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Elvin is dead


Guest ariceffron

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Guest youmustbe

Jazz moved so fast back in 50's, 60's...6 months would go by and it was somehere else.

Elvin was the MAN, replacing Max and Art...but Tony came around, and by 64, Elvin was passe.

Just the way it was back when Jazz was a happening music, connected to popular culture, and contemporary artistic thought. When it mattered!

Now it is something different. Everything ages, but not aways like a fine wine.

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Guest youmustbe

You're not too far off! It WAS fiercly competitive. Because Jazz was part of a culture, racially, and aesthetically.

Today, Jazz is a classical music, and that's fine. But then....

BTW Tony's first gig in New York, was in the Connection. Jackie brought him alomg, the drummer didn't show and Tony played.

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I just got a job teaching music in a town near Nagasaki, Japan where Elvin met Keiko and where they had (or have) a home. I will try to visit Elvin's Nagasaki home while I am there. RIP Elvin.

Edited by jamn
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Nice tribute by Mike Zwerin in today's International Herald Tribune.

JAZZ: REMEMBERING ELVIN JONES

PARIS Elvin Jones, who died of heart failure on May 18 at 76, revolutionized modern drumming with a style that was described as "surging," "multidirectional," "volcanic" and, by the critic Leonard Feather, as a "continuum in which no beat of the bar was necessarily indicated by any specific accent."

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He will be missed. Jones accompanied Allen Ginsberg reading William Blake; he played a gunslinger in "Zachariah," a hippie western starring Don Johnson; his portrait was painted by Larry Rivers ("The Drummer"), and he read e.e. cummings and listened to Jacques Brel. "You should not judge other people's music by your values," he said. "You have to take it on its own terms." The singer-songwriter and ex-Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt compared Jones's passing to "a giant Redwood tree falling in the forest. It will take a thousand years to grow another."

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After growing up in Detroit with his brothers - the trumpeter Thad and the pianist Hank - he worked for a while in a steel mill in Pontiac, Michigan, "pouring molten iron out of a Bessemer converter," he said. "It could be dangerous work, partly because it's so repetitive. The biggest risk is losing your concentration, kind of like drumming."

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One rainy Tuesday night in 1964 in the Half Note on Hudson Street in New York, the John Coltrane quartet was performing. After a set that consisted of one nonstop 50-minute version of "Afro Blue," Jones came off drenched in sweat and said: "What does he think he's doing? A 50-minute tune?!" Which was a good insight into their relationship. Jones, it must be said, had effortlessly maintained his surging and erupting continuum the entire time.

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At dawn one morning 18 years later, during a European tour with the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band, the English saxophonist Alan Skidmore walked into the breakfast room of a hotel in Zurich where Jones, Howard Johnson, John Scofield, Jimmy Knepper, Woody Shaw and some of Gruntz's other musicians were sipping coffee only half awake. Skidmore walked over and put his thick eyeglasses into Jones's face and said: "Elvin, it sure is a pleasure to wake up in the morning and see you."

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Elvin famously said hello to friends by picking them up from the floor with rib-threatening bear hugs. Air kisses were not his thing. It was sad, over the past two years, to watch him weaken. When a journalist asked him where the 1,500 students who enrolled in one of his percussion clinics in Japan were going to find work, his generous smile lit up his strong face, along with the room itself: "You don't have to win the Tour de France to enjoy riding a bicycle."

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Jones had a strong following in Japan. He and his Japanese wife, Keiko, had homes in New York and Nagasaki. His manager, roadie, dietitian and homemaker, Keiko is credited with having kept Jones's negative impulses inactive for the last 15 years or so. It was her job to set up his drum kit. She was meticulous about it - there were precise numbers of turns of the screws anchoring the cymbals, and the high hat had to be a certain distance from the bass drum, which she tuned every night. Then, you could rely on it, before sitting down to perform, Jones would readjust just about all of it. It was a kind of dance they did, and it continued as she shouted her approval while playing air drums along with him behind the stage.

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Two generations after he created it, his rolling pulse remains at the heart of the music - young drummers still play like Jones. When he would come off a snare drum roll on the second instead of the first beat, he said he was de-emphasizing the strong beat. But a drummer with a big band functions as a sort of conductor - making sure everyone knows where "one" is, for instance - and when, after leaving Coltrane in 1966, Jones was hired by Duke Ellington, for reasons never explained to him but having to do with either rhythmic (multidirectional drumming) or political (new guy on the block) ambiguity, Ellington also kept his previous drummer on the payroll. Jones called it: "One of my least pleasant musical experiences."

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In recent years, he played "Hello, Dolly" as an encore with his band, the Jazz Machine - which has included Joshua Redman, Delfeayo Marsalis and John's son, Ravi Coltrane. "I could never understand how people could have trouble comprehending my time," he said. "I never thought I was being all that complex. I just try and maintain my own perception of rhythm as support. It's all about paying attention to other people and supporting what they are doing. I'm still wrestling to control my own impulses - you know, trying to avoid hitting everything at once."

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Jones recalled "a guy named Horse who worked at the mill. Horse would drink a pint of Old Grand-Dad with the sandwich in his lunch pail. He said it kept the dust off his lungs. He could handle it. Whether it's a steel mill or a jazz band, relating to human beings involves basic truths, positive and negative. They have never changed and never will change. That's why I read poetry. It's universal. I like human beings. That's why I play music."

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Sorry to duplicate if someone else already posted this:

Memorial Service for Elvin

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the family, friends & fans of

ELVIN JONES

"A CELEBRATION OF LIFE"

A Memorial Service for Elvin

at

RIVERSIDE CHURCH

490 Riverside Drive

(120th St. & Riverside Drive)

SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 2004

11:00 AM

Presented by the Jones Family:

Hank, Bruce, Nathan, Thad II and Paul Jr.

with special thanks to the Jazz Foundation of America

For more information:

contact: Lenny Triola

516-781-2749

Please make donations to:

Jazz Foundation of America

(which assists elderly jazz musicians in crisis)

322 West 48th Street

NYC 10036

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Thanks for the notice, I'd like to go.

After growing up in Detroit with his brothers - the trumpeter Thad and the pianist Hank - he worked for a while in a steel mill in Pontiac, Michigan, "pouring molten iron out of a Bessemer converter," he said. "It could be dangerous work, partly because it's so repetitive. The biggest risk is losing your concentration, kind of like drumming."

I worked in a plastic factory in my late teens. I got a few real nasty burns and cuts came real close to loosing a finger at one point. Real dangerous work!

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is sad news. Elvin has been my favorite drummer since the early 60s - first heard him on the Trane Village Vanguard LP which a neighbor brought around. That was a turning point for me.

That loose feel, and the triplet thing, just knock me out.

I can't begin to count how many hours I've spent listening to albums with Elvin on board.

This was one of the players who was on a much higher plane than most others. One sign of his quality is the fact that, even when he was playing lightly with the brushes, you get the feeling that you are sitting on top of a volcano which is about to erupt. (Examples of that: the Johnny Hartman album "I Just Stopped By To Say Hello", and a few of those BN tracks with Larry Young and Grant Green.) That is not intended to mean that he did not play with taste when quiet accompaniment was needed.

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