Parker sax bids top $300,000
From correspondents in New York
LEGENDARY jazz virtuoso Charlie Parker's alto saxophone has sold for nearly $US262,000 ($331,980) at an auction of jazz memorabilia in New York.
The 430 lots on offer at the sale included instruments, clothing and musical scores from Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, John Coltrane and Stan Getz.
Along with the saxophones, trumpets and drum sets, there was a lot of bidder interest in the hand-written items, including a profanity-laced letter from Armstrong to his agent which sold for $US29,500 ($37,380).
Another highlight was the original musical arrangement for Coltrane's classic song, A Love Supreme, written by the musician himself in pencil and blue ink.
The three sheets of manuscript that made up the lot were the target of some aggressive bidding and finally sold for $US129,500 ($164,000).
"Today is kind of sacred," said T.S. Monk, who attended the auction as the son of jazz great Thelonious Monk and an award-winning musician in his own right.
"They are all so alive," Monk said of the musicians represented at the sale. "They're alive in our hearts, they're alive in our collective souls.
"Sometimes their message was muted by racism, other times by politics and even artistic snobbery.
"But their music has flourished. It's grown and profoundly influenced all those that it has touched."
Unusually for such a high-profile collection, the auction house organising the sale, Guernsey's, had provided no price estimates, and the vast majority of lots had no reserve price attached.
However, a tenor saxophone that belonged to John Coltrane was withdrawn after it failed to make $US500,000 ($633,500).
http://townsvillebulletin.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,12321170,00.html
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Democrat & Chronicle: Features (Arts) > Jazz legend took the wiggling to heart Jazz
Democrat & Chronicle: Features (Arts)
Jazz legend took the wiggling to heart Jazz
John Pitcher
Staff music critic
(February 20, 2005) — Jazz great Clark Terry is known as a fervent supporter of music education, and given his early musical experiences it's easy to understand why.
Growing up poor as one of 10 children in St. Louis, Terry didn't have the money to go college. So he was forced to seek lessons from older musicians in town, and none of them really wanted to help out a young player who might one day surpass them.
"I was just a kid looking to play, so I went up to this old-timer and asked, 'Hey man, how do I improve my tone?'" Terry recalls. "He says, 'Go home, sit in a straight-back chair, and blow your horn in front of a mirror while wiggling your left ear.' I was stupid enough to believe him, so the next time I gave a concert, I heard these old ladies saying, 'Did you see that boy wiggling his ear?'"
Terry, who is now 84 and one of the world's great trumpeters, says he'll keep his ears still this Friday when he joins the Eastman Jazz Ensemble and its conductor, Bill Dobbins, for a concert at the Eastman Theatre. The event will offer the ensemble's bright young players the chance to study and perform with a master. It also promises to expose them (and the rest of us, for that matter) to one of the most expressive and recognizable sounds in jazz.
Terry has appeared on nearly 900 albums over the past 60 years, and it's hard to think of any 20th-century jazz musician who hasn't benefited from knowing and playing with him.
Born on Dec. 20, 1920, Terry grew up listening to jazz. His older sister was married to a musician in a group called the Musical Ambassadors, and one day the band's trumpet player heard 13-year-old Terry (who had never had a lesson) blowing on his horn. According to Terry, the astonished musician exclaimed, "Boy you're going to be a horn player one day."
"I was stupid enough to believe him," Terry says.
Actually, everyone else who heard him believed it, too. Lionel Hampton loved the Terry sound and hired him in 1945 (that was the trumpeter's first big break).
Terry then played with Count Basie, and in the 1950s joined Duke Ellington's band — he was with Ellington at the now legendary 1956 Newport Jazz Festival concert.
But Terry will likely always be remembered for his stint with The Tonight Show band in the 1960s.
"Those weren't the best days for big bands, but (Johnny) Carson kept the music alive," Terry says. "It was sweet and was the best time of my life."
JPITCHER@DemocratandChronicle.com
Jazz legend took the wiggling to heart Jazz
John Pitcher
Staff music critic
(February 20, 2005) — Jazz great Clark Terry is known as a fervent supporter of music education, and given his early musical experiences it's easy to understand why.
Growing up poor as one of 10 children in St. Louis, Terry didn't have the money to go college. So he was forced to seek lessons from older musicians in town, and none of them really wanted to help out a young player who might one day surpass them.
"I was just a kid looking to play, so I went up to this old-timer and asked, 'Hey man, how do I improve my tone?'" Terry recalls. "He says, 'Go home, sit in a straight-back chair, and blow your horn in front of a mirror while wiggling your left ear.' I was stupid enough to believe him, so the next time I gave a concert, I heard these old ladies saying, 'Did you see that boy wiggling his ear?'"
Terry, who is now 84 and one of the world's great trumpeters, says he'll keep his ears still this Friday when he joins the Eastman Jazz Ensemble and its conductor, Bill Dobbins, for a concert at the Eastman Theatre. The event will offer the ensemble's bright young players the chance to study and perform with a master. It also promises to expose them (and the rest of us, for that matter) to one of the most expressive and recognizable sounds in jazz.
Terry has appeared on nearly 900 albums over the past 60 years, and it's hard to think of any 20th-century jazz musician who hasn't benefited from knowing and playing with him.
Born on Dec. 20, 1920, Terry grew up listening to jazz. His older sister was married to a musician in a group called the Musical Ambassadors, and one day the band's trumpet player heard 13-year-old Terry (who had never had a lesson) blowing on his horn. According to Terry, the astonished musician exclaimed, "Boy you're going to be a horn player one day."
"I was stupid enough to believe him," Terry says.
Actually, everyone else who heard him believed it, too. Lionel Hampton loved the Terry sound and hired him in 1945 (that was the trumpeter's first big break).
Terry then played with Count Basie, and in the 1950s joined Duke Ellington's band — he was with Ellington at the now legendary 1956 Newport Jazz Festival concert.
But Terry will likely always be remembered for his stint with The Tonight Show band in the 1960s.
"Those weren't the best days for big bands, but (Johnny) Carson kept the music alive," Terry says. "It was sweet and was the best time of my life."
JPITCHER@DemocratandChronicle.com
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Warren Vach� Sr., 90, a Mainstay of Jazz in New Jersey, Is Dead
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Warren Vach Sr., 90, a Mainstay of Jazz in New Jersey, Is Dead: "February 20, 2005
Warren Vach Sr., 90, a Mainstay of Jazz in New Jersey, Is Dead
By PETER KEEPNEWS
February 20, 2005
Warren Vaché Sr., 90, a Mainstay of Jazz in New Jersey, Is Dead
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Warren Vaché Sr., a bassist, author and historian who was long a mainstay of jazz in New Jersey, died on Feb. 4 in Rahway, N.J. He was 90.
The cause was complications of pneumonia and prostate cancer, said his son, the jazz cornetist Warren Vaché Jr.
Mr. Vaché, the father of two jazz musicians (his other son, Allan, plays clarinet), was an accomplished musician himself and an indefatigable advocate of traditional jazz.
Early in his career he was a frequent participant in jam sessions at Nick's, a Greenwich Village nightclub that was home base to the guitarist Eddie Condon, the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and other traditionalists.
He later worked throughout New Jersey as a sideman, with the trumpet player Doc Cheatham among many others, and as the leader of his own group, the Syncopatin' Seven. He continued to perform until his early 80's.
Never a full-time musician, he serviced jukeboxes and sold electronic appliances, among other jobs, to support his jazz activities, which also included writing about jazz and promoting it.
He was the author or co-author of several books and a frequent contributor to jazz magazines. His last completed book, a biography of the trumpet player Chris Griffin, is scheduled to be published this year by Scarecrow Press.
Mr. Vaché was also a founder of the New Jersey Jazz Society and editor of its magazine, Jersey Jazz, for about a decade.
He is survived by his wife, Madeline, and his two sons.
Warren Vach Sr., 90, a Mainstay of Jazz in New Jersey, Is Dead
By PETER KEEPNEWS
February 20, 2005
Warren Vaché Sr., 90, a Mainstay of Jazz in New Jersey, Is Dead
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Warren Vaché Sr., a bassist, author and historian who was long a mainstay of jazz in New Jersey, died on Feb. 4 in Rahway, N.J. He was 90.
The cause was complications of pneumonia and prostate cancer, said his son, the jazz cornetist Warren Vaché Jr.
Mr. Vaché, the father of two jazz musicians (his other son, Allan, plays clarinet), was an accomplished musician himself and an indefatigable advocate of traditional jazz.
Early in his career he was a frequent participant in jam sessions at Nick's, a Greenwich Village nightclub that was home base to the guitarist Eddie Condon, the clarinetist Pee Wee Russell and other traditionalists.
He later worked throughout New Jersey as a sideman, with the trumpet player Doc Cheatham among many others, and as the leader of his own group, the Syncopatin' Seven. He continued to perform until his early 80's.
Never a full-time musician, he serviced jukeboxes and sold electronic appliances, among other jobs, to support his jazz activities, which also included writing about jazz and promoting it.
He was the author or co-author of several books and a frequent contributor to jazz magazines. His last completed book, a biography of the trumpet player Chris Griffin, is scheduled to be published this year by Scarecrow Press.
Mr. Vaché was also a founder of the New Jersey Jazz Society and editor of its magazine, Jersey Jazz, for about a decade.
He is survived by his wife, Madeline, and his two sons.
KRT Wire | 02/19/2005 | Charlie Parker sax to be auctioned
KRT Wire | 02/19/2005 | Charlie Parker sax to be auctioned: "---"
Charlie Parker sax to be auctioned
BY LEE HILL KAVANAUGH
Knight Ridder Newspapers
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - (KRT) - For half a century, the two-toned silver and brass saxophone, etched with the serial number 295173, lay mute beneath a bed.
Gone were the glory days when it appeared in magazines and newspapers; when its emergence from the red case meant an audience waited; when it glimmered under spotlights as it gave voice to streams of music never heard before.
Those were the days when the sax, even at rest on a stand and still damp with sweat and spit, could draw oohs and ahhs from younger musicians.
This alto sax, a King Super 20, was made for one musician: Charlie Parker. "Bird." Native of Kansas City. Genius in jazz. Father of bebop. A musician whose recordings and compositions inspire musicians still.
Sunday at Lincoln Center in New York, at least for a few hours, the saxophone's former glory will be restored, although without the hands that once caressed it. Featured on the cover of an auction house catalog, the instrument, along with hundreds of other personal items from jazz greats, will be auctioned.
The sax's beauty still stuns. The sterling silver bell. Starburst etchings. Genuine mother-of-pearl coverings on the keys - keys engineered and advertised as mechanically superior for a faster response and action, allowing its owner to pour out streams of notes.
But this sax had a darker side as well.
Whenever Bird needed money, serious money, to pay for drugs, he hocked his beloved King at a pawnshop. But each time, this sax was rescued and returned to its master's hands. Other saxes weren't so fortunate.
When the famous die and sometimes even before, anything they've touched becomes a thing of value. Chan Parker, Bird's common-law wife, knew that. After his death in 1955, she held onto the King, hiding it under her bed, sliding it out for a peek every now and then whenever a knowledgeable visitor politely asked to see it.
But on her deathbed in 1999, she told her daughter, Kim Parker, to take the horn. It might help her someday, Chan Parker said.
That someday is here.
Sunday someone will buy one used saxophone. One that experts predict may sell for a half-million dollars or more.
After Chan's death, Kim Parker and the alto sax traveled from France to Pennsylvania. But the King was once more hidden away, for another five years. Parker could not bring herself to sell it: The instrument was too precious; the offers too low.
Until weeks ago, when the saxophone entered the auction along with hundreds of other jazz items. Several eager jazz scholars were the first to inspect it, opening the dusty red case with the Charlie Parker nameplate.
Phil Schaap, trumpeter and curator of jazz at Lincoln Center, not only touched the horn, he also twisted the alto's sections together, placed a handy reed on the mouthpiece, tightened the ligatures and blew.
The moment, he said, should have been dramatic: He was playing Bird's horn!
But the moment fell flat.
E flat, to be exact.
A single note gurgled up from the belly of the alto, splattering out in a bleet.
"I got a very, very awkward squawk," he said. Embarrassed, he quickly put down the King.
"But whatever it did for Bird," he says, "it could do for someone else. I hope it does get played."
Only one professional, besides Bird, has ever played the instrument on a gig: Phil Woods.
Woods is a famous jazz musician in his own right. Influenced by Parker (he transcribed and memorized all his solos), among others, the alto saxophonist developed a sound of his own. Leader of the hard bop jazz style, he's also a composer, leader of bands and clinics, and a five-time Grammy winner. (In late April, he will perform in Lawrence.)
Woods, who married Chan a few years after Parker's death, also became a father to the Parker children, Kim and Baird, and he and Chan later had their own children.
But all the hype, the romance about the instrument, the mutterings from fans that Bird's soul still emanates from the horn - they annoy Woods. There's no magic in that horn, he said.
"If the man is not around, it's just a piece of metal. Without Bird, the horn doesn't mean very much. ... The pads are falling off!"
Woods played the horn long ago during the early days of his marriage with Chan. The story has been told often, but he shared it once more.
"I had no money, so I hocked my Selmar to buy groceries," he remembered. But as he walked into their apartment, his arms laden with food, the phone rang. It was the manager of the Five Spot and he wanted Woods for a gig. "I told Chan, `I'm gonna have to play the King.' I didn't have my horn!
"... So there I am, playing, when wouldn't you know it, Charlie Mingus walks in. He recognized the horn right away. He looked at me, gave me a look of disdain. Oh man! It was like `Who do you think you are?'
"I told him, `Look man, I'm just trying to feed the family.'"
Woods doesn't have any financial claim to the horn, nor does he plan on attending the auction. But his stepdaughter, Kim Parker, might. He's hoping that the saxophone will sell at a high price. Based on a previous sale of another Bird horn, it should.
In 1994, Woods was surprised when Kansas City paid $144,000 for the white Grafton saxophone that Chan brought to an auction in London. The instrument, now on display at the American Jazz Museum at 18th and Vine, was "a plastic piece of " junk, Woods added, and then joked that he could find a few more lying around if people wanted them. But Parker had played a Grafton a few times, which made the saxophone desirable.
But that doesn't impress Woods.
"Look, Charlie Parker could play a tomato can, but I wouldn't buy it for $140,000. I wouldn't pay $14 for it. ... His is not the great American success story.
"... I wish people were more concerned with the people than the instrument."
Over the years, many people have touched the King, including Kansas Citian Dooley Weilert. He repaired Parker's horns whenever the musician was in town visiting family or playing gigs.
Parker stopped to see Weilert first at McLean's Band Shop, 211 E. 13th St., and a few years later at 112 E. 14th St., where Weilert opened his own shop in 1949. Saxophonists who stopped in Kansas City would usually come into his shop for a tuneup, Weilert said.
For a musician, a trusted repairman is as highly esteemed as a gifted physician.
"We called him `The Bird,'" said Weilert, now 91. His eyes still light up when he speaks about Parker's visits.
"Charlie had a low voice. He didn't talk a great deal. ... We talked about food," he said. Weilert would repad Parker's horns, taking off everything and then putting it back together. He would add new corks, too.
Weilert made sure everything worked as Parker stood by. And when the saxophone was finished, Weilert would hand it over for a test drive.
"Oh, he wouldn't play scales; he played jazz," said Weilert. "He'd say to me, `When you get through fixing them, they play just as good as anybody in New York would do.' That made me proud."
Over the years, historians and fans have searched for alto saxophones Parker played. There were many bought and pawned, but definitive Parker ownership cannot be proved.
But with the King there is no doubt: A photo in the book Celebrating Bird shows Parker playing the King in 1949.
"He was a spokesperson for King," said Chuck Haddix, a jazz scholar who is director of the Marrs Sound Archives at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His book on Kansas City jazz, "Kansas City: From Ragtime to Bebop," is due next month from Oxford University Press.
After years of researching articles on Kansas City musicians, and reading so much about Parker's addictions and financial woes, Haddix said, "It's a miracle the horn survived considering how many horns he hocked."
At the auction Sunday, the King alto will be one of the favorite items for sale, said jazz scholar Barry Kernfeld, editor of the Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Kernfeld, who wrote the descriptions in the Guernsey catalog, has viewed everything on sale.
"The coolest thing about this sax is there are so many photos of him playing this horn," Kernfeld said. He speculated that the King is the most photographed jazz instrument in the world.
The last page of the book "Bird's Diary" shows a pawnshop ticket for the King, he said, from Edelstein Brothers Licensed Pawn Brokers, 233 E. 14th St., near Second Avenue, New York. The date was Jan. 24, 1955.
Seven weeks later, Parker was dead.
The price on the ticket to buy back the King was $100, he said.
"I think it'll go for a little more than that."
---
Charlie Parker sax to be auctioned
BY LEE HILL KAVANAUGH
Knight Ridder Newspapers
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - (KRT) - For half a century, the two-toned silver and brass saxophone, etched with the serial number 295173, lay mute beneath a bed.
Gone were the glory days when it appeared in magazines and newspapers; when its emergence from the red case meant an audience waited; when it glimmered under spotlights as it gave voice to streams of music never heard before.
Those were the days when the sax, even at rest on a stand and still damp with sweat and spit, could draw oohs and ahhs from younger musicians.
This alto sax, a King Super 20, was made for one musician: Charlie Parker. "Bird." Native of Kansas City. Genius in jazz. Father of bebop. A musician whose recordings and compositions inspire musicians still.
Sunday at Lincoln Center in New York, at least for a few hours, the saxophone's former glory will be restored, although without the hands that once caressed it. Featured on the cover of an auction house catalog, the instrument, along with hundreds of other personal items from jazz greats, will be auctioned.
The sax's beauty still stuns. The sterling silver bell. Starburst etchings. Genuine mother-of-pearl coverings on the keys - keys engineered and advertised as mechanically superior for a faster response and action, allowing its owner to pour out streams of notes.
But this sax had a darker side as well.
Whenever Bird needed money, serious money, to pay for drugs, he hocked his beloved King at a pawnshop. But each time, this sax was rescued and returned to its master's hands. Other saxes weren't so fortunate.
When the famous die and sometimes even before, anything they've touched becomes a thing of value. Chan Parker, Bird's common-law wife, knew that. After his death in 1955, she held onto the King, hiding it under her bed, sliding it out for a peek every now and then whenever a knowledgeable visitor politely asked to see it.
But on her deathbed in 1999, she told her daughter, Kim Parker, to take the horn. It might help her someday, Chan Parker said.
That someday is here.
Sunday someone will buy one used saxophone. One that experts predict may sell for a half-million dollars or more.
After Chan's death, Kim Parker and the alto sax traveled from France to Pennsylvania. But the King was once more hidden away, for another five years. Parker could not bring herself to sell it: The instrument was too precious; the offers too low.
Until weeks ago, when the saxophone entered the auction along with hundreds of other jazz items. Several eager jazz scholars were the first to inspect it, opening the dusty red case with the Charlie Parker nameplate.
Phil Schaap, trumpeter and curator of jazz at Lincoln Center, not only touched the horn, he also twisted the alto's sections together, placed a handy reed on the mouthpiece, tightened the ligatures and blew.
The moment, he said, should have been dramatic: He was playing Bird's horn!
But the moment fell flat.
E flat, to be exact.
A single note gurgled up from the belly of the alto, splattering out in a bleet.
"I got a very, very awkward squawk," he said. Embarrassed, he quickly put down the King.
"But whatever it did for Bird," he says, "it could do for someone else. I hope it does get played."
Only one professional, besides Bird, has ever played the instrument on a gig: Phil Woods.
Woods is a famous jazz musician in his own right. Influenced by Parker (he transcribed and memorized all his solos), among others, the alto saxophonist developed a sound of his own. Leader of the hard bop jazz style, he's also a composer, leader of bands and clinics, and a five-time Grammy winner. (In late April, he will perform in Lawrence.)
Woods, who married Chan a few years after Parker's death, also became a father to the Parker children, Kim and Baird, and he and Chan later had their own children.
But all the hype, the romance about the instrument, the mutterings from fans that Bird's soul still emanates from the horn - they annoy Woods. There's no magic in that horn, he said.
"If the man is not around, it's just a piece of metal. Without Bird, the horn doesn't mean very much. ... The pads are falling off!"
Woods played the horn long ago during the early days of his marriage with Chan. The story has been told often, but he shared it once more.
"I had no money, so I hocked my Selmar to buy groceries," he remembered. But as he walked into their apartment, his arms laden with food, the phone rang. It was the manager of the Five Spot and he wanted Woods for a gig. "I told Chan, `I'm gonna have to play the King.' I didn't have my horn!
"... So there I am, playing, when wouldn't you know it, Charlie Mingus walks in. He recognized the horn right away. He looked at me, gave me a look of disdain. Oh man! It was like `Who do you think you are?'
"I told him, `Look man, I'm just trying to feed the family.'"
Woods doesn't have any financial claim to the horn, nor does he plan on attending the auction. But his stepdaughter, Kim Parker, might. He's hoping that the saxophone will sell at a high price. Based on a previous sale of another Bird horn, it should.
In 1994, Woods was surprised when Kansas City paid $144,000 for the white Grafton saxophone that Chan brought to an auction in London. The instrument, now on display at the American Jazz Museum at 18th and Vine, was "a plastic piece of " junk, Woods added, and then joked that he could find a few more lying around if people wanted them. But Parker had played a Grafton a few times, which made the saxophone desirable.
But that doesn't impress Woods.
"Look, Charlie Parker could play a tomato can, but I wouldn't buy it for $140,000. I wouldn't pay $14 for it. ... His is not the great American success story.
"... I wish people were more concerned with the people than the instrument."
Over the years, many people have touched the King, including Kansas Citian Dooley Weilert. He repaired Parker's horns whenever the musician was in town visiting family or playing gigs.
Parker stopped to see Weilert first at McLean's Band Shop, 211 E. 13th St., and a few years later at 112 E. 14th St., where Weilert opened his own shop in 1949. Saxophonists who stopped in Kansas City would usually come into his shop for a tuneup, Weilert said.
For a musician, a trusted repairman is as highly esteemed as a gifted physician.
"We called him `The Bird,'" said Weilert, now 91. His eyes still light up when he speaks about Parker's visits.
"Charlie had a low voice. He didn't talk a great deal. ... We talked about food," he said. Weilert would repad Parker's horns, taking off everything and then putting it back together. He would add new corks, too.
Weilert made sure everything worked as Parker stood by. And when the saxophone was finished, Weilert would hand it over for a test drive.
"Oh, he wouldn't play scales; he played jazz," said Weilert. "He'd say to me, `When you get through fixing them, they play just as good as anybody in New York would do.' That made me proud."
Over the years, historians and fans have searched for alto saxophones Parker played. There were many bought and pawned, but definitive Parker ownership cannot be proved.
But with the King there is no doubt: A photo in the book Celebrating Bird shows Parker playing the King in 1949.
"He was a spokesperson for King," said Chuck Haddix, a jazz scholar who is director of the Marrs Sound Archives at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His book on Kansas City jazz, "Kansas City: From Ragtime to Bebop," is due next month from Oxford University Press.
After years of researching articles on Kansas City musicians, and reading so much about Parker's addictions and financial woes, Haddix said, "It's a miracle the horn survived considering how many horns he hocked."
At the auction Sunday, the King alto will be one of the favorite items for sale, said jazz scholar Barry Kernfeld, editor of the Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Kernfeld, who wrote the descriptions in the Guernsey catalog, has viewed everything on sale.
"The coolest thing about this sax is there are so many photos of him playing this horn," Kernfeld said. He speculated that the King is the most photographed jazz instrument in the world.
The last page of the book "Bird's Diary" shows a pawnshop ticket for the King, he said, from Edelstein Brothers Licensed Pawn Brokers, 233 E. 14th St., near Second Avenue, New York. The date was Jan. 24, 1955.
Seven weeks later, Parker was dead.
The price on the ticket to buy back the King was $100, he said.
"I think it'll go for a little more than that."
---
Monday, February 14, 2005
ABC 4 :: NEWS > Utah > Jazz Grammys
ABC 4 :: NEWS: "Jazz
Best Contemporary Jazz Album
Unspeakable - Bill Frisell
Best Jazz Vocal Album
R.S.V.P. (Rare Songs, Very Personal) - Nancy Wilson
Best Jazz Instrumental Solo
Speak Like A Child - Herbie Hancock, soloist
Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group
Illuminations - McCoy Tyner With Gary Bartz, Terence Blanchard, Christian McBride & Lewis Nash
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
Concert In The Garden - Maria Schneider Orchestra
Best Latin Jazz Album
Land Of The Sun - Charlie Haden"
Best Contemporary Jazz Album
Unspeakable - Bill Frisell
Best Jazz Vocal Album
R.S.V.P. (Rare Songs, Very Personal) - Nancy Wilson
Best Jazz Instrumental Solo
Speak Like A Child - Herbie Hancock, soloist
Best Jazz Instrumental Album, Individual or Group
Illuminations - McCoy Tyner With Gary Bartz, Terence Blanchard, Christian McBride & Lewis Nash
Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album
Concert In The Garden - Maria Schneider Orchestra
Best Latin Jazz Album
Land Of The Sun - Charlie Haden"
Friday, February 11, 2005
San Diego Union Tribune > Jazz Organist Jimmy Smith dies at 79
San Diego Union Tribune
Jazz organist Jimmy Smith dies at 79
ASSOCIATED PRESS
5:11 p.m. February 9, 2005
Associated Press
J
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Jimmy Smith, an award-winning jazz organist who was considered a pioneer with the instrument, has died of natural causes at his home. He was 79.
Smith's death Tuesday in Scottsdale was announced by officials at Concord Records.
"Jimmy Smith transformed the organ into a jazz instrument. Jazz has lost a pioneering talent, not to mention a one-of-a-kind personality," National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia said Wednesday.
Born in Norristown, Pa., in 1925, Smith ruled the Hammond B-3 organ in the 1950s and 1960s, fusing R&B, blues, and gospel influences with bebop references.
Smith's sessions with record label Blue Note from 1956 to 1963 included collaborations with Kenny Burrell, Lee Morgan, Lou Donaldson, Tina Brooks, Jackie McLean, Ike Quebec and Stanley Turrentine. He started playing the Hammond organ in 1951.
"Jimmy was one of the greatest and most innovative musicians of our time," said fellow Hammond B-3 artist Joey DeFrancesco.
The two recently recorded an album together called Legacy, which is scheduled to be released next week.
Jazz organist Jimmy Smith dies at 79
ASSOCIATED PRESS
5:11 p.m. February 9, 2005
Associated Press
J
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Jimmy Smith, an award-winning jazz organist who was considered a pioneer with the instrument, has died of natural causes at his home. He was 79.
Smith's death Tuesday in Scottsdale was announced by officials at Concord Records.
"Jimmy Smith transformed the organ into a jazz instrument. Jazz has lost a pioneering talent, not to mention a one-of-a-kind personality," National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Dana Gioia said Wednesday.
Born in Norristown, Pa., in 1925, Smith ruled the Hammond B-3 organ in the 1950s and 1960s, fusing R&B, blues, and gospel influences with bebop references.
Smith's sessions with record label Blue Note from 1956 to 1963 included collaborations with Kenny Burrell, Lee Morgan, Lou Donaldson, Tina Brooks, Jackie McLean, Ike Quebec and Stanley Turrentine. He started playing the Hammond organ in 1951.
"Jimmy was one of the greatest and most innovative musicians of our time," said fellow Hammond B-3 artist Joey DeFrancesco.
The two recently recorded an album together called Legacy, which is scheduled to be released next week.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
My MP3.TV - News > Branford Marsalis Trades Stardom for Tradition
My MP3.TV - News > Branford Marsalis Trades Stardom for Tradition
2005-02-02 ::
Branford Marsalis Trades Stardom for Tradition
View other " Blues / Jazz " articles!
Jazz musician Branford Marsalis has no regrets when it comes to his professional decisions. He left his famed post as bandleader-sidekick on The Tonight Show, quickly left his position as musical director of Sting's post-Police band, and turned down a contract with a major record label.
"I learned a lot about American pop culture and the entertainment business," Marsalis said in a recent interview with the Associated Press (AP), describing his Tonight Show experience from 1992 to '95. "What makes entertainment work for everybody is a certain embracing of the blatant superficiality of it, and that's just something that I wasn't able to do. ... It was the revelation I needed to realize that I'm not an entertainer, I'm an artist."
The 44-year-old musician currently lives his life by defining his own success. He started his own record label, Marsalis Music in 2002. Around the same time he moved his family from New York City to the suburbs of Durham, N.C., allowing him to purchase a home that was large enough to accommodate a basement recording studio. Originally from New Orleans himself, Marsalis told AP he preferred returning to his Southern roots to raise his family.
Although he has taken the road less travelled in his industry, Marsalis still performs live, these days it’s with his quartet at jazz clubs, festivals and college campuses. His current quartet, which includes pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts has enjoyed nearly six years together. The quartet has links with Marsalis dating back to the late '70s at Boston's Berklee College of Music.
The quartet is currently nominated for a Grammy in the best jazz instrumental album category for their all-ballads album, “Eternal”. The saxophonist has been previously awarded with three Grammys in both the jazz and pop categories.
Marsalis is the first one to admit hat his musical path was unclear until he took the gig as The Tonight Show bandleader's post and felt something was missing.
"My crisis of conscience has always been in, like, leaving jazz to go do other things, because I wasn't really sure about wanting to play jazz," Marsalis said. "Once I decided that jazz was what I wanted to do ... I realized that this is what I was meant to do and I just set about the task of doing it."
Our Thoughts
Branford Marsalis is a true artist, using his talent to produce beautiful music rather than make millions.
2005-02-02 ::
Branford Marsalis Trades Stardom for Tradition
View other " Blues / Jazz " articles!
Jazz musician Branford Marsalis has no regrets when it comes to his professional decisions. He left his famed post as bandleader-sidekick on The Tonight Show, quickly left his position as musical director of Sting's post-Police band, and turned down a contract with a major record label.
"I learned a lot about American pop culture and the entertainment business," Marsalis said in a recent interview with the Associated Press (AP), describing his Tonight Show experience from 1992 to '95. "What makes entertainment work for everybody is a certain embracing of the blatant superficiality of it, and that's just something that I wasn't able to do. ... It was the revelation I needed to realize that I'm not an entertainer, I'm an artist."
The 44-year-old musician currently lives his life by defining his own success. He started his own record label, Marsalis Music in 2002. Around the same time he moved his family from New York City to the suburbs of Durham, N.C., allowing him to purchase a home that was large enough to accommodate a basement recording studio. Originally from New Orleans himself, Marsalis told AP he preferred returning to his Southern roots to raise his family.
Although he has taken the road less travelled in his industry, Marsalis still performs live, these days it’s with his quartet at jazz clubs, festivals and college campuses. His current quartet, which includes pianist Joey Calderazzo, bassist Eric Revis, and drummer Jeff "Tain" Watts has enjoyed nearly six years together. The quartet has links with Marsalis dating back to the late '70s at Boston's Berklee College of Music.
The quartet is currently nominated for a Grammy in the best jazz instrumental album category for their all-ballads album, “Eternal”. The saxophonist has been previously awarded with three Grammys in both the jazz and pop categories.
Marsalis is the first one to admit hat his musical path was unclear until he took the gig as The Tonight Show bandleader's post and felt something was missing.
"My crisis of conscience has always been in, like, leaving jazz to go do other things, because I wasn't really sure about wanting to play jazz," Marsalis said. "Once I decided that jazz was what I wanted to do ... I realized that this is what I was meant to do and I just set about the task of doing it."
Our Thoughts
Branford Marsalis is a true artist, using his talent to produce beautiful music rather than make millions.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Sun Herald.Com > Wayne Shorter's philosophical mind and abstract jazz
Wayne Shorter's philosophical mind and abstract jazz
Posted on Sun, Jan. 30, 2005
Wayne Shorter's philosophical mind and abstract jazz
By ZAN STEWART
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
'Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter'
by Michelle Mercer (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 301 pages, $24.95)
In describing the remarkable saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous - a founder, with Shorter and Joe Zawinul, of the pioneering jazz/fusion band Weather Report - once said, "Wayne, he is like the wind."
It's an intriguing statement, worth considering. Acclaimed for his singular compositions and his potent performances, with Miles Davis, Art Blakey and with Weather Report, Shorter is quick to move from one place to another - musically, in his witty-to-warm-to-serious conversation, undoubtedly in thought. His ideas can be hard to decipher, enigmatic, but can also smack you right in the face. He's a highly philosophical, gifted artist with the power to affect lives.
Whether Shorter ever heard Vitous' description, he would probably find it fitting. He embraces the word and the ideas it suggests, naming his second daughter Iska, "Wind" in the Nigerian Hausa language, and calling one of his tunes "Wind."
Vitous' metaphor also rings true in Michelle Mercer's comprehensive, if uneven, biography, "Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter." Based on interviews with Shorter, his colleagues and his personal circle and on arduous research, the book helps us understand this complex, important American musician.
"Footprints" follows Shorter from his earliest memories growing up in Newark, N.J., where he was born in 1933, to his current status as a jazz icon revered by musicians and fans alike. If for years Shorter was not a major name and needed to be exposed, as Davis told him shortly before his death in 1991, he is now, and Mercer's book will surely further that exposure.
Shorter didn't begin his study of music until the relatively late age of 15. Music touched Shorter first via film soundtracks; from hearing Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey and Thelonious Monk on radio programs his father listened to; and from catching Basie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others at the Adams Theater, when he cut class from Newark Arts High.
It was at Arts High that Shorter, then a clarinet student, joined a class in music theory in the middle of the school year - and scored 100 percent on his final exam. "I walked home with a new awareness of music, with a vague but deeply felt sense that music was the direction I was supposed to go in," he recalls.
Soon, Shorter was a saxophonist, playing around Newark. He began composing during his mid-'50s stint as a music education major at New York University; by then his saxophone prowess had earned him the sobriquet "The Newark Flash."
During his tenures with Blakey (1959-64) and Davis (1964-70), and on the Blue Note albums made during that period, Shorter wrote many of the numbers that are now part of the jazz repertoire. These include "Speak No Evil," "Children of the Night," "Infant Eyes" and "Footprints."
Mercer tracks Shorter's 1970-85 Weather Report years - he called the band "a soundtrack of the imagination" - and devotes an overly long section to "Native Dancer," Shorter's 1974 Columbia album with Brazilian singer-composer Milton Nascimento.
Shorter's brief late-'70s-'80s forays as a cameo soloist on non-jazz recordings and occasional performances with Mitchell, Santana and Steely Dan are examined.
Also documented are Shorter's unique electronic-orchestral albums for Columbia (1985-87) and Verve (1995). The musical survey ends with two Verve albums - "Footprints Live!" (2002) and "Alegria" (2003).
Between the musical material, Mercer weaves Shorter's personal story. His wide-ranging, filmic imagination can be fascinating; no wonder his artistic endeavors have been so varied. He's a shy man, often reticent, though neither he nor Mercer ever really explains why.
Shorter's conversion to Nichiren Buddhism, and the tremendous impact it has had on his life, is explored in depth. Shorter has had tragedies, and these are not shied away from. Iska suffered brain damage after a tetanus shot when she was 3 months old, and his second wife, Ana Maria, died aboard TWA Flight 800 when it crashed off Long Island in 1996. In both cases, Shorter's practice of Buddhism helped him to get past sorrow and stay steady. As he explains his beliefs, his ultimately upbeat moods seem quite apropos, even admirable.
Mercer can write lucid, flowing prose, as in this description of a Shorter band performance: "Their passages denied expectations of the usual musical techniques, such as crescendo and decrescendo, and tension and release."
But too often she undermines the book's impact with loose transitions, florid statements and cliches. For example, she refers to the "sprawling cruelty" of Stravinsky's dynamic "Rite of Spring."
And there are numerous errors, small but annoying: Newark's McCarter Highway is called "MacArthur"; John Coltrane's album "A Love Supreme" is called a song.
Still, if you're interested in a man who is "like the wind," then this book is the place to find the story.
Posted on Sun, Jan. 30, 2005
Wayne Shorter's philosophical mind and abstract jazz
By ZAN STEWART
NEWHOUSE NEWS SERVICE
'Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter'
by Michelle Mercer (Jeremy P. Tarcher, 301 pages, $24.95)
In describing the remarkable saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, Czech bassist Miroslav Vitous - a founder, with Shorter and Joe Zawinul, of the pioneering jazz/fusion band Weather Report - once said, "Wayne, he is like the wind."
It's an intriguing statement, worth considering. Acclaimed for his singular compositions and his potent performances, with Miles Davis, Art Blakey and with Weather Report, Shorter is quick to move from one place to another - musically, in his witty-to-warm-to-serious conversation, undoubtedly in thought. His ideas can be hard to decipher, enigmatic, but can also smack you right in the face. He's a highly philosophical, gifted artist with the power to affect lives.
Whether Shorter ever heard Vitous' description, he would probably find it fitting. He embraces the word and the ideas it suggests, naming his second daughter Iska, "Wind" in the Nigerian Hausa language, and calling one of his tunes "Wind."
Vitous' metaphor also rings true in Michelle Mercer's comprehensive, if uneven, biography, "Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter." Based on interviews with Shorter, his colleagues and his personal circle and on arduous research, the book helps us understand this complex, important American musician.
"Footprints" follows Shorter from his earliest memories growing up in Newark, N.J., where he was born in 1933, to his current status as a jazz icon revered by musicians and fans alike. If for years Shorter was not a major name and needed to be exposed, as Davis told him shortly before his death in 1991, he is now, and Mercer's book will surely further that exposure.
Shorter didn't begin his study of music until the relatively late age of 15. Music touched Shorter first via film soundtracks; from hearing Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey and Thelonious Monk on radio programs his father listened to; and from catching Basie, Stan Kenton, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and others at the Adams Theater, when he cut class from Newark Arts High.
It was at Arts High that Shorter, then a clarinet student, joined a class in music theory in the middle of the school year - and scored 100 percent on his final exam. "I walked home with a new awareness of music, with a vague but deeply felt sense that music was the direction I was supposed to go in," he recalls.
Soon, Shorter was a saxophonist, playing around Newark. He began composing during his mid-'50s stint as a music education major at New York University; by then his saxophone prowess had earned him the sobriquet "The Newark Flash."
During his tenures with Blakey (1959-64) and Davis (1964-70), and on the Blue Note albums made during that period, Shorter wrote many of the numbers that are now part of the jazz repertoire. These include "Speak No Evil," "Children of the Night," "Infant Eyes" and "Footprints."
Mercer tracks Shorter's 1970-85 Weather Report years - he called the band "a soundtrack of the imagination" - and devotes an overly long section to "Native Dancer," Shorter's 1974 Columbia album with Brazilian singer-composer Milton Nascimento.
Shorter's brief late-'70s-'80s forays as a cameo soloist on non-jazz recordings and occasional performances with Mitchell, Santana and Steely Dan are examined.
Also documented are Shorter's unique electronic-orchestral albums for Columbia (1985-87) and Verve (1995). The musical survey ends with two Verve albums - "Footprints Live!" (2002) and "Alegria" (2003).
Between the musical material, Mercer weaves Shorter's personal story. His wide-ranging, filmic imagination can be fascinating; no wonder his artistic endeavors have been so varied. He's a shy man, often reticent, though neither he nor Mercer ever really explains why.
Shorter's conversion to Nichiren Buddhism, and the tremendous impact it has had on his life, is explored in depth. Shorter has had tragedies, and these are not shied away from. Iska suffered brain damage after a tetanus shot when she was 3 months old, and his second wife, Ana Maria, died aboard TWA Flight 800 when it crashed off Long Island in 1996. In both cases, Shorter's practice of Buddhism helped him to get past sorrow and stay steady. As he explains his beliefs, his ultimately upbeat moods seem quite apropos, even admirable.
Mercer can write lucid, flowing prose, as in this description of a Shorter band performance: "Their passages denied expectations of the usual musical techniques, such as crescendo and decrescendo, and tension and release."
But too often she undermines the book's impact with loose transitions, florid statements and cliches. For example, she refers to the "sprawling cruelty" of Stravinsky's dynamic "Rite of Spring."
And there are numerous errors, small but annoying: Newark's McCarter Highway is called "MacArthur"; John Coltrane's album "A Love Supreme" is called a song.
Still, if you're interested in a man who is "like the wind," then this book is the place to find the story.
Monday, January 24, 2005
Thursday, January 20, 2005
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
The New York Times > Arts > Music > Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
The New York Times
January 20, 2005
Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
By BEN RATLIFF
There is Charlie Parker's King alto saxophone, with mother-of-pearl keys, his primary horn in the 1950's. There is Benny Goodman's clarinet, John Coltrane's soprano and tenor saxophones, Gerry Mulligan's baritone. Thelonious Monk's tailored jacket. A ribald 27-page letter from Louis Armstrong to his manager. One of Ornette Coleman's notebooks from the late 1950's, with his practice exercises and, on one of the last pages, one of his greatest compositions, "Focus on Sanity," written in pencil. Home movies of Coltrane shoveling snow outside his house in Philadelphia in the late 1950's. Charlie Parker concert recordings made by his wife, Chan, and high school book reports by Monk.
On Feb. 20 at the Allen Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, Guernsey's Auction House will put all these items, and many others, on the block at a special jazz auction. Previews will be held on Feb. 18 and 19, but Guernsey's would not estimate how much the auction will make.
"It would be folly to try to come up with a number," said Guernsey's owner, Arlan Ettinger. Very few of the lots have reserves - the secret minimum prices agreed upon by the sellers and the house. Nor is the house listing estimates in its catalog.
Jazz artifacts have been auctioned before, through Christie's and Sotheby's, but there has been no single auction of this size entirely dedicated to jazz. And though there have been jazz collectors of one kind or another since the 1930's, it seems to have taken many of the families of jazz's royalty this long to dislodge the once mundane items, long buried in closets, that now have great value not only to jazz aficionados but also to the larger community of collectors.
But just because these memorabilia are now turning up at a public auction does not mean they will end up in public hands, at least not right away.
Instruments and sheet music have entered the collections of institutions like the Smithsonian and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University - the country's greatest academic center for jazz studies - which preserve them and make them available for scholars. (The city of Kansas City, Mo., owns one of Parker's plastic alto saxophones, sold at auction by Sotheby's in 1995 for around $140,000, and it has become the centerpiece of the town's American Jazz Museum. The University of Wisconsin owns the bass that belonged to the great Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton and occasionally lets students play it.) But institutions, which have limited budgets and often rely on donations by the artists' families to acquire material, may not have the money to buy many of the items at Guernsey's auction.
Instead the pieces may be bought by collectors of modest means who dearly cling to their scraps of history, perhaps without giving them proper care. Or they might be acquired by wealthy collectors who eventually lose interest in them and, after death, release them to museums.
"If I were to guess," Mr. Ettinger said, "sooner or later, the majority of this material will end up in museums. But it could take a decade."
In the Smithsonian's collection lie reams of unpublished Duke Ellington music, Lionel Hampton's vibraphone and Ella Fitzgerald's entire archive, among thousands of other items. In nearly every case, the material was donated.
"We'd love to have some of these things in this auction," said John Edward Hasse, the Smithsonian's curator of American music. "But we don't get a penny from the federal budget for acquisitions. So we rely heavily on the good will, generosity and public spiritedness of musicians and their families."
Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, is the source for much of the Coltrane material in the auction, including the saxophones and paperwork. In a telephone interview yesterday, she said she had been approached by several museums in the past, including the Smithsonian, but the circumstances had never seemed right for her to donate material.
"We got a letter about this auction in New York," she explained, "and I had never before considered anything like that. All of the instruments that we have are kept here in our family. But once I thought it through, I thought it would be O.K. if we presented some of the memorabilia."
Some of the proceeds, she explained, will go to the John Coltrane Foundation, a fund that has supported young jazz musicians for 18 years by giving them scholarships to music schools. Some will go to Jowcol, the Coltrane publishing company; some to her own charities, including churches and hospitals in Los Angeles and Detroit, the Red Cross, and a small school for orphaned children in Puttaparthi, India, near Madras. She still expects at some point, she said, to strike a deal with the Smithsonian.
One auction piece from Ms. Coltrane's house in California - the original sheet-music sketches for Coltrane's 1964 suite "A Love Supreme," among the most important works in jazz - bears explicit notes and markings in Coltrane's hand. ("Make ending attempt to reach transcendent level"; "Rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at end"; "Last chord to sound like final chord of 'Alabama.' ") These two pages, which have never been seen by scholars, aren't just a curio: they will affect scholarship.
Many objects are more important than they seem at first glance, revealing something about an artist's early interests, his psychology or the culture of the times. Also in the Coltrane collection is a fifth-grade school scrapbook, solemnly emblazoned in cut-out block letters with the words "Negro History Book," which indicates who made an impression on him in the 1930's. In it, he copied out poems by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and pasted pictures of black entertainers like the Dancing Nicholas Brothers, Marian Anderson and Fletcher Henderson, as well as the etiquette teacher Charlotte Hawkins Brown.
In Monk's school essay books, from 1933 (he was 15), there is a book report on "A Tale of Two Cities," an essay in an exquisite, old-fashioned serif-spangled hand about why Boys' Life is his favorite magazine, and one on the topic of good newspaper journalism. And in the left cuff of one of his tailored jackets, sewn in gold thread, is the phrase "Crepé Scole With Nellie." It refers, via a misspelling, to his tune "Crepuscule With Nellie," written for his wife, Nellie. That Monk would stash a secret phrase to himself in a hidden place says something about the hidden compartments of his character and his great affection for his wife.
"My hope is that the purchasers are the more sharing institutions and collectors," said the jazz historian Phil Schaap, who helped Guernsey's evaluate the objects. "Things tended to go more to repositories until recently. Which means, to me, the suggestion that repositories don't have the money to buy these things." He paused. "The pageantry of it, though, is pretty impressive," he said. "It's all going to be in one room."
The New York Times
January 20, 2005
Pieces of Jazz History Head to Auction Block
By BEN RATLIFF
There is Charlie Parker's King alto saxophone, with mother-of-pearl keys, his primary horn in the 1950's. There is Benny Goodman's clarinet, John Coltrane's soprano and tenor saxophones, Gerry Mulligan's baritone. Thelonious Monk's tailored jacket. A ribald 27-page letter from Louis Armstrong to his manager. One of Ornette Coleman's notebooks from the late 1950's, with his practice exercises and, on one of the last pages, one of his greatest compositions, "Focus on Sanity," written in pencil. Home movies of Coltrane shoveling snow outside his house in Philadelphia in the late 1950's. Charlie Parker concert recordings made by his wife, Chan, and high school book reports by Monk.
On Feb. 20 at the Allen Room in Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall, Guernsey's Auction House will put all these items, and many others, on the block at a special jazz auction. Previews will be held on Feb. 18 and 19, but Guernsey's would not estimate how much the auction will make.
"It would be folly to try to come up with a number," said Guernsey's owner, Arlan Ettinger. Very few of the lots have reserves - the secret minimum prices agreed upon by the sellers and the house. Nor is the house listing estimates in its catalog.
Jazz artifacts have been auctioned before, through Christie's and Sotheby's, but there has been no single auction of this size entirely dedicated to jazz. And though there have been jazz collectors of one kind or another since the 1930's, it seems to have taken many of the families of jazz's royalty this long to dislodge the once mundane items, long buried in closets, that now have great value not only to jazz aficionados but also to the larger community of collectors.
But just because these memorabilia are now turning up at a public auction does not mean they will end up in public hands, at least not right away.
Instruments and sheet music have entered the collections of institutions like the Smithsonian and the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University - the country's greatest academic center for jazz studies - which preserve them and make them available for scholars. (The city of Kansas City, Mo., owns one of Parker's plastic alto saxophones, sold at auction by Sotheby's in 1995 for around $140,000, and it has become the centerpiece of the town's American Jazz Museum. The University of Wisconsin owns the bass that belonged to the great Ellington bassist Jimmy Blanton and occasionally lets students play it.) But institutions, which have limited budgets and often rely on donations by the artists' families to acquire material, may not have the money to buy many of the items at Guernsey's auction.
Instead the pieces may be bought by collectors of modest means who dearly cling to their scraps of history, perhaps without giving them proper care. Or they might be acquired by wealthy collectors who eventually lose interest in them and, after death, release them to museums.
"If I were to guess," Mr. Ettinger said, "sooner or later, the majority of this material will end up in museums. But it could take a decade."
In the Smithsonian's collection lie reams of unpublished Duke Ellington music, Lionel Hampton's vibraphone and Ella Fitzgerald's entire archive, among thousands of other items. In nearly every case, the material was donated.
"We'd love to have some of these things in this auction," said John Edward Hasse, the Smithsonian's curator of American music. "But we don't get a penny from the federal budget for acquisitions. So we rely heavily on the good will, generosity and public spiritedness of musicians and their families."
Alice Coltrane, the widow of John Coltrane, is the source for much of the Coltrane material in the auction, including the saxophones and paperwork. In a telephone interview yesterday, she said she had been approached by several museums in the past, including the Smithsonian, but the circumstances had never seemed right for her to donate material.
"We got a letter about this auction in New York," she explained, "and I had never before considered anything like that. All of the instruments that we have are kept here in our family. But once I thought it through, I thought it would be O.K. if we presented some of the memorabilia."
Some of the proceeds, she explained, will go to the John Coltrane Foundation, a fund that has supported young jazz musicians for 18 years by giving them scholarships to music schools. Some will go to Jowcol, the Coltrane publishing company; some to her own charities, including churches and hospitals in Los Angeles and Detroit, the Red Cross, and a small school for orphaned children in Puttaparthi, India, near Madras. She still expects at some point, she said, to strike a deal with the Smithsonian.
One auction piece from Ms. Coltrane's house in California - the original sheet-music sketches for Coltrane's 1964 suite "A Love Supreme," among the most important works in jazz - bears explicit notes and markings in Coltrane's hand. ("Make ending attempt to reach transcendent level"; "Rising harmonies to a level of blissful stability at end"; "Last chord to sound like final chord of 'Alabama.' ") These two pages, which have never been seen by scholars, aren't just a curio: they will affect scholarship.
Many objects are more important than they seem at first glance, revealing something about an artist's early interests, his psychology or the culture of the times. Also in the Coltrane collection is a fifth-grade school scrapbook, solemnly emblazoned in cut-out block letters with the words "Negro History Book," which indicates who made an impression on him in the 1930's. In it, he copied out poems by Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson, and pasted pictures of black entertainers like the Dancing Nicholas Brothers, Marian Anderson and Fletcher Henderson, as well as the etiquette teacher Charlotte Hawkins Brown.
In Monk's school essay books, from 1933 (he was 15), there is a book report on "A Tale of Two Cities," an essay in an exquisite, old-fashioned serif-spangled hand about why Boys' Life is his favorite magazine, and one on the topic of good newspaper journalism. And in the left cuff of one of his tailored jackets, sewn in gold thread, is the phrase "Crepé Scole With Nellie." It refers, via a misspelling, to his tune "Crepuscule With Nellie," written for his wife, Nellie. That Monk would stash a secret phrase to himself in a hidden place says something about the hidden compartments of his character and his great affection for his wife.
"My hope is that the purchasers are the more sharing institutions and collectors," said the jazz historian Phil Schaap, who helped Guernsey's evaluate the objects. "Things tended to go more to repositories until recently. Which means, to me, the suggestion that repositories don't have the money to buy these things." He paused. "The pageantry of it, though, is pretty impressive," he said. "It's all going to be in one room."
Friday, January 07, 2005
The Village Voice > Hiphop Turns 30 Whatcha celebratin' for?
by Greg Tate
January 4th, 2005 3:23 PM
The Numbers Beyond the Bling
In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail
By Ward HarkavyWe are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.
Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more.
Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.
True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.
Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.
No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.
The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.
But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.
Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.
Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function in the real economic and educational system of these United States like first-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four centuries after they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entreprenurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's best and brightest.
If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.
Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the retired.
That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?
Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.
Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?
Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world's people—urbanized and institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?
All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservative -Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.
Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, African-fer-the-Africans -at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.
The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a -story-to-sell poverty.
You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.
Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways.
We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.
More by Greg Tate
Got Your Sex Raps Here
Nevertheless, Nas still sounds like a man whoÂ’s thinking even when heÂ’d rather not be
Nas's Street's Disciple
White Freedom
The angstiest wigga alive exercises privilege, bears cross, rallies flock, begs forgiveness
Eminem's Encore
The Resurrection and the Light
Ray Charles compels 12 disciples to tell us just exactly who they are
Band in My Head
How Mojo, Bitches Brew, and Butch Morris inspired a funktional African American family unit
Greg Tate on how he invented a band he wanted to hear but could not find.
Apocalypse Now
Janetgate 2004: Black sexuality awaits its Foucault—but three books fill the gap for now
January 4th, 2005 3:23 PM
The Numbers Beyond the Bling
In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail
By Ward HarkavyWe are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.
Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more.
Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.
True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.
Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.
No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.
The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.
But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.
Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.
Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function in the real economic and educational system of these United States like first-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four centuries after they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entreprenurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's best and brightest.
If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.
Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the retired.
That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?
Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.
Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?
Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world's people—urbanized and institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?
All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservative -Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.
Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, African-fer-the-Africans -at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.
The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a -story-to-sell poverty.
You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.
Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways.
We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.
More by Greg Tate
Got Your Sex Raps Here
Nevertheless, Nas still sounds like a man whoÂ’s thinking even when heÂ’d rather not be
Nas's Street's Disciple
White Freedom
The angstiest wigga alive exercises privilege, bears cross, rallies flock, begs forgiveness
Eminem's Encore
The Resurrection and the Light
Ray Charles compels 12 disciples to tell us just exactly who they are
Band in My Head
How Mojo, Bitches Brew, and Butch Morris inspired a funktional African American family unit
Greg Tate on how he invented a band he wanted to hear but could not find.
Apocalypse Now
Janetgate 2004: Black sexuality awaits its Foucault—but three books fill the gap for now
Friday, December 31, 2004
BBC > Jazz giant Artie Shaw dies at 94
One of the most famous American band leaders of the swing era, the clarinettist Artie Shaw, has died.
He died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 94.
His 1938 recording of the Cole Porter tune Begin the Beguine helped make him one of the most famous and highly-paid musicians in the US at the time.
A self-declared perfectionist, Shaw was married eight times. His wives included Hollywood actresses Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go /pr/fr/-/2/hi /entertainment/4136505 .stm
He died at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 94.
His 1938 recording of the Cole Porter tune Begin the Beguine helped make him one of the most famous and highly-paid musicians in the US at the time.
A self-declared perfectionist, Shaw was married eight times. His wives included Hollywood actresses Lana Turner, Ava Gardner and Evelyn Keyes.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go /pr/fr/-/2/hi /entertainment/4136505 .stm
Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Investors.com > World-Class New York City Jazz Performance Center Turns Up the Volume with LightPointe Optical Wireless Solutions
2004 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- LightPointe, a designer and manufacturer of optical wireless products based on free-space optics (FSO) technology, today announced that Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City has deployed LightPointe's optical wireless bridge to extend high-speed connectivity to the organization's newly opened Frederick P. Rose Hall.
Under the leadership of artistic director and renowned jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center is the largest not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. The $128 million, 100,000 square foot Frederick P. Rose Hall opened in midtown Manhattan in October to support the continued development of jazz music through a year-round schedule of education, performance and broadcast events.
In completing the new building, Jazz at Lincoln Center executives sought a solution to extend the reach of an existing 100 Mbps network from its administrative offices, located across the street from the performance facility. While they needed high-speed bandwidth to ensure access to the organization's ticketing software, custom databases and email, they eliminated the possibility of deploying fiber-optic cable because of rights-of-way challenges and time delays. Microwave radio technology also was ruled out due to spectrum licensing and liability concerns. Jazz at Lincoln Center's service provider, a tier-one provider in Manhattan, then recommended LightPointe's FlightLite(TM) Gigabit Ethernet optical wireless bridge, a high-capacity, license-free solution that uses beams of light to transmit voice, data and video through the air-without any of the installation challenges of fiber or microwave.
Fred Murphy, associate director of information technology for Jazz at Lincoln Center, calls FlightLite the most reliable part of his entire network. "The FlightLite has performed flawlessly during our inaugural events at Rose Hall this fall," Murphy said. "Without LightPointe, I don't know how we'd be able to provide Ethernet-class connectivity to our staff at the new facility. We had ruled out all other options, including T1 lines, which at 1.5 Mbps, simply didn't provide the bandwidth we need to operate a world-class business," he added.
Through the FlightLite optical wireless bridge, staffers at the new performance hall gain seamless access to business-critical enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server, a Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone system, Patron Edge ticketing software and ArtsVision database. In addition to providing necessary connectivity, the LightPointe installation is projected to produce a return on investment in approximately three years.
Bob Preston, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for LightPointe, said Jazz at Lincoln Center's selection of LightPointe is indicative of a growing trend in enterprise connectivity. "More and more companies are turning to optical wireless to extend the reach of their high- performance networks across campus environments," he said. "Where T1 links or 802.11 solutions once sufficed, today there is an increased demand for high- speed data, voice and video transport. Optical wireless meets this challenge while also providing robust security, economical price-per-bit and ease of installation."
To date, LightPointe has sold more than 2,500 optical wireless bridges in more than 60 countries to leading enterprises and mobile wireless service providers. In addition to the best-selling FlightLite line, LightPointe offers the FlightSpectrum(TM) with fixed four-beam operation; FlightStrata(TM), the flagship product with advanced multi-beam tracking, optical beam shaping and speeds up to 1.25 Gbps; and the FlightApex(TM), the highest-capacity optical wireless product on the market with multi-beam technology and connectivity speeds up to 2.5 Gbps.
About Jazz at Lincoln Center
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. With the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz. Its productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio and television programs, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, a jazz appreciation curriculum for children, advanced training through the Julliard Institute for Jazz Studies, music publishing, children's concerts, lectures, adult education courses, film programs, and student and educator workshops. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, President & CEO Hughlyn F. Fierce, Executive Director Derek E. Gordon, Chairman of the Board Lisa Schiff and Jazz at Lincoln Center Board and staff, Jazz at Lincoln Center will produce hundreds of events during its 2004-05 season. This is the inaugural season in Jazz at Lincoln Center's new home -- Frederick P. Rose Hall -- the first-ever performance, education, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz.
About LightPointe
LightPointe designs and manufactures high-speed optical wireless products based on free-space optics (FSO) technology for cost-effective bridging in enterprise and carrier networks. LightPointe products have been deployed in more than 60 countries, and the company is recognized worldwide for the highest standards of quality and service. To learn more, please visit www.lightpointe.com.
SOURCE LightPointe
Jeff Bean of LightPointe, +1-858-643-5319, or
jbean@lightpointe.com, or Sue Hetzel of HetzelMeade Communications,
+1-760-434-9927, or sue@hetzelmeade.com
http://www.lightpointe.com
Under the leadership of artistic director and renowned jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center is the largest not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. The $128 million, 100,000 square foot Frederick P. Rose Hall opened in midtown Manhattan in October to support the continued development of jazz music through a year-round schedule of education, performance and broadcast events.
In completing the new building, Jazz at Lincoln Center executives sought a solution to extend the reach of an existing 100 Mbps network from its administrative offices, located across the street from the performance facility. While they needed high-speed bandwidth to ensure access to the organization's ticketing software, custom databases and email, they eliminated the possibility of deploying fiber-optic cable because of rights-of-way challenges and time delays. Microwave radio technology also was ruled out due to spectrum licensing and liability concerns. Jazz at Lincoln Center's service provider, a tier-one provider in Manhattan, then recommended LightPointe's FlightLite(TM) Gigabit Ethernet optical wireless bridge, a high-capacity, license-free solution that uses beams of light to transmit voice, data and video through the air-without any of the installation challenges of fiber or microwave.
Fred Murphy, associate director of information technology for Jazz at Lincoln Center, calls FlightLite the most reliable part of his entire network. "The FlightLite has performed flawlessly during our inaugural events at Rose Hall this fall," Murphy said. "Without LightPointe, I don't know how we'd be able to provide Ethernet-class connectivity to our staff at the new facility. We had ruled out all other options, including T1 lines, which at 1.5 Mbps, simply didn't provide the bandwidth we need to operate a world-class business," he added.
Through the FlightLite optical wireless bridge, staffers at the new performance hall gain seamless access to business-critical enterprise applications, including Microsoft Exchange Server, a Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone system, Patron Edge ticketing software and ArtsVision database. In addition to providing necessary connectivity, the LightPointe installation is projected to produce a return on investment in approximately three years.
Bob Preston, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for LightPointe, said Jazz at Lincoln Center's selection of LightPointe is indicative of a growing trend in enterprise connectivity. "More and more companies are turning to optical wireless to extend the reach of their high- performance networks across campus environments," he said. "Where T1 links or 802.11 solutions once sufficed, today there is an increased demand for high- speed data, voice and video transport. Optical wireless meets this challenge while also providing robust security, economical price-per-bit and ease of installation."
To date, LightPointe has sold more than 2,500 optical wireless bridges in more than 60 countries to leading enterprises and mobile wireless service providers. In addition to the best-selling FlightLite line, LightPointe offers the FlightSpectrum(TM) with fixed four-beam operation; FlightStrata(TM), the flagship product with advanced multi-beam tracking, optical beam shaping and speeds up to 1.25 Gbps; and the FlightApex(TM), the highest-capacity optical wireless product on the market with multi-beam technology and connectivity speeds up to 2.5 Gbps.
About Jazz at Lincoln Center
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. With the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz. Its productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio and television programs, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, a jazz appreciation curriculum for children, advanced training through the Julliard Institute for Jazz Studies, music publishing, children's concerts, lectures, adult education courses, film programs, and student and educator workshops. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, President & CEO Hughlyn F. Fierce, Executive Director Derek E. Gordon, Chairman of the Board Lisa Schiff and Jazz at Lincoln Center Board and staff, Jazz at Lincoln Center will produce hundreds of events during its 2004-05 season. This is the inaugural season in Jazz at Lincoln Center's new home -- Frederick P. Rose Hall -- the first-ever performance, education, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz.
About LightPointe
LightPointe designs and manufactures high-speed optical wireless products based on free-space optics (FSO) technology for cost-effective bridging in enterprise and carrier networks. LightPointe products have been deployed in more than 60 countries, and the company is recognized worldwide for the highest standards of quality and service. To learn more, please visit www.lightpointe.com.
SOURCE LightPointe
Jeff Bean of LightPointe, +1-858-643-5319, or
jbean@lightpointe.com, or Sue Hetzel of HetzelMeade Communications,
+1-760-434-9927, or sue@hetzelmeade.com
http://www.lightpointe.com
Saturday, November 20, 2004
Big News.Com > Judge dismisses musician's claim over use of his name
Friday November 19, 2004
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A federal judge Friday dismissed a lawsuit by a 69-year-old jazz musician from Yarmouth against a Japanese company whose chain of clothing stores bears his name.
The ruling was the latest legal setback for Cecil McBee, a Grammy-winning bass player who has spent nine years and several hundred thousand dollars on court battles in Japan and Maine.
McBee claimed that Delica Inc., owner of the chain of some three dozen stores in Japan that sell trendy clothing to teenage girls, took his name without permission.
The company said it was sheer coincidence that its boutiques and the musician shared the same name. In court papers, Delica suggested that it chose the name for its pleasant sound.
McBee's lawsuit sought to force the chain to either stop using his name or to provide him with compensation. His lawyer had suggested a formula based on a percentage of sales, which amount to roughly $100 million a year.
Rejecting the recommendation of a magistrate judge, U.S. District Judge Gene Carter concluded that the court lacks jurisdiction in the case because any damage awards would conflict with Japanese trademark law.
McBee's lawyer, Robert Newton, said he anticipates an appeal.
Newton said McBee was ``quite disappointed, but he's a strong individual and we've always recognized that this case was difficult.''
``We stayed true to the belief that because of the globalization of the marketplace, there has to be a venue somewhere in which this man can get justice,'' the lawyer said.
Todd Holbrook, who represented Delica, said his client will be pleased to learn that its long legal battle has been won. ``It's justice delayed, but it's justice nonetheless,'' he said.
During his 40-year career, McBee has toured globally and performed with such jazz greats as Benny Goodman and Miles Davis. He received his Grammy in 1989 for his contribution to ``Blues for John Coltrane.''
From: http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=43b2b79e5fcf16ff&cat=f8c1fc641c28ce0a
PORTLAND, Maine (AP) A federal judge Friday dismissed a lawsuit by a 69-year-old jazz musician from Yarmouth against a Japanese company whose chain of clothing stores bears his name.
The ruling was the latest legal setback for Cecil McBee, a Grammy-winning bass player who has spent nine years and several hundred thousand dollars on court battles in Japan and Maine.
McBee claimed that Delica Inc., owner of the chain of some three dozen stores in Japan that sell trendy clothing to teenage girls, took his name without permission.
The company said it was sheer coincidence that its boutiques and the musician shared the same name. In court papers, Delica suggested that it chose the name for its pleasant sound.
McBee's lawsuit sought to force the chain to either stop using his name or to provide him with compensation. His lawyer had suggested a formula based on a percentage of sales, which amount to roughly $100 million a year.
Rejecting the recommendation of a magistrate judge, U.S. District Judge Gene Carter concluded that the court lacks jurisdiction in the case because any damage awards would conflict with Japanese trademark law.
McBee's lawyer, Robert Newton, said he anticipates an appeal.
Newton said McBee was ``quite disappointed, but he's a strong individual and we've always recognized that this case was difficult.''
``We stayed true to the belief that because of the globalization of the marketplace, there has to be a venue somewhere in which this man can get justice,'' the lawyer said.
Todd Holbrook, who represented Delica, said his client will be pleased to learn that its long legal battle has been won. ``It's justice delayed, but it's justice nonetheless,'' he said.
During his 40-year career, McBee has toured globally and performed with such jazz greats as Benny Goodman and Miles Davis. He received his Grammy in 1989 for his contribution to ``Blues for John Coltrane.''
From: http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=43b2b79e5fcf16ff&cat=f8c1fc641c28ce0a
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