sounds like two different guys,” said Denny Breau, also a professional guitarist. “The fact that people are still listening to him, studying him, doesn’t surprise me. There’s still nobody even close to him.”
Breau’s music has continued to reach new audiences largely thanks to Bachman, who was a teenager in Winnipeg when he first heard Breau play.
Bachman was 15 and a budding guitarist when he started hanging around with Breau, trying to learn all he could. Bachman would achieve pop music success in the late ’60s and early ’70s as guitarist for the rock band The Guess Who. He wrote or co-wrote several of the band’s hits, including “These Eyes,” “Laughing” and “American Woman.” Later in the 1970s, he had more rock hits as a founder of Bachman-Turner Overdrive, including “Takin’ Care of Business” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”
In an interview with the Toronto Star in 2012, Bachman said of his long music career: “I’m just doing what I’ve wanted to do since that day I was 15 and heard Lenny Breau play the guitar.”
Over the years, Bachman has collected thousands of hours of Breau’s music and has issued some previously unreleased recordings on his Guitarchives label. One of those was an album called “LA Bootleg 1984,” released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 Juno Award. The album includes Breau recordings made at Donte’s, a Hollywood jazz club, in June 1984.
In the 1998 Bachman also released an album called “Lenny Breau: Boy Wonder” which included country-tinged songs recorded by Breau at Event Records in Westbrook, when Breau was just 14 or 15 years old.
Hawkes remembers that when Bachman first called him to buy the recordings, made in the mid-50s, he was hesitant about the price. Bachman hung up without agreeing to anything, then called Hawkes back later that day, saying he just had to have those recordings.
“He was able to get Lenny’s music out to a lot of people, so I give him credit for that,” said Hawkes, sitting in Lenny’s restaurant in March.
The new Lenny’s restaurant, an upscale pub with room for live music in one corner of the room, is in a building on Route 302 that Hawkes once used as a studio and to sell stereo equipment. While playing and recording music for years Hawkes was also an electronics technician and TV repairman, and the 13-foot-tall TV repairman sign he built in 1962 still stands watch over the property.
Hawkes used a building attached to what is now the restaurant as his Event Records studio. That’s where Breau recorded as a teenager. Hawkes sold the buildings a few years ago to Portland entrepreneur and music fan Bill Umbel. When considering names for the new eatery and music venue, Lenny’s struck him. Hawkes provided him with dozens of pictures of Breau, that are scattered through out the restaurant.
There is also text on the wall explaining who Breau was, when he lived, and why his guitar style influenced so many.
“The fact that people here in Maine can come here and find out about Lenny is just great,” said Hawkes, who lives next door to the new restaurant. “I think he deserves the recognition.”
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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Warwick, Ny 10990
USA
Jazz piano great Kenny Barron talks music, life and mentors. | SanDiegoUnionTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/apr/09/kenny-barron-interview/
** Kenny Barron reflects on rich career in jazz
————————————————————
By George Varga (http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/staff/george-varga/)
The Kenny Baron Trio is (from left) bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, drummer Johnathan Blake and pianist Kenny Barron.
As one of the most gifted and prolific jazz pianists of the past half-century years, Kenny Barron has made more than 50 solo albums. He’s also been a key member in the bands of such legends as James Moody, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard and Lionel Hampton, among many others.
But one of the most memorable early moments in this nine-time Grammy Award nominee’s illustrious career came in 1962, when this then-19-year-old keyboardist auditioned — or, rather, didn’t audition — to play in the band of bebop trumpet king Dizzy Gillespie.
** Jazz at the Athenaeum presents the Kenny Barron Trio
————————————————————
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 15
Where: TSRI Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $30 Athenaeum members; $35 nonmembers
Phone: (858) 454-5872
Online:ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri (http://www.ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri)
“There was no audition!” Barron recalled with a hearty laugh, speaking from his home in Brooklyn. “Dizzy hired me solely on Moody’s recommendation; he never heard me play until my opening night, the first gig I played with Dizzy.”
Did the then-recently-married young pianist immerse himself in Gillespie’s demanding concert repertoire before he joined the famed trumpeter’s band?
“No, I didn’t,” replied Barron, 72, who performs here Friday with his trio at La Jolla’s TSRI Auditorium. “He just hired me on the basis of Moody’s recommendation — and the fact I was 19. He felt that, being married, I’d be a more responsible kind of person. I didn’t use drugs. I was always punctual. I was there to take care of business and learn as much as I could.”
Barron, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2010, clearly learned well.
He has long been acclaimed as an unusually graceful and resourceful pianist, composer and band leader in his own right. His formidable technical prowess, improvisational ingenuity and unerring good taste enable him to stand out in any setting, be it with jazz greats, string quartets, such pop and R&B vocal luminaries as Roberta Flack and Maria Muldaur, opera icon Kathleen Battle, or such pop-jazz mainstays as George Benson and San Diego-bred singer Michael Franks.
Along the way, Barron’s recordings have been sampled on recordings by everyone from hip-hop favorites De La Soul and Pete Rock to soon-to-retire EDM star Avicii and house music mainstay Basement Jaxx. His supple piano playing has also been featured in the scores to a number of films by director Spike Lee, including “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X” and “Bamboozled.”
** “Sound like portraits”
————————————————————
Whatever the style, Barron’s ability to play exactly what is right for any song at hand — no more, no less — makes him that rare pianist whose eloquence is matched by his concision. His artful approach to performing and composing have earned him praise from many jazz luminaries, including former San Diego saxophone giant Moody, who died here in 2010.
In a 2007 Union-Tribune interview, an effusive Moody declared: “I’ve worked with Kenny a lot and I’ve never heard him make a mistake. He’s fantastic! And all of his solos sound like portraits.”
Barron chuckled appreciatively as the comments of Moody, one of his biggest mentors, were read to him over the phone.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes!” Barron said. “I mean, it was very kind of him to say that, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’m still making them. But that’s OK, because you grow from your mistakes.
“Moody was just the nicest guy. He was a sweetheart, and he was always like that. I don’t think I ever heard him utter a cross word. Moody was always wanting to learn new things, and he was always interested in interaction. He’d often ask me, ‘How do you do this?’ When we were in Dizzy’s together, he’d say, ‘Play these (chord) changes,’ and I would, and he’d play over them. He was always interested in trying to stretch himself.
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.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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Jazz piano great Kenny Barron talks music, life and mentors. | SanDiegoUnionTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/apr/09/kenny-barron-interview/
** Kenny Barron reflects on rich career in jazz
————————————————————
By George Varga (http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/staff/george-varga/)
The Kenny Baron Trio is (from left) bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, drummer Johnathan Blake and pianist Kenny Barron.
As one of the most gifted and prolific jazz pianists of the past half-century years, Kenny Barron has made more than 50 solo albums. He’s also been a key member in the bands of such legends as James Moody, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard and Lionel Hampton, among many others.
But one of the most memorable early moments in this nine-time Grammy Award nominee’s illustrious career came in 1962, when this then-19-year-old keyboardist auditioned — or, rather, didn’t audition — to play in the band of bebop trumpet king Dizzy Gillespie.
** Jazz at the Athenaeum presents the Kenny Barron Trio
————————————————————
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 15
Where: TSRI Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $30 Athenaeum members; $35 nonmembers
Phone: (858) 454-5872
Online:ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri (http://www.ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri)
“There was no audition!” Barron recalled with a hearty laugh, speaking from his home in Brooklyn. “Dizzy hired me solely on Moody’s recommendation; he never heard me play until my opening night, the first gig I played with Dizzy.”
Did the then-recently-married young pianist immerse himself in Gillespie’s demanding concert repertoire before he joined the famed trumpeter’s band?
“No, I didn’t,” replied Barron, 72, who performs here Friday with his trio at La Jolla’s TSRI Auditorium. “He just hired me on the basis of Moody’s recommendation — and the fact I was 19. He felt that, being married, I’d be a more responsible kind of person. I didn’t use drugs. I was always punctual. I was there to take care of business and learn as much as I could.”
Barron, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2010, clearly learned well.
He has long been acclaimed as an unusually graceful and resourceful pianist, composer and band leader in his own right. His formidable technical prowess, improvisational ingenuity and unerring good taste enable him to stand out in any setting, be it with jazz greats, string quartets, such pop and R&B vocal luminaries as Roberta Flack and Maria Muldaur, opera icon Kathleen Battle, or such pop-jazz mainstays as George Benson and San Diego-bred singer Michael Franks.
Along the way, Barron’s recordings have been sampled on recordings by everyone from hip-hop favorites De La Soul and Pete Rock to soon-to-retire EDM star Avicii and house music mainstay Basement Jaxx. His supple piano playing has also been featured in the scores to a number of films by director Spike Lee, including “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X” and “Bamboozled.”
** “Sound like portraits”
————————————————————
Whatever the style, Barron’s ability to play exactly what is right for any song at hand — no more, no less — makes him that rare pianist whose eloquence is matched by his concision. His artful approach to performing and composing have earned him praise from many jazz luminaries, including former San Diego saxophone giant Moody, who died here in 2010.
In a 2007 Union-Tribune interview, an effusive Moody declared: “I’ve worked with Kenny a lot and I’ve never heard him make a mistake. He’s fantastic! And all of his solos sound like portraits.”
Barron chuckled appreciatively as the comments of Moody, one of his biggest mentors, were read to him over the phone.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes!” Barron said. “I mean, it was very kind of him to say that, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’m still making them. But that’s OK, because you grow from your mistakes.
“Moody was just the nicest guy. He was a sweetheart, and he was always like that. I don’t think I ever heard him utter a cross word. Moody was always wanting to learn new things, and he was always interested in interaction. He’d often ask me, ‘How do you do this?’ When we were in Dizzy’s together, he’d say, ‘Play these (chord) changes,’ and I would, and he’d play over them. He was always interested in trying to stretch himself.
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=4cc52124e8) | 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=4cc52124e8&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 piano great Kenny Barron talks music, life and mentors. | SanDiegoUnionTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/apr/09/kenny-barron-interview/
** Kenny Barron reflects on rich career in jazz
————————————————————
By George Varga (http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/staff/george-varga/)
The Kenny Baron Trio is (from left) bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, drummer Johnathan Blake and pianist Kenny Barron.
As one of the most gifted and prolific jazz pianists of the past half-century years, Kenny Barron has made more than 50 solo albums. He’s also been a key member in the bands of such legends as James Moody, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard and Lionel Hampton, among many others.
But one of the most memorable early moments in this nine-time Grammy Award nominee’s illustrious career came in 1962, when this then-19-year-old keyboardist auditioned — or, rather, didn’t audition — to play in the band of bebop trumpet king Dizzy Gillespie.
** Jazz at the Athenaeum presents the Kenny Barron Trio
————————————————————
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 15
Where: TSRI Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $30 Athenaeum members; $35 nonmembers
Phone: (858) 454-5872
Online:ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri (http://www.ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri)
“There was no audition!” Barron recalled with a hearty laugh, speaking from his home in Brooklyn. “Dizzy hired me solely on Moody’s recommendation; he never heard me play until my opening night, the first gig I played with Dizzy.”
Did the then-recently-married young pianist immerse himself in Gillespie’s demanding concert repertoire before he joined the famed trumpeter’s band?
“No, I didn’t,” replied Barron, 72, who performs here Friday with his trio at La Jolla’s TSRI Auditorium. “He just hired me on the basis of Moody’s recommendation — and the fact I was 19. He felt that, being married, I’d be a more responsible kind of person. I didn’t use drugs. I was always punctual. I was there to take care of business and learn as much as I could.”
Barron, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2010, clearly learned well.
He has long been acclaimed as an unusually graceful and resourceful pianist, composer and band leader in his own right. His formidable technical prowess, improvisational ingenuity and unerring good taste enable him to stand out in any setting, be it with jazz greats, string quartets, such pop and R&B vocal luminaries as Roberta Flack and Maria Muldaur, opera icon Kathleen Battle, or such pop-jazz mainstays as George Benson and San Diego-bred singer Michael Franks.
Along the way, Barron’s recordings have been sampled on recordings by everyone from hip-hop favorites De La Soul and Pete Rock to soon-to-retire EDM star Avicii and house music mainstay Basement Jaxx. His supple piano playing has also been featured in the scores to a number of films by director Spike Lee, including “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X” and “Bamboozled.”
** “Sound like portraits”
————————————————————
Whatever the style, Barron’s ability to play exactly what is right for any song at hand — no more, no less — makes him that rare pianist whose eloquence is matched by his concision. His artful approach to performing and composing have earned him praise from many jazz luminaries, including former San Diego saxophone giant Moody, who died here in 2010.
In a 2007 Union-Tribune interview, an effusive Moody declared: “I’ve worked with Kenny a lot and I’ve never heard him make a mistake. He’s fantastic! And all of his solos sound like portraits.”
Barron chuckled appreciatively as the comments of Moody, one of his biggest mentors, were read to him over the phone.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes!” Barron said. “I mean, it was very kind of him to say that, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’m still making them. But that’s OK, because you grow from your mistakes.
“Moody was just the nicest guy. He was a sweetheart, and he was always like that. I don’t think I ever heard him utter a cross word. Moody was always wanting to learn new things, and he was always interested in interaction. He’d often ask me, ‘How do you do this?’ When we were in Dizzy’s together, he’d say, ‘Play these (chord) changes,’ and I would, and he’d play over them. He was always interested in trying to stretch himself.
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=4cc52124e8) | 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=4cc52124e8&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
Jazz piano great Kenny Barron talks music, life and mentors. | SanDiegoUnionTribune.com
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2016/apr/09/kenny-barron-interview/
** Kenny Barron reflects on rich career in jazz
————————————————————
By George Varga (http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/staff/george-varga/)
The Kenny Baron Trio is (from left) bassist Kiyoshi Kitagawa, drummer Johnathan Blake and pianist Kenny Barron.
As one of the most gifted and prolific jazz pianists of the past half-century years, Kenny Barron has made more than 50 solo albums. He’s also been a key member in the bands of such legends as James Moody, Buddy Rich, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard and Lionel Hampton, among many others.
But one of the most memorable early moments in this nine-time Grammy Award nominee’s illustrious career came in 1962, when this then-19-year-old keyboardist auditioned — or, rather, didn’t audition — to play in the band of bebop trumpet king Dizzy Gillespie.
** Jazz at the Athenaeum presents the Kenny Barron Trio
————————————————————
When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 15
Where: TSRI Auditorium, 10620 John Jay Hopkins Drive, La Jolla
Tickets: $30 Athenaeum members; $35 nonmembers
Phone: (858) 454-5872
Online:ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri (http://www.ljathenaeum.org/jazz-at-tsri)
“There was no audition!” Barron recalled with a hearty laugh, speaking from his home in Brooklyn. “Dizzy hired me solely on Moody’s recommendation; he never heard me play until my opening night, the first gig I played with Dizzy.”
Did the then-recently-married young pianist immerse himself in Gillespie’s demanding concert repertoire before he joined the famed trumpeter’s band?
“No, I didn’t,” replied Barron, 72, who performs here Friday with his trio at La Jolla’s TSRI Auditorium. “He just hired me on the basis of Moody’s recommendation — and the fact I was 19. He felt that, being married, I’d be a more responsible kind of person. I didn’t use drugs. I was always punctual. I was there to take care of business and learn as much as I could.”
Barron, who was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2010, clearly learned well.
He has long been acclaimed as an unusually graceful and resourceful pianist, composer and band leader in his own right. His formidable technical prowess, improvisational ingenuity and unerring good taste enable him to stand out in any setting, be it with jazz greats, string quartets, such pop and R&B vocal luminaries as Roberta Flack and Maria Muldaur, opera icon Kathleen Battle, or such pop-jazz mainstays as George Benson and San Diego-bred singer Michael Franks.
Along the way, Barron’s recordings have been sampled on recordings by everyone from hip-hop favorites De La Soul and Pete Rock to soon-to-retire EDM star Avicii and house music mainstay Basement Jaxx. His supple piano playing has also been featured in the scores to a number of films by director Spike Lee, including “Do the Right Thing,” “Malcolm X” and “Bamboozled.”
** “Sound like portraits”
————————————————————
Whatever the style, Barron’s ability to play exactly what is right for any song at hand — no more, no less — makes him that rare pianist whose eloquence is matched by his concision. His artful approach to performing and composing have earned him praise from many jazz luminaries, including former San Diego saxophone giant Moody, who died here in 2010.
In a 2007 Union-Tribune interview, an effusive Moody declared: “I’ve worked with Kenny a lot and I’ve never heard him make a mistake. He’s fantastic! And all of his solos sound like portraits.”
Barron chuckled appreciatively as the comments of Moody, one of his biggest mentors, were read to him over the phone.
“I’ve made a lot of mistakes!” Barron said. “I mean, it was very kind of him to say that, but I’ve made a lot of mistakes, and I’m still making them. But that’s OK, because you grow from your mistakes.
“Moody was just the nicest guy. He was a sweetheart, and he was always like that. I don’t think I ever heard him utter a cross word. Moody was always wanting to learn new things, and he was always interested in interaction. He’d often ask me, ‘How do you do this?’ When we were in Dizzy’s together, he’d say, ‘Play these (chord) changes,’ and I would, and he’d play over them. He was always interested in trying to stretch himself.
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=4cc52124e8) | 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=4cc52124e8&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
George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill – Chicago Tribune
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/ct-ent-0411-george-freeman-review-20160409-column.html
** George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill
————————————————————
Howard Reich (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/chinews-howard-reich-20130507-staff.html#nt=byline)
George Freeman
“Has anyone here ever been to someone’s 89th birthday?” Green Mill (safari-reader://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/lifestyle-leisure/dining-drinking/green-mill-%28club%29-PLENT000175-topic.html) owner Dave Jemilo asked the crowd Friday night, by way of introducing the evening’s attraction.
“Hardly anyone makes it to that, and we’ve got George Freeman!”
A big roar went up with those words, for the beloved Chicago guitarist indeed was marking the grand occasion, though a bit early. Freeman’s birthday falls on April 10, but he traditionally celebrates during the nearest weekend at the Green Mill, as he did last year.
As always, a nearly life-size cutout of Von Freeman — the guitarist’s elder brother — looked on from a corner of the club above and behind the stage, reminding everyone of the family’s eminence in jazz. George Freeman never enjoyed quite the international acclaim of his elder brother, Chicago tenor saxophone legend Von Freeman, who died in 2012 at age 88; nor did sibling Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, an admired drummer who died in 2006.
But the guitarist nobly has upheld the family’s musical legacy. In recent years, he has savored a welcome career resurgence, performing steadily alongside Chicago guitarist Mike Allemana, who long played with Von Freeman and has helped give George Freeman another chapter in a very long story.
Allemana was right there onstage with guitarist Freeman again, the musicians joined by guest drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and Chicago organ master Pete Benson — the same band that ushered in Freeman’s 88th birthday last year at the Mill.
Even before Freeman played a note, however, he characteristically reached out to the audience.
“Everybody say, ‘Yeah!'” Freeman shouted with the gusto of a younger man.
After everyone yelled back, Freeman asked for more.
“Everybody say ‘Hell, yeah!'” Freeman bellowed.
The vocal blast that followed brought a smile to Freeman’s face.
“All right,” he said, immediately launching into an up-tempo swinger that set the tone and tempo for the first set. For nearly everything that Freeman and friends played was big, rowdy and shot through with the spirit of the blues.
Granted, at the start Freeman played mostly long-held notes, his fingers presumably warming up as he went along. But what he initially lacked in velocity he made up for in drive, laying into relentless repeated notes, bending pitches without inhibition, leaning on dissonance to make sure he was heard.
He was, but his colleagues did not hold back. Allemana and Benson offered profusions of notes during their own solos, and Purdie provided relentless backbeats through it all. The sheer energy and rhythmic thrust of this music said a great deal about the nature of youth, which in some cases obviously defies the date on the calendar.
For all the exuberance of this performance, though, Freeman’s most detailed playing emerged in an original ballad. The guitarist’s control of pianissimo tone, meticulousness of chordal voicing and delicacy of melodic embellishment represented some of his best work of recent vintage. While Benson produced a soft underlay of swelling chords on Hammond B-3 organ, Freeman improvised one ornately conceived phrase after another, his ability to invent lines apparently undiminished by the passage of time.
As Freeman’s notes became softer and softer, his solo eventually trailed off into the ether, the guitarist then whispering into the microphone, “That’s all.”
That was plenty.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
George Freeman plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway; $15; 773-878-5552 or www.greenmilljazz.com (http://www.greenmilljazz.com/) . (http://greenmilljazz.com/)
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=08da354817) | 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=08da354817&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
George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill – Chicago Tribune
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/ct-ent-0411-george-freeman-review-20160409-column.html
** George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill
————————————————————
Howard Reich (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/chinews-howard-reich-20130507-staff.html#nt=byline)
George Freeman
“Has anyone here ever been to someone’s 89th birthday?” Green Mill (safari-reader://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/lifestyle-leisure/dining-drinking/green-mill-%28club%29-PLENT000175-topic.html) owner Dave Jemilo asked the crowd Friday night, by way of introducing the evening’s attraction.
“Hardly anyone makes it to that, and we’ve got George Freeman!”
A big roar went up with those words, for the beloved Chicago guitarist indeed was marking the grand occasion, though a bit early. Freeman’s birthday falls on April 10, but he traditionally celebrates during the nearest weekend at the Green Mill, as he did last year.
As always, a nearly life-size cutout of Von Freeman — the guitarist’s elder brother — looked on from a corner of the club above and behind the stage, reminding everyone of the family’s eminence in jazz. George Freeman never enjoyed quite the international acclaim of his elder brother, Chicago tenor saxophone legend Von Freeman, who died in 2012 at age 88; nor did sibling Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, an admired drummer who died in 2006.
But the guitarist nobly has upheld the family’s musical legacy. In recent years, he has savored a welcome career resurgence, performing steadily alongside Chicago guitarist Mike Allemana, who long played with Von Freeman and has helped give George Freeman another chapter in a very long story.
Allemana was right there onstage with guitarist Freeman again, the musicians joined by guest drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and Chicago organ master Pete Benson — the same band that ushered in Freeman’s 88th birthday last year at the Mill.
Even before Freeman played a note, however, he characteristically reached out to the audience.
“Everybody say, ‘Yeah!'” Freeman shouted with the gusto of a younger man.
After everyone yelled back, Freeman asked for more.
“Everybody say ‘Hell, yeah!'” Freeman bellowed.
The vocal blast that followed brought a smile to Freeman’s face.
“All right,” he said, immediately launching into an up-tempo swinger that set the tone and tempo for the first set. For nearly everything that Freeman and friends played was big, rowdy and shot through with the spirit of the blues.
Granted, at the start Freeman played mostly long-held notes, his fingers presumably warming up as he went along. But what he initially lacked in velocity he made up for in drive, laying into relentless repeated notes, bending pitches without inhibition, leaning on dissonance to make sure he was heard.
He was, but his colleagues did not hold back. Allemana and Benson offered profusions of notes during their own solos, and Purdie provided relentless backbeats through it all. The sheer energy and rhythmic thrust of this music said a great deal about the nature of youth, which in some cases obviously defies the date on the calendar.
For all the exuberance of this performance, though, Freeman’s most detailed playing emerged in an original ballad. The guitarist’s control of pianissimo tone, meticulousness of chordal voicing and delicacy of melodic embellishment represented some of his best work of recent vintage. While Benson produced a soft underlay of swelling chords on Hammond B-3 organ, Freeman improvised one ornately conceived phrase after another, his ability to invent lines apparently undiminished by the passage of time.
As Freeman’s notes became softer and softer, his solo eventually trailed off into the ether, the guitarist then whispering into the microphone, “That’s all.”
That was plenty.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
George Freeman plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway; $15; 773-878-5552 or www.greenmilljazz.com (http://www.greenmilljazz.com/) . (http://greenmilljazz.com/)
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=08da354817) | 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=08da354817&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
George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill – Chicago Tribune
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/ct-ent-0411-george-freeman-review-20160409-column.html
** George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill
————————————————————
Howard Reich (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/chinews-howard-reich-20130507-staff.html#nt=byline)
George Freeman
“Has anyone here ever been to someone’s 89th birthday?” Green Mill (safari-reader://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/lifestyle-leisure/dining-drinking/green-mill-%28club%29-PLENT000175-topic.html) owner Dave Jemilo asked the crowd Friday night, by way of introducing the evening’s attraction.
“Hardly anyone makes it to that, and we’ve got George Freeman!”
A big roar went up with those words, for the beloved Chicago guitarist indeed was marking the grand occasion, though a bit early. Freeman’s birthday falls on April 10, but he traditionally celebrates during the nearest weekend at the Green Mill, as he did last year.
As always, a nearly life-size cutout of Von Freeman — the guitarist’s elder brother — looked on from a corner of the club above and behind the stage, reminding everyone of the family’s eminence in jazz. George Freeman never enjoyed quite the international acclaim of his elder brother, Chicago tenor saxophone legend Von Freeman, who died in 2012 at age 88; nor did sibling Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, an admired drummer who died in 2006.
But the guitarist nobly has upheld the family’s musical legacy. In recent years, he has savored a welcome career resurgence, performing steadily alongside Chicago guitarist Mike Allemana, who long played with Von Freeman and has helped give George Freeman another chapter in a very long story.
Allemana was right there onstage with guitarist Freeman again, the musicians joined by guest drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and Chicago organ master Pete Benson — the same band that ushered in Freeman’s 88th birthday last year at the Mill.
Even before Freeman played a note, however, he characteristically reached out to the audience.
“Everybody say, ‘Yeah!'” Freeman shouted with the gusto of a younger man.
After everyone yelled back, Freeman asked for more.
“Everybody say ‘Hell, yeah!'” Freeman bellowed.
The vocal blast that followed brought a smile to Freeman’s face.
“All right,” he said, immediately launching into an up-tempo swinger that set the tone and tempo for the first set. For nearly everything that Freeman and friends played was big, rowdy and shot through with the spirit of the blues.
Granted, at the start Freeman played mostly long-held notes, his fingers presumably warming up as he went along. But what he initially lacked in velocity he made up for in drive, laying into relentless repeated notes, bending pitches without inhibition, leaning on dissonance to make sure he was heard.
He was, but his colleagues did not hold back. Allemana and Benson offered profusions of notes during their own solos, and Purdie provided relentless backbeats through it all. The sheer energy and rhythmic thrust of this music said a great deal about the nature of youth, which in some cases obviously defies the date on the calendar.
For all the exuberance of this performance, though, Freeman’s most detailed playing emerged in an original ballad. The guitarist’s control of pianissimo tone, meticulousness of chordal voicing and delicacy of melodic embellishment represented some of his best work of recent vintage. While Benson produced a soft underlay of swelling chords on Hammond B-3 organ, Freeman improvised one ornately conceived phrase after another, his ability to invent lines apparently undiminished by the passage of time.
As Freeman’s notes became softer and softer, his solo eventually trailed off into the ether, the guitarist then whispering into the microphone, “That’s all.”
That was plenty.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
George Freeman plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway; $15; 773-878-5552 or www.greenmilljazz.com (http://www.greenmilljazz.com/) . (http://greenmilljazz.com/)
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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George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill – Chicago Tribune
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/ct-ent-0411-george-freeman-review-20160409-column.html
** George Freeman swings into his 89th birthday at Green Mill
————————————————————
Howard Reich (http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/reich/chinews-howard-reich-20130507-staff.html#nt=byline)
George Freeman
“Has anyone here ever been to someone’s 89th birthday?” Green Mill (safari-reader://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/lifestyle-leisure/dining-drinking/green-mill-%28club%29-PLENT000175-topic.html) owner Dave Jemilo asked the crowd Friday night, by way of introducing the evening’s attraction.
“Hardly anyone makes it to that, and we’ve got George Freeman!”
A big roar went up with those words, for the beloved Chicago guitarist indeed was marking the grand occasion, though a bit early. Freeman’s birthday falls on April 10, but he traditionally celebrates during the nearest weekend at the Green Mill, as he did last year.
As always, a nearly life-size cutout of Von Freeman — the guitarist’s elder brother — looked on from a corner of the club above and behind the stage, reminding everyone of the family’s eminence in jazz. George Freeman never enjoyed quite the international acclaim of his elder brother, Chicago tenor saxophone legend Von Freeman, who died in 2012 at age 88; nor did sibling Eldridge “Bruz” Freeman, an admired drummer who died in 2006.
But the guitarist nobly has upheld the family’s musical legacy. In recent years, he has savored a welcome career resurgence, performing steadily alongside Chicago guitarist Mike Allemana, who long played with Von Freeman and has helped give George Freeman another chapter in a very long story.
Allemana was right there onstage with guitarist Freeman again, the musicians joined by guest drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie and Chicago organ master Pete Benson — the same band that ushered in Freeman’s 88th birthday last year at the Mill.
Even before Freeman played a note, however, he characteristically reached out to the audience.
“Everybody say, ‘Yeah!'” Freeman shouted with the gusto of a younger man.
After everyone yelled back, Freeman asked for more.
“Everybody say ‘Hell, yeah!'” Freeman bellowed.
The vocal blast that followed brought a smile to Freeman’s face.
“All right,” he said, immediately launching into an up-tempo swinger that set the tone and tempo for the first set. For nearly everything that Freeman and friends played was big, rowdy and shot through with the spirit of the blues.
Granted, at the start Freeman played mostly long-held notes, his fingers presumably warming up as he went along. But what he initially lacked in velocity he made up for in drive, laying into relentless repeated notes, bending pitches without inhibition, leaning on dissonance to make sure he was heard.
He was, but his colleagues did not hold back. Allemana and Benson offered profusions of notes during their own solos, and Purdie provided relentless backbeats through it all. The sheer energy and rhythmic thrust of this music said a great deal about the nature of youth, which in some cases obviously defies the date on the calendar.
For all the exuberance of this performance, though, Freeman’s most detailed playing emerged in an original ballad. The guitarist’s control of pianissimo tone, meticulousness of chordal voicing and delicacy of melodic embellishment represented some of his best work of recent vintage. While Benson produced a soft underlay of swelling chords on Hammond B-3 organ, Freeman improvised one ornately conceived phrase after another, his ability to invent lines apparently undiminished by the passage of time.
As Freeman’s notes became softer and softer, his solo eventually trailed off into the ether, the guitarist then whispering into the microphone, “That’s all.”
That was plenty.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
George Freeman plays at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway; $15; 773-878-5552 or www.greenmilljazz.com (http://www.greenmilljazz.com/) . (http://greenmilljazz.com/)
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.
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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