Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed

Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/business/norman-c-pickering-refined-the-record-player-dies-at-99.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries

** Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99
————————————————————

By BRUCE WEBER (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/bruce_weber/index.html) NOV. 28, 2015

Norman Pickering, photographed in 1986, also studied the acoustics of stringed instruments. Rameshwar Das

Norman C. Pickering, an engineer, inventor and musician whose pursuit of audio clarity and beauty helped make phonograph records and musical instruments sound better, died on Nov. 18 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 99.

His wife, Barbara, said the cause was cancer.

“I only do what I love to do,” Mr. Pickering told The New York Times in 1986 (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/04/nyregion/long-islanders-an-engineer-musician-pursues-the-sound-of-perfection.html) , though that did not limit him much.

A man of intellectual energy and wandering curiosity, Mr. Pickering flew planes and designed solutions to help mammoth passenger aircraft manage vibration issues. He played the French horn because a baseball injury to his hand upended his aspiration to be an orchestral violinist. He studied the acoustical properties of stringed instruments, and he aided ophthalmologists by developing an ultrasound method for identifying eye ailments.

Record lovers, however, probably owe him the most. In 1945, Mr. Pickering, who enjoyed listening to records and was frustrated by the sound quality of recordings, developed an improved pickup — that is, the mechanism that includes the phonograph needle, or stylus, and translates the information in the groove of a record into an electrical signal that can be reproduced as sound.

Previous pickups were heavier and more unwieldy; styluses were made of steel, they needed to be replaced frequently, and the weight of the mechanism wore out records after a limited number of plays.

The so-called Pickering pickup (and later, its even more compact iteration, the Pickering cartridge) was introduced just as the favored material for records was shifting from shellac to vinyl, which had a lower playback noise level.

Originally designed for use in broadcast and recording studios, it was a fraction of the size of earlier models, and it replaced the steel of the stylus with a significantly lighter and harder material — sapphire or diamond — which lasted much longer and traced a more feathery path along the record. Because of it, records lasted longer and original sounds were reproduced with less distortion.

The difference “wasn’t just a little, it was magnificent,” Mr. Pickering recalled in a 2005 interview for an oral history program of the National Association of Music Merchants (https://www.namm.org/) .

Norman Charles Pickering was born in Brooklyn on July 9, 1916. His father, Herbert, was a marine engineer who disapproved of his son’s interest in music.

“His father thought it was for sissies,” Mr. Pickering’s wife, Barbara, said. But his mother, the former Elsie Elliott, played the piano, and young Norman learned to read music sitting by her side on the piano bench. Her mother introduced him to the violin, starting his lessons at age 7.

As a teenager, Mr. Pickering hurt his right hand playing ball, so he turned to the French horn. (Its valves are played with the left hand.)

At his father’s insistence, though he would have preferred music school, Mr. Pickering attended Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) and after graduating went to Juilliard.

In 1937, he joined the fledgling Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, playing three seasons in the horn section, and in 1940, he joined C. G. Conn (now Conn-Selmer (http://www.conn-selmer.com/en-us/) ), a leading manufacturer of musical instruments in Elkhart, Ind., where he helped design instruments, including a Conn model French horn that has been in wide professional use.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the C. G. Conn plant was converted by the Sperry Gyroscope Company to produce aircraft instruments, and Mr. Pickering spent the war years in a Sperry research laboratory on Long Island. The work sparked his interest in aviation and led to his vibration control designs for Boeing 707s and 747s.

Mr. Pickering, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, married the former Barbara Goldowsky, a writer who uses her maiden name professionally, in 1979. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter, Judith Crow; three sons, David, Frederick and Rolf Pickering; two stepsons, Alexander and Boris Goldowsky; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1948, Mr. Pickering was among the founders of the Audio Engineering Society (http://www.aes.org/) , now an international organization that disseminates news and information about improvements in audio technology.

In the 1970s, he worked in a laboratory at Southampton Hospital in Southampton, N.Y., where he developed his ultrasound diagnostic technique for the eyes. After 1980, he turned to his first love, violins, studying their acoustics; serving as president of the Violin Society of America (http://www.vsaweb.org/) ; consulting for D’Addario, a manufacturer of guitar strings and orchestral strings; and building violins and bows.

Oddly enough, given the musical pleasures for living-room listeners that Mr. Pickering’s pickup engendered, the inventor himself did not envision it as a product for wide use; his aim was to aid broadcasters and recording companies. But as high-fidelity equipment grew in sophistication and popularity, demand for his pickups ballooned, and by the mid-1950s, his manufacturing company employed more than 150 people.

“It was a big surprise to me that the public took to this device as they did,” Mr. Pickering said in a 2011 oral history interview for the engineering society. “It was never intended to be a consumer product. It was a professional transducer for people in the record business. So we found that we were selling them right and left for people who just wanted to play records at home.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=eaf01e4b94) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=eaf01e4b94&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/business/norman-c-pickering-refined-the-record-player-dies-at-99.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries

** Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99
————————————————————

By BRUCE WEBER (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/bruce_weber/index.html) NOV. 28, 2015

Norman Pickering, photographed in 1986, also studied the acoustics of stringed instruments. Rameshwar Das

Norman C. Pickering, an engineer, inventor and musician whose pursuit of audio clarity and beauty helped make phonograph records and musical instruments sound better, died on Nov. 18 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 99.

His wife, Barbara, said the cause was cancer.

“I only do what I love to do,” Mr. Pickering told The New York Times in 1986 (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/04/nyregion/long-islanders-an-engineer-musician-pursues-the-sound-of-perfection.html) , though that did not limit him much.

A man of intellectual energy and wandering curiosity, Mr. Pickering flew planes and designed solutions to help mammoth passenger aircraft manage vibration issues. He played the French horn because a baseball injury to his hand upended his aspiration to be an orchestral violinist. He studied the acoustical properties of stringed instruments, and he aided ophthalmologists by developing an ultrasound method for identifying eye ailments.

Record lovers, however, probably owe him the most. In 1945, Mr. Pickering, who enjoyed listening to records and was frustrated by the sound quality of recordings, developed an improved pickup — that is, the mechanism that includes the phonograph needle, or stylus, and translates the information in the groove of a record into an electrical signal that can be reproduced as sound.

Previous pickups were heavier and more unwieldy; styluses were made of steel, they needed to be replaced frequently, and the weight of the mechanism wore out records after a limited number of plays.

The so-called Pickering pickup (and later, its even more compact iteration, the Pickering cartridge) was introduced just as the favored material for records was shifting from shellac to vinyl, which had a lower playback noise level.

Originally designed for use in broadcast and recording studios, it was a fraction of the size of earlier models, and it replaced the steel of the stylus with a significantly lighter and harder material — sapphire or diamond — which lasted much longer and traced a more feathery path along the record. Because of it, records lasted longer and original sounds were reproduced with less distortion.

The difference “wasn’t just a little, it was magnificent,” Mr. Pickering recalled in a 2005 interview for an oral history program of the National Association of Music Merchants (https://www.namm.org/) .

Norman Charles Pickering was born in Brooklyn on July 9, 1916. His father, Herbert, was a marine engineer who disapproved of his son’s interest in music.

“His father thought it was for sissies,” Mr. Pickering’s wife, Barbara, said. But his mother, the former Elsie Elliott, played the piano, and young Norman learned to read music sitting by her side on the piano bench. Her mother introduced him to the violin, starting his lessons at age 7.

As a teenager, Mr. Pickering hurt his right hand playing ball, so he turned to the French horn. (Its valves are played with the left hand.)

At his father’s insistence, though he would have preferred music school, Mr. Pickering attended Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) and after graduating went to Juilliard.

In 1937, he joined the fledgling Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, playing three seasons in the horn section, and in 1940, he joined C. G. Conn (now Conn-Selmer (http://www.conn-selmer.com/en-us/) ), a leading manufacturer of musical instruments in Elkhart, Ind., where he helped design instruments, including a Conn model French horn that has been in wide professional use.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the C. G. Conn plant was converted by the Sperry Gyroscope Company to produce aircraft instruments, and Mr. Pickering spent the war years in a Sperry research laboratory on Long Island. The work sparked his interest in aviation and led to his vibration control designs for Boeing 707s and 747s.

Mr. Pickering, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, married the former Barbara Goldowsky, a writer who uses her maiden name professionally, in 1979. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter, Judith Crow; three sons, David, Frederick and Rolf Pickering; two stepsons, Alexander and Boris Goldowsky; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1948, Mr. Pickering was among the founders of the Audio Engineering Society (http://www.aes.org/) , now an international organization that disseminates news and information about improvements in audio technology.

In the 1970s, he worked in a laboratory at Southampton Hospital in Southampton, N.Y., where he developed his ultrasound diagnostic technique for the eyes. After 1980, he turned to his first love, violins, studying their acoustics; serving as president of the Violin Society of America (http://www.vsaweb.org/) ; consulting for D’Addario, a manufacturer of guitar strings and orchestral strings; and building violins and bows.

Oddly enough, given the musical pleasures for living-room listeners that Mr. Pickering’s pickup engendered, the inventor himself did not envision it as a product for wide use; his aim was to aid broadcasters and recording companies. But as high-fidelity equipment grew in sophistication and popularity, demand for his pickups ballooned, and by the mid-1950s, his manufacturing company employed more than 150 people.

“It was a big surprise to me that the public took to this device as they did,” Mr. Pickering said in a 2011 oral history interview for the engineering society. “It was never intended to be a consumer product. It was a professional transducer for people in the record business. So we found that we were selling them right and left for people who just wanted to play records at home.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=eaf01e4b94) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=eaf01e4b94&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/business/norman-c-pickering-refined-the-record-player-dies-at-99.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries

** Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99
————————————————————

By BRUCE WEBER (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/bruce_weber/index.html) NOV. 28, 2015

Norman Pickering, photographed in 1986, also studied the acoustics of stringed instruments. Rameshwar Das

Norman C. Pickering, an engineer, inventor and musician whose pursuit of audio clarity and beauty helped make phonograph records and musical instruments sound better, died on Nov. 18 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 99.

His wife, Barbara, said the cause was cancer.

“I only do what I love to do,” Mr. Pickering told The New York Times in 1986 (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/04/nyregion/long-islanders-an-engineer-musician-pursues-the-sound-of-perfection.html) , though that did not limit him much.

A man of intellectual energy and wandering curiosity, Mr. Pickering flew planes and designed solutions to help mammoth passenger aircraft manage vibration issues. He played the French horn because a baseball injury to his hand upended his aspiration to be an orchestral violinist. He studied the acoustical properties of stringed instruments, and he aided ophthalmologists by developing an ultrasound method for identifying eye ailments.

Record lovers, however, probably owe him the most. In 1945, Mr. Pickering, who enjoyed listening to records and was frustrated by the sound quality of recordings, developed an improved pickup — that is, the mechanism that includes the phonograph needle, or stylus, and translates the information in the groove of a record into an electrical signal that can be reproduced as sound.

Previous pickups were heavier and more unwieldy; styluses were made of steel, they needed to be replaced frequently, and the weight of the mechanism wore out records after a limited number of plays.

The so-called Pickering pickup (and later, its even more compact iteration, the Pickering cartridge) was introduced just as the favored material for records was shifting from shellac to vinyl, which had a lower playback noise level.

Originally designed for use in broadcast and recording studios, it was a fraction of the size of earlier models, and it replaced the steel of the stylus with a significantly lighter and harder material — sapphire or diamond — which lasted much longer and traced a more feathery path along the record. Because of it, records lasted longer and original sounds were reproduced with less distortion.

The difference “wasn’t just a little, it was magnificent,” Mr. Pickering recalled in a 2005 interview for an oral history program of the National Association of Music Merchants (https://www.namm.org/) .

Norman Charles Pickering was born in Brooklyn on July 9, 1916. His father, Herbert, was a marine engineer who disapproved of his son’s interest in music.

“His father thought it was for sissies,” Mr. Pickering’s wife, Barbara, said. But his mother, the former Elsie Elliott, played the piano, and young Norman learned to read music sitting by her side on the piano bench. Her mother introduced him to the violin, starting his lessons at age 7.

As a teenager, Mr. Pickering hurt his right hand playing ball, so he turned to the French horn. (Its valves are played with the left hand.)

At his father’s insistence, though he would have preferred music school, Mr. Pickering attended Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) and after graduating went to Juilliard.

In 1937, he joined the fledgling Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, playing three seasons in the horn section, and in 1940, he joined C. G. Conn (now Conn-Selmer (http://www.conn-selmer.com/en-us/) ), a leading manufacturer of musical instruments in Elkhart, Ind., where he helped design instruments, including a Conn model French horn that has been in wide professional use.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the C. G. Conn plant was converted by the Sperry Gyroscope Company to produce aircraft instruments, and Mr. Pickering spent the war years in a Sperry research laboratory on Long Island. The work sparked his interest in aviation and led to his vibration control designs for Boeing 707s and 747s.

Mr. Pickering, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, married the former Barbara Goldowsky, a writer who uses her maiden name professionally, in 1979. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter, Judith Crow; three sons, David, Frederick and Rolf Pickering; two stepsons, Alexander and Boris Goldowsky; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1948, Mr. Pickering was among the founders of the Audio Engineering Society (http://www.aes.org/) , now an international organization that disseminates news and information about improvements in audio technology.

In the 1970s, he worked in a laboratory at Southampton Hospital in Southampton, N.Y., where he developed his ultrasound diagnostic technique for the eyes. After 1980, he turned to his first love, violins, studying their acoustics; serving as president of the Violin Society of America (http://www.vsaweb.org/) ; consulting for D’Addario, a manufacturer of guitar strings and orchestral strings; and building violins and bows.

Oddly enough, given the musical pleasures for living-room listeners that Mr. Pickering’s pickup engendered, the inventor himself did not envision it as a product for wide use; his aim was to aid broadcasters and recording companies. But as high-fidelity equipment grew in sophistication and popularity, demand for his pickups ballooned, and by the mid-1950s, his manufacturing company employed more than 150 people.

“It was a big surprise to me that the public took to this device as they did,” Mr. Pickering said in a 2011 oral history interview for the engineering society. “It was never intended to be a consumer product. It was a professional transducer for people in the record business. So we found that we were selling them right and left for people who just wanted to play records at home.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=eaf01e4b94) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=eaf01e4b94&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/business/norman-c-pickering-refined-the-record-player-dies-at-99.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fobituaries

** Norman C. Pickering, Who Refined the Record Player, Dies at 99
————————————————————

By BRUCE WEBER (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/bruce_weber/index.html) NOV. 28, 2015

Norman Pickering, photographed in 1986, also studied the acoustics of stringed instruments. Rameshwar Das

Norman C. Pickering, an engineer, inventor and musician whose pursuit of audio clarity and beauty helped make phonograph records and musical instruments sound better, died on Nov. 18 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 99.

His wife, Barbara, said the cause was cancer.

“I only do what I love to do,” Mr. Pickering told The New York Times in 1986 (http://www.nytimes.com/1986/05/04/nyregion/long-islanders-an-engineer-musician-pursues-the-sound-of-perfection.html) , though that did not limit him much.

A man of intellectual energy and wandering curiosity, Mr. Pickering flew planes and designed solutions to help mammoth passenger aircraft manage vibration issues. He played the French horn because a baseball injury to his hand upended his aspiration to be an orchestral violinist. He studied the acoustical properties of stringed instruments, and he aided ophthalmologists by developing an ultrasound method for identifying eye ailments.

Record lovers, however, probably owe him the most. In 1945, Mr. Pickering, who enjoyed listening to records and was frustrated by the sound quality of recordings, developed an improved pickup — that is, the mechanism that includes the phonograph needle, or stylus, and translates the information in the groove of a record into an electrical signal that can be reproduced as sound.

Previous pickups were heavier and more unwieldy; styluses were made of steel, they needed to be replaced frequently, and the weight of the mechanism wore out records after a limited number of plays.

The so-called Pickering pickup (and later, its even more compact iteration, the Pickering cartridge) was introduced just as the favored material for records was shifting from shellac to vinyl, which had a lower playback noise level.

Originally designed for use in broadcast and recording studios, it was a fraction of the size of earlier models, and it replaced the steel of the stylus with a significantly lighter and harder material — sapphire or diamond — which lasted much longer and traced a more feathery path along the record. Because of it, records lasted longer and original sounds were reproduced with less distortion.

The difference “wasn’t just a little, it was magnificent,” Mr. Pickering recalled in a 2005 interview for an oral history program of the National Association of Music Merchants (https://www.namm.org/) .

Norman Charles Pickering was born in Brooklyn on July 9, 1916. His father, Herbert, was a marine engineer who disapproved of his son’s interest in music.

“His father thought it was for sissies,” Mr. Pickering’s wife, Barbara, said. But his mother, the former Elsie Elliott, played the piano, and young Norman learned to read music sitting by her side on the piano bench. Her mother introduced him to the violin, starting his lessons at age 7.

As a teenager, Mr. Pickering hurt his right hand playing ball, so he turned to the French horn. (Its valves are played with the left hand.)

At his father’s insistence, though he would have preferred music school, Mr. Pickering attended Newark College of Engineering (now part of the New Jersey Institute of Technology) and after graduating went to Juilliard.

In 1937, he joined the fledgling Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, playing three seasons in the horn section, and in 1940, he joined C. G. Conn (now Conn-Selmer (http://www.conn-selmer.com/en-us/) ), a leading manufacturer of musical instruments in Elkhart, Ind., where he helped design instruments, including a Conn model French horn that has been in wide professional use.

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the C. G. Conn plant was converted by the Sperry Gyroscope Company to produce aircraft instruments, and Mr. Pickering spent the war years in a Sperry research laboratory on Long Island. The work sparked his interest in aviation and led to his vibration control designs for Boeing 707s and 747s.

Mr. Pickering, whose first two marriages ended in divorce, married the former Barbara Goldowsky, a writer who uses her maiden name professionally, in 1979. In addition to her, he is survived by a daughter, Judith Crow; three sons, David, Frederick and Rolf Pickering; two stepsons, Alexander and Boris Goldowsky; and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 1948, Mr. Pickering was among the founders of the Audio Engineering Society (http://www.aes.org/) , now an international organization that disseminates news and information about improvements in audio technology.

In the 1970s, he worked in a laboratory at Southampton Hospital in Southampton, N.Y., where he developed his ultrasound diagnostic technique for the eyes. After 1980, he turned to his first love, violins, studying their acoustics; serving as president of the Violin Society of America (http://www.vsaweb.org/) ; consulting for D’Addario, a manufacturer of guitar strings and orchestral strings; and building violins and bows.

Oddly enough, given the musical pleasures for living-room listeners that Mr. Pickering’s pickup engendered, the inventor himself did not envision it as a product for wide use; his aim was to aid broadcasters and recording companies. But as high-fidelity equipment grew in sophistication and popularity, demand for his pickups ballooned, and by the mid-1950s, his manufacturing company employed more than 150 people.

“It was a big surprise to me that the public took to this device as they did,” Mr. Pickering said in a 2011 oral history interview for the engineering society. “It was never intended to be a consumer product. It was a professional transducer for people in the record business. So we found that we were selling them right and left for people who just wanted to play records at home.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=eaf01e4b94) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=eaf01e4b94&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

‘Jaco,’ a Documentary About the Jazz Musician Jaco Pastorius – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/arts/music/review-jaco-a-documentary-about-the-jazz-musician-jaco-pastorius.html?_r=0

** ‘Jaco,’ a Documentary About the Jazz Musician Jaco Pastorius
————————————————————

By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) NOV. 27, 2015

Jaco Pastorius, recording his first album in 1975. Courtesy Legacy Recordings, Slang East/West LLC

When Jaco Pastorius first met Joe Zawinul, the keyboardist and composer behind Weather Report, he had his introduction ready. “My name is John Francis Pastorius III,” he said, as Zawinul later remembered. “I’m the greatest bass player in the world.”

That line appears more than once in “Jaco (http://jacopastorius.com/film/) ,” an illuminating, compassionate new documentary, and its hubris comes across as both playful and deeply serious. Pastorius, who died tragically in 1987 at 35, was a sensation in his time. A maestro of the fretless electric bass guitar, he was revered for his warm, singing tone; his distinctly sinewy attack; and his mastery of harmonics, with which he could play chiming chords and a range of expressive effects.

In his brief but estimable solo career — and during his tenure as a member of Weather Report, (http://www.weatherreportdiscography.org/) a jazz fusion band then working at arena scale — Pastorius left an impression of irrepressible creative energies humming at a complicated frequency. He’s often remembered, reductively, as a tortured genius. The film is conscientious about providing a fuller picture, while acknowledging that there’s no way of knowing what he might still have become.
Joni Mitchell, who worked with Pastorius on albums including “Hejira.” Slang East/West

“Jaco” was produced and financed by Robert Trujillo, the bassist in Metallica, who has a formative teenage memory of Pastorius in concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The film took shape over the last six years, as Mr. Trujillo conducted dozens of interviews and gathered a pile of archival footage, including home movies shot on Super 8. The result, directed by Paul Marchand and Stephen Kijak and now available on DVD and Blu-ray, adheres to standard documentary form, but with enough rare footagand flickering insight to feel like something special.

The signs of Pastorius’s influence are widespread in pop as well as in jazz, and not just among instrumental heirs like Richard Bona and Esperanza Spalding. “Jaco” assembles testimonials from prominent rock and funk bassists (Bootsy Collins, Sting, Flea) as well as former friends and colleagues. Some of the most revealing firsthand material comes from an instructional video that Pastorius made in the early 1980s with the soul bassist Jerry Jemmott, an admiring peer.

Pastorius grew up near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., listening to a mélange of music, including broadcasts from Cuba, which he picked up with a transistor radio. “Many of the patterns that Jaco played on the bass were really conga patterns,” the drummer Peter Erskine, a close musical partner in and out of Weather Report, observes in the film.

“Jaco” does a fine job of evoking the Floridian idyll of Pastorius’s early years, during which he was a musician with steady gigs, playing neighborhood clubs. His first major touring gig was with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, a hotshot white Southern soul act. The film briskly moves from this period to Pastorius’s discovery by Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat & Tears, who brought him to New York to record his self-titled debut album

That album, which included his signature originals “Continuum” and “Portrait of Tracy,” and a head-turning version of “Donna Lee,” established Pastorius as an onrushing force. He had begun to circulate as a sideman, working with artists like Ian Hunter, whose solo album “All American Alien Boy” features a bravura 16-bar bass solo on its title track (https://youtu.be/RXiYkOEBv8U) . In the film, Mr. Hunter recalls Pastorius as a figure of almost childlike focus: “Enormous ego, but innocent.”

The film delves deeper into another association, with Joni Mitchell, whose albums “Hejira,” “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and “Mingus” are unimaginable without Pastorius; to call him the bassist on those sessions somehow undersells his role. Some of the most striking performance footage of Pastorius in the film comes from Ms. Mitchell’s 1979 tour with a band also featuring Michael Brecker on saxophones and Pat Metheny on guitar.6

Mr. Metheny is a conspicuous absence among the talking heads in “Jaco,” and there’s barely a nod to his 1976 album, “Bright Size Life,” one of the more significant entries in the Pastorius sideman discography. Where the film makes up for this and other flaws is in its treatment of Weather Report, which resembled a pressure cooker.

Describing the dynamic between Pastorius and Zawinul, who died in 2007, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/arts/12zawinul.html) Robert Thomas Jr., the band’s longtime percussionist, drew a more volatile metaphor: “Two cobras in a very small cage.” Still, Pastorius made a defining contribution to Weather Report, on the smash-hit album “Heavy Weather” and especially in concert: A vital new four-CD boxed set, “The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978-1981” (Columbia/Legacy), provides all the proof anyone could need (https://youtu.be/T8zIvxm9CW4) .

The film traces the subsequent trajectory Pastorius took from an aesthetically ambitious, large-canvas second album, “Word of Mouth,” toward increasingly erratic public behavior. A psychiatrist from Bellevue Hospital, where he was committed in 1986, turns up to reiterate his diagnosis of bipolar disorder. By the end, Pastorius was back in Fort Lauderdale, living in a park. He died of a brain hemorrhage after being assaulted by a manager of a nightclub.

“Jaco,” which portrays its subject in better times as a devoted father, is sensitive on the subject of his mental illness, and far less provocative than it could be about his death. (Not much is said about the club manager, not even that he served a mere four months in prison (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-07-04/news/8902190261_1_gain-time-jaco-pastorius-luc-havan) .) At one point, Mr. Erskine ruefully recalls how Pastorius had become a cartoon wild man, indulging people’s outsize expectations for his behavior. And Mary Pastorius and John Pastorius IV, his oldest children, each reflect touchingly on the father they lost.

Early in the film, during a clip from his instructional video, Pastorius seems to engage in similar reflection. “What drove you to this point?” Mr. Jemmott asks plainly, and the moment of embarrassed, shifty silence that follows is heartbreaking — a reminder that whether Pastorius was the world’s greatest bass player may actually be one of the less crucial questions to ask about him.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=6599f3cf32) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=6599f3cf32&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

‘Jaco,’ a Documentary About the Jazz Musician Jaco Pastorius – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/arts/music/review-jaco-a-documentary-about-the-jazz-musician-jaco-pastorius.html?_r=0

** ‘Jaco,’ a Documentary About the Jazz Musician Jaco Pastorius
————————————————————

By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) NOV. 27, 2015

Jaco Pastorius, recording his first album in 1975. Courtesy Legacy Recordings, Slang East/West LLC

When Jaco Pastorius first met Joe Zawinul, the keyboardist and composer behind Weather Report, he had his introduction ready. “My name is John Francis Pastorius III,” he said, as Zawinul later remembered. “I’m the greatest bass player in the world.”

That line appears more than once in “Jaco (http://jacopastorius.com/film/) ,” an illuminating, compassionate new documentary, and its hubris comes across as both playful and deeply serious. Pastorius, who died tragically in 1987 at 35, was a sensation in his time. A maestro of the fretless electric bass guitar, he was revered for his warm, singing tone; his distinctly sinewy attack; and his mastery of harmonics, with which he could play chiming chords and a range of expressive effects.

In his brief but estimable solo career — and during his tenure as a member of Weather Report, (http://www.weatherreportdiscography.org/) a jazz fusion band then working at arena scale — Pastorius left an impression of irrepressible creative energies humming at a complicated frequency. He’s often remembered, reductively, as a tortured genius. The film is conscientious about providing a fuller picture, while acknowledging that there’s no way of knowing what he might still have become.
Joni Mitchell, who worked with Pastorius on albums including “Hejira.” Slang East/West

“Jaco” was produced and financed by Robert Trujillo, the bassist in Metallica, who has a formative teenage memory of Pastorius in concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The film took shape over the last six years, as Mr. Trujillo conducted dozens of interviews and gathered a pile of archival footage, including home movies shot on Super 8. The result, directed by Paul Marchand and Stephen Kijak and now available on DVD and Blu-ray, adheres to standard documentary form, but with enough rare footagand flickering insight to feel like something special.

The signs of Pastorius’s influence are widespread in pop as well as in jazz, and not just among instrumental heirs like Richard Bona and Esperanza Spalding. “Jaco” assembles testimonials from prominent rock and funk bassists (Bootsy Collins, Sting, Flea) as well as former friends and colleagues. Some of the most revealing firsthand material comes from an instructional video that Pastorius made in the early 1980s with the soul bassist Jerry Jemmott, an admiring peer.

Pastorius grew up near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., listening to a mélange of music, including broadcasts from Cuba, which he picked up with a transistor radio. “Many of the patterns that Jaco played on the bass were really conga patterns,” the drummer Peter Erskine, a close musical partner in and out of Weather Report, observes in the film.

“Jaco” does a fine job of evoking the Floridian idyll of Pastorius’s early years, during which he was a musician with steady gigs, playing neighborhood clubs. His first major touring gig was with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, a hotshot white Southern soul act. The film briskly moves from this period to Pastorius’s discovery by Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat & Tears, who brought him to New York to record his self-titled debut album

That album, which included his signature originals “Continuum” and “Portrait of Tracy,” and a head-turning version of “Donna Lee,” established Pastorius as an onrushing force. He had begun to circulate as a sideman, working with artists like Ian Hunter, whose solo album “All American Alien Boy” features a bravura 16-bar bass solo on its title track (https://youtu.be/RXiYkOEBv8U) . In the film, Mr. Hunter recalls Pastorius as a figure of almost childlike focus: “Enormous ego, but innocent.”

The film delves deeper into another association, with Joni Mitchell, whose albums “Hejira,” “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and “Mingus” are unimaginable without Pastorius; to call him the bassist on those sessions somehow undersells his role. Some of the most striking performance footage of Pastorius in the film comes from Ms. Mitchell’s 1979 tour with a band also featuring Michael Brecker on saxophones and Pat Metheny on guitar.6

Mr. Metheny is a conspicuous absence among the talking heads in “Jaco,” and there’s barely a nod to his 1976 album, “Bright Size Life,” one of the more significant entries in the Pastorius sideman discography. Where the film makes up for this and other flaws is in its treatment of Weather Report, which resembled a pressure cooker.

Describing the dynamic between Pastorius and Zawinul, who died in 2007, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/arts/12zawinul.html) Robert Thomas Jr., the band’s longtime percussionist, drew a more volatile metaphor: “Two cobras in a very small cage.” Still, Pastorius made a defining contribution to Weather Report, on the smash-hit album “Heavy Weather” and especially in concert: A vital new four-CD boxed set, “The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978-1981” (Columbia/Legacy), provides all the proof anyone could need (https://youtu.be/T8zIvxm9CW4) .

The film traces the subsequent trajectory Pastorius took from an aesthetically ambitious, large-canvas second album, “Word of Mouth,” toward increasingly erratic public behavior. A psychiatrist from Bellevue Hospital, where he was committed in 1986, turns up to reiterate his diagnosis of bipolar disorder. By the end, Pastorius was back in Fort Lauderdale, living in a park. He died of a brain hemorrhage after being assaulted by a manager of a nightclub.

“Jaco,” which portrays its subject in better times as a devoted father, is sensitive on the subject of his mental illness, and far less provocative than it could be about his death. (Not much is said about the club manager, not even that he served a mere four months in prison (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-07-04/news/8902190261_1_gain-time-jaco-pastorius-luc-havan) .) At one point, Mr. Erskine ruefully recalls how Pastorius had become a cartoon wild man, indulging people’s outsize expectations for his behavior. And Mary Pastorius and John Pastorius IV, his oldest children, each reflect touchingly on the father they lost.

Early in the film, during a clip from his instructional video, Pastorius seems to engage in similar reflection. “What drove you to this point?” Mr. Jemmott asks plainly, and the moment of embarrassed, shifty silence that follows is heartbreaking — a reminder that whether Pastorius was the world’s greatest bass player may actually be one of the less crucial questions to ask about him.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=6599f3cf32) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=6599f3cf32&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

‘Jaco,’ a Documentary About the Jazz Musician Jaco Pastorius – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/28/arts/music/review-jaco-a-documentary-about-the-jazz-musician-jaco-pastorius.html?_r=0

** ‘Jaco,’ a Documentary About the Jazz Musician Jaco Pastorius
————————————————————

By NATE CHINEN (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/nate_chinen/index.html) NOV. 27, 2015

Jaco Pastorius, recording his first album in 1975. Courtesy Legacy Recordings, Slang East/West LLC

When Jaco Pastorius first met Joe Zawinul, the keyboardist and composer behind Weather Report, he had his introduction ready. “My name is John Francis Pastorius III,” he said, as Zawinul later remembered. “I’m the greatest bass player in the world.”

That line appears more than once in “Jaco (http://jacopastorius.com/film/) ,” an illuminating, compassionate new documentary, and its hubris comes across as both playful and deeply serious. Pastorius, who died tragically in 1987 at 35, was a sensation in his time. A maestro of the fretless electric bass guitar, he was revered for his warm, singing tone; his distinctly sinewy attack; and his mastery of harmonics, with which he could play chiming chords and a range of expressive effects.

In his brief but estimable solo career — and during his tenure as a member of Weather Report, (http://www.weatherreportdiscography.org/) a jazz fusion band then working at arena scale — Pastorius left an impression of irrepressible creative energies humming at a complicated frequency. He’s often remembered, reductively, as a tortured genius. The film is conscientious about providing a fuller picture, while acknowledging that there’s no way of knowing what he might still have become.
Joni Mitchell, who worked with Pastorius on albums including “Hejira.” Slang East/West

“Jaco” was produced and financed by Robert Trujillo, the bassist in Metallica, who has a formative teenage memory of Pastorius in concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. The film took shape over the last six years, as Mr. Trujillo conducted dozens of interviews and gathered a pile of archival footage, including home movies shot on Super 8. The result, directed by Paul Marchand and Stephen Kijak and now available on DVD and Blu-ray, adheres to standard documentary form, but with enough rare footagand flickering insight to feel like something special.

The signs of Pastorius’s influence are widespread in pop as well as in jazz, and not just among instrumental heirs like Richard Bona and Esperanza Spalding. “Jaco” assembles testimonials from prominent rock and funk bassists (Bootsy Collins, Sting, Flea) as well as former friends and colleagues. Some of the most revealing firsthand material comes from an instructional video that Pastorius made in the early 1980s with the soul bassist Jerry Jemmott, an admiring peer.

Pastorius grew up near Fort Lauderdale, Fla., listening to a mélange of music, including broadcasts from Cuba, which he picked up with a transistor radio. “Many of the patterns that Jaco played on the bass were really conga patterns,” the drummer Peter Erskine, a close musical partner in and out of Weather Report, observes in the film.

“Jaco” does a fine job of evoking the Floridian idyll of Pastorius’s early years, during which he was a musician with steady gigs, playing neighborhood clubs. His first major touring gig was with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, a hotshot white Southern soul act. The film briskly moves from this period to Pastorius’s discovery by Bobby Colomby of Blood, Sweat & Tears, who brought him to New York to record his self-titled debut album

That album, which included his signature originals “Continuum” and “Portrait of Tracy,” and a head-turning version of “Donna Lee,” established Pastorius as an onrushing force. He had begun to circulate as a sideman, working with artists like Ian Hunter, whose solo album “All American Alien Boy” features a bravura 16-bar bass solo on its title track (https://youtu.be/RXiYkOEBv8U) . In the film, Mr. Hunter recalls Pastorius as a figure of almost childlike focus: “Enormous ego, but innocent.”

The film delves deeper into another association, with Joni Mitchell, whose albums “Hejira,” “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter” and “Mingus” are unimaginable without Pastorius; to call him the bassist on those sessions somehow undersells his role. Some of the most striking performance footage of Pastorius in the film comes from Ms. Mitchell’s 1979 tour with a band also featuring Michael Brecker on saxophones and Pat Metheny on guitar.6

Mr. Metheny is a conspicuous absence among the talking heads in “Jaco,” and there’s barely a nod to his 1976 album, “Bright Size Life,” one of the more significant entries in the Pastorius sideman discography. Where the film makes up for this and other flaws is in its treatment of Weather Report, which resembled a pressure cooker.

Describing the dynamic between Pastorius and Zawinul, who died in 2007, (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/arts/12zawinul.html) Robert Thomas Jr., the band’s longtime percussionist, drew a more volatile metaphor: “Two cobras in a very small cage.” Still, Pastorius made a defining contribution to Weather Report, on the smash-hit album “Heavy Weather” and especially in concert: A vital new four-CD boxed set, “The Legendary Live Tapes: 1978-1981” (Columbia/Legacy), provides all the proof anyone could need (https://youtu.be/T8zIvxm9CW4) .

The film traces the subsequent trajectory Pastorius took from an aesthetically ambitious, large-canvas second album, “Word of Mouth,” toward increasingly erratic public behavior. A psychiatrist from Bellevue Hospital, where he was committed in 1986, turns up to reiterate his diagnosis of bipolar disorder. By the end, Pastorius was back in Fort Lauderdale, living in a park. He died of a brain hemorrhage after being assaulted by a manager of a nightclub.

“Jaco,” which portrays its subject in better times as a devoted father, is sensitive on the subject of his mental illness, and far less provocative than it could be about his death. (Not much is said about the club manager, not even that he served a mere four months in prison (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-07-04/news/8902190261_1_gain-time-jaco-pastorius-luc-havan) .) At one point, Mr. Erskine ruefully recalls how Pastorius had become a cartoon wild man, indulging people’s outsize expectations for his behavior. And Mary Pastorius and John Pastorius IV, his oldest children, each reflect touchingly on the father they lost.

Early in the film, during a clip from his instructional video, Pastorius seems to engage in similar reflection. “What drove you to this point?” Mr. Jemmott asks plainly, and the moment of embarrassed, shifty silence that follows is heartbreaking — a reminder that whether Pastorius was the world’s greatest bass player may actually be one of the less crucial questions to ask about him.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=6599f3cf32) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=6599f3cf32&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/frank-sinatra-and-the-scandalous-but-scholarly-biography

** Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography
————————————————————

BY ADAM GOPNIK (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-gopnik)

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Gopnick-Sinatra-Scandalous-Scholarly-Biography-1187.jpgFrank Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation. Photograph by William Gottlieb / Redferns / Getty Having come out of the closet, or the casino, not long ago, as an unqualified Frank Sinatra idolater (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-pure-artistry-of-frank-sinatra) , I approached the second volume of James Kaplan’s biography of the singer (“Sinatra: The Chairman”) with what our critical mothers and fathers would have called immense trepidation, since the book would have to deal not just with the great man’s best records but with his messy entanglement with the mob and his sad, stultified later years. (I saw him perform once, toward the very end, at Madison Square Garden, and it was like seeing the dead El Cid mounted on his horse to lead the Spanish Army: noble but undeniably stiff.)
Kaplan’s book turns out to be, to continue in the old reviewers’ language, hugely readable, vastly entertaining, a page-turner, and all the rest. But it’s also interesting as a fine instance of a strikingly newish kind of thing: the serious and even scholarly biography of a much gossiped-over pop figure, where the old Kitty Kelley-style scandal-sheet bio is turned into a properly documented and footnoted study that nonetheless trades on, or at least doesn’t exclude, the sensational bits.
Peter Guralnick’s two-volume account of Elvis Presley was the pioneering model of the genre. Designed in some small part to defuse Albert Goldman’s ugly, contemptuous—but often insightful—biography of the King, Guralnick worked through the details of Elvis’s life with more studious patience than Leon Edel devoted to Henry James’s (Guralnick’s long endnote arguing through who actually worked the lathe on Elvis’s first recording, Sam Phillips or his assistant, is a stunner). Guralnick is a fan, and this was both good—he deeply loved Elvis, not just the Sun sessions, which everyone admires, but more ‘problematic’ material, too—and bad, because, in his earnest desire to show Elvis the American singer, he rather slighted Elvis the American icon, who (and Goldman was not wrong in this) enacted the role of self-made King in a kind of instinctive burlesque of all the ancient stereotypes of majesty, from the official mistress to the exotic “possession” of Hawaii. What was weird is
that, in Guralnick’s book, Goldman’s more sensational gossip was, on the whole, quietly confirmed—Elvis was a junkie with occult preoccupations, who did die of an overdose, and was toured to death by “Colonel” Tom Parker, in part because Parker really was an illegal immigrant, from Holland, who couldn’t get a passport and was frightened to take Elvis abroad—while being simultaneously deprecated as inessential.
The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Elvis was, to put it bluntly, as a dumb fuck with a drug problem; Guralnick showed that he did have a drug problem, but was far from dumb, with keen spiritual yearnings that, through bad management and bad luck, got sidetracked into those grinding tours and substance abuse. The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Sinatra is as a bad guy with a big voice. Kaplan shows that the bad-guy stuff was, in truth, pretty bad, about as bad as one had imagined and a lot worse than one had hoped. He did hang out with and cultivate mobsters, real killers, though more in a semi-hostile, semi-affectionate fraternal manner than with the pitiful, feudal devotion pictured in “The Godfather.” (There seems to be no truth in the rumors that the mob bullied Harry Cohn into casting Sinatra in “From Here To Eternity,” not least because Cohn was plenty mobbed-up himself.)
Worse, Sinatra beat people up, or had others beat them up for him, often in shameful acts of bullying—picking on casino employees or less successful, dependent entertainers. (This happened to Shecky Greene, who emerges in the biography as a far more interesting and volatile man than one could have ever imagined, and, weirdly, to Jackie Mason, who had shots fired at him, apparently for dissing the Chairman.) Kaplan even offers veiled, worrying hints that Sinatra might have been implicated in an actual murder. (A man with whom he had an altercation was killed in a mysterious traffic accident a few weeks later.) These instances were sporadic and counterbalanced by his many acts of charity, some impulsive, and some systematic—touring for the benefit of children’s hospitals and the like.
Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation, and in its (often imagined) presence his temper tipped over in an instant. This was followed, usually, by remorse, once he had sobered up and stopped seeing red. But, in the interim, real damage was done to real people: he threw a telephone at a businessman once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fracturing his skull and very nearly killing him. The other cause of his rage may be oddly taboo to tell. Sinatra was a bad, mean drunk, and, since he was often drunk, he was often bad and mean. (John Lennon was a bad, mean drunk, too, and when he got loose long enough to show it the author of “Imagine” and “Julia” could do similarly violent things.) Despite everything we ought to have learned, we still make a ballad out of alcohol. It was Jack on the rocks, not crack from a bag, and so we somehow think that it’s not so bad. The other sad truth Kaplan illustrates is that demons rage in the rich and famous as
much as they do in the poor and unknown—and maybe rage still more, since, having defeated the usual demons of worldly failure that haunt the rest of us, the famous are left alone with the remaining, inexpungible ones, grinning up evilly at them from inside.
Kaplan is not a fan in quite the way that Guralnick was, but he is an unqualified admirer, and with better reason, since what there is to admire is not a handful of early records, but ten years of work, from 1954 to 1964, of astonishing accomplishment—the best uninterrupted session of interpretive singing ever offered by an American, becoming in the end the finest monument that the great American songwriters possess. Kaplan’s Sinatra was a violent guy—but he didn’t have a “big voice” like one of those operatic tenors with a voice so big that it has pushed everything else out of his skull. Sinatra, he shows, had an astonishing musical intelligence, of a subtlety and soulfulness still unequalled. He was a master of understatement and narrative so complete that he could still spellbind audiences after his voice had gone, and he was even more of a legend among other musicians than among his fans. Nor is Kaplan simply an idolater. He sees how genius sits in a fortunate network,
offering character sketches of Sinatra’s arrangers, who were as essential to Sinatra’s art as George Martin’s production was to the Beatles. They’re captured as more than names: the saturnine Nelson Riddle, the last-minute genius Billy May, and the old-fashioned Gordon Jenkins, not to mention supporters as gifted and forgotten as Milt Bernhart, who played the indelible trombone solo on Riddle’s transformed version of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Shouldn’t this push aside the malicious gossip? Why does the other crap matter at all? It matters because if art and the lower reaches of journalism and biography converge on a single point of common purpose, it is in being truthful about human beings as they really are and not as we would have them be. History is what we have to struggle to remember even when legend is more pleasing. It would be nice if Sinatra had been a good guy with a few regrettable friendships rooted in Jersey simpatico—it was a lot worse than that. It would be nice if J.F.K. were a family man with a sometimes-wandering eye—the truth there, too, is more ravenous and complicated. None of this need diminish our admiration or even our love for them. Humanism is made from a faith in humans, as they actually are, flawed and real, screaming devilish threats at casino managers and then singing “Angel Eyes.”
And then, one of the things you learn ever more certainly as you grow older is that all art is made in the image of the artist. It can often be articulated as an opposite, with all the low spots in life thrust forward in art, as with Sinatra. But it is some sort of picture. It isn’t supposed to be so; high-minded people are supposed to pull life and art apart, trust the tale not the teller, and all that. But if an abstract artist makes pictures only of white, there is a white moment, or knight, somewhere there in her past, bugging her still. Sinatra’s painfully bipolar nature is exactly the pattern of his best music, with “swinging” records continually succeeded by sad ones, again and again, and though this is obviously partly a response to the oscillating commercial demands for dance music on the one hand and make-out music on the other, it isn’t just or mainly that. No one else even attempted it quite this relentlessly. We have “Songs for Swinging Lovers” and “Only the
Lonely” because Sinatra was a desperately driven man with a melancholic depth. This doesn’t make up for other people’s fractures and stitches, not remotely. But there the albums are, and there he is, a whole man, made up of broken parts, like everyone else. Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
Need to stop reading?
We’ll send you a reminder.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d19415f376) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d19415f376&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/frank-sinatra-and-the-scandalous-but-scholarly-biography

** Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography
————————————————————

BY ADAM GOPNIK (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-gopnik)

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Gopnick-Sinatra-Scandalous-Scholarly-Biography-1187.jpgFrank Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation. Photograph by William Gottlieb / Redferns / Getty Having come out of the closet, or the casino, not long ago, as an unqualified Frank Sinatra idolater (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-pure-artistry-of-frank-sinatra) , I approached the second volume of James Kaplan’s biography of the singer (“Sinatra: The Chairman”) with what our critical mothers and fathers would have called immense trepidation, since the book would have to deal not just with the great man’s best records but with his messy entanglement with the mob and his sad, stultified later years. (I saw him perform once, toward the very end, at Madison Square Garden, and it was like seeing the dead El Cid mounted on his horse to lead the Spanish Army: noble but undeniably stiff.)
Kaplan’s book turns out to be, to continue in the old reviewers’ language, hugely readable, vastly entertaining, a page-turner, and all the rest. But it’s also interesting as a fine instance of a strikingly newish kind of thing: the serious and even scholarly biography of a much gossiped-over pop figure, where the old Kitty Kelley-style scandal-sheet bio is turned into a properly documented and footnoted study that nonetheless trades on, or at least doesn’t exclude, the sensational bits.
Peter Guralnick’s two-volume account of Elvis Presley was the pioneering model of the genre. Designed in some small part to defuse Albert Goldman’s ugly, contemptuous—but often insightful—biography of the King, Guralnick worked through the details of Elvis’s life with more studious patience than Leon Edel devoted to Henry James’s (Guralnick’s long endnote arguing through who actually worked the lathe on Elvis’s first recording, Sam Phillips or his assistant, is a stunner). Guralnick is a fan, and this was both good—he deeply loved Elvis, not just the Sun sessions, which everyone admires, but more ‘problematic’ material, too—and bad, because, in his earnest desire to show Elvis the American singer, he rather slighted Elvis the American icon, who (and Goldman was not wrong in this) enacted the role of self-made King in a kind of instinctive burlesque of all the ancient stereotypes of majesty, from the official mistress to the exotic “possession” of Hawaii. What was weird is
that, in Guralnick’s book, Goldman’s more sensational gossip was, on the whole, quietly confirmed—Elvis was a junkie with occult preoccupations, who did die of an overdose, and was toured to death by “Colonel” Tom Parker, in part because Parker really was an illegal immigrant, from Holland, who couldn’t get a passport and was frightened to take Elvis abroad—while being simultaneously deprecated as inessential.
The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Elvis was, to put it bluntly, as a dumb fuck with a drug problem; Guralnick showed that he did have a drug problem, but was far from dumb, with keen spiritual yearnings that, through bad management and bad luck, got sidetracked into those grinding tours and substance abuse. The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Sinatra is as a bad guy with a big voice. Kaplan shows that the bad-guy stuff was, in truth, pretty bad, about as bad as one had imagined and a lot worse than one had hoped. He did hang out with and cultivate mobsters, real killers, though more in a semi-hostile, semi-affectionate fraternal manner than with the pitiful, feudal devotion pictured in “The Godfather.” (There seems to be no truth in the rumors that the mob bullied Harry Cohn into casting Sinatra in “From Here To Eternity,” not least because Cohn was plenty mobbed-up himself.)
Worse, Sinatra beat people up, or had others beat them up for him, often in shameful acts of bullying—picking on casino employees or less successful, dependent entertainers. (This happened to Shecky Greene, who emerges in the biography as a far more interesting and volatile man than one could have ever imagined, and, weirdly, to Jackie Mason, who had shots fired at him, apparently for dissing the Chairman.) Kaplan even offers veiled, worrying hints that Sinatra might have been implicated in an actual murder. (A man with whom he had an altercation was killed in a mysterious traffic accident a few weeks later.) These instances were sporadic and counterbalanced by his many acts of charity, some impulsive, and some systematic—touring for the benefit of children’s hospitals and the like.
Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation, and in its (often imagined) presence his temper tipped over in an instant. This was followed, usually, by remorse, once he had sobered up and stopped seeing red. But, in the interim, real damage was done to real people: he threw a telephone at a businessman once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fracturing his skull and very nearly killing him. The other cause of his rage may be oddly taboo to tell. Sinatra was a bad, mean drunk, and, since he was often drunk, he was often bad and mean. (John Lennon was a bad, mean drunk, too, and when he got loose long enough to show it the author of “Imagine” and “Julia” could do similarly violent things.) Despite everything we ought to have learned, we still make a ballad out of alcohol. It was Jack on the rocks, not crack from a bag, and so we somehow think that it’s not so bad. The other sad truth Kaplan illustrates is that demons rage in the rich and famous as
much as they do in the poor and unknown—and maybe rage still more, since, having defeated the usual demons of worldly failure that haunt the rest of us, the famous are left alone with the remaining, inexpungible ones, grinning up evilly at them from inside.
Kaplan is not a fan in quite the way that Guralnick was, but he is an unqualified admirer, and with better reason, since what there is to admire is not a handful of early records, but ten years of work, from 1954 to 1964, of astonishing accomplishment—the best uninterrupted session of interpretive singing ever offered by an American, becoming in the end the finest monument that the great American songwriters possess. Kaplan’s Sinatra was a violent guy—but he didn’t have a “big voice” like one of those operatic tenors with a voice so big that it has pushed everything else out of his skull. Sinatra, he shows, had an astonishing musical intelligence, of a subtlety and soulfulness still unequalled. He was a master of understatement and narrative so complete that he could still spellbind audiences after his voice had gone, and he was even more of a legend among other musicians than among his fans. Nor is Kaplan simply an idolater. He sees how genius sits in a fortunate network,
offering character sketches of Sinatra’s arrangers, who were as essential to Sinatra’s art as George Martin’s production was to the Beatles. They’re captured as more than names: the saturnine Nelson Riddle, the last-minute genius Billy May, and the old-fashioned Gordon Jenkins, not to mention supporters as gifted and forgotten as Milt Bernhart, who played the indelible trombone solo on Riddle’s transformed version of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Shouldn’t this push aside the malicious gossip? Why does the other crap matter at all? It matters because if art and the lower reaches of journalism and biography converge on a single point of common purpose, it is in being truthful about human beings as they really are and not as we would have them be. History is what we have to struggle to remember even when legend is more pleasing. It would be nice if Sinatra had been a good guy with a few regrettable friendships rooted in Jersey simpatico—it was a lot worse than that. It would be nice if J.F.K. were a family man with a sometimes-wandering eye—the truth there, too, is more ravenous and complicated. None of this need diminish our admiration or even our love for them. Humanism is made from a faith in humans, as they actually are, flawed and real, screaming devilish threats at casino managers and then singing “Angel Eyes.”
And then, one of the things you learn ever more certainly as you grow older is that all art is made in the image of the artist. It can often be articulated as an opposite, with all the low spots in life thrust forward in art, as with Sinatra. But it is some sort of picture. It isn’t supposed to be so; high-minded people are supposed to pull life and art apart, trust the tale not the teller, and all that. But if an abstract artist makes pictures only of white, there is a white moment, or knight, somewhere there in her past, bugging her still. Sinatra’s painfully bipolar nature is exactly the pattern of his best music, with “swinging” records continually succeeded by sad ones, again and again, and though this is obviously partly a response to the oscillating commercial demands for dance music on the one hand and make-out music on the other, it isn’t just or mainly that. No one else even attempted it quite this relentlessly. We have “Songs for Swinging Lovers” and “Only the
Lonely” because Sinatra was a desperately driven man with a melancholic depth. This doesn’t make up for other people’s fractures and stitches, not remotely. But there the albums are, and there he is, a whole man, made up of broken parts, like everyone else. Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
Need to stop reading?
We’ll send you a reminder.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d19415f376) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d19415f376&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/frank-sinatra-and-the-scandalous-but-scholarly-biography

** Frank Sinatra and the Scandalous but Scholarly Biography
————————————————————

BY ADAM GOPNIK (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/adam-gopnik)

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Gopnick-Sinatra-Scandalous-Scholarly-Biography-1187.jpgFrank Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation. Photograph by William Gottlieb / Redferns / Getty Having come out of the closet, or the casino, not long ago, as an unqualified Frank Sinatra idolater (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-pure-artistry-of-frank-sinatra) , I approached the second volume of James Kaplan’s biography of the singer (“Sinatra: The Chairman”) with what our critical mothers and fathers would have called immense trepidation, since the book would have to deal not just with the great man’s best records but with his messy entanglement with the mob and his sad, stultified later years. (I saw him perform once, toward the very end, at Madison Square Garden, and it was like seeing the dead El Cid mounted on his horse to lead the Spanish Army: noble but undeniably stiff.)
Kaplan’s book turns out to be, to continue in the old reviewers’ language, hugely readable, vastly entertaining, a page-turner, and all the rest. But it’s also interesting as a fine instance of a strikingly newish kind of thing: the serious and even scholarly biography of a much gossiped-over pop figure, where the old Kitty Kelley-style scandal-sheet bio is turned into a properly documented and footnoted study that nonetheless trades on, or at least doesn’t exclude, the sensational bits.
Peter Guralnick’s two-volume account of Elvis Presley was the pioneering model of the genre. Designed in some small part to defuse Albert Goldman’s ugly, contemptuous—but often insightful—biography of the King, Guralnick worked through the details of Elvis’s life with more studious patience than Leon Edel devoted to Henry James’s (Guralnick’s long endnote arguing through who actually worked the lathe on Elvis’s first recording, Sam Phillips or his assistant, is a stunner). Guralnick is a fan, and this was both good—he deeply loved Elvis, not just the Sun sessions, which everyone admires, but more ‘problematic’ material, too—and bad, because, in his earnest desire to show Elvis the American singer, he rather slighted Elvis the American icon, who (and Goldman was not wrong in this) enacted the role of self-made King in a kind of instinctive burlesque of all the ancient stereotypes of majesty, from the official mistress to the exotic “possession” of Hawaii. What was weird is
that, in Guralnick’s book, Goldman’s more sensational gossip was, on the whole, quietly confirmed—Elvis was a junkie with occult preoccupations, who did die of an overdose, and was toured to death by “Colonel” Tom Parker, in part because Parker really was an illegal immigrant, from Holland, who couldn’t get a passport and was frightened to take Elvis abroad—while being simultaneously deprecated as inessential.
The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Elvis was, to put it bluntly, as a dumb fuck with a drug problem; Guralnick showed that he did have a drug problem, but was far from dumb, with keen spiritual yearnings that, through bad management and bad luck, got sidetracked into those grinding tours and substance abuse. The ugly, scuttlebutt version of Sinatra is as a bad guy with a big voice. Kaplan shows that the bad-guy stuff was, in truth, pretty bad, about as bad as one had imagined and a lot worse than one had hoped. He did hang out with and cultivate mobsters, real killers, though more in a semi-hostile, semi-affectionate fraternal manner than with the pitiful, feudal devotion pictured in “The Godfather.” (There seems to be no truth in the rumors that the mob bullied Harry Cohn into casting Sinatra in “From Here To Eternity,” not least because Cohn was plenty mobbed-up himself.)
Worse, Sinatra beat people up, or had others beat them up for him, often in shameful acts of bullying—picking on casino employees or less successful, dependent entertainers. (This happened to Shecky Greene, who emerges in the biography as a far more interesting and volatile man than one could have ever imagined, and, weirdly, to Jackie Mason, who had shots fired at him, apparently for dissing the Chairman.) Kaplan even offers veiled, worrying hints that Sinatra might have been implicated in an actual murder. (A man with whom he had an altercation was killed in a mysterious traffic accident a few weeks later.) These instances were sporadic and counterbalanced by his many acts of charity, some impulsive, and some systematic—touring for the benefit of children’s hospitals and the like.
Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation, and in its (often imagined) presence his temper tipped over in an instant. This was followed, usually, by remorse, once he had sobered up and stopped seeing red. But, in the interim, real damage was done to real people: he threw a telephone at a businessman once at the Beverly Hills Hotel, fracturing his skull and very nearly killing him. The other cause of his rage may be oddly taboo to tell. Sinatra was a bad, mean drunk, and, since he was often drunk, he was often bad and mean. (John Lennon was a bad, mean drunk, too, and when he got loose long enough to show it the author of “Imagine” and “Julia” could do similarly violent things.) Despite everything we ought to have learned, we still make a ballad out of alcohol. It was Jack on the rocks, not crack from a bag, and so we somehow think that it’s not so bad. The other sad truth Kaplan illustrates is that demons rage in the rich and famous as
much as they do in the poor and unknown—and maybe rage still more, since, having defeated the usual demons of worldly failure that haunt the rest of us, the famous are left alone with the remaining, inexpungible ones, grinning up evilly at them from inside.
Kaplan is not a fan in quite the way that Guralnick was, but he is an unqualified admirer, and with better reason, since what there is to admire is not a handful of early records, but ten years of work, from 1954 to 1964, of astonishing accomplishment—the best uninterrupted session of interpretive singing ever offered by an American, becoming in the end the finest monument that the great American songwriters possess. Kaplan’s Sinatra was a violent guy—but he didn’t have a “big voice” like one of those operatic tenors with a voice so big that it has pushed everything else out of his skull. Sinatra, he shows, had an astonishing musical intelligence, of a subtlety and soulfulness still unequalled. He was a master of understatement and narrative so complete that he could still spellbind audiences after his voice had gone, and he was even more of a legend among other musicians than among his fans. Nor is Kaplan simply an idolater. He sees how genius sits in a fortunate network,
offering character sketches of Sinatra’s arrangers, who were as essential to Sinatra’s art as George Martin’s production was to the Beatles. They’re captured as more than names: the saturnine Nelson Riddle, the last-minute genius Billy May, and the old-fashioned Gordon Jenkins, not to mention supporters as gifted and forgotten as Milt Bernhart, who played the indelible trombone solo on Riddle’s transformed version of Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Shouldn’t this push aside the malicious gossip? Why does the other crap matter at all? It matters because if art and the lower reaches of journalism and biography converge on a single point of common purpose, it is in being truthful about human beings as they really are and not as we would have them be. History is what we have to struggle to remember even when legend is more pleasing. It would be nice if Sinatra had been a good guy with a few regrettable friendships rooted in Jersey simpatico—it was a lot worse than that. It would be nice if J.F.K. were a family man with a sometimes-wandering eye—the truth there, too, is more ravenous and complicated. None of this need diminish our admiration or even our love for them. Humanism is made from a faith in humans, as they actually are, flawed and real, screaming devilish threats at casino managers and then singing “Angel Eyes.”
And then, one of the things you learn ever more certainly as you grow older is that all art is made in the image of the artist. It can often be articulated as an opposite, with all the low spots in life thrust forward in art, as with Sinatra. But it is some sort of picture. It isn’t supposed to be so; high-minded people are supposed to pull life and art apart, trust the tale not the teller, and all that. But if an abstract artist makes pictures only of white, there is a white moment, or knight, somewhere there in her past, bugging her still. Sinatra’s painfully bipolar nature is exactly the pattern of his best music, with “swinging” records continually succeeded by sad ones, again and again, and though this is obviously partly a response to the oscillating commercial demands for dance music on the one hand and make-out music on the other, it isn’t just or mainly that. No one else even attempted it quite this relentlessly. We have “Songs for Swinging Lovers” and “Only the
Lonely” because Sinatra was a desperately driven man with a melancholic depth. This doesn’t make up for other people’s fractures and stitches, not remotely. But there the albums are, and there he is, a whole man, made up of broken parts, like everyone else. Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
Need to stop reading?
We’ll send you a reminder.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=d19415f376) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=d19415f376&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Ringo Starr to auction Beatles White Album No 0000001 | Music | The Guardian

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/25/ringo-starr-auction-beatles-white-album-no0000001

** Ringo Starr to auction Beatles White Album No 0000001
————————————————————
Ringo Starr’s first pressing of the Beatles White Album

It’s the ultimate rock’n’roll souvenir. Ringo Starr (http://www.theguardian.com/music/ringo-starr) is to auction off the first ever copy of the band’s1968 album, The Beatles, more commonly known as the White Album (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/15/beatles-white-album) .

Each unit of the record, which acquired its name due to its minimalist packaging, came with its own serial number stamped on the cover. White Album No 0000001 will be sold at Julien’s (http://www.julienslive.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/163/lot/71120/) , the Beverly Hills auction house that specialises in celebrity memorabilia, on 3 to 5 December.

The first four pressings of the LP were all in possession of the Beatles. It was assumed that No 0000001 belonged to John Lennon (http://www.theguardian.com/music/johnlennon) , who Paul McCartney (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/09/paul-mccartney-discusses-his-relationship-with-john-lennon-video) once said “shouted loudest” for it. But it turns out the drummer has had the record all along, and kept it locked away in a London bank vault for more than 35 years.

Bidding on the record starts at $20,000 (£13,276), but it is estimated to fetch up to $60,000. Copy No 0000005 (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/25/beatles-white-album) of the album sold at an auction in 2008 for around $30,000.

Starr is also auctioning off many items of jewellery, as well as art, clothes and instruments, including George Harrison (http://www.theguardian.com/music/georgeharrison) ’s Gretsch Tennessean guitar, which is expected to fetch up to $200,000.

Other items, which together take up 55 pages of the auction house’s website (http://www.julienslive.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/163/) , include a Roy Lichtenstein painting, expected to fetch up to $25,000, and the suit Starr wore in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night (http://www.theguardian.com/film/a-hard-day-s-night) , expected to fetch up to $20,000.

— Juliens Auctions (@JuliensAuctions) November 5, 2015 (https://twitter.com/JuliensAuctions/status/662139271558508545)

Ringo Starr’s UK 1st pressing White Album No 0000001 is part of our auction on December 4th! #TheBeatles (https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheBeatles?src=hash) #Auction (https://twitter.com/hashtag/Auction?src=hash) pic.twitter.com/NpJgRzQk4e (https://t.co/NpJgRzQk4e)

All proceeds of the auction will go to the Lotus Foundation (http://lotusfoundation.com/) , founded by Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach, to “fund, support, participate in and promote charitable projects aimed at advancing social welfare in diverse areas”.

The auction will be the second time in two months that Beatles memorabilia has been sold at Julien’s. Earlier this month, a guitar once stolen from Lennon in the 1960s sold for $2.4m (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/08/john-lennons-guitar-sold-for-24m-at-auction) at the auction house, and a Beatles drum head went for $2.1m, fetching some of the highest prices ever for rock’n’roll memorabilia.

The price for Lennon’s guitar far surpassed the $965,000 paid at a 2013 Christie’s (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/06/bob-dylan-electric-guitar-fender-stratocaster-auction-christies) auction for Bob Dylan’s Sunburst Fender Stratocaster, which Dylan played at the 1965 Newport folk festival, where he shocked folk traditionalists with a set of rock songs.

According to Guinness World Records, a Fender Stratocaster sold for a record $2.7m at a 2005 charity event in Qatar. The instrument had been signed by Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney (http://www.theguardian.com/music/paulmccartney) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=fdf3efaedb) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=fdf3efaedb&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Ringo Starr to auction Beatles White Album No 0000001 | Music | The Guardian

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/25/ringo-starr-auction-beatles-white-album-no0000001

** Ringo Starr to auction Beatles White Album No 0000001
————————————————————
Ringo Starr’s first pressing of the Beatles White Album

It’s the ultimate rock’n’roll souvenir. Ringo Starr (http://www.theguardian.com/music/ringo-starr) is to auction off the first ever copy of the band’s1968 album, The Beatles, more commonly known as the White Album (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/15/beatles-white-album) .

Each unit of the record, which acquired its name due to its minimalist packaging, came with its own serial number stamped on the cover. White Album No 0000001 will be sold at Julien’s (http://www.julienslive.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/163/lot/71120/) , the Beverly Hills auction house that specialises in celebrity memorabilia, on 3 to 5 December.

The first four pressings of the LP were all in possession of the Beatles. It was assumed that No 0000001 belonged to John Lennon (http://www.theguardian.com/music/johnlennon) , who Paul McCartney (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/09/paul-mccartney-discusses-his-relationship-with-john-lennon-video) once said “shouted loudest” for it. But it turns out the drummer has had the record all along, and kept it locked away in a London bank vault for more than 35 years.

Bidding on the record starts at $20,000 (£13,276), but it is estimated to fetch up to $60,000. Copy No 0000005 (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/25/beatles-white-album) of the album sold at an auction in 2008 for around $30,000.

Starr is also auctioning off many items of jewellery, as well as art, clothes and instruments, including George Harrison (http://www.theguardian.com/music/georgeharrison) ’s Gretsch Tennessean guitar, which is expected to fetch up to $200,000.

Other items, which together take up 55 pages of the auction house’s website (http://www.julienslive.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/163/) , include a Roy Lichtenstein painting, expected to fetch up to $25,000, and the suit Starr wore in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night (http://www.theguardian.com/film/a-hard-day-s-night) , expected to fetch up to $20,000.

— Juliens Auctions (@JuliensAuctions) November 5, 2015 (https://twitter.com/JuliensAuctions/status/662139271558508545)

Ringo Starr’s UK 1st pressing White Album No 0000001 is part of our auction on December 4th! #TheBeatles (https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheBeatles?src=hash) #Auction (https://twitter.com/hashtag/Auction?src=hash) pic.twitter.com/NpJgRzQk4e (https://t.co/NpJgRzQk4e)

All proceeds of the auction will go to the Lotus Foundation (http://lotusfoundation.com/) , founded by Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach, to “fund, support, participate in and promote charitable projects aimed at advancing social welfare in diverse areas”.

The auction will be the second time in two months that Beatles memorabilia has been sold at Julien’s. Earlier this month, a guitar once stolen from Lennon in the 1960s sold for $2.4m (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/08/john-lennons-guitar-sold-for-24m-at-auction) at the auction house, and a Beatles drum head went for $2.1m, fetching some of the highest prices ever for rock’n’roll memorabilia.

The price for Lennon’s guitar far surpassed the $965,000 paid at a 2013 Christie’s (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/06/bob-dylan-electric-guitar-fender-stratocaster-auction-christies) auction for Bob Dylan’s Sunburst Fender Stratocaster, which Dylan played at the 1965 Newport folk festival, where he shocked folk traditionalists with a set of rock songs.

According to Guinness World Records, a Fender Stratocaster sold for a record $2.7m at a 2005 charity event in Qatar. The instrument had been signed by Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney (http://www.theguardian.com/music/paulmccartney) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=fdf3efaedb) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=fdf3efaedb&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Ringo Starr to auction Beatles White Album No 0000001 | Music | The Guardian

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/25/ringo-starr-auction-beatles-white-album-no0000001

** Ringo Starr to auction Beatles White Album No 0000001
————————————————————
Ringo Starr’s first pressing of the Beatles White Album

It’s the ultimate rock’n’roll souvenir. Ringo Starr (http://www.theguardian.com/music/ringo-starr) is to auction off the first ever copy of the band’s1968 album, The Beatles, more commonly known as the White Album (http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/15/beatles-white-album) .

Each unit of the record, which acquired its name due to its minimalist packaging, came with its own serial number stamped on the cover. White Album No 0000001 will be sold at Julien’s (http://www.julienslive.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/163/lot/71120/) , the Beverly Hills auction house that specialises in celebrity memorabilia, on 3 to 5 December.

The first four pressings of the LP were all in possession of the Beatles. It was assumed that No 0000001 belonged to John Lennon (http://www.theguardian.com/music/johnlennon) , who Paul McCartney (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/oct/09/paul-mccartney-discusses-his-relationship-with-john-lennon-video) once said “shouted loudest” for it. But it turns out the drummer has had the record all along, and kept it locked away in a London bank vault for more than 35 years.

Bidding on the record starts at $20,000 (£13,276), but it is estimated to fetch up to $60,000. Copy No 0000005 (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/nov/25/beatles-white-album) of the album sold at an auction in 2008 for around $30,000.

Starr is also auctioning off many items of jewellery, as well as art, clothes and instruments, including George Harrison (http://www.theguardian.com/music/georgeharrison) ’s Gretsch Tennessean guitar, which is expected to fetch up to $200,000.

Other items, which together take up 55 pages of the auction house’s website (http://www.julienslive.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/163/) , include a Roy Lichtenstein painting, expected to fetch up to $25,000, and the suit Starr wore in the 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night (http://www.theguardian.com/film/a-hard-day-s-night) , expected to fetch up to $20,000.

— Juliens Auctions (@JuliensAuctions) November 5, 2015 (https://twitter.com/JuliensAuctions/status/662139271558508545)

Ringo Starr’s UK 1st pressing White Album No 0000001 is part of our auction on December 4th! #TheBeatles (https://twitter.com/hashtag/TheBeatles?src=hash) #Auction (https://twitter.com/hashtag/Auction?src=hash) pic.twitter.com/NpJgRzQk4e (https://t.co/NpJgRzQk4e)

All proceeds of the auction will go to the Lotus Foundation (http://lotusfoundation.com/) , founded by Starr and his wife, Barbara Bach, to “fund, support, participate in and promote charitable projects aimed at advancing social welfare in diverse areas”.

The auction will be the second time in two months that Beatles memorabilia has been sold at Julien’s. Earlier this month, a guitar once stolen from Lennon in the 1960s sold for $2.4m (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/nov/08/john-lennons-guitar-sold-for-24m-at-auction) at the auction house, and a Beatles drum head went for $2.1m, fetching some of the highest prices ever for rock’n’roll memorabilia.

The price for Lennon’s guitar far surpassed the $965,000 paid at a 2013 Christie’s (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2013/dec/06/bob-dylan-electric-guitar-fender-stratocaster-auction-christies) auction for Bob Dylan’s Sunburst Fender Stratocaster, which Dylan played at the 1965 Newport folk festival, where he shocked folk traditionalists with a set of rock songs.

According to Guinness World Records, a Fender Stratocaster sold for a record $2.7m at a 2005 charity event in Qatar. The instrument had been signed by Keith Richards, Eric Clapton and Paul McCartney (http://www.theguardian.com/music/paulmccartney) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=fdf3efaedb) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=fdf3efaedb&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone Trumpet Player, Dies at 71 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/arts/music/cynthia-robinson-sly-and-the-family-stone-trumpet-player-dies-at-71.html

** Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone Trumpet Player, Dies at 71
————————————————————

By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) NOV. 26, 2015

Sly and the Family Stone in their heyday, featuring from left, Rose Stone, Larry Graham, Sly Stone, Freddie Stone, Greg Errico, Jerry Martini (seated) and Cynthia Robinson. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Cynthia Robinson, a trumpet player and original member of the seminal psychedelic-funk-soul group Sly and the Family Stone, died on Monday in Carmichael, Calif. She was 71.

The cause was cancer, Jerry Martini, a friend and bandmate, said.

Ms. Robinson joined Sly Stone in a short-lived group called Sly and the Stoners in 1966. Soon after, he asked her to be a member of the Family Stone, whose inclusion of black and white musicians of both sexes, and its hippie style, made it a living poster for the ideals of the counterculture.

In addition to supplying trumpet riffs, Ms. Robinson chipped in with vocals. At the beginning of “Dance to the Music,” the group’s first hit, she can be heard shouting, “Get on up and dance to the music!” and she is part of the punchy “hey, hey, hey” chorus in “I Want to Take You Higher.”

“Cynthia’s role in music history isn’t celebrated enough,” the producer and musician Questlove wrote on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/-dvyB3wa-x/) . “Her & sister Rose”— Mr. Stone’s sister, a singer and keyboardist with the group — “weren’t just pretty accessories there to ‘coo’ & ‘shoo wop shoo bob’ while the boys got the glory. Naw. They took names and kicked ass while you were dancing in the aisle.”

With the rest of the band, Ms. Robinson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Cynthia Robinson was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Sacramento. She played flute in elementary school, but there were no flutes available at her high school, and she was told to play the clarinet. Unhappy, she asked a fellow student, whom she had heard playing the trumpet in a practice room, if she could give his instrument a try.

“Everything I blew was off key, but I knew it could sound good if you worked on it, and that’s what I wanted to do,” she told the online magazine Rookie (http://www.rookiemag.com/2013/08/cynthia-sly-and-family-stone/) in 2013.

Playing the trumpet put her in conflict with the boys at her school, who considered the trumpet strictly a male instrument. “It left me with the impression that, you know, no guy in the world would let a girl play the trumpet in his group,” she said in a 1993 interview (http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/377a1b-interview-with-cynthia-robinson) for the Boston public radio station WGBH.

Her first trumpet belonged to a beatnik, who told her she could have it if she played at one of his parties. “It smelled bad, it had all kinds of green crud inside the tubing, so I took it home, cleaned it, soaked it in hot water, cleaned it all out, and it was mine,” she told Rookie.

Ms. Robinson had known Mr. Stone in high school by his real name, Sylvester Stewart, and had followed him when he was a D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL. But when they crossed paths in the mid-1960s, she did not realize that “Sly Stone” was her former friend. By then he was a musician and record producer, with ideas about forming a musical group.

Although Sly and the Stoners failed to catch fire, the Family Stone showed promise from the outset. In an early rehearsal, the members tried a Ray Charles song, “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” with gratifying results.

“We hit that first note, and it was like the Fourth of July — I just saw sparks and lights and my body just went totally nuts,” Ms. Robinson told Rookie. “I couldn’t play anymore — it was magnificent. I’d never heard a sound that great.”

The group’s first album, “A Whole New Thing,” released in 1967, went nowhere, but “Dance to the Music,” released the following year, scored a Top 10 hit with the title song, leading to a string of chart successes: “Everyday People,” “Stand,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).”

The group broke up in 1975, but Ms. Robinson continued to record with Mr. Stone into the next decade. She played with the funk band Graham Central Station, led by her cousin and fellow Family Stone member Larry Graham, and worked with George Clinton and Prince. In 2006, she began playing with a new version of the Family Stone, which included two of the band’s original members, the saxophonist Mr. Martini and the drummer Greg Errico, as well as her daughter with Mr. Stone, Sylvette Phunne Robinson, also known as Phunne Stone. She and her daughter sang lead vocals on “Do Yo Dance,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNNOMqIyTjQ) a single released by the group this past summer.

Ms. Robinson died at Phunne Stone’s home and had lived in Sacramento. Survivors also include another daughter, Laura Marie Robinson, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

“We were not even anticipating or reaching for stardom when we started,” Ms. Robinson told Rookie. “We just loved playing together.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e9d741be68) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=e9d741be68&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone Trumpet Player, Dies at 71 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/arts/music/cynthia-robinson-sly-and-the-family-stone-trumpet-player-dies-at-71.html

** Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone Trumpet Player, Dies at 71
————————————————————

By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) NOV. 26, 2015

Sly and the Family Stone in their heyday, featuring from left, Rose Stone, Larry Graham, Sly Stone, Freddie Stone, Greg Errico, Jerry Martini (seated) and Cynthia Robinson. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Cynthia Robinson, a trumpet player and original member of the seminal psychedelic-funk-soul group Sly and the Family Stone, died on Monday in Carmichael, Calif. She was 71.

The cause was cancer, Jerry Martini, a friend and bandmate, said.

Ms. Robinson joined Sly Stone in a short-lived group called Sly and the Stoners in 1966. Soon after, he asked her to be a member of the Family Stone, whose inclusion of black and white musicians of both sexes, and its hippie style, made it a living poster for the ideals of the counterculture.

In addition to supplying trumpet riffs, Ms. Robinson chipped in with vocals. At the beginning of “Dance to the Music,” the group’s first hit, she can be heard shouting, “Get on up and dance to the music!” and she is part of the punchy “hey, hey, hey” chorus in “I Want to Take You Higher.”

“Cynthia’s role in music history isn’t celebrated enough,” the producer and musician Questlove wrote on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/-dvyB3wa-x/) . “Her & sister Rose”— Mr. Stone’s sister, a singer and keyboardist with the group — “weren’t just pretty accessories there to ‘coo’ & ‘shoo wop shoo bob’ while the boys got the glory. Naw. They took names and kicked ass while you were dancing in the aisle.”

With the rest of the band, Ms. Robinson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Cynthia Robinson was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Sacramento. She played flute in elementary school, but there were no flutes available at her high school, and she was told to play the clarinet. Unhappy, she asked a fellow student, whom she had heard playing the trumpet in a practice room, if she could give his instrument a try.

“Everything I blew was off key, but I knew it could sound good if you worked on it, and that’s what I wanted to do,” she told the online magazine Rookie (http://www.rookiemag.com/2013/08/cynthia-sly-and-family-stone/) in 2013.

Playing the trumpet put her in conflict with the boys at her school, who considered the trumpet strictly a male instrument. “It left me with the impression that, you know, no guy in the world would let a girl play the trumpet in his group,” she said in a 1993 interview (http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/377a1b-interview-with-cynthia-robinson) for the Boston public radio station WGBH.

Her first trumpet belonged to a beatnik, who told her she could have it if she played at one of his parties. “It smelled bad, it had all kinds of green crud inside the tubing, so I took it home, cleaned it, soaked it in hot water, cleaned it all out, and it was mine,” she told Rookie.

Ms. Robinson had known Mr. Stone in high school by his real name, Sylvester Stewart, and had followed him when he was a D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL. But when they crossed paths in the mid-1960s, she did not realize that “Sly Stone” was her former friend. By then he was a musician and record producer, with ideas about forming a musical group.

Although Sly and the Stoners failed to catch fire, the Family Stone showed promise from the outset. In an early rehearsal, the members tried a Ray Charles song, “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” with gratifying results.

“We hit that first note, and it was like the Fourth of July — I just saw sparks and lights and my body just went totally nuts,” Ms. Robinson told Rookie. “I couldn’t play anymore — it was magnificent. I’d never heard a sound that great.”

The group’s first album, “A Whole New Thing,” released in 1967, went nowhere, but “Dance to the Music,” released the following year, scored a Top 10 hit with the title song, leading to a string of chart successes: “Everyday People,” “Stand,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).”

The group broke up in 1975, but Ms. Robinson continued to record with Mr. Stone into the next decade. She played with the funk band Graham Central Station, led by her cousin and fellow Family Stone member Larry Graham, and worked with George Clinton and Prince. In 2006, she began playing with a new version of the Family Stone, which included two of the band’s original members, the saxophonist Mr. Martini and the drummer Greg Errico, as well as her daughter with Mr. Stone, Sylvette Phunne Robinson, also known as Phunne Stone. She and her daughter sang lead vocals on “Do Yo Dance,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNNOMqIyTjQ) a single released by the group this past summer.

Ms. Robinson died at Phunne Stone’s home and had lived in Sacramento. Survivors also include another daughter, Laura Marie Robinson, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

“We were not even anticipating or reaching for stardom when we started,” Ms. Robinson told Rookie. “We just loved playing together.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e9d741be68) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=e9d741be68&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone Trumpet Player, Dies at 71 – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/27/arts/music/cynthia-robinson-sly-and-the-family-stone-trumpet-player-dies-at-71.html

** Cynthia Robinson, Sly and the Family Stone Trumpet Player, Dies at 71
————————————————————

By WILLIAM GRIMES (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/william_grimes/index.html) NOV. 26, 2015

Sly and the Family Stone in their heyday, featuring from left, Rose Stone, Larry Graham, Sly Stone, Freddie Stone, Greg Errico, Jerry Martini (seated) and Cynthia Robinson. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Cynthia Robinson, a trumpet player and original member of the seminal psychedelic-funk-soul group Sly and the Family Stone, died on Monday in Carmichael, Calif. She was 71.

The cause was cancer, Jerry Martini, a friend and bandmate, said.

Ms. Robinson joined Sly Stone in a short-lived group called Sly and the Stoners in 1966. Soon after, he asked her to be a member of the Family Stone, whose inclusion of black and white musicians of both sexes, and its hippie style, made it a living poster for the ideals of the counterculture.

In addition to supplying trumpet riffs, Ms. Robinson chipped in with vocals. At the beginning of “Dance to the Music,” the group’s first hit, she can be heard shouting, “Get on up and dance to the music!” and she is part of the punchy “hey, hey, hey” chorus in “I Want to Take You Higher.”

“Cynthia’s role in music history isn’t celebrated enough,” the producer and musician Questlove wrote on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/-dvyB3wa-x/) . “Her & sister Rose”— Mr. Stone’s sister, a singer and keyboardist with the group — “weren’t just pretty accessories there to ‘coo’ & ‘shoo wop shoo bob’ while the boys got the glory. Naw. They took names and kicked ass while you were dancing in the aisle.”

With the rest of the band, Ms. Robinson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.

Cynthia Robinson was born on Jan. 12, 1944, in Sacramento. She played flute in elementary school, but there were no flutes available at her high school, and she was told to play the clarinet. Unhappy, she asked a fellow student, whom she had heard playing the trumpet in a practice room, if she could give his instrument a try.

“Everything I blew was off key, but I knew it could sound good if you worked on it, and that’s what I wanted to do,” she told the online magazine Rookie (http://www.rookiemag.com/2013/08/cynthia-sly-and-family-stone/) in 2013.

Playing the trumpet put her in conflict with the boys at her school, who considered the trumpet strictly a male instrument. “It left me with the impression that, you know, no guy in the world would let a girl play the trumpet in his group,” she said in a 1993 interview (http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/377a1b-interview-with-cynthia-robinson) for the Boston public radio station WGBH.

Her first trumpet belonged to a beatnik, who told her she could have it if she played at one of his parties. “It smelled bad, it had all kinds of green crud inside the tubing, so I took it home, cleaned it, soaked it in hot water, cleaned it all out, and it was mine,” she told Rookie.

Ms. Robinson had known Mr. Stone in high school by his real name, Sylvester Stewart, and had followed him when he was a D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL. But when they crossed paths in the mid-1960s, she did not realize that “Sly Stone” was her former friend. By then he was a musician and record producer, with ideas about forming a musical group.

Although Sly and the Stoners failed to catch fire, the Family Stone showed promise from the outset. In an early rehearsal, the members tried a Ray Charles song, “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” with gratifying results.

“We hit that first note, and it was like the Fourth of July — I just saw sparks and lights and my body just went totally nuts,” Ms. Robinson told Rookie. “I couldn’t play anymore — it was magnificent. I’d never heard a sound that great.”

The group’s first album, “A Whole New Thing,” released in 1967, went nowhere, but “Dance to the Music,” released the following year, scored a Top 10 hit with the title song, leading to a string of chart successes: “Everyday People,” “Stand,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again).”

The group broke up in 1975, but Ms. Robinson continued to record with Mr. Stone into the next decade. She played with the funk band Graham Central Station, led by her cousin and fellow Family Stone member Larry Graham, and worked with George Clinton and Prince. In 2006, she began playing with a new version of the Family Stone, which included two of the band’s original members, the saxophonist Mr. Martini and the drummer Greg Errico, as well as her daughter with Mr. Stone, Sylvette Phunne Robinson, also known as Phunne Stone. She and her daughter sang lead vocals on “Do Yo Dance,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNNOMqIyTjQ) a single released by the group this past summer.

Ms. Robinson died at Phunne Stone’s home and had lived in Sacramento. Survivors also include another daughter, Laura Marie Robinson, six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

“We were not even anticipating or reaching for stardom when we started,” Ms. Robinson told Rookie. “We just loved playing together.”

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=e9d741be68) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=e9d741be68&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Jazz Joke

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c5bbd925d6) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=c5bbd925d6&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Jazz Joke

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c5bbd925d6) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=c5bbd925d6&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Jazz Joke

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=c5bbd925d6) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=c5bbd925d6&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Big, Wide Story Of Stereophonic Sound | Leonard Maltin

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin/the-big-wide-story-of-stereophonic-sound-20151123?utm_medium=sailthru_newsletter

** The Big, Wide Story Of Stereophonic Sound
————————————————————

Leonard Maltin By Leonard Maltin | Leonard Maltin November 23, 2015 at 2:48PM

Shane in Stereo-680

Shane in Stereo-680

For a subject that’s integral to the success of motion pictures, precious little has been written about sound. I’m not referring to the dawn of the talkie era but later developments that came in conjunction with widescreen, Cinerama, and 3-D in the early 1950s, in a feverish attempt to lure people away from their new television sets and back into movie theaters. (And let’s not forget the pioneering efforts of Walt Disney with his introduction of Fantasound in 1940 for the roadshow engagements of Fantasia.)

Longtime UCLA Film and Television Archive preservationist Bob Gitt has made a great study of sound and performed compelling demonstrations over the years…but now Robert Furmanek, of the 3-D Archive, has compiled a fascinating article about the history, introduction and promotion of Stereophonic sound in the 1950s.

Using articles and ads from trade magazines of the period, Bob helps bring this era to life with all its technological advances and attendant ballyhoo. Even if you don’t understand the scientific aspects of the story I think you’ll enjoy the “big picture” he paints, along with the wonderfully evocative advertisements.
5000 Fingers of Dr. T Poster

The drum-beating was so loud during this period that Cole Porter even wrote a satirical song about the audio craze for his 1955 Broadway musical Silk Stockings, introduced by Don Ameche and Hildegarde Neff—and later reprised in the 1957 movie by Fred Astaire and Janis Paige. Porter added additional lyrics (and sanitized others) for the MGM movie but this original stanza will give you a sampling:

If Zanuck’s latest picture were the good old-fashioned kind
There’d be no one in front to look at Marilyn’s behind
If you want to hear applauding hands resound
You’ve got to have glorious technicolor,
Breath-taking Cinemascope and
Stereophonic sound.

To read Bob Furmanek’s informative column, click HERE (http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/the-first-year-of-stereophonic-sound) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0669a068e2) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0669a068e2&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Big, Wide Story Of Stereophonic Sound | Leonard Maltin

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin/the-big-wide-story-of-stereophonic-sound-20151123?utm_medium=sailthru_newsletter

** The Big, Wide Story Of Stereophonic Sound
————————————————————

Leonard Maltin By Leonard Maltin | Leonard Maltin November 23, 2015 at 2:48PM

Shane in Stereo-680

Shane in Stereo-680

For a subject that’s integral to the success of motion pictures, precious little has been written about sound. I’m not referring to the dawn of the talkie era but later developments that came in conjunction with widescreen, Cinerama, and 3-D in the early 1950s, in a feverish attempt to lure people away from their new television sets and back into movie theaters. (And let’s not forget the pioneering efforts of Walt Disney with his introduction of Fantasound in 1940 for the roadshow engagements of Fantasia.)

Longtime UCLA Film and Television Archive preservationist Bob Gitt has made a great study of sound and performed compelling demonstrations over the years…but now Robert Furmanek, of the 3-D Archive, has compiled a fascinating article about the history, introduction and promotion of Stereophonic sound in the 1950s.

Using articles and ads from trade magazines of the period, Bob helps bring this era to life with all its technological advances and attendant ballyhoo. Even if you don’t understand the scientific aspects of the story I think you’ll enjoy the “big picture” he paints, along with the wonderfully evocative advertisements.
5000 Fingers of Dr. T Poster

The drum-beating was so loud during this period that Cole Porter even wrote a satirical song about the audio craze for his 1955 Broadway musical Silk Stockings, introduced by Don Ameche and Hildegarde Neff—and later reprised in the 1957 movie by Fred Astaire and Janis Paige. Porter added additional lyrics (and sanitized others) for the MGM movie but this original stanza will give you a sampling:

If Zanuck’s latest picture were the good old-fashioned kind
There’d be no one in front to look at Marilyn’s behind
If you want to hear applauding hands resound
You’ve got to have glorious technicolor,
Breath-taking Cinemascope and
Stereophonic sound.

To read Bob Furmanek’s informative column, click HERE (http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/the-first-year-of-stereophonic-sound) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0669a068e2) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0669a068e2&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Big, Wide Story Of Stereophonic Sound | Leonard Maltin

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

http://blogs.indiewire.com/leonardmaltin/the-big-wide-story-of-stereophonic-sound-20151123?utm_medium=sailthru_newsletter

** The Big, Wide Story Of Stereophonic Sound
————————————————————

Leonard Maltin By Leonard Maltin | Leonard Maltin November 23, 2015 at 2:48PM

Shane in Stereo-680

Shane in Stereo-680

For a subject that’s integral to the success of motion pictures, precious little has been written about sound. I’m not referring to the dawn of the talkie era but later developments that came in conjunction with widescreen, Cinerama, and 3-D in the early 1950s, in a feverish attempt to lure people away from their new television sets and back into movie theaters. (And let’s not forget the pioneering efforts of Walt Disney with his introduction of Fantasound in 1940 for the roadshow engagements of Fantasia.)

Longtime UCLA Film and Television Archive preservationist Bob Gitt has made a great study of sound and performed compelling demonstrations over the years…but now Robert Furmanek, of the 3-D Archive, has compiled a fascinating article about the history, introduction and promotion of Stereophonic sound in the 1950s.

Using articles and ads from trade magazines of the period, Bob helps bring this era to life with all its technological advances and attendant ballyhoo. Even if you don’t understand the scientific aspects of the story I think you’ll enjoy the “big picture” he paints, along with the wonderfully evocative advertisements.
5000 Fingers of Dr. T Poster

The drum-beating was so loud during this period that Cole Porter even wrote a satirical song about the audio craze for his 1955 Broadway musical Silk Stockings, introduced by Don Ameche and Hildegarde Neff—and later reprised in the 1957 movie by Fred Astaire and Janis Paige. Porter added additional lyrics (and sanitized others) for the MGM movie but this original stanza will give you a sampling:

If Zanuck’s latest picture were the good old-fashioned kind
There’d be no one in front to look at Marilyn’s behind
If you want to hear applauding hands resound
You’ve got to have glorious technicolor,
Breath-taking Cinemascope and
Stereophonic sound.

To read Bob Furmanek’s informative column, click HERE (http://www.3dfilmarchive.com/the-first-year-of-stereophonic-sound) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0669a068e2) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0669a068e2&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

“What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/up-from-the-hold

** Up from the Hold
————————————————————

** The story of tap.
————————————————————

** BY JOAN ACOCELLA (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/joan-acocella)
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/151130_r27352-1200.jpgAt tap’s high tide, the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, tap was everywhere: in movies, in the theatre, and above all in clubs. Illustration by Simone Massoni Tap, which is the dance form of jazz music, has been around more or less since the late nineteenth century, but, unlike jazz, which has been the subject of many deep-browed books, it has a small, mediocre literature. There have been some valuable works—biographies and memoirs, collections of interviews, even a few histories—but never a volume that did the real heavy lifting: critical, analytical, historical, comprehensive.
It’s not hard to see why. Dance itself, because it mostly went unrecorded, was little studied in a serious way, and there was no reason that tap should have been an exception. Indeed, there are many reasons that it should have been the worst served. First, it is a peculiar form, in that it is both movement and music. Most other kinds of dance can be described as being performed to the music, but tap, like other foot-stamping forms—flamenco, Irish step dancing, most Indian classical dance—also makes its own music. Even if there’s a pianist onstage, or a whole orchestra, the most important sound at any tap concert is the one being made by the dancer’s feet. And that sensory doubleness, sight combined with sound, makes for a psychological-aesthetic doubleness. We get an abstract art, music, wedded to a narrative art, the story that is inescapably there whenever a human body places itself before us.
Then, there is tap’s history, the fact that it was created by extremely poor people, Irish and West African, in a place that they came to not because they wanted to be there—that is, here—but because in their own lands either they were starving or they had been captured and converted into salable property. I know of no account of the origins of tap that does not include the story that, during the voyage from Africa, slaves were periodically brought up from the ship’s hold and forced to dance on the deck. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them from dying. Imagine what this meant. Commanded to dance, they did routines that, maybe just a month or two earlier, had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or an expression of their relationship to their grandparents. Now the purpose of the dance was simply to put them through their paces, as if they were dogs or horses. They must have wanted, in some measure,
to impress their captors, in order to be better treated. They must also have been ashamed of that wish, and wondered why they didn’t throw themselves overboard. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of grief and humiliation that was built into tap at its birth.
Honi Coles, the distinguished “class act” tapper, once said that when Bill (Bojangles) Robinson was making movies in the nineteen-thirties with Shirley Temple—films in which, some people later claimed, this great star was pushed into Uncle Tomism—he was the happiest man in the world. “Part of it was the generosity that black entertainers showed to whites,” Coles said. “We were so happy somebody wanted what we did, we were ready just to give it away.”
Today’s black choreographers are not so ready. In New York, Donald Byrd, a prominent African-American choreographer, recently presented a piece, “The Minstrel Show Revisited,” that links nineteenth-century minstrelsy—which was a breeding ground of tap and also the ancestor of some of black America’s most brilliant comedy (Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle)—with the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
This tangle of emotions—who wants to take it on? And who wants to anger as many people as any book on tap will do, no matter what it says? (Some people still don’t want to hear that Irish step dancing contributed to tap, which it unquestionably did.) But forget the politics. What about the technical matters—the question of when a dancer will drop his heel, and how much he’s working from the side of the foot rather than from the middle? That’s not to speak of the range of musical choices. Really, in order to write a book on this subject, a person would almost have to be not just a dance critic but a tap dancer.
That book has now been published—“What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, Brian Seibert, is a dance critic for the Times. (He also contributes to Goings On About Town, in The New Yorker.) He is a tap dancer; he never went pro, but he has studied for most of his life. The book took him more than ten years to write.
One problem that he had to contend with was the unvarnished racism of much of the historical material. Because he is white, he might have spent the whole book shaking a compensatory fist or—more likely—walking on eggshells. He doesn’t. Now and then, he utters a cry of indignation. There are also certain injustices—no greater, I would say, than other injustices—that seem to be recorded, however quietly, on every page. (Again and again, Seibert notes the instances in which routines created by black dancers were credited to other people. He can’t get over it. He himself is an artist—he writes beautiful prose and is a crackerjack storyteller—and he can’t stand to see artists go unacknowledged.) But, in general, he states the facts dispassionately: the Vegas casinos where the tappers who performed there couldn’t get a room or eat, the critics complaining if a dancer seemed to them to show an insufficiently “Negro” spirit, the artists’ complicity, performing as the Three Little
Dots or Two Real Coons. Seibert doesn’t tell us to get mad about these things. He lets us get mad by ourselves.
It’s hard to know which of Seibert’s dance portraits to spotlight, because there are so many wonderful ones. Should it be John Bubbles (1902-86), who Seibert and a lot of other commentators think was one of the greatest tap dancers on record? (George Gershwin chose him to create the role of Sportin’ Life, in “Porgy and Bess.”) It is an unlooked-for gift that “What the Eye Hears” was published in the age of YouTube, which offers thrilling footage of many of the early-twentieth-century performers, including Bubbles. (See the video labelled “Buck and Bubbles . . .Varsity Show.”) As Seibert points out, we don’t have to take his word for it. Or should one focus on Jimmy Slyde (1927-2008), the bebop master whom Seibert saw while he was still in his prime, and whom he clearly adored? Whoever the dancer, the book’s emphasis is on technical achievement and musical invention—that is, on art. Many people, including dance critics, have often thought of tap as something that people with a
certain skill just got up there and did, in order to have, and give us, a good time. Seibert digs down into the particulars. Slyde, he says, used his shoulders the way other people use their eyebrows. Bubbles used the thump of the foot to “emphasize offbeat accents and to ground his more complex syncopations afforded by the tempo.”
Seibert also brings in the matter of personality—charisma and charm, which are crucial matters in tap—and he has some fun with people who were short on it. (Of Eleanor Powell: “Like many performers of her time, Powell habitually affected a pose of ecstatic pleasure, head back and mouth open. In some close-ups, she looks ready to eat the camera.”) He does not give a lot of biographical information, and, alas, he runs shy of scandal, but some improprieties sneak in, by way of explaining artistic matters. Baby Laurence (1921-74), whom the old tappers viewed as a master, was not recorded on film during his superb middle years, because his heroin addiction was such that he could never get it together to be in a show. His best performances, Seibert says, were given on the sidewalk, “cutting” (doing a challenge dance) with his colleague Groundhog, in front of Minton’s Playhouse, the famous club in Harlem. “The dealers liked to watch them,” their friend Miles Davis said. “They gave
them shit for free if they got down.”
Seibert does not disrespect Baby Laurence for this. Indeed, he sees something good in just about every dancer he writes about. I am talking here not about charity, merely judiciousness. He has a few adjustments to make to great reputations, for example, that of Fred Astaire, who is so often described as perfect. He doesn’t love Gene Kelly—“In the age of swing, he seldom swung”—though he calls Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” number imperishable (“that wet face, stretching into rain as if to bask in sun”). At the same time, he considers Donald O’Connor “the age’s most underrated dancer.” One performer showed this little grace; another took a step just a certain way. If Seibert betrays any identifiable bias, it’s toward women. That’s O.K. by me. Many male tappers, black and white, have taken female tappers less than seriously. Cartoon “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?”Buy the print » (http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/New-Yorker-Current-Issue-Prints_c148582_.htm) One job
Seibert gave himself was to trace a clear historical arc, and he does that. Through the meeting of Irish and West African people trying to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night—often together, in the same dance halls—the thing we call tap dance emerged, with its special technique and, as it grew alongside jazz, its special rhythmic qualities. At its high tide, the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, tap was everywhere: in movies, in musicals, in vaudeville, and above all in clubs. Then something happened. People in the field speak of an actual moment when the change occurred: the death of Bill Robinson. On the day of Robinson’s funeral, in 1949, the schools in Harlem closed at noon. Three thousand people crowded into the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and thousands more stood outside. Mayor William O’Dwyer gave the eulogy. After that, as the speed tapper Buster Brown (1913-2002) put it, “Bang. No more jobs.”
Of course, the economic drain was not because of Robinson. He was seventy-two; he had a right to die. But many factors converged. In Broadway shows, the fashion changed from tap acts to “dream ballets.” (Seibert says that Agnes de Mille, the leading popularizer of the dream ballet, was sometimes spoken of in the community as “the Woman Who Killed Tap.”) As for television, jobs were few, and usually ill-paid. Seibert writes that Honi Coles’s partner, Cholly Atkins, “remembered that the top fee for an act like Coles and Atkins was a hundred-fifty dollars an episode—which, after the agent’s cut, bought some groceries.” But Broadway and television were small matters compared with the closing of the night clubs. People didn’t go to clubs anymore—they stayed home and watched TV. Popular music changed, too, from tap-friendly jazz to rock and roll. Atkins took a job choreographing routines for Motown groups. He taught the Supremes, and Martha and the Vandellas, how to move. Other men
got work as janitors or hotel clerks, or they drank.
Then, in the seventies, a number of white female tappers—the most important were Brenda Bufalino and Jane Goldberg—decided that tap had to be saved. They pulled these discouraged men out of their living rooms and organized festivals where tap could once again be performed and taught. Seibert can be very funny about how the women ran around getting the old tappers their meds and drove them to their appointments, and how, at the teaching sessions, the woman often got the job of explaining how a step should be done, at which point the great man, from his chair, might correct her, in front of the class.
Those women should be honored, but what tap needed, in addition to classes and festivals, was a big star. Soon he came: Gregory Hines (1946-2003), the son of a jazz drummer and, with his brother Maurice, part of a child tap act. For a time, Hines wanted to be a rock guitarist, and a hippie, but finally he was willing to be a tap dancer, and, with his affability and his virility and his tank tops, everyone fell in love with him. He starred in big-time musicals—“Eubie!” (1979), “Sophisticated Ladies” (1981), “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992), getting Tony Award nominations for all three—and in movies, including “The Cotton Club” (1984), “White Nights” (1985), and “Tap” (1989). In “White Nights,” he did an extended competition dance with Mikhail Baryshnikov, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. It was “difficult to choose which one to watch, which shade of cool to savor,” Seibert writes. “For Hines to hold his own against the man justly considered the greatest dancer in the world—that
said something about Hines. For a tap dancer, and a black one, to be framed as an equal to ballet’s prince—that said something about tap, and where Hines might take it.” But Hines died young, at fifty-seven, of liver cancer.
The mantle passed to Hines’s foremost protégé, Savion Glover, and one of the most interesting things in “What the Eye Hears” is to watch Seibert try to sort out his feelings about Glover’s influence on today’s tap. Glover, now forty-one, is certainly the most accomplished tap technician living—probably the most accomplished who ever lived. (Hines never reached Glover’s level.) Seibert credits him for that, but then wonders whether such extreme concentration on technique is good for the field, or even for the art. Glover has drilled deeper and deeper into sound, but tap is other things besides sound. It is charm and suavity and wit. Indeed, it is silence as well as sound. (Bill Robinson used long, long pauses.) Glover tends to see himself and a few others, legatees of certain approved elders, as “the Last HooFeRz standing,” with the right to dictate how tap should be done.
This goes directly against Seibert’s primary emphasis, which is inclusiveness, a welcoming attitude, a love of things mixing up together. He must be the world’s most enthusiastic multiculturalist. Syncopation, he says, was a creed that Irving Berlin, “as a Jewish immigrant whose family had fled Russian pogroms, . . . had learned from a Negro ragtime pianist in New York’s Chinatown at a dive called Nigger Mike’s. (Mike was also a Russian Jew.)” It’s not just cultures that Seibert likes to see mix. Leonard Reed, a light-skinned tapper, and later an important producer—he claimed to have invented the Shim Sham, a simple heel-toe combination that became a sort of anthem of tap—was born in a tepee in Oklahoma. Seibert writes, “His mother was Choctaw Cherokee, and her great-grandfather was black. As for his father, Reed said that he was ‘white and Irish or something.’ ” That, to Seibert, is the way tap is, and should be.
If this attitude is one of the book’s beauties, it is also the source of what I think is its one serious fault, which is that it includes too much. (It is more than five hundred pages long.) The small tap groups of the seventies and eighties are not compelling enough to merit the space that Seibert gives them. The same goes for his coverage of tap outside the United States. The tap dancers of Estonia: I wish them well, but until they do something of note I don’t need to read about them. Nevertheless, since there is so little prior literature, you can understand Seibert’s wish to be thorough. Also—a common problem with heavily researched books—he found out things he couldn’t bear not to use. (Tap hasn’t caught on in Africa! Hitler loved Fred Astaire!)
But, if some modern tappers are not fascinating to read about, others are—for example, the virtuoso Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, now thirty-seven years old. In the late nineteen-nineties, Savion Glover, unaccustomed at that point to choreographing for women, put her in his show “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” though he had her dressed as a boy. Another person of interest is Michelle Dorrance, thirty-six years old, whose mother was a ballet dancer and whose father is the coach of the University of North Carolina’s women’s soccer team. Dorrance is ambitious. She’s had her own company for four years, and she creates ensemble choreography, not a specialty of tap soloists. Seibert feels that she has also extended the art psychologically. Tap has long been said to have a narrow subjective field: wit, joy, slyness. Dorrance’s choreography, Seibert writes, widens the territory, laying bare “emotions hidden in the mechanics of tap technique, revealing how swiveling ankles reveal
tender parts.” This year, she won a MacArthur Fellowship. If tap is to survive, these people need to be written about.
Tap is in a strange place: very often, when it is used, it is not just an artistic medium, a language, but also—automatically, almost—a subject. It refers to itself, as a focus of nostalgia or historical meditation or something else. This has been true of almost all tap movies since the eighties, and of the most popular tap musicals, such as “42nd Street” (1980) and “Bring in ’da Noise.” Another example is coming to Broadway in April: “Shuffle Along, Or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” which is a reprise of a fabled all-black revue. Created by the same men who made “Bring in ’da Noise,” Glover and George C. Wolfe, it will, like that production, tell us about tap as well as show it. This is a road that tap cannot go down forever. It makes the art too inverted, too limited, and it offers too few jobs. For tap to move forward, there has to be some replacement for the clubs of the old days, and I don’t know where that will come from. I guess
the form could be kept alive by grants and private patronage, like ballet and modern dance, but it is not as popular as ballet, or even modern dance.
It could die. Other genres that were once central to Western art have dropped off the shelf—epic poetry, commedia dell’arte, verse drama, the masque—and, if this list were expanded to include Asia, it would be much longer. Japan’s venerable puppetry traditions—Bunraku, Awaji—exist only because they are funded by the government. The classic dance forms of India, from what I am told by some of their more conservative practitioners, have almost no audience outside the festivals. The same could happen to tap. In that case, it will go down in the history books as a marvellous thing that grew and died under certain historical conditions, mostly in the twentieth century. And Seibert’s book will serve as a noble testimonial. ♦ Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
Need to stop reading?
We’ll send you a reminder.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=7a3bd1cc5b) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=7a3bd1cc5b&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

“What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/up-from-the-hold

** Up from the Hold
————————————————————

** The story of tap.
————————————————————

** BY JOAN ACOCELLA (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/joan-acocella)
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/151130_r27352-1200.jpgAt tap’s high tide, the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, tap was everywhere: in movies, in the theatre, and above all in clubs. Illustration by Simone Massoni Tap, which is the dance form of jazz music, has been around more or less since the late nineteenth century, but, unlike jazz, which has been the subject of many deep-browed books, it has a small, mediocre literature. There have been some valuable works—biographies and memoirs, collections of interviews, even a few histories—but never a volume that did the real heavy lifting: critical, analytical, historical, comprehensive.
It’s not hard to see why. Dance itself, because it mostly went unrecorded, was little studied in a serious way, and there was no reason that tap should have been an exception. Indeed, there are many reasons that it should have been the worst served. First, it is a peculiar form, in that it is both movement and music. Most other kinds of dance can be described as being performed to the music, but tap, like other foot-stamping forms—flamenco, Irish step dancing, most Indian classical dance—also makes its own music. Even if there’s a pianist onstage, or a whole orchestra, the most important sound at any tap concert is the one being made by the dancer’s feet. And that sensory doubleness, sight combined with sound, makes for a psychological-aesthetic doubleness. We get an abstract art, music, wedded to a narrative art, the story that is inescapably there whenever a human body places itself before us.
Then, there is tap’s history, the fact that it was created by extremely poor people, Irish and West African, in a place that they came to not because they wanted to be there—that is, here—but because in their own lands either they were starving or they had been captured and converted into salable property. I know of no account of the origins of tap that does not include the story that, during the voyage from Africa, slaves were periodically brought up from the ship’s hold and forced to dance on the deck. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them from dying. Imagine what this meant. Commanded to dance, they did routines that, maybe just a month or two earlier, had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or an expression of their relationship to their grandparents. Now the purpose of the dance was simply to put them through their paces, as if they were dogs or horses. They must have wanted, in some measure,
to impress their captors, in order to be better treated. They must also have been ashamed of that wish, and wondered why they didn’t throw themselves overboard. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of grief and humiliation that was built into tap at its birth.
Honi Coles, the distinguished “class act” tapper, once said that when Bill (Bojangles) Robinson was making movies in the nineteen-thirties with Shirley Temple—films in which, some people later claimed, this great star was pushed into Uncle Tomism—he was the happiest man in the world. “Part of it was the generosity that black entertainers showed to whites,” Coles said. “We were so happy somebody wanted what we did, we were ready just to give it away.”
Today’s black choreographers are not so ready. In New York, Donald Byrd, a prominent African-American choreographer, recently presented a piece, “The Minstrel Show Revisited,” that links nineteenth-century minstrelsy—which was a breeding ground of tap and also the ancestor of some of black America’s most brilliant comedy (Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle)—with the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
This tangle of emotions—who wants to take it on? And who wants to anger as many people as any book on tap will do, no matter what it says? (Some people still don’t want to hear that Irish step dancing contributed to tap, which it unquestionably did.) But forget the politics. What about the technical matters—the question of when a dancer will drop his heel, and how much he’s working from the side of the foot rather than from the middle? That’s not to speak of the range of musical choices. Really, in order to write a book on this subject, a person would almost have to be not just a dance critic but a tap dancer.
That book has now been published—“What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, Brian Seibert, is a dance critic for the Times. (He also contributes to Goings On About Town, in The New Yorker.) He is a tap dancer; he never went pro, but he has studied for most of his life. The book took him more than ten years to write.
One problem that he had to contend with was the unvarnished racism of much of the historical material. Because he is white, he might have spent the whole book shaking a compensatory fist or—more likely—walking on eggshells. He doesn’t. Now and then, he utters a cry of indignation. There are also certain injustices—no greater, I would say, than other injustices—that seem to be recorded, however quietly, on every page. (Again and again, Seibert notes the instances in which routines created by black dancers were credited to other people. He can’t get over it. He himself is an artist—he writes beautiful prose and is a crackerjack storyteller—and he can’t stand to see artists go unacknowledged.) But, in general, he states the facts dispassionately: the Vegas casinos where the tappers who performed there couldn’t get a room or eat, the critics complaining if a dancer seemed to them to show an insufficiently “Negro” spirit, the artists’ complicity, performing as the Three Little
Dots or Two Real Coons. Seibert doesn’t tell us to get mad about these things. He lets us get mad by ourselves.
It’s hard to know which of Seibert’s dance portraits to spotlight, because there are so many wonderful ones. Should it be John Bubbles (1902-86), who Seibert and a lot of other commentators think was one of the greatest tap dancers on record? (George Gershwin chose him to create the role of Sportin’ Life, in “Porgy and Bess.”) It is an unlooked-for gift that “What the Eye Hears” was published in the age of YouTube, which offers thrilling footage of many of the early-twentieth-century performers, including Bubbles. (See the video labelled “Buck and Bubbles . . .Varsity Show.”) As Seibert points out, we don’t have to take his word for it. Or should one focus on Jimmy Slyde (1927-2008), the bebop master whom Seibert saw while he was still in his prime, and whom he clearly adored? Whoever the dancer, the book’s emphasis is on technical achievement and musical invention—that is, on art. Many people, including dance critics, have often thought of tap as something that people with a
certain skill just got up there and did, in order to have, and give us, a good time. Seibert digs down into the particulars. Slyde, he says, used his shoulders the way other people use their eyebrows. Bubbles used the thump of the foot to “emphasize offbeat accents and to ground his more complex syncopations afforded by the tempo.”
Seibert also brings in the matter of personality—charisma and charm, which are crucial matters in tap—and he has some fun with people who were short on it. (Of Eleanor Powell: “Like many performers of her time, Powell habitually affected a pose of ecstatic pleasure, head back and mouth open. In some close-ups, she looks ready to eat the camera.”) He does not give a lot of biographical information, and, alas, he runs shy of scandal, but some improprieties sneak in, by way of explaining artistic matters. Baby Laurence (1921-74), whom the old tappers viewed as a master, was not recorded on film during his superb middle years, because his heroin addiction was such that he could never get it together to be in a show. His best performances, Seibert says, were given on the sidewalk, “cutting” (doing a challenge dance) with his colleague Groundhog, in front of Minton’s Playhouse, the famous club in Harlem. “The dealers liked to watch them,” their friend Miles Davis said. “They gave
them shit for free if they got down.”
Seibert does not disrespect Baby Laurence for this. Indeed, he sees something good in just about every dancer he writes about. I am talking here not about charity, merely judiciousness. He has a few adjustments to make to great reputations, for example, that of Fred Astaire, who is so often described as perfect. He doesn’t love Gene Kelly—“In the age of swing, he seldom swung”—though he calls Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” number imperishable (“that wet face, stretching into rain as if to bask in sun”). At the same time, he considers Donald O’Connor “the age’s most underrated dancer.” One performer showed this little grace; another took a step just a certain way. If Seibert betrays any identifiable bias, it’s toward women. That’s O.K. by me. Many male tappers, black and white, have taken female tappers less than seriously. Cartoon “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?”Buy the print » (http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/New-Yorker-Current-Issue-Prints_c148582_.htm) One job
Seibert gave himself was to trace a clear historical arc, and he does that. Through the meeting of Irish and West African people trying to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night—often together, in the same dance halls—the thing we call tap dance emerged, with its special technique and, as it grew alongside jazz, its special rhythmic qualities. At its high tide, the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, tap was everywhere: in movies, in musicals, in vaudeville, and above all in clubs. Then something happened. People in the field speak of an actual moment when the change occurred: the death of Bill Robinson. On the day of Robinson’s funeral, in 1949, the schools in Harlem closed at noon. Three thousand people crowded into the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and thousands more stood outside. Mayor William O’Dwyer gave the eulogy. After that, as the speed tapper Buster Brown (1913-2002) put it, “Bang. No more jobs.”
Of course, the economic drain was not because of Robinson. He was seventy-two; he had a right to die. But many factors converged. In Broadway shows, the fashion changed from tap acts to “dream ballets.” (Seibert says that Agnes de Mille, the leading popularizer of the dream ballet, was sometimes spoken of in the community as “the Woman Who Killed Tap.”) As for television, jobs were few, and usually ill-paid. Seibert writes that Honi Coles’s partner, Cholly Atkins, “remembered that the top fee for an act like Coles and Atkins was a hundred-fifty dollars an episode—which, after the agent’s cut, bought some groceries.” But Broadway and television were small matters compared with the closing of the night clubs. People didn’t go to clubs anymore—they stayed home and watched TV. Popular music changed, too, from tap-friendly jazz to rock and roll. Atkins took a job choreographing routines for Motown groups. He taught the Supremes, and Martha and the Vandellas, how to move. Other men
got work as janitors or hotel clerks, or they drank.
Then, in the seventies, a number of white female tappers—the most important were Brenda Bufalino and Jane Goldberg—decided that tap had to be saved. They pulled these discouraged men out of their living rooms and organized festivals where tap could once again be performed and taught. Seibert can be very funny about how the women ran around getting the old tappers their meds and drove them to their appointments, and how, at the teaching sessions, the woman often got the job of explaining how a step should be done, at which point the great man, from his chair, might correct her, in front of the class.
Those women should be honored, but what tap needed, in addition to classes and festivals, was a big star. Soon he came: Gregory Hines (1946-2003), the son of a jazz drummer and, with his brother Maurice, part of a child tap act. For a time, Hines wanted to be a rock guitarist, and a hippie, but finally he was willing to be a tap dancer, and, with his affability and his virility and his tank tops, everyone fell in love with him. He starred in big-time musicals—“Eubie!” (1979), “Sophisticated Ladies” (1981), “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992), getting Tony Award nominations for all three—and in movies, including “The Cotton Club” (1984), “White Nights” (1985), and “Tap” (1989). In “White Nights,” he did an extended competition dance with Mikhail Baryshnikov, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. It was “difficult to choose which one to watch, which shade of cool to savor,” Seibert writes. “For Hines to hold his own against the man justly considered the greatest dancer in the world—that
said something about Hines. For a tap dancer, and a black one, to be framed as an equal to ballet’s prince—that said something about tap, and where Hines might take it.” But Hines died young, at fifty-seven, of liver cancer.
The mantle passed to Hines’s foremost protégé, Savion Glover, and one of the most interesting things in “What the Eye Hears” is to watch Seibert try to sort out his feelings about Glover’s influence on today’s tap. Glover, now forty-one, is certainly the most accomplished tap technician living—probably the most accomplished who ever lived. (Hines never reached Glover’s level.) Seibert credits him for that, but then wonders whether such extreme concentration on technique is good for the field, or even for the art. Glover has drilled deeper and deeper into sound, but tap is other things besides sound. It is charm and suavity and wit. Indeed, it is silence as well as sound. (Bill Robinson used long, long pauses.) Glover tends to see himself and a few others, legatees of certain approved elders, as “the Last HooFeRz standing,” with the right to dictate how tap should be done.
This goes directly against Seibert’s primary emphasis, which is inclusiveness, a welcoming attitude, a love of things mixing up together. He must be the world’s most enthusiastic multiculturalist. Syncopation, he says, was a creed that Irving Berlin, “as a Jewish immigrant whose family had fled Russian pogroms, . . . had learned from a Negro ragtime pianist in New York’s Chinatown at a dive called Nigger Mike’s. (Mike was also a Russian Jew.)” It’s not just cultures that Seibert likes to see mix. Leonard Reed, a light-skinned tapper, and later an important producer—he claimed to have invented the Shim Sham, a simple heel-toe combination that became a sort of anthem of tap—was born in a tepee in Oklahoma. Seibert writes, “His mother was Choctaw Cherokee, and her great-grandfather was black. As for his father, Reed said that he was ‘white and Irish or something.’ ” That, to Seibert, is the way tap is, and should be.
If this attitude is one of the book’s beauties, it is also the source of what I think is its one serious fault, which is that it includes too much. (It is more than five hundred pages long.) The small tap groups of the seventies and eighties are not compelling enough to merit the space that Seibert gives them. The same goes for his coverage of tap outside the United States. The tap dancers of Estonia: I wish them well, but until they do something of note I don’t need to read about them. Nevertheless, since there is so little prior literature, you can understand Seibert’s wish to be thorough. Also—a common problem with heavily researched books—he found out things he couldn’t bear not to use. (Tap hasn’t caught on in Africa! Hitler loved Fred Astaire!)
But, if some modern tappers are not fascinating to read about, others are—for example, the virtuoso Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, now thirty-seven years old. In the late nineteen-nineties, Savion Glover, unaccustomed at that point to choreographing for women, put her in his show “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” though he had her dressed as a boy. Another person of interest is Michelle Dorrance, thirty-six years old, whose mother was a ballet dancer and whose father is the coach of the University of North Carolina’s women’s soccer team. Dorrance is ambitious. She’s had her own company for four years, and she creates ensemble choreography, not a specialty of tap soloists. Seibert feels that she has also extended the art psychologically. Tap has long been said to have a narrow subjective field: wit, joy, slyness. Dorrance’s choreography, Seibert writes, widens the territory, laying bare “emotions hidden in the mechanics of tap technique, revealing how swiveling ankles reveal
tender parts.” This year, she won a MacArthur Fellowship. If tap is to survive, these people need to be written about.
Tap is in a strange place: very often, when it is used, it is not just an artistic medium, a language, but also—automatically, almost—a subject. It refers to itself, as a focus of nostalgia or historical meditation or something else. This has been true of almost all tap movies since the eighties, and of the most popular tap musicals, such as “42nd Street” (1980) and “Bring in ’da Noise.” Another example is coming to Broadway in April: “Shuffle Along, Or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” which is a reprise of a fabled all-black revue. Created by the same men who made “Bring in ’da Noise,” Glover and George C. Wolfe, it will, like that production, tell us about tap as well as show it. This is a road that tap cannot go down forever. It makes the art too inverted, too limited, and it offers too few jobs. For tap to move forward, there has to be some replacement for the clubs of the old days, and I don’t know where that will come from. I guess
the form could be kept alive by grants and private patronage, like ballet and modern dance, but it is not as popular as ballet, or even modern dance.
It could die. Other genres that were once central to Western art have dropped off the shelf—epic poetry, commedia dell’arte, verse drama, the masque—and, if this list were expanded to include Asia, it would be much longer. Japan’s venerable puppetry traditions—Bunraku, Awaji—exist only because they are funded by the government. The classic dance forms of India, from what I am told by some of their more conservative practitioners, have almost no audience outside the festivals. The same could happen to tap. In that case, it will go down in the history books as a marvellous thing that grew and died under certain historical conditions, mostly in the twentieth century. And Seibert’s book will serve as a noble testimonial. ♦ Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
Need to stop reading?
We’ll send you a reminder.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=7a3bd1cc5b) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=7a3bd1cc5b&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

“What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/30/up-from-the-hold

** Up from the Hold
————————————————————

** The story of tap.
————————————————————

** BY JOAN ACOCELLA (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/joan-acocella)
————————————————————
http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/151130_r27352-1200.jpgAt tap’s high tide, the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, tap was everywhere: in movies, in the theatre, and above all in clubs. Illustration by Simone Massoni Tap, which is the dance form of jazz music, has been around more or less since the late nineteenth century, but, unlike jazz, which has been the subject of many deep-browed books, it has a small, mediocre literature. There have been some valuable works—biographies and memoirs, collections of interviews, even a few histories—but never a volume that did the real heavy lifting: critical, analytical, historical, comprehensive.
It’s not hard to see why. Dance itself, because it mostly went unrecorded, was little studied in a serious way, and there was no reason that tap should have been an exception. Indeed, there are many reasons that it should have been the worst served. First, it is a peculiar form, in that it is both movement and music. Most other kinds of dance can be described as being performed to the music, but tap, like other foot-stamping forms—flamenco, Irish step dancing, most Indian classical dance—also makes its own music. Even if there’s a pianist onstage, or a whole orchestra, the most important sound at any tap concert is the one being made by the dancer’s feet. And that sensory doubleness, sight combined with sound, makes for a psychological-aesthetic doubleness. We get an abstract art, music, wedded to a narrative art, the story that is inescapably there whenever a human body places itself before us.
Then, there is tap’s history, the fact that it was created by extremely poor people, Irish and West African, in a place that they came to not because they wanted to be there—that is, here—but because in their own lands either they were starving or they had been captured and converted into salable property. I know of no account of the origins of tap that does not include the story that, during the voyage from Africa, slaves were periodically brought up from the ship’s hold and forced to dance on the deck. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them from dying. Imagine what this meant. Commanded to dance, they did routines that, maybe just a month or two earlier, had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or an expression of their relationship to their grandparents. Now the purpose of the dance was simply to put them through their paces, as if they were dogs or horses. They must have wanted, in some measure,
to impress their captors, in order to be better treated. They must also have been ashamed of that wish, and wondered why they didn’t throw themselves overboard. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of grief and humiliation that was built into tap at its birth.
Honi Coles, the distinguished “class act” tapper, once said that when Bill (Bojangles) Robinson was making movies in the nineteen-thirties with Shirley Temple—films in which, some people later claimed, this great star was pushed into Uncle Tomism—he was the happiest man in the world. “Part of it was the generosity that black entertainers showed to whites,” Coles said. “We were so happy somebody wanted what we did, we were ready just to give it away.”
Today’s black choreographers are not so ready. In New York, Donald Byrd, a prominent African-American choreographer, recently presented a piece, “The Minstrel Show Revisited,” that links nineteenth-century minstrelsy—which was a breeding ground of tap and also the ancestor of some of black America’s most brilliant comedy (Richard Pryor, Dave Chappelle)—with the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
This tangle of emotions—who wants to take it on? And who wants to anger as many people as any book on tap will do, no matter what it says? (Some people still don’t want to hear that Irish step dancing contributed to tap, which it unquestionably did.) But forget the politics. What about the technical matters—the question of when a dancer will drop his heel, and how much he’s working from the side of the foot rather than from the middle? That’s not to speak of the range of musical choices. Really, in order to write a book on this subject, a person would almost have to be not just a dance critic but a tap dancer.
That book has now been published—“What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, Brian Seibert, is a dance critic for the Times. (He also contributes to Goings On About Town, in The New Yorker.) He is a tap dancer; he never went pro, but he has studied for most of his life. The book took him more than ten years to write.
One problem that he had to contend with was the unvarnished racism of much of the historical material. Because he is white, he might have spent the whole book shaking a compensatory fist or—more likely—walking on eggshells. He doesn’t. Now and then, he utters a cry of indignation. There are also certain injustices—no greater, I would say, than other injustices—that seem to be recorded, however quietly, on every page. (Again and again, Seibert notes the instances in which routines created by black dancers were credited to other people. He can’t get over it. He himself is an artist—he writes beautiful prose and is a crackerjack storyteller—and he can’t stand to see artists go unacknowledged.) But, in general, he states the facts dispassionately: the Vegas casinos where the tappers who performed there couldn’t get a room or eat, the critics complaining if a dancer seemed to them to show an insufficiently “Negro” spirit, the artists’ complicity, performing as the Three Little
Dots or Two Real Coons. Seibert doesn’t tell us to get mad about these things. He lets us get mad by ourselves.
It’s hard to know which of Seibert’s dance portraits to spotlight, because there are so many wonderful ones. Should it be John Bubbles (1902-86), who Seibert and a lot of other commentators think was one of the greatest tap dancers on record? (George Gershwin chose him to create the role of Sportin’ Life, in “Porgy and Bess.”) It is an unlooked-for gift that “What the Eye Hears” was published in the age of YouTube, which offers thrilling footage of many of the early-twentieth-century performers, including Bubbles. (See the video labelled “Buck and Bubbles . . .Varsity Show.”) As Seibert points out, we don’t have to take his word for it. Or should one focus on Jimmy Slyde (1927-2008), the bebop master whom Seibert saw while he was still in his prime, and whom he clearly adored? Whoever the dancer, the book’s emphasis is on technical achievement and musical invention—that is, on art. Many people, including dance critics, have often thought of tap as something that people with a
certain skill just got up there and did, in order to have, and give us, a good time. Seibert digs down into the particulars. Slyde, he says, used his shoulders the way other people use their eyebrows. Bubbles used the thump of the foot to “emphasize offbeat accents and to ground his more complex syncopations afforded by the tempo.”
Seibert also brings in the matter of personality—charisma and charm, which are crucial matters in tap—and he has some fun with people who were short on it. (Of Eleanor Powell: “Like many performers of her time, Powell habitually affected a pose of ecstatic pleasure, head back and mouth open. In some close-ups, she looks ready to eat the camera.”) He does not give a lot of biographical information, and, alas, he runs shy of scandal, but some improprieties sneak in, by way of explaining artistic matters. Baby Laurence (1921-74), whom the old tappers viewed as a master, was not recorded on film during his superb middle years, because his heroin addiction was such that he could never get it together to be in a show. His best performances, Seibert says, were given on the sidewalk, “cutting” (doing a challenge dance) with his colleague Groundhog, in front of Minton’s Playhouse, the famous club in Harlem. “The dealers liked to watch them,” their friend Miles Davis said. “They gave
them shit for free if they got down.”
Seibert does not disrespect Baby Laurence for this. Indeed, he sees something good in just about every dancer he writes about. I am talking here not about charity, merely judiciousness. He has a few adjustments to make to great reputations, for example, that of Fred Astaire, who is so often described as perfect. He doesn’t love Gene Kelly—“In the age of swing, he seldom swung”—though he calls Kelly’s “Singin’ in the Rain” number imperishable (“that wet face, stretching into rain as if to bask in sun”). At the same time, he considers Donald O’Connor “the age’s most underrated dancer.” One performer showed this little grace; another took a step just a certain way. If Seibert betrays any identifiable bias, it’s toward women. That’s O.K. by me. Many male tappers, black and white, have taken female tappers less than seriously. Cartoon “He’s right behind me, isn’t he?”Buy the print » (http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/New-Yorker-Current-Issue-Prints_c148582_.htm) One job
Seibert gave himself was to trace a clear historical arc, and he does that. Through the meeting of Irish and West African people trying to enjoy themselves on a Saturday night—often together, in the same dance halls—the thing we call tap dance emerged, with its special technique and, as it grew alongside jazz, its special rhythmic qualities. At its high tide, the nineteen-twenties through the fifties, tap was everywhere: in movies, in musicals, in vaudeville, and above all in clubs. Then something happened. People in the field speak of an actual moment when the change occurred: the death of Bill Robinson. On the day of Robinson’s funeral, in 1949, the schools in Harlem closed at noon. Three thousand people crowded into the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and thousands more stood outside. Mayor William O’Dwyer gave the eulogy. After that, as the speed tapper Buster Brown (1913-2002) put it, “Bang. No more jobs.”
Of course, the economic drain was not because of Robinson. He was seventy-two; he had a right to die. But many factors converged. In Broadway shows, the fashion changed from tap acts to “dream ballets.” (Seibert says that Agnes de Mille, the leading popularizer of the dream ballet, was sometimes spoken of in the community as “the Woman Who Killed Tap.”) As for television, jobs were few, and usually ill-paid. Seibert writes that Honi Coles’s partner, Cholly Atkins, “remembered that the top fee for an act like Coles and Atkins was a hundred-fifty dollars an episode—which, after the agent’s cut, bought some groceries.” But Broadway and television were small matters compared with the closing of the night clubs. People didn’t go to clubs anymore—they stayed home and watched TV. Popular music changed, too, from tap-friendly jazz to rock and roll. Atkins took a job choreographing routines for Motown groups. He taught the Supremes, and Martha and the Vandellas, how to move. Other men
got work as janitors or hotel clerks, or they drank.
Then, in the seventies, a number of white female tappers—the most important were Brenda Bufalino and Jane Goldberg—decided that tap had to be saved. They pulled these discouraged men out of their living rooms and organized festivals where tap could once again be performed and taught. Seibert can be very funny about how the women ran around getting the old tappers their meds and drove them to their appointments, and how, at the teaching sessions, the woman often got the job of explaining how a step should be done, at which point the great man, from his chair, might correct her, in front of the class.
Those women should be honored, but what tap needed, in addition to classes and festivals, was a big star. Soon he came: Gregory Hines (1946-2003), the son of a jazz drummer and, with his brother Maurice, part of a child tap act. For a time, Hines wanted to be a rock guitarist, and a hippie, but finally he was willing to be a tap dancer, and, with his affability and his virility and his tank tops, everyone fell in love with him. He starred in big-time musicals—“Eubie!” (1979), “Sophisticated Ladies” (1981), “Jelly’s Last Jam” (1992), getting Tony Award nominations for all three—and in movies, including “The Cotton Club” (1984), “White Nights” (1985), and “Tap” (1989). In “White Nights,” he did an extended competition dance with Mikhail Baryshnikov, choreographed by Twyla Tharp. It was “difficult to choose which one to watch, which shade of cool to savor,” Seibert writes. “For Hines to hold his own against the man justly considered the greatest dancer in the world—that
said something about Hines. For a tap dancer, and a black one, to be framed as an equal to ballet’s prince—that said something about tap, and where Hines might take it.” But Hines died young, at fifty-seven, of liver cancer.
The mantle passed to Hines’s foremost protégé, Savion Glover, and one of the most interesting things in “What the Eye Hears” is to watch Seibert try to sort out his feelings about Glover’s influence on today’s tap. Glover, now forty-one, is certainly the most accomplished tap technician living—probably the most accomplished who ever lived. (Hines never reached Glover’s level.) Seibert credits him for that, but then wonders whether such extreme concentration on technique is good for the field, or even for the art. Glover has drilled deeper and deeper into sound, but tap is other things besides sound. It is charm and suavity and wit. Indeed, it is silence as well as sound. (Bill Robinson used long, long pauses.) Glover tends to see himself and a few others, legatees of certain approved elders, as “the Last HooFeRz standing,” with the right to dictate how tap should be done.
This goes directly against Seibert’s primary emphasis, which is inclusiveness, a welcoming attitude, a love of things mixing up together. He must be the world’s most enthusiastic multiculturalist. Syncopation, he says, was a creed that Irving Berlin, “as a Jewish immigrant whose family had fled Russian pogroms, . . . had learned from a Negro ragtime pianist in New York’s Chinatown at a dive called Nigger Mike’s. (Mike was also a Russian Jew.)” It’s not just cultures that Seibert likes to see mix. Leonard Reed, a light-skinned tapper, and later an important producer—he claimed to have invented the Shim Sham, a simple heel-toe combination that became a sort of anthem of tap—was born in a tepee in Oklahoma. Seibert writes, “His mother was Choctaw Cherokee, and her great-grandfather was black. As for his father, Reed said that he was ‘white and Irish or something.’ ” That, to Seibert, is the way tap is, and should be.
If this attitude is one of the book’s beauties, it is also the source of what I think is its one serious fault, which is that it includes too much. (It is more than five hundred pages long.) The small tap groups of the seventies and eighties are not compelling enough to merit the space that Seibert gives them. The same goes for his coverage of tap outside the United States. The tap dancers of Estonia: I wish them well, but until they do something of note I don’t need to read about them. Nevertheless, since there is so little prior literature, you can understand Seibert’s wish to be thorough. Also—a common problem with heavily researched books—he found out things he couldn’t bear not to use. (Tap hasn’t caught on in Africa! Hitler loved Fred Astaire!)
But, if some modern tappers are not fascinating to read about, others are—for example, the virtuoso Dormeshia Sumbry-Edwards, now thirty-seven years old. In the late nineteen-nineties, Savion Glover, unaccustomed at that point to choreographing for women, put her in his show “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” though he had her dressed as a boy. Another person of interest is Michelle Dorrance, thirty-six years old, whose mother was a ballet dancer and whose father is the coach of the University of North Carolina’s women’s soccer team. Dorrance is ambitious. She’s had her own company for four years, and she creates ensemble choreography, not a specialty of tap soloists. Seibert feels that she has also extended the art psychologically. Tap has long been said to have a narrow subjective field: wit, joy, slyness. Dorrance’s choreography, Seibert writes, widens the territory, laying bare “emotions hidden in the mechanics of tap technique, revealing how swiveling ankles reveal
tender parts.” This year, she won a MacArthur Fellowship. If tap is to survive, these people need to be written about.
Tap is in a strange place: very often, when it is used, it is not just an artistic medium, a language, but also—automatically, almost—a subject. It refers to itself, as a focus of nostalgia or historical meditation or something else. This has been true of almost all tap movies since the eighties, and of the most popular tap musicals, such as “42nd Street” (1980) and “Bring in ’da Noise.” Another example is coming to Broadway in April: “Shuffle Along, Or, the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” which is a reprise of a fabled all-black revue. Created by the same men who made “Bring in ’da Noise,” Glover and George C. Wolfe, it will, like that production, tell us about tap as well as show it. This is a road that tap cannot go down forever. It makes the art too inverted, too limited, and it offers too few jobs. For tap to move forward, there has to be some replacement for the clubs of the old days, and I don’t know where that will come from. I guess
the form could be kept alive by grants and private patronage, like ballet and modern dance, but it is not as popular as ballet, or even modern dance.
It could die. Other genres that were once central to Western art have dropped off the shelf—epic poetry, commedia dell’arte, verse drama, the masque—and, if this list were expanded to include Asia, it would be much longer. Japan’s venerable puppetry traditions—Bunraku, Awaji—exist only because they are funded by the government. The classic dance forms of India, from what I am told by some of their more conservative practitioners, have almost no audience outside the festivals. The same could happen to tap. In that case, it will go down in the history books as a marvellous thing that grew and died under certain historical conditions, mostly in the twentieth century. And Seibert’s book will serve as a noble testimonial. ♦ Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.
Need to stop reading?
We’ll send you a reminder.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=7a3bd1cc5b) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=7a3bd1cc5b&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Quarrymen/Beatles (Rare) In Spite Of All The Danger – Full Version. (1958). – YouTube

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8tobAFqjPY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8tobAFqjPY

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0c5c0d2ae5) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0c5c0d2ae5&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Quarrymen/Beatles (Rare) In Spite Of All The Danger – Full Version. (1958). – YouTube

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8tobAFqjPY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8tobAFqjPY

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0c5c0d2ae5) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0c5c0d2ae5&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Quarrymen/Beatles (Rare) In Spite Of All The Danger – Full Version. (1958). – YouTube

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8tobAFqjPY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8tobAFqjPY

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=0c5c0d2ae5) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=0c5c0d2ae5&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Longtime criminal defense attorney and jazz broadcaster Don Wolff dies : Entertainment

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/longtime-criminal-defense-attorney-and-jazz-broadcaster-don-wolff-dies/article_0df7a7b5-aced-5515-a965-a15e71a02b73.html

** Longtime criminal defense attorney and jazz broadcaster Don Wolff dies
————————————————————
By Christine Byers (http://www.stltoday.com/users/profile/cbyers)

Don Wolff was so good at representing soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the military that Army officials asked him to work for them as a prosecutor.

It was the 1960s. And Wolff was serving in Germany, where he met the second love of his life, Heide.

He met the first, jazz music, as it echoed from clubs he wasn’t old enough to enter while he sold newspapers in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square district, according to friends and relatives.

He balanced both along with his passion for the pursuit of justice, they said.

Mr. Wolff died Friday (Nov. 20, 2015) of leukemia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 80.

Mr. Wolff’s father was a grocer and owned a small neighborhood corner store in an African-American area, said his son, Nelson Wolff, of Clayton. “He grew up in poverty and was born into the Jewish faith, so he was very aware of discrimination and was particularly sympathetic to racial discrimination,” Nelson Wolff said. “It ignited his passion for the law.”

He also was a track star at University City High School, where he graduated in 1955. His talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied law.

As a soldier, Mr. Wolff would frequent the Army Post Exchange to hear bootlegged copies of jazz performances. He also saw live concerts as American jazz surged in popularity while rock ’n’ roll swept the states, said Madeline Dames, who worked with Mr. Wolff on various jazz endeavors for nearly two decades.

He returned to St. Louis and served as a prosecutor, known for taking on cases no one else wanted, his son said.

“In the late 1960s, he had to prosecute a sitting judge,” he said, adding that an artist’s rendering of the trial now hangs in his office. “That was a hot potato … he was successful in bringing the case.”

Mr. Wolff later became one of the area’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys.

Mr. Wolff handled capital cases and felonies involving porn and First Amendment issues, as well as cases where police officers were accused of crimes. He didn’t accept fees from other attorneys or officers for their cases, his son said.

“People would ask him, ‘How can you represent a murderer?’” his son said. “But by representing the accused, he could ensure the rights of all people were adequately protected.”

In addition to Nelson, Mr. Wolff and his wife had two other children.

“Growing up in the house of a trial lawyer, you didn’t win many arguments,” Nelson Wolff recalled. “We constantly felt like we were being cross-examined, because we were …

“All those years of losing arguments to him prepared me to take on the role of a lawyer.”

Mr. Wolff approached his appreciation for jazz with the same conviction, Dames said.

The Wolff Jazz Institute at Harris-Stowe State College is built around recordings and memorabilia Mr. Wolff and his wife donated in 2002.

Mr. Wolff’s radio show “I Love Jazz” aired on various stations, including KMOX, from the mid-1990s to 2008, when it became a TV show on HEC-TV. Dames worked with him for 18 years.

He concluded every program with a quote from Duke Ellington, which said in part: “Music will always ease your pain and produce peace and love. And that’s my wish for you.”

Visitation will be 2 p.m. Monday at United Hebrew Congregation, 13788 Conway Road. A New Orleans-style jazz funeral is set to follow at 3 p.m.

In addition to his wife and son, among the survivors are another son, Michael Wolff of St. Louis; a daughter, Kristina Hourihane of Glenview, Ill.; and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, the Urban League of Metropolitan St Louis, or the DLW Scholarship Fund at the UM School of Law.

Don Wolff was so good at representing soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the military that Army officials asked him to work for them as a prosecutor.

It was the 1960s. And Wolff was serving in Germany, where he met the second love of his life, Heide.

He met the first, jazz music, as it echoed from clubs he wasn’t old enough to enter while he sold newspapers in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square district, according to friends and relatives.

He balanced both along with his passion for the pursuit of justice, they said.

Mr. Wolff died Friday (Nov. 20, 2015) of leukemia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 80.

Mr. Wolff’s father was a grocer and owned a small neighborhood corner store in an African-American area, said his son, Nelson Wolff, of Clayton. “He grew up in poverty and was born into the Jewish faith, so he was very aware of discrimination and was particularly sympathetic to racial discrimination,” Nelson Wolff said. “It ignited his passion for the law.”

He also was a track star at University City High School, where he graduated in 1955. His talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied law.

As a soldier, Mr. Wolff would frequent the Army Post Exchange to hear bootlegged copies of jazz performances. He also saw live concerts as American jazz surged in popularity while rock ’n’ roll swept the states, said Madeline Dames, who worked with Mr. Wolff on various jazz endeavors for nearly two decades.

He returned to St. Louis and served as a prosecutor, known for taking on cases no one else wanted, his son said.

“In the late 1960s, he had to prosecute a sitting judge,” he said, adding that an artist’s rendering of the trial now hangs in his office. “That was a hot potato … he was successful in bringing the case.”

Mr. Wolff later became one of the area’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys.

Mr. Wolff handled capital cases and felonies involving porn and First Amendment issues, as well as cases where police officers were accused of crimes. He didn’t accept fees from other attorneys or officers for their cases, his son said.

“People would ask him, ‘How can you represent a murderer?’” his son said. “But by representing the accused, he could ensure the rights of all people were adequately protected.”

In addition to Nelson, Mr. Wolff and his wife had two other children.

“Growing up in the house of a trial lawyer, you didn’t win many arguments,” Nelson Wolff recalled. “We constantly felt like we were being cross-examined, because we were …

“All those years of losing arguments to him prepared me to take on the role of a lawyer.”

Mr. Wolff approached his appreciation for jazz with the same conviction, Dames said.

The Wolff Jazz Institute at Harris-Stowe State College is built around recordings and memorabilia Mr. Wolff and his wife donated in 2002.

Mr. Wolff’s radio show “I Love Jazz” aired on various stations, including KMOX, from the mid-1990s to 2008, when it became a TV show on HEC-TV. Dames worked with him for 18 years.

He concluded every program with a quote from Duke Ellington, which said in part: “Music will always ease your pain and produce peace and love. And that’s my wish for you.”

Visitation will be 2 p.m. Monday at United Hebrew Congregation, 13788 Conway Road. A New Orleans-style jazz funeral is set to follow at 3 p.m.

In addition to his wife and son, among the survivors are another son, Michael Wolff of St. Louis; a daughter, Kristina Hourihane of Glenview, Ill.; and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, the Urban League of Metropolitan St Louis, or the DLW Scholarship Fund at the UM School of Law.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=59f69c6e3e) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=59f69c6e3e&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Longtime criminal defense attorney and jazz broadcaster Don Wolff dies : Entertainment

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/longtime-criminal-defense-attorney-and-jazz-broadcaster-don-wolff-dies/article_0df7a7b5-aced-5515-a965-a15e71a02b73.html

** Longtime criminal defense attorney and jazz broadcaster Don Wolff dies
————————————————————
By Christine Byers (http://www.stltoday.com/users/profile/cbyers)

Don Wolff was so good at representing soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the military that Army officials asked him to work for them as a prosecutor.

It was the 1960s. And Wolff was serving in Germany, where he met the second love of his life, Heide.

He met the first, jazz music, as it echoed from clubs he wasn’t old enough to enter while he sold newspapers in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square district, according to friends and relatives.

He balanced both along with his passion for the pursuit of justice, they said.

Mr. Wolff died Friday (Nov. 20, 2015) of leukemia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 80.

Mr. Wolff’s father was a grocer and owned a small neighborhood corner store in an African-American area, said his son, Nelson Wolff, of Clayton. “He grew up in poverty and was born into the Jewish faith, so he was very aware of discrimination and was particularly sympathetic to racial discrimination,” Nelson Wolff said. “It ignited his passion for the law.”

He also was a track star at University City High School, where he graduated in 1955. His talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied law.

As a soldier, Mr. Wolff would frequent the Army Post Exchange to hear bootlegged copies of jazz performances. He also saw live concerts as American jazz surged in popularity while rock ’n’ roll swept the states, said Madeline Dames, who worked with Mr. Wolff on various jazz endeavors for nearly two decades.

He returned to St. Louis and served as a prosecutor, known for taking on cases no one else wanted, his son said.

“In the late 1960s, he had to prosecute a sitting judge,” he said, adding that an artist’s rendering of the trial now hangs in his office. “That was a hot potato … he was successful in bringing the case.”

Mr. Wolff later became one of the area’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys.

Mr. Wolff handled capital cases and felonies involving porn and First Amendment issues, as well as cases where police officers were accused of crimes. He didn’t accept fees from other attorneys or officers for their cases, his son said.

“People would ask him, ‘How can you represent a murderer?’” his son said. “But by representing the accused, he could ensure the rights of all people were adequately protected.”

In addition to Nelson, Mr. Wolff and his wife had two other children.

“Growing up in the house of a trial lawyer, you didn’t win many arguments,” Nelson Wolff recalled. “We constantly felt like we were being cross-examined, because we were …

“All those years of losing arguments to him prepared me to take on the role of a lawyer.”

Mr. Wolff approached his appreciation for jazz with the same conviction, Dames said.

The Wolff Jazz Institute at Harris-Stowe State College is built around recordings and memorabilia Mr. Wolff and his wife donated in 2002.

Mr. Wolff’s radio show “I Love Jazz” aired on various stations, including KMOX, from the mid-1990s to 2008, when it became a TV show on HEC-TV. Dames worked with him for 18 years.

He concluded every program with a quote from Duke Ellington, which said in part: “Music will always ease your pain and produce peace and love. And that’s my wish for you.”

Visitation will be 2 p.m. Monday at United Hebrew Congregation, 13788 Conway Road. A New Orleans-style jazz funeral is set to follow at 3 p.m.

In addition to his wife and son, among the survivors are another son, Michael Wolff of St. Louis; a daughter, Kristina Hourihane of Glenview, Ill.; and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, the Urban League of Metropolitan St Louis, or the DLW Scholarship Fund at the UM School of Law.

Don Wolff was so good at representing soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the military that Army officials asked him to work for them as a prosecutor.

It was the 1960s. And Wolff was serving in Germany, where he met the second love of his life, Heide.

He met the first, jazz music, as it echoed from clubs he wasn’t old enough to enter while he sold newspapers in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square district, according to friends and relatives.

He balanced both along with his passion for the pursuit of justice, they said.

Mr. Wolff died Friday (Nov. 20, 2015) of leukemia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 80.

Mr. Wolff’s father was a grocer and owned a small neighborhood corner store in an African-American area, said his son, Nelson Wolff, of Clayton. “He grew up in poverty and was born into the Jewish faith, so he was very aware of discrimination and was particularly sympathetic to racial discrimination,” Nelson Wolff said. “It ignited his passion for the law.”

He also was a track star at University City High School, where he graduated in 1955. His talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied law.

As a soldier, Mr. Wolff would frequent the Army Post Exchange to hear bootlegged copies of jazz performances. He also saw live concerts as American jazz surged in popularity while rock ’n’ roll swept the states, said Madeline Dames, who worked with Mr. Wolff on various jazz endeavors for nearly two decades.

He returned to St. Louis and served as a prosecutor, known for taking on cases no one else wanted, his son said.

“In the late 1960s, he had to prosecute a sitting judge,” he said, adding that an artist’s rendering of the trial now hangs in his office. “That was a hot potato … he was successful in bringing the case.”

Mr. Wolff later became one of the area’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys.

Mr. Wolff handled capital cases and felonies involving porn and First Amendment issues, as well as cases where police officers were accused of crimes. He didn’t accept fees from other attorneys or officers for their cases, his son said.

“People would ask him, ‘How can you represent a murderer?’” his son said. “But by representing the accused, he could ensure the rights of all people were adequately protected.”

In addition to Nelson, Mr. Wolff and his wife had two other children.

“Growing up in the house of a trial lawyer, you didn’t win many arguments,” Nelson Wolff recalled. “We constantly felt like we were being cross-examined, because we were …

“All those years of losing arguments to him prepared me to take on the role of a lawyer.”

Mr. Wolff approached his appreciation for jazz with the same conviction, Dames said.

The Wolff Jazz Institute at Harris-Stowe State College is built around recordings and memorabilia Mr. Wolff and his wife donated in 2002.

Mr. Wolff’s radio show “I Love Jazz” aired on various stations, including KMOX, from the mid-1990s to 2008, when it became a TV show on HEC-TV. Dames worked with him for 18 years.

He concluded every program with a quote from Duke Ellington, which said in part: “Music will always ease your pain and produce peace and love. And that’s my wish for you.”

Visitation will be 2 p.m. Monday at United Hebrew Congregation, 13788 Conway Road. A New Orleans-style jazz funeral is set to follow at 3 p.m.

In addition to his wife and son, among the survivors are another son, Michael Wolff of St. Louis; a daughter, Kristina Hourihane of Glenview, Ill.; and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, the Urban League of Metropolitan St Louis, or the DLW Scholarship Fund at the UM School of Law.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=59f69c6e3e) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=59f69c6e3e&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Longtime criminal defense attorney and jazz broadcaster Don Wolff dies : Entertainment

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.stltoday.com/entertainment/longtime-criminal-defense-attorney-and-jazz-broadcaster-don-wolff-dies/article_0df7a7b5-aced-5515-a965-a15e71a02b73.html

** Longtime criminal defense attorney and jazz broadcaster Don Wolff dies
————————————————————
By Christine Byers (http://www.stltoday.com/users/profile/cbyers)

Don Wolff was so good at representing soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the military that Army officials asked him to work for them as a prosecutor.

It was the 1960s. And Wolff was serving in Germany, where he met the second love of his life, Heide.

He met the first, jazz music, as it echoed from clubs he wasn’t old enough to enter while he sold newspapers in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square district, according to friends and relatives.

He balanced both along with his passion for the pursuit of justice, they said.

Mr. Wolff died Friday (Nov. 20, 2015) of leukemia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 80.

Mr. Wolff’s father was a grocer and owned a small neighborhood corner store in an African-American area, said his son, Nelson Wolff, of Clayton. “He grew up in poverty and was born into the Jewish faith, so he was very aware of discrimination and was particularly sympathetic to racial discrimination,” Nelson Wolff said. “It ignited his passion for the law.”

He also was a track star at University City High School, where he graduated in 1955. His talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied law.

As a soldier, Mr. Wolff would frequent the Army Post Exchange to hear bootlegged copies of jazz performances. He also saw live concerts as American jazz surged in popularity while rock ’n’ roll swept the states, said Madeline Dames, who worked with Mr. Wolff on various jazz endeavors for nearly two decades.

He returned to St. Louis and served as a prosecutor, known for taking on cases no one else wanted, his son said.

“In the late 1960s, he had to prosecute a sitting judge,” he said, adding that an artist’s rendering of the trial now hangs in his office. “That was a hot potato … he was successful in bringing the case.”

Mr. Wolff later became one of the area’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys.

Mr. Wolff handled capital cases and felonies involving porn and First Amendment issues, as well as cases where police officers were accused of crimes. He didn’t accept fees from other attorneys or officers for their cases, his son said.

“People would ask him, ‘How can you represent a murderer?’” his son said. “But by representing the accused, he could ensure the rights of all people were adequately protected.”

In addition to Nelson, Mr. Wolff and his wife had two other children.

“Growing up in the house of a trial lawyer, you didn’t win many arguments,” Nelson Wolff recalled. “We constantly felt like we were being cross-examined, because we were …

“All those years of losing arguments to him prepared me to take on the role of a lawyer.”

Mr. Wolff approached his appreciation for jazz with the same conviction, Dames said.

The Wolff Jazz Institute at Harris-Stowe State College is built around recordings and memorabilia Mr. Wolff and his wife donated in 2002.

Mr. Wolff’s radio show “I Love Jazz” aired on various stations, including KMOX, from the mid-1990s to 2008, when it became a TV show on HEC-TV. Dames worked with him for 18 years.

He concluded every program with a quote from Duke Ellington, which said in part: “Music will always ease your pain and produce peace and love. And that’s my wish for you.”

Visitation will be 2 p.m. Monday at United Hebrew Congregation, 13788 Conway Road. A New Orleans-style jazz funeral is set to follow at 3 p.m.

In addition to his wife and son, among the survivors are another son, Michael Wolff of St. Louis; a daughter, Kristina Hourihane of Glenview, Ill.; and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, the Urban League of Metropolitan St Louis, or the DLW Scholarship Fund at the UM School of Law.

Don Wolff was so good at representing soldiers accused of wrongdoing in the military that Army officials asked him to work for them as a prosecutor.

It was the 1960s. And Wolff was serving in Germany, where he met the second love of his life, Heide.

He met the first, jazz music, as it echoed from clubs he wasn’t old enough to enter while he sold newspapers in St. Louis’ Gaslight Square district, according to friends and relatives.

He balanced both along with his passion for the pursuit of justice, they said.

Mr. Wolff died Friday (Nov. 20, 2015) of leukemia at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 80.

Mr. Wolff’s father was a grocer and owned a small neighborhood corner store in an African-American area, said his son, Nelson Wolff, of Clayton. “He grew up in poverty and was born into the Jewish faith, so he was very aware of discrimination and was particularly sympathetic to racial discrimination,” Nelson Wolff said. “It ignited his passion for the law.”

He also was a track star at University City High School, where he graduated in 1955. His talent earned him a scholarship to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied law.

As a soldier, Mr. Wolff would frequent the Army Post Exchange to hear bootlegged copies of jazz performances. He also saw live concerts as American jazz surged in popularity while rock ’n’ roll swept the states, said Madeline Dames, who worked with Mr. Wolff on various jazz endeavors for nearly two decades.

He returned to St. Louis and served as a prosecutor, known for taking on cases no one else wanted, his son said.

“In the late 1960s, he had to prosecute a sitting judge,” he said, adding that an artist’s rendering of the trial now hangs in his office. “That was a hot potato … he was successful in bringing the case.”

Mr. Wolff later became one of the area’s most celebrated criminal defense attorneys.

Mr. Wolff handled capital cases and felonies involving porn and First Amendment issues, as well as cases where police officers were accused of crimes. He didn’t accept fees from other attorneys or officers for their cases, his son said.

“People would ask him, ‘How can you represent a murderer?’” his son said. “But by representing the accused, he could ensure the rights of all people were adequately protected.”

In addition to Nelson, Mr. Wolff and his wife had two other children.

“Growing up in the house of a trial lawyer, you didn’t win many arguments,” Nelson Wolff recalled. “We constantly felt like we were being cross-examined, because we were …

“All those years of losing arguments to him prepared me to take on the role of a lawyer.”

Mr. Wolff approached his appreciation for jazz with the same conviction, Dames said.

The Wolff Jazz Institute at Harris-Stowe State College is built around recordings and memorabilia Mr. Wolff and his wife donated in 2002.

Mr. Wolff’s radio show “I Love Jazz” aired on various stations, including KMOX, from the mid-1990s to 2008, when it became a TV show on HEC-TV. Dames worked with him for 18 years.

He concluded every program with a quote from Duke Ellington, which said in part: “Music will always ease your pain and produce peace and love. And that’s my wish for you.”

Visitation will be 2 p.m. Monday at United Hebrew Congregation, 13788 Conway Road. A New Orleans-style jazz funeral is set to follow at 3 p.m.

In addition to his wife and son, among the survivors are another son, Michael Wolff of St. Louis; a daughter, Kristina Hourihane of Glenview, Ill.; and eight grandchildren.

Memorial contributions may be made to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Eastern Missouri, the Urban League of Metropolitan St Louis, or the DLW Scholarship Fund at the UM School of Law.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=59f69c6e3e) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=59f69c6e3e&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Secret Behind Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’: ESQUIRE

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a39822/the-sinatra-papers/?mag=esq

** The Secret Behind Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
————————————————————

BY ESQUIRE EDITORS NOV 20, 2015 @ 8:00 AM ENTERTAINMENTGAY TALESE

In honor of Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday on December 12, Taschen is publishing a beautiful limited-edition version of Gay Talese’s iconic 1966 Esquire story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (http://classic.esquire.com/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold/) .” Among the book’s highlights are images of the writer’s trademark outlines scratched onto shirt boards.

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Alongside Talese’s piece are photographs by legendary photographer Phil Stern (http://www.philsternarchives.com/) , who shot Sinatra on various occasions, though perhaps most notably at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

Frank Sinatra at John F. Kennedy’s preinaugural gala rehearsal, Washington D.C., 1961

Phil Stern

“I knew it would be an historic occasion and I wanted to be in on it,” said (http://www.philsternarchives.com/archive/jfk/inaugural-gala-book/) Stern about the image, “So I wrote a note to Frank on a file card and left it in his dressing room. It read something like: ‘I’d like to photograph the inauguration. Check one of three boxes – fuck off, I’ll think about it, or yes.'”​

Phil Stern

Taschen’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is available now (http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/artists_editions/all/03128/facts.gay_talese_phil_stern_frank_sinatra_has_a_cold.htm) . ​And don’t miss Gay Talese talking to David Brancaccio about growing up listening to Sinatra on our latest Esquire Classic podcast (http://classic.esquire.com/editors-notes/podcast/) .​

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=fa777b4623) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=fa777b4623&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Secret Behind Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’: ESQUIRE

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a39822/the-sinatra-papers/?mag=esq

** The Secret Behind Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
————————————————————

BY ESQUIRE EDITORS NOV 20, 2015 @ 8:00 AM ENTERTAINMENTGAY TALESE

In honor of Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday on December 12, Taschen is publishing a beautiful limited-edition version of Gay Talese’s iconic 1966 Esquire story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (http://classic.esquire.com/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold/) .” Among the book’s highlights are images of the writer’s trademark outlines scratched onto shirt boards.

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Alongside Talese’s piece are photographs by legendary photographer Phil Stern (http://www.philsternarchives.com/) , who shot Sinatra on various occasions, though perhaps most notably at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

Frank Sinatra at John F. Kennedy’s preinaugural gala rehearsal, Washington D.C., 1961

Phil Stern

“I knew it would be an historic occasion and I wanted to be in on it,” said (http://www.philsternarchives.com/archive/jfk/inaugural-gala-book/) Stern about the image, “So I wrote a note to Frank on a file card and left it in his dressing room. It read something like: ‘I’d like to photograph the inauguration. Check one of three boxes – fuck off, I’ll think about it, or yes.'”​

Phil Stern

Taschen’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is available now (http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/artists_editions/all/03128/facts.gay_talese_phil_stern_frank_sinatra_has_a_cold.htm) . ​And don’t miss Gay Talese talking to David Brancaccio about growing up listening to Sinatra on our latest Esquire Classic podcast (http://classic.esquire.com/editors-notes/podcast/) .​

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=fa777b4623) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=fa777b4623&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

The Secret Behind Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’: ESQUIRE

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a39822/the-sinatra-papers/?mag=esq

** The Secret Behind Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
————————————————————

BY ESQUIRE EDITORS NOV 20, 2015 @ 8:00 AM ENTERTAINMENTGAY TALESE

In honor of Frank Sinatra’s 100th birthday on December 12, Taschen is publishing a beautiful limited-edition version of Gay Talese’s iconic 1966 Esquire story “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold (http://classic.esquire.com/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold/) .” Among the book’s highlights are images of the writer’s trademark outlines scratched onto shirt boards.

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Courtesy of Gay Talese

Alongside Talese’s piece are photographs by legendary photographer Phil Stern (http://www.philsternarchives.com/) , who shot Sinatra on various occasions, though perhaps most notably at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

Frank Sinatra at John F. Kennedy’s preinaugural gala rehearsal, Washington D.C., 1961

Phil Stern

“I knew it would be an historic occasion and I wanted to be in on it,” said (http://www.philsternarchives.com/archive/jfk/inaugural-gala-book/) Stern about the image, “So I wrote a note to Frank on a file card and left it in his dressing room. It read something like: ‘I’d like to photograph the inauguration. Check one of three boxes – fuck off, I’ll think about it, or yes.'”​

Phil Stern

Taschen’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” is available now (http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/artists_editions/all/03128/facts.gay_talese_phil_stern_frank_sinatra_has_a_cold.htm) . ​And don’t miss Gay Talese talking to David Brancaccio about growing up listening to Sinatra on our latest Esquire Classic podcast (http://classic.esquire.com/editors-notes/podcast/) .​

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=fa777b4623) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=fa777b4623&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Photo of the Week: Lundy’s Restaurant Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

If you grew up in Sheepshead Bay like I did, Lundy’s Restaurant was the place to go for seafood.

Here’s a little jazz factoid about Lundy’s: Teresa Brewer (http://50.56.218.160/archive/category.php?category_id=15&id=17758) was related to the owner Irving Lundy and of course she was married to legendary record producer Bob (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thiele) Thiele (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thiele) .

http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=e892f7cca5&e=493dd851a4

Photo of the Week:
Lundy’s Restaurant
By Tess Colwell, Digitization Associate

http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=a5f6c2c0d2&e=493dd851a4
[Lundy’s Restaurant], 1961, V1974.4.1678; John D. Morrell photographs, ARC.005; Brooklyn Historical Society.

Lundy’s Restaurant in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn has seen its fair share of good and bad times since it opened in 1935. In its heyday, the restaurant reportedly seated over 2,000 patrons. Opened by Irving Lundy, the historic seafood restaurant operated from 1935-1977, and then again from 1997-2007. This photograph depicts the restaurant in 1961 at 1901 Emmons Avenue.

Irving Lundy was born in 1895, the oldest of seven children. Lundy came from a long line of fish sellers. His grandfather and great-uncles owned several fish stores, and by the turn of the century, the family had an established reputation as renowned fish sellers. Within a three year span (1917-1920), Lundy’s parents died from illness, and then his brothers, Clayton and Stanley, died tragically in a boating accident.

By 1926, the first Lundy Brothers restaurant was built on stilts over a pier in Sheepshead Bay. The restaurant closed when the city made plans to revitalize the pier and build bulkheads. The restaurant on Emmons Avenue was built across the street and opened in 1935. They served heaping portions of fresh seafood—oysters, lobsters, and clams, as well as biscuits and fresh pies. Robert Cornfield, in his book Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant, notes, “The resort feel of Lundy’s made it a weekend destination for those from other boroughs—there was the abundance of the Shore Dinner, the walk around the bay and across the wooden bridge to the beautifully landscaped streets of Manhattan Beach, the overarching sky over the narrows.”[1]

Despite great success and notoriety, Lundy and his restaurant faced many tragedies over the years: Lundy was kidnapped and robbed on numerous occasions, the restaurant was robbed by gunmen, his sister and brother-in-law were murdered, and there were labor protests and legal issues. Lundy died of a heart attack in 1977 and the restaurant closed shortly thereafter. Two decades later, the restaurant was re-opened under new management, and closed permanently in 2007. Today, Lundy’s Landing Shopping Plaza has replaced the restaurant.

There is so much more to learn and discover about the Lundy family and the restaurant history. Cornfield’s book is an excellent starting place and is available at BHS’s Othmer Library. This photograph comes from the John D. Morrell photographs collectio (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=f73c2b5dff&e=493dd851a4) n, which contains over 2,000 photographs documenting nearly every Brooklyn neighborhood from 1957-1974. Additional photographs, including a few more from Lundy’s, can be viewed here (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=9d732fa660&e=493dd851a4) .

[1] Robert Cornfield, Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant (New York, N.Y: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 48.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=331e2af30d&e=493dd851a4) , which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our Brooklyn Visual Heritage website here (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=83351b56ad&e=493dd851a4) . To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections, visit BHS’s Othmer Library (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=a9727e2e28&e=493dd851a4) Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=29b1d8f3d5) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=29b1d8f3d5&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Photo of the Week: Lundy’s Restaurant Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

If you grew up in Sheepshead Bay like I did, Lundy’s Restaurant was the place to go for seafood.

Here’s a little jazz factoid about Lundy’s: Teresa Brewer (http://50.56.218.160/archive/category.php?category_id=15&id=17758) was related to the owner Irving Lundy and of course she was married to legendary record producer Bob (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thiele) Thiele (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thiele) .

http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=e892f7cca5&e=493dd851a4

Photo of the Week:
Lundy’s Restaurant
By Tess Colwell, Digitization Associate

http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=a5f6c2c0d2&e=493dd851a4
[Lundy’s Restaurant], 1961, V1974.4.1678; John D. Morrell photographs, ARC.005; Brooklyn Historical Society.

Lundy’s Restaurant in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn has seen its fair share of good and bad times since it opened in 1935. In its heyday, the restaurant reportedly seated over 2,000 patrons. Opened by Irving Lundy, the historic seafood restaurant operated from 1935-1977, and then again from 1997-2007. This photograph depicts the restaurant in 1961 at 1901 Emmons Avenue.

Irving Lundy was born in 1895, the oldest of seven children. Lundy came from a long line of fish sellers. His grandfather and great-uncles owned several fish stores, and by the turn of the century, the family had an established reputation as renowned fish sellers. Within a three year span (1917-1920), Lundy’s parents died from illness, and then his brothers, Clayton and Stanley, died tragically in a boating accident.

By 1926, the first Lundy Brothers restaurant was built on stilts over a pier in Sheepshead Bay. The restaurant closed when the city made plans to revitalize the pier and build bulkheads. The restaurant on Emmons Avenue was built across the street and opened in 1935. They served heaping portions of fresh seafood—oysters, lobsters, and clams, as well as biscuits and fresh pies. Robert Cornfield, in his book Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant, notes, “The resort feel of Lundy’s made it a weekend destination for those from other boroughs—there was the abundance of the Shore Dinner, the walk around the bay and across the wooden bridge to the beautifully landscaped streets of Manhattan Beach, the overarching sky over the narrows.”[1]

Despite great success and notoriety, Lundy and his restaurant faced many tragedies over the years: Lundy was kidnapped and robbed on numerous occasions, the restaurant was robbed by gunmen, his sister and brother-in-law were murdered, and there were labor protests and legal issues. Lundy died of a heart attack in 1977 and the restaurant closed shortly thereafter. Two decades later, the restaurant was re-opened under new management, and closed permanently in 2007. Today, Lundy’s Landing Shopping Plaza has replaced the restaurant.

There is so much more to learn and discover about the Lundy family and the restaurant history. Cornfield’s book is an excellent starting place and is available at BHS’s Othmer Library. This photograph comes from the John D. Morrell photographs collectio (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=f73c2b5dff&e=493dd851a4) n, which contains over 2,000 photographs documenting nearly every Brooklyn neighborhood from 1957-1974. Additional photographs, including a few more from Lundy’s, can be viewed here (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=9d732fa660&e=493dd851a4) .

[1] Robert Cornfield, Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant (New York, N.Y: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 48.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=331e2af30d&e=493dd851a4) , which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our Brooklyn Visual Heritage website here (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=83351b56ad&e=493dd851a4) . To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections, visit BHS’s Othmer Library (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=a9727e2e28&e=493dd851a4) Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=29b1d8f3d5) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=29b1d8f3d5&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Photo of the Week: Lundy’s Restaurant Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/

If you grew up in Sheepshead Bay like I did, Lundy’s Restaurant was the place to go for seafood.

Here’s a little jazz factoid about Lundy’s: Teresa Brewer (http://50.56.218.160/archive/category.php?category_id=15&id=17758) was related to the owner Irving Lundy and of course she was married to legendary record producer Bob (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thiele) Thiele (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Thiele) .

http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=e892f7cca5&e=493dd851a4

Photo of the Week:
Lundy’s Restaurant
By Tess Colwell, Digitization Associate

http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=a5f6c2c0d2&e=493dd851a4
[Lundy’s Restaurant], 1961, V1974.4.1678; John D. Morrell photographs, ARC.005; Brooklyn Historical Society.

Lundy’s Restaurant in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn has seen its fair share of good and bad times since it opened in 1935. In its heyday, the restaurant reportedly seated over 2,000 patrons. Opened by Irving Lundy, the historic seafood restaurant operated from 1935-1977, and then again from 1997-2007. This photograph depicts the restaurant in 1961 at 1901 Emmons Avenue.

Irving Lundy was born in 1895, the oldest of seven children. Lundy came from a long line of fish sellers. His grandfather and great-uncles owned several fish stores, and by the turn of the century, the family had an established reputation as renowned fish sellers. Within a three year span (1917-1920), Lundy’s parents died from illness, and then his brothers, Clayton and Stanley, died tragically in a boating accident.

By 1926, the first Lundy Brothers restaurant was built on stilts over a pier in Sheepshead Bay. The restaurant closed when the city made plans to revitalize the pier and build bulkheads. The restaurant on Emmons Avenue was built across the street and opened in 1935. They served heaping portions of fresh seafood—oysters, lobsters, and clams, as well as biscuits and fresh pies. Robert Cornfield, in his book Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant, notes, “The resort feel of Lundy’s made it a weekend destination for those from other boroughs—there was the abundance of the Shore Dinner, the walk around the bay and across the wooden bridge to the beautifully landscaped streets of Manhattan Beach, the overarching sky over the narrows.”[1]

Despite great success and notoriety, Lundy and his restaurant faced many tragedies over the years: Lundy was kidnapped and robbed on numerous occasions, the restaurant was robbed by gunmen, his sister and brother-in-law were murdered, and there were labor protests and legal issues. Lundy died of a heart attack in 1977 and the restaurant closed shortly thereafter. Two decades later, the restaurant was re-opened under new management, and closed permanently in 2007. Today, Lundy’s Landing Shopping Plaza has replaced the restaurant.

There is so much more to learn and discover about the Lundy family and the restaurant history. Cornfield’s book is an excellent starting place and is available at BHS’s Othmer Library. This photograph comes from the John D. Morrell photographs collectio (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=f73c2b5dff&e=493dd851a4) n, which contains over 2,000 photographs documenting nearly every Brooklyn neighborhood from 1957-1974. Additional photographs, including a few more from Lundy’s, can be viewed here (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=9d732fa660&e=493dd851a4) .

[1] Robert Cornfield, Lundy’s: Reminiscences and Recipes from Brooklyn’s Legendary Restaurant (New York, N.Y: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998), 48.

Interested in seeing more photos from BHS’s collection? Visit our online image gallery (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=331e2af30d&e=493dd851a4) , which includes a selection of our images. Interested in seeing even more historic Brooklyn images? Visit our Brooklyn Visual Heritage website here (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=83351b56ad&e=493dd851a4) . To search BHS’s entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections, visit BHS’s Othmer Library (http://brooklynhistory.us5.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=cf0ded2e6441a8992bb00a824&id=a9727e2e28&e=493dd851a4) Wed-Sat, 1:00-5:00 p.m.

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=29b1d8f3d5) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=29b1d8f3d5&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Judith Hendricks dies at 78 – Toledo Blade

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.toledoblade.com/news/2015/11/18/Judith-Hendricks-dies-at-78.html

** Judith Hendricks dies at 78
————————————————————

Published: Wednesday, 11/18/2015 – Updated: 6 hours ago

BY TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Judith Hendricks

GRAND LUBELL PHOTOGRAPHY

Judith Hendricks, 78, wife of internationally renowned jazz legend and Toledo native Jon Hendricks, 94, died this morning in a New York City hospital where she had been treated since Friday for a brain aneurysm.

She passed away at 12:20 a.m., nearly two days after the family agreed to take her off life support on Monday, according to the couple’s daughter, Aria Hendricks.

Doctors found Ms. Hendricks had an undiagnosed brain tumor while investigating the aneurysm.

“I thought it was just stress,” her daughter said of her mother’s headaches.

Judith Hendricks, who earlier beat a 2006 melanoma diagnosis, was married 56 years to Toledo native Jon Hendricks, known to jazz aficionados worldwide as the “father of vocalese” for his impact on developing that style of jazz singing decades ago, especially with the groundbreaking ’50s group, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

Mr. Hendricks is Toledo’s most famous jazz musician outside of pianist Art Tatum.

He and Judith met in a New York jazz club where Ms. Hendricks was employed, Kay Elliott, Art Tatum Jazz Society spokesman, said.

“She was the reason he was able to be Jon Hendricks because she took care of him perfectly,” Ms. Elliott said. “She was his manager, his lover, his everything.”

Singer Ramona Collins agreed.

“It was clear Judith steered the boat, so to speak. People agreed they were quite the couple,” she said. “It’s just a shock. It came out of nowhere. Jon is an international figure. He really is. These people were serious soulmates.”

Efforts are being made to reach Mr. Hendricks, who spends most of his time in New York.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com (mailto:thenry@theblade.com) or 419-724-6079 or on Twitter @ecowriterohio (https://twitter.com/ecowriterohio) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=68fbd602ca) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=68fbd602ca&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Judith Hendricks dies at 78 – Toledo Blade

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.toledoblade.com/news/2015/11/18/Judith-Hendricks-dies-at-78.html

** Judith Hendricks dies at 78
————————————————————

Published: Wednesday, 11/18/2015 – Updated: 6 hours ago

BY TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Judith Hendricks

GRAND LUBELL PHOTOGRAPHY

Judith Hendricks, 78, wife of internationally renowned jazz legend and Toledo native Jon Hendricks, 94, died this morning in a New York City hospital where she had been treated since Friday for a brain aneurysm.

She passed away at 12:20 a.m., nearly two days after the family agreed to take her off life support on Monday, according to the couple’s daughter, Aria Hendricks.

Doctors found Ms. Hendricks had an undiagnosed brain tumor while investigating the aneurysm.

“I thought it was just stress,” her daughter said of her mother’s headaches.

Judith Hendricks, who earlier beat a 2006 melanoma diagnosis, was married 56 years to Toledo native Jon Hendricks, known to jazz aficionados worldwide as the “father of vocalese” for his impact on developing that style of jazz singing decades ago, especially with the groundbreaking ’50s group, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

Mr. Hendricks is Toledo’s most famous jazz musician outside of pianist Art Tatum.

He and Judith met in a New York jazz club where Ms. Hendricks was employed, Kay Elliott, Art Tatum Jazz Society spokesman, said.

“She was the reason he was able to be Jon Hendricks because she took care of him perfectly,” Ms. Elliott said. “She was his manager, his lover, his everything.”

Singer Ramona Collins agreed.

“It was clear Judith steered the boat, so to speak. People agreed they were quite the couple,” she said. “It’s just a shock. It came out of nowhere. Jon is an international figure. He really is. These people were serious soulmates.”

Efforts are being made to reach Mr. Hendricks, who spends most of his time in New York.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com (mailto:thenry@theblade.com) or 419-724-6079 or on Twitter @ecowriterohio (https://twitter.com/ecowriterohio) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=68fbd602ca) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=68fbd602ca&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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

Judith Hendricks dies at 78 – Toledo Blade

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.toledoblade.com/news/2015/11/18/Judith-Hendricks-dies-at-78.html

** Judith Hendricks dies at 78
————————————————————

Published: Wednesday, 11/18/2015 – Updated: 6 hours ago

BY TOM HENRY
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Judith Hendricks

GRAND LUBELL PHOTOGRAPHY

Judith Hendricks, 78, wife of internationally renowned jazz legend and Toledo native Jon Hendricks, 94, died this morning in a New York City hospital where she had been treated since Friday for a brain aneurysm.

She passed away at 12:20 a.m., nearly two days after the family agreed to take her off life support on Monday, according to the couple’s daughter, Aria Hendricks.

Doctors found Ms. Hendricks had an undiagnosed brain tumor while investigating the aneurysm.

“I thought it was just stress,” her daughter said of her mother’s headaches.

Judith Hendricks, who earlier beat a 2006 melanoma diagnosis, was married 56 years to Toledo native Jon Hendricks, known to jazz aficionados worldwide as the “father of vocalese” for his impact on developing that style of jazz singing decades ago, especially with the groundbreaking ’50s group, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

Mr. Hendricks is Toledo’s most famous jazz musician outside of pianist Art Tatum.

He and Judith met in a New York jazz club where Ms. Hendricks was employed, Kay Elliott, Art Tatum Jazz Society spokesman, said.

“She was the reason he was able to be Jon Hendricks because she took care of him perfectly,” Ms. Elliott said. “She was his manager, his lover, his everything.”

Singer Ramona Collins agreed.

“It was clear Judith steered the boat, so to speak. People agreed they were quite the couple,” she said. “It’s just a shock. It came out of nowhere. Jon is an international figure. He really is. These people were serious soulmates.”

Efforts are being made to reach Mr. Hendricks, who spends most of his time in New York.

Contact Tom Henry at: thenry@theblade.com (mailto:thenry@theblade.com) or 419-724-6079 or on Twitter @ecowriterohio (https://twitter.com/ecowriterohio) .

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

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

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

Unsubscribe (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/unsubscribe?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]&c=68fbd602ca) | Update your profile (http://jazzpromoservices.us2.list-manage.com/profile?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=911f90f0b1&e=[UNIQID]) | Forward to a friend (http://us2.forward-to-friend.com/forward?u=3186fe64133adb244b1010be2&id=68fbd602ca&e=[UNIQID])

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

Copyright (C) 2015 All rights reserved.

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