by Allen Lowe | Dec 13, 2019 12:32 pm

Helen Ward Photo

Saxophonist Allen Lowe with Matthew Shipp on piano, Newman Taylor Baker on drums.

I played the old Rodgers and Hart tune “You Are Too Beautiful” on the saxophone for a downtown crowd last weekend — something I thought I might never be able to do again.

When I played the saxophone last Saturday at a brunch event at the Elm City Market, it was my first actual gig since completing a seven-week treatment for cancer.

The treatment left me, in the immediate sense, depressed, depleted, and doubtful that I would ever return to public performance. My doctors warned me I might not be able to play again — not be able to write or record or perform the music that has sustained me for decades.

It was a chilling prospect.

Strangely enough, in the weeks right after the treatments ended I felt oddly self-confident. During those grueling days of hunger and thirst (I could not eat solid food for almost two months and most liquids tasted like sand), I had been practicing in my head no matter what. I went over old tunes and chord changes, thinking about scales and passing tones, even as I felt like I had to work from the assumption that my musical life was over.

I would on occasion sit down at a piano and spin out a few chord changes, thinking of new songs I could write to new chord progressions, even as I felt that I was in denial.

The weight on my head, the fallout from radiation and chemotherapy, were just too heavy, too much to come back from. Sure, I had played with some of the greatest jazz musicians of the last 30 years, had recorded and composed significant works for significant players. But that was more than just a memory; it felt like a delusion.

I often compensated for my fear at lying on the radiation table exposed to waves of invisible and poisonous rays by treating it as though it was happening to someone else. So I pictured myself on hundreds of stages as though the work had been done by someone else, someone who felt confident and healthy, cognizant of a world outside. (One of the odder side effects of chemotherapy was a faux tunnel vision that cropped out everything outside of my immediate field of vision and consciousness. I could see more, but I didn’t want to.)

Helen Ward Photo

Allen Lowe at Elm City Market on Dec. 7 with bassist Kevin Ray

The Elm City Market performance last Saturday (a second is planned this coming Saturday) is what is known as a “standards gig.” The truth is that, even before my illness, I hadn’t played one of these in maybe 25 years. (I tend to play original music in most situations.) I love old tunes, I know a lot of them, and it was anybody’s guess at how well my hands and brain would coordinate. Was it like riding a bike? Would I crash and injure myself?

Well, except for a chronically dry mouth, it was relatively relaxed and easy. It helped to have an old friend on bass (the excellent Kevin Ray) along. It helped that this was not a performance in the classic sense.

But from the start I felt as thought my mind was coordinated, even if I forgot the occasional chord or missed the occasional interval. I was ready to, as the late great clarinetist Pee Wee Russell once advocated, play every solo like it was my last.

A Large Lump In My Throat

If you are an athlete, the worst possible injury you can sustain is one to your knee or your arm; for an actor, well, maybe to the larynx or the face. If you are a professional musician (in my case a jazz saxophonist), it’s the hands, particularly the fingers. I never thought about any other part of my anatomy as being particular vulnerable until I was told last summer I had throat cancer.

I have a tendency to always want to avoid clichés and typical, knee-jerk responses to things as they occur in life (and death). I think such reactions are a way of substituting someone else’s experience for our own; they keep us from really looking at life, not just our own but at everyone else’s, through our own eyes. This has made me wary of easy, glib sentimentality. There is an old description used by a great critic to describe modernist emotion at its best as something that is “beyond tears.” What he was suggesting is that instead of appealing to audiences’ most easily-accessed emotions, which are conditioned to be the same-old reactions they have had year after year to the same-old stories, we, as artists, have to challenge and even lead them. We have to make them experience the next and newest emotion they will feel by articulating it ourselves, even before they realize they are about to feel it. (This is a weak paraphrase of an idea expressed by my old teacher, the late, great critic Richard Gilman.)

Faced suddenly with an overdose of reality, I wondered how I would respond to cancer, in both a public and private way.

None of my doctors thought I would die from this disease, but they did assure me that I would suffer greatly from the cure. I was faced with treatments that included the harshest chemotherapy available (something called cisplatten) and seven weeks/35 treatments of high-intensity radiation to my jaw.

I would lose my taste buds, a lot of my salivary glands, possibly a significant amount of my hearing, and be unable to play the saxophone for some time. And there was no way of predicting how weak my jaw would become, if I would lose my teeth or my jaw strength, all of which impacted on my ability to play the saxophone, on the strength and character of my sound on the horn.

My salivary glands would likely suffer anything from impairment to destruction. As I was to discover soon, this would mean horrible difficulty swallowing, badly-chapped lips, cracks in the skin next to my lips, and a regular nighttime sensation of constantly drowning.

All of that, I was assured, would either stop or come back when treatments (seven weeks total) were completed. Or maybe it wouldn’t.

My oncologist told me she had one saxophonist/patient who managed to start playing four months after the treatments ended. This concerned me, though not as much as the possibility of hearing loss (30 percent of patients experienced this) and neuropathy in my hands, which could, if it got bad enough, end my musical life. Since I already have varying degrees of carpal tunnel in both hands (from nearly 13 years of corporate torture, otherwise known as a day job), this seemed like adding injury to injury.

Of course there was not much choice in all of this for me. The diagnosis was clear; I had a rather large lump that had grown in my throat, and the alternative was a near-certain death, and not necessarily in the far future. These things progress in their own time, which is sometimes slow and sometimes fast.

I had moments of complete terror. Though I am retired from my former work, my entire life is currently centered around work as a composer, saxophonist, and historian. I am married with two grown children, and I was distraught at the thought of abandoning them.

On top of all this, though I am no longer a musician-in-his-youth (I am 65), and though I have felt myself being aged out of the social contract, I am playing better now than I ever played before. I am still composing, and I have a new book planned and a number of musical projects in the works.

What would I do?

I would of course get the damned treatments. But I was also determined not to define this as a great moment of tragedy.

I would (try and) fight the urge to descend (or ascend, I guess) into the typical philosophical dead ends of attempting to determine how all of this impacted on the Meaning of Life, of how it impacted on the meaning of my life in particular, and what my life meant in relationship to the universal condition of life as it negotiated the terms of this irrational sickness. I already had an answer to all that. The impact was clear, the meaning obvious: I would do virtually nothing but get treatments for tw months, followed by a period of recovery, and it would be a miserable experience. Nothing about it would be edifying in any existential way, and the best thing about it was that it had a finite ending. It would definitely stop at a certain and clearly marked point, and there was a good chance I would recover well enough to resume “normal” life — which of course was dependent on what I defined as normal life.

But there was also a chance that things would go wrong: my throat, which was being radiated, might close up, I could end up with a feeding tube and/or in excruciating pain. And, like some of the patients I saw passing through the Smilow Cancer Center where I was treated, I might end up as a walking ghost, weak and defeated and ready to surrender without resistance to whatever odd fate awaited me.

Fast forward seven weeks: I will spare you all the raw details, but nothing in my previous life prepared me for the darkness that descended over me for the duration of my cancer treatments. Every week post-chemo a cloud came over me, like one of those sudden storms in which the sky first turns a hopeless shade of black and is followed by torrents of unstoppable rain. The difference was that these were my personal clouds, and remained for three or four days at a time, and never really receded. They only withdrew temporarily like an enemy engaged in guerrilla warfare steeling itself for another attack (or, in my case, the next chemo).

It is hard to describe the deep and near-irreversible pall of being under the influence of chemo: Nothing seems worth doing. Time floats over and around you in an endless loop of sadness and hopelessness. This is fate, you think, an illness that has stalled like an endless front of bad weather, and blocked you from ever moving forward and away, free of the grip of its cold, cold hands.

There were times when dying seemed a reasonable alternative to the weekly assault of chemotherapy and the daily blitz of radiation. And radiation was a strange and awful thing. Each time, I was strapped to a table –  well, my face was strapped, restrained –  with a mask that barely allowed me to breathe. For eight long minutes each morning I felt like I was being baptized to the point of drowning. For three months, in reaction to this, I was unable to fall sleep while flat on my back. I still wake up three or four times a night to a sense that I am sinking slowly into a drowning pool.

The Other Side

I decided early on that I was through with music, with writing, with basic human interaction. It was all too difficult and too risky. I had trouble talking on the phone with people. I did not want to see anyone other than my wife (keep the children away; they did not need to see me like this), though I have to say that the much-maligned social media kept me from completely sinking into myself.

So here I am, about 10 weeks after my final treatment. My taste buds are about halfway back. My salivary glands are significantly better, though I sip liquids constantly and wake up in the morning with a feeling that a family of moths has, overnight, nested in my mouth.

I have been playing the saxophone consistently for about a month. I am composing music, writing my book, and have even gotten a few gigs, including a few Saturdays at Elm City Market at State and Chapel in New Haven (the next one is this Saturday, Dec. 14, 10:30 a.m to 1:30 p.m.), and a concert Jan. 5 in Brooklyn at the concert hall Roulette.

I still hate the music business, but jazz is like an addiction from which there is no recovery. I am playing as well as ever, with maybe even a bit more conviction and desperation.  I am also determined to keep annoying the people who have grown a little tired at my complaints about the arts world both here and around the country.

Though I was ready to do so at many points throughout this whole ordeal, I will not surrender. When the end comes they will have to pry my saxophone from my cold dead hands.

Allen Lowe, a Hamden resident, has recorded as a leader with Roswell Rudd, Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Doc Cheatham, Ken Peplowski, JD Allen, Matthew Shipp, Kalaparusha, Ursula Oppens, Don Byron, and others. (Learn more about his recordings and his books here.)  An 8 CD career retrospective of his music, Disconnected Works, has been released by ESP Disk.

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BY TAMMY SCILEPPI

Back in the early ’60s, popular composer/bandleader William “Count” Basie and his contemporary Edward “Duke” Ellington, enjoyed hanging out and jamming together in St. Albans, the legendary home of A-list jazz icons such as Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and John Coltrane, who resided in its ritzy enclave Addisleigh Park.

In fact, Basie and his wife Catherine lived there since the mid-1940s, as did Ellington’s composer/arranger son Mercer Ellington. And Yankees slugger Babe Ruth spent so much time at the St. Albans Golf and Country Club that many area residents thought he lived there.

Pick up a copy of “St. Albans” (Arcadia Publishing) and take a trip back in time to that exciting era. Queens native Claire Serant’s new “time capsule” book — due for release on Jan. 27 — is chock full of 200 vintage photos and fun historical facts. She highlights the neighborhood’s famous and not-so-famous people and places, courtesy of current and former residents, Queens Library, the Library of Congress, and the Press of Southeast Queens.

You’ll learn about St. Albans’ evolution from a 19th century farming community to a working-class/middle-class community with European roots in the 1920s and ‘30s to a predominately African American and Caribbean American community that continues to embrace its ambitious past through strong connections to business, civic, political, and religious groups.

Serant, a former New York City journalist who teaches at Brooklyn College and Medgar Evers College, decided to pen her book because she was looking for a “fun” writing project.

“As a college professor, I’m always reading students’ work. I wanted to do what I love — research, writing, looking at historical photos and interviewing people,” she explained. “At the same time, a former student, Nicholas Hirshon, wrote ‘Forest Hills’ and ‘Nassau Coliseum’ for Arcadia. Another acquaintance, Carl Ballenas, wrote ‘Jamaica,’ ‘Jamaica Estates,’ ‘Maple Grove Cemetery,’ ‘Kew Gardens’ and ‘Richmond Hill’ for Arcadia. When I frequented Barnes and Noble stores, I saw many of the other sepia-toned Arcadia books and thought, ‘Why not write about St. Albans?’” 

Serant said the neighborhood was always very special to her because she worshipped at St. Albans Congregational Church on Linden Boulevard and knew people from St. Albans from school, work or social events. 

“When I covered Queens as a general assignment reporter for the New York Daily News [14 years], I wrote about St. Albans civic and business leaders, so it was nice to speak with many longtime residents and new acquaintances,” she said.

The author scored many cool pics from locals, as well as places like the Jamaica NAACP branch, which provided a photo of early members, including sociologist/journalist and former Addisleigh Park resident W.E.B. Du Bois, and American diplomat Ralph Bunche, who won a Nobel Peace Prize. Serant also took a few photos herself, but daughter Blair Garrett, was her main photographer.

One slice-of-life shot shows brothers Reuben “Ruby” and Jacob “Jinx” Kaplan, co-owners of popular jazz spot Club Ruby (located on Baisley Blvd. and 120th Ave. from early 1950s to mid-1960s), serving and serenading customers. It featured musicians, like trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson. 

Serant, who hails from Springfield Gardens and now lives in Nassau County, said the timing was right for her book project. 

“Right now, there are a lot of longtime St. Albans residents who have retired or relocated south. Their adult children might be trying to figure out whether to sell their family home or not. I wanted a book to remind the second generation of what their parents worked for when they came to St. Albans,” she said. “With all of the gentrification taking place in NYC, St. Albans folks – like the rest of southeast Queens – should remember the area’s value.”

“It’s a place where those hardworking families put down roots in order to give their children the ability to succeed,” she added.

Serant will appear at a book signing event from 6 to 8 p.m. on Jan. 30 at Black Spectrum Theatre Company, located at Roy Wilkins Park at 177th Street and Baisley Boulevard.

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https://gothamist.com/arts-entertainment/photos-subway-swing-party-transports-new-yorkers-back-jazz-era
 

Photos: ‘Subway Swing’ Party Transports New Yorkers Back To The Jazz Era

Dec. 13, 2019 2:58 p.m.

The annual Subway Swing party hosted by the Transit Museum swung into Downtown Brooklyn last night. Dozens of Jazz Era-aficionados got to party inside the 1936 decommissioned subway station that houses the museum, with live jazz bands, period-appropriate clothing and swing dancing.

Unlike previous years, when participants took an hour-long ride on an old subway train to get to the museum, this year’s event took place solely at the museum, so there was more time for dancing, cocktails, and talking in old timey slang about giggle water, rag-a-muffins and getting zozzled.

Check out lots of fun photos of the event up above—and below, you can take a look at some of the cool vintage signs that were on-hand. If you missed out, you can still get in some swing dancing this Sunday at the Underground Jazz and Swing Festival: “Hundreds of jazz musicians, swing dancers, vintage clothing enthusiasts, photographers, families, commuters, and subway/railroad buffs will converge on the 145th Street A/C/D train station’s Uptown D train platform (lowest level) for a full day of music, dance and happiness — totally FREE with your Metrocard swipe.”

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J&R Music spent 44 years at its site along the length of Park Row (1971 to 2914), amassing not just a global reputation as music retailers but also pieces of American music history. Now, as the company develops its properties there, it is adding a venue to celebrate that history — and has called on neighbor Michael Dorf to do it. J&R Music Lounge By City Winery will open sometime this spring in the basement of 15 Park Row, and will be billed as a live music lounge and supper club to seat about 200 — much smaller than its City Winery siblings, but with the same cool vibe.

It all started with a call out of the blue to Dorf from Rachelle Friedman, the R in J&R (her husband is the J). “She’s a legend,” said Dorf, who went to her officeat 15 Park Row about a year ago to discuss her idea — sitting among souvenirs like a white baby grand signed by Lady Gaga. At that time he was a bit bogged down, having just learned that his lease for City Winery would soon be terminated to make way for Disney. “But she was so compelling and such a good saleswoman that I couldn’t not go along.” To envision the space that the two cooked up, think jazz club but with a broader definition of jazz — live music with dinner and some ticketed events, some not. “It’s hard to define, it may be more of an eatery with good music, but we are going to feel that out.” And since Dorf speaks in fully-formed sentences, and is clearly so jazzed about this venture, I’ll let him take it from here:

“It’s all really exciting. The building has such a deep history — it was once the tallest building in the city before the Woolworth Building was built — and we get to be part of this historic space. It’s about preserving some of the great things about New York. J&R was not just a retail chain, it was New York, and it was downtown New York. It’s an honor to pay homage to a 40-year retailer that we always used, not just for music but for parts and even for toasters. And this is really a partnership. Jason Friedman, Rachelle’s son, is excited about it and is getting involved in construction so I don’t have to show up here every day. They are far from a mom-and-pop operation, but they are personally involved. It is making it a lot more fun and a lot easier on me as we build out Pier 57 at the same time.”

They hope to have the space open by April or May.

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https://www.twincities.com/2019/12/15/st-paul-jazz-saxophonist-irv-mr-smooth-williams-age-100-has-played-his-final-concert/
 

St. Paul jazz saxophonist Irv ‘Mr. Smooth’ Williams has died. He performed at his own 100th birthday this year.

Ross RaihalaDecember 15, 2019 at 8:01 pm

St. Paul jazz saxophonist Irv “Mr. Smooth” Williams died Saturday in hospice care at Episcopal Homes in St. Paul. He was 100 and he was playing music right up until the end. Services are pending.

“He’s one of the sweetest, kindest, gentlest people you can imagine,” said Lowell Pickett, owner of Minneapolis club the Dakota in 2016. “And, obviously, his tone is beautiful. That sweet wonderful tone, that’s why he got the nickname ‘Mr. Smooth.’ ”

Raised in Cincinnati and Little Rock, Ark., Williams started playing music at the age of 6. He first picked up the flute, then tried the violin and later the clarinet. He took up the saxophone at 12, when he was old enough to join the school band. “I liked that you had to be creative to play jazz music,” he told the Pioneer Press in 2016.

He went on to pursue music professionally and backed the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Fletcher Henderson and Mary Lou Williams. He enlisted in the Navy during World War II and served on ships and played clarinet and sax in Navy bands. He came to St. Paul with a Navy big band, met the woman who would become his first of two wives and ended up making the city his home.

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By that point, Williams had earned a reputation in jazz circles and Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong heavily recruited him to join them on the road. But Williams didn’t like touring and stayed in town, teaching in the St. Paul Public Schools and performing in venues all around town, including the Sherwood Supper Club, Cassius’s Bamboo Room, the Flame Bar, the Red Feather, Freddie’s, the Crystal Coach, the Top of the Hilton and Suzette’s.

What kept him in St. Paul? “I had kids, of course,” he said. “That’s about it. That’s a long story.”

Williams had nine children. His daughter Sandra Jones said Sunday that “he was a great dad with a wonderful sense of humor. He was always full of fun. We’d having shaving cream fights and water balloon fights until my mom made us stop. He was young at heart and kind of a kid at heart.”

In 1984, Williams became the first jazz musician honored by the state of Minnesota with his own “Irv Williams Day.” The 1990 Celebrate Minnesota state map featured his photo.

“He’s got all the plaques and awards you can imagine,” said guitarist Steve Blons, who has known Williams for decades. “He told me a story about when he was honored by Norm Coleman, back when he was the mayor of St. Paul. Irv told Coleman, ‘This is great, but where’s the money?’ ”

Pickett opened the Dakota in 1985 at St. Paul’s Bandana Square and Williams soon became a regular there. Williams followed Pickett to downtown Minneapolis when he moved the Dakota to Nicollet Mall in 2003.

“He started playing at the Dakota at an age when most people are retired,” said Pickett, who told a story about Williams once responding to an audience request for “Satin Doll.”

“He said, ‘Oh gosh, I must have played that song 500 times. A thousand times, three thousand times. Man, I hate that song.’ The person who asked for it told him he didn’t need to play it. ‘No, no, you asked for it. I’ll be happy to play it for you.’ And right before he put the horn to his mouth, he said, ‘I sure hate this song.’ He told me later that usually ends the requests.”

Williams first hinted at retirement in the liner notes of his 2004 album “That’s All.” Four years later, he followed it up with another CD, “Finality.” But Williams kept at it, and played annual birthday shows at the Dakota as well as happy-hour gigs. In 2015, he issued his final album, “Pinnacle.”

Several times, Pickett threw Williams retirement parties at the Dakota. Backstage after one of them, Williams asked Pickett about the coming Friday. “I said, ‘What about it? Did you want to play?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, I kind of think I do.’ ”

In 2016, Blons said: “My professional opinion is that music is part of why he’s still alive. It’s been the thing that has given him the most joy, sense of purpose and social connections to musicians and the public. He’s talked multiple times about quitting, but then two days later, he’s talking about next week’s show. My expectation is that he’ll continue to play until he literally cannot do it anymore. He might play until the day he dies; that wouldn’t surprise me.”

Williams moved into an assisted-living facility in 2017, Jones said, and went into hospice care in September. “Basically, it was for weakness,” she said. “Being 100 years old, he was getting progressively weaker and his geriatric doctor recommended hospice.”

When Williams turned 100 in August, he was too tired to make the trip to the Dakota. But he played for nearly an hour for family and friends at a birthday party at Episcopal Homes.

“Music gave him enormous fulfillment,” Jones said. “He never stopped.”

When asked in 2016 how many reeds he’s gone through over the course of his life, Williams let out a loud, hearty laugh. “Well, I’ve been playing since I was 12 years old. So I would say a million reeds, at least.

“I don’t have retirement in mind, but the good Lord does. Whenever he says stop, I’ll take the signal. I’ll continue to play as long as I don’t get tired, and I do get tired sometimes. I do enjoy talking about music and meeting other musicians. Anybody who wants to talk about music, I will talk about it, so get the word around.”

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W

hen I turned on my car, Eartha Kitt’s voice poured out of the stereo and covered me like smoke—an aural vapor, a remnant of the hot, fast-moving fire that the cabaret singer embodied when she was alive. A chorus of trumpets, with their tinny nasally brilliance, announces the start of “C’est Si Bon,” and seven seconds later Eartha slides in on the breath. With one long glance in my rearview mirror, I left my driveway and went in search of the performer’s alter ego, who went by the name Eartha Mae.   

I wanted to see where Eartha Mae came from, to travel the roads she walked upon. Her hometown is two hours southeast of mine, so I drove, letting the singer play me into the town of North, South Carolina. By then, Eartha Kitt had been dead for a decade, but as I listened to her voice, she was alive, wry and spry, her trilling voice singing about her champagne tastes, which happen to be out of the price range of her potential suitor, who only has beer bottle money. 

I needed to get to the root of the longing that spawned Kitt’s signature purr—and the heartache behind the growl that audiences know so well. I wanted to better understand Eartha Mae, who set out from her hometown hoping to find something better than picking cotton on the plantation where she was born. My goal was to see through the innuendos she used as a distraction and focus on the woman behind that controlled vibrato who wrestled with who she was and where she was from. Eartha Kitt was a diva—outspoken, provocative, seductive, and sophisticated. I believed Eartha Mae was a chameleon—becoming whatever the world needed her to be in order to survive. 

In her prime, Eartha Kitt became an icon. She danced with the Katherine Dunham Company before becoming a cabaret singer and actress. She visited one hundred and eight countries, performing songs in more than ten languages. Orson Welles reportedly called her “the most exciting woman alive,” and by 1960 she had a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. From the start, she defied the archetypes often ascribed to black women of her time: jezebel, maid, cook, slave, or tragic mulatto. During her five-decade career she won several Emmys and was nominated for a Grammy and two Tonys. 

I recently polled a handful of friends on their impressions of Eartha Kitt. Most were familiar with her name, her rendition of the song “Santa Baby,” and the fact that she voiced the villain Yzma in Disney’s animated movie The Emperor’s New Groove—but the knowledge ended there. A couple knew that in 1968 she was blacklisted by the CIA for making a critical comment about U.S. involvement in Vietnam at a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson. The event was billed as a conversation about how to fix juvenile delinquency, but no one was talking about the topic at hand. When the moment presented itself, Kitt broached the subject. “Boys I know across the nation feel it doesn’t pay to be a good guy,” Kitt said. “They figure with a record they don’t have to go off to Vietnam. You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. They rebel in the street. They will take pot and they will get high. They don’t want to go to school because they’re going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam.” 

The move cemented her position as an activist but endangered her career. Kitt was a black woman stating her opinion to a white woman in arguably the most important building in the country. After the luncheon, government officials started frequenting the places Kitt was set to perform, intent on digging up dirt for a dossier on the performer, making venue owners so nervous they canceled her domestic appearances, which forced her to perform abroad where her anti-war stance was accepted. Few of my friends knew of her meager beginnings or her triumphant return to the United States, where she was welcomed back to the White House by then president Jimmy Carter.

I was introduced to Eartha Kitt’s legacy when I was sixteen. It was my first year at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities, a residential high school for artists.

On move-in day, portraits of history-making African-American women lined the hallway from the elevator to our dorm rooms. Viola Davis’s photo hung outside my classmate’s room, and Althea Gibson in front of mine. Right outside of my residential advisor’s office was an image of Eartha Kitt. In the posed portrait from the 1950s she is looking off camera, her torso tilted forward, hair expertly coiffed in a series of loose curls. She wears a strapless black dress with a sweetheart neckline, her left hand propped on her hip showing off the large ring on her middle finger, her right hand just out of the frame. I didn’t know yet that her smolder hid anger and hurt. Lips pursed to be slightly provocative, eyes defiant, the interplay of shadow and light across her collarbones juxtaposed with the arch of her eyebrows. Her curves made me walk a little taller every time I passed by. In all of my mama’s fashion magazines, I had never seen a woman like that, a Marilyn Monroe with skin like mine. The same photo is on the cover of her 1953 studio album That Bad Eartha, but instead of the depiction being in black and white, it is black and fuchsia, her skin awash in the hot pink hue, an indication of the supernatural force she would soon become. I wanted to be her, even though I also felt an affinity for Billie Holiday. Eartha Kitt’s story, I thought, had a better ending. 

My RA, Reagan, a proud black woman with shoulder-length dreadlocks from a town not far from North, where Eartha Kitt grew up, told me everything she knew about Eartha, emphasizing that talented girls from small towns can make it, too. I wanted desperately to be an artist, but having economic ambitions and making art felt mutually exclusive. My ancestral hometown of Silverstreet, South Carolina, was an industrial and agricultural boomtown gone bust, and it needed somebody who could bring back money and skills. I felt that the women on the walls had more ambition and creativity than I did, and I knew that being an artist might bring me more heartache than I could stand. So, I buried my creativity and left the South for college, only to find that Eartha followed me.

In 2006 she found me in the middle of the night in my dorm room, unable to sleep, crouched over my laptop lurking on the earliest iteration of what would become YouTube. Joyce Bryant’s version of “Love for Sale” wound down and the algorithm continued playing songs it thought I might like based on my initial search. Eartha Kitt’s rendition of the song came on. Written by Cole Porter from the viewpoint of a prostitute, “Love for Sale” debuted in 1930. Critics responded by deeming its subject matter too “filthy” for audiences of the time. Eartha’s version has none of the desperation of the original and where her predecessors emphasized the words “for sale”—singing the line as if they were hawking wares on the street, Kitt’s focus is on the word “love,” and it comes out of her mouth in an elongated, controlled whisper, her wanting punctuated by the bang of the bongos, the song’s lyrics shaped by the ebb and swell of the brass backing her up. She sings like a classy lady down on her luck, a little shy about her situation but resourceful enough to work with what she has.

Listening to Eartha sing, I was unprepared for the scope and depth of the nostalgia that washed over me. The lyrics unlocked my longing to make art that moved people, and I played the song on repeat before going down the rabbit hole of trying to understand someone I wanted to emulate—the seeming effortlessness of her performance and the way she knew how to build intimacy with her listener. She could talk to anybody—including Albert Einstein—and she had an ease with her body that I still haven’t found. Eartha Kitt shaped the way I thought of the world and what art could do for it. I remembered what Reagan told me: Black girls from small towns could make it after all. So I committed myself to being an artist. After college I moved to New York City and attended graduate school. In 2013, I moved back to my hometown of Spartanburg, hoping my ambitions might make economic sense there.

“Eartha Kitt” (1968). © PictureLux/The Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo 

Over the years, I read the three autobiographies and one retrospective Eartha Kitt penned during her lifetime. I listened to every single song of hers I could get my hands on. I scoured the internet for videos of her performances. One conversation with a journalist forever endeared her to me: a snippet from the 1982 documentary All By Myself: The Eartha Kitt Story. I keep the short video, titled “Eartha Kitt on Love and Compromise,” in my YouTube favorites. 

The exchange takes place in a garden, where fuchsia shrubs serve as the scene’s backdrop.

“Can anyone live with Eartha Kitt?” a male voice asks. She lets him ramble for a moment, trying to rephrase the inflammatory and intimate inquiry while she sips something out of a silver tumbler. Tired of his line of questioning, she finally counters.

“Compromise, for what?” she exclaims, slightly bewildered, her words tinged with a bit of indignation.

He continues: “If a man came into your life, wouldn’t you want to compromise?”

Eartha takes one look at him and lets out a lion’s roar of a laugh and spits out the word “stupid” before laughing two beats longer. She gives the interviewer an incredulous stare before changing her demeanor. Passionate and enthusiastic in her response, she looks directly into the camera and says, “For what? That relationship is a relationship that has to be earned”—she swings her arm out as she says the word for extra emphasis—“not compromised for.” A few seconds later, she looks off camera and says, “I think there’s nothing in the world more beautiful than falling in love, but falling in love for the right reason, falling in love for the right purpose . . . falling in love . . . falling in love.” She says that last word as if the syllables are dripping from her mouth like the last drops of water from a faucet. 

“When you fall in love”—she continues looking off camera, props her hand under her chin, and appears as if she has drifted into a daydream before turning back to her inquisitor—“what is there to compromise about?”

Unsatisfied with her answer, the interviewer continues in the same probing evening-news voice: “Isn’t love a union between two people, or does Eartha fall in love with herself?”

After several beats, she responds: “Yes—I fall in love with myself and I want someone to share it with me.” She elongates her neck and coaxes a softer, more seductive personality out of the air around her. “I want someone to share me . . . with me,” she continues. She glances back and forth from the camera to the reverie she was in a few minutes earlier, as if she is watching the memory trail away. She averts her gaze and looks down. When she looks into the camera again, she is wearing another mood, the one most audiences recognize—the sophisticated, seductive, feline-like lady who sings cabaret. She sits with this character for just a moment before answering another of the interviewer’s questions about her love life. She looks up at the sky and places her left hand in her hair. She arches her back and tilts her neck, eyes upward before the video ends, awkwardly freezing on the final frame. 

Why would a woman like Eartha, a woman who had survived so much bad, feel the need to compromise? 

Before she was Catwoman on the television show Batman in the 1960s, before she spoke out against the Vietnam War and was exiled for it, before her redemption and the sold-out shows with a multicultural international repertoire at Café Carlyle in New York City in the 1990s, she was simply Eartha Mae Keith, a little girl who never knew her daddy and whose mama had given her away before she was school-aged because she couldn’t afford to keep her.

“I’m not an extrovert,” Eartha explained when she went on Terry Wogan’s talk show in 1989 to promote her latest memoir. “I can tease as Eartha Kitt, but as Eartha Mae, forget it,” she said with a laugh. “I’m hiding behind the bushes, behind the chairs, behind everything that I could possibly find to hide behind, because I never have [. . .] that kind of security within Eartha Mae, which makes me feel that she will never be accepted.”

This summer, when I left my house for North, I was on a mission to unify the Eartha Kitt of my imagination with Eartha Mae, the young girl who walked the strawberry blond roads of her hometown, so forsaken that, according to her autobiographies, she only felt truly at home in the wilderness. 

I wrote to the librarian at Benedict College, a historically black liberal arts college not far from North, which held in its archives some documentation of Eartha Kitt’s 1997 visit to South Carolina. The librarian’s correspondence cut off mid-exchange, however, and my follow-ups went unanswered. I had also written to relatives who held her precious memories, but those messages, too, went unanswered. I decided to visit the one place I knew I could find parts of her: North, South Carolina, touted as her hometown. She may have actually been born in the jurisdiction of St. Matthews, but like most things in the South, the truth gets a little breathing room: lines are drawn and redrawn to suit whoever is in power; histories can be smudged in order to make offenders seem less awful; and a little, mistreated “yella gal” once rejected by blacks and whites alike can become the figurehead for the American Dream in a town that wanted nothing to do with her when she left. 

I made my way down I-26, past the neat rows of trimmed oak trees and freshly mown grass. It was late July, but the leaves had already started to brown on the trees, the result of too much water at the wrong time. I knew that this meant fall would be early this year, and the trees would soon lose their coverings. My playlist flipped through a number of jazz standards Eartha Kitt was known for. Her breathy sighing in syncopation with the habanera rhythm and cinquillo on “The Girl from Ipanema” is signature Eartha, filled with smooth cooing and long melodic lines.   

The countryside along Highway 321 was a pastiche of rusting fences, houses with junkyards in the front and roadside chapels that on Sundays would be so filled with praise that the service could wash all of your cares away. 

Several miles later, the pine trees fell away and the turquoise sky wore its big, round clouds like pearls. The wheat swaying in the wind that Eartha Kitt mentions at the beginning of her first autobiography, Thursday’s Child, was no longer visible from the road. These days, soybeans have usurped wheat as the crop of the moment and the fields are pea green, the plants bowing under the weight of their fruit. 

As I drove down Savannah Highway, the trees closed in again. I moved down the road this way, ever conscious of the expanding and contracting. The area around here is filled with millponds, little lakes, and state roads with numbers but no names.

When I got into town, I noticed the railroad tracks running parallel to Main Street—North, population 725 as of 2017, became an incorporated town in the 1890s, when the South Bound Railway Company built a depot there. John North, one of the men who donated some land to make the development possible, had the municipality named after him and became the town’s first mayor. The railroad tracks appeared to still be in use, perhaps all that is left of the initially lucrative cotton industry that put the town on the map. North, which sits halfway between Greenville and Charleston, hasn’t figured out how to rebrand itself like the towns around it have in recent years.

A brown sign in a blue frame said WELCOME TO NORTH, SOUTH CAROLINA, and a hedge of fuchsia rose bushes sat out in front of it. Farther down the street the sign for the Williston Telephone Company swung listlessly in the heady midday heat. Over to my right, across the railroad tracks, a hearse sat in the front yard of the funeral home. Its predecessor sat around the corner, rusted out, waiting to see what the end’s gonna be.

Eartha Mae’s homeplace exists away from Main Street, out past the Air Force’s North Auxiliary Airfield, in an area where Bull Swamp Creek and the North Fork Edisto River meet. North, as she portrayed it in her memoirs, was a brutal, unyielding place where chain gangs working on the roads were the norm, booze and violence were mainstays, and she was often so starved for food and affection that she turned to eating raw sweet potatoes, which left a black ring around her mouth. 

I drove away from the main thoroughfare, and the landscape changed from the wide, pristine houses at the center of town to smaller, squat brick houses. Ochre-red rusted roofs popped up less than a mile outside of town. As the kudzu crept out of the forest and started to cover everything in its path, the houses got older—the planks graying, the structures swaying. 

Plywood billboards advertising spots like Piggly Wiggly and wares like Neese’s Sausage dotted the side of the road, along with smaller signs advertising five-dollar lunch baskets at the Hilltop Cafe.

The marsh emerged from behind a wall of impermeable pine. I got out of my car at the edge of the marsh, and the dirt path that led back to the highway was the color of a flesh wound that refuses to heal. I walked to where the water met the sand, feeling my footsteps force the earth underneath my soles to acknowledge my weight and give way. The sound disturbed a great blue heron who took off in search of a quieter space. 

A great sense of sadness came over me as I looked out over the dead, bleached, bone-colored oak trees. For years Eartha Mae was abused by the family that kept her, and she believed her prayers went unanswered in the way she needed them to be. When she wasn’t picking cotton under an oppressive sun, she was slopping hogs and hauling wood. 

“We were not treated like people,” she said angrily in an interview about her upbringing. “We were treated like [. . .] three-quarters of a person.” 

In her autobiography I’m Still Here, Eartha writes that when the adults were away she was often dressed in a croaker sack, tied to a tree, and beaten by the household’s children until her flesh gave way and her blood mixed with the red clay and sand composite now underneath my feet. 

Reprieve came when a relative in New York sent for her. Someone at her church saw the way Eartha Mae was treated and wrote to the only kin they knew she had.

If you don’t come get this child she is going to be worked to death, beaten to death, or starved to death, the letter said. A month later Eartha was loaded on a train with a couple of catfish sandwiches, on her way to Manhattan. It would take years for Eartha Mae to become Eartha Kitt, and it would be more than a decade before she saw North, South Carolina, again.

Where are you from?

Who are your people? 

When I left the swamp near Eartha’s childhood home and made my way back to the center of town, I went through this line of questioning everywhere I went: Robin’s Cafe, Huffman’s Fish N’ Chic, the only gas station in the center of town. It was as if the locals could smell the Upstate red clay on me, like something immediately indicated I was different. The young folks I met in restaurants were friendly enough, but they were daydreaming about being somewhere else. They were trying to get out of North. I was trying to break in. 

Where are you from? 

Who are your people?

It happened to me in the Piggly Wiggly, and when I was walking down Main Street, looking at the empty façades that once held five-and-dimes and restaurants people like Eartha wouldn’t have had the money to patronize. 

Where are you from? 

Who are your people?

I thought about how jarring it must have been that Eartha couldn’t really answer those questions. All she had were sketchy memories, stories transmitted in hushed tones, and hints from adults who never had the intention of telling her the whole truth. “I don’t have a family,” she once told an interviewer. “I’m an orphan so I know nothing about my blood relations—I only know what I was told—that I am one of the children of a cotton plantation owner’s sons who took advantage, obviously, of my mother and therefore put me in a position of not being accepted by anybody.” 

For the better part of the afternoon, I couldn’t figure out what marked me as foreign. It took hours before I realized I was the only light-skinned African American I’d seen all day. 

I try not to think much about miscegenation, but it troubles the edges of my life. I realized how odd it might be for the townspeople: a “high yellow” woman in a strange car asking about another “high yellow” woman.

Even though my parents and I share the same features—curved jawline; short, wide nose; and high cheekbones—my lighter skin and reddish-brown hair set me apart from the pecan tan complexion and raven black hair of my parents and brother, so much so that when my parents got divorced, my father’s lawyers asked for a paternity test. The cruel rhyme “mama’s baby, daddy’s maybe” followed me until I left college. 

Eartha Mae’s skin color—my skin color—was an indicator of a possible dirty little secret that folks older than me called “night-time integration,” the product of the lust and desires of white men, and the powerlessness of black women who couldn’t refuse. There were eleven documented lynchings in Orangeburg County before 1950, an effort to make sure that black people knew their place and stayed in line. In North, Eartha Mae’s light skin color was the bane of her existence, the catalyst for her tortured relationship with the South. With a drop of black blood in her veins, white people had no want for her. For the other side of the color line, her skin color served as a constant reminder of facts that black people couldn’t escape—that they were emancipated but not free, sharecropping someone else’s land and living on borrowed time. So they didn’t want her around. I walked through town carrying some of the unease she must have felt.

I could only find record of Eartha returning to North twice. 

On February 26, 1950, she learned that her “Aunt Mamie,” the woman who gave her a ticket to leave North and its brutality behind, had died. At the time, Eartha was performing in Paris. So she made her way back across the Atlantic to New York City to claim her relative’s body and honor her aunt’s final wish to be buried in North. They returned to town the way Eartha left—by train. 

When Eartha arrived, her relatives could barely understand her newfound New York accent. I knew what that was like. After years of my own departures and returns, I learned that nobody understands you when you return—the transformation that happens while you’re away alters your insides, like the astronauts who go to space and come back with changed chromosomes. 

In 1997, Eartha Kitt received a request from Benedict College. The institution was asking for her help—they wanted her to headline a benefit concert that would help keep the school running. She agreed, but she asked that the students do her a favor: find her birth certificate. Eartha wasn’t sure of the day or year she was born, or exactly who her parents were, and as she grew older she got tired of wondering. 

When she touched down in Columbia, the students shared that they were able to find the piece of paper, but she would have to petition the courts in order to see it.

During a television interview taped during the Benedict visit, Eartha said, “I had no idea how I’d feel coming home. I left in tears, but it seems I’ve come home to love. I have been in over a hundred and eight countries and today you make me inextricably proud to say that I’m a South Carolinian.” 

After six months of court filings and petitions, she came back to South Carolina in 1998 to claim the piece of paper she’d desired for seven decades. She learned she was born on January 17, 1927—not January 26, 1926, as she believed. However, her father’s name was blacked out. The Southern power structure was determined to protect someone who was surely dead, and she was once again denied the opportunity to learn more about her origins. 

I wondered how that made her feel. I wanted to know if she still sang “My Heart Belongs to Daddy” and “My Daddy Is a Dandy” in her cabaret sets at the Carlyle, or if she found reason to retire them, knowing this section of her life would continue to be a mystery. You could always feel the hurt, the wanting she injected into her songs, but I pondered whether her later performances were tinged with disappointment, or if she found a way to make use of the pain.

I wanted to know if her statement about being proud to be a South Carolinian still held true. As a black female artist driving the backroads of her hometown, I needed it to be.

Her last book, Rejuvenate, doesn’t ruminate on her beginnings the way her previous books do. It barely mentions South Carolina at all. 

After my stop in the swamp, I did one last lap around town. As I drove, I saw fuchsia crape myrtles out of the corner of my eye, just out of focus. The plant is not indigenous to South Carolina, or to North America at all. It was brought from China to Europe in 1759, and French botanist André Michaux transported the plant to Charleston in 1786. The shrub spread throughout the state, the native and imported constantly rubbing up against one another, and the crape myrtles eventually made their way into the woods, taking up residence as if they had always been part of the scene. In North, the bright-colored, fragile flowers often mark the edge of homesites reclaimed by the forest, a preternatural burst of color in places where you least expect to find it. 

That was Eartha Kitt. If other women were defined by subdued shades of pink—mauve, rose, and the like—Eartha Kitt was fuchsia, a vivid redder, hotter version of the demure, expected pastel. The color commands your attention, the way her voice does when she sings. 

Afternoon shifted quickly to evening and the stars started to make themselves known as I made my way home to Spartanburg. On the way out of town, I spotted a field full of fuchsia blooms, low to the ground but visible against the rosy-fingered sunset. 

Cotton.

I pulled my car over onto a side road, crouched down and wrapped my fingers around the flower’s long slender bloom and held the weight of the plant in my hand. The blooms are only this color for a day or two before they transform, turning into those polarizing cotton bolls that so many white people find attractive, making wreaths for their front doors, filling flower vases with the plant that caused hardship for so many others. 

I clambered back to my car. “Thursday’s Child” came on as I pulled the Camry back onto the pavement. Her verses stripped down and naked, Eartha sings the history of pain and aching to belong:

I never know which way I’m bound
I’m Thursday’s child;
Heartbreak hangs around
For Thursday’s child.

The song is derived from a fortune-telling nursery rhyme supposed to predict the future of a person based on their day of birth, and “Thursday’s child has far to go.” 

There are a number of ways to interpret the verse. One is that this particular child will face obstacles and barriers before reaching the goal she desires. Some interpret the rhyme as saying the child could travel the world, covering great distances. Others think that it means the child’s potential and talent will take him far. 

Thinking about Eartha’s life, about my home, I realized that all of these interpretations could exist together, the uncanny and the splendid sharing the same space, Eartha Mae and Eartha Kitt bound up in one body, ambition and boundaries caught in the same frame. As she sang, I tried to make sense of the dissonance, hoping to sift out the hard truths from the facts. 

I was not sure what this said about my South, or Eartha’s North—maybe that the divide we teeter on will always be there. Perhaps the places we know and love are incapable of change, constantly painting over the rough parts with a new coat of paint. I wondered if we artists and our home, the South, with all of its contradictions, were Thursday’s children, and pondered what we could do about it. As the song comes to an end, Eartha sings the final stanza twice:

I’ll always be blamed
For what I was named,
But still I’m not ashamed,
I’m Thursday’s child.

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Will Friedwald 

Dec. 10, 2019 4:20 pm ET

In Buddy Rich’s lifetime, perhaps the legendary drummer’s most listened-to performance was his 1967 version of “Love For Sale.” It’s a number he revisits on an excellent new release, “Just in Time: The Final Recording” (Gearbox Records) a previously unreleased concert from Ronnie Scott’s in London, taped less than six months before his death in 1987 at age 69. Jazz musicians, other percussionists especially, were astonished by Rich’s ability to propel a band and drive it relentlessly forward, and to make his presence felt without even taking a drum solo. But by the time of his centennial in 2017, the Rich recording that most people knew, much more so than any of his actual music, was the infamous “bus tapes” (recorded in the early 1980s by Lee Musiker, his pianist at the time), in which the bandleader vehemently curses out his entire band, not only for what he felt was an subpar performance but because, ridiculous as it sounds, a few of them sported facial hair. The tape-recorded rant, which was famously quoted on “Seinfeld,” has given Rich an infamy that far overshadows his playing.

In his final two decades—the ones in which he most successfully led his own touring orchestra—Rich (who is also the subject of a new biography, “One of a Kind” by Swedish author Pelle Berglund ) was a highly sought-after guest on TV talk shows at least as much for his caustic, salty personality as for his musical skill. And the chief objects of his derision were rock and country music. In Rich’s colorful, antagonistic language, they were played by amateurs and listened to by morons. (His most-quoted line was, “If you don’t have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band.”)

The ironic thing about such statements (and YouTube is full of them) is that Rich might have actually liked rock more than he was willing to admit. There’s an undeniable rock influence in his highly successful big band of the 1970s and ’80s that is abundantly clear in the new album. Here was an orchestra that moved with a rhythmic momentum comparable to Duke Ellington and Count Basie at their best, yet there was none of the whimsy or lightheartedness of other jazz ensembles. Its music had a lot more in common, attitude-wise, with a heavy-metal band. Never warm or sentimental, its playing had a hard, rock-like edge that paralleled the antisocial, antagonistic stance of the leader himself. Take “The Trolley Song”: When Judy Garland sings it, it’s a fun and frivolous show-type tune about young love. As Rich plays it, it’s all lean and mean, like a locomotive speeding to its destination at a furious pace. Even the band’s few waltzes, like Freddie Hubbard’s more characteristically capricious “Up Jumped Spring,” are aggressive in the extreme.

The centerpiece of the concert is “Good News” (which, alas, is only included on the “deluxe” editions of the LP and CD and the streaming version), an extended work by saxophonist Bob Mintzer. This band had played several such pieces before, including Bill Reddie’s “Channel One Suite,” and two concert-style medleys based on classic works of musical theater, “West Side Story” (also arranged by Reddie) and “Porgy and Bess” (heard on the new album). At 31 minutes, “Good News” is the longest and most ambitious of them all. It’s virtually an entire album unto itself, with many different sections, yet the blues section doesn’t sound like, say, Basie’s traditional swing band playing the blues. And the slower passages sound more like stadium rock “power ballads” than like the love songs of Ellington or other jazz artists. There’s an extended drum solo, but the bulk of the solo space is given to Steve Marcus, the outstanding saxophonist who was the primary horn soloist in the Rich band for roughly a dozen years before the leader’s death. 

More than anything, “Good News” seems to have been informed by the longer, more ambitious works by the so-called progressive rock bands of the 1970s and ’80s, such as “Tarkus,” the 1971 album by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 

Even with the leader less than six months away from his death, the band is pushing itself to its limits, and everything it plays is overflowing with energy and dynamics. Buddy Rich may have inspired his mostly very young charges as much by browbeating them verbally as by his own playing, but the results speak for themselves.

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

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Will Friedwald 

Dec. 10, 2019 4:20 pm ET

In Buddy Rich’s lifetime, perhaps the legendary drummer’s most listened-to performance was his 1967 version of “Love For Sale.” It’s a number he revisits on an excellent new release, “Just in Time: The Final Recording” (Gearbox Records) a previously unreleased concert from Ronnie Scott’s in London, taped less than six months before his death in 1987 at age 69. Jazz musicians, other percussionists especially, were astonished by Rich’s ability to propel a band and drive it relentlessly forward, and to make his presence felt without even taking a drum solo. But by the time of his centennial in 2017, the Rich recording that most people knew, much more so than any of his actual music, was the infamous “bus tapes” (recorded in the early 1980s by Lee Musiker, his pianist at the time), in which the bandleader vehemently curses out his entire band, not only for what he felt was an subpar performance but because, ridiculous as it sounds, a few of them sported facial hair. The tape-recorded rant, which was famously quoted on “Seinfeld,” has given Rich an infamy that far overshadows his playing.

In his final two decades—the ones in which he most successfully led his own touring orchestra—Rich (who is also the subject of a new biography, “One of a Kind” by Swedish author Pelle Berglund ) was a highly sought-after guest on TV talk shows at least as much for his caustic, salty personality as for his musical skill. And the chief objects of his derision were rock and country music. In Rich’s colorful, antagonistic language, they were played by amateurs and listened to by morons. (His most-quoted line was, “If you don’t have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band.”)

The ironic thing about such statements (and YouTube is full of them) is that Rich might have actually liked rock more than he was willing to admit. There’s an undeniable rock influence in his highly successful big band of the 1970s and ’80s that is abundantly clear in the new album. Here was an orchestra that moved with a rhythmic momentum comparable to Duke Ellington and Count Basie at their best, yet there was none of the whimsy or lightheartedness of other jazz ensembles. Its music had a lot more in common, attitude-wise, with a heavy-metal band. Never warm or sentimental, its playing had a hard, rock-like edge that paralleled the antisocial, antagonistic stance of the leader himself. Take “The Trolley Song”: When Judy Garland sings it, it’s a fun and frivolous show-type tune about young love. As Rich plays it, it’s all lean and mean, like a locomotive speeding to its destination at a furious pace. Even the band’s few waltzes, like Freddie Hubbard’s more characteristically capricious “Up Jumped Spring,” are aggressive in the extreme.

The centerpiece of the concert is “Good News” (which, alas, is only included on the “deluxe” editions of the LP and CD and the streaming version), an extended work by saxophonist Bob Mintzer. This band had played several such pieces before, including Bill Reddie’s “Channel One Suite,” and two concert-style medleys based on classic works of musical theater, “West Side Story” (also arranged by Reddie) and “Porgy and Bess” (heard on the new album). At 31 minutes, “Good News” is the longest and most ambitious of them all. It’s virtually an entire album unto itself, with many different sections, yet the blues section doesn’t sound like, say, Basie’s traditional swing band playing the blues. And the slower passages sound more like stadium rock “power ballads” than like the love songs of Ellington or other jazz artists. There’s an extended drum solo, but the bulk of the solo space is given to Steve Marcus, the outstanding saxophonist who was the primary horn soloist in the Rich band for roughly a dozen years before the leader’s death. 

More than anything, “Good News” seems to have been informed by the longer, more ambitious works by the so-called progressive rock bands of the 1970s and ’80s, such as “Tarkus,” the 1971 album by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. 

Even with the leader less than six months away from his death, the band is pushing itself to its limits, and everything it plays is overflowing with energy and dynamics. Buddy Rich may have inspired his mostly very young charges as much by browbeating them verbally as by his own playing, but the results speak for themselves.

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

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Robin D. G. Kelley talks with musician Vijay Iyer about systems of oppression, the responsibility of artists, and how jazz sells proximity to blackness to white people.

ROBIN D. G. KELLEY, VIJAY IYER

I first met Vijay in the late 1990s, not long after he relocated from the Bay Area to New York City. We were all part of the Jazz Study Group, a small assemblage of writers, artists, scholars, and musicians that gathered every couple of months at Columbia University to discuss the music from an interdisciplinary perspective. Vijay certainly stood out, having left California with a PhD in music and cognitive science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a unique musical and political experience as part of the Asian Improv Arts movement founded by pianist Jon Jang and saxophonist Francis Wong, radical musicians anchored in black music, Asian-Pacific diasporic traditions, and a revolutionary commitment to social justice. Vijay brought to the New York music scene an unusual level of innovation and openness, but his refusal to treat music as a set of bounded, discrete cultural traditions, not to mention his name and brown skin, often led critics to listen for “Indianness” in everything he did. But he and many of his contemporaries pushed against all of these boundaries, and they pushed against the racism within the industry that not only pigeonholed artists but limited their ability to make a living. To this end he cofounded the short-lived Creative Musicians Alliance in 2001, which we discuss below.

Robin D. G. Kelley: The word “ally” is often used to identify those who are supportive of other’s struggles, and it’s a word that has had a lot of currency in the era of Black Lives Matter and Occupy. What would you say the term mean to you, especially in the context of making music?

Vijay Iyer: That’s a really profound and profoundly American question. I’ve been advising a student—by his own account, a privileged white kid from the South—who’s doing a project on Thomas Dorsey and Rosetta Tharpe, who were iconic innovators of gospel music. For the project, he’s writing about them, but then with an ensemble he’s also to present his own versions of some of the music that made them famous. And he’s been having a crisis around, basically, “Who am I in relation to all of this?”

My conversations with him have brought me to reflect about how blackness in the arts has a caché: it’s cool to seem black, right? I’ve even noticed that on social media, when I post a photo of myself standing next to a black person—literally any black person—it gets more likes than if I just post a picture of myself. ‘I think many people think I’m cool because of my proximity to blackness—but also because I’m not actually black, you know?’ I think many people think I’m cool because of my proximity to blackness—but also because I’m not actually black, you know? And that’s inextricable from the history of black music in the United States being sold by white companies and appropriated by non-black people, or inhabited in different ways by non-black people, which is this sort of way of managing and selling proximity to blackness without the guilt.

But for me, that just can’t be the point, right? That’s basically what I told my student: “This has to be about what you’re doing for people’s liberation, not what are you doing to gain some kind of status or currency.” You know, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous challenge: What are you doing for others? That’s the question I pose to myself in every context. This can’t just be about me sounding cool or looking awesome. It has to be in service of something larger. You want to actually open a conversation and activate people’s imaginations, and allow them to imagine a different world than the one we’re in. And that’s the kind of work that an artist can do, because we’re not there to answer questions exactly. We’re there to stir something up, and also to offer an alternative to the reality that we’re inhabiting.

This summer we were playing at Village Vanguard in Manhattan for a week, and the first night we got up there, it was a full house, and I just started by saying: “Let me get this out of the way. Trump sucks.” Because I was thinking about how these venues are rooms in which people from very different backgrounds find themselves thrown together. That’s amplified in historic venues such as that, where the space in its heyday was a room where white people would come listen to black musicians. And maybe feel a little edgy by doing that—I mean, it’s called Village Vanguard. But then what’s the next step beyond sitting next to it? Or sitting and looking at it? Do you ever feel mobilized by it?

I try to keep in mind that music that is doing political work is not the same as a political work of music. I’m not saying that the moment where I just said “Trump sucks” is an example of that, exactly—it’s more a question of what are you enacting in the act of being together and creating together. And the kind of agency you afford each other, the way you listen to each other. And maybe the diversity that you might represent as an ensemble.

RK: Can you talk about that? What is required to make music in an ensemble and are there political implications to this work?  What does it do to you, and for you?

VI: I have learned that being in these kinds of aggregates is implicitly to take up the charge of challenging white dominance. And really, when you look at the history of the music, even music that wasn’t ostensibly political like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, that was almost always, for decades, a group of black men making music together. And Blakey, for example, had a sense of responsibility to nurture young people like himself, to enlist them, and just let them apprentice to a certain reality. That’s community work to me, even if it goes by a different name. And it wasn’t like he was writing or featuring songs with political titles or something, but it’s sort of enacting a sense of, “This is a space for us.”

‘I want my music to actually open a conversation and allow people to imagine a different world than the one we’re in.’

I’ve also often found myself in spaces that were basically black spaces: black men, and then me. So what did that mean for me? Who was I in relation to all that? But it’s often a certain kind of mutual leap of imagination: “OK, I think that’s something we can do together.” Whatever our differences might be in terms of heritage, and cultural awareness, and generation, and all that. There’s a sense we’re in a certain struggle together. I was in Amiri Baraka’s band at the Dodge Poetry Festival when he performed “Somebody Blew Up America,” which led to him being stripped of the title of Poet Laureate of New Jersey—or rather, it wasn’t just revoked from him, but revoked from existence. There was no longer ever going to be a poet laureate in New Jersey because of that. We were literally the only non-white people anywhere. I remember we were hanging out backstage, and when it was time for us to play, Baraka comes around and says, “OK, all the Negroes and one Indian please report to the stage.” That was the kind of thing he could do: he just named what we were all experiencing, like, “This is this hypervisibility that we’re all experiencing in this context.”

RK: But is that, for you, allyship? Or is it something else?

VI: You know, I am really cautious around words like that: these nouns that become freighted with people’s agendas. Because I don’t know what somebody wants that word to mean when I say it. I’m the same with the word jazz. It’s too many competing agendas around one noun. I think it’s more productive to deal in verbs: How do we do work together toward a common purpose?

RK: Right. To ally.

VI: Yes. And then, who am I in relation to that larger purpose? And especially as someone who is something of an outsider, but also a non-white, non-black outsider. Because in much the way that blackness occupies a certain place in the white imagination, South Asian culture was very prominent in the black imagination as well. King is a prime example: he was inspired by tactics that Gandhi cultivated, and that was a huge point of reference for him in the civil rights movement, which then changed the world.

‘Words like allyship become freighted with people’s agendas. I don’t know what somebody wants that word to mean when I say it.’

But the Coltranes also made all these musical gestures to “the East,” as it was called. In John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things,” everything’s stripped down to a drone. And then Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda took that sensibility much further and actually immersed herself in Indian spiritual practice. You can probably locate this historically better than I can, but I attribute it in part to the post–World War II black experience of coming home and realizing that you’re actually not welcome, and then starting to rethink your investment in all kinds of European culture, including Christianity. So another manifestation of that is people looking to Islam, or searching for a sense of common cause with the rest of the Third World.

And so a particular brand of allyship emerges out of black people looking outside the West for other examples of how to be. And also realizing that there’s a common cause there, a common struggle. But then what are people like me in that context? My parents came to the United States in the mid-sixties from India because of the change in immigration laws that allowed for an influx of people with technical and scientific educations. So that’s very different than people who were descended from the enslaved. When people say we’re a nation of immigrants, those kinds of important distinctions get elided. That said, we still came from a postcolonial landscape.

RK: The African American–South Asian connection went both ways, too. The Dalit Black Panthers, for example. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the particular variant of Islam that really took off among musicians was the Ahmadiyya movement, which begins with a South Asian Muslim. I want to go back though to talk about how you’ve worked with a lot of multiracial formations—when we first met, you were very involved with Asian Improv.

VI: When I was in the Bay Area in the nineties, I encountered that whole community—Francis Wong, Jon Jang, Anthony Brown, Miya Masaoka, Mark Izu, Brenda Wong Aoki, Hafez Modirzadeh—and the cultural work they were doing was critical to a particular moment in what we could call the trajectory of Asian American identity formation. They were doing a particular kind of work that was centered around community organizing, and music as an aspect of that, and it was part of a communist sensibility, actually. A lot of them were labor organizers, in fact.

It was very powerful in that setting to see that you could basically be yourself. Like, you could even mention or address your own ethnicity while being allied with the new civil rights movement. And that community gave me some of my first opportunities. The Asian American jazz festival, which Asian Improv organized, gave me some of my first major gigs as a leader. I remember we had this large group that I called Brotherhood of the Diaspora. It was a pan-ethnic kind of thing, based in the idea that we could somehow find a common cause. We could do something together, we could ally around something.

That brings us back to the idea of ally as verb, which means it doesn’t become an identity. Instead it’s a purpose, or a task.

RK: Exactly. A praxis, the application of theory toward changing society. I remember hearing you talk fifteen or twenty years ago about the Creative Musicians Alliance you cofounded with Miya Masaoka, Aaron Stewart, and Reggie Workman. And you were very motivated by this idea of creating a collective, and how a collective might increase collaboration across race and ethnic divisions, which could in turn shape the culture of the music industry to respect difference without defining artists by it. What ended up happening with that organization?

VI: Well, we were a bit scattered and it was in my early years in New York City. It’s very difficult to sustain collective sensibility there because the city has a way of forcing you into survival mode. So I think that particular aggregate was one such casualty. We were very inspired by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and the Black Artists Group, which aimed to uplift innovative work by artists of color, period. And you wouldn’t believe how hard that is to find organizations that does that. I mean, jazz is a space in which that supposedly happens, but as we said earlier, jazz is really a space that sells proximity to blackness to white people. ‘No matter who you were, or where you were from, if you weren’t white then you had to somehow be a folk musician.’ And so because of that, it’s always this peculiar, fetishistic, fraught dynamic. And that’s why people push back on the label “jazz,” and initiated this other language of the creative music movement, basically claiming a mobility and artistic self-determination. Because what I also found is that we artists of color in general, and particularly in that moment (late-1990s, early 2000s), were often expected to perform tradition. No matter who you were, or where you were from, if you weren’t white then you had to somehow be a folk musician. Channel the ancient ways of your people, you know? It’s like: “Can I comment on modernity just like you all do every damn day? We have something to say about this.” The projects that I ended up doing with Mike Ladd were speaking to that. They were about people of color claiming the right to comment on the contemporary predicament.

RK: Have things changed since then?

VI: Well, I think what’s changed is that we’ve done it. We’ve set out this path that no longer seems extraordinary. And not just me, but a lot of us have reclaimed that right to invent. It’s hard to express how much opposition we faced back then. Back then it was actually like, “What makes you think you belong here?” I still encounter vestiges of it here and there, but I also enjoy a certain freedom because I’ve done all these things and acquired a certain reputation. So then the responsibility, as Toni Morrison said, is to free someone else.

RK: So what’s next for you? You are committed to making this place better than we found it, as James Baldwin might say. What’s next for you in terms of your creative projects and your attempts to do the politics of making music?

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Joe McQueen, the dynamic yet humble jazz saxophonist who made Ogden his home for 74 years starting in the days when musicians like Count Basie and Charlie Parker would play in the northern Utah city’s segregated nightclubs, has died.

“Bad” Brad Wheeler, a Utah radio host and longtime friend, noted McQueen’s death on Saturday in a Facebook post and later confirmed it in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.

“We were definitely very special friends,” Wheeler wrote. “He made me feel like I was a part of his family and promised me before he passed that we would always be connected.”

Wheeler said McQueen died Saturday at 10:20 in the morning — on the exact anniversary he came to Ogden at night. “It’s kind of poetic that way.”

Lucretia McQueen said on Facebook that she was going to miss her cousin.

“You made your mark on earth and I [know] you will be playing that trumpet loud in heaven,” she wrote. “See ya when I get there.”

The railroad brought McQueen and his bride, Thelma, to Ogden on Dec. 7, 1945, when he came for a two-week gig and stayed for life. He gained an early reputation among jazz musicians on the train between Chicago and San Francisco, and some legends — names like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Ray Charles and Lester Young — stopped to play with him.

McQueen became so well-known around Ogden that white students would try to get into the black clubs to hear him. By the late 1950s, the white-only clubs wanted to hire him. Those clubs refused to admit McQueen’s black fans, and the musician told club owners they had to change their policies.

“I made it known if they were going to hire my band and not let black people come in, I wouldn’t be playing there,” the civil rights pioneer said in 2005. Many club owners, fearing a popular performer would get away, gave in.

Wheeler said ending segregation in parts of Utah was something McQueen was proud of in his life.

The nonprofit music promoter Excellence in the Community paid tribute to McQueen and his legacy.

“Joe was the coolest cat in town,” the group wrote on Facebook, “and lived a life that we as musicians can all hope to live.”

Joe McQueen was born in Dallas on May 30, 1919, and grew up in Ardmore, Okla. His father left when he was a young boy; his mother died when he was 14, and he went to live with his grandparents.

“I didn’t have it too easy when I was a kid,” McQueen told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2005. “I was working two or three jobs sometimes and trying to go to school, too.”

His cousin, Herschel Evans, had a brief run playing tenor sax with Lionel Hampton and Count Basie. When McQueen was 14, he saw Evans’ sax and picked it up. When he tried playing it, Evans was impressed. “He said I was a natural,” McQueen said.

McQueen played tuba and clarinet before settling on the tenor sax. Before long, he got work with big bands around the Midwest.

McQueen met Thelma in Ardmore on a dance floor during his band’s performance. They married June 10, 1944, four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day.

In December 1945, just after the end of World War II, McQueen and Thelma were living in the Bay Area. McQueen’s band was hired for a two-week gig in Ogden. The story goes that the group’s bandleader gambled away the travel money, leaving the McQueens stranded. The story, McQueen told The Tribune in 2017, “got it all wrong.”

“I could’ve left and gone anywhere I want. You’re not stranded if you got money. And I’m not bragging, but I had enough money I could’ve gone anywhere. I could’ve gone back to California. I could’ve gone to Oklahoma,” McQueen said. “[Ogden] was just so different than anyplace I’d ever been. … So one thing led to another, we stayed here and we still like it.”

Settling down in Ogden — “being on the road was just a pain in the a–,” he said in 2017 — meant that anytime the train brought a jazz star to town, they would play with McQueen.

“So Charlie Parker comes to town, he got off the train and some guys told him a band was playing across the street from the station,” McQueen recalled. “He walks into the room, and I saw who it was and I almost fell over! He came down and played with us.”

In 1969, McQueen, for years a cigarette smoker, was diagnosed with throat cancer. He had surgery, and quit playing for several years. He worked as a mechanic and thought about selling his sax. The railroads weren’t bringing musicians through town, Ogden’s 25th Street became home to a string of disreputable dive bars, and disco overtook jazz in popularity.

It took a new generation of younger Ogden musicians to talk McQueen into performing again. He signed up for the odd gig around northern Utah, playing classics like “Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Pennies From Heaven,” and telling war stories about his early days.

“I just play what I feel on a given night. I never play the same solo twice,” he said in 2005, adding that he carried around 5,000 songs in his head. “A lot of guys, if they can’t read it, they can’t play it. But once I get the tune down, I never forget it. It’s strictly a gift.”

Wheeler said he developed a special relationship with McQueen after the two were in an accident together. Wheeler is white and loves blues and rock. McQueen was black and played only jazz.

“Our friendship transcended age and race and even genre,” he said, trying to choke back tears Saturday night.

McQueen also became friends with Utah Gov. Gary Herbert — who used to play the trumpet — and the musician knew just about every faith leader in Utah, too.

“He was a very spiritual guy,” Wheeler said. “He was a jazz man, but at the same time he was a salty preacher.”

Wheeler said he was going to visit McQueen at the care center where he was living and bring him home Saturday when he learned of his passing. He took McQueen’s wife there, instead, and the two said goodbye.

McQueen had been sick in recent months and was diagnosed with intestinal cancer. Wheeler said he didn’t recover much after surgery for that diseases in the past few weeks.

McQueen is survived by his wife, Thelma, and countless musicians who played with him or learned from him.

Tribune reporter Courtney Tanner contributed to this story.

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Buddy Terry, a saxophonist who worked in a broad array of styles and situations — making his most enduring contribution in the realm of soul jazz, and on the ground in Newark, his hometown — died on Nov. 29 in Maplewood, N.J. He was 78.

His son Ornette Terry said the cause was a stroke, one of several he had suffered over the last decade.

Doug Doyle / WBGO News remembers Buddy Terry, and speaks with his son Miles.

With a brawny but agile sound on tenor saxophone and a lighter, brighter tone on alto and soprano, Terry had the adaptable skillset of an in-demand sideman — which he was, working with Count Basie, Horace Silver and many others. He appears on the debut album by pianist Harold Mabern, recorded for Prestige Records in 1968. That same year, he served a stint with Ray Charles, inhabiting David “Fathead” Newman’s illustrious tenor chair.

Terry made a small clutch of albums in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, first on Prestige and then on Mainstream. These albums, which have long been cult objects for a certain type of soul-jazz enthusiast, have now reentered circulation; two years ago, producer and filmmaker Judd Apatow revived the Mainstream label with two reissues, one of which was Terry’s spirit-seeking 1971 album Awareness.

Elsewhere in Terry’s slim discography, there are historic moments hiding in plain sight.  Bass virtuoso Stanley Clarke reckons that Terry was the first to record one of his compositions — “Quiet Afternoon,” on the 1972 album Pure Dynamite.

That album featured a monumental lineup, with all the parts doubled: Eddie Henderson and Woody Shaw on trumpets; Kenny Barron and Joanne Brackeen on piano and keyboards; Clarke and Buster Williams on bass; Airto Moreira and Mtumé on percussion; Billy Hart and Lenny White on drums. There are just three tracks, including a swirling, semiabstract Terry original called “Paranoia,” perhaps in homage to his fellow Newark tenor man Wayne Shorter, whom he quotes in the melody (and who had recently made an album titled Schizophrenia).

The year after Pure Dynamite, Terry pivoted toward the sanctified power of the gospel church, and its connection with rhythm and blues, on an album titled Lean on Him. Featuring session heavyweights like Larry Willis on electric piano and Bernard Purdie on drums, it puts vocals out front — providing one of the earliest showcases on record for Dee Dee Bridgewater, on songs like “Climbing Higher Mountains.” (The tenor solo on that song, which begins just after 1:15, is a fine illustration of Terry’s righteous and rooted style.)

Edlin Terry was born in Newark on Jan. 30, 1941, to Edlin Terry, Sr., an entrepreneur, and the former Catherine Smith, a schoolteacher. He had an older sister, Kathryn Davis.

Buddy, as he was known from an early age, attended the Charlton Street School, where he began his musical studies on clarinet. At South Side High School (later renamed Malcolm X Shabazz High School), his classmates included organist Larry Young, trumpeter Woody Shaw and drummer Eddie Gladden — all of whom would play on his 1968 Prestige album Natural Soul.

A lifelong Newark native, Terry was celebrated as one of the Newark Jazz Elders, a confab of veteran musicians with deep roots in nightlife of Brick City. Like most members of the group, he honed his craft in local institutions like Sugar Hill, Hickory House, the Key Club and Teddy Powell’s Lounge. The city was no less central to his social life; among his childhood sweethearts was singer and actress Melba Moore, who attended Newark Arts High.

Terry married the former Georgiana Nellie Smallwood in 1959, and they had eight children. In addition to Ornette Arthur Terry, they include Wade Terry, D. Kareem Terry, Gregory Terry, Miles Terry and Kim Mary Terry. (Two of their sons, Edlin Terry III and Quincy Terry, are deceased; Georgiana died in 1981.) Surviving family also includes three daughters — Robin Barnes, Angel Racheal Bullock and Lavajah Terry — along with many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.

While Terry never released another album after Lean on Him, he continued to work steadily. He played in the pit for the 1976 Broadway revue Bubbling Brown Sugar, and on a series of commercial radio and jingle sessions. He taught music and woodwinds at Essex County College, and formed an association with the Duke Ellington Alumni Band. 

Through a wedding gig, he met Dave Post, co-owner of Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J., and bassist and bandleader for a group called Swingadelic.

“He had a great attitude, he was there to play, and he was very generous with his music, and a very funny guy,” remembers Post, who featured Terry in Swingadelic from 2000 to 2010. “Having a guy like that on the bandstand, who was a link to the Ray Charles Orchestra and the Basie band and Art Blakey and Horace Silver, really meant a lot.”

With the passing of Terry, Newark loses another piece of its jazz history. (Another Newark Jazz Elder, his fellow saxophonist Connie Lester, died earlier this year at 88.) A funeral service at 10 a.m. on Saturday, at Wells Cathedral Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Newark, will be open to the public. 

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https://variety.com/2019/music/news/joe-smith-dead-dies-elektra-capitol-warner-bros-label-head-1203421876/
 

Joe Smith, Former Label Head at Warner Bros., Elektra and Capitol, Dies at 91

Chris Willman

CREDIT: Courtesy WMG Archives

Joe Smith, whose four decades in the music business included heading Warner Bros. in the 1960s and ’70s, Elektra in the ’70s and ’80s and Capitol in the late 1980s and ’90s, has died at 91, multiple sources have confirmed.

“I’m so fortunate to have gotten out of (the music business) when I got out of it because there’s no fun anymore,” Smith, whose Warners run included the signing of Van Morrison, Black Sabbath, America, Alice Cooper and the Doobie Brothers, told Variety when he received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame four years ago. “We were there during a great time, and (then) it hit a wall.”

Besides leading three of the more historically important labels in the business across different eras, Smith is also remembered for his 1988 book “Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music,” which included interviews with a slate of legendary artists few others would have enjoyed access to — including Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney, Artie Shaw, Woody Herman, Ella Fitzgerald, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Neil Diamond and Billy Joel. Smith was the head of Capitol Records when he conducted the interviews.

A native of Chelsea, Mass., Smith first fell in love with music as a youngster listening to the jazz of Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Stan Getz. After a stint in the military and a degree from Yale, Smith got into radio as a disc jockey, and as a DJ in Boston in 1960 was called to testify in the congressional payola hearings before moving to the west coast the following year to work in promotion for Warner Bros.

Smith because the president of Warner Bros. in 1972. During his time at “the bunny,” he worked with artists including Rod Stewart, James Taylor, Deep Purple, Petula Clark, the Allman Brothers Band, Jethro Tull, George Benson, Al Jarreau and Seals & Crofts. On the Reprise side, he was involved with the careers of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, Randy Newman and Joni Mitchell.

In 1975 he slid over to become chairman of the sister company at Warner Communications,  Elektra/Asylum, replacing David Geffen, who left to enter the film business. Artists he worked with there included Mitchell (again), the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Queen, the Cars, Carly Simon, Judy Collins, Motley Crue, Hank Williams Jr. and X.

After being pushed out at Elektra in late 1982, Smith declared that he was retiring from the business altogether at the beginning of 1983. But exactly four years later, he jumped back in, announcing that he was returning as vice chairman and chief executive of the then deeply troubled Capitol-EMI, right at the dawn of the CD era. “We’re not going to have lawyers listening to records or marketing people deciding who will be signed to a record contract,” he told the Los Angeles Times at the time.

Smith did indeed preside over the revitalization of the downcast Capitol labels. Still, he maintained, the ’60s represented his peak as an executive as well as a music fan.

“The best time was building Warner Bros.,” said Smith, whose first success at the label was with Peter, Paul & Mary. “It was dumbfoundingly dull when we got there. The big acts were Ira Ironstrings and all the people who were on the TV shows like Connie Stevens. I was A&R and promotion, and we bought Reprise and Mo (Ostin) came aboard and the two of us had this magic run.

“The Grateful Dead was probably the most important signing because we were changing from the Petula Clark-Frank Sinatra company to what was happening in music,” he told Variety.

In the end, “The biggest record sales I had were with Garth Brooks,” Smith told the Chelsea Record, his hometown paper. “I signed Garth Brooks (at Capitol) and he sold more records than anybody. I also had the Eagles’ ‘Greatest Hits’ album (at Elektra/Asylum), which was up there with Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ album as the two biggest of all time.”

Smith recalled for Variety the halcyon days at Warner Bros., by then by far the most highly esteemed label in the business, at least among rockers and singer/songwriters, and one where prestige artists were used as bait to get other prestige artists.

He recalled how he signed Bonnie Raitt. Capitol flew Raitt to Los Angeles from the East Coast to play the Troubadour, ostensibly an audition for the label. Smith, then president of Warners, had heard about Raitt from friends and colleagues in his hometown of Boston, where Raitt had a made a name for herself in the folk clubs.

“We had Tony Joe White on the bill as the opening act,” Smith recalled to Variety. “I went to the show and saw Bonnie and asked her, ‘Can we do some business?’” Raitt made it clear she was there on Capitol’s dime and had morning meetings at the Tower, but was willing to meet with him after 2 p.m. Before they parted, she mentioned her appreciation of Warner Bros., noting Ry Cooder and Randy Newman were her two favorite artists. “The phone calls went out to Cooder and Randy,” Smith says. “‘Get your ass in here at 2 o’clock. I want you in here when she arrives.’ That’s what happened, and we had a great run.”

Later, he called Raitt “the most satisfying success story because I signed her twice. I signed her at Warner back in the ‘70s and gave her a shot again at Capitol . . . and saw her win seven Grammys,” he pointed out to the Los Angeles Times in 1993.

Of his personal tastes, Smith told the paper, “It’s mostly jazz and R&B.; I’ve developed a classical interest since I’ve been here (at Capitol-EMI), because we got these 2,000 albums on Angel. But there’s no question with jazz. I’ll go to one of the record stores and buy 20 jazz albums at a time. I can never get enough Stan Getz, whom I became friendly with just before he died.”

For his book in the 1980s, Smith got an interview with almost every legend he wanted, from the early jazz era to the MTV superstars of the day — except, ironically, with a legend who was signed to Capitol, Frank Sinatra.

“I’m running Frank Sinatra’s record company and he won’t do an interview with me because he has been assassinated by Kitty Kelly in a book and he didn’t want to do any more interviews for a book,” Smith revealed to his hometown paper. “It’s strange because two years later Frank and I were together and he asked me if I wanted him to do that interview. I said to him, ‘I’d love to talk to you, Frank, but the book’s been out for two years.”

Smith regretted that the dozens of interviews he did with legends for “Off the Record” were condensed to bite-sized pieces for the book. He donated the tapes of all his interviews to the Library of Congress.

Smith retired from Capitol-EMI Music — where, besides reconnecting with Raitt, he also developed acts like MC Hammer — in March 1993, when he was 65.

“The nature of this business began to change a number of years ago, when it became very big money and major corporations moved in,” he told the Los Angeles Times upon his Capitol retirement. “And to the extent that it’s become a bigger business, it’s become necessary to put people in charge who are more business-oriented than those of us who were very music-oriented. We’re very much like other businesses now. … Fifteen years ago we might have blithely gone ahead and done what we thought was right musically. Today there are bound to be some business considerations applied, and to an extent that hurts music because you don’t know what you’re missing.”

After retiring from Capitol-EMI, Smith had a few further forays into the entertainment business, like serving as executive producer on a World Cup Soccer tournament that included an appearance by the Three Tenors at Dodger Stadium. He settled down with his wife, Donnie Smith, in Beverly Hills.

His film appearances included cameos in “Jamboree,” “FM” and “One Trick Pony.” He once estimated that his total time on the big screen amounted to 11 minutes. Most recently, in one of his nonfiction film appearances, he was featured in the 2017 documentary “Long Strange Trip,” about the history of the Grateful Dead.

One of the first celebrity testimonials that came in Monday night was from Magic Johnson, who tweeted, “Joe was one of the biggest Laker fans as a 40+ year ticket holder. HIs legacy in the music business was forever cemented in the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2015. RIP to my friend. I am forever grateful for you.”

Smith’s Lakers dedication was lampooned by none other than Don Rickles in 1988, when the music mogul was being honored at the annual City of Hope charity dinner. “The Lakers won the basketball championship, and it only cost Joe $7,450,000 to be on TV and go, ‘Yeah Lakers,’” Rickles said during his roast.

Talking with Variety upon his getting his Walk of Fame honor in 2015, Smith talked about drifting apart from the music business. “I loved what I was doing, then it was time to hang it up,” he said. “The record business fell apart when you could get music for nothing.”

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Composer Irving Burgie, who helped popularize Caribbean music and co-wrote the enduring Harry Belafonte hit “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” has died at the age of 95.

At the Barbados Independence Day Parade on Saturday, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced Burgie died Friday.

“Day-O,” written in 1952, has been ubiquitous, appearing in everything from the film and Broadway musical “Beetlejuice” to an E-Trade commercial. “Day-O” was also the wake-up call for the astronauts on two Space Shuttle missions in the 1990s. When a superstar list of music royalty gathered to film the “We Are the World” video in 1985, most burst into a playful version of “Day-O” in between takes. Lil’ Wayne used a sample of “Day-O” in his “6 Foot 7 Foot.”

According to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Burgie’s songs have sold over 100 million records throughout the world. Many were recorded by Belafonte, including eight of the 11 songs on Belafonte’s 1956 album, “Calypso,” the first album to sell over 1 million copies in the U.S. Burgess also penned songs for the Kingston Trio (“The Seine,” “El Matador,” and “The Wanderer”) and for other groups.

His “Jamaica Farewell” has been recorded by Belafonte, Jimmy Buffett, Carly Simon and others. Others who have sung his songs include Mantovani, Miriam Makeba and Julio Iglesias. Burgie’s classic Caribbean standards include such familiar hits as “Island in The Sun,” “Angelina,” and he was co-writer of “Mary’s Boy Child.” He also wrote the 1963 off-Broadway musical “Ballad for Bimshire” that starred Ossie Davis.

He served in an all-black U.S. Army battalion in World War II and used GI Bill funds to pay for music studies. Burgie studied at the Juilliard School of Music, University of Arizona and University of Southern California. He became a folk singer using the stage name “Lord Burgess” and performed the circuit between New York and Chicago, making his New York nightclub debut at the Village Vanguard in 1954.

After announcing his death, Mottley asked for a moment of silence for the Brooklyn-born Burgie, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem of Barbados — his mother’s homeland.

“We write our names on history’s page/With expectations great/Strict guardians of our heritage/Firm craftsmen of our fate,” go some of the lines of the anthem.

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Clifford T. Murphy, one of the most revered jazz musicians in a city known for producing many great ones, died Wednesday in ProMedica Toledo Hospital from multiple health issues. He was 87.

Mr. Murphy’s ailments included diabetes and kidney disease, the latter of which resulted in kidney dialysis treatments three times a week in recent years.

Both legs were cut off below the knee because of serious infections, starting with his left one in November, 2014.

Eleven months later, his right leg was amputated as well. But his health rapidly went downhill after a traffic accident Oct. 3, which left him with a broken femur. He returned to his residence at Merit House, 4645 Lewis Ave., following a month of hospitalization, but the ordeal and the ensuing complications exacerbated his decline, his daughter, Deborah Murphy, said.

“We’re happy about him no longer suffering and being in pain,” she said. “He finally let go.”

Mr. Murphy was a bassist who impressed people by how effortlessly his unusually large, bear-like hands glided across his instrument’s strings. But to hundreds of musicians — many of whom went on to play professionally across America — Mr. Murphy was the more calming, gentle, and reassuring half of a duo that for several decades took it upon themselves to teach young people how to play jazz through real-life nightclub experience.

Mr. Murphy and his longtime musical sidekick, jazz pianist Claude Black, performed together from the late 1940s until Mr. Black died of cancer in 2013. Much of it was at the now-defunct club called Murphy’s Place in downtown Toledo that Mr. Murphy and his partner, the late Joan Russell, operated for years. The Murphys — the house band anchored by Mr. Murphy and Mr. Black — played as many as six nights a week.

Michael Whitty, who played trombone and piano on and off with those two since 2000, said he put plans to move to Florida on hold until Mr. Murphy stopped performing in 2016. Mr. Whitty, who now lives in the Tampa area, said he felt so indebted to Mr. Murphy that he told him he would carry his bass and “carry him, if necessary” to gigs after Murphy’s Place closed just so his aging mentor could continue to perform at other venues, such as the Toledo Club.

“I’m just happy that he doesn’t have to suffer anymore,” Mr. Whitty said. “He was a beautiful human being. He was encouraging to anyone who wanted to learn the art form.”

He said he was impressed how Mr. Murphy “was all smiles” and “acted like nothing was wrong” even when people knew he was in pain recently, adding that he “didn’t dwell on the negatives.”

Sean Dobbins, a Detroit-area drummer and Wayne State University faculty member, said he turned down his chance for a University of Michigan music scholarship to instead perform with Mr. Murphy and Mr. Black at Murphy’s Place after high school, adding that he knew in his heart it was an important hands-on opportunity he couldn’t pass up. He played in a trio with them for eight years, from 1993 to 2001, and continued to come back to sit in with those two in subsequent years.

“That was my university. That’s where I learned to play,” Mr. Dobbins said.

Jazz has had its share of drug abuse over the years. Mr. Dobbins said Mr. Murphy encouraged him and other aspiring musicians to stay away from drugs and “build the person before you build the musician.”

“Young people wanted to be around him because he genuinely cared about them,” Mr. Dobbins said. “He was always accessible. He was always answering questions. Clifford made people feel confident.”

Toledo-area jazz vocalists Lori Lefevre Johnson and Morgan Platt Stiegler also recall him fondly.

“Clifford was a kind and gentle big bear of a man who left a huge legacy of jazz in our community. He was a mentor for so many young jazz players, offering support and encouragement, a big smile and a warm hug,” Ms. Lefevre Johnson said. “I was blessed to sing with Clifford [Murphy] and Claude Black at Murphy’s Place where I learned so much about jazz, about performing, and about love and support for your fellow musicians. Clifford was a musical giant full of love for the music and for all who were lucky enough to share the stage with him. He could play any jazz standard in any key and play it right.”

Ms. Platt Stiegler described him as “a gentle soul, an otherworldly musician who was cut of a different cloth than others.”

“A light came from him that one cannot describe but would know it to see it,” she said. “Some would call it a positive energy, others a creative energy. Clifford was steady and calm and peaceful. He embodied jazz, art and God’s love.”

One of Toledo’s best-known blues guitarists, Patrick Lewandowski said Mr. Murphy used to sneak sandwiches to homeless people through the Murphy’s Place kitchen doorway.

“Joan would get mad about it, but he did it anyway,” said Mr. Lewandowski, a founding member and longtime music director of Tent City, the biggest annual event of the homeless awareness group, 1Matters.

Dave Gierke, Toledo School for the Arts development director, said Mr. Murphy and Ms. Russell “were one of the first to embrace” the fledgling charter school’s commitment to the downtown area when it began holding classes in 1999.

He described Mr. Murphy and Mr. Black as “mentors and surrogate instructors to our students and the impression still exists within our alumni.”

Ken Zuercher, a retired TSA music instructor, said Mr. Murphy was especially supportive of young musicians.

Antar Martin, a jazz bassist in San Diego, is one former TSA student who said Mr. Murphy and Mr. Black “were the building blocks to what led some of us to become professional musicians.”

“They really did open all of our eyes up to the world of jazz. Even more than 2,000 miles away, that influence of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Black is still felt,” Mr. Martin, 34, who played for years in the Navy’s jazz band and is now a freelance musician, said.

Mr. Murphy was born Feb. 5, 1932 in Toledo.

He attended Robinson Junior HIgh School, where he played football and basketball, then went on to Scott High School but did not graduate.

His parents allowed him to enter the military in 1949 at age 17, before the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. He was stationed in Japan before being sent over to fight in Korea.

An Army infantryman, Mr. Murphy earned two Purple Hearts and three Bronze Stars.

In a 2017 interview, he told The Blade that his father, the Rev. Robert Murphy, had a great influence on him as a child.

Being in the church choir whetted his appetite for music, he said.

An aunt wanted him to play saxophone.

“But all I heard were bass tones,” Mr. Murphy said back then.

He bought his first bass after returning home from Korea, riding a bus downtown with his mother. It was so big he couldn’t get it through the bus doorway. So he carried it two miles home.

For years, local jazz historian-photographer Doug Swiatecki visited Mr. Murphy on a weekly basis  while working on a book he is doing about Toledo’s jazz history. He said he is devoting an entire chapter to Mr. Murphy and finds himself trimming because there is such a deep connection.

One thing many people probably don’t know: As a young boy, probably 8 or 10 years old, Mr. Murphy sat inside the home of Toledo’s Art Tatum — widely viewed as one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time — to hear him practice later in his career when he came back to town from New York.

Mr. Swiatecki said he’s aware of only one other musician alive today, Toledo-born jazz pianist Stanley Cowell, who has a connection to Mr. Tatum.

He said Mr. Murphy was inspired to become a bassist by the great Ray Brown, a bassist who was once jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald’s husband and a member of her band.

“Clifford is emblematic of the history of jazz,” Mr. Swiatecki said, referring to an era in which masters “learned from their elders.”

“You could use the word ‘icon.’ He was literally and figuratively a giant of jazz. But these words fall short,” he said. “The guy was just loved by everyone.”

Perrysburg native Ray Parker, a bassist who performs in some of New York’s finest jazz clubs, said he has always been in awe of Mr. Murphy’s large hands and his “warm and generous” spirit.

“He was one of the cornerstones for years,” agreed his father, Gene Parker, a multi-instrumentalist who was a 1980 National Endowment for the Arts recipient and University of Toledo’s jazz studies director from 1993 to 1995.

Mr. Parker, 76, of Perrysburg, has also taught jazz at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio, and at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is show in a 2014 YouTube video interviewing Mr. Murphy and performing with him.

Plans are being made for a funeral service at 11 a.m. on Dec. 7, preceded by several hours of visitation the night before. Locations have not been confirmed yet. Arrangements are being handled by the House of Day Funeral Service, 2550 Nebraska Ave., Toledo.

The Toledo jazz community has honored Mr. Murphy with annual birthday celebrations each February for several years now.

Ms. Platt Stiegler summed up her thoughts with these words:   

“Fly high and rest easy, Clifford,” she said. “We love you. Jazz loves you. Music loves you.”

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Joe Pesci–whether he likes it or not–will always be known for his darkly funny (like a clown?) onscreen persona. His signature black humor, which is always cut with insecurity and rage, earned him an Oscar in 1991, and has made him a cornerstone of American cinema. This year, the actor was convinced to return from his decades-long retirement to star alongside Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. But The Irishman isn’t Pesci’s only big artistic endeavor of 2019. The actor is also putting out a jazz album this month called Pesci…Still Singing. That’s right, Pesci is a jazz singer. He sings!

The movie mob boss, who was a child performer, has been crooning for just about as long as he’s been acting. And, like his character in The Irishman, Pesci’s music isn’t over-the-top aggressive or comically acerbic. His old-fashioned jazz albums, for the most part, are tender, playful, and sincere. They hail from an eclectic jazz history that includes the predictable influences like Frankie Valli, but also more esoteric artists such as the seldom-remembered blues vocalist, Jimmy Scott. We’ve come to know Pesci on screen as an Italian-American angry man. But what’s made Pesci such an enduring presence in Hollywood for so many years is not just his ability to accurately portray violent psychopaths onscreen. It’s his range. Irishman, for the first time since perhaps Raging Bull, gives Pesci a chance to showcase his subtlety. That’s exactly what we can see in his music career, which connects to hallmarks of jazz music and big band classics. Pesci may not ever get recognition for it–but he’s got some serious range.

Pesci’s presence in the music scene goes all the way back to the early ’60s. A Jersey-born kid of a working class Italian-American family, he’s partly responsible for the success of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons–Pesci actually introduced a few of the guys to singer and songwriter Bob Gaudio, who would go on to write many of the group’s biggest hits. There’s even a scene in the Jersey Boys musical about it.

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Throughout the ’60s, Pesci made a name for himself in the Jersey music scene, playing guitar in groups like Joey Dee and the Starliters, an early rock and roll outfit that also hosted a young Jimi Hendrix as guitar player for a brief moment. Pesci put out his own solo album in 1968. This was before Raging Bull, before Goodfellas, before the actor was even on Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese’s radar. It’s called Little Joe Sure Can Sing. It’s a collection of covers of pop songs from the era, like the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” “Fixing a Hole,” and the Bee Gees’ song, “To Love Somebody.” His voice, as expected, is high pitched and commanding–pretty much exactly what you’re probably imagining as you read this. It doesn’t sound like anything special, but Little Joe does put the famously crass movie star in a different perspective.

Pesci earned himself an Oscar nomination in 1980 for his performance in Raging Bull, going on to win the Supporting Actor award for Goodfellas in ’91, then appearing in hugely successful pictures like Casino, the Lethal Weapon series, and Home Alone. The actor’s last significant role came in 2006 as a glorified cameo in The Good Shepherd, one of Robert De Niro’s directorial efforts. Pesci later performed in the poorly-received Love Ranch alongside Helen Mirren in 2010. He almost showed up in the John Travolta Gotti biopic from 2018–even claiming to have gained 30 pounds to play mob enforcer Angelo Ruggiero–but the role was cut and Pesci sued the production for $3 million. We haven’t really heard from the guy at all in the past few decades, unless you count his Snickers commercials from 2011. That’s because the actor actually retired from the industry in 1999 to focus on his music career.

“Little Joe” would continue to put out albums over the next few decades under different names. In 1998, he released an album following the success of My Cousin Vinny, called Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You. That’s his character’s name from the movie. Unlike his other albums, this one’s a raucous, satirical project that sounds like a coked-up version of Dean Martin. My favorite is the obscene breakup song “Take Your Love and Shove it,” which is every bit as mean and offensive as Cousin Vinny from the film. The opening lyrics of the song are, “Why don’t you take your love and shove it up your big fat ass / you know you’re the reason we’re through!” 

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Then came the “Joe Doggs” era, yet another rebranding of the actor’s enduring pop culture reputation. Pesci, who is famously contentious toward the press (he refused to speak at all during a recent Irishman event) apparently intended to keep the identity of “Doggs” a secret during the release of Falling in Love Again, his album with notable jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco in 2003. It’s a legitimate jazz album, full of big-time musicians from the scene. Unlike his covers or the parody music in his My Cousin Vinny album, Falling in Love Againis a display of Pesci’s serious commitment to the medium. This isn’t the sort of gushy, elevator muzak you hear in Starbucks from smooth jazz guys like Dave Coz or Kenny G. Pesci’s understated tone on the album sounds less like a schmoozy lounge singer and more like an instrument on the band stand. If you can get past the Goodfellas visuals that may be playing in your head while you listen, it’s actually pretty impressive to hear. And the album coming out following the release of Irishman seems to be more of this kind of music, at least based on the song that’s been released so far, which features Adam Levine and legendary trumpet player Arturo Sandoval.

Whether you’re into Pesci’s music taste or not, it’s clear the actor has a real respect for the craft. Pesci has spoken at length about the influence of the late vocalist, “Little” Jimmy Scott. Probably most recognized for his appearance in Twin Peaks, Scott made a huge impact on Pesci’s career from a very early stage. He’s the reason Pesci put the “Little” in front of his own name for his first album. 

Scott had a rare genetic disorder called “Kallman syndrome” that altered his adolescent growth and gave him an unusually high singing voice. Scott was a prominent figure in jazz music in the early ’50s, appearing on Lionel Hampton records and even providing vocals for Charlie Parker. In Scott’s biography, which was written about in a United Press article from 2003, Pesci said about the late singer, “He’d listen to me and encourage me. Some days he’d disappear for days at a time, but when I caught up with him … he’d smile and welcome me into his world. … We’d sing together nonstop for hours, sometimes all night. … He became my guru. I became his shadow.” Pesci’s reverence for the little-known singer in endearing, and in the clip below, it’s plain to see the influence Scott made on the actor’s musical disposition, with both of them putting an emphasis on phrasing and tone in their singing.

Pesci…Still Singing drops on November 29, shortly after the premiere of The Irishman on Netflix. With all the reports of how resistant Pesci was to appearing in Irishman, it’s not clear if this is the new golden era for the longtime performer. To me, 2019 seems like a swan song for a 76-year-old artist who may be a bit more interested in returning to music than anything else right now.

Dom Nero Dom Nero is a staff video editor at Esquire, where he also writes about film, comedy, and video games.

Watch Next

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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Joe Pesci–whether he likes it or not–will always be known for his darkly funny (like a clown?) onscreen persona. His signature black humor, which is always cut with insecurity and rage, earned him an Oscar in 1991, and has made him a cornerstone of American cinema. This year, the actor was convinced to return from his decades-long retirement to star alongside Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. But The Irishman isn’t Pesci’s only big artistic endeavor of 2019. The actor is also putting out a jazz album this month called Pesci…Still Singing. That’s right, Pesci is a jazz singer. He sings!

The movie mob boss, who was a child performer, has been crooning for just about as long as he’s been acting. And, like his character in The Irishman, Pesci’s music isn’t over-the-top aggressive or comically acerbic. His old-fashioned jazz albums, for the most part, are tender, playful, and sincere. They hail from an eclectic jazz history that includes the predictable influences like Frankie Valli, but also more esoteric artists such as the seldom-remembered blues vocalist, Jimmy Scott. We’ve come to know Pesci on screen as an Italian-American angry man. But what’s made Pesci such an enduring presence in Hollywood for so many years is not just his ability to accurately portray violent psychopaths onscreen. It’s his range. Irishman, for the first time since perhaps Raging Bull, gives Pesci a chance to showcase his subtlety. That’s exactly what we can see in his music career, which connects to hallmarks of jazz music and big band classics. Pesci may not ever get recognition for it–but he’s got some serious range.

Pesci’s presence in the music scene goes all the way back to the early ’60s. A Jersey-born kid of a working class Italian-American family, he’s partly responsible for the success of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons–Pesci actually introduced a few of the guys to singer and songwriter Bob Gaudio, who would go on to write many of the group’s biggest hits. There’s even a scene in the Jersey Boys musical about it.

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

Throughout the ’60s, Pesci made a name for himself in the Jersey music scene, playing guitar in groups like Joey Dee and the Starliters, an early rock and roll outfit that also hosted a young Jimi Hendrix as guitar player for a brief moment. Pesci put out his own solo album in 1968. This was before Raging Bull, before Goodfellas, before the actor was even on Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese’s radar. It’s called Little Joe Sure Can Sing. It’s a collection of covers of pop songs from the era, like the Beatles’ “Fool on the Hill,” “Fixing a Hole,” and the Bee Gees’ song, “To Love Somebody.” His voice, as expected, is high pitched and commanding–pretty much exactly what you’re probably imagining as you read this. It doesn’t sound like anything special, but Little Joe does put the famously crass movie star in a different perspective.

Pesci earned himself an Oscar nomination in 1980 for his performance in Raging Bull, going on to win the Supporting Actor award for Goodfellas in ’91, then appearing in hugely successful pictures like Casino, the Lethal Weapon series, and Home Alone. The actor’s last significant role came in 2006 as a glorified cameo in The Good Shepherd, one of Robert De Niro’s directorial efforts. Pesci later performed in the poorly-received Love Ranch alongside Helen Mirren in 2010. He almost showed up in the John Travolta Gotti biopic from 2018–even claiming to have gained 30 pounds to play mob enforcer Angelo Ruggiero–but the role was cut and Pesci sued the production for $3 million. We haven’t really heard from the guy at all in the past few decades, unless you count his Snickers commercials from 2011. That’s because the actor actually retired from the industry in 1999 to focus on his music career.

“Little Joe” would continue to put out albums over the next few decades under different names. In 1998, he released an album following the success of My Cousin Vinny, called Vincent LaGuardia Gambini Sings Just for You. That’s his character’s name from the movie. Unlike his other albums, this one’s a raucous, satirical project that sounds like a coked-up version of Dean Martin. My favorite is the obscene breakup song “Take Your Love and Shove it,” which is every bit as mean and offensive as Cousin Vinny from the film. The opening lyrics of the song are, “Why don’t you take your love and shove it up your big fat ass / you know you’re the reason we’re through!” 

Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

Then came the “Joe Doggs” era, yet another rebranding of the actor’s enduring pop culture reputation. Pesci, who is famously contentious toward the press (he refused to speak at all during a recent Irishman event) apparently intended to keep the identity of “Doggs” a secret during the release of Falling in Love Again, his album with notable jazz organist Joey DeFrancesco in 2003. It’s a legitimate jazz album, full of big-time musicians from the scene. Unlike his covers or the parody music in his My Cousin Vinny album, Falling in Love Againis a display of Pesci’s serious commitment to the medium. This isn’t the sort of gushy, elevator muzak you hear in Starbucks from smooth jazz guys like Dave Coz or Kenny G. Pesci’s understated tone on the album sounds less like a schmoozy lounge singer and more like an instrument on the band stand. If you can get past the Goodfellas visuals that may be playing in your head while you listen, it’s actually pretty impressive to hear. And the album coming out following the release of Irishman seems to be more of this kind of music, at least based on the song that’s been released so far, which features Adam Levine and legendary trumpet player Arturo Sandoval.

Whether you’re into Pesci’s music taste or not, it’s clear the actor has a real respect for the craft. Pesci has spoken at length about the influence of the late vocalist, “Little” Jimmy Scott. Probably most recognized for his appearance in Twin Peaks, Scott made a huge impact on Pesci’s career from a very early stage. He’s the reason Pesci put the “Little” in front of his own name for his first album. 

Scott had a rare genetic disorder called “Kallman syndrome” that altered his adolescent growth and gave him an unusually high singing voice. Scott was a prominent figure in jazz music in the early ’50s, appearing on Lionel Hampton records and even providing vocals for Charlie Parker. In Scott’s biography, which was written about in a United Press article from 2003, Pesci said about the late singer, “He’d listen to me and encourage me. Some days he’d disappear for days at a time, but when I caught up with him … he’d smile and welcome me into his world. … We’d sing together nonstop for hours, sometimes all night. … He became my guru. I became his shadow.” Pesci’s reverence for the little-known singer in endearing, and in the clip below, it’s plain to see the influence Scott made on the actor’s musical disposition, with both of them putting an emphasis on phrasing and tone in their singing.

Pesci…Still Singing drops on November 29, shortly after the premiere of The Irishman on Netflix. With all the reports of how resistant Pesci was to appearing in Irishman, it’s not clear if this is the new golden era for the longtime performer. To me, 2019 seems like a swan song for a 76-year-old artist who may be a bit more interested in returning to music than anything else right now.

Dom Nero Dom Nero is a staff video editor at Esquire, where he also writes about film, comedy, and video games.

Watch Next

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
 

Sam Whiting November 26, 2019 Updated: November 29, 2019, 8:25 am

Jazz guitarist Eddie Duran, seen in 1966, has died. Photo: Chronicle file photo

In the 1950s, the jazz giant Charlie “Bird” Parker came to San Francisco for a series of concerts. The bebop sax genius had his pick of local sidemen and picked Eddie Duran, a Mexican American who had taught himself to play Latin jazz on guitar in order to join a family combo.

That stint with Bird solidified Duran as a go-to guitarist and he ended up performing and recording with saxmen Stan Getz and Paul Desmond, and pianists George Shearing and Vince Guaraldi. Benny Goodman took him on an international tour that included three shows in Carnegie Hall, with Duran also playing a solo.

Duran, who also recorded five solo albums in a career that lasted 70 years, died Friday, Nov. 22, at his home in Sonoma in the company of his three favorite guitars, said his wife Madaline Duran. He was 94.

Jazz guitarist Eddie Duran, seen in 1983, was a sought-after musician and he played with anybody and everybody. Photo: Mike Maloney, The Chronicle

At 5 feet 6 inches, Duran could look tiny behind a guitar. But he had stage presence as the longtime bandleader at the famed hungry i nightclub and a TV regular on the morning “Al Collins Show.”  Duran had perfect technique and impeccable time as a rhythm player, and was sensitive to melody while also improvising.

“I was always amazed at how beautifully he could accompany people, whether it be vocalists or horn players,” said Dick Conte, pianist and longtime DJ at KCSM Jazz 91, the last jazz station in the Bay Area. “He had a great ability to listen and know where someone was going musically, and he’d go right along with them.”

Edward Lozano Duran was born Sept. 6, 1925, into a musical family among six siblings. His parents, Fernando and Emma, were immigrants from Veracruz, Mexico, who did not speak English. Fernando Duran found work as a cigar maker in North Beach, but the family was so poor that Duran, the youngest, was once hospitalized with malnutrition.

Tired of their diet of coffee and bread, the children all learned instruments to perform behind the only daughter, Celia, who sang and danced. Duran was assigned the guitar and learned to play by listening to Django Reinhardt records on the family Victrola. The Durans played sets after movies in the big downtown theaters. They also entered and won a major radio “Amateur Hour” competition, in 1938, when Duran was 13 years old.

Two years later, Duran dropped out of Mission High School to play music full time. He played the Copacabana, Chez Paree, Streets of Paris and Tin Pan Alley among clubs in North Beach and the Tenderloin. It was going well until he was drafted, and joined the U.S. Navy.

After his hitch was up, he returned to San Francisco and attended barber college. He met and married another native San Franciscan, Arlene Wolf, who played piano and sang under the stage name Arlene Hart. His brother-in-law, Andy Lackbay, was a celebrity barber with a salon named Original Andy’s, and Duran went to work there.

But the Duran brothers — Carlos, Manny and Eddie — were still performing. Pianist Vince Guaraldi (of “Charlie Brown Christmas” fame) recruited him for the Vince Guaraldi Trio with Dean Reilly on bass. In 1955, the Vince Guaraldi Trio became the house band at the hungry i. Duran also played with his brothers to open the show, and played intros for comedians like Mort Sahl and Jonathan Winters.

Ever in demand, Duran also played in the Cal Tjader’s Mambo Quintet, and in the New York band of Shearing.

“Eddie’s guitar playing was very soulful,” said Reilly, who played in Duran’s own trio on the album “Ginza,” and on “Let there be Love” with Getz and vocalist Dee Bell.

Duran played with Pearl Bailey and with Vernon Alley; he played with anybody and at any hour, often at the famous jazz clubs the Blackhawk, Facks II and Jimbo’s Bop City, where the booze was poured into coffee cups and the jam session would go until daylight.

Eddie Duran (right) met Madaline Askew who became his second wife two years after they met in 1981. His first wife died in 1976. Photo: Chronicle file photo

Duran’s first wife, Arlene Wolf, died of cancer in 1976. Five years later, Duran was headlining the 1981 Cotati Jazz Festival when he met Madaline Askew, an aspiring sax player. They were married after two years and lived for many more years in Duran’s apartment off Russell Street on Russian Hill. They performed together as Mad & Eddie Duran.

Duran also performed as a duo with his oldest daughter, pianist Sharman Duran, often at the now-defunct Moose’s restaurant on Washington Square. He even performed in a trio with both his daughters, including Pilar Duran, a jazz guitarist who lives in Mendocino County.

“He was one of the last representatives of West Coast jazz,” said Sharman. “He lived and breathed playing guitar, and he was a great personality.”

His daughters survive him as does a son, Joel Duran of San Mateo. A musical tribute to Duran is being planned at a venue to be named. When details are completed, the event will be promoted on KCSM, 91.1 FM and kcsm.org.

Correction: An earlier version of this obituary misidentified Jimbo’s Bop City.

• Sam Whiting Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com. Instagram: sfchronicle_art

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November 22, 2019 Leave a Comment

By Benjamin Sears

Biographer James Kaplan was aided by the assistance of Irving Berlin’s two elder daughters, and that makes this biography particularly valuable.

Irving Berlin: New York Genius by James Kaplan. Jewish Lives, Yale University Press, 424 pages, $26.

Irving Berlin has long been a subject of interest for writers, their approaches ranging from the scholarly (Charles Hamm) to the fawning (Alexander Woolcott). In recent years, a spate of new studies and biographies have appeared, including histories of specific songs. James Kaplan’s Irving Berlin: New York Genius is a significant addition.

Kaplan approaches his biography by focusing on Irving Berlin as a Jewish New Yorker. As with all those writing on the composer’s life, he had to deal with vague, sometimes conflicting, stories about Berlin’s years before 1909 and his initial success as a songwriter, along with ambiguity about later happenings in his long life.  Kaplan was aided by the assistance of Berlin’s two elder daughters, and that makes this biography particularly valuable. It is the first that draws on direct family input. Berlin was always his own public relations man; early on he created a version of his life for public consumption; those “facts” were used and reused over his lifetime, often making it difficult for a biographer to find new information, given the seemingly endless series of articles that essentially only retold the same story.

Kaplan negotiates the inevitable uncertainty well, often noting when it is hard to determine which alternative is true. Many Berlin stories, such as the meeting with George Gershwin or the evolution of the song Easter Parade, have differing versions. The biographer is forced to make choices. Berlin himself would often give different accounts of the same event, Easter Parade being one example. (For full disclosure, I edited the Irving Berlin Reader, in which I dealt with Easter Parade.)

As a Jew in America in the 20th century, Berlin inevitably suffered the effects of antisemitism. His courtship of Irish Catholic Ellin Mackay was met with disapproval and even obstruction on the part of her father, Clarence Mackay. In another example of conflicting stories, Berlin is said to have given Mackay one million dollars after Mackay lost everything in the stock market crash.  Berlin daughter Mary Ellin Barrett, in interviews with Kaplan, firmly asserts that this was not true. Eventually, Berlin and Mackay were able to maintain a polite relationship.

The most virulent antisemitism aimed at Berlin was in response to God Bless America. Rev. Dr. Edgar Franklin Romig, minister of the West End Collegiate Reformed Church in Manhattan, felt compelled to sermonize on what he perceived to be the song’s shortcomings. Kaplan points out what the sermon was saying, via the coded language of the time: “The nerve of this Jewish songwriter!”  He does not mention the virulent and uncoded attack on Berlin by Cleve Sallandar in an American Nazi publication, though he does cite the power of the antisemitic German-American Bund to draw a sizable crowd to Madison Square Garden in the years leading up to World War II. Berlin was by no means immune to this atmosphere of hate.

In contrast, Kaplan presents a different perspective on the Jewish immigrant experience in America. He highlights Berlin’s purchase of a country home in the Catskills. “This was the immigrant Jew’s Chekovian dream: his very own place in the country.” For a man who moved from a childhood of  intense poverty in Russia to intense poverty in the U.S., yet managed to achieve financial stability, this homestead stood as a significant accomplishment.

While Kaplan does not place it in the context of the Jewish experience in America, he points out that Berlin’s army unit, which performed his World War II revue This Is the Armythroughout the U.S. and in the American theaters of war in Europe and Asia, was the first integrated unit in U.S. history.  Berlin never forgot his own experience as a member of a minority.

A famous Berlin story concerns his lunch with Winston Churchill in London during the war. Supposedly, Churchill thought he was dining with philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Berlin’s own account of the meeting makes it unclear whether Churchill really did not know which Berlin was his guest. Kaplan lets readers draw their own conclusion — without lessening the story’s amusing aspect.

Berlin’s last hit song was written in 1967, but the times had already passed him by. A 60-year run for any popular songwriter is an amazing achievement but, as Kaplan and others have pointed out, Berlin felt he had been forced into retirement, and he had a hard time adjusting. Kaplan is very sympathetic to Berlin’s last years, when those adjustments to retirement and old age could make dealing with him difficult. In her memoir, Mary Ellin Barrett is quite frank about how hard it could be to deal with her father in those last years; some, though, have simply presented Berlin as an angry, bitter old man. Kaplan describes these years in a way that helps the reader empathize with what life must have been like for Berlin — and that is an important service to the composer’s legacy.

Overall, while this biography presents Berlin as a Jewish immigrant living the Jewish experience in America, the volume also serves as a good introduction to the composer for the general reader. Given the complexities of the man’s personality, it is doubtful if any study could ever be considered “definitive.” However, every impartial recounting of his life and accomplishments only adds to our understanding of this significant figure in American popular music.

One final and lovely Berlin story from the book. “Once, when the three girls were young Ellin had chided Linda for putting her elbows on the dinner table. ‘Daddy puts his elbows on the table,’ Linda said. ‘Your father is a genius,’ Ellin replied, ending the conversation.” Yes, he was.

Singer Benjamin Sears, with pianist Bradford Conner, has been performing and recording Irving Berlin for thirty years. Their final Berlin CD in a series of seven is in process. Sears is editor of The Irving Berlin Reader (Oxford University Press). CDs of Berlin, and others, are available at www.benandbrad.com

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The incomparable life and extraordinary, trailblazing career of jazz titan and influential composer Charlie Parker will be honored throughout 2020 with a worldwide celebration commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth (August 29, 1920). Lovingly dubbed Bird 100 after the nickname of the preeminent alto saxophonist who was one of the fathers of bebop and progenitors of modern jazz, the centennial will include a host of major initiatives including exciting new music releases, a tribute tour, festivals and events, prestigious exhibitions, special partnerships, a unique graphic novel, exclusive collectible art, and myriad of independent appreciations and concerts.

“The centennial of Charlie Parker is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to celebrate his life, legacy and art form with the world. We are thrilled to honor Bird’s transformative musical impact on past, present and future generations,” said the Estate of Charlie Parker. 

Parker’s longtime label Verve Records in conjunction with UMe, the global catalog company of Universal Music Group, will kick off the yearlong celebration this week with a limited edition vinyl pressing of the rare 12″ LP, The Magnificent Charlie Parker, an exclusive release for Record Store Day’s Black Friday, taking place Friday, November 29 at independent record stores around the country. The limited album, out of print on vinyl since its original 1955 release, is pressed on vibrant yellow vinyl and includes a quintessential David Stone Martin cover as well as painstakingly recreated art including Clef Records labels. The 11-song LP features Parker going toe-to-toe with frequent collaborators Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Max Roach and John Lewis with arrangements by Gil Evans.

The artwork for The Magnificent Charlie Parker is also available for purchase, along with four additional classic album covers, including four by David StoneMartin, as archival quality, framed canvas prints exclusively via uDiscover. The high-end wall art is available in a variety of sizes and includes the albums: Big Band, Machito Jazz With Flip & Bird, The Magnificent Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker With Strings and Charlie Parker With Strings (Vol. 2). For more information and to order, visit uDiscover: https://shop.udiscovermusic.com/collections/charlie-parker

Verve/UMe plan to celebrate Parker with several releases throughout 2020 and are currently in the works on a vinyl boxed set of Parker’s complete Clef 10″ albums featuring David Stone Martin’s iconic illustrated covers. Charlie Parker: The Clef 10″ Albums Collection will arrive on August 28, 2020 timed with Parker’s 100th birthday and include five extraordinary albums he recorded for Norman Granz‘s Clef Records: Bird and Diz, Charlie Parker, Charlie Parker Plays South Of The Border, Charlie Parker With Strings and Charlie Parker With Strings (Vol. 2). The LPs will feature newly remastered audio from the original analog tapes and will include faithful reproductions of the classic artwork and packaging. The albums will pressed on 180-gram black 10″ vinyl and will be housed in an attractive slipcase. Representing Bird’s fruitful late ’40s to mid-50s Clef period, the albums have never been released together and all but Bird and Diz have been out of print on vinyl since their original releases. These albums are being presented in the form they were originally released in for the first time in more than six decades. 

Craft Recordings will release The Savoy 10-inch Collection in February 2020. The deluxe boxed set features four 10″ LPs cut from newly restored and remastered audio. The collection highlights Parker’s pioneering bebop recordings for Savoy Records from 1944-1948, featuring jazz legends Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, John Lewis, Bud Powell, Max Roach and more. The package includes faithfully restored original album artwork, plus a booklet containing vintage photos, rare ephemera and new liner notes by GRAMMY-winning author Neil Tesser. The complete set will also be released digitally.

Bird’s incredible legacy and immortal music will soar throughout the year with a variety of festivals, concerts, events and an exciting tribute tour. Sanctioned by the Estate of Charlie Parker, “Fly Higher: Charlie Parker @ 100″ features acclaimed co-musical directors Rudresh Mahanthappa (alto saxophone) and Terri Lyne Carrington (drums) as they celebrate the jazz master, one of the most innovative and influential artists in modern musical history and examine his impact in pop, hip-hop, rap, rock and jazz. Joined by a superb lineup including Charenée Wade (vocals), Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Kris Davis (piano), Larry Grenadier (bass) and Kassa Overall (DJ), Mahanthappa and Carrington will honor Parker’s centennial year by showcasing Parker’s uncompromising musical joy, humor and beauty by mining his deep repertoire and showcasing new, modern compositions. The tour is produced by Danny Melnick for Absolutely Live Entertainment and represented for bookings by International Music Network. For more information, visit charliebirdparker.com/events/tour-events

Parker’s hometown Kansas City, Kansas and his adopted hometown New York City will honor the legend with their annual festivals and both have big plans for his 100th birthday. On the last weekend of August 2020, the annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival will kick off in New York City. For the past 28 years, the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival has presented some of the finest musicians in the world who reflect Charlie Parker‘s musical individuality and genius, to promote appreciation for this highly influential and world-renowned artist. Produced by City Parks Foundation, the festival is a vibrant and free celebration of jazz that brings together storied, veteran players and the next generation of jazz artists. The festival is held over the course of three days in neighborhoods where Charlie Parker lived and worked, in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park and the East Village’s Tompkins Square Park. More information will be available here soon: cityparksfoundation.org/charlieparker

Birdland, the NYC jazz club that adopted their ornithological name in 1949 to capitalize on the popularity of their regular headliner Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, will curate a month-long Charlie Parker Jazz festival at the famed venue in August 2020. Each week will feature a different headliner honoring Bird with the festivities launching with “Bird With Strings” in which renowned clarinetist Ken Peplowski will be the music director and he and a conductor friend will invite different soloists, on many different instruments, to play the arrangements with a chamber orchestra. This will be followed with Birdland’s 10th annual “Bird-thday Celebration” featuring an all-star ensemble performing Parker’s compositions. The month will culminate with celebrated saxophonist Joe Lovano and the Joe Lovano Us Five who will do a reprise of Bird Songs, their Bird-themed album released on Blue Note Records in 2011. For tickets and more info, visit Birdlandjazz.com.

Additionally in NYC, Jazz Congress will host a panel discussion about Parker titled “Bird and Beyond: Celebrating Charlie Parker at 100″ at the conference taking place January 13-14th, 2020 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Later in the year, the New York Public Library for Performing Arts at Lincoln Center will

present a series of programs that will include conversations and screenings in the Library’s Bruno Walter Auditorium, plus listening salons of rarely heard recordings in the Library cafe.

Celebrating its sixth year, the annual Charlie Parker Celebration in Kansas City, Kansas will celebrate Parker’s centennial with Spotlight: Charlie Parker, a 10-day citywide celebration of his life and music on August 20-29, 2020. KC Jazz Alive, University of Missouri Kansas City, the American Jazz Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Mutual Musicians Foundation, Bruce Watkins Cultural Center and numerous other cultural and civic organizations will host jam sessions, tours, lectures, exhibits, panel discussions, poetry slams, workshops and concerts celebrating Charlie Parker-Kansas City’s native son. More information available at Spotlightcharlieparker.org

Other collaborations and partnerships include an event at The GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles to be announced at a later date, an official custom Charlie Parker Legends Series alto saxophone mouthpiece with RS Berkeley, modeled after the original one Parker used, and a graphic novel that the Charlie Parker Estate is currently developing with the esteemed Z2 Comics. The boutique company which has pioneered the “graphic album” format will bring some of Charlie Parker‘s wild stories to vivid life through the marriage of comics and music.

Bird 100 will be an incredible opportunity to bring Charlie Parker‘s music to new audiences, expand awareness of his role in not only advancing jazz but helping to invent the artform known as bebop, celebrate his importance as an early “superstar soloist” of modern music and bring the extraordinary, inspirational and heartbreaking story of the man known as “Bird” to new platforms.

If jazz history can be divided into two epochs – danceable swing and improvisational bebop – then Charlie Parker is the fault line. During his brief but remarkable career, the alto saxophonist nicknamed “Bird” gave jazz lightning tempos, mind-bending chord substitutions, and previously unexplored harmonic depth, paving the way for hard bop, free jazz, fusion and everything after. Miles Davis summed up his accomplishments: “You can tell the history of jazz in four words. Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.”

Parker was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1920, but “Bird” was arguably born during a jam session at the city’s Reno Club in 1937. Invited to play with Count Basie‘s drummer Jo Jones, 16-year-old Parker began a promising solo over George Gershwin‘s “I Got Rhythm” – and bricked on the chord changes. Jones threw a cymbal that clashed at Parker’s feet; the audience jeered. Instead of giving up the horn, he practiced harder than ever and moved to New York City in 1939 to prove his mettle.

One night that year, Parker woodshedded the Ray Noble song “Cherokee” with the guitarist William “Biddy” Fleet and had a eureka moment. “I’d been getting bored with the stereotyped changes that were being used all the time,” he later told Down Beat. “By using the higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.” Armed with this new knowledge, Parker composed pieces that went on to be standards, like “Yardbird Suite,” “Chasin’ the Bird” and “Ornithology.”

Parker, who died in 1955 at only 34, was a meteoric musician that burned bright and much too quick. But his legacy more than lives on; it’s jazz scripture. Jack Kerouac called him “as important as Beethoven.” Four of his recordings were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame including albums Charlie Parker With Strings and Jazz At Massey Hall and the songs “Ornithology” and “Billie’s Bounce.” In 1974, he was awarded a posthumous Grammy for Best Performance By A Soloist for “First Recordings.”

In 1988, the Clint Eastwood-directed biopic “Bird” brought his story to the silver screen. The U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in his honor in 1995.

Although his life and career were short, the New Yorker has praised Parker as “one of the wonders of twentieth-century music” and the New York Times deemed him “matchless” and a “bebop exemplar.” And Parker’s popularity continues to grow. Today, one of his saxophones is on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and culture in Washington, D.C. – an enduring reminder that America will always have a “Bird” in its hand.

charliebirdparker.com

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By Giovanni Russonello

Nov. 26, 2019

Wendell Harrison and Phil Ranelin have been collaborating since the 1970s, when they self-released albums, planned their concerts and published an international magazine.

The saxophonist Wendell Harrison, left, and the trombonist Phil Ranelin are the founders a 1970s Detroit jazz collective called Tribe. A new collection celebrates the spirit of their work.Emily Rose Bennett for The New York Times

DETROIT — Wendell Harrison sat at his dining room table on Chandler Street in the North End neighborhood on a recent Sunday afternoon, leafing through the pages of old Tribe magazines and dusting off copies of his earliest albums, which he self-released in the 1970s.

Each LP and magazine was emblazoned with a striking insignia: two mask-like profiles facing left and right, bisected by a spear. Letters spelling “Tribe” ran down the center of the logo in a twisting pattern, as if braiding the two faces together into a single shape.

A saxophonist by trade and an organizer by nature, Mr. Harrison, 77, recalled when this table was the home base for the Tribe collective. Led by four jazz musicians, Tribe’s members put out their own records; published a widely influential, Afrocentric magazine with a circulation reaching 25,000; organized concerts, often in tandem with dancers and theater performers; and taught music to local children.

In the process, it helped define a path forward for Detroit’s arts community as the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s gave way to an uncertain future in a city ravaged by postindustrial decline.

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“We had phones in here,” Mr. Harrison remembered, gesturing across the magazine-strewn table. “We had deals where if you bought an ad, we’d give you eight tickets to give away to the kids in the community.”

Tribe officially disbanded in 1977, after the trombonist Phil Ranelin, Mr. Harrison’s primary creative partner and the collective’s co-founder, decamped to Los Angeles. But Mr. Harrison remained in the Chandler Street house, never slowing down or letting go of his collectivist convictions.

The tracks “Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014” had either never been released or were available only on limited-run albums.Emily Rose Bennett for The New York Times

A boldface reminder of that arrived earlier this month, when the British label Strut Records released “Hometown: Detroit Sessions 1990-2014,” collecting recordings that Mr. Harrison; his wife, the pianist Pamela Wise; Mr. Ranelin; and other members of their creative community made in recent decades. The album is credited to Tribe, though that name had been retired by the time these tracks were captured.

“The phrase I use is ‘the Tribe diaspora,’” the journalist and critic Mark Stryker, who has covered Detroit’s jazz scene since the 1990s, said in an interview, adding that Tribe’s members have had an outsize impact on their hometown by continuing to collaborate, and by constantly welcoming younger musicians into the fold.

“They all assimilated this kind of idea that if you were a jazz musician in Detroit, you didn’t wait around for people to do things for you — you did it yourself,” he said.

This year Mr. Stryker published “Jazz From Detroit,” the first book-length survey of Detroit’s formidable — though often overlooked — jazz history. The chapter on Tribe is part of a larger section titled “Taking Control: Self-Determination in the 1960s and ’70s,” devoted to the constellation of artist-run organizations that sprang up in Detroit in those years.

“Phil and Wendell, like a lot of Detroiters of their generation, are cultural warriors — because they had to be,” Mr. Stryker said. “Through the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and 2000s, maybe no city fell further in America than Detroit.”

But Mr. Ranelin, 80, who hailed from Indiana, also remembered the Motor City as a beacon of promise. “There was a sense of black pride in Detroit that didn’t necessarily exist in Indianapolis,” he said, in a joint interview with Mr. Harrison and Ms. Wise over the phone from Los Angeles.

Asked about Tribe’s ethic of self-actualization, he was unambiguous: “As far as I’m concerned, it was about survival.”

Tribe was never a band so much as it was a group of well-organized friends and colleagues: Mr. Harrison, Mr. Ranelin, the pianist Harold McKinney and the trumpeter Marcus Belgrave. As a result, the albums released under the Tribe moniker in the 1970s — and those that its members have put out in ongoing collaborations since — represent a record of the natural, ever-evolving ecology of a local jazz scene: musicians interacting, trading leadership roles and innovating in small, interdependent ways.

“Hometown,” like many of those earlier recordings, works as a wide-lens picture of the Detroit jazz scene. The sound of these tracks reflects a group of musicians grounded in Detroit’s sturdy bebop tradition — with a big, elastic swing feel undergirding some of the tunes, and dashing solos from the group’s members throughout — but also adept at sculpting lush horn arrangements or incorporating propellant African drums and radical poetry (recited on two tracks by Mbiyu Chui, the pastor at the Shrine of the Black Madonna).

All of these tracks had either never been released or were available only on limited-run albums. “Hometown” is the latest in a string of foreign reissues of Tribe-affiliated material, including “Message From the Tribe: An Anthology of Tribe Records 1972-76” (2010) and the two-volume “Vibes From the Tribe”(1997).

Mr. Ranelin has been heartened to see Tribe’s music reaching a greater audience outside Detroit now than ever before. “Since we didn’t have a lot of distribution, it took 20, 25 years for it to finally roll around — and then boom, all of a sudden, these young people are really interested in Tribe,” he said. “But all this time, Tribe never left us.”

Mr. Ranelin arrived in Detroit in 1967, after taking a job at Motown Records. Mr. Harrison came three years later, returning to his hometown after nearly a decade in New York, where he had played with hard-bop and jazz-funk musicians like Grant Green and Hank Crawford, as well as the astro-jazz bandleader Sun Ra.

Mr. Harrison had picked up some business acumen from Ra — who released his own albums by the dozen — and from his own mother, who ran a small real-estate business in Detroit, and expected her newly returned son to help manage it.

In fact, Mr. Belgrave was renting a room from her in the early ’70s, which led him and Mr. Harrison to reconnect. Mr. McKinney had recently helped start the Metro Arts youth-education program along with the educator Amelita Mandingo; Mr. Harrison began teaching there.

Working often with Mr. Belgrave, Mr. McKinney and other like-minded musicians, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Ranelin set about recording and releasing their own albums, and established a regular performance schedule at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The program booklet that Mr. Harrison assembled for one of those shows inspired the journalist Herb Boyd to suggest that Tribe release its own publication.

Before long, the magazine — edited by Mr. Boyd — was a fully fledged general-interest publication aimed at a young, radical-minded black audience. Its cover stories ran the gamut, from the keyboardist Herbie Hancock to the politician Coleman Young, then seeking election as the city’s first black mayor, to the school-busing crisis.

“We were attracting attention, and we promoted ourselves through the magazine,” Mr. Harrison said. “It was a pipeline to our fans.”

The magazine became Tribe’s moneymaker, distributed internationally through a network of artists’ collectives and small black businesses. But it eventually outgrew itself and folded in 1977, the same year Mr. Ranelin left for Los Angeles. Soon after, Mr. Harrison started Rebirth Inc., a nonprofit devoted to jazz education that he and Ms. Wise still run today.

The couple has continued to work with members of that Tribe diaspora, performing often and recording in their basement studio. And they remain dedicated to passing on the spirit that led to Tribe’s founding almost 50 years ago.

Mr. Harrison — who last year won the Kresge Foundation’s prestigious Eminent Artist lifetime-achievement award — still teaches twice a week at the Detroit School of Arts, and still collaborates with Mr. Ranelin. Earlier this month they embarked on a short, state-wide tour, performing and speaking to students at Michigan State University and a half-dozen high schools. He and Ms. Wise often receive grants to bring jazz bands into elementary and middle schools. Every Tuesday night for the past few years they have been hosting jam sessions in their basement, which their most dedicated students attend.

“Beside the music, he gave me the mind-set and made me believe I could do anything,” the saxophonist Benny Rubin, 19, said. “Sometimes I would learn more about the music from just hearing him talk.”

Mr. Rubin began studying with Mr. Harrison as a high schooler, and became a regular attendee at the Tuesday-night jams. Now he’s a jazz student at the New School in New York.

“Whenever I come back to Detroit, I’m excited for him to hear me play,” he said. “He doesn’t really criticize me that much anymore, he just encourages me, because he understands where I’m coming from.”

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https://variety.com/2019/music/news/the-true-story-of-erroll-garner-the-first-artist-to-sue-a-major-label-and-win-1203413083/
 

The True Story of Erroll Garner, the First Artist to Sue a Major Label and Win

Dan Ouellette

It’s not at all unusual for artists to engage in creative or financial differences with their record labels, but only a few end up in court. Last year, Kanye West sued his label, Universal, and publisher, EMI, claiming that his deals amounted to “servitude” (the EMI suit was settled in September), echoing Prince’s famous battle with Warner Bros. 25 years before, in which the artist painted the word “slave” on his face to protest his contract with Warner Bros. before parting ways with the label in 1996. Brad Paisley sued Sony Music over a royalty dispute in 2014, Trent Reznor engaged in a bitter legal battle with his first label, TVT; the list goes on.

However, you have to dial back to 1960 to find the major precedent: when star jazz pianist Erroll Garner sued Columbia Records for breaking his contract — and won after a nearly three-year battle in a New York Supreme Court decision.

It was a landmark case that has been largely forgotten. “The Erroll Garner story is an important one,” says UCLA history professor and author Robin D.G. Kelley. “The context is the ‘50s at the height of Garner’s power. He was winning DownBeat polls and other international prizes. He was at the top of his game, and his manager, Martha Glaser (pictured above, right, with Garner), had worked out a contract with Columbia with an unprecedented clause giving Erroll the right to approve the release of any of his recorded music.”

Best known for composing the classic “Misty,” Garner had been a goldmine to Columbia thanks to his 1955 album “Concert by the Sea,” recorded live with his trio at Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. It was a hit album of his characteristic swinging, eccentric, polyrhythmic singular style that had sold a million copies by 1958. Glaser had signed the artist to a five-year deal with Columbia in 1956 and was in the midst of renegotiating it when in 1960, the label began to release songs from Garner’s prodigious backlog of studio recordings without his consent. Legendary jazz A&R executive George Avakian had championed Garner at Columbia, but he was replaced R by pop producer Mitch Miller, the mentor of singer Bobby Darin (who’d incidentally scored a big hit with “Misty” in 1959). Somewhere in the mix, Columbia overlooked Garner’s right of release approval.

Legendary talent scout and producer John Hammond (who discovered Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Bruce Springsteen, among others) had just returned to Columbia after a hiatus. Garner reached out to him via a telegraph. He wrote in 1960: “I must demand that you immediately withdraw ‘Swinging Solos’ record album which your Columbia Recordssubsidiary released … this took place despite my written notice to your record people … the material was not approved and was unworthy of public sale. As a matter of ethics I am amazed that release took place precisely at the time my manager was meeting with [you] at [your] request and while [you] were assuring her that the album would not be released.

“Is it you feel you can sandbag me because I am a Negro artist?,” Garner continued. “Must demand that sale and distribution of album stop immediately and that it be recalled from press, radio people and record dealers who have previously received it … because it not only violates my artistic integrity but that of every artist on your label.”

Garner and Glaser sued Columbia, the label hit back with a countersuit in federal court, which meant the pianist had to pony up $40,000 for a cash bond; friends helped him to fund it. In a statement at the time, Garner wrote: “I paid the cash bond because I felt, and I feel, that not only my rights are at issue in this case, but the rights of my fellow members of the record and music industry are involved, and it became deeply urgent to sustain the injunction. I truly hope that the future for all recording artists might hold greater security for creative property as a result of this action.”

During the course of the lengthy litigation of lawsuit and counter lawsuits, Columbia released two more of Garner’s sessions (“The One and Only Erroll Garner” and  “The Provocative Erroll Garner,” a title that in itself was provocative, given the situation). The pianist was forced to sit out two and a half years of recording at the height of his career. Some speculate that the absence is a major reason why he’s not as lionized today as contemporaries like Dave Brubeck.

Kelley points out another factor in the dispute, which started in 1958, when the Saturday Evening Post wrote a negative portrayal of Garner, a self-taught master improviser who couldn’t read music. “They portrayed him as a happy, naïve guy,” Kelley says. “They said he was out of touch with reality. When asked about Bach, the writer said Erroll thought it was some kind of beer. They said he was illiterate and set Garner up as someone who had nothing to do with money and didn’t care. The mainstream press saw him as an idiot savant.” In contrast, Kelley says that the black press, where his battle was a headline story, heralded him as a sober, articulate, intelligent David-who-beat-Goliath. I feel this can be seen as a civil rights case as well as a precedent for artists.”

When Garner won his landmark case of making a groundbreaking statement on an artist’s freedom, he received a cash settlement, his masters were returned and Columbia agreed to recall and destroy the records it had released without his approval, although many of those albums ended up for sale on the black market (it’s possible that distributors, rather than Columbia, were responsible for illegally selling the albums).

The money funded the launching of Garner’s own independent label with Glaser. With Glaser producing, Garner recorded 12 albums in 18 years for Octave Records. Those albums were distributed by different companies through the course of the label’s existence.

“That was also a remarkable feat,” says Peter Lockhart Senior Producer of the Erroll Garner Jazz Project and a vice president of Octave Music. . “As far as we know, that was the birth of an artist doing his own licensing deal.”

Kelley agrees. “What Erroll did was set a precedent for artists,” he says. “They could have the rights to their own material.”

In her 1981 correspondence with Hammond, four years after Garner’s death, Glaser contended that the lawsuit was about much more than finances. The exec replied, “I often wonder how an artist with Mr. Garner‘s legal problems vis a vis with CBS, given his artistic and sales importance at the time, would be treated today by lawyers and executives for the company. Erroll was possibly the first Black artist — or artist of any color — to stand up to a major record company (at a time when Black artists had difficulty even in getting good lawyers)….The public knew little of what was happening (unlike today when any squabble between an artist and a company is headline news) because Mr. Garner’s attorney insisted on no publicity for the three years of litigation and Garner’s recording career was on ice.”

For his part, Hammond wrote in the correspondence, “Erroll was a wonderful artist. The greatest mistake he ever made was in leaving CBS for purely financial reasons. I did my best to patch things up.”

While Garner’s Octave output didn’t have Columbia’s marketing muscle, it did give him the freedom to record new music, including live shows. This year the Octave Remastered Series, issued by Mack Avenue Records, was launched with the rerelease of all 12 Octave Garner albums, with restored master takes and newly discovered unreleased songs. “You can hear how Erroll plays with a freedom on these albums,” says Lockhart, the senior producer of the series. “For ‘Dreamstreet,’ his first album on Octave, he was discussing repertoire with Martha. While Erroll played an ‘Oklahoma!’ medley at his concerts, he had never recorded it. He wasn’t sure, but Martha said, ‘You can do whatever you want now.’ So Erroll jumped at the chance and recorded [‘Oklahoma!’ songs] ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ and ‘Surrey With the Fringe on Top.’ He didn’t have to ask a label for permission.”

The Octave Remastered Series began in late September with four Garner albums and will continue with reissues monthly through June of next year.

“There is so much to discover about Erroll,” says pianist Christian Sands, the estate’s creative ambassador, whose goal is to reimagine Garner’s music in his band for audiences into the foreseeable future. “He was at the forefront of so many things. In his music, he was a pioneer in crossing genres from classical to jazz to pop to Latin jazz. And he broke barriers socially. Here was a black artist with a Jewish manager at a time in the heat of an environment of racism. And Martha was on the front lines of the civil rights movement. And the two of them were great at dealing with contracts. They pushed back. If things weren’t right, they said, ‘Okay, we’ll walk.’ They knew how to call their bluff.”

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Jazz was developed outside of the academy, but it lives on in part through the schools and institutions that have sought to preserve the music’s history, thanks to donations from musicians, producers, writers, and photographers. Universities, libraries, and museums around the country contain the documents that lend jazz its narrative—scores, letters, photographs, and other papers.

“At its essence, jazz is about individuals,” says Michael Fitzgerald, who wrote a paper on jazz archives in the United States and now works as an electronic services librarian at the University of the District of Columbia, which is home to the Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives, “and while it is a music reliant upon the fleeting art of improvisation, there is also a wealth of physical materials that can help researchers of the present and future understand the lives and creative activities of musicians.”

Such materials, Fitzgerald explains, “tell the multifaceted stories behind the official release—giving posterity a glimpse at what musicians do on a daily basis and how creative works evolve over time.”

Here’s a quick look at just some of the places that house those materials (with handy links). 

Institute of Jazz Studies
Rutgers University’s collection in Newark, N.J., is one of the world’s great jazz resources, featuring the collections of Count Basie, Benny Carter, Andrew Hill, Abbey Lincoln, Annie Ross, and Mary Lou Williams, among others.

National Museum of American History
The Washington, D.C., museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, holds Duke Ellington’s collection, which includes scores, manuscripts, recordings, photographs and business records, among other documents.

Jazz Archive at Duke University
Duke’s archive contains, among other things, Mary Lou Williams memorabilia gathered by her biographer Linda Dahl, Les Brown’s scores, and Frank Foster’s papers, with a particular emphasis on musicians from North Carolina. 

James R. and Susan Neumann Jazz Collection at Oberlin College
Oberlin’s sizable collection, made possible through a private donation, comprises more than 100,000 recordings, along with books, periodicals, photographs, sheet music, and memorabilia. 

Erroll Garner Archive @ Pitt
Garner was a Pittsburgh native, so it’s fitting that his collection—music, photos, correspondence—would end up at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Living Jazz Archives
William Paterson University’s archive in New Jersey contains materials from Clark Terry, Thad Jones, Michael Brecker, Art Farmer, and James Williams, with more in the works.

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
Part of the New York Public Library, the center holds materials from Ron Carter, Billy Taylor, and Sy Oliver. In 2017, it acquired Sonny Rollins’ extensive archive.

Brubeck Collection
Dave Brubeck’s alma mater, University of the Pacific (previously known as College of the Pacific), now owns the great pianist’s collection, featuring audio recordings, photographs, news clippings, and interviews. 

Louis Armstrong House Museum
Louis Armstrong’s former home in Corona, Queens, is now a museum and mecca for Pops aficionados; Armstrong’s collection—including quirky scrapbooks, tapes, and letters—was also recently digitized. 

Benny Goodman Papers at Yale University
Goodman’s papers remain secure in the New Haven, Conn., archives of Yale. 

Library of Congress
The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., holds collections from some of the most important artists in jazz, including Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Dexter Gordon, and Gerry Mulligan. 

Hogan Jazz Archive
Tulane University’s Hogan Jazz Archive in New Orleans is a formidable source, featuring the papers of Nick LaRocca—who recorded the first jazz album with the Original Dixieland Jass Band—as well as trumpeter Al Hirt and scholar Donald M. Marquis, who wrote the definitive biography of Buddy Bolden. 

Los Angeles Jazz Institute
The archive at the Los Angeles Jazz Institute contains a wide variety of resources, such as photographs, recordings, interviews, books, periodicals, artwork, and memorabilia. 

W. Eugene Smith Collection at the University of Arizona
The photographer W. Eugene Smith’s archive is located at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. Smith documented New York’s jazz scene in granular detail in the 1950s and ’60s.

Paul Whiteman Collection at Williams
Housed at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., Whiteman’s collection includes scores, recordings, and photographs, among other items. All told, there are “600 linear feet of material,” according to the Williams webpage.

Chicago Jazz Archive
The University of Chicago’s archive contains the collections of Anthony Braxton, Marian McPartland, and more. 

Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives
The archives at the University of the District of Columbia (named for the pioneering D.C. jazz radio DJ Felix E. Grant) include a vast trove of recordings, including critic/author Will Friedwald’s collection, which was started by his late father Herb.

Al Cohn Memorial Jazz Collection
Located in Pennsylania at East Stroudsburg Universiy’s Kemp Library, the Cohn collection contains valuable material from the archives of Zoot Sims, Eddie Safranski, and other significant figures in jazz history, including its namesake.

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The Morning Call |

Nov 24, 2019 | 7:49 AM 

Jazz great Louis Armstrong

Louis Armstrong wearing a Brooklyn College cheer sweater performed for celebrities, students and faculty on the campus in New York in 1941. The college honored him with the degree “Doctor of Swing.” (AP Photo) (anonymous/AP)

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The announcer steps to the microphone in Muhlenberg College’s Memorial Hall and introduces a performer who already is among the most celebrated and influential of his genre. 

“Let’s have a big hand now for Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong!” 

Armstrong takes the stage, greeting the audience of 4,000 with “What happen!” And his band, an equally celebrated lineup known as Armstrong’s All-Stars, kicks into the slow, appropriately titled “Sleepy Time Down South.” It lets Armstrong display his horn talent and raspy, grizzled voice — even some scat singing.

Sixty-three years ago Sunday, Louis Armstrong, by then already a jazz legend with a career of more than 30 years, performed at Muhlenberg in a show to benefit the recently revived Allentown Police Athletic League.

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It was the artist near the top of his game, playing with a great band — and on a good day, to boot.

And for more than six decades, it has lived only in the memories of those who saw it.

On Nov. 29, ORG Music, a California boutique record company, will release a vinyl album, “Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars Live in 1956” — a near-pristine recording of the concert that even Muhlenberg and the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York apparently never knew existed.

The album will be released as part of the 12th annual Record Store Day, which celebrates the culture of independently owned vinyl shops.

“I love that era of the All-Stars,” said Andrew Rossiter, chief executive officer of ORG Music. “It just sounds like a party. It sounds like they’re having a great time and they’re all great players.

“And the sound that they get with that small ensemble is massive. It kind of rivals some of the big band stuff you would hear. So I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s Armstrong at his best; I think you could make that argument for a handful of different periods. But for me, it’s one of my favorites.”

How the tape surfaced after 63 years — and was turned into a commercial album — is a story of the love of Armstrong’s music, but also one that leaves plenty of mystery in its wake.

Armstrong concludes the opening song with “Good evening everybody!” and segues into the popular 1950s tune “Blueberry Hill.” Between songs, he laughs heartily, and introduces “Tin Roof Blues,” saying, “We goin’ take a trip down to my hometown, New Orleans, Louisiana. … ‘Course, you know, folks, it was before my time.”

“No, no!” says someone else on stage. “Wasn’t nothin’ before his time!” as Armstrong laughs.

Armstrong is a favorite of Paul Roark, who from 1-3 p.m. Saturdays does a show on KUZU-FM 92.9 in Denton, Texas, that features music from the era of 78 rpm recordings.

“I’m a huge jazz fan,” Roark said, laughing. “And, well, Louis was God.”

Roark, 52, said he was searching the internet one night, which, as an avid collector of reel-to-reel tapes, he often does. On eBay, he saw a listing for a tape marked “Louis Armstrong concert Pennsylvania.”

“I thought it was going to be a mislabeled standard LP release,” Roark said. Another live concert recording, “The Complete Town Hall 1947,” had just been released, “so I just thought it was going to be somebody’s recording of the Town Hall concert.”

Roark said the tape had been listed on eBay for a while with no offers, so he bought it for $9.99. He said it arrived in a generic box that he knew was of the 1950s.

“When I put it on and I heard the guy do the intro, I was, like, no commercial LP would have had that long of an intro on it,” he said. “So it’s got to be something different.”

Roark researched the tape. The band’s lineup is introduced on it — Trummy Young, Edmund Hall, Billy Kyle and Velma Middleton — which narrowed the time period. Roark said a passing reference to Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog” narrowed it further.

“I figured it had to be when he was on TV that night and it was such a big deal,” Roark said. “If you look, that was two or three days before that concert.”

Roark found the exact date of the Armstrong show in a story in The Morning Call that matched other details, as well. “That was the only reference to it,” Roark said.

While The Morning Call and Muhlenberg’s student newspaper, The Weekly, both wrote advance articles on the show, neither reviewed it. Students were off that week for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Roark and Rossiter said even the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, New York, wasn’t aware of the recording. “I don’t think anyone out there realized that this show was recorded and this tape existed,” Rossiter said. The museum did not respond to requests seeking comment for this article.

Roark said he got back in touch with the woman who sold the tape on eBay and asked, “‘How did you get this?’ And she said, ‘I just found it at a flea market or something, I don’t know.’ She was a general junk dealer, basically.”

It was the only reel-to-reel tape she had among the nicknacks she was selling on eBay, Roark said. “I certainly don’t think she knew what she had.” 

Louis Armstrong performed on March 20, 1956, at Muhlenberg College’s Memorial Hall, with Trummy Young on trombone, Arvel Shaw on bass, Barrett Deems on drums, Bill Kyle on piano and Edmund Hall on the clarinet perform. (Morning Call File Photo / The Morning Call)

The Allentown connection

Louis Armstrong is among the most popular jazz musicians of all time.

His career spanned six decades, with him first appearing on recordings in the 1920s as part of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, and by the end of the decade as a solo artist, taking him from his native New Orleans to Chicago.

“He had such a long career, with so many peaks,” Rossiter, the ORG Music president, said. By 1939, Armstrong had a hit recording of the song “Jeepers Creepers” and, in 1949, “Blueberry Hill.”

By the 1950s, he had recorded eight of his 12 songs that eventually would be included in the Grammy Award Hall of Fame. But in that decade, his hits were more frequent, including “La Vie En Rose / C’est Si Bon,” which he performs on the tape.

“He was already a huge, huge name, kind of a marquee name in popular music — definitely in jazz,” Rossiter said. “He was the biggest name at that time.”

The Morning Call files indicate Armstrong first played the Lehigh Valley on March 20, 1956, also at Muhlenberg. That show drew 3,700 people.

Armstrong’s second appearance in Allentown was the show captured on the tape. It came shortly before Armstrong had his biggest run of popularity, Rossiter said.

“Once you turn a corner into the ‘60s, he’s more of a household name, whether you’re a music fan or not,” Rossiter said.

After a 1962 hit with a version of “Mack The Knife,” Armstrong recorded his biggest popular music song in 1964 with “Hello Dolly” from the Broadway musical of the same name. Armstrong’s version was inducted into the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame in 2001.

And in 1967 he released “What a Wonderful World,” which topped the pop charts and also was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, in 1999. In 1968 he had his last hit, with a version of “Talk to the Animals” from the movie “Doctor Doolittle.”

During that time, Armstrong played a show in 1960 at Liberty High School in Bethlehem that drew just 350 people, likely because it was Easter weekend. He also played at Lehigh University in 1961 with Bob McClister’s orchestra at Grace Hall for 1,000 undergraduates and their guests.

A 1968 Morning Call article says Armstrong appeared in Allentown in 1962, but no record of the show remains. His last performance in the Lehigh Valley was in 1968 for 1,600 people at Memorial Hall in an event sponsored by the Allentown Junior Chamber of Commerce.

Armstrong died in 1971 at age 69. He was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame lists Armstrong’s “West End Blues” among the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll.

The performer remained so popular that a version of his All-Stars played at Bethlehem’s first Musikfest in 1984, but with none of the members who played at Muhlenberg.

Louis Armstrong performed on March 20, 1956, at Muhlenberg College’s Memorial Hall, before an audience of 3,700. Among the songs he and his band performed were: “Bucket Got a Hole in It,” “How High the Moon” and “Sleepy Time Down South.” (Morning Call File Photo / The Morning Call)

Armstrong shows the range of his talent, blowing subtly over a bass-focused number, labeled on the album as simply “Blues in B♭.” On a 6½-minute medley of “Tenderly You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Armstrong plays perhaps his best horn of the show — strong and distinctive. He plays a nuanced, very bluesy “C’est Si Bon.” “La Vie En Rose” is done by request, and he introduces “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” a wild and powerful trumpet piece, by saying they did it for Princess Margaret.

Even Muhlenberg College didn’t know the Armstrong show had been taped, said Susan Maldonado, the college’s special collections and archive librarian. No college files or folders exist regarding the recording.

“Somebody must have had really nice equipment to record with that kind of quality right off the stage,” Roark said. “It could have been pulled off a mixer board of some type, but it still would have been primitive in that time.”

It’s possible the recording was done for Muhlenberg’s radio station, but Maldonado says the station also has no record of the tape or even of the show.

Roark played the tape on his radio show, presumably the first time anyone had heard the performance in more than 60 years, then stored it away as he reached out to record companies to see if there was any interest.

He said he spoke to another company that released only limited editions marketed for short periods. Then he talked to ORG, because it had released previous Louis Armstrong live albums — even one from 1956, with relatively the same lineup.

“We don’t necessarily specialize in any certain genre. We’ve done everything from Nirvana to John Coltrane to Johnny Cash, really all over the place,” Rossiter said.

ORG, he said, is interested in recordings that are either long forgotten or haven’t been issued in decades. “Or in this case, which is the best possible scenario, something that no one even knew existed.” 

“It was so obviously in our wheelhouse that we were excited about it and wanted to make it happen. … It just popped out at us,” Rossiter said.

Roark sent him digital transfers that he had done with the tape.

“I’m a big fan of New Orleans-style traditional jazz, and no one really beats Louis when it comes to that stuff,” Rossiter said. “Louis’s just got something special, and you can hear it in the recording — how the audience is responding and it feels like a special moment. At a college performance, nonetheless. Not even at a big, proper theater hall.

“And so we felt, more than anything, this is kind of a historic recording that we needed to get out there. For a tape that was unknown to everyone else and presumably not professionally recorded by anyone known, it came out great.”

ORG routinely pays “mechanical royalties” — money to a songwriter whenever a copy of a song is made. For the Armstrong tape, rights for the recordings “were a little less straightforward, but we sorted out an arrangement with the help of our lawyer. There were no major issues,” Rossiter said.

The recording had places where the sound dropped out and other imperfections, and it probably wasn’t stored with care, but it sounded “incredible,” Rossiter said. 

ORG worked with a facility that Rossiter considers the best for archival tape transfers. “We just wanted to get it as flawless as possible,” where it was transferred to high-resolution digital files, he said. The recording also was in mono and was divided into stereo.

“It was exciting to see it happen,” Rossiter said. “The audio’s definitely a bit rougher before mastering. We cleaned it up as best we could without changing anything or taking away the integrity of it. But I think it came out pretty great.”

Louis Armstrong performs during the Daily News Jazz Festival at Madison Square Garden in 1963. (John Duprey/New York Daily News)

A voice after 63 years

The 12-song, 45-minute disc closes with a reprise of “Sleepy Time Down South.”

“We’re very happy that we swung for ya,” Armstrong says. “Thanks a million and good night.”

Rossiter said ORG thought the recording was special enough to release as part of Record Store Day.

“That’s really special for us, because most of our business is done through independent retailers,” he said.

ORG eventually will release the album on CD and digital formats.

“When we do something like this — when we take a release that’s never been out before — and the first opportunity anyone’s going to get to hear it they actually have to walk into a physical, independent mom-and-pop record store and buy the record, that’s important to us,” Rossiter said, “and partially a way to give back to the indie retail community, because they support us.”

Morning Call Lehigh Valley Music reporter and columnist John J. Moser can be reached at 610-820-6722 or jmoser@mcall.com. 

“Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars: Live in 1956” will be sold at: 

The Main Street Jukebox, Stroudsburg; Easton Record Exchange; Gr8soundz, Hellertown; Young Ones, Kutztown; Double Decker, Allentown; The Exchange, Ross Township; Rattail Records, Kutztown; Compact Disc Center, Bethlehem; Sound Check Records, Jim Thorpe; Liberty Vinyl, Lansford.

Source: ORG Music website.

John J. Moser

Contact

John has covered Lehigh Valley music for more than 20 years, and has been The Morning Call music critic since 2009. Also was assistant metro editor and editor of its offices in Bethlehem, Lehighton and Quakertown. He has won more than two dozen statewide and national awards as a reporter and editor.

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The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia nominated the Hotel Powelton/Powelton Café at 20-24 N. 40th Street, a large Queen Anne style corner building with a fascinating social history. The hotel was built by Thomas C. Sloan in 1893 when a population boost led to increased commercial activity in the once-suburban area. In the early 20th century, the hotel’s northern half was partially converted into a chemical laboratory by the A.C. Barnes Companyowned by Albert C. Barnes, famed art collector and founder of the Barnes Foundation. The company manufactured Argyrol and other pharmaceuticals at the location, expanding operations into the entire building in 1919. Barnes’ factory was known for hiring a predominately African American workforce and providing progressive benefits to its employees, including a six-hour work day that was, according to the nomination, “organized around a voluntary, two-hour paid midday seminar,” a lending library open to company workers, and a gallery displaying “rarely less than one hundred pictures on view at all times.” About a decade later, the first floor of the former hotel became the Powelton Café, a leading venue and jazz club that hosted prominent African American performers including Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and many more, into the 1960s.

The former Hotel Powelton/Powelton Cafe/A.C. Barnes Company laboratory at 20-24 N. 40th Street in 2013. | Photo: Bradley Maule

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31. Best Improvised Jazz Solo
For an instrumental jazz solo performance. Two equal performers on one recording may be eligible as one entry. If the soloist listed appears on a recording billed to another artist, the latter’s name is in parenthesis for identification. Singles or Tracks only.

• ELSEWHERE
  Melissa Aldana, soloist
   
• SOZINHO
  Randy Brecker, soloist
   
• TOMORROW IS THE QUESTION
  Julian Lage, soloist
   
• THE WINDUP
  Branford Marsalis, soloist
   
• SIGHTSEEING
  Christian McBride, soloist

32. Best Jazz Vocal Album
For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new vocal jazz recordings.

• THIRSTY GHOST
  Sara Gazarek
   
• LOVE & LIBERATION
  Jazzmeia Horn
   
• ALONE TOGETHER
  Catherine Russell
   
• 12 LITTLE SPELLS
  Esperanza Spalding
   
• SCREENPLAY
  The Tierney Sutton Band

33. Best Jazz Instrumental Album
For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new instrumental jazz recordings.

• IN THE KEY OF THE UNIVERSE
  Joey DeFrancesco
   
• THE SECRET BETWEEN THE SHADOW AND THE SOUL
  Branford Marsalis Quartet
   
• CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE’S NEW JAWN
  Christian McBride
   
• FINDING GABRIEL
  Brad Mehldau
   
• COME WHAT MAY
  Joshua Redman Quartet

34. Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
For albums containing at least 51% playing time of new ensemble jazz recordings.

• TRIPLE HELIX
  Anat Cohen Tentet
   
• DANCER IN NOWHERE
  Miho Hazama
   
• HIDING OUT
  Mike Holober & The Gotham Jazz Orchestra
   
• THE OMNI-AMERICAN BOOK CLUB
  Brian Lynch Big Band
   
• ONE DAY WONDER
  Terraza Big Band

35. Best Latin Jazz Album
For vocal or instrumental albums containing at least 51% playing time of newly recorded material. The intent of this category is to recognize recordings that represent the blending of jazz with Latin, Iberian-American, Brazilian, and Argentinian tango music.

• ANTIDOTE
  Chick Corea & The Spanish Heart Band
   
• SORTE!: MUSIC BY JOHN FINBURY
  Thalma de Freitas With Vitor Gonçalves, John Patitucci, Chico Pinheiro, Rogerio Boccato & Duduka Da Fonseca
   
• UNA NOCHE CON RUBÉN BLADES
  Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra With Wynton Marsalis & Rubén Blades
   
• CARIB
  David Sánchez
   
• SONERO: THE MUSIC OF ISMAEL RIVERA
  Miguel Zenón

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By Jon Pareles

Nov. 18, 2019

In 2018, he was told he had Stage 4 prostate cancer and months to live. This week, he released his 15th album and is more dedicated than ever to finding humanity in music.

PASADENA, Calif. — “The shoe dropped,” as the songwriter and producer Joe Henry dryly puts it, on Nov. 15, 2018. He had been suffering from incapacitating back pain that doctors insisted was temporary; he finally demanded an M.R.I. scan. The first doctor who read it recognized Stage 4 prostate cancer that had metastasized into his bones, and told him he had three to seven months to live. That doctor was wrong. Henry’s cancer is in remission, and he is vigorous and happily making music.

Exactly one year after his diagnosis, Henry has released his 15th solo album, “The Gospel According to Water.” The album is filled with songs that “came in a flood as I’ve never experienced,” Henry said in an interview at his home office and studio.

On the albums he has been making since the 1980s, Henry has built a trove of sturdy and mysterious songs: cryptic yet evocative, nonlinear yet clearly heartfelt, rooted but exploratory. His melodies are steeped in folk, blues and Tin Pan Alley, but take unexpected turns. Through the years, Henry has experimented with styles and recording techniques and spiked his studio bands with jazz musicians, among them Ornette Coleman and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. His lyrics are full of perfectly enigmatic quatrains, like the opening verse of a song on the new album, “The Fact of Love”: “My eyes are closed but they are raised/Keeping light both out and in/I will walk this river, dazed/Without a trace that I have been.”

“I write a lot of things that I can’t explain but I know them to be right,” Henry said. Fellow songwriters are among his most dedicated fans; John Prine, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Elvis Costello, Rosanne Cash and Lucinda Williams all premiered songs from his new album on their own websites. T Bone Burnett, an early champion of Henry’s songwriting and a mentor for Henry’s career as a producer, said, “His songs are open to interpretation, but the feeling of them is very clear. He uses language in a completely surprising and unexpected way.”

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If Henry, 58, had been born a decade or two earlier, he would have been acclaimed alongside literary-minded songwriters like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Robbie Robertson and Randy Newman, all of whom he readily cites as influences (along with John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Gabriel García Márquez, William Carlos Williams, Flannery O’Connor and Wallace Stevens).

While Henry’s own releases have built him a loyal following, he has also produced dozens of albums for other musicians including Raitt, Costello, Aimee Mann, Allen Toussaint and Bettye LaVette. He won Grammys in blues and folk categories for producing albums by Solomon Burke, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

“I realized I wasn’t only interested in just recording myself, but that I felt devoted to the art of record making,” Henry said. “On my own, I got a chance to do that every couple of years. That’s like trying to learn to drive by driving one day a year. You’ve got to log some real time.”

Henry’s best-known song is rarely associated with him. It’s Madonna’s “Don’t Tell Me,” a Top 10 hit in 2000 that he wrote with Madonna (who is his sister-in-law) and her co-producer, Mirwais, based on his own song “Stop.” 

“There were lyrics in that song that I was sure would go by the wayside because they were too obtuse for a pop song,” he said. When he saw her perform it in an arena, he was amazed when “At one point they stopped playing and were singing a cappella, and 25,000 people were singing the song.” Henry realized it wasn’t that his lyrics were obtuse, but “that my delivery system doesn’t vibrate at this frequency. But she knew how.” As performer, songwriter or producer, Henry said, the goal is the same: “To make something meaningful come out of a pair of speakers.”

What has defined Henry’s career, and probably circumscribed it, is a principled sense of modesty, always deferring to the music. “When he talks about songwriting, he talks about how mysterious the process is and how unconscious it is,” said his son, Levon Henry, a saxophonist who has played sessions for many of his father’s albums. “And when he talks about record-making, he talks about who all the musicians in the room are and what they’re bringing to the table, and how important it is to create an environment in which people feel emboldened to display their own creativity and listen to each other. The way that my dad holds up a mirror to things around him, and tries to not take credit for it, is a real testament to how collaborative life is and how creativity works.”

At his house, Henry’s office held a spinet piano, a rack of acoustic guitars, a turntable, vintage ribbon microphones and assorted CDs and LPs. A sizable old desk was topped with books — James Joyce, Confucius, Langston Hughes — and a pencil sharpener, with a few fresh shavings from that morning; he writes first drafts in longhand. Around the walls were photographs of his heroes — Dylan, Ray Charles, Miles Davis, Billy Strayhorn, Woody Guthrie, W.C. Fields — and his studio collaborators. He had cued up background music on an iPod: Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, the bluesman Lonnie Johnson. “I’m a talker,” he noted on the way in to a four-hour conversation that ranged through reminiscences, musical history, vintage gear talk and broader philosophies.

Henry was born in 1960 in Charlotte, N.C., but his family moved frequently: to Georgia, Ohio and Michigan, where he met his future wife, Melanie Ciccone, in high school. “Every couple of years I was the new kid at yet another school,” he said. “My response to it was to disappear into my room in front of a record player. I understood from a very young age that that was my language.”

He taught himself to play guitar and piano, listened to old blues, folk songs, Johnny Cash and Frank Sinatra, and wrote a lot of poetry as a steppingstone to songs. He got his first record deal in the mid-1980s and made his first albums while living in New York City. But he found more like-minded musicians after moving to Los Angeles, where Burnett eased him into producing (and also produced Henry’s third album, “Shuffletown”). He and Burnett still share a pool of regular stage and studio collaborators, and a recording philosophy that prizes live interaction.

“I’m not a purist,” Henry insisted. “Edit, tune, fly something in — anything to make it musical — ultimately it’s all fair game. But there’s a moment of discovery, a moment where something else takes over, and that’s the thing I want to document. The stuff that I invariably go back to is where I can hear somebody’s humanity unveiled.”

While Henry’s early albums were clearly indebted to Dylan and Waits, his songs were already distinctive: erudite and surreal. “The early part of my working life, I completely rejected the genre classification of myself as a singer-songwriter,” he said. “I associated it with a certain group of singer-songwriters of the ’70s whose whole ethos seemed to be, how real are you willing to be? As if this is a page from your diary, and the more painful the better the song. And I just reject that completely. I’m trying to shake off facts. I don’t want facts to obscure my truth.”

He also chose not to devise a marketable public persona for himself. “I couldn’t. I knew I wasn’t going to,” he said. “What I wanted to do, and the only thing I felt like I could do, was to try to create songs that were persuasive enough that I could disappear into them.”

When Henry received the cancer diagnosis, his first instinct was “I’m going to have to write my way through this,” he said. Through last winter, he wrote poems daily; “I felt bereft of song,” he said. But as his condition improved with treatment, songs arrived in a rush. “Every song but two was written between Valentine’s Day and Father’s Day,” he said. “Some of them, I wrote lyrics like I was taking dictation. And on at least three or four occasions, I just picked up a guitar and knew where the song was, without one thought to melody or changes.”

By spring, he wanted to test his new songs in front of an audience. He set up a solo concert at Largo at the Coronet, the longtime Los Angeles songwriters’ haven. The show announcement echoed words that appear on William Butler Yeats’s gravestone: “Casting a Cold Eye on Life, on Death.” 

He had decided to reveal his situation. “I announced the diagnosis from the stage because I thought it would illuminate the songs,” he said. “When I did finally say it out loud there was a gasp. And as I kept talking before I started playing there were people in the room audibly crying.” 

Henry still hadn’t recorded the songs. An old friend, the recording engineer S. Husky Hoskulds, offered some studio time, and Henry thought he’d take a day to make some solo recordings to see if the songs were good enough for an album. But then he brought along Levon Henry on reed instruments, the pianist Patrick Warren and a visiting British guitarist, John Smith. “We ended up with a band by accident,” Hoskulds said, “but I kept the same plan in place which was just put everyone in the room, no headphones, put up a handful of microphones and let them go.”

The recording turned out intimate, pristine and charged. “This is people in a room listening to each other,” said Hoskulds. “Joe texted me and said ‘I think we might have an album here.’”

Henry left the original sessions almost completely untouched, though he did overdub backing vocals from JT Nero and Allison Russell (of Birds of Chicago) on two tracks. But he was grateful that he had let the songs escape the weight of his expectations.

“If I had dared to think, maybe this is my last record — because at the time I could have easily been convinced to be thinking in those terms — then it’s got to be everything, it’s got to be the ultimate,” he said. “For me, it was, I have to be committed to the absolute truth essence of what these songs mean. And they happened fast and they were alive to me because I gave myself over to them. That’s what I needed to do as a recording artist too, was to stand aside and be available, do my job. I’m not driving the wagon — it’s running away with us. As it always is.”

The new songs invoke time, silence, music, faith, love, death and remembrance — none of them new topics in Henry’s catalog. “I’m writing about what I’ve always written about. How do we stand up to whatever life is asking us? Anybody who’s writing anything, if it’s going to endure, is writing about our baseline humanity and how we hang on to it as long as we can,” he said. “I’m not writing about cancer. I wouldn’t and I wouldn’t know how. This is the black earth out of which these songs have grown. But like any living thing, they’re reaching toward light.”

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Larry Blumenfeld 

Nov. 12, 2019 12:19 pm ET

On warm September night, in a third-floor studio of a nondescript building in New York, Terri Lyne Carrington sat at her drum kit alongside her ensemble, Social Science. A small audience—mostly press, musicians and music-business insiders—settled into couches and armchairs. This preview performance of music from Ms. Carrington’s two-disc “Waiting Game” (Motéma), out now, was a casual affair, yet its mood was charged with focused, pent-up energy. It felt a bit like a meeting of a nascent political underground. 

In a way, it was. “We’re taking on the issues that bother us,” Ms. Carrington said before she and her band performed “Trapped in the American Dream,” a song whose rapped text, delivered over stuttering hip-hop-inflected beats, commented on inequities within this country’s prison system. Next, during “Bells (Ring Loudly),” an R&B groove framed lyrics about police brutality. 

In between songs, Ms. Carrington and her co-producers, pianist Aaron Parks and guitarist Matthew Stevens, spoke about the project’s beginnings. Ms. Carrington wrote the album’s title number—which sounds hymn-like and contains the line “complacency has its price”—the night after the 2016 presidential election, she said. Days later, she called Messrs. Parks and Stevens, saying simply, “It’s time to start a band.” “All she really told us,” Mr. Stevens said, “was ‘I want these songs to talk about this particular moment in time.’ There was no talk of genre.”

Ms. Carrington’s career, which includes work with jazz standard-bearers such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, has long blurred musical styles. She’s no stranger to speaking out: Last year, she was appointed as founding artistic director of the Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice at Berklee College of Music. She is especially adept at creating concept albums and working with vocalists; the expansive cast for “The Mosaic Project,” her Grammy-winning 2011 release, included Dianne Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Cassandra Wilson.

“Waiting Game” represents a struggle for justice, for which Ms. Carrington has recruited her own small army. Its core is Social Science, a sextet that includes—along with the drummer and Messrs. Parks and Stevens— Morgan Guerin, who plays saxophone and bass; singer Debo Ray ; and Kassa Overall, credited here as DJ and MC. (Additional musicians on some tracks include trumpeter Nicholas Payton and bassists Derrick Hodge and Esperanza Spalding. ) Disc One’s 11 tracks also include singer Mark Kibble ; rappers Maimouna Youssef, Kokayi, Rapsody and Raydar Ellis ; and spoken-word artists Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Meshell Ndegeocello.

This diversity of voices supports the idea of a movement, or at least a community. Ms. Carrington wrote nearly all the sung lyrics; the rappers and speakers provided their own texts. With so many elements, things could have grown scattered. Yet Disc One’s songs are tight and catchy, each riding a distinct groove and nearly all textured with layers of finely crafted sonic details. These qualities owe to Ms. Carrington’s savvy as both drummer and producer. In “Pray the Gay Away,” a lively Brazilian maracatu rhythm underscores commentary about homophobia. Its infectious groove eventually gives way to a more loose-limbed approach, wherein Mr. Overall chops lyrics into sampled fragments that punctuate Mr. Payton’s searing trumpet lines. The riveting track “No Justice (for Political Prisoners)” is built on a slowly shuffling blues, interweaving spoken text from Ms. Ndegeocello and sampled snippets of the voices of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur.

Throughout, the combination of sung and spoken words, of improvisation and song structure, and of jazz and hip-hop sensibilities suggests the give-and-take and sense of nuance absent from much contemporary political debate. And the range of emotions is broad: Rapsody sounds enraged about gender bias on a tango-flavored tune, “The Anthem”; Mr. Youssef, indignant about the exploitation of indigenous peoples on the urgently funky “Purple Mountains”; and Mr. Warner, earnest considering senseless deaths in “Bells (Ring Loudly).” The straightforward pleas of “Waiting Game” are sung in two versions—prayerfully by Mr. Kibble, set against the sampled sound of a ticking clock, and mournfully by Ms. Ray, accompanied by Messrs. Parks and Stevens. 

Disc One’s lone instrumental track, “Over and Sons,” highlights the beguiling sense of tension-and-release Ms. Carrington can create with Messrs. Parks and Stevens. The only cover, of Joni Mitchell’s “Love,” features Ms. Spalding on electric bass, showcasing the intuitive bond she and Ms. Carrington have developed through the past decade, most notably in a trio with the now-deceased pianist Geri Allen. These qualities, and these four musicians (with Ms. Spalding on acoustic bass), shine throughout Disc Two—42 minutes of improvised music, edited into four sections, with added strings and woodwinds orchestrated by Edmar Colón. If Disc One’s lyrics ruminate about freedom, here, wordlessly, is what that condition sounds like. 

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

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https://pastdaily.com/2016/01/24/1975-monterey-jazz-festival-house-band-jam-session-past-daily-downbeat/
 

1975 Monterey Jazz Festival – House Band Jam Session – Past Daily Downbeat

gordonskene

1975 Monterey Jazz Festival – Paul Desmond and Svend Asmussen – two of the All-star House Band.

1975 Monterey Jazz Festival – House Band Jam Session – Sept. 20, 1975 – KBCA-FM Los Angeles – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –

1975 Monterey Jazz Festival this weekend. An illustrious and talent-filled festival, taking place some 41 years ago. The entire festival was broadcast live, and relayed to then-Jazz station KBCA-FM in Los Angeles, who ran it non-stop. Great show, as is evidenced by this jam session given by the House Band, which consisted of Paul Desmond, Sven Asmussen, John Lewis, Harry “Sweets”Edison, Clark Terry, Benny Golson, Mundell Lowe, Toots Thielemanns, Richard Davis and a host of others, all crammed on stage and offering up a delightful stew of hot Jazz for some 35 minutes.

All held together and MC’d by Jimmy Lyons, the festival cut a very wide musical swath; featuring everyone from Dizzy Gillespie and the Tashiko Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band to Blood, Sweat and Tears and The Meters. It signified the changes going on in Jazz, how the old guard was still holding on, but the new breed of musicians were coming on the scene in a big way.

It wound up being one of the more satisfying Jazz festivals in the 1970s – proving once again that Jazz was a melting pot of ideas and points of view; that it was ever-evolving, but that it wasn’t rejecting its history but rather learning and perfecting because of it.

Highlights of this festival have been available on DVD, but not the whole Festival, and not complete sets. And even though this one is missing the first few minutes, and a technical problem forced me to drop a rendition of Willow Weep For Me with Harry Sweets Edison because his muted trumpet played havoc with the sound. Still, most of these performances haven’t been available in any form. So if you’re new to Jazz and hearing about The Monterey Jazz Festival and the legacy of performers taking part, here’s a sample of what 1975 was like.

Enjoy – and come back for more in the coming weeks.

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The techniques he developed with Manfred Eicher, the founder of the ECM label, had a major influence on the recordings of Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett and many others. 

By Giovanni Russonello

• Nov. 12, 2019
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Jan Erik Kongshaug, a recording engineer who helped sculpt the rich and quietly splendorous sound of ECM Records, an influential label that has produced timeless jazz and contemporary classical recordings, died on Nov. 5 in Oslo. He was 75.

His son Espen said the cause was a chronic lung ailment.

Mr. Kongshaug’s wide-ranging career included work with some of Norway’s best-known pop musicians. A guitarist since childhood, he also recorded two jazz albums of his own.

But his most lasting contributions came with ECM, where he engineered or mastered hundreds of albums from 1970 until the end of his life. Though he played a more inconspicuous role than Manfred Eicher, the label’s renowned founder and main producer, Mr. Kongshaug was arguably just as crucial to defining the famous “ECM sound,” which relied on precision and fidelity and used heavy helpings of reverb to create a feeling of both magnitude and intimacy.

“We had an influence on each other,” Mr. Eicher recalled in a phone interview. “He was not an experienced engineer at the beginning; I was not an experienced producer. We learned to capture sound together, to shape sound together.”

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The pair first collaborated on the experimental Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek’s 1970 quartet record, “Afric Pepperbird,” one of the earliest ECM albums. They felt an immediate kinship.

“We had the same attitude towards sound; it was very easy,” Mr. Kongshaug said in a 2010 interview with the website All About Jazz. “We didn’t have to talk. It just worked, and it sounded nice.”

The techniques they developed would leave a major mark on the recorded output of the guitarist Pat Metheny, the pianists Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, the vibraphonist Gary Burton and other jazz luminaries, as well as contemporary classical artists on ECM’s roster like Meredith Monk and Arvo Pärt.

Mr. Eicher, the guitarist Pat Metheny and Mr. Kongshaug, seated from left, with the percussionist Nana Vasconcelos in 1981.Credit…Deborah Feingold, via ECM Records

“Across styles,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote of ECM in 2017, “the label’s hallmark has been the contemplative detail of its music, a kind of acoustic enhanced realism.”

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Despite the sonic distinctiveness of the albums they made together, Mr. Kongshaug always adapted to the strengths and idiosyncrasies of the musicians he recorded. He would sometimes place microphones far from the instruments to capture the sound of the room; other times he simply used reverb to create the feeling of space, on occasion combining reverbs with different effects on a single track.

“He changed the sound as necessary when we recorded,” Mr. Eicher said. “Chick Corea’s solo records, Paul Bley’s solo record ‘Open, to Love’ and Keith Jarrett’s ‘Facing You’: All three piano players recorded on the same piano, but all sounded very different — from the mic positions, the different action. We never had a standard sound.”

Jan Erik Kongshaug was born on July 4, 1944, in Trondheim, Norway. His parents, John Kongshaug and Bjorg Alice Teigen, were professional musicians on Trondheim’s dance-music scene.

In addition to his son Espen, Mr. Kongshaug is survived by his wife, Kirsten Steen; two other sons, Rune and Paal; and five grandchildren.

Jan grew up around music. By the time he was 10, he had performed an accordion solo on the radio; soon after, he and his parents began to play publicly as a family trio. He eventually took up the guitar as his main instrument. 

He played for a year on a cruise ship; it docked repeatedly in New York City, and he often went to jazz clubs to hear greats like John Coltrane perform.

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After returning home in 1964, he became well known on the Trondheim scene. The Norwegian magazine Jazznytt awarded him first place (in a tie) as best guitarist in its 1967 poll.

After studying electrical engineering for two years, Mr. Kongshaug moved to Oslo and took a position at Arne Bendiksen Studio, where he filled a dual role as studio musician and sound engineer. It was there that his collaboration with Mr. Eicher began. When Mr. Kongshaug moved to Talent Studio in Oslo in the mid-1970s, Mr. Eicher followed him and began recording ECM artists there. (Founded in 1969, the label is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.)

All the while, Mr. Kongshaug worked steadily as a performing musician: with the pop band the Beefeaters in the late 1960s and early ’70s, with the traditional dance musician Sven Nyhus’s quartet for two decades and with the jazz composer Frode Thingnæs’s ensemble for roughly as long.

After a stint back in Trondheim, he returned to Oslo and in 1984 founded Rainbow Studio, which remains one of Norway’s premier recording studios.

He received the Spellemannspris (the Norwegian equivalent of the Grammy) in 1982 and in 1990 for his work as a sound engineer. This year he was awarded the King’s Medal of Merit from the Norwegian government and received a prize from the Rockheim, Norway’s museum of popular music. In March, more than 400 musicians convened in Oslo to perform in his honor at the Kongshaug Festival.

Kari Bremnes, a popular vocalist in Norway who often recorded with Mr. Kongshaug, remembered him fondly in an email.

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“I knew Jan Erik Kongshaug as a remarkable sensitive and talented listener,” she wrote. “He had this deep understanding of — and respect for — musicians and every instrument played. 

“Jan Erik didn’t talk much,” she continued, “he was a humble man in person, and his focus was always on the music and how to make it sound as true and genuine as possible.”

A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 13, 2019, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Jan Erik Kongshaug, 75; Shaped the Sound of Records by Corea, Jarrett and Others. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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By Richard Sandomir

Updated Nov. 12, 2019, 11:20 a.m. ET

Robert Freeman, who helped define the image of the Beatles by taking the cover photographs for five of their early albums, including “With the Beatles” and “Rubber Soul,” died on Wednesday in a hospital in London. He was 82. 

His former wife Tiddy Rowan said the cause was pneumonia.

Mr. Freeman’s association with the Beatles was relatively brief — about three years — but memorable. He shot his first album cover for them in 1963 as their popularity was soaring, then joined them in 1964 on their tour of the United States; he photographed his last in late 1965, for “Rubber Soul,” which drew attention for its distorted picture.

That image was a twist on the standard group shot.

Mr. Freeman was projecting slides from his photo shoot onto an album-size piece of cardboard propped on a table. When the cardboard tilted backward, the effect was a fisheye version of the band’s faces. John Lennon dominated the picture “like some cruelly impassive, suede-collared Tartar prince,” Philip Norman wrote in “John Lennon: The Life” (2008).

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The fisheye effect on one of the most striking Beatles album covers was accidental. “Because the album was titled ‘Rubber Soul,’” Paul McCartney said, “we felt that the image fitted perfectly.”

The band loved it. As Paul McCartney recalled on his website after Mr. Freeman’s death, “He assured us that it was possible to print it this way and because the album was titled ‘Rubber Soul’ we felt that the image fitted perfectly.”

Another sort of serendipity led to Mr. Freeman’s cover photograph of the British release “With the Beatles” in August 1963, his first work with the group. 

He had not been a photographer for long, but his portraits of jazz musicians like John Coltrane for The Sunday Times of London and other publications had impressed Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. Mr. Epstein asked Mr. Freeman to come to Eastbourne, England, to shoot the cover of their second album.

The conditions were ideal. Light from the windows on one side of a hotel dining room left their faces partly in shadows. A maroon curtain created a dark background behind them. 

“They came down at midday wearing their black polo-necked sweaters,” Mr. Freeman wrote in his book “The Beatles: A Private View” (2003). “It seemed natural to photograph them in black-and-white wearing their customary dark clothes. It gave unity to the image. There was no makeup, hairdresser or stylist — just myself, the Beatles and a camera.”

Mindful of how to fit the four Beatles onto an album cover, he asked Ringo Starr to stand in the right corner of the frame and bend his knee, as if he were a rung below the others. “He was the last to join the group, he was the shortest and he was the drummer,” Mr. Freeman wrote.

The same picture, but with a bluish tint, appeared early the next year on the United States release of “Meet the Beatles,” which had many of the same songs as “With the Beatles.”

Mr. McCartney said the photograph was not a carefully arranged studio shot.

“I think it took no more than half an hour to accomplish,” he wrote.

Mr. Freeman’s photography helped define the Beatles’ iconography before they moved onto a pen and black ink illustration for the cover of “Revolver,” by the bassist and artist Klaus Voormann, and the wildly innovative artwork for the “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s” cover, which was designed by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.

The cover of the album “A Hard Day’s Night” was distinguished by Mr. Freeman’s photographs of each Beatle, one row above the other, in five different poses. And his cover photo for “Help!” showed the Beatles standing side by side in matching blue outfits and making semaphore signals.

Robert Grahame Freeman was born on Dec. 5, 1936, in London to Freddy and Dorothy (Rumble) Freeman. His father was an insurance broker for theaters in London. During World War II, Robert was evacuated to Yorkshire for about a year while his sisters stayed in London.

His interest in photography had its origins at Clare College at the University of Cambridge, where he studied modern languages and worked at the student newspaper. After he graduated and served in the British Army, he began working at The Sunday Times of London and other publications, which brought him to Brian Epstein’s attention.

Mr. Freeman’s career ranged well beyond his short time with the Beatles. While still shooting their album covers, he was hired in 1963 to be the first photographer of the sexy glamour calendar published by the Pirelli tire company. One model he photographed for the 1964 calendar was Sonny Spielhagen, his first wife. They would later divorce.

He went on to make television commercials in Britain and directed the films “The Touchables” (1968) and “Secret World” (1969), which starred Jacqueline Bisset. He photographed Sophia Loren, Andy Warhol and Jimmy Cliff, and made a film of a performance by Mr. Cliff.

While living in Hong Kong with Ms. Rowan, his second wife, he took up landscape photography and formed a company with her to produce and direct commercials.

In the 1990s he moved to Spain, where he became friendly with the director Pedro Almodóvar and took pictures of him and Penélope Cruz, his frequent star.

He is survived by a daughter and a son, Janine and Dean Freeman, from his marriage to Ms. Spielhagen; a daughter, Holly Freeman, from his marriage to Ms. Rowan, an author; six grandchildren; one great-grandson; and a sister, Barbara Floyd.

Mr. Freeman stayed in Spain for about 20 years, selling his photographs privately before a stroke led him to move back to London. 

“He lost the use of his left hand and couldn’t walk properly,” Ms. Rowan said by phone. “He’d shuffle around his apartment and would take pictures in Battersea Park from his wheelchair.”

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Gerry Teekens, founder and proprietor of Criss Cross Jazz, an unassuming Dutch indie label that became a vital repository of recorded jazz from the 1980s onward, died on Oct. 31. He was 83.

His death was confirmed by his son, Jerry Teekens, Jr. At the news, tributes poured in from Criss Cross artists old and new, including soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome and guitarist David Gilmore.

Formerly a professional drummer, Teekens founded Criss Cross in 1981 with a mission to document swinging, straight-ahead jazz of the highest caliber. At first the roster featured musicians as revered as guitarist Jimmy Raney and saxophonist Warne Marsh, but it grew to include the young and the promising: saxophonists Kenny Garrett, Chris Potter and Mark Turner, to name but a few, and pianists Orrin Evans, Bill Charlap and Benny Green.

Multiple times a year, Teekens would cross the ocean from Enschede, Netherlands (thus the Criss Cross name), taking up at Rudy Van Gelder’s famed studio in New Jersey (and later at Systems Two in Brooklyn) for a full week of recording — knocking out an album a day, in the old-school way.

In recent years the Criss Cross aesthetic began to broaden, with artists like alto saxophonist David Binney and trumpeter Alex Sipiagin using electronics and synthesizers, moving beyond the strictures of one-take-and-done while still remaining on board with the label.

Teekens had his diehard personal tastes — his fondness for standards, bebop and blues — but he also trusted artists with whom he’d developed a track record and a rapport. So he oversaw a catalog that came to embody some of jazz’s inner tensions, as a music of tradition and change all at once.

Criss Cross releases have a certain standardized and simple look, each one accompanied by lengthy liner notes reflecting a fastidious house style. I wrote more than 30 of these, starting in 2002. Teekens would sometimes invite me to Systems Two — where I witnessed recording sessions by pianist David Kikoski and guitarists Adam Rogers, Lage Lund and Mike Moreno, among others — before commissioning me to write.

He wasn’t especially chatty between takes, and hard to read at times, but out of the blue he could start reminiscing about seeing Bud Powell live in Europe in the early ’60s. Inscrutably, he might cease contact for years, only to end the silence with a sudden voicemail, in that unmistakably gravelly high-pitched voice: “This is Gerry Teekens. I need some liner notes. I’m in a terrible hurry.”

In an email, Orrin Evans remembers Teekens as “an opinionated dude with strong views on what was ‘swinging’ or not.” Evans adds: “Most times we fought about my sidemen and the material I chose for my record dates — but he helped me pay my rent with those dates at least once a year, and by watching him run a label I learned what to do and what not to do when I started my label.”

Gerry Teekens was born on Dec. 5, 1935 in The Hague, Netherlands. After a stint as a working drummer, he became a professor of German studies and taught the subject for 25 years. In his free time, he organized tours and concerts for American jazz musicians including Marsh and Raney, two of Criss Cross’ inaugural artists, along with trumpeters Johnny Coles and Chet Baker, pianists Kirk Lightsey and Kenny Barron, saxophonist Clifford Jordan and others.

In addition to his son, Teekens is survived by his wife and two grandchildren.

The best way to appreciate Teekens’ significance is to catalog-dive the 400-plus recordings listed at the utilitarian yet efficient Criss Cross website. What you’ll find is a specific yet wideranging subset of modern jazz history, starting in the Young Lion years, with heady releases by the likes of trumpeter Tom Harrell (Moon Alley) and saxophonist Sam Newsome (Sam I Am, his debut and only recording on tenor).

A few years later comes Mark Turner’s influential debut Yam-Yam, along with efforts by Tim Warfield, Ralph Bowen, Walt Weiskopf and Seamus Blake — a tenor sax lineage that carried forward on the label with Dayna Stephens and Noah Preminger.

Trombonists Wycliffe Gordon, Conrad Herwig and Steve Davis had a healthy presence as well, as did the late organist Melvin Rhyne. The label’s output began to slow around 2017; its three releases in 2019 were Preminger’s After Life, Lage Lund’s Terrible Animals and bassist Matt Brewer’s Ganymede.

In a critical appreciation of Teekens and Criss Cross for The New York Times in 1996, Peter Watrous compared the label’s role to that of Blue Note or Prestige in the ‘50s.

“It is recording works that make up the backbone of jazz, played by musicians who might not be photogenic, charismatic or extroverted enough to be taken up by the pop star-making machinery of major labels,” Watrous wrote. “Criss Cross’ releases are a record of the daily activity of jazz practice without the intrusion of marketing or the weight of financial expectation.”

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Founder of international jazz label Criss Cross passed away in EnschedeENSCHEDE – In May the newest CD was released on the international label Criss Cross Jazz, with the title After Life, oddly enough. Gerry Teekens, the man who started the internationally acclaimed label in 1981 and kept it on his own, died on October 31 in his hometown of Enschede at the age of 83.Ton Ouwehand06-11-19, 16:01 Gerry Teekens , owner of the international record company Criss Cross Jazz. © Wim Corduwener At the end of the sixties, he came to Enschede from The Hague to become a German teacher at Ichthus College. He chose Enschede because a home was offered. He then had a life as a jazz musician as a drummer. He was a teacher for 25 years. He gave music to it, he thought that was too serious a thing to do. He did organize jazz concerts at the Ichthus. The Sesjun radio program was broadcast live from the auditorium a number of times. Teekens had important American jazz musicians playing there: saxonists Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Teddy Edwards, guitarists Jimmy Raney, Doug Raney and vibraphonist Dave Pike. He invited pupils such as Adje van den Berg and Herman Kok at home. He would let them hear what was really good, Adje told later. At Teekens he first heard the great jazz guitarists. Paul Acket Bird Award Teekens was a full-time teacher, but he led a double life in jazz. During the school holidays he organized tours of important American musicians through Europe. He collected jazz records all his life. At concerts, he was ready with sound carriers afterwards. It often happened that he gave German on Monday morning at 8 am, while he was just coming from Paris. The American guitarist Jimmy Raney meant a lot to him. To record the music, he rented a studio after a tour: Raney ’81 became the first Criss Cross album. More than four hundred would follow. Especially of young musicians, many of whom have become top of the jazz world. North Sea Jazz distinguished him in 1999 with a Paul Acket Bird Award. His son Jerry announced that he would continue Criss Cross with his two daughters. “My father’s life’s work cannot be lost.”
 

Oprichter internationaal jazzlabel Criss Cross overleden in Enschede

ENSCHEDE – In mei verscheen de nieuwste cd op het internationale label Criss Cross Jazz, met gek genoeg de titel After Life. Gerry Teekens, de man die in 1981 het internationaal hoog aangeschreven label begon en in z’n eentje draaiend hield, is op 31 oktober in zijn woonplaats Enschede op 83-jarige leeftijd overleden.

Ton Ouwehand06-11-19, 16:01

Eind jaren zestig kwam hij vanuit Den Haag naar Enschede om leraar Duits te worden op het Ichthus College. Hij koos voor Enschede omdat er een woning bij werd aangeboden. Hij had er toen als drummer een leven als jazzmuzikant opzitten. Op de kop af 25 jaar was hij docent. Het musiceren gaf hij eraan, dat vond hij een te serieuze zaak om erbij te doen. Wel organiseerde hij jazzconcerten op het Ichthus. 

Het radioprogramma Sesjun werd een aantal keren live vanuit de aula uitgezonden. Teekens liet er belangrijke Amerikaanse jazzmusici spelen: de saxonisten Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Teddy Edwards, de gitaristen Jimmy Raney, Doug Raney en vibrafonist Dave Pike.

Leerlingen als Adje van den Berg en Herman Kok nodigde hij thuis uit. Hij zou ze laten horen wat echt goed was, vertelde Adje later. Bij Teekens hoorde hij voor het eerst de grote jazzgitaristen.

Paul Acket Bird Award

Teekens was fulltime docent, maar hij leidde een dubbelleven in de jazz. In de schoolvakanties organiseerde hij tournees van belangrijke Amerikaanse musici door Europa. Hij verzamelde zijn hele leven jazzplaten. Bij concerten stond hij na afloop klaar met geluidsdragers. Het kwam regelmatig voor dat hij op maandagochtend om 8 uur Duits gaf, terwijl net uit Parijs kwam. 

De Amerikaanse gitarist Jimmy Raney betekende veel voor hem. Om de muziek vast te leggen huurde hij na een tournee een studio: Raney’81 werd de eerste Criss Cross-plaat. Er zouden er meer dan vierhonderd volgen. Met name van jonge musici, van wie velen tot de top van de jazzwereld zijn gaan behoren. North Sea Jazz onderscheidde hem in 1999 met een Paul Acket Bird Award.

Zijn zoon Jerry laat weten Criss Cross samen met zijn twee dochters voort te zetten. “Het levenswerk van mijn vader mag niet verloren gaan.”

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