The William P. Gottlieb Collection over sixteen hundred photographs of celebrated jazz artists >
jazz scene from 1938 to 1948,
primarily in New York City and Washington, D.C.USA
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/wghtml/wghome.html
Benjamin Gordon Powell Jr.
1930-2010 Trombonist who performed or recorded
with everyone from Frank Sinatra to
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins
but who was best known for his long tenure with Count Basie’s big band
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/arts/music/04powell.html
graphic designer who used avant-garde
painting and photography
to create some of the most striking album covers of the 1950s,
and who designed the visually arresting book jackets for “In Cold Blood” and
“The Godfather”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/arts/design/27fujita.html
October 18, 2009
The New York Times
By AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
THELONIOUS MONK
The Life and Times of an American Original
By Robin D. G. Kelley
Illustrated. 588 pp. Free Press. $30
Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his
junior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16
out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother,
Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to
New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who
suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might
receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny,
tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life,
understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to
play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United
States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of
his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.
The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working
at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a
late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have
been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the
musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even
as a teenager, Monk “really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the
original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that
he’s playing now.”
It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings,
along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in
dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was
hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in
attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the
melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and
player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . .
. improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as
comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo
piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy
Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. It’s
unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play
Rachmaninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a
favorite.
Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography,
“Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no
primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by
Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the
New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too
many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can
teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go
in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.
Monk was well enough known and appreciated in his lifetime to have appeared on
the cover of the Feb. 28, 1964, issue of Time magazine. He was 46 at the time,
and after many years of neglect and scuffling had become one of the principal
faces and sounds of contemporary jazz. The Time article, by Barry Farrell, is,
given the vintage and target audience, well done, both positive and fair, and
accurate in the main. But it does make much of its subject’s eccentricities, and
refers to Monk’s considerable and erratic drug and alcohol use. This last would
have raised eyebrows in the white middle-class America of that era.
Throughout the book, Kelley plays down Monk’s “weirdness,” or at least
contextualizes it. But Monk did little to discourage the popular view of him as
odd. Always a sharp dresser and stickler for just the right look, he also
favored a wide array of unconventional headgear: astrakhan, Japanese skullcap,
Stetson, tam-o’-shanter. He had a trickster sense of humor, in life and in
music, and he loved keeping people off-balance in both realms. Off-balance was
the plane on which Monk existed. He also liked to dance during group
performances, but this served very real functions: first, as a method of
conducting, communicating musical instructions to the band members; and second,
to let them know that he dug their playing when they were in a groove and
swinging.
Even early in his career, Monk often insisted on showing up late to gigs,
driving bandleaders, club owners and audiences to distraction. And on occasion
he would simply fall asleep at the piano. He would also disappear to his room in
the family apartment for two weeks at a time. When he was young, these behaviors
or idiosyncrasies were tolerated and, more or less, manageable. But the manic,
erratic behavior turned out to be the precursor of a more serious bipolar
illness that would over time become immobilizing. From his father, Thelonious
Sr., who was gone from the scene by the time Monk was 11, Thelonious Jr. seems
to have gotten his musical gene (there always seems to be one in there). But he
also inherited his father’s illness. Monk Sr. was committed to the State
Hospital for the Colored Insane in Goldsboro, N.C., at the age of 52, in 1941.
He never left.
Kelley, the author of “Race Rebels” and other books, makes use of the “carpet
bombing” method in this biography. It is not pretty, or terribly selective, but
it is thorough and hugely effective. He knows music, especially Monk’s music,
and his descriptions of assorted studio and live dates, along with what Monk is
up to musically throughout, are handled expertly. The familiar episodes of
Monk’s career are all well covered: the years as house pianist at Minton’s
after-hours club in Harlem, which served as an incubator for the new “modern
music,” later to be called bebop; the brilliant “Genius of Modern Music”
sessions for Blue Note, Monk’s first recordings with him as the bandleader; the
drug bust, where Monk took the rap for Bud Powell and lost his New York cabaret
license for six years; his triumphant return in 1957 with his quartet, featuring
John Coltrane, at the Five Spot; the terrible beating Monk took for resisting
arrest in New Castle, Del.; the final dissolution and breakdown. Likewise, the
characters in Monk’s life and career are well served: his fellow musicians; his
family; his friend and benefactor, the fascinating Pannonica (Nica) de
Koenigswarter, the “jazz baroness,” at whose home in Weehawken, N.J., Monk spent
his final years. He would die, after a long silence, in 1982, in the arms of his
wife, Nellie.
Musicians — particularly jazz musicians of Monk’s period, and most especially
Monk, taciturn and gnomic in utterance by nature — tend not, as writers do, to
write hundreds of letters sharing with intimates what is going on in their
hearts or heads. A biography of Monk, perforce, has to rely on the not always
reliable, often conflicting, memories of others. Instinct is involved, surely as
much as perspicacity, in sifting through the mass of observation and anecdote.
The Monk family appears to have shared private material with Kelley that had
hitherto been unavailable. This trust was not misplaced. There will be shapelier
and more elegantly written biographies to come — Monk, the man and the music, is
an endlessly fascinating subject — but I doubt there will be a biography anytime
soon that is as textured, thorough and knowing as Kelley’s. The “genius of
modern music” has gotten the passionate, and compassionate, advocate he
deserves. h
December 30, 2008
The New York Times
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Freddie Hubbard, a jazz trumpeter who dazzled audiences and critics alike
with his virtuosity, his melodicism and his infectious energy, died on Monday in
Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Sherman Oaks.
The cause was complications of a heart attack he had on Nov. 26, said his
spokesman, Don Lucoff of DL Media.
Over a career that began in the late 1950s, Mr. Hubbard earned both critical
praise and commercial success — although rarely for the same projects.
He attracted attention in the 1960s for his bravura work as a member of the Jazz
Messengers, the valuable training ground for young musicians led by the veteran
drummer Art Blakey, and on albums by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many
others. He also recorded several well-regarded albums as a leader. And although
he was not an avant-gardist by temperament, he participated in three of the
seminal recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz”
(1960), Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch” (1964) and John Coltrane’s “Ascension”
(1965).
In the 1970s Mr. Hubbard, like many other jazz musicians of his generation,
began courting a larger audience, with albums that featured electric
instruments, rock and funk rhythms, string arrangements and repertory sprinkled
with pop and R&B songs like Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and
the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow.” His audience did indeed grow, but his
standing in the jazz world diminished.
By the start of the next decade he had largely abandoned his more commercial
approach and returned to his jazz roots. But his career came to a virtual halt
in 1992 when he damaged his lip, and although he resumed performing and
recording after an extended hiatus, he was never again as powerful a player as
he had been in his prime.
Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938, in Indianapolis. His first
instrument was the alto-brass mellophone, and in high school he studied French
horn and tuba as well as trumpet. After taking lessons with Max Woodbury, the
first trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, at the Arthur Jordan
Conservatory of Music, he performed locally with, among others, the guitarist
Wes Montgomery and his brothers.
Mr. Hubbard moved to New York in 1958 and almost immediately began working with
groups led by the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the drummer Philly Joe Jones and
others. His profile rose in 1960 when he joined the roster of Blue Note, a
leading jazz label; it rose further the next year when he was hired by Blakey,
widely regarded as the music’s premier talent scout.
Adding his own spin to a style informed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and
Clifford Brown, Mr. Hubbard played trumpet with an unusual mix of melodic
inventiveness and technical razzle-dazzle. The critics took notice. Leonard
Feather called him “one of the most skilled, original and forceful trumpeters of
the ’60s.”
After leaving Blakey’s band in 1964, Mr. Hubbard worked for a while with another
drummer-bandleader, Max Roach, before forming his own group in 1966. Four years
later he began recording for CTI, a record company that would soon become known
for its aggressive efforts to market jazz musicians beyond the confines of the
jazz audience.
His first albums for the label, notably “Red Clay,” contained some of the best
playing of his career and, except for slicker production and the presence of
some electric instruments, were not significantly different from his work for
Blue Note. But his later albums on CTI, and the ones he made after leaving the
label for Columbia in 1974, put less and less emphasis on improvisation and
relied more and more on glossy arrangements and pop appeal. They sold well, for
the most part, but were attacked, or in some cases simply ignored, by jazz
critics. Within a few years Mr. Hubbard was expressing regrets about his career
path.
Most of his recordings as a leader from the early 1980s on, for Pablo,
Musicmasters and other labels, were small-group sessions emphasizing his gifts
as an improviser that helped restore his critical reputation. But in 1992 he
suffered a setback from which he never fully recovered.
By Mr. Hubbard’s own account, he seriously injured his upper lip that year by
playing too hard, without warming up, once too often. The lip became infected,
and for the rest of his life it was a struggle for him to play with his
trademark strength and fire. As Howard Mandel explained in a 2008 Down Beat
article, “His ability to project and hold a clear tone was damaged, so his fast
finger flurries often result in blurts and blurs rather than explosive phrases.”
Mr. Hubbard nonetheless continued to perform and record sporadically, primarily
on fluegelhorn rather than on the more demanding trumpet. In his last years he
worked mostly with the trumpeter David Weiss, who featured Mr. Hubbard as a
guest artist with his group, the New Jazz Composers Octet, on albums released
under Mr. Hubbard’s name in 2001 and 2008, and at occasional nightclub
engagements.
Mr. Hubbard won a Grammy Award for the album “First Light” in 1972 and was named
a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.
He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Briggie Hubbard, and his son, Duane.
Mr. Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as
well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview
with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice to younger
musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please,
keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”
Johnny
Griffin, a jazz tenor-saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control, and
harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented musicians of his generation,
and who abandoned his hopes for an American career when he moved to Europe in
1963, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was
80 and had lived in Availles-Limouzine for 24 years.
His death was announced to Agence France-Presse by his wife, Miriam, who did not
give a cause. He played his last concert Monday in Hyères.
His height — around five feet five — earned him the nickname “The Little Giant”;
his speed in bebop improvising marked him as “The Fastest Gun in the West”; a
group he led with Eddie Lockjaw Davis was informally called the “tough tenor”
band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard bop
tenor players.
And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization. In the early 1960s, he
became embittered by the acceptance of free jazz; he stayed true to his identity
as a bebopper. When he felt the American jazz marketplace had no use for him (at
a time he was also having marital and tax troubles) , he left for Holland.
At that point America lost one of its best musicians, even if his style fell out
of sync with the times.
“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything any more,” he said in a 1993
interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty
in the music, the humanity.”
Indeed his work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant
whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound,
mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.
Mr. Griffin grew up on the South Side of Chicago and attended DuSable High
School, where he was taught by the high school band instructor Capt. Walter
Dyett, who also taught the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the
saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.
Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: At the age of 12, attending his grammar
school graduation dance at the Parkway ballroom, he saw Ammons play in King
Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14, he was playing
alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby
Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the guitarist T-Bone Walker.
At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to
join Lionel Hampton’s big band, switching to tenor saxophone. From then until
1951, he was mostly on the road, though based in New York City. By 1947 he was
touring with Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan who ran a rhythm-and-blues band, and
with Morris he made his first recordings for the Atlantic record label. He
entered the army in 1951, was stationed in Hawaii, and played in an army band.
Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie
became a force in jazz. He heard both with the Billy Eckstine band in 1945;
having first internalized the more ballad-like saxophone sound earlier
popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, he was now entranced by the
lightning-fast phrasing of the new music, bebop. In general, his style remained
brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.
Beyond the 1960s, his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen,
and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues
honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing
chords.
Starting in the late 1940s, he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and
Thelonious Monk, and he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.”
After his army service, he went back to Chicago and started playing with Monk, a
move that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic
style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet back
in New York in the late ‘50s; later, in 1967, he played with Monk’s touring
eight- and nine-person groups.
In 1957, Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint, and
in 1958 started making his own records for the Riverside label. On a series of
recordings, including “Way Out” and “The Little Giant,” his rampaging energy got
its moment in the sun: on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles to test a
musician’s mettle, he was simply blazing.
A few years later he hooked up with Eddie Lockjaw Davis, a more blues-oriented
tenor saxophonist, and made a series of records that act as barometers of taste:
listeners tend to either find them thrilling or filled with too many notes,
especially on Monk tunes. The matchup with Davis was a popular one, and they
would sporadically reunite through the ‘70s and ‘80s.
In 1963 he left the United States, eventually settling in Paris and recording
thereafter mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American
expatriates like Kenny Clarke, sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973
he moved to Bergambacht, in the Netherlands; in the early 80s he moved to
Poitiers, in southwestern France.
With his American quartet — including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer
Kenny Washington — he stayed true to the bebop small-group ideal, and the 1991
record he made with the group for the Antilles label, called “The Cat,” was
received warmly as a comeback.
Every April he returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday
week at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago, and usually spent a week at the Village
Vanguard in New York before returning home to his quiet countryside chateau.
August 25, 2007
The New York Times
By PETER KEEPNEWS
Max Roach was remembered at his funeral not just as a brilliant drummer who
helped bring about radical changes in American music, but also as a committed
activist who worked hard to bring about radical changes in American society.
Mr. Roach “used his music as an instrument of our struggle,” the Rev. Calvin O.
Butts III of Abyssinian Baptist Church said in eulogizing Mr. Roach, who died on
Aug. 16 at the age of 83. Mr. Roach’s funeral, held yesterday morning at
Riverside Church in Morningside Heights, drew a capacity crowd of friends,
admirers and fellow musicians.
Former President Bill Clinton, in a statement read by Representative Charles B.
Rangel, Democrat of New York, praised Mr. Roach as “one of the first jazz
musicians to align his craft with the goals of the civil rights movement.”
But Mr. Roach’s musical contributions were not neglected. The writer Amiri
Baraka, while noting that the music Mr. Roach and the singer Abbey Lincoln made
in the 1960s was “part of the liberation movement,” also read a poem that
included a long list of musicians who owed Mr. Roach an artistic debt. Bill
Cosby said that he owed Mr. Roach a different kind of debt — and that Mr. Roach
had owed him one, too.
“Why I became a comedian is because of Max Roach,” he said. “I wanted to be a
drummer.”
As a young jazz fan in Philadelphia, Mr. Cosby explained, he tried to teach
himself to play drums by copying records and watching the great jazz drummers in
action. But when he first saw Mr. Roach, he said, he was awed by his virtuosity
and realized that “there were no tricks, nothing I could take.”
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Cosby told the crowd, he decided that the rudimentary
drum kit for which he had paid $75 was not for him. And, he added, when he
finally met Mr. Roach some years later, the first thing he said to him was, “You
owe me $75.”
As befits a memorial for a man recognized as one of the architects of modern
jazz, music played an important part in the service. The vocalist Cassandra
Wilson, the pianists Randy Weston and Billy Taylor, and the saxophonist Jimmy
Heath were among those who performed.
Mr. Heath performed an unaccompanied improvisation on a song whose title
encapsulated what many of the speakers said about Mr. Roach: “There Will Never
Be Another You.”
One of the great bebop drummers, he went on to help define modern jazz
Saturday August 18, 2007
Guardian
Ronald Atkins
It says much for Charlie Parker's ability to spot talent that two young
sidemen from his most famous quintet, Miles Davis (obituary September 30, 1991)
and Max Roach, left him far behind. Roach, who has died aged 83, was rated among
the greatest of pioneering drummers and later shone as an innovative composer
and bandleader.
Parker brought an unprecedented rhythmic intensity to jazz, packing his solos
with phrases that used the gap between beats as a springboard. The underlying
pulse had quickened during the swing decade from two beats to four. Parker and
other bebop masters stretched it to eight in a bar. It followed that a
swing-style background guitar strumming would impede the soloists. So, strummers
were outlawed, which left more flexible, less intrusive bassists to combine
metric and harmonic roles.
Roach, barely 20 when he recorded Koko with Parker, reinvented the role of the
drums to exploit these changes. He had the imagination and the quickfire hands,
not merely to tap eight beats evenly on his top cymbal at speed but to elaborate
them or vary the tones. Bebop's doubling the number of beats created space that
encouraged the drummer to overlap between bars, and Roach did so with an endless
array of fill-ins and paradiddles. Inventiveness and technical dexterity were
equally balanced in his solos, which he built with impeccable logic.
Born in New Land, North Carolina, Roach was four when his family moved to New
York. His aunt was pianist in the local baptist church, where the young Max
sang. When he was eight, he began studying piano, when he was 12, his father
bought him a drum kit. He taught himself music and had a succession of gigs
while still at the boy's high school in Brooklyn. At 16 he briefly played with
Duke Ellington's orchestra. Later he studied theory and composition at the
Manhattan School of Music.
Roach's recording debut was with Coleman Hawkins in 1943 and he toured with
Benny Carter's big band. By 1945, firmly into bebop mode, he worked with Parker
and Dizzy Gillespie, appearing on all the Parker classics, from Koko to Billie's
Bounce and Parker's Mood. In 1949-50 he featured on Davis's Birth of the Cool
sessions.
In the early 1950s Roach gravitated to Los Angeles, working with west coast
musicians and appearing in the film Carmen Jones (1954). In the same year,
offered the chance to form a group, he recruited the superlative trumpeter
Clifford Brown into what became known as the Roach-Brown quintet. Brown's
saxophone partners were successively Teddy Edwards, Harold Land and Sonny
Rollins. Kenny Dorham joined after Brown was killed in a car crash. Brown's
death sent Roach into a profound, alcohol-fuelled depression, for which he
received psychiatric help. He also defeated a heroin habit.
Parker died in 1955, and modern jazz, via groups led by Davis, Art Blakey,
Horace Silver and others ironed out bebop's jagged edges. The first Roach
quintets fitted this pattern, though even then, the leader's tendency to pick
very fast tempos added an abrasiveness that became more marked when, after
Rollins and then Dorham left, he brought in younger men. Replacing the piano
with tuba or trombone pushed the drums further towards the front line.
After 1955, a radical tide inspired black Americans to focus on African culture.
Increasingly writing the material for his groups, Roach's contributions
intensified through an association with singer Abbey Lincoln - they later
married - and Lincoln introduced him to lyricist Oscar Brown Jr (obituary June
1, 2005). The three collaborated on the Freedom Now Suite (1960). Roach broke
entirely fresh ground with the album, It's Time, composing the music for a
16-piece choir and a jazz sextet, followed by the equally gripping Lift Every
Voice And Sing, made up of his arrangements of spirituals.
Among musicians who identified with black consciousness, Roach was most
frequently involved in direct action. Together with Charles Mingus - with whom
he had set up the shortlived Debut label in 1952 - he organised the Newport
Rebels concert, featuring musicians allegedly ignored by the main Newport
festival. Roach even interrupted a Miles Davis Carnegie Hall charity performance
because he disapproved of the beneficiary. The Village Vanguard club's owner
once pleaded with him to just play music and stop lecturing the audience.
In the 1980s, he set Martin Luther King Jr's I Have A Dream speech to a drum
accompaniment. His British appearances included a 1986 concert during Africa
Week. Its organisers, the then Greater London Council, named a Brixton park
after him.
Many young musicians he employed carved out their own niches. Among them were
trumpeter Booker Little and saxophonists Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman.
Little's partnership with the reedsman Eric Dolphy, a double-act that thrived on
extremes of emotional contrast, works to perfection on Tender Warriors, from
another classic Roach album, Percussion Bitter Suite. Their successors,
trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater and saxophonist Odean Pope, appeared in a number of
Roach's groups during a period of 20 years.
By then, jazz musicians were in demand for academic posts and in 1972, Roach had
begun a long association with the University of Massachusetts where he joined
the department of music and dance. His awards included an honorary doctorate in
music from the New England Conservatory. In 1988, he became the first jazz
musician to be given a MacArthur fellowship, reserved for those making major
contributions to American culture and science.
Roach outgrew the conventions of bebop to the extent that younger innovators
such as Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor played duets with him. He played his
last concert with Taylor at Colombia University in 2000. Never interested in
retracing his career, he continued to break fresh ground well into his 70s. He
was among the first jazz stars to claim rappers followed a black tradition by
making music without expensive instruments. In 1983 he shared the stage with a
team of breakdancers, a rapper and two DJs. He won an Obie for his music for
three Sam Shepard plays in 1984. He performed with symphony orchestras,
classical string quartets - in one of which his daughter Maxine played cello -
as well as with Japanese drummers and Chinese free improvisers, and composed
music for Alvin Ailey dance pieces. Perhaps the most telling long-term outcome
of his interest in Africa was the splendidly named M'Boom, first set up in the
early 1970s, an African-related percussion ensemble including marimba and
xylophone that incorporated jazz ideas. His last recording was with Clark Terry
in 2002.
Roach's three marriages ended in divorce. His survivors include a son and
daughter from his first marriage, a son from another relationship and twin
daughters from his third marriage.
· Maxwell Lemuel Roach, musician, born January 10 1924; died August 16 2007
From The Times Archives > On This Day - June 14, 1986
Benny Goodman was at one time the
best-known musician in the US, and was the first to play jazz in Carnegie Hall,
New York
BENNY GOODMAN, one of the world’s greatest
jazz clarinettists and the first man to bring together blacks and whites in one
band, died from a heart attack at his Manhattan home yesterday. He was 77.
His body was found in his East Side apartment yesterday afternoon, said Mr Lloyd
Rausch, his personal assistant.
The “King of Swing”, who dominated jazz for 50 years, was raised in Chicago and
started playing in a synagogue when he was 13. He went on to become the first
person to play jazz in New York’s Carnegie Hall.
He had recently emerged from semi-retirement, and finding his sound and
techniques were still good, formed a new band last year and began accepting
engagements.
He brought blacks into his band in the 1930s, using the piano of Teddy Wilson
and the vibes of Lionel Hampton.
“He was really a great man, a godsend to the world,” Mr Wilson said yesterday.
“We’ve lost another giant,” said big band leader Ray Anthony.
A blunt, grumpy man who was not afraid to call rock‘n’roll “amplified junk”, he
made numerous recordings and was known throughout the world.
Ronnie Scott paid tribute to Goodman last night. “You cannot overestimate his
talent, he was one of the greats.
“He was known as a hard man to work with and was famous for the glare he would
give people when they did something he did not like.
“As a musician he was hard to fault and to me was the greatest jazz clarinet
player of all time,” he said.
From The Guardian archive > April 19 1960 > Davis and Dizzy
compared
April 19 1960
The Guardian
Miles Davis is one of the most advanced innovators in modern jazz: the same
was said of Dizzy Gillespie fifteen years ago. Two recent releases afford an
interesting comparison between them. Davis's work (Fontana TFL 5072) does not
seem as far out of the normal pattern as Gillespie's at the time, but the ear
has now grown more accustomed to accepting change.
The first sound of Gillespie's brittle and angular flights, apparently in
defiance of the chord sequence behind them, struck a world used to the bland
harmonising of "traditional" and swing bands.
The reaction was meat and drink to Gillespie. His music, brash and extrovert,
has always reflected its creator. The more controversy he could stir with his
melodic and rhythmic juggling, the more intricate his experiments became. At one
stage it became a point of principle with him that no other musician should be
able to follow his circumnavigation of any tune. (He and Thelonious Monk used to
map fantastic chord progressions which they set about if any other player came
to sit with them, leaving him adrift wondering where the tune went.)
The questing spirit remains. His latest record (H.M.V. CLP 1318) shows he is
concerning himself with leavening what he regards as the rhythmic dough of jazz.
His fingers press here and there, and the result is a more digestible offering.
In places he has overdone it slightly and we have to make do with puff pastry
where we expected bread, but that is to be expected from experiment.
Davis also concerns himself with rhythmic effect, but in another way. His
preoccupation is mainly with the pattern of the melodic instruments. He is as
fond of riffs as any rock'n'roller, though with a little more sensitivity. Where
the rock man will bash his way up the chord from tonic to dominant and back,
apparently to eternity, Davis plays nervously with repeated semitone figures,
different for each instrument and constantly changing in accent and rhythm. The
effect is less unsettling than it may sound, for Davis's bland, unifying trumpet
knits it together admirably.
There could not be a greater contrast between Davis's and Gillespie's approach.
Where Gillespie looked his audience over, laughed at it and defied it to
understand what he was doing, Davis seems unaware that he has an audience. His
effects are aimed at himself and at those who play with him. He never laughs;
nor, for that matter, does he cry. The general aspect of his music is one of
inquiring melancholy. His work repays study.
The United States is now in the midst of one of those remarkable phenomena of
mass hysteria which occur from time to time on this side of the Atlantic.
Mr. Frank Sinatra is inspiring extraordinary personal devotion on the part of
many thousands of young people, and particularly young girls between the ages
of, say, twelve and eighteen. The adulation bestowed upon him is similar to that
lavished upon Colonel Lindbergh fifteen years ago [or] Rudolph Valentino a few
years earlier.
Mr. Sinatra has to be guarded by police whenever he appears in public. Indeed,
during the late political campaign, he broke up a demonstration for Governor
Dewey, the Republican candidate, merely by presenting himself on the sidelines
as a spectator. (Since Mr. Sinatra was an ardent supporter of President
Roosevelt, some unkind people suggested that he had done this from political
motives.)
His earnings are in the neighbourhood of $1,250,000 annually. He cannot put his
nose out of doors without careful precautions in advance.
Psychologists have written soberly about the hypnotic quality of his voice and
the remarkable effect upon young women. The teenage girls who constitute the
main part of his audience wear short white half-hose, and are therefore called "bobby-sox
girls" or, more simply, "bobby-soxers."
Mr. Sinatra was born and brought up in comparative poverty in the city of
Hoboken, New Jersey. He did nothing in particular until about twenty when he
began to sing with a band in night clubs and cinema theatres. It is reasonable
to suppose that his popularity with young people was at first a fiction invented
by his press agent.
There is no doubt, however, that the matter has now become a genuine phenomenon.
A writer in the "New Republic" recently described the scene in a New York cinema
when Mr. Sinatra was part of the "stage show" there. On the opening day of his
engagement the crowd waiting for admission early in the morning got out of hand;
police and ambulances had to be summoned.
Multitudes of admirers of "The Voice", as Mr. Sinatra is popularly called,
refused to leave after having seen one complete performance in a non-stop
programme which went on every day from nine in the morning until after midnight.
Of 3,500 spectators, only about 250 left at the end of the first performance.
One young woman is known to have sat through 56 consecutive performances, which
means about eight consecutive days.
