Harold Land (1928-2001)

Photo by Francis Wolf

Been doing a little reading on jazz saxophonist Harold Land, who passed away in 2001. Here's the NYT obituary:

Harold Land, 73, Saxophonist Who Made a Splash in the Bop Era
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: July 30, 2001

Harold Land, a West Coast tenor saxophonist who had a brush with the jazz pantheon through a brief tenure with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet in the mid-1950's, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 73 and lived in Los Angeles.

The cause was a stroke, said his wife, Lydia.

Mr. Land was performing with great strength even until last year as part of the Harold Land-Billy Higgins Quintet, a group that had come to the Jazz Standard in Manhattan three times in recent years. His dire, brooding sound began somewhere between rhythm and blues and Coleman Hawkins, and after the early 1960's owed more and more to John Coltrane's harmonies, phrasing and experiments with modalism.

Born in Houston, Mr. Land moved with his family to San Diego when he was 5. He began playing saxophone at 16 after hearing Hawkins's recording of ''Body and Soul.'' After high school Mr. Land worked in a band led by a local bass player, Ralph Houston, who also helped him join the musicians' union. Then he was in the trumpeter Froebel Brigham's band at the Creole Palace, a jazz club. He made his first recording at 21 as part of Brigham's band. He toured briefly with the rhythm-and-blues bandleaders (and brothers) Jimmy and Joe Liggins and then in 1954 moved to Los Angeles.

The trumpeter Clifford Brown heard Mr. Land in a jam session at the home music studio of the saxophonist Eric Dolphy, and Mr. Land was abruptly hired into the Brown-Roach band, which already had a wide reputation, replacing the saxophonist Teddy Edwards. For almost two years, based in Philadelphia, far from his wife and young son, he contributed to some of the finest records of the hard-bop era, including ''Study in Brown.'' He was becoming famous in jazz circles.

But in late 1955, when he learned that his grandmother was dying in Los Angeles, he quit and moved back there to be with his family. He was an archetypal example of a musician whose career might have taken off if he had stayed in the New York area.

Back on the West Coast, he joined the bassist Curtis Counce's group, recording with Counce and making his own records for Contemporary, including ''The Fox,'' from 1959, a lesser-known classic with a number of tunes written by the pianist Elmo Hope and Mr. Land's own tricky, blisteringly fast title number.

He recorded for Concord in the 1970's, and in the 80's he joined the Timeless All-Stars sextet. He returned to performing on his own more frequently and widely in the late 1990's. He had taught jazz at the University of California at Los Angeles for the past three and a half years. His final record, from last year, was ''The Promised Land,'' on Audiophonic.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by a son, the jazz pianist Harold Land Jr. of Los Angeles, and a grandson.

Musicologist Christopher Small (1927-2011)

NYT
September 10, 2011
Christopher Small, Cultural Musicologist, Is Dead at 84
By BEN RATLIFF

Christopher Small, a New Zealand-born writer and musicologist who argued that music is above all an active ritual involving those who play and listen to it and only secondarily a matter of “black dots,” as he once called written music, died on Wednesday in Sitges, Spain. He was 84.

His death was confirmed by the musicologist Susan McClary.

On the strength of three books, originally published in Britain, Mr. Small’s influence on American academics and music critics grew in the 1970s and ’80s, and again in the ’90s, when Wesleyan University Press gave them new life in the United States.

With elegant simplicity, using jargon-free prose for a general audience, he made broad comparisons between musical traditions in Africa and Asia and between Europe and America, talking about ritual, cultural identity and the rise of western music as a mercantile, nonparticipatory art.

He also wrote about the classical tradition as well as popular music — he preferred the term “vernacular” — in his efforts to understand western music as phenomena of capitalist societies. At the same time, he wondered about the most basic questions of music: why we pick up instruments or raise our voices together in the first place.

In “Musicking,” published in 1998, he argued that music is an action, not an object; a verb, not a noun, as the title implied. He framed the book around the rituals of a symphonic concert in a modern hall: the concertgoer’s experience of the building’s size and interior spaces, the ticket-taking, the seated arrangement of the players, the standards of excellence in individual performance, and the inevitable opining after the concert about whether it was any good.

Mr. Small’s aim, he wrote, was to “decipher the signals that are everywhere being given and received.” He stressed that all people involved in a musical performance — the musicians, audience, roadies, publicists, cleaning crew — are part of its ritual.

His other two books were “Music, Society, Education” (1977) and “Music of the Common Tongue” (1987).

Some of his statements were provocative. Though he was trained in the classical tradition as both a musician and teacher and continued to listen to Mozart and Haydn, he called the works of the standard symphony repertory “bedtime stories told to adults.”

read the full post HERE.

David Fanshawe (1942-2010)

The Washington Post was one of many outlets that ran an obituary of composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe.

David Fanshawe, 68, dies; ethnomusicologist who composed 'African Sanctus'

By Emma Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; B06

David Fanshawe, 68, a British musician and explorer best known for composing "African Sanctus," a controversial interpretation of the Latin Mass set against a backdrop of tribal music he recorded on a three-year journey up the Nile River, died July 5 at a hospital in Swindon, England. He had complications from a stroke.

Beginning in the 1960s, long before the craze for world music took hold in the Western world, Mr. Fanshawe traveled thousands of miles in Africa and the South Pacific -- largely on foot, but also by camel, canoe, barge and sailboat -- to record traditional songs and sounds of the world's indigenous peoples.

He weaved those recordings with live performances by singers and instrumentalists to create original compositions that were performed at venues including Washington's Kennedy Center.

The most famous of his compositions was "African Sanctus," an hour-long choral Mass in 13 movements first performed as "African Revelations" in 1972. The piece pairs the Lord's Prayer with war drums from eastern Sudan and couples a traditional dance from Uganda with Sanctus, a hymn from Christian liturgy.

Mr. Fanshawe estimated that "African Sanctus" was performed more than 1,000 times but acknowledged that the work's interpretation of the Lord's Prayer had a polarizing effect on critics.

"Mr. Fanshawe's idea of fusing the ominous sound of Sudanese war drums with the choir's gentle prayer for peace was a masterful touch," music critic Robert Sherman wrote in the New York Times in 1982. "It was a thrilling experience."

However, music reviewer Richard Carter wrote in The Washington Post that the combination of traditional and classical music "simply does not add up to anything more than a work of banal, dreary, jejune, prosaic vapidity."

The composer's efforts raised ethical questions from those who questioned whether his recordings were an aural sort of imperialism that exploited indigenous musicians.

"It's an extraordinary collection of music and images," said Carol A. Muller, a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Pennsylvania. But "there is an edge to everything he did," she said. "There is a level of complete arrogance, a kind of colonial mind-set, that you can go to Africa and make these recordings and use them at your own will."

He brushed off such criticism, saying that his recordings help the world remember songs that otherwise would be forgotten.

"I've tried to make recordings in remote places that preserve the music honestly. I've paid the musicians what I can," he told the St. Petersburg Times in 2000. "All I can say is that if I hadn't recorded this music, or taken these photographs, nobody else would have."

David Fanshawe was born in a seaside town in Devon, England, during an air raid on April 9, 1942. "My father was born in India, four generations of my family were born in India, all the stories I heard were from India and I was born in bloody Devon," he once said.

His family's history kindled in him a desire to explore the world -- and he did it through music. After working for several years as an apprentice sound engineer in the British film industry, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.

He said his inspiration for melding the world's musical traditions came from an epiphany he had while hitchhiking around the Middle East in the late 1960s. As he listened to a Latin Mass in a church in Old Jerusalem, he heard from outside the sound of imams calling the Muslim faithful to prayer.

"I heard that cacophony, and I heard that as harmony -- harmony between East and West, harmony between Christian and Muslim, harmony between Christ and Muhammad," Mr. Fanshawe told a Vermont newspaper in 2008. "I heard in my head the duality of both religions singing to the glory of one God."

In 1969, Mr. Fanshawe set out from Cairo on a journey that traced the shape of a cross: south on the Nile to Lake Victoria, then west to the mountains of Sudan and east to the Red Sea. Armed only with a simple rucksack, a tape recorder and a few British pounds, Mr. Fanshawe endured the sort of exotic travails that later made him the subject of BBC documentaries.

Read the full story HERE.

Fanshawe's website is HERE.

Francisco Aguabella (1925-2010)

Legendary Cuban drummer Francisco Aguabella died today after a battle with cancer. Aguabella was born in the Cuban city of Matanzas on October 10, 1925, the youngest of seven children though only one of two to survive a typhus epidemic. Though neither of his parents were musicians, Francisco began playing music while a child and was drawn to the music that surrounded him in Matanzas. He began to play the sacred batá drums at age twelve, taught by another youngster at the time, the legendary Esteban Vega Bacallao, popularly known as Cha-Chá (1925-2007). According to Raul Fernandez' book From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz, Aguabella apprenticed on the supporting drums for five years (two on okónkolo, three on itótele) before studying the lead drum of this ensemble. He became known as a fierce and powerful drummer in both sacred and secular contexts, becoming, by his own account, the lead soloist for a local comparsa group at age 16, an accomplishment of which he was very proud. At age eighteen Aguabella was initiated into a local Abakuá potencia (an Afro-Cuban male initiation society). During this time he also became friends with drummer Julito Collazo (1925-2004), who would later become, along with Aguabella, an important source of batá drumming in the United States.

In his early twenties Aguabella worked on docks in Havana and Matanzas while continuing to drum during his free time. Eventually he was asked by influential Havana drummers to join their show troupe in Havana. In Havana, Aguabella also played in various sacred, band, and comparsa groups. In 1953 American dancer Katherine Dunham saw Aguabella perform in a nightclub and requested his services for a show scene in a movie (Mambo, starring Shelley Winters and Anthony Quinn)that was being filmed in Havana. Dunham invited Aguabella to join her company, and he soon accompanied her to Italy, the first of many tours. In addition to drumming, Aguabella had small dance and acting roles in the company's productions.

After touring with Dunham, Aguabella came to the United States at a time when Latin music was mixing with popular jazz. While fellow drummer Collazo settled in New york, Aguabella settled in California, living in Los Angeles and San Francisco for the rest of his life. Aguabella had an impressive career, including recordings, performances, and tours with artists such as Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Sinatra, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Eddie Palmieri, Cachao, Lalo Schifrin, Cal Tjader, Nancy Wilson, Weather Report, Poncho Sanchez, Bebo Valdes, Carlos Santana, Malo, Three Dog Night, Paul Simon, and the Doors. (According to Francisco, Sinatra would introduce him to audiences as "My Italian conga drummer, Francisco Aguabella.") Aguabella also led his own Latin jazz group, playing concerts and issuing recordings for many years. He also composed music for his and other ensembles, mostly works that took advantage of his extensive drumming knowledge. Importantly, Aguabella was a source of authentic sacred Afro-Cuban music in the United States at a time when few knew the secrets of sacred drumming. Aguabella was awarded the National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Durfee Foundation's Master Musicians' Fellowship, and was recognized by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. He was the subject of a documentary film by Les Blank titled "Sworn to the Drum." Agubella taught Afro-Cuban music at UCLA from the mid-1990s until 2008.

Aguabella was the strongest, fiercest drummer I have ever seen. I once saw him play a sacred tambor in the 1980s (for Changó, with frighteningly fast, loud, and long sections of drumming), and also at the famed Conga Summit concert in San Francisco. By the time I got to study with him a bit in the mid to late 1990s, he had mellowed considerably from his earlier days, when he had the reputation of being a tough taskmaster. I last saw him in late 2008, when the photos below were taken.






Information above was based on Aguabella's own biography, Raul Fernandez' From Afro-Cuban Rhythm to Latin jazz, and personal communication.

Graciela Peréz-Gutierrez (1915-2010)

NYT has an obituary of the famous Graciela:

April 9, 2010
Graciela Peréz-Gutierrez, Afro-Cuban Singer, Dies at 94
By BEN RATLIFF

Graciela Peréz-Gutierrez, known professionally as Graciela, one of the great voices in Afro-Cuban music, died on Wednesday in Manhattan, where she lived. She was 94.

The cause was renal and pulmonary failure, said Mappy Torres, her friend and assistant.

For 32 years, Graciela sang with a band formed by her foster brother, Machito, whose real name was Frank Grillo.

Many of Graciela’s most famous appearances on records, including “Que Me Falta,” “Vive Como Yo,” “Ay José” and “Si Si No No,” were swoons and flirtations, from coy to outrageous. She was a forthright performer, singing with a clear and powerful alto voice; she could make it soft, then expand it into a clipped vibrato or a ragged shout.

Graciela and Machito, both raised by Graciela’s parents in Havana, were each established professional singers before they teamed up in New York in 1943.

In Cuba, Graciela had been singing with the all-female Orquesta Anacaona and El Trio Garcia and had traveled to New York, South America and Europe. Machito had moved from Havana to New York City in 1937, recorded with the Orchestra Siboney and Xavier Cugat, and ultimately formed the Afro-Cubans with the trumpeter Mario Bauzá, a group that helped galvanize the mambo and Latin-jazz movements.

When Machito was drafted into the United States Army in 1943, Bauzá sent for Graciela, eight years Machito’s junior, to join the Afro-Cubans. She was the band’s lead singer for a year before Machito’s return. From then through the 1950s, with the two lead singers trading off vocal turns and Graciela clicking through the rhythm pattern with her wooden claves, the band established a high standard for the mambo orchestra.

The Afro-Cubans played to integrated audiences at the Palladium, Town Hall, the Apollo, the 52nd Street jazz clubs, the Concord Hotel in the Catskills and the Crescendo nightclub in Hollywood, among other places.

Graciela left the Afro-Cubans in 1975 but rejoined with Bauzá’s own band, first in 1976 on “La Botanica” and then during the 1990s in his career’s 11th-hour revival.

Graciela was never married and had no immediate surviving family members. She died, Ms. Torres said, with her claves in her hands.

Joseph Kwame Degbor (1953-2010)

I am saddened to pass on information from John Gabriel, Executive Director for the Center for World Music, that the talented Ghanaian performer/educator Joseph Kwame Degbor passed away in Accra, Ghana on Monday, February 22, following a sudden two-week illness. 

Joseph Kwame Degbor was born on November 11, 1953 in the village Botoku in the Kpando District of the Volta Region of Ghana, West Africa. His father, Paul Kwame Degbor, was a village chief. As a large collection of drums existed in his father's palace, Kwame grew up surrounded by drums and quickly demonstrated a prodigious ability for drumming. By six years of age he began competing with elderly drummers on the talking drums, Borborbor, Zigi, Agbadza, Asafo, and Adowa. In middle school Kwame became the leader of the school's Cultural Troupe, and at the Training College, he emerged as a talented dancer and singer. After training as a teacher, he focused more on dance and created a dance group in Agate village, where the Arts Council of Ghana was impressed with his abilities and appointed him as a representative for the Hohoe and Kpando Districts in 1982. Kwame also became an integral part of the Centre for National Culture beginning in 1982. In 1999 he graduated from the University of Ghana, Legon with a major in Theatre Arts (Dance). After completing his degree, Kwame returned to the Centre for National Culture in Ho and continued training various traditional performance groups in the region. At the Centre for National Culture, Kwame was put in charge of Performing Arts, becoming Director of Programme, Artistic Director of the Centre's Folkloric Company, and Acting Deputy Director for the Centre. Respected for his vast knowledge of folk performing arts, Kwame traveled outside the Volta Region to teach and evaluate dances in other parts of the country.

Between 1992 and 2005 he assisted with the San Diego State University Summer Workshops in Ghana. In 2004 he was invited to San Diego by the Center for World Music to be an Artist-Teacher in Residence. He served as a lecturer at San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego, and as an artist-teacher he taught and performed at California State University, San Marcos and at numerous junior colleges and public schools. He also acted as Artistic Director of San Diego-based drum and dance troupe Ho-Asogli, and as a drummer, storyteller, and especially as a phenomenally graceful dancer, introduced thousands of San Diegans to the beauty of West African Arts. Kwame was preparing to travel to San Diego when he became ill. Kwame is survived by two wives, four sons, and two daughters.

The Center for World Music will organize a memorial service for Kwame in San Diego; information will be forthcoming when available.

See also this newer post with link to an interview with Kwame.

* This post was updated to correct the number of children Kwame had.

Another Liam Clancy obit (NYT)

NYT
[Columbia]

December 5, 2009
Liam Clancy, Last of the Folk Group, Dies at 74
By BRUCE WEBER

Liam Clancy, an Irish troubadour and the last surviving member of the singing Clancy Brothers, who found fame in the United States and helped spread the popularity of Irish folk music around the world, died on Thursday in Cork, Ireland. He was 74.

His death was announced by his family and reported on the Web site www.liamclancy.com. He had been treated for pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease, The Associated Press reported.

Wearing white Aran sweaters, the Clancy Brothers, joined by a fellow Irishman, Tommy Makem, won fans with musicality, sentimentality and irreverence, not unlike the Smothers Brothers a few years later, though without their penchant for patter.

Both authentic Irish and expatriate Irish, they were cultural crossovers, and, for a while, celebrities. When they were criticized, it was as the epitome of staged Irishness, as a documentary about Liam Clancy put it.

Mr. Clancy played guitar, sang in a bell-clear baritone, wore a friendly, slightly roguish expression and exuded a humorous world-weariness that made him beloved by his countrymen as quintessentially Irish. But he and his musical clan made their name in America.

It was in 1956 that Mr. Clancy, then 20 or 21 and intending to be an actor, immigrated to the United States, joining two of his older brothers, Tom and Paddy, in New York. He achieved some success as an actor; he and Tom starred as prison guards in a well-received stage dramatization of the Frank O’Connor story “The Guests of the Nation,” and he appeared on Broadway in a short-lived production of James Costigan’s “Little Moon of Alban.”

In the meantime, the brothers and Mr. Makem, a friend of Liam’s who had also immigrated, began singing together, performing rowdy and sentimental Irish folk tunes at clubs and fund-raisers and developing a local following. They recorded on a label established by Paddy Clancy, and in the early 1960s, billed as the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, they made a career-changing appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” They soon found themselves in the midst of the folk music revolution, touring and recording several albums.

Liam Clancy lived in Greenwich Village, where he befriended another young folk singer, Bob Dylan. They dated a pair of sisters, Mr. Clancy told interviewers. Recalling that time in an interview on Irish television two years ago, Mr. Clancy said that he, a Roman Catholic from rural Ireland, and Mr. Dylan, a Jew from a small Minnesota town, shared an important quality.

“People who were trying to escape repressed backgrounds, like mine and Bob Dylan’s, were congregating in Greenwich Village,” he said. “It was a place you could be yourself, where you could get away from the directives of the people who went before you, people who you loved but who you knew had blinkers on.”

Mr. Dylan told an interviewer in 1984: “I never heard a singer as good as Liam ever. He was just the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life. Still is, probably.”

....

read the rest HERE

Liam Clancy, last of the Clancy Brothers, dies at 74

MSNBC/AP

Irish folk pioneer Liam Clancy dies at 74
He was last member of Clancy Brothers, which took U.S. by storm in ’60s

updated 1:38 p.m. PT, Fri., Dec . 4, 2009

DUBLIN - Irish balladeer Liam Clancy, last of the Clancy Brothers troupe whose feisty, boozy songs of old Ireland struck a sentimental chord worldwide, died Friday in a Cork hospital. He was 74.

Clancy died in his hospital bed flanked by his wife Kim and daughters Siobhan and Fiona, his manager and family said. He suffered for years against incurable pulmonary fibrosis, the same lung-destroying disease that claimed one of his older singing brothers, Bobby, in 2002.

Ireland's arts minister, Martin Cullen, led nationwide tributes to Clancy, praising his "superb singing, warm voice and gift for communicating in a unique storytelling style."

"It was always so obvious with Liam Clancy that he loved what he was doing and his very presence made you feel welcome," Cullen said.

Clancy, the youngest of 11 children in a County Tipperary household filled with folklore and song, emigrated to the U.S. in 1956 to join two elder brothers, Tom and Patrick, in New York City who were singing on the side as they pursued budding careers as Broadway actors.

But after recording a 1956 album of Irish rebel songs, they grew a New York following as musicians and formed a partnership with Northern Ireland immigrant Tommy Makem. Soon they were earning more as weekend singers in Manhattan bars and clubs than as full-time stage actors.

Scouts for U.S. television's flagship “Ed Sullivan Show” spotted them performing in Greenwich Village's White Horse Tavern, and their 16-minute appearance in March 1961 on the program — extended because of the last-minute cancellation of another act — turned them into an Irish-American folk phenomenon.

Their agent cultivated a schmaltzy appeal to Irish emigrants worldwide, encouraging the Clancy Brothers and Makem to perform in cream-white Aran wool sweaters hand-knit from home as well as tweed fishermen's caps.

But their up-tempo resurrection of traditionally slow, sad Irish songs made a deeper impression on much of America's emerging folk artist movement, including Bob Dylan, who paid tribute to Liam Clancy as "the best ballad singer I'd ever heard in my life."

The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem performed Carnegie Hall, toured Ireland, Britain, Australia and repeatedly throughout the U.S., and recorded more than a dozen albums before breaking up amid arguments over bills, babes and booze in 1974.

....

read the rest HERE

Ethnomusiologist Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy: 1927-2009

UCLA press release

I would add that he was, truly, a gentleman and a scholar, a gentle soul and generous and patient teacher.

Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy: 1927-2009

Published: June 24, 2009

Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy, an ethnomusicologist with an international reputation as a researcher, teacher, administrator, and an emeritus faculty member of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, died peacefully of lung cancer on Saturday, June 20 at his home in Van Nuys, California.

Jairazbhoy joined the UCLA Department of Music as a full professor in 1975 and in 1988 became the founding chair of the new Department of Ethnomusicology and Systematic Musicology at UCLA.

Professor Jairazbhoy’s comprehensive knowledge of India’s folk, classical, and popular music traditions was unrivalled among those in the field of ethnomusicology, which combines the study of music with the ethnographic techniques and theories of anthropology. In addition, his promotion of audio-visual documentation and use of technology to disseminate performing arts traditions, his leadership in advancing the methodological debates of his field, and his pioneering efforts to create institutions which advance the study of “world music” traditions, made a place for him among those whose goal is no less than global human understanding.

Born in England of Indian parents, Jairazbhoy became interested in music as a child watching his mother play the sitar at home. He attended high school in India and England and received and B.A. in Geography from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. in 1971 in Indian Music from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Publications to his credit include The Rags of North Indian Music: Their Structure and Evolution and Hi-Tech Shiva and Other Apocryphal Stories: An Academic Allegory. He has also produced numerous audio and video documents, which include A Musical Journey through India, 1963-1964 and, in collaboration with his wife, Dr. Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, Bake Restudy in India: 1938-1984, which received an award from the Society for Visual Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, and Retooling a Tradition: A Rajasthani Puppet Takes Umbrage at his Stringholders, a fictive documentary. He also taught numerous courses in ethnomusicology at UCLA, including field and laboratory methods, transcription and organology, as well as courses on the folk and classical music of India. He served as director of Indian music performance in the department until his retirement in 1994.

One of Jairazbhoy’s major contributions is in the use of audio-visual materials. The work of scholars such as Jairazbhoy, whose research is based primarily on fieldwork in remote locales of poorer nations, demands a high level of proficiency in the technical facets of photography, sound recording, and video recording. (When a musical tradition has not previously been documented, the scholar must of course do all his or her own AV documentation before [s]he can begin to analyze the music or investigate its history and social background.) Jairazbhoy always had a strong technical bent, and by the 1980s he expanded his publications from the purely text-based to videos and films he edited and produced from his own field footage. In 1994, he and his wife established their own registered non-profit-making publishing company, Apsara Media for Intercultural Education (motto: "Bringing Ethnographic Content to the Classroom"), which is extremely active in publishing AV materials and books on the performing and other arts of South and Southeast Asia (many based on their own work, but including some that are collaborations with or authored by other parties).

Jairazbhoy’s work was revered throughout his life as pioneering because of his ability to think “outside-the-box.” For example, still today in Indian music circles, many people consider Indian classical music to be the only form of South Asian music worth studying. Jairazbhoy began his career in the 1950s playing, presenting, and writing on just that classical tradition. Nevertheless, almost from the outset, he developed a passionate interest in the undocumented but wonderfully diverse folk music traditions of India and Pakistan, and spent the last half-century bringing them to light. In many cases, the only reason we have any documentation of entire genres and their social and historical importance is because of Jairazbhoy's work.

In a related vein, when in the early 1970s the North American field of ethnomusicology was almost entirely focused on classical and folk musics of the world, he courted controversy by reading a paper at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual meeting on Bollywood film music ("How Indian is Indian Film Music?" [1973]), and advocating for popular music to be taken seriously as a hugely influential musical form (a view that is now mainstream). The same pioneering spirit led him to experiment in the 1970s and early 1980s with video field recording and computer applications for data organization and retrieval, to institute the first phase of an ongoing "restudy" of Indian musical genres recorded in the 1930s by Dutch researcher Arnold Bake (in fact, the first restudy ever undertaken in the field of ethnomusicology), and to collaborate with colleagues from other fields in work on acoustics and music perception.

This "can do" spirit also resulted in numerous leadership roles: Jairazbhoy spearheaded the formation in the mid 1980s of India's renowned Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology in New Delhi, which is now considered a worldwide model; in 1975 he became the first non-white President of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the premier professional association in North America; in 1988 he was the founding chair of the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA (now arguably the leading program in ethnomusicology in the English-speaking world); he consulted and presented for three Smithsonian Institution festivals; and he served as a member for eleven years of the Board of Directors of the UNESCO-affiliated International Council for Traditional Music (the most high-profile international organization in our field). The ideas and innovations he implemented in these roles still affect these institutions and their missions today.

Since his official retirement in 1994, Jairazbhoy’s career has remained vibrantly active. His most recent book came out in January 2008; he recently had an article published by Ethnomusicology, the flagship journal in the field; he edited and produced two published DVDs based on his field research in 2007; and awards and speaking invitations continued to flow in both domestically and internationally.

Since 1994, Jairazbhoy has spent four months nearly every year during the winter in India continuing his field research; despite his age, and despite difficult physical conditions in the countryside and small towns. An enormous flow of published works resulted from these trips and other research: his 2008 book on puppetry in Rajasthan; seven videos and DVDs as well as an audio CD, some produced in collaboration with his ethnomusicologist/filmmaker wife Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, that document folk music traditions of India, Pakistan, and Hmong Americans; two refereed journal articles; four book chapters; five conference papers; and several other smaller items. This period has also seen publication of the substantially revised second edition of his 1971 book The Rags of North Indian Music, now considered a classic in scholarship on Indian classical music. He and Catlin-Jairazbhoy recently completed a new DVD project based on recent fieldtrips to restudy South Indian musical traditions first recorded in the 1930s by Dutch scholar Arnold Bake. The DVD, Music for a Goddess, was screened in March at the National Centre for performing Arts, Mumbai.

Jairazbhoy was a role model for humanly concerned scholarship: until the end of his life, he continued to support the New Delhi Archive he established, depositing copies of all his materials there to benefit the originating communities and Indian scholars; he spoke constantly at Indian institutions; and following the disastrous Gujarat earthquake of 2001, he and Catlin-Jairazbhoy lobbied and raised funds for destitute musicians of the region, helping them get smashed instruments reconstructed, and ultimately assisting them in obtaining invitations to perform at both domestic and international venues, which helped their families both economically and in terms of social status. They were also engaged in a similar effort to help sacred musicians dedicated to the Goddess Renuka/Yellamma improve their own and their children's prospects while retaining musical traditions they wish to continue (despite local government determination to destroy everything associated with their lifestyle). These activities are in fact an extension of Jairazbhoy's decades-long custom of using his own personal funds to provide financial and counseling support to less well-off artists in India, in particular musicians and puppeteers from Rajasthan, and Sidis (African-Indians) from Gujarat.

Jairazbhoy's achievements have been richly rewarded with both domestic and international recognition. His professional society in North America, the Society for Ethnomusicology, has given him both of its highest awards: in 1995 he accepted the prestigious invitation to give the Charles Seeger Memorial Lecture (the keynote address) at the Society's annual meeting; and in 2005 the Board of the Society named him an "honorary life member," an honor reserved for the most distinguished senior figures in the field. In India, Jairazbhoy was honored in 2005 with the Music Forum Award (Mumbai) for "Contribution to the Cause of Indian Music by Overseas Resident Personality." He has also achieved the rare distinction of an entry on his life and work in the world's primary English-language music encyclopedia, the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980 and 2001 editions). In 2009 an oral history of his life and work was completed and submitted to the UCLA Library's Center for Oral History Research. In 2008 he received the UCLA Dickson Emeritus Award in recognition of his numerous ongoing contributions to UCLA, to many musicians and institutions in India, and to the wider world of scholarship.

Jairazbhoy donated his body to the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine Donated Body Program for teaching and research.

He is survived by his wife, Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy, daughters Nishat Jairazbhoy (Spacek), Angela (Jairazbhoy) Schurer, Judy (Jairazbhoy) Lewicki, son Paul Jairazbhoy, and godson Abdul Hamid Sidi.

Sarod master Ali Akbar Khan (1922-2009)

Times of India

Sarod maestro dies at 88
20 Jun 2009, 0447 hrs IST, Namita Devidayal, TNN


NEW DELHI: Ustad Ali Akbar Khan once said that music is the only thing that you can share with a million people and you don't lose, you gain. After sharing his music all over the world, the sarod maestro died in San Francisco on Friday morning, following a prolonged kidney ailment.

He was 88. He is survived by his wife Mary, 11 children, and an extraordinary musical legacy that includes the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California.

Ali Akbar Khan was born in 1922 in East Bengal (Bangladesh) and, like so many children born into musical families, learned how to play various instruments before he could spell. His father, Baba Allauddin Khan, was one of the great names of Hindustani music. "For us, as a family, music is like food. When you need it you don't have to explain why, because it is basic to life," Ali Akbar Khan had said.

In his early twenties, he made his first recording in Lucknow for HMV. He then became the court musician for the Maharaja of Jodhpur where he worked for seven years.

In 1955, on the request of violin master Yehudi Menuhin, Ali Akbar Khan first visited the US and performed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By the sixties, the West was clamouring for more and he pushed India on the world music map, with a little help from his friend Pandit Ravi Shankar (who was earlier married to Khansahib's sister, Annapurna Devi).

Responding to a wave of interest in the West, he began teaching and living in the US and, in 1967, founded the Ali Akbar College of Music in California, where he had been teaching since, along with tabla stalwart Ustad Zakir Hussain. Khansahib also opened a branch of his college in Basel, Switzerland, run by his disciple Ken Zuckerman, where he taught when on his world tours. Speaking from London, Ustad Zakir Hussain said, "He was one of the greatest musicians ever, a musician's musician.

Jesús Alfonso Miró, Director of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, Dies at 60

From Ned Sublette:

At 6:45 a.m. today, June 3 2009, at 60 years of age, Jesús Alfonso Miró,
musical director of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, exceptional composer and
percussionist, died in his home town of Matanzas, Cuba. The only son of the
Alfonso Miró family, he was the father of 8 children, all dedicated to the
rumba as musicians or dancers. Two of them have been members of the
Muñequitos and at present, Freddy Jesús Alfonso Borges, a practitioner of
his father’s art, plays the quinto of the group and has begun to follow as
well in his path as the composer of heartfelt rumbas.

As a musician of Los Muñequitos Jesús traveled to almost all the continents.
Wherever he went he left friends and disciples. He shone on every stage he
played on, but he never forgot his roots and lived a full life, proud of his
lineage as a rumbero, enjoying the flavor of every corner of his barrio, la
Marina. Beginning at the age of seven, he participated as a musician and
dancer in the Comparsa La Imaliana, founded by his father and by Félix
Vinagera. For a time he was a member of the Orquesta de Música Moderna of
his city and of the Papa Goza group. From 1967 he was musical director and
quinto of Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, a group which he profoundly loved and
to which he dedicated the greatest part of his life.

As a composer he was indispensable to the repertoire of the group, with his
works known worldwide. He was the author of “Congo Yambumba,” “La Llave,”
“Chino Guaguao,” “Lengua de Obbara,” “Saludo a Nueva York,” and many others
that are now classics of Cuban rumba. Prestigious interpreters including
Eddie Palmieri took note of his sabrosura and the popularity of his works,
including them on their records and mentioning him as indispensable to the
music of our continent.

When Jesús Alfonso was still very young, together with another of the great
figures of Los Muñequitos, Ricardo Cané, he went to the mountains of Cuba to
teach literacy to the people of the countryside, graduating later as a young
revolutionary teacher. For his great contributions to music and to his
community, he received the title of Hijo Ilustre (Illustrious Son) of
Matanzas.

Jesús Alfonso, member of the Matanzas society Efí Irondó Itá Ibekó and
respectful observer of the regla de Osha, will be remembered by all his
community and especially by rumberos around the world. His name will never
be forgotten. His strong voice and the sound of his hands on the skins will
remain in the memory of those who knew him and recognize him as one of the
most celebrated musicians of all time, because Jesús was to the rumba as was
Cuní or Chapottín to the son. Jesús gave his entire life to the rumba. His
name is next to Chano, Tata, Papín, and all the greats of Cuban music.

Viewing will be in the place where Los Muñequitos de Matanzas rehearse every
day, at 7906 Matanzas Street, between Contrera and Milanés. After respects
are paid, he will be buried in the early hours tomorrow.

To his wife Dulce María Galup, to his children and other family members, to
Diosdado Ramos and all his compañeros in the rumba who have so much admired
him and are today feeling his loss, we send our heartfelt condolences.


CARY DIEZ

As per Ned's List (Sublette)

New Orleans Guitarist Snooks Eaglin (1936-2009)

OFFBEAT

I have been waiting for a good obit for Snooks. As always, Offbeat comes through:

Snooks Eaglin 1936-2009

By Jeff Hannusch

The generation that made the defining records in New Orleans’ rhythm and blues became a little smaller when Snooks Eaglin died February 18 from cardiac arrest. He was 73. Eaglin is remembered for his ability to mimic almost any song after a cursory listen and his unique guitar style. His fretting hand often completed chords with his thumb, or he used it to play bass runs that complimented his rhythm and lead playing. Instead of picks, he flailed at the guitar strings with his thumb and fingers. It often appeared that his fingers were bent backwards at a 90 degree angle.

“He can play a job with just a drummer and make it sound like a four-piece group,” said the late Earl King in 1987. “I’ve seen Snooks play for years, but I still shake my head every time he picks up the guitar.”

Fird Eaglin, Jr. was born January 21, 1936. He was rendered blind at the age of 19 months, after an emergency operation to remove a brain tumor. Being blind though didn’t keep Eaglin out of mischief as a child.

“That’s how I got the name Snooks,” said Eaglin, in 1987. “There was a radio program with a character named Baby Snooks. Baby Snooks was always getting into trouble. They started calling me Snooks, because I was always getting into something.”

Eaglin was five when his father brought home an inexpensive Harmony guitar. He learned to play and at age 11 won a talent contest at WNOE for his rendition of the, “Twelfth Street Rag.” At 15, he purchased his first electric guitar, a Twintone, and a small amplifier. He briefly attended the Louisiana School for the Blind in Scotlandville, but withdrew to play music professionally.

In the early 1950s, Eaglin hung out at Victor Augustine’s curio shop on Dryades Street, where many musicians rehearsed. Augustine, a part time songwriter with his own label, got Eaglin to record one of his songs, “Jesus Will Fix It.” Around this time, Eaglin was approached by Sugar Boy Crawford who was looking for a guitarist to replace Irving Bannister—who was drafted—in the Shaw-weez. This led to the historic 1953 Checker session where Eaglin provided the slashing rhythm guitar on the Carnival classic, “Jock-a-Mo.”

When Bannister returned and reclaimed his job, Eaglin joined the Flamingos, a group that patterned themselves after the popular Hawkettes. The band featured Allen Toussaint on piano.

“Snooks was phenomenal even then,” said Toussaint in 1987. “People in the audience would call out a popular song and Snooks would play them note-for-note. The rest of us just stumbled on behind.”

In 1958, folklorist Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen recorded 57 Eaglin performances that appeared on several labels. Allen and Oster had heard about Eaglin from his neighbors and recorded him playing traditional blues, pop songs, folk and rock ’n’ roll. The liner notes on the original albums portrayed Eaglin as a troubadour who busked for spare change in the French Quarter. That didn’t sit well with Eaglin.

“I never played in the streets once in my life,” said Eaglin. “I was making plenty money playing in nightclubs.”

Eaglin tried to persuade Oster to record the Flamingos, but he wasn’t interested, and the group disbanded when Shirley and Lee raided it for a tour. In 1960, Imperial’s Dave Bartholomew signed Eaglin and produced several uninspired singles under the name “Ford” Eaglin. “I thought those records could have come out better,” said Eaglin. “Dave had his way, and I had mine. But by him being the producer, he won most of the arguments.”

After Imperial folded, he cut one other single on the Fun label before moving to Donaldsonville, Louisiana in the mid-1960s to play clubs along Bayou Lafourche. In 1970, he moved to St. Rose and began playing regularly at the Playboy Club in the French Quarter. It was there that he encountered a young Quint Davis, who was in the early stages of organizing the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Davis paired Eaglin with the newly rediscovered Professor Longhair, a coupling which benefited both musicians and produced some mind-boggling recordings.

The following year, Eaglin made an LP for Sam Charters’ “Legacy of the Blues” series that appeared in Europe, and he recorded two legendary albums with the Wild Magnolias in 1974. But after that, it was more than a decade before he returned to the studio.

“The money wasn’t right,” said Eaglin, “I had several offers, but I want my money up front. I don’t like royalties.”

Eventually, Eaglin struck up a relationship with Hammond Scott, who won Eaglin’s trust. In 1986, they recorded Baby, You Can Get Your Gun for Scott’s Black Top label. Several more Eaglin/Black Top albums appeared, which exposed Eaglin to a wider audience. Tours of Europe and virtually every important American blues festival would follow.

In recent years, Eaglin’s appearances were confined to the Jazz Fest and the Mid-City Lanes’ Rock ’n’ Bowl, where he regularly packed the house. A well-attended visitation for Eaglin was held at the Howlin’ Wolf on February 27 which included musical tributes by Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint and Deacon John. A traditional jazz funeral followed. Eaglin was laid to rest in Providence Park Cemetery in Jefferson Parish. His passing is the end of a chapter in New Orleans’ music history.

Published May 2009, OffBeat Louisiana Music & Culture Magazine, Volume 22, No. 5.

Former NBA star/bassist Wayman Tisdale dies at age 44

SI

Former NBA veteran Tisdale dies at age 44



Wherever Wayman Tisdale went, whatever he was doing, chances were he was smiling.

Tisdale was a three-time All-American at Oklahoma in the mid-1980s before playing a dozen years in the NBA and later becoming an accomplished jazz musician.

But those who knew Tisdale, who died Friday at a hospital in his hometown of Tulsa, Okla., recalled not only his professional gifts but a perpetually sunny outlook, even in the face of a two-year battle with cancer that took his life at 44.

"I don't know of any athlete at Oklahoma or any place else who was more loved by the fans who knew him than Wayman Tisdale," said Billy Tubbs, who coached Tisdale with the Sooners. "He was obviously, a great, great player, but Wayman as a person overshadowed that. He just lit up a room and was so positive."

Jeff Capel, the current Oklahoma coach, noted Tisdale's "incredible gift of making the people who came in contact with him feel incredibly special."

After three years at Oklahoma, Tisdale played in the NBA with the Indiana Pacers, Sacramento Kings and Phoenix Suns. The 6-foot-9 forward, with a soft left-handed touch on the court, averaged 15.3 points for his career. He was on the U.S. team that won the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics.

Gov. Brad Henry attended Oklahoma at the same time Tisdale did and later appointed him to the state's Tourism Commission.

"Oklahoma has lost one of its most beloved sons," Henry said. "Wayman Tisdale was a hero both on and off the basketball court. ... Even in the most challenging of times, he had a smile for people, and he had the rare ability to make everyone around him smile. He was one of the most inspirational people I have ever known."

State senators paused and prayed Friday morning after learning of his death.

Tisdale learned he had cancerous cyst below his right knee after breaking his leg in a fall at his home in Los Angeles on Feb. 8, 2007. He said then he was fortunate to have discovered the cancer early.

"Nothing can change me," Tisdale told The Associated Press last June. "You go through things. You don't change because things come in your life. You get better because things come in your life."

His leg was amputated last August and a prosthetic leg that he wore was crimson, one of Oklahoma's colors. He attended an Oklahoma City Thunder game April 7 and later that month was honored at the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa. During the ceremony, he spoke about his cancer, saying "In my mind, I've beaten it."

He recently told Tulsa television station KTUL he had acute esophagitis, which prevented him from eating for about five weeks and led to significant weight loss. Among the causes of that condition are infections, medications, radiation therapy and systemic disease.

Last month, Tisdale was chosen for induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame.

He was the first freshman to be a first-team All-American since freshmen were allowed to play again in the 1971-72 season. He was also one of 10 three-time All-Americans. Patrick Ewing and Tisdale were the last to accomplish the feat, from 1983-85.

"On the court, he was an offensive machine that could score with the best of them," said Dallas Mavericks president Donnie Nelson, an assistant on Tisdale's Suns teams. "Off the court, he was grounded in faith and family."

Tisdale played on an Olympic team that sailed to the gold medal in Los Angeles. The squad was coached by Bob Knight and featured the likes of Ewing, Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins and Chris Mullin.

"Wayman was kind of a catalyst for people accepting roles," said C.M. Newton, the manager of the '84 team and now chairman of the NIT selection committee. "Michael was the leader of the team but Wayman was special in that way."

Perkins and Tisdale shared a love of music and became friends during the Olympics. Perkins later was the best man at Tisdale's wedding.

"That's a real friend who's got your back and would do just about anything for you," Perkins said. "That smile just gets you."

As a musician, Tisdale recorded eight albums. A bass guitarist who often wrote his own material, his most recent album, "Rebound," was inspired by his fight with cancer and included guest appearances by several artists, including saxophonist Dave Koz and country star and fellow Oklahoma native Toby Keith.

His "Way Up!" release debuted in July 2006 and spent four weeks as the No. 1 contemporary jazz album. His hits included "Ain't No Stopping Us Now," "Can't Hide Love" and "Don't Take Your Love Away."

"He was truly an inspiration to me, paving the way for an athlete like myself to pursue a passion for writing and performing music," said Bernie Williams, the former New York Yankees star turned jazz musician. "I had the honor and privilege of having Wayman perform on the title track of my new album, and was looking forward to collaborating with him again."

Tisdale averaged 25.6 points and 10.1 rebounds during his three seasons with the Sooners, earning Big Eight Conference player of the year each season.

He still holds Oklahoma's career records for points and rebounds. Tisdale also owns the school's single-game scoring mark -- 61 points against Texas-San Antonio as a sophomore -- and career marks for points per game, field goals and free throws made and attempts.

In 1997, Tisdale became the first Oklahoma player in any sport to have his jersey number retired. Two years ago, then-freshman Blake Griffin asked Tisdale for permission to wear No. 23, which Tisdale granted. Griffin went on to become the consensus national player of the year this past season as a sophomore.

"I spoke with him pretty frequently this past season and he helped me in ways he probably doesn't even know," Griffin said.

Tisdale is survived by his wife, Regina, and four children.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Travis Edmonson, Influential Folk Singer, Dies at 76

NYT





May 14, 2009
Travis Edmonson, Influential Folk Singer, Dies at 76
By BRUCE WEBER

Travis Edmonson, who brought a Mexican flavor to the fertile San Francisco folk music scene of the 1950s and who, with the duo Bud and Travis, influenced Bay Area groups that lasted longer and became better known, died Saturday in Mesa, Ariz. He was 76.

The cause was heart failure, said Mike Bartlett, a friend and family spokesman. Mr. Edmonson had an aneurysm and a stroke in 1982 that curtailed his performing career and had been in declining health recently, Mr. Bartlett said.

A witty and mischievous man with an irrepressibly arch style of stage patter, Mr. Edmonson was a gifted natural singer, with a bell-clear, versatile tenor capable of romantic crooning, cowboy yodeling and folksy, up-tempo harmonizing. Along with comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl, and musicians like the Kingston Trio, Lou Gottlieb of the Limeliters and the Smothers Brothers, Mr. Edmonson was among those who made San Francisco generally and two nightclubs particularly (the hungry i and the Purple Onion) a rebellious center of Eisenhower-era hip culture.

With Mr. Gottlieb, he was a member of the Gateway Singers, a seminal quartet. In 1958, Mr. Edmonson and another guitarist and singer, Bud Dashiell, formed the duo Bud and Travis. Over the next seven years they recorded eight albums and played innumerable concerts and club dates, and their musical virtuosity and seemingly effortless comedic teamwork — not to mention their telegenic looks — earned them appearances on television variety shows and even comedy series like “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.”

In a tight-knit music scene, Bud and Travis shared stages, a gift for potent harmonizing and even individual songs with the Limeliters, the Kingston Trio and the Smothers Brothers; according to Mr. Bartlett, Mr. Edmonson claimed to have lived in the same house with Tom and Dick Smothers in San Francisco at one point, and to have been their landlord.

In performance, what distinguished Bud and Travis more than anything was Mr. Edmonson’s passion for mariachi and the other Mexican musical traditions that he had absorbed as a boy in Arizona. Many Latin numbers — “La Bamba,” for example — were part of the Bud and Travis repertory, and Mr. Edmonson’s own signature song, one that he considered his favorite piece of music, was “Malagueña Salerosa,” a folk lamentation with a tinge of both heartbreak and religious supplication.

“I idolized him,” Bob Shane of the original Kingston Trio said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “He had command of the stage better than anyone I’d ever seen. He had a wonderful feel for whatever music he was singing. And then, of course, he was this straight-looking white guy who sang these beautiful Mexican songs.”

Travis Jerome Edmonson was born on Sept. 23, 1932, in Long Beach, Calif., but he spent much of his childhood in the Arizona border town of Nogales, where his mother, Lillian, was a teacher, and his father, Everett, a social worker who also ran a grocery. Everyone in the family — Travis had three older brothers — played guitar, and he spent a good part of his young life in Mexican villages, chasing after the sources of the musical sounds that drifted across the border.

His parents sent him to high school in Tucson, and he later attended the University of Arizona there, studying anthropology (and also classical guitar, his first formal musical training). He never graduated, but he and a friend, Roger Smith — who would later star in the television series “77 Sunset Strip” and marry Ann-Margret — became locally famous for serenading college girls on behalf of themselves and classmates who would hire them for the purpose.

Mr. Edmonson served in the Army in the early 1950s and afterward began his career as a solo act in San Francisco before Mr. Gottlieb invited him to join the Gateway Singers. Playing a gig with them in Los Angeles, he ran into Mr. Dashiell, an Army buddy of his older brother Colin, and their partnership was born. It lasted for seven years, after which Mr. Edmonson continued to perform solo until his stroke in 1982. Mr. Dashiell died in 1989.

Married and divorced five times, he is survived by his companion, Rose Marie Heidrick; a son, Steven, who lives near San Francisco; five daughters: Tammy Edmonson of San Francisco, Elizabeth Edmonson of Las Vegas and Ellen Murphy, Erin Kissel and Linda Schneider, all of Tucson; and several grandchildren.

“We didn’t think of ourselves as folk singers; we were entertainers,” Mr. Shane said of the circle of San Francisco performers that he and Mr. Edmonson belonged to. “And all of those early people you could say were influenced by Bud and Travis. Of course you could also say Bud and Travis were influenced by them.”

NYC Percussionist Manny Oquendo dies

World Music Central

Master Timbalero and Bandleader Manny Oquendo Dies in New York

Saturday, March 28 2009 @ 02:22 PM EDT

Renowned salsa musician Manny Oquendo died March 25, 2009 at a New York hospital. Oquendo was a veteran of the days when Latin bands crowded into a studio to polish off a recording in an all-night session. "The first recording (singer) Tito Rodriguez did, we took the 7th Avenue train to record for SMC label," Oquendo recalled. "Tito Puente did the arrangements. You recorded on monaural, with just a few mikes. You couldn't stop and overdub. You just played."

Oquendo's musical education consisted of the old-school, "just play" approach, and he was in the right place to learn. He grew up on Kelly Street in the Bronx, New York, not far from the great Cuban tres player, Arsenio Rodriguez. Colin Powell, who'd later become a general, lived on the block too, so did pianist Noro Morales. And a lot of kids who'd later make their names in Latin music, such as Joe Cuba, the Palmieri brothers, Little Ray Romero, grew up playing stickball on Kelly Street.

Oquendo became an expert on Cuban rhythms and began playing bongo and timbales with a succession of New York's top bands , with José Curbelo and Vicentico Valdes before moving into the orchestras of Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez.

In 1963, he joined La Perfecta, the conjunto organized by pianist Eddie Palmieri. "La Perfecta was struggling at that time, trying to compete with all the other bands at the Palladium," says Oquendo. "I'm talking about big bands with 15 people in them. Eddie's was a small conjunto group. But what made us different was the music and the playing " we were looser, more free."

In 1974, Oquendo and Jerry Gonzalez left La Perfecta to move in their own direction. In the years since, Manny Oquendo and Libre became preservationists of the tipico sound, nurturing some of the most dedicated sidemen in the business.

Groundbreaking Female Flutist Frances Blaisdell dies at 97

NYT


March 31, 2009
Frances Blaisdell, ‘Girl Flutist’ Who Opened Doors, Dies at 97
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Frances Blaisdell, a flutist who played her way into what was then the male world of orchestral music, becoming one of the early women to play a woodwind instrument with the New York Philharmonic, died on March 11 in Portola Valley, Calif. She was 97.

Her son, John, announced her death.

In addition to playing with the Philharmonic, Ms. Blaisdell performed with prominent chamber ensembles, on Broadway, at Radio City Music Hall, in vaudeville, and with Phil Spitalny and His All-Girl Orchestra on the “Hour of Charm” on CBS and NBC radio. She also taught generations of leading flutists.

“I had lots of opportunities because I was sort of a freak, and people couldn’t imagine a girl flutist,” she said in an interview printed in The Flutist Quarterly in 2005.

Chamber Music magazine suggested in 1992 that she was considerably more than that, saying, “Every woman flute player in every major American orchestra, every little girl who pays the flute in a school band, has Frances Blaisdell to thank. She was first.”

Ms. Blaisdell had to overcome the mixed feelings of her father to become a professional; proud of her talent, he feared that as a woman, she would not survive as a player. He was in the lumber business, but his own love was the flute, and he started teaching her to play when she was 5. He wished she were a boy and called her Jim, she said in The Flutist Quarterly interview, which first appeared in the New York Flute Club newsletter. Ms. Blaisdell wrote to Ernest Wagner, a flutist with the New York Philharmonic, to ask if he would teach “Jim.”

When she appeared for her lesson, she said, Mr. Wagner refused to teach her, saying there was no future for a woman trying to play the flute in orchestras. But he finally agreed to six lessons, and then more.

Ms. Blaisdell’s father wanted her to pursue a career, but saw no future for her in music. He gave her the choice of being a teacher, nurse or secretary. She persuaded him that since she was graduating at 16, two years early, she should spend the two years pursuing her dream.

“Two years, but not another day,” he said.

So in 1928 she wrote Georges Barrère, the great French flutist, who taught at what is now Juilliard. She was given an appointment, perhaps because her name had been taken down as “Francis.” She was admitted with a scholarship.

Ms. Blaisdell later studied with two other giants of the flute, Marcel Moyse and William Kincaid. In 1941, after Barrère had a stroke, she took his place in the Barrère Trio.

In 1930, she became first flute of the National Orchestral Association and soon joined Barrère to play Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 under the baton of Walter Damrosch at Madison Square Garden. She was first flute in the New Opera Company and in the New Friends of Music.

On Nov. 26, 1932, she was the soloist with the Philharmonic at a children’s concert, playing Mozart’s Flute Concerto No. 2 in D major. Josh Marcum, a spokesman for the Philharmonic, confirmed the appearance.

But in 1937, she was refused an audition for an opening as assistant first flute of the Philharmonic because she was a woman. In 1962, she said, she became one of the first women to play a woodwind with the Philharmonic, when a piece demanded extra flutes. Mr. Marcum said this was possible, but not provable.

In 1937, Ms. Blaisdell married Alexander Williams, first clarinetist for the Philharmonic. They and three other Philharmonic players formed the Blaisdell Woodwind Quintet, which had a radio series. Mr. Williams died in 2003.

In addition to her son, Frances Louise Blaisdell is survived by her daughter, Alexandra Hawley; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Ms. Blaisdell played several concerts with the soprano Lily Pons, providing the requisite flute trills that accompany many showpieces for a coloratura soprano, and taught at the Manhattan School of Music, among other places. In 1973, she moved to California, where she taught at Stanford for 35 years.

Ms. Blaisdell adapted to the show business side of classical music. She said she wore a beautiful gold lamé dress at Radio City Music Hall for five shows a day in 1934 or 1935. She had two Rockettes on each side of her. Still, she was deathly frightened the first time she gazed into the immense black space, which looked, she said, like the “caverns of hell.”

A Rockette nudged her and said, “Get going, kid, and smile.”

Ms. Blaisdell did. After a couple of shows, it was easy."

Film Composer Maurice Jarre (1924-2009)

NYT

March 31, 2009
Maurice Jarre, Hollywood Composer, Dies at 84
By BRUCE WEBER

Maurice Jarre, a composer who mastered the musical idiom of the Hollywood epic and was nominated nine times for Academy Awards, winning three, died Saturday in Malibu. He was 84.

He died after a short illness, said his agent, Laura Engel, speaking on behalf of Mr. Jarre’s wife, Fong.

Mr. Jarre (pronounced Zhar) won all three of his Academy Awards for films directed by David Lean, whose exotic locales served as fodder for Mr. Jarre’s lush musical imagination. Whether evoking the deserts of Arabia for “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), the Russian steppes for “Dr. Zhivago” (1965) or the Indian subcontinent in “A Passage to India” (1984), Mr. Jarre’s vivid scoring for percussion — he was a percussionist himself — his use of wide intervals to suggest vast landscapes and his appropriation of musical modes indigenous to the films’ settings, made the music a crucial element of the romance and spectacle of the stories.

He may be best known for the melancholy melody that was the prime leitmotif from the score of “Dr. Zhivago,” Mr. Lean’s heart-tugging love story set in Russia during World War I and the Russian Revolution, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. Associated with Ms. Christie’s character, the theme, a lilting tune with a seeming sigh of longing attached to each phrase, was repeated again and again during the film with different instrumentation, most notably the balalaika. It came to be known as “Lara’s Theme” and became a standard of easy listening, a staple of elevators and dentist’s offices; when words were added by Paul Francis Webster, the song became known as “Somewhere, My Love” and was recorded by Connie Francis, Ray Conniff and many others.

For decades, Mr. Jarre was among the most sought-after composers in the movie industry. He was a creator of both subtle underscoring and grand, sweeping themes, not only writing for conventional orchestras (sometimes augmented by the more exotic instrumentation of other cultures) but also experimenting with electronic sounds later in his career. He was prolific; he contributed music to more than 150 movies of a wide variety: dramatic and comic, ponderous and light-hearted, artsy and baldly mercenary, high-minded and trashy.

The films included the World War II epic “The Longest Day” (1962) and the Neil Simon sex comedy “Plaza Suite” (1971); the exploitative tale of interracial lust on an antebellum Southern plantation, “Mandingo” (1975) and Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Günter Grass’s Holocaust novel, “The Tin Drum” (1979); a modern thriller of sexual obsession, “Fatal Attraction” (1987), a biography of Dian Fossey, who lived in Africa among the apes, “Gorillas in the Mist” (1988) and the gentle drama of schoolboys and their idealistic teacher, directed by Peter Weir, “Dead Poets Society” (1989).

Mr. Jarre composed music for five movies directed by Mr. Weir, including the electronic scores for “The Year of Living Dangerously” (1982) and “Witness” (1985). When he collaborated with the director Jerry Zucker on the fantasy drama “Ghost,” (1990), he was nominated for the ninth time for an Oscar.

Maurice Alexis Jarre was born Sept. 13, 1924, in Lyon, France. He came to music relatively late, dropping out of the Sorbonne, where he was studying engineering, and enrolling in the Paris Conservatory, where his teachers included the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, the timpanist Félix Passerone and Joseph Martenot, the inventor of an electronic keyboard, a predecessor of the synthesizer.

His early compositions were not for film but for the theater; during the 1950’s he was associated with France’s Théâtre National Populaire. He composed his first film scores for the French director Georges Franju. He made his breakthrough in Hollywood when the producer Sam Spiegel heard his score for the film “Sundays and Cybele,” which eventually won an Oscar for best foreign language film, and he hired him to work on “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Mr. Jarre married four times; he is survived by his wife, Fong, whom he married in 1984. Other survivors include two sons, Jean-Michel, a composer, and Kevin, a screenwriter; and a daughter, Stéfanie. Though Mr. Jarre had lived in the United States for decades, the president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a statement after his death, calling Mr. Jarre “a great composer” who, by working in film, “broadened the public for symphonic music.”

“He showed everyone that music is just as important as images for the beauty and success of a film,” Mr. Sarkozy said.

Mr. Jarre worked with many legendary directors, including Alfred Hitchcock (“Topaz”), John Huston (“The Man Who Would Be King”) and Luchino Visconti (“The Damned”). It is an oddity, perhaps, that his most successful partner in Hollywood was one he met so early on, Mr. Lean, with whom he made four films; the only one for which he did not win an Oscar was “Ryan’s Daughter,” (1970), an unhappy love story set in Ireland during World War I about an adulterous affair that is the sexual and romantic awakening of a young woman. (Vincent Canby, the New York Times film critic, called the score “dreadfully ever-present.”) Otherwise, in Mr. Jarre, Mr. Lean found the perfect composer to enhance his sweeping storytelling.

Mr. Jarre often said that Mr. Lean had very specific ideas about the role that music should play in his films and that he understood what Mr. Lean wanted.

“Four films, three Oscars,” Mr. Jarre concluded in an interview with Variety in 1989. “That’s not so bad.”

Motown Drummer Uriel Jones dies at 74

Funk Brothers Jones and James Jamerson.

NYT

March 26, 2009
Uriel Jones, a Motown Drummer, Dies at 74
By BEN SISARIO

Uriel Jones, a drummer with the Funk Brothers, the studio musicians at Motown Records who played without credit on virtually every hit during that label’s heyday in the 1960s, died on Tuesday in Dearborn, Mich. He was 74.

The cause was complications of a recent heart attack, his sister-in-law Leslie Coleman said.

Drawn from the ranks of Detroit jazz players by Berry Gordy Jr., the founder of Motown, the Funk Brothers were the label’s regular studio backup band from 1959 to 1972, when Motown moved to Los Angeles and left most of them behind.

The players appeared on songs by Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Temptations, Martha and the Vandellas and many others, and “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a 2002 documentary, opens with the claim that they “played on more No. 1 records than the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and the Beatles combined.” Yet the group remained largely unknown until that film’s release.

The band’s main drummer was the formidable Benny Benjamin, but as he became sidelined by drug addiction, Mr. Jones and another player, Richard Allen, known as Pistol, gradually took over drumming duties. Mr. Benjamin died of a stroke in 1969, and Mr. Allen died in 2002, shortly before the release of the film.

Mr. Jones joined the Funk Brothers around 1963 after touring with Marvin Gaye, and plays on Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” the Miracles’ “Tracks of My Tears,” Jimmy Ruffin’s “What Becomes of the Brokenhearted,” and Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” among many other songs.

Born in Detroit, Mr. Jones began playing music in high school. But his first instrument was the trombone, said his wife, June. She survives him, along with three children, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

“He wanted to box also,” Ms. Jones said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. “When he went to band classes his lip was swollen and he couldn’t play the trombone, so he had to switch to the drums.”

Mr. Jones remained in Detroit after Motown left, and continued to play in local clubs with other Funk Brothers alumni, including Earl Van Dyke, the keyboardist, who died in 1992. After “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” Mr. Jones toured widely with other surviving Funk Brothers.

In interviews later, he said he regretted being underpaid, but held no grudges against Motown.

“We know now that we didn’t get the money that we was supposed to,” he told The Call and Post, a Cleveland newspaper, in 2002, “but the way I look at it is, ‘What would my life had been like without Motown?’ I’d rather it had been with Motown.”

Cuban Bassist Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez (1933-2009)

AP

Buena Vista Social Club bassist Lopez dead at 76
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ, Associated Press Writer Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press Writer 2 hrs 1 min ago

HAVANA – Orlando "Cachaito" Lopez, considered the "heartbeat" of Cuba's legendary Buena Vista Social Club for his internationally acclaimed bass playing, died Monday of complications from prostate surgery, fellow musicians said. He was 76.

Lopez, a founding member of the band brought together in the 1990s by American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder, died in a Havana hospital several days after surgery, said Manuel Galban, a Cuban musician who played with Lopez for decades.

"We have lost a great companion," said Galban.

Born in Havana in 1933, Lopez became an international sensation as part of the Buena Vista Social Club — a group of elderly, sometimes retired, musicians who were living quietly in Cuba before Cooder brought them together and they became worldwide sensations.

"I will remember him as marvelous, both in his music and as a person," Galban, a guitarist, said by telephone. "He was extraordinary, affable, a great bassist."

Lopez died less than a week after turned 76.

"I called him last week because it was his birthday and his voice didn't sound too good," said musician Amadito Valdes, who added that Lopez had undergone prostate surgery several days ago. "He was a person who was always sharing with everyone around him, very noble."

Lopez was held by many to be Buena Vista's heartbeat and had played to international audiences as part of its touring company.

The group, which plays a mix of traditional Cuban rhythms, has lost many of its key members of late. Singer Compay Segundo — who was born Maximo Francisco Repilado Munoz — pianist Ruben Gonzalez, and vocalists Ibrahim Ferrer and Pio Leyva have all died in recent years.

But Lopez was also a star in his own right, independent of Buena Vista. His groundbreaking debut album Cachaito won a BBC Radio 3 Award for Word Music in 2002.

Lopez hailed from a family of at least 30 bass players, including his uncle, legendary bassist Israel "Cachao" Lopez. His nickname translates to "Little Cachao." His father Orestes played piano and cello in addition to the bass and was also a composer.

Lopez originally played the violin, but as he said publicly many times, eventually switched to the bass after his grandfather urged him to take up the family craft.

He was a pioneer of Cuban mambo, and by 17 was part of a noted big band group known as Riverside. He later joined Cuba's national symphony. He also played with a band called "Los Zafiros."

Lopez was at home playing classic as well as popular music but also dabbled in late night jazz and jazz fusion.

However, he only gained international notoriety when Cooder brought him together with such standouts as Compay Segundo, Ibrahim Ferrer, Ruben Gonzalez and Omara Portuondo to form Buena Vista.

Later, Wim Wenders released a documentary titled Buena Vista Social Club, in which he profiled the musicians whose talents had all but been forgotten.

Family members planned to cremate the body but there was no immediate word on funeral services.

Freddie Hubbard (1938-2008)

Jazz great Freddie Hubbard dead at 70
By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer John Rogers, Associated Press Writer Mon Dec 29, 5:49 pm ET

LOS ANGELES – Freddie Hubbard, the Grammy-winning jazz musician whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players and who collaborated with such greats as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, died Monday, a month after suffering a heart attack. He was 70.

Hubbard died at Sherman Oaks Hospital, said his manager, fellow trumpeter David Weiss of the New Jazz Composers Octet. He had been hospitalized since suffering the heart attack a day before Thanksgiving.

A towering figure in jazz circles, Hubbard played on hundreds of recordings in a career dating to 1958, the year he arrived in New York from his hometown Indianapolis, where he had studied at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music and with the Indianapolis Symphony.

Soon he had hooked up with such jazz legends as Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley and Coltrane.

"I met Trane at a jam session at Count Basie's in Harlem in 1958," he told the jazz magazine Down Beat in 1995. "He said, `Why don't you come over and let's try and practice a little bit together.' I almost went crazy. I mean, here is a 20-year-old kid practicing with John Coltrane. He helped me out a lot, and we worked several jobs together."

In his earliest recordings, which included "Open Sesame" and "Goin' Up" for Blue Note in 1960, the influence of Davis and others on Hubbard is obvious, Weiss said. But within a couple years he would develop a style all his own, one that would influence generations of musicians, including Wynton Marsalis.

"He influenced all the trumpet players that came after him," Marsalis told The Associated Press earlier this year. "Certainly I listened to him a lot. ... We all listened to him. He has a big sound and a great sense of rhythm and time and really the hallmark of his playing is an exuberance. His playing is exuberant."

Hubbard played on more than 300 recordings, including his own albums and those of scores of other artists. He won his Grammy in 1972 for best jazz performance by a group for the album "First Light."

As a young musician, Hubbard became revered among his peers for a fiery, blazing style that allowed him to hit notes higher and faster than just about anyone else with a horn. As age and infirmity began to slow that style, he switched to a softer, melodic style and played a flugelhorn. His fellow musicians were still impressed.

"The sound he gets on just one note. I know he does all the flashy stuff and the high stuff and it's all great but ... he'd play `Body and Soul' on the flugelhorn and it was just that much better again than everyone around him," trumpeter Chris Botti said in an interview earlier this year.

___

Associated Press Writer Charles J. Gans in New York contributed to this story.

From downbeat:

Freddie Hubbard Dies
Daily News Headlines

Posted 12/29/2008

Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who from the mid '60s to the late '80s was arguably the most powerful and prolific trumpeter in jazz, died Monday morning in Sherman Oaks Hospital in Sherman Oaks, Calif., of complications from a heart attack he had in late November. He was 70.

Blessed with a sound that combined Clifford Brown's technique, Lee Morgan's bravura and Miles Davis' sensitivity, Hubbard was prominent for much of his career both a leader and a sideman. Born in Indianapolis on April 7, 1938, Hubbard's earliest professional gigs were with guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers before he moved to New York in 1958, working with Eric Dolphy, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones and many others. He recorded with John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and on Oliver Nelson's Blues And The Abstract Truth album.

In 1961, he joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers for three years and recorded as a leader for Blue Note. His albums for the label include Breaking Point, Goin' Up and Hub-Tones, and he appeared as a sideman on a number of important Blue Note dates, including Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage and Empyrean Isles. After stints with Atlantic and Impulse! records, Hubbard worked with producer Creed Taylor in 1970 and recorded a number of accessible and noteworthy jazz-fusion classics including Red Clay, Straight Life, Sky Dive and First Light. In the mid '70s, Hubbard signed with Columbia and recorded and toured with VSOP: a Miles Davis reunion combo featuring Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams.

Hubbard also collaborated with vocalists Chaka Khan and Elton John and recorded Double Take with trumpeter Woody Shaw. His recorded on the Atlantic, Pablo ad EMI throughout the '80s. After a series of lip problems had sidelined him for almost a decade, Hubbard re-emerged in the past few years with David Weiss’s New Jazz Composers Octet. He released On The Real Side (Times Square) last year to celebrate his 70th birthday.