sheldonm

Have a GREAT Birthday Lon!

They always do this at whatever company is set up to sell CD's. In the past, it had been the jazz record mart. Last year, inexplicably, it was best buy. ..best buy sells jazz cds??? Who knew?

great! we can retake that photo with fred, kidd, and me. this time i'll try not to inflate my neck like a blowfish. ..should I post that photo???

...yeah, I was really looking forward to that...

I know nothing about his balls but he can still play! m

..which is he....69 or 71??? In any event....still playing his ass off! m

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Here are a few shots of him from this past June....two of them fronting his own band at Vision Fest in NYC and the other with Freddie, David and the Cookers band in Indy. m

...just got a note that the afterfest sessions at the Velvet will be Fred Anderson, Kidd Jordan, Harrison Bankhead and Isaiah Spencer + special guests.

...correct, they sent me a note to confirm it's just the handful on the cover of the email. m

Hey man, I'll be at the festival all week as will Jazzshrink...and Danimal. EJP626 and Sal will most likely make appearances as well. Regarding the main stage (Petrillo Music Shell)...it really doesn't open until about an hour before the evening shows begin. Some of the front and center seats are reserved for members of the Chicago Jazz Institute members but there are plenty of good seats to be had if you're there when that area opens up. As far as getting autographs, there is not really a way to get to the main stage as you'll be run off long before you get there by security and the stage is so deep, getting the artists attention would be tough. Pretty easy to get a good view at the other stages though...as well as autographs if you want them. The new Showcase has only been open a handful of weeks but it's pretty nice. It's located in Dearborn Station and has ample parking in the area and a handful of great places to eat around there. It's very close to where HotHouse used to be. The afterfest parties at the Showcase will be hosted as in the norm...by Ira Sullivan but others performing will pop in as well. Don't forget the afterfest parties at the Velvet Lounge....sure to be a blast and crowded! I'll be in town from Tuesday through the end of the festival. PM me for my email and cell number; it would be great to hook up with you! Mark~

I had the same problem. E-mailed Concord, but no response yet. I wonder if perhaps the sale applies only to the 100 or so CDs listed directly under the sale sign. That would be fairly lame, though there are a handful of interesting discs there. I guess we'll know more tomorrow. I just experimented, and that appears to be the case (3-for-2 only applies to the specific CDs listed on the sale page). ...that sucks...but on the other hand...I saw a buch of cds for $8.98 with free shipping I'd like...plus the 10% discount. Still a decent deal!

I'm ready to hit "purchase" but it's not giving me the free ones?

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Here are a couple shots I made of him the last time I saw him.....

..a paid concert to promote free concerts.....

....right!! http://www.perfectpeople.net/photo-picture...un-e-carlos.htm

Didn't make the Harris show but did make McPherson, which was very good! Will also check out Lou Donaldson on 8/7, Jimmy Heath's Quartet on 8/16 and a few nights during the Chicago Jazz Fest with Ira Sullivan and Friends...plus much time at the Velvet Lounge!!! Line-up looks good in September as well with Golson, Dr. Lonnie Smith and Chris Potter scheduled at this time. m~

...saw Gary Wright back in the day...fun show. m

updated 9:31 a.m. ET, Tues., July. 1, 2008 SEATTLE - Jazz vocalist Ernestine Andersons home has been saved from foreclosure for now. Thanks, in part, to music legend Quincy Jones and contemporary jazz artist Diane Schuur. More than $43,000 poured in including donations from Jones and Schuur after recent news stories about the Seattle jazz legends financial woes, said Carmen Gayton, a friend of Andersons family. The money to stop the foreclosure was delivered Monday, Gayton added. She declined to say how much Jones and Schuur had donated. But Gayton said Anderson, 79, needs more money in order to be able to decrease the monthly payments on her principal loan balance of nearly $460,000. Gayton added that a financial manager is working pro-bono to look for ways to restructure Andersons loan, which has monthly payments of more than $4,400. Gayton also said Anderson will try to sell a second house next door to the home shes trying to save. Slide show The week in celebrity sightings Damon, Affleck, Alexander show their poker faces, Neil Young rocks Roskilde, Kevin Costner goes back to Durham and more. more photos Anderson, who once sang with the likes of Jones and Ray Charles, was more than $30,000 in arrears in payments and penalties last week. Gayton has said Andersons monthly income is $1,000 from Social Security, and at her age, her performances are limited. After 30 albums and four Grammy nominations, Anderson is one of Seattles most respected names in music, part of a jazz scene the flourished in the city well before grunge and alternative rock took the stage. Donations ranging from $5 to $5,000 streamed in after her story broke, Gayton said. Were incredibly grateful for all the people who went to the bank or mailed a check, she said. Anderson is one of dozens of people facing foreclosure in her Central District neighborhood. More than 200 houses face foreclosure in Andersons zip code, according to Realty Trac, a Web site that tracks foreclosures. © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

...what Allen says!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/11/arts/music/11durham.html Bobby Durham, 71, Drummer Who Played With Jazz Greats, Dies By DENNIS HEVESI Published: July 11, 2008 Bobby Durham, a drummer whose precise, understated style made him much sought after as a sideman by jazz greats like Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald, died Monday in Genoa, Italy. He was 71 and had homes near Genoa and Basel, Switzerland. The cause was lung cancer, said Sandra Fuller, a friend. Mr. Durham was probably best known for his trio work, from 1966 to 1971, with Peterson at the piano and Ray Brown playing bass. He also drew significant notice from 1973 to 1980 as an accompanist to Fitzgerald. “One of his specialties was brushes,” said Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, referring to soft-stroke wire drumsticks. “It’s important when you work with a singer that you play sensitively, that you don’t overwhelm,” Mr. Morgenstern said. But Mr. Durham, he said, “was also capable of playing really good extended solos.” Mr. Morgenstern’s assessment echoed one in 1980 by John S. Wilson, writing in The New York Times about Mr. Durham’s performance with the organist Shirley Scott and the tenor saxophonist Harold Vick. Mr. Durham “makes his presence felt without being obtrusive,” Mr. Wilson wrote. “He steps forward occasionally with brief, rollicking statements that add sparkle to the group, and he feeds crisp breaks to Mr. Vick,” Mr. Wilson added. “When he finally takes a solo, he builds a steady, controlled development that never gives way to gratuitous flashiness.” Besides playing with jazz greats like Hampton, in 1962, and Ellington, in 1966, Mr. Durham made recordings with, among others, the trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Eldridge, the pianist Tommy Flanagan, the guitarist Joe Pass and the alto saxophonist Benny Carter. One of Mr. Durham’s specialties, with brush sticks softly in play, was scat singing. Robert Joseph Durham was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 3, 1937. His father was a professional tap dancer, and Bobby was taught to tap at the age of 2. He started playing drums with his junior high school band; by 16 he was playing professionally with a group called the Orioles. His next big gig was with a Marine Corps band, from 1956 to 1959. Leading his own trio, Mr. Durham performed all over the world. “I played everywhere but Russia, Alaska and Arabia,” he said in a profile in the Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz. Mr. Durham’s wife, the former Betsy Perkins, died in 1996. He is survived by two daughters, Valarie Ahrar of Philadelphia and Robbin Carver of Woodbury, N.J.; and four grandchildren.

I came across this article on Lee Morgan while reading a story on Jesse Jackson on a website. m~ A Legendary Revival Jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan would have celebrated his 70th birthday this year. High praise is long overdue. July 10, 2008--Certain birthdays are special for almost all jazz fans. On April 7, the mental iPod almost always lands on Billie Holiday classics in honor of Lady Day's birthday. Ditto April 29 for Duke Ellington, May 26 for Miles Davis, September 23 for John Coltrane, March 9 for Ornette Coleman and October 10 for Thelonious Monk. On July 10, the sounds in my head will be singly devoted, but I may not have the entire jazz community with me. That day marks the anniversary of Lee Morgan's birth. The trumpeter led a brief and dramatic life, and since he crumpled to the ground in February 1972, shot dead by his common-law wife outside a New York nightclub in between sets, his music has faded further and further from view. He was 33. Once a leading jazz star, he's now a cult figure in a niche music genre. He would have been 70 this year, and it's high time for a revival. "Lee Morgan was the first jazz musician I heard that made people scream," said cornetist/vocalist Olu Dara, who heard Morgan in New York in the early '60s. "Morgan was the only trumpeter that scared me," said Dave Douglas, one of the current greats on the instrument. "There was drama in almost every solo. He was reaching for note after note with well, practically a desperation, and you were never really sure he was going to hit the note but he always did." Drama was Lee Morgan's stock in trade. He took up the instrument at 14 when his sister gave him a horn as a gift. Barely three years later, Morgan was leaving his native Philadelphia to go on East coast tours with bands led by established masters like Art Blakey and Dizzy Gillespie. Morgan so impressed Diz that sometimes Gillespie let his young charge take the featured solo on the master's signature tune, "A Night in Tunisia." Right after his high school graduation in 1956, Morgan signed to Blue Note Records and began working on his debut recording. Jazz is no stranger to prodigies, but in contrast to most young fast trackers, Morgan's early recordings excelled in ballads. He brought great emotional depth and tenderness to tunes that most youngsters rely on technique to get through. Morgan's virtuosity made him a first-call trumpeter at the Blue Note label and as a sideman he contributed mightily to two of the label's all-time classic recordings, Coltrane's "Blue Train" and Jimmy Smith's "The Sermon." Then in 1958, Morgan joined Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and a year later became its musical director. The 1959-'61 edition of Blakey's band ranks among the most important jazz groups of its era. They made powerful music; it didn't just swing, it swaggered; one minute it was elegant and seductive the next it was forcefully propulsive and Morgan was at the center taking searing solos that screamed both insolence and longing. Yet Morgan fell prey to drug addiction and in late 1961, he left the band abruptly to return home and clean up. In July 1963, Morgan was listening to a Philadelphia jazz radio show and heard a memorial broadcast dedicated to him. That effectively ended his convalescence and hastened his return to the jazz scene. Morgan had not written much music before his departure, but he composed incessantly during his down time. He was eager to hit the studio and began recording frequently later that year. The first release from these sessions was The Sidewinder, the title track was a cool, finger-popping summer groove tune. To the delighted surprise of nearly everyone, it became a fluke hit, climbing the pop charts in 1964. Then the song was licensed for a Dodge ad that ran often during the World Series and "The Sidewinder" already an improbable hit, did the impossible, it scaled the pop charts for a second time. Blue Note Records was in financial trouble at the time (all jazz labels had suffered declines due to the incursion of rock-and-roll), but the hit revived the imprint. Much of Morgan's other late '63/early '64 output was shelved in search of another hit. Records like "Cornbread" and "The Rumproller" followed and while neither crossed over to the pop charts, both title cuts were state of the art, edgy groove jazz (why they aren't widely sampled in hip-hop is a mystery to me). Although these records may have been conceived as gropes at commercial success, Morgan and his sidemen played with fire and urgency. At a time when jazz was being pushed to the margins commercially and avant-garde sounds were splintering the jazz community, Morgan wanted to show that he could still move the crowd. Morgan chafed at the shelving of what he regarded as important works, and finally the release in 1966 of Search for the New Land proved his point. The title track is an extended probing composition, a meditation on race relations. The ebullience that marked his earlier work is gone, replaced by ruminative solos. An indication of an emerging social conscience was evident in his ode to African liberationist "Mr. Kenyatta." "The Sidewinder" was Morgan's hit, but "Search for the New Land" is his enduring artistic triumph. Morgan was one of many jazz musicians who believed it was high time for their music to get institutional respect. He was an activist for the cause and helped lead sit-ins on TV talk shows (which were often done live) to make the point. Because of his work and that of many other activists like Max Roach, jazz is a thriving field at many leading colleges and universities. Unfortunately Morgan never shook his demons. His recording output in the late '60s became uneven after a drug dealer punched out Morgan's front teeth, making trumpet playing all but impossible. He was also a noted womanizer, and in the early '70s, he was widely rumored to be having an extramarital affair with Bobbi Humphrey, now a jazz great, but then a teenaged flute player in Morgan's band. Morgan's common-law wife, Helen, went to Slugs on the Lower East Side one night to confront him about it. She brought a gun and pulled it on him; it went off. Morgan died en route to the hospital. The case was pled down to involuntary manslaughter, and Morgan's wife received only a probationary sentence. However, with Morgan's death, so too died much of his music. Several sides of his work, mostly from that late '63/early '64 period were finally released in the late '70s, but in an era that canonizes so many jazz greats, Morgan, indisputably one of the eight finest trumpet players in jazz history, has gone largely ignored. Part of his invisibility is owed to the fact that Morgan wasn't much of a band leader. He was an integral part of the great Art Blakey band, but under his own name, Morgan was more apt to put together groups for great recordings rather than lead a band for many years at a time as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman did. Morgan's unsavory personal life counts against him. Many jazz deifiers seek to position the music as the anti-hip-hop, yet Morgan was hardly an up-standing citizen. Miles and Trane and many others struggled with their drug addictions and won. Morgan, despite the examples of Holiday, Lester Young and Charlie Parker, lost. I think that the jazz demimonde doesn't want any more tragic figures. Still, Morgan accomplished more artistically in 16 years than many jazz musicians do in decades. He isn't the man you'd want your daughter bringing home, but he is a trumpeter you should hear on your iPod, CD player or even better, your turntable. His music was heard and loved by millions in the '60s, and it shouldn't be just the domain of a coterie of jazz fans today. Martin Johnson is a New York writer.