Lazaro Vega

Perhaps Maria Scheinder's music, according to the descriptions in her new CD, have a visual/emotional narrative driving her organization of sounds, though she surrenders great chunks of the story line to the improvisors in the orchestra.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- August 5, 2007 The Katrina Effect, Measured in Gigs By ANDREW PARK New Orleans ON a recent sultry afternoon here, Tipitina’s — arguably the most famous musical haunt in a city famous for its music — is eerily quiet. This ramshackle, two-story yellow joint at the corner of Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas won’t start jumping until after dark, when Ivan Neville and his band, Dumpstaphunk, take center stage. But upstairs, past balconies smelling of stale beer and cigarettes, past walls plastered with yellowed concert posters, musicians are working. Some edit concert fliers, tweak Web sites or research overseas jazz festivals; others get legal advice or mix audio and video; others simply chatter about who has found gigs and who is still struggling. Since late 2005, just a few months after Hurricane Katrina tore through this city, more than 1,000 New Orleans musicians have become members of Tipitina’s three cooperative music offices. “I go in sometimes and all I’m doing is checking my e-mails,” says Margie Perez, an effervescent blues singer. For Ms. Perez and others trying to rebuild fragile livelihoods as artists, grass-roots efforts like the co-ops have been a boon, helping them to replace lost or damaged instruments and sound equipment, arranging and subsidizing gigs and providing transportation, health care and housing. The Tipitina’s Foundation, the club’s charitable arm, has distributed about $1.5 million in aid; in all, Tipitina’s and other nonprofit groups have marshaled tens of millions of dollars in relief from around the world to help bolster the music business here. But it remains to be seen how long a loose-knit band of charities can stand in for coordinated economic development in one of New Orleans’s most important business sectors. Although New Orleans is one of the country’s most culturally distinct cities, a large-scale recording industry never took root here, even before Katrina. Yet the informal music sector, the kind visitors find in clubs and bars, and large-scale musical events like Jazz Fest, is a mainstay of the city’s tourism business. In fact, local authorities say, music and cuisine are the twin pillars of the tourism industry here; the leisure and hospitality businesses account for almost 63,000 jobs in the city and for about 35 percent of the sales taxes. Both of those figures are larger than those of any other business sector, including the energy industry. Still, nearly two years after Katrina, there are fewer restaurants and bars offering live music, and the ones that do are paying less, musicians say. As the reality of the slow recovery has set in, fewer locals feel that they can afford cover charges or even tips, so clubs that used to have live music four or five nights a week have cut back to two or three. Conventions, typically a strong source of music gigs, are running at 70 percent of 2004 levels, but leisure travel remains far below pre-Katrina levels, according to the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau. Over all, visitors generated $2.9 billion in spending in 2006, down from $4.9 billion in 2004, according to the bureau. About 3.7 million people visited the city in 2006, compared with more than 10 million in 2004. Compounding the music scene’s slow revival is the challenge of tracking musicians — who are typically paid in cash and often hold down other jobs — in order to get them financial support. Habitat for Humanity, which is building what it describes as a “musicians’ village” in the Ninth Ward, initially struggled to find creditworthy applicants — just one instance of relief for artists failing to meet its mark. “It’s kind of like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,” says Roland von Kurnatowski, who owns Tipitina’s with his wife, Mary. “New Orleans musicians are unique and if you try to mess with what makes them unique too much, it’s not a good thing. What they need is revenue opportunities.” Economic development leaders for the city and the state of Louisiana praise the efforts of Tipitina’s at a time when governmental resources are strained. “With the demise of the venues and the lack of tourism, we’ve got to find a way to get people back to work,” says Lynn Ourso, executive director of the Louisiana Music Commission. “They’re putting these musicians to work on computers, showing how they can globally transmit and distribute — they’re teaching job skills.” MR. KURNATOWSKI, 56, is an unlikely anchor of the local music business. A New Orleans native and Tulane graduate, he says he had never heard of Tipitina’s until he was asked to invest in the club in 1995. By then it was a beloved venue known for rollicking performances by locals like Dr. John and the Meters as well as touring acts like James Brown and Widespread Panic, but it had a spotty financial history. It was started by friends of the influential New Orleans pianist Professor Longhair as a place for him to play late in his career, but struggled under novice management and closed for a year in the mid-1980s. Mr. Kurnatowski, a real estate investor who owns about 35 apartment complexes in the Gulf Coast region, had begun marketing storage units in a converted hotel as rehearsal space and thought that having a connection with Tipitina’s might lure musicians into renting. But the deteriorating club, facing new competition from the House of Blues, needed a new sound system and air-conditioning system. Mr. Kurnatowski agreed to make an equity investment; within a year he bought it outright for about $500,000. He soon realized that he had neither the expertise nor the time to run Tipitina’s properly — especially because he was a morning person. “It’s a different routine,” he says. “It’s working nights, and it just wasn’t very practical.” Intrigued by the club’s history and its intense following, he couldn’t bring himself to sell it. He also says that his other real estate investments gave him enough financial breathing room to think creatively about what to do with Tipitina’s. So, in 1997, he and his wife formed the Tipitina’s Foundation, which would begin to use the club, still for-profit, to serve the nonprofit mission of helping musicians. The move provided a rationale for holding on to Tipitina’s, even if it only broke even, and marked a return to the club’s early purpose of supporting the local music scene. Its projects included an internship program for children wanting to get into the music business and a fund-raiser to buy instruments for local school bands. The first of its co-ops, a collaboration between the foundation and the city, opened in 2003. (Branches in Shreveport and Alexandria, La., opened later.) The foundation could have easily fallen victim to Katrina’s devastation. Many of the city’s cultural organizations suffered extensive damage to facilities and had to cut their payrolls. Tipitina’s suffered only limited wind damage, and the foundation’s services were in demand. Many musicians lived in devastated neighborhoods like Gentilly and the Ninth Ward; those in other parts of town still lost instruments, amplifiers and CD collections to the flooding. Bands were scattered around the country, and some meager savings accounts were obliterated. After Katrina struck in August 2005, Mr. Kurnatowski and the executive director, Bill Taylor, decided to try to reconstitute the foundation’s work. By late October, they had reopened the club and the co-op, both of which quickly became hubs of activity for musicians returning to town. A legal clinic that provided musicians with free help with contracts, copyright issues and licensing agreements became a popular service. “Even if they lost everything, they still had their intellectual property,” says Ashlye M. Keaton, a lawyer who runs the clinic. “You could see the look in people’s eyes: ‘This is all I have, this is my career, and I’m going to do everything I can to protect it.’ ” For his part, Mr. Kurnatowski pledged to plow all profits from Tipitina’s, which scaled back its staff and eliminated guaranteed payouts to musicians, into the foundation. The club has cut its number of shows to four nights a week from six, but has seen total attendance and bar sales stay steady. Even so, Mr. Kurnatowski says, Tipitina’s operates on razor-thin margins: he says the club earned about $40,000 last year on revenue of about $500,000. Other organizations also tried to put some financial muscle behind the local music business. The New Orleans Musicians Clinic paid musicians to play at the airport and offered $100 guarantees to musicians who could find gigs for themselves elsewhere. The Jazz Foundation of America also subsidized performances. The New Orleans Musician’s Relief Fund, a charity started by the former dB’s bassist Jeff Beninato, offered a temporary apartment to musicians. Renew Our Music, another relief fund, gave financial grants to musicians, while funds from Gibson Guitar and MusiCares, a charitable organization affiliated with the Recording Academy, helped buy scores of new instruments. For artists dependent on support, such backing was invaluable. Margie Perez, a former travel agent, had arrived in New Orleans just eight months before the storm. She returned to town in January 2006 to discover that her apartment in the Broadmoor neighborhood had been badly flooded. Determined to stay, she found other housing — for twice what she paid pre-Katrina — went to work cleaning damaged houses and started visiting the Tipitina’s co-op. She picked up work in different bands and this last spring was invited to sing with the pianist and producer Allen Toussaint at Jazz Fest. Ms. Perez, 42, also has a part-time job at a clothing boutique and is training to be a tour guide; the music business here is still too anemic for her to depend on it for her livelihood. “You just get into as many projects as you can,” Ms. Perez says. “I’m in, like, five different bands and that’s kind of the case with a lot of musicians in town.” Indeed, even as crowds come back, littering Bourbon Street with beer cans and daiquiri cups, musicians say they’re not seeing their incomes rebound. Wil Kennedy, a guitarist and singer who plays for passers-by in Jackson Square, says the situation is still “as bad as it was after 9/11,” with his tips down as much as 75 percent from the peak period before 9/11. In the clubs, guarantees of a minimum payout are now less common; many clubs offer musicians just the take at the door or a percentage of drink sales. “They’ve kind of gotten used to getting the music cheap when people were so desperate they’d play for a sandwich and a $20 bill,” says Kim Foreman, secretary and treasurer of a local branch of the American Federation of Musicians, which has lost about 120 of its 800 dues-paying members. Poverty keeps many musicians living with substandard housing and health care, Mr. Foreman says. Katrina left as many as half of the city’s roughly 5,000 working musicians marooned elsewhere, says Jordan Hirsch, executive director of Sweet Home New Orleans, an organization that provides financial support to musicians. “A lot of people in Texas and Georgia and around the country want to be back, feel that their best economic opportunities are here, but just can’t get from A to B,” Mr. Hirsch says. Others are scared off by the rampant crime and lack of basic services here, despite an economic need to be back in the Big Easy’s cultural stew. “Right now, New Orleans is not fit for my family,” says the Hot 8 Brass Band trombonist Jerome Jones, who has relocated to Houston with his wife and four of his five children. Mr. Jones, whose bandmate Dinerral Shavers was murdered here last December, says he plans to commute to New Orleans for gigs and band business. IT’S an article of faith among New Orleanians that the music scene is an indelible part of the city’s appeal. But the city and state historically haven’t recognized the role that musicians and other creative workers play in driving tourism and improving the quality of life, advocates say. As a result, they say, the city and state have underinvested in the cultural sector of the economy. “People don’t think of artists as a category of workers,” says Maria-Rosario Jackson, director of the Urban Institute’s Culture, Creativity, and Communities Program, which found that the city’s infrastructure for “cultural vitality” even before Katrina rated in the bottom half of the country’s metropolitan areas. Figuring how “to translate that authenticity to economic development has been the challenge for all these years,” says Scott Aiges, who headed the city’s music office before Katrina and is now director of marketing and communications for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation, which owns Jazz Fest. Just weeks before the storm, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu unveiled a new strategy for developing what was described as the “cultural economy.” Since then, the state has pushed through tax breaks for arts districts, musical and theatrical productions and sound recordings and made sure that events like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, which provide work for many musicians, survived. But a separate individual tax break for artistic earnings failed in the State Legislature because of concerns that it wasn’t fair to other working people, and other large-scale attempts have languished because of a lack of financing. In May 2006, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, which was formed by Mayor C. Ray Nagin, recommended plowing $648 million into the cultural sector to create jobs, rebuild damaged facilities and open a national jazz center. But those ideas were shelved with the rest of the commission’s work, and subsequent, scaled-back proposals still await financing. New Orleans “needs some anchors around which the economy can begin to rebuild, and arts and culture are an obvious one,” says Holly Sidford, a principal at AEA Consulting in New York, which developed the recommendations for the commission’s cultural subcommittee at the request of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. “But without investment, really deliberate and coherent investment, that won’t happen.” Ernest Collins, the city’s executive director for arts and entertainment, says of the commission’s recommendations, which Mr. Nagin endorsed: “That was a very large price tag. And needless to say, we don’t have that money.” Leaders of nonprofit groups and organizations like Tipitina’s say they are resigned to filling the void left by the public and private sectors as long as they can. Mr. Aiges, whose group owns Jazz Fest, is using receipts from the event to add new festivals, build an Internet-based system that will allow musicians to connect with talent coordinators and potential licensees, and put on a networking event for musicians during next year’s festival. Sweet Home New Orleans is compiling the first database of local musicians, which should help it to distribute relief faster and more effectively, and hopes to get part-time work for them in other businesses. Next month, the Tipitina’s Foundation will release a new CD honoring Fats Domino, with proceeds from it earmarked for resurrecting his music publishing company and opening a co-op near the singer’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward. But musicians say they wonder if New Orleans will ever nurture their careers the way it once did. The Hot 8 Brass Band, which was featured prominently in Spike Lee’s documentary film “When the Levees Broke,” is concentrating on touring elsewhere in the United States and abroad — even if that might mean missing Mardi Gras — so it can play for outsiders. Outsiders, say band members, seem to value them more than their hometown. “They make you feel how valuable you are to New Orleans,” says Raymond Williams, a trumpeter for the band. “I feel like maybe the city should treat musicians in the same way.” Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118532323897176964.html July 25, 2007 MUSIC King Oliver in the Groove(s) By NAT HENTOFF July 25, 2007; Page D12 When I was in my teens, reading about the storied sites of early jazz, I envied the Chicagoans of the 1920s who were hip enough to spend nights at the Lincoln Gardens café where King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band was in residence, recently joined by Oliver's young New Orleans protégé, Louis Armstrong. But the few recordings I could find sounded as if time had worn the music down and dim, including the clicks and scratches of those used early discs. Now, however, in a remarkable feat of sound restoration, "King Oliver/Off the Record: The Complete 1923 Jazz Band Re-Recordings" (archeophone.com, also at Amazon.com) makes it very clear to me why among the regulars in the audience back then were the young white jazz apprentices who -- according to Lil Hardin (the pianist in the band) -- thronged to hear King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band whenever they played in Chicago: "They'd line up 10 deep in front of the stand -- Muggsy Spanier, Dave Tough, George Wettling -- listening intently. Then they'd talk to Joe Oliver and Louis." (Also among them were Eddie Condon and 14-year-old Benny Goodman.) Drummer George Wettling described the excitement in the club in "Hear Me Talkin' to Ya, Dover," a book published in 1955 that I co-edited with Nat Shapiro: "Joe would stand there, fingering his horn with his right hand and working his mute with his left, and how they would rock the place! Unless you were lucky enough [to be there], you can't imagine what swing they got." Now we can. David Sager (a recorded sound technician at the Library of Congress) and Doug Benson (a teacher and recording engineer at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md.) created their Off the Record label last year to bring King Oliver's Creole Band back to life. Working on rare original recordings supplied by collectors, Mr. Benson, writes his partner, "began to capture onto the digital domain clean, smooth transfers of the discs, using a wide array of styli." The actual music was deep in the original grooves -- though until now poorly reissued and reproduced. The 1923 sounds had to be excavated. While there were distinctive soloists in the band -- clarinetist Johnny Dodds, trombonist Honore Dutrey and, of course, the leader and the newcomer from New Orleans who would eventually swing the world -- this was essentially a dance band. In his exceptionally instructive notes, Mr. Sager explains: "That the Oliver band's sound was replete with marvelous invention, and a superior 'hot' sound, was the added premium. The principle, however, was rhythm." Joe Oliver never had to announce the next number. As trombonist Preston Jackson recalled, "He would play two or three bars, stomp twice, and everybody would start playing, sharing with the dancers the good time they were having." "After they would knock everybody out with about forty minutes of 'High Society,'" Wettling said, "Joe would look down at me, wink, and then say, 'Hotter than a forty-five.'" Years later, I would hear from musicians who had been at the Lincoln Gardens about the always startling, simultaneous "hot breaks" Armstrong and Oliver played. (A "break" is when the rhythm section stops and one or more horns electrify the audience for a couple of measures.) Among the 37 numbers in the two-disc set, these legendary "breaks" can be heard on "Snake Rag," "Weatherbird Rags," "The Southern Stomps," and "I Ain't Gonna Tell Nobody." Energized by joining the players and dancers at Lincoln Gardens, I remembered a night long ago at Preservation Hall in New Orleans where, in another "hot" dance band, trombonist Jim Robinson lifted me into joy. What Oliver and Armstrong brought from New Orleans to Chicago, and then to the rest of the planet, exemplified how Robinson also felt about his New Orleans birthright: "I enjoy playing for people that are happy. If everyone is in a frisky spirit, the spirit gets into me and I can make my trombone sing. If my music makes people happy, I will try to do more. It gives me a warm heart and that gets into my music." Oliver and Armstrong felt the same way. Since the members of King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band were driven by the desire to keep the dancers and themselves happy, hearing them as they were at Lincoln Gardens provides a keener understanding that this music began in the intersecting rhythms of the musicians and the dancers' pleasure. And in all the different forms jazz has taken since, when it ain't got somewhere that makes-you-want-to-move swing, it may impress some critics with its cutting-edge adventurousness, but it's not likely to make anyone shout -- as King Oliver's banjoist, Bill Johnson, did one night at Lincoln Gardens -- "Oh play that thing!" In his deeply researched article on King Oliver in the Summer 2007 issue of the invaluable American Legacy: The Magazine of African-American Life and Culture, Peter Gerler notes that after Lincoln Gardens was destroyed in a fire on Christmas Eve, 1924, Joe Oliver brought a new band, the Dixieland Syncopaters, into the Plantation Café, which like Lincoln Gardens "was a 'black-and-tan' club, where crowds of blacks and whites mingled, danced, and enjoyed the music of top black bands." A Variety review of the new King Oliver band exclaimed: "If you haven't heard Oliver and his boys, you haven't heard real jazz. . . . You dance calmly for a while, trying to fight it, and then you succumb completely." Now that Messrs. Sager and Benson have brought us inside the Lincoln Gardens, their coming attractions on their Off the Record label include 1922 recordings by Kid Ory, the New Orleans king of the "tailgate trombone"; long unavailable sessions by Clarence Williams's Blue Five (with Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet); and the classic Bix Beiderbecke sides on the Gennett label. There are more to come. Messrs. Benson and Sager have been friends since junior high school, where both played in the trombone section of the school band. Mr. Benson also plays bass and piano, and is a composer and arranger. They have now parlayed their lifelong enthusiasm for this music into a permanent sound library of historic jazz performances freshly retrieved from inside the original grooves. With regard to what's ahead on their label, Mr. Sager says eagerly: "It will be interesting to see what technology enables us to do in the coming years." I yearn to listen to Bix Beiderbecke directly, so I can hear what Louis Armstrong heard: "You take a man with a pure tone like Bix's and no matter how loud the other fellows may be blowing, that pure tone will cut through it all." Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal. URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118532323897176964.html

Thank you Larry Kart. http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/ente...ent/6927534.stm Free jazz pioneer's awards honour One of jazz's great innovators, Ornette Coleman, has spoken of his feelings after receiving two major music awards at the age of 77. Coleman has won both a lifetime achievement Grammy and the Pulitzer Prize for music in recent months, the latter awarded for his latest album Sound Grammar. The saxophonist told BBC World Service's The Beat programme that although he has often had a prickly relationship with critics, "I can't say it doesn't mean anything." "It makes me aware of the growth that I have achieved," he said. "I do honour people that know more than I do, and tell me if it's good, if it has meaning. "If I have found a way to share what I do, to inspire people to go even further than what I don't know yet - that idea is the most supreme form of expression in culture." Ideas Coleman is known as one of the great jazz innovators, pioneering improvised "free jazz." In 1960, his album Free Jazz split the jazz world. By discarding jazz elements such as fixed chord changes, Coleman was hailed as groundbreaking by some. And he remains unapologetic about how he has pushed at boundaries through his career. "I've had people say, 'you can't play like that' - and I say, 'what do you mean - I've already played it.' "I'm not trying - I'm playing." However, early 1960s acclaimed jazz musicians such as Miles Davis regarded Coleman's music as a direct affront to their years of training - something Coleman rejects. I have taught myself everything I know Ornette Coleman "I wasn't thinking of insults, I was thinking of ideas," Coleman said. "Imagine - if you don't have ideas, what are you going to do? "They weren't playing movements, they were playing changes. I was playing ideas, changes and non-transposed notes." He recalled in particular the day his mother bought him a horn when he was a young boy. "I thought it was a toy and I played it the way I am playing today," he said. "I didn't know that you had to learn to play, I thought you had to play to play. And I still think that. "I didn't know that music was a style and that it had rules and stuff. I thought it was just sound. I still believe that. "I am not that sensitive or that weak to believe that because someone says I can't do something, I haven't done it. "I have taught myself everything I know. I have written symphonies, and no-one has taught me. Because I realised that the human being is all there is." Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/ente...ent/6927534.stm

Donald Byrd's "Long Green" on Savoy with Frank Foster, Hank Jones, P.C. and Kenny Clarke is a favorite date, not just for sentimental reasons. Jones's Teddy Wilson in bebop approach is a contrast to the heated solos, but it is more as an ensemble contributor, intros, comping, that he significantly adds to the sound. Take him out and it is not the same record. Hawk's "Disorder at the Border" (Called "Hawk's Tune") from the 1950 JATP concert at Carnegie Hall...Hank's in fast company. Hawk eats everyone alive because Roy's not there to put up a fight. The Frank Wess/Hank Jones thing, with the Basie overtones -- I'll listen to that for Gus Johnson, the writing by Thad. Too organized to be earth shattering but not exactly bland. Frank Wess. Here in the twilight of Hanks Jones and Billy Taylor...Brubeck...

The way she uses soloists to bridge the story line played by the ensemble, and the way she vizualizes that in the liner notes, gives the individual musician a more important role in her music than "merely" playing a solo on changes. Her use of the warbler recordings -- what did Dolphy say?

I don't think it is a censorship issue as much as a competitive one. And you're right: these hogs have made regulation of television, radio and newspapers by the same owners all but non-existent. Now that they've made their bed all nice and comfy they don't want to get up and answer the door. "Huge difference and minus all the local hype." See, that's what makes radio great: localism. Not syndication. Syndication is a good addition to local programming yet the advancements in computer technology have made possible the consolidation of radio ownership centered around a profit motive that cuts personnel, removes the station's content from the location it is coming from and replaces it with audience tested "product" that's proven commercially viable, especially as manufactured nostalgia. That's commercial radio in a nutshell. Then there are the people yelling at you or otherwise being as entertaining as a room full of tired toddlers on "talk radio." I don't know why Clem's hearing what he's hearing on NPR affiliates, though the news push so many stations went with opens the door for all kinds of "coverage." In any case, many channels broadcasting from a hard drive whirring quietly in an air conditioned room is a central reason why people aren't listening to commercial FM radio. No one's taking chances in that model. Local, stations, however, are another story. WGN radio in Chicago (which is as professional as radio can be IMHO) has been a country wide "local" station for years. Local hype in Ann Arbor means WEMU promoting live jazz and blues shows across southeastern Michigan. There's a cheesy local FM station in Grand Haven, Michigan that combines canned music with local ads and obituaries, farm reports and nautical "notes" which the town listens to. My wife listens to a local station from Martha's Vineyard everyday. Localism is where radio thrives. That's the reason I've been here 24 years: no oversight! Well, from a programming point of view this push towards "day parting" is ever present, which is why you often here jazz shows like somanex because the professional programming philosophy, and these consultants are expensive, have observed people sleeping at night, so logically the way to reach your largest audience in that day part is to help them to it. Brilliant! So the Evan Parker is on after midnight. At least it remains a choice. Ah, compromise. Letting me or Werf loose at XM would be, who knows, their death knell? We're from the Great Lakes where Chicago's "ancient to the future" point of view is to be emulated. It is the philosophy which counteracts all the "professionalism" of not taking chances. It's God and the Devil all over again. Not that the sat stations aren't taking chances. The whole endeavor is a chance, as is waking up and driving into the Manistee National Forrest to see if the audience cares if I play "Moon Ray" by vibraphonist Herb Gibson before returning to a set featuring Roy Eldridge, this time with the Artie Shaw Orchestra and Gramercy 5. As for hearing the same thing all the way across the country, how different is that, really, from the almost identical programming on commercial radio coast to coast? (Read of one person driving from Louisiana to L.A. and counting something like 400 times he heard "Yellow Submarine"). Ruminations.

Last night Cootie Williams; tonight Johnny Hodges; tomorrow Roy Eldridge. 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. est www.bluelake.org (Tonight at midnight 'Out on Blue Lake' features the Evan Parker Trio with George Lewis).

No doubt -- and you see the results of unchallenging music programming: it goes away. The biggest problem with public radio is that is was supposed to pay for itself, that the grant trough was only for start up, and the radio stations would be giving back to the culture as in the European model, i.e. creating performances, comissioning works, paying artists to do so, and dissemenating it to the public. Unfortunately many of the stations never got the "good stuff" but scrapped and whored to just keep afloat. The question, though, is what does sat radio offer that you can't find other places? Though commercial radio is a dust heap the sum total of net radio offers as much or more diversity than the sat stations, which, by the way, I listen to at family and friends' homes. The advantage of sat radio is that each station is pretty much "on demand." You don't have to wait for anything to come up, you go to a place it always is. Terrestrail radio is starting to be able to do that with the incoming digital stations, but "on-demand" programming via the web is, by law, verbotin (and no on pays attention, they just do it).

And sorry Lazaro, with much respect I have to say I disagree with you that the Republicans are all in favor of this and helping big business. If anything it's big business such as Clear Channel and Infinity that have their hands on the strings of politicians and are maming this a very difficult process with still no decision. Take a look at how long this merger talk has been going on. I know you're in the business and I admire the programming you do, but for the most part standard commercial radio in an inferior product. Once you listen to satellite you'll never go back to the dozens of "morning zoos" and "two for Tuesdays", and " it's a Def Leppard, block party weekend!" type of listening experience. Yes, the commercial radio world is a bilge pump. The original bill establishing sat rad had 70 co-signers: should look at that list before making sweeping generalizations, yet -- the deregulation of government in the service of corporate greed continues.

When they applied for these special frequencies it was with the proviso that the two stations would never merge, that competition would be the watch word. They also said there'd be no local weather, no local traffic. Went back on everything. "Oh, the marketplace has changed, it's all different now." The only thing that's changed is the doorman holding out their hat. If they can't make it with their multi-million dollar budgets, to hell with them. What do they offer that's different than "terrestrail" radio, especially if web streaming moves into automobiles? The rest of us down here on the ground are trying to make it on far less. See, the Republicans are coming to the rescue of big business, again. They're all about free market until the rubber is warming up to hit the road and then they're like, "Wait, I have STOCK in that!"

Ha! During Dolphy's bass clarinet solo on "Fables" Mingus starts to play "Ysabel's Table Dance."

That would be cool. Ever see their performance studios?

I think the connotation of "dirty" as it is used here is not so much "sexual," though that's part of it, but more how "dirty" is to "jazz" what "legit" is to "classical." Dirty meaning not taking the notes on the page literally, adding "rude" sounds (as a friend's put it) and not playing "strict" time.

Zonked out and didn't make it, Randy. Very sorry for that. Had plans to be there but this week was a ripper (two live recording sessions and a live broadcast, not much sleep and by Friday night, lights out). Hope it went down well. Pushed it hard for you. LV

So the Dime boot is the whole concert? I'd heard the BBC broadcast was a truncated version of the concert.....

Coming up tonight!

The Last Encore? Jazz has long been held up as America's music. But whenWashington honored the legends this spring, it may have been more of a memorial than a celebration. By Wells Tower Sunday, May 13, 2007; W16 ONE SATURDAY EVENING IN MARCH, the first night of the Kennedy Center's weeklong "Jazz in Our Time" celebration, nearly every living jazz titan who could spare the time and was feeling hale enough to make the trip gathered in an upstairs lounge to pose for a group photograph. The guest list included pianists Dave Brubeck, Ahmad Jamal and Hank Jones, trumpet players Donald Byrd and Clark Terry, saxophonists Ornette Coleman and Benny Golson, vocalists Nancy Wilson, Al Jarreau and Abbey Lincoln -- along with 22 others. The Kennedy Center's PR corps dubbed the occasion "A Great Day in Washington," a calculated hat-doffing to a legendary photograph of a similar gathering nearly 50 years before, which ran in Esquire magazine and became the subject of a documentary, "A Great Day in Harlem." The first "Great Day" portrait shows 57 jazz musicians shouldered together on the stoop of a soot-streaked Harlem brownstone one summer morning in 1958, five years before the Beatles' first record. If a cathedral is ever raised for the worship of jazz music, a stained-glass reproduction of the Esquire photo will probably glow above the pulpit. The photo encapsulates or foretells just about everything you need to know about the golden century in the greatest musical tradition born on American shores: There's trumpeter Red Allen, who played with Jelly Roll Morton, the composer loosely credited with jazz's invention at the turn of the century, squeezed in with 1930s swing legends such as drummer Gene Krupa and Count Basie, alongside Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk, who set fire to the old traditions and forged swing into bebop, standing within spitball range of post-bop composer Charles Mingus, not far from cool jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, who played with the late Miles Davis, whose "Kind of Blue" reissue would be America's top-selling jazz album in 2001, a century or so after jazz had blared its birth cry in the saloons of New Orleans. Looking at it now, the "Great Day" photo seems somehow implausible, less a record of an actual event than a giddy, era-garbling collage, like the cover of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," where Bob Dylan poses cheek by jowl with Sigmund Freud. Much has changed in 50 years. Jazz has come a long way from that anonymous stoop on 126th Street to one of the nation's loftiest marble troves of high cultural treasure. Beyond the photograph, the jazz luminaries gathered here at the Kennedy Center had a grand evening ahead of them -- a concert in their honor and a ceremony, complete with gold medals, dubbing them "Living Jazz Legends," the proceedings emceed by the heavyweight champion of the venerability circuit, James Earl Jones. The Esquire shoot was a casual, chaotic affair, the musicians wearing suits or shirtsleeves, shades or porkpie hats or toking on cigars. The photographers couldn't keep Harlem out of the shot, and a dozen or so gangly neighborhood kids elbowed their way amongst the musicians, taking up spots beside Basie on the curb. Tonight's event, held in the elegant gloom of the Kennedy Center's jazz club, was invitation-only, mandatory black-tie. As the honorees filed in and the room grew dark with evening dress, it was hard not to note a funereal air in the room. While jazz had gotten respectable, it had also gotten old. The roster of titans, with a couple of exceptions, were on the far side of 70, driving home the uncomfortable truth that the days of jazz superstardom slipped by some time ago. If the Harlem portrait captured the music's noble history alongside the younger generation who would carry the tradition forward, one couldn't help but notice in the present cast a distressing paucity of celebrated heirs. By 6 p.m. or so, most of the living legends had arrived. Brubeck, squinting bonhomously under a blowsy wealth of white hair, loitered by the stage with pianist Chick Corea, who got his start with Miles Davis, and who flouted the black-tie edict with a belted samurai-ish smock. Wynton Marsalis stood near the refreshment table, administering a vigorous massage to the upper arm of singer Jon Hendricks. "Hey, aren't you too young to be here?" someone chided Marsalis, who is 45, and the only invitee shy of retirement age. The singer Al Jarreau strolled in, wearing a beret and a tracing of lipliner. "We were just talking about you," a woman said to him. "As long as someone's talking about me," Jarreau said. At the front of the room, where two rows of leather-upholstered chairs were arrayed on a low stage, a Kennedy Center representative stepped to the microphone. "On behalf of the Kennedy Center, we cannot thank you enough for coming to this historic occasion here this evening," he said. "But before we go any further, I have to credit the man who made it all possible. This is the man that says to me too often [that] in the world of jazz, people are only recognized -- you know when. . . Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Billy Taylor." The applause surged, and Billy Taylor came forward, beaming a panoramic grin. "Everybody I'm looking at tonight I've known for more years than I even want to think about," said Taylor, who is usually introduced, after a deep breath, as a pianist, composer, educator, music advocate, media personality and the Kennedy Center's artistic adviser for jazz. Taylor (at whose behest the center had built the suave grotto of the Jazz Cafe itself) had both organized the event and was to be one of its most rigorously feted honorees. In terms of lifetime achievements, few in the room could top him, whose career plaudit load includes an Emmy, a Grammy, two Peabody awards, the National Medal of the Arts (bestowed on him by President George H.W. Bush) and enough honorary degrees to clothe a good-size village in doctoral hoods. Nor are there many professional résumés out there to best that of Taylor, who has shared stages with Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and pretty much everyone who mattered in the age when jazz mattered most. But despite all that, Taylor remains an obscure, if beloved, figure in the world of jazz. Taylor is probably Washington's second-most prominent contribution to jazz history, outranked only by Ellington, yet you generally can't find his albums at the local CD shop. Taylor's peculiar obscurity owes itself in part to the quest he'd already taken up when the shutter winked on the famous Harlem tableau (he did not appear in that photo). As America began to turn away from jazz toward rock, folk, Motown, and Sinatra and the Rat Pack, jazz musicians weathered the approaching blight in all sorts of ways. Some quit, or changed their sound, or left for Europe, or simply shut their ears and played on against the mounting chorus of critics who asserted that jazz was dead. Taylor did something few other musicians wanted to attempt. He put the music ahead of his artistic ambitions and became jazz's first career educator and public evangelist, laboring for six decades in the conviction that mainstream Americans can be taught to go on caring about a musical inheritance that they seem determined to neglect. After the applause subsided, a stage manager took the microphone and explained to the honorees how the shoot and the award ceremony were going to unfold. "What we want to do. Is bring all the honorees on stage. In as smooth a fashion. And as quick a fashion. As possible," he said, in the maddeningly slow and loud locution of someone addressing the lunchroom at a nursing home. The stage manager explained that the honorees would stand in a straight line. Then it was picture time, and the titans were called forward. With varying degrees of ease, the 32 mounted the dais. The cast would not immediately come to order. Marsalis was teasing Brubeck. Ahmad Jamal was caught up in a bout of horseplay with Jarreau and Hendricks. Corea wouldn't look at the camera. "Look at me, Chick," the photographer called. "Ornette Coleman, a little to your right. Smiling is a good thing, Freddie," he said to Freddie Hubbard, master of the hard-bop trumpet, famous in his prime for pitching foul-mouthed, tearful tantrums in the middle of his sets. Through a lightning storm of camera flashes, Taylor, sitting in the front row, wore an unflagging grin, even though singer Little Jimmy Scott, who was looking quite tired, was listing into Taylor's left shoulder. "Billy Taylor, perfect smile every time," the photographer said. "You got about two more minutes," someone called. After another shot or two, the photographer gave the legends leave to go. "It's a great day in Washington," the photographer called out. Yet as the legends stepped down from the stage, a question seemed to hang in the room: Fifty years from now, and the next "Great Day" shoot, would there be flesh-and-blood players filling out the frame, or just photo plates from a history book propped on a music stand? BILLY TAYLOR IS A TALL MAN, hunched only slightly by age. His expression, even in repose, is a smile of a high, uncasual wattage, the expression of someone who has spent so much time beaming into camera lenses that the smile has been permanently scribed into his muscle memory. He is 85 years old, with a somewhat dubiously thick head of red-brown hair, and a face still so youthful that a scrupulous box office clerk would be within his rights to card Taylor for the senior citizen discount. He favors Ralph Lauren buttoned shirts and loafers, though his most distinctive accessory is his glasses. He has two pairs at least, and both are large apparatuses of beveled plastic with lenses the size of soap dishes. His showier pair, which he wears for public occasions, has little gilt embellishments on the temples, and could be melted down and minted into a handsome, spacious jewelry box. Taylor was raised in Washington, but for the last 30 years, he has lived in a five-room apartment in Riverdale, N.Y., with his wife, Theodora. A library of vinyl albums and CDs fills one wall of the living room, which otherwise is the domain of a sleek, black Steinway baby grand, its wheels bedded in the wall-to-wall carpet. The carpet is a striking shade of red, lending Taylor's apartment the atmosphere of a perpetual awards gala. One chilly afternoon in late winter, Taylor sat playing the piano. The tune was a jouncing stride number, a tripping melody in the upper keys and chunky quarter tones in the bass. The movement of his hands was a sight of startling effortlessness. He held his fingers straight and flat. They appeared too placid, too easeful to be responsible for the fusillade of tones burbling from the Steinway. It looked as though he was doing a poor job of miming along with a player piano. Five years ago, Taylor suffered a stroke that temporarily crippled his left hand. He feared he'd never play again, but he committed himself to a vigorous therapy of five-finger exercises and, within two years, won back the use of his hand. That afternoon in his apartment, the pianist seemed restored to the fullness of his powers, or close to it, anyway. "I can't practice like I used to, though there's not the need to practice now," said Taylor, who officially retired from the concert stage two years ago. "I'm still in the process of just repairing whatever I have left, trying to make sure that I can play as best I can for as long as I can." He pinched off the song with a tidy flourish. "I wrote that song for my Uncle Bob," he said. "He was a great stride player. When I was a kid, I wanted to play just like him." Taylor was born in Greenville, N.C., in 1921. His father was a dentist, like his father before him, who was the first African American dentist in Greenville. Both of Taylor's parents were pianists, and he started lessons at age 7, by which time the family had moved north to Washington, to a house on Fairmont Street, near Howard University. In his free time, Taylor haunted the Library of Congress, browsing through the records and scores of the musicians he admired -- Fats Waller, James P. Johnson, Willie "the Lion" Smith and the piano virtuoso Art Tatum -- though the musician he most admired was Ben Webster, Duke Ellington's saxophonist, whose velvet-throated horn was famous for its sensual immensity. "He had this big, incredible sound," Taylor said. "You could hear him breathing when he played. If he had four bars on an Ellington record, I'd go out and buy it." Jazz was in full ferment in Washington in the 1930s. U Street, known then as "Black Broadway," thrummed with clubs and dance halls. Taylor played his first gig there at age 13, and earned 50 cents. But the heart of the D.C. jazz scene was the Howard Theatre, where Taylor went nearly every week to hear the world's biggest names in jazz -- Cab Calloway, Basie, Louis Armstrong, Holiday -- for a door charge of 40 cents. At Dunbar High School, Taylor played in the orchestra. He also took private lessons with Henry Grant, who had taught Ellington. After graduating in 1938, Taylor enrolled at Virginia State University (then Virginia State College), his father's alma mater. Taylor wanted to pursue music, but his father had other ideas, so Taylor majored in sociology, which he studied disinterestedly, reserving his energies and passion for his music. "My sophomore year, a professor of mine, the composer Undine Moore, she called me into her office. She said, 'Billy, what's your major?' I said, 'Sociology.' She said: 'Wrong. You're wasting your time with sociology. Change your major to music.' I said, 'Okay.'" Taylor's father, to whom he hadn't mentioned switching majors, wasn't happy when he got the next tuition bill, and he told Taylor he could finance his own education from then on. So Taylor paid his way through college gigging with a five-piece combo, sometimes playing as many as three shows a week at black dances and clubs throughout the mid-Atlantic. Some nights, Taylor and his band would pull all-night drives to make it back to Petersburg in time for morning classes. He graduated from college in 1942, at a time when most men his age were heading overseas to fight in World War II. Taylor assumed that he, too, would be shipped off to combat, but the physical exam revealed that he'd contracted tuberculosis. "I'd been abusing my health, trying to make the band work and pay my bills," Taylor said. "The doctor said: 'Four-F, man. You need to get yourself together.'" On a Friday night in the summer of 1944, he caught a train to New York. He went to his uncle's house in Harlem, staying only long enough to drop off his bags. In the 1940s, 20 or more clubs lined 52nd Street, the thriving epicenter of what was then the most important jazz scene on the planet. But Taylor went instead to Minton's Playhouse, a smoggy dive on 118th Street, where a few years earlier trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and saxophonist Charlie "Bird" Parker invented the strident phonic language the critics were calling bebop. Taylor walked through the door around 9 p.m. He told the bandleader he was a piano player, just in from D.C., and that he'd like to sit in. The bandleader told Taylor to wait. Taylor went to the bar. He nursed a drink, and kept nursing it until 3 in the morning, when he was finally offered a turn at the keys. He hadn't been playing long, when he looked up to see Ben Webster on the bandstand beside him. Webster had just gotten off from his regular gig at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and when the tune wound down, Webster approached the young pianist. He liked the unconventional way Taylor voiced his chords. Webster's pianist had just left the band, and Webster asked Taylor if he'd like to audition for the job the following Sunday at the Three Deuces. Taylor's 60-year career proceeded from the set he played that night at the Three Deuces. Webster not only offered him the job, but Art Tatum, another of Taylor's idols, was sitting in the audience. In the months that followed, Tatum, arguably the finest virtuoso that jazz piano has ever seen, took him on as a protege, proclaiming Taylor to the press as "the greatest young jazz pianist in the world." That same year, Taylor married Theodora Castion, whom he'd met on a visit to New York a couple of years before, and the young couple moved into an apartment in Harlem. Courtly, clean-cut and bespectacled, Taylor often cut an unlikely figure among the men with whom he shared the bandstand. Heroin was coming into vogue, and Taylor's colleague Charlie Parker was the renowned avatar of addiction chic. While Taylor's mentor, Tatum, was no junkie, he was a prodigious alcoholic, ultimately drinking himself to death in 1956. Webster, too, was one of jazz's more unpredictable celebrities. Nicknamed, "the Brute," Webster was a fearsome drunk with a reputation for violence, rumored to have once thrown a woman from a hotel window. Taylor, when he first arrived in New York, might have gone the way of his hard-living associates, if it weren't for Jo Jones, Basie's drummer. "Whenever Jo would introduce me to people I admired, people like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, he'd say: 'This is Billy Taylor. He doesn't drink.' By which he meant, I shouldn't drink. And that was fine. So I didn't drink whenever Jo Jones was there, but when he wasn't around, I'd be knocking them back. But one time, he gave me a spanking I'll never forget. I was playing at this club on 52nd Street. I'd had a couple of drinks, feeling pretty good, and I look up, and Jo is sitting there between Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, the most important guys I knew. He just sat there with his arms crossed, giving me this very reproachful look -- I couldn't play, one of the few times I really got stage fright. I thought, 'Oh, man, why did I take that second drink?' After that, never again. You couldn't force me to have a drink if I was going near a piano." Taylor's consumption habits weren't the only thing that set him apart in the smoke-veiled lounges of 52nd Street. "It was hard, sometimes," Taylor said. "People would see me and say: 'Look at him, he looks like a professor. Isn't he straight?'" In 1949, Taylor's reputation as a gifted, eminently versatile player landed him a job as house pianist at Birdland, the nightclub named for Parker, and America's hottest venue for avant-garde jazz. Taylor would enjoy the longest tenure on Birdland's bench of anyone in the club's history. But Taylor stood apart from Birdland's hipster crowd. In 1951, the differences between Taylor and the clannish clique of narcotics-users he played with at Birdland came to a head. One night, the band was taking up a collection for a heroin score. When Taylor refused to chip in, the band voted to cut him from the group. Taylor also had his differences with musicians such as Parker and Gillespie, whom he felt weren't doing enough to educate audiences increasingly alienated by the rancor and difficulty of the bop sound. Listeners accustomed to the pop sensibilities of swing music were buffaloed by bop's preference for blistering solos and jagged departures from standard harmonies. "People were asking serious questions about jazz and seeking serious answers," Taylor told Melody Maker in 1971. "It bothered me when Diz and Bird would start talking bebop and giving nonsensical answers to what they were intelligent enough to know was a seriously meant question . . . It bothered me so much that every chance I got, I tried to set the record straight." Jazz needed a spokesman, Taylor felt, someone who could explain the sometimes challenging music to audiences without resorting to elliptical hipsterisms, such as Louis Armstrong's claim that, "man, if you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." But no one seemed interested in the job, and so Taylor volunteered. He delivered lecture-performances explicating jazz at Yale and colleges throughout the Northeast. He narrated the music's journey from plantation fields, through ragtime and stride, to swing and bop. He unlocked for audiences the black box of jazz improvisation, explaining how musicians transform chords and melodies into spontaneously composed solos. He laid bare the mechanics of chord voicings, harmony, of bop's intricate dissonances and rhythms, of the musical interplay in ensembles, and anything else audiences and young players wanted to know. In 1958, he took a position as on-air musical director for "The Subject Is Jazz" on NBC, a 13-episode series chronicling the music's history and anticipating Ken Burns's documentary by more than 40 years. In addition to playing regular local club dates, he held down a daily DJ slot spinning jazz records at a black-owned radio station, WLIB (AM). "Billy Taylor's radio show was very important," said critic Gary Giddins, who grew up in New York in the 1960s. "For the few of us who were jazz fanatics during the height of the Beatles thing, Taylor's show was it. He was very good. He was very likable on the air, he and [his colleague] Ed Williams. They would zone in on a record, and they would pick a track and play the track over and over again. They were treating it like pop music. They brought people into the music, and I'm sure they sold records." Taylor's recording career, however, was slipping into the doldrums, in part, he said, because his label, Capitol, had trained its promotional energies on Taylor's rock-and-roll labelmates, the Beatles among them. "If they couldn't make you into the next Elvis Presley," Taylor said, "they didn't want to waste time on you." Musicians were suffering across the jazz pantheon. Big bands had fallen out of vogue. Armstrong and Ellington retreated to their tour buses, driven to earn a living before live audiences rather than in the studio. Benny Goodman started adding Stravinsky and Mozart to his repertoire. Others, such as Webster, Chet Baker, Don Byas, Stan Getz and Bud Powell, left for Europe, where audiences held jazz in more abiding esteem than those in its native land. Miles Davis, who by the close of the 1960s had abandoned acoustic jazz for electrified fusion, grew so embittered at the record companies' treatment of jazz artists that he said that to call him a jazz musician was akin to calling him "nigger." Rather than continue making records, Taylor quit recording altogether and devoted himself to trying to persuade American audiences that jazz was not a dying form. In 1964, Taylor raised $10,000 from a beer company and commissioned the construction of a New Orleans-style rolling bandstand, pulled by a truck, which Taylor dubbed the "Jazzmobile." If black listeners were no longer coming out to hear jazz, he would bring jazz to them, free of charge. Every weekend in summer, the Jazzmobile trucked in luminaries -- Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers, Brubeck, Milt Hinton -- to some of the poorest neighborhoods in Harlem and the Bronx. Along with the concerts, the Jazz-mobile sponsored free music instruction at local schools to anyone who walked in the door. Taylor also tried to pitch jazz to the next generation of listeners. He appeared on the PBS children's programs "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company." In 1969, he spent a week as guest host of "Captain Kangaroo," where he introduced a nation of perhaps bewildered children to the music of stride piano hero Willie "the Lion" Smith and Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. In 1969, Taylor landed a job as bandleader for the "David Frost Show," a nightly talk and variety program hosted by the arid British journalist. In getting the job, Taylor had made broadcast history as the first African American bandleader on network television. The Cleveland Plain Dealer noted Frost's new hire with the headline, "David Frost Musical Director is BLACK." In the same era, Taylor was commuting regularly to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he was working on a doctorate in musicology. In 1977, he was hired to host the NPR program "Jazz Alive," syndicated to more than 200 stations, in which he conducted interviews and offered commentary on jazz performances. "He really knew how to sell the music," said Gary Giddins. "He's not the deepest thinker when he talks about the music because he doesn't want to get over anybody's head. And that's a gift, that's a gift. He brings everybody in with him." In 1981, eight years after the Frost show had gone off the air, Taylor was hired as arts correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning," regularly hosting profiles of jazz musicians, carrying his message of the music's importance and vitality into millions of American homes. Not long after Taylor was hired by the network, Mayor Marion Barry proclaimed a "Billy Taylor Day" in Washington. In the 1970s, he rededicated himself to performing, sometimes leaving home for months at a time. By then, Taylor's children, Kimberly and Duane, were nearly grown, and Taylor had been around for precious little of their childhood. Taylor's wife, Theodora, told an interviewer not long after he was hired for the Frost show, "I've raised two children, almost by myself." TAYLOR'S DOCTORAL THESIS, which he finished in 1975, can be summed up in what is probably the most widely bruited sentence in today's jazz community: "Jazz is America's classical music." And while it was partly through the efforts of people such as Taylor that jazz has at last found its way into America's uppermost preserves of high culture -- the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center and endowed chairs from Harvard to UCLA -- the motto also speaks to the unhappy destiny jazz would share with classical music near the end of the 20th century. "What nationalist boosters of jazz never expected when they struck gold with their classical allusion is that the two veins of music would end up suffering similar fates," wrote Richard Woodward in the Village Voice in 2001. "For many of the same reasons, jazz and classical music find themselves limping into the millennium under the burden of a glorious but sclerotic sense of tradition, and supported by an aging audience base that shows no sign of rejuvenating anytime soon." One of jazz's bestselling albums, Miles Davis's "Kind of Blue," hit the charts in 1959, and the four decades that followed would witness the music's fitful recession from mainstream listenership. With a handful of notable exceptions, instrumental jazz failed to win back audiences that had started to stray at the onset of the bop era. Riven by new categories -- free jazz, Latin, fusion, acid jazz, smooth jazz -- consensus as to what jazz was or wasn't began to disintegrate. Even the music's most commercially successful incarnation in years, smooth jazz, posed an artistic quandary. A heavily pasteurized, atmospheric music that favored listener-friendly melodies over improvisatory prowess, smooth jazz, in the 1980s, revived the music's presence on mainstream radio. But the hard-core jazz establishment largely dismissed the new genre as a commercial abomination. In 1992, saxophonist Kenny G lofted smooth jazz into the Top 40 with "Breathless," which, with sales of more than 15 million copies, is the bestselling instrumental album in recording history. Yet no one has deplored his success more venomously than the jazz community. "You're in a room with Hitler, Stalin and Kenny G, and you've got a gun with only two bullets. What do you do?" asks a bitter joke circulating widely on jazz chat sites. "Shoot Kenny G twice." As the decades passed, jazz's star-making machinery slipped into disrepair. Record companies signed fewer artists, and though New York clubs such as the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note and Iridium still thrive today, jazz clubs in the rest of America have undergone a massive die-off. In 1968, the riots waged in the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination shuttered the jazz clubs along U Street, leaving the city of Ellington's birth with only a handful of jazz venues, among them Blues Alley and One Step Down on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, which closed in 2000. By the early '90s, with the exception of smooth jazz, the music had all but vanished from American commercial radio. But it found new allies in august venues such as the Kennedy Center, which in 1994 brought in Taylor as artistic adviser to help launch its fledgling jazz program. "It was past time that cultural institutions should recognize jazz as a cultural icon in this country," said Darrell Ayers, the Kennedy Center's vice president for education. "When Billy came on, we saw a huge proliferation in our jazz programming." Under Taylor's watch, the Kennedy Center's concert series expanded from four per year to more than 50, and in 1997, Taylor launched a radio show, "Billy Taylor's Jazz," at the Kennedy Center. Taylor also expanded the center's education initiatives, including the "Betty Carter's Jazz Ahead" program, a weeklong jazz camp whose alumni include players such as Blue Note recording artist Jason Moran, 32, the most celebrated young jazz pianist in the nation today. Though jazz vocalists such as Harry Connick Jr., Cassandra Wilson and Diana Krall still sell records in pop quantities, the market continues to be frosty for instrumental stars. These days, even Marsalis, the only household name to emerge from the jazz world in the last quarter-century, is far from commercial viability as a recording artist. Of the dozen records he recorded in the 1990s, none logged sales over 15,000 units. In 2001, Burns's documentary series "Jazz" inspired a rash of CD releases, with Burns hoping to catch an updraft in sales from this piece of rare publicity. But the documentary, which, to the disappointment of the contemporary jazz scene, chronicled only the music's early history and basically ignored the present, didn't do much to buoy sales of new releases. By 2005, America's classical music would barely register a pulse with the record-buying public. With sales at 1.8 percent of market share, jazz was outstripped not only by traditional classical recordings, which were trickling off the shelves at 2.4 percent, but even by children's music, whose sales beat out jazz by 0.5 percentage points, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. WHILE TAYLOR IS PROBABLY JAZZ'S MOST relentlessly affable personality since Armstrong himself, he does, from time to time, suffer pangs of melancholy that history will likely remember him as a statesman, not as a musician. "I have not prospered," Taylor told a reporter in 1983, when he was 61 years old. "I wanted my music played by everybody. I wanted to play it myself in Europe, but I've never been invited to Europe. My name doesn't mean enough at the box office. I used to think there was something wrong with me. But I know I can play the piano. I know I have influenced people. I hear other people imitating me, and their records are the ones played on the air. They've just added some sauce, but it's still me." In the mid-1980s, Taylor returned to the studio to try to reclaim the reputation as a pianist-composer that began atrophying when he swore off recording two decades earlier. He established his own record label, Taylor Made, and released four albums. Critics received the albums genially if not ecstatically, but by then, the window for opportunity had pretty well been painted shut for jazz artists, at least as far as record sales were concerned. "I wish, in hindsight, that I had followed my first inclination, to do what a lot of other guys were doing, just going on fighting to get their music out there. But, at the time, it just seemed pointless," he said on the Monday morning after the Kennedy Center event, in a handsome suite at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Maryland Avenue SW. Wearing a pink Ralph Lauren shirt, Taylor sat at the folding bench of a black Yamaha electric piano, which the Kennedy Center had rented for him. "Part of it was that I had another choice, so I didn't have to do that. I said, I'll direct my time and efforts to this other direction. It was a mistake, careerwise. I should have done more." By the 1970s, the critics had mostly made up their minds about Taylor's playing. Though they praised him as a refined and versatile stylist, they tended to fault his penchant for excessive cultivation and charm -- precisely those qualities that made him such an able spokesman for the music. "He is impressive to those excited by technique, and his touch is polite and polished," wrote one reviewer. "But underneath there is a void." "Billy had incredible ears and an incredible touch," said critic Giddins. "He was a blessing to everyone because he could play everything. He was a great virtuoso player, and he wrote one of the all-time great [gospel] numbers ever, 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,'" later recorded by such disparate artists as Nina Simone, John Denver and Allman Brothers guitarist Derek Trucks. "Billy used to do this left-handed arrangement of 'All the Things You Are.' It was an incredible virtuoso feat, but it wasn't something that really moved you." Part of what hounded Taylor, Giddins pointed out, was that by the late 1950s, critical appetites had begun to favor wild individualism over pianistic elan. They wanted devastating originality, exemplified by the veering, fitful melodies of Thelonious Monk, or the surging dynamism of pianists such as Ahmad Jamal or, later, Bill Evans, whose playing is so haunted, so gracefully grief-racked that his live recordings at the Village Vanguard conjure an image of the pianist quietly snugging a noose around his neck to the audience's jolly din of table chatter and chiming glassware. "The good reviews were so few and far between," said Taylor, looking back on the critical response to his playing. "As compared to a lot of friends of mine who really got glowing reviews, I would get a lot of faint praise, and yet people were coming to see me night after night. I couldn't figure that out." I recounted to Taylor something a jazz critic acquaintance had said while were talking about Taylor's life and work. "He's done great things as an advocate for jazz, but I didn't know he'd had a piano career." "Yeah, I know," Taylor said. "That's happened to me a lot. There's no question that being an advocate eclipsed my reputation as a musician. It was my doing. When I got into it, people were saying, 'Jazz is dead,' and I said, 'I think you're wrong.' I wanted to prove to people that jazz has an audience. I had to do that for me." The phone rang, and Taylor rose to answer it. The front desk was calling to let him know that people from the rental outfit were coming by to pick up the piano. "I did everything I know how to do, both in music and in trying to help people understand what the music was about," Taylor said. "I did my best. I gave it my best shot. Unfortunately, it just didn't work." EVERY SUMMER FOR THE LAST 25 YEARS, Taylor has returned to his alma mater in Amherst, where he spends two weeks teaching young artists at a program called "Jazz in July." Three years ago, he met a young piano prodigy named Christian Sands, and was sufficiently taken with his playing to invite Sands for a concert at the Kennedy Center last year. One bitter day in February, Sands, 17, was recording a CD at a studio in New Haven, Conn., and Taylor obliged his request to sit in as producer. "I was hoping we'd be able to do something together before I went off to college," said Sands, who was waiting to hear back from the Manhattan School of Music and the New England Conservatory. Taylor is "a very lyrical player. He always tells a story when he plays . . . These days, people don't play with the same feeling that those early cats from his generation did. He was there when the tunes were written." Sands began playing piano at age 3. At his first lesson, his teacher introduced him to Beethoven by playing "Ode to Joy." The teacher was astounded, according to Sands's father, Sylvester, when the boy, who would turn out to have perfect pitch, wandered over to the keys and tapped out the melody in fluid mimicry. As he was learning classical technique, Sands was also absorbing jazz styles from his father, an amateur jazz pianist. "I remember when he was 6, Christian was in the middle of a classical recital when he stopped reading the music and started doing jazz riffs," said Sylvester Sands. "I said, 'You're not sticking to the music. I think you should be playing jazz.'" Sands began playing jazz at age 7, and it wasn't long before some of his most eminent forebears began taking note of his gifts. When Sands was in fourth grade, Brubeck's doctor happened to catch one of his recitals. After hearing Sands play "Take Five," he arranged a meeting with Brubeck. Sands impressed Brubeck with a rendition of "Blue Rondo a la Turk," from Brubeck's bestselling "Time Out," and the two became friends. These days, they speak often on the phone, and Brubeck, who lives in southern Connecticut, invites the Sands family to spend his birthday with him each December. "People [my age] don't even really know what jazz is, or where it came from," Sands said. "They haven't really listened to it. When they think of jazz, they think of elevator music or Kenny G. It's hard to explain it to them." Sands also plays classical music and dabbles in hip-hop, but he foresees a career in jazz, never mind the challenge of making a living at it. "For me and other young musicians, it's our job to try to make the music popular again," Sands said. "Or at least to try." Sands, a soft-spoken, light-skinned young man with a fringe of mustache, appears to be heading toward an accomplished career. Last year, after two summers under Taylor's tutelage in Amherst, Sands was selected to perform at the 48th Annual Grammy Awards, where he engaged in a musical duel with piano legend Oscar Peterson. The week before the recording session, Sands had been out in Los Angeles for his second appearance at the Grammys. While the quintet was setting up in the studio, Taylor and Sands sat in the control room. Taylor asked how he had liked his time in L.A. "It was a lot of fun," said Sands, who performed one of his own compositions as part of the broadcast. He continued, somewhat glumly: "But they only played, like, three seconds of it, and that was during the applause." "Oh, that's ridiculous," said Taylor, shaking his head. Though Taylor himself was honored in the Grammys' 2005 broadcast ("They gave me an award for living so long") and was once vice president of New York's chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, which administers the awards, he regards the academy as yet another of the legion of institutions to have forsaken jazz in his time. When the engineer had dialed knobs and tweaked levels to his satisfaction, Sands retreated to the nine-foot-long Steinway, and the recording session began. The band counted off a solemn mid-tempo ballad Sands had composed. Taylor sat enthroned in an office chair on an upper terrace in the control room. When the music started, Taylor's eyes went wide and his spine straightened, and he listened with the focused scrutiny of a jeweler peering through a loupe. "How was that?" Sands asked when the take was over. Taylor leaned into the producer's microphone on the table in front of him. "It was very nice," he said. "Now do another one, and play it like you mean it." The combo wound through another couple of takes, and Taylor listened with unflagging attentiveness, raising himself out of his seat every now and again to walk -- with some effort and a slight limp -- to the studio to render face-to-face coaching to the horns or to clarify a pianistic detail to Sands. By midday, an upper register F key on the Steinway had gone sour after the morning's drubbing. While the piano tuner did his work, the musicians sat with Taylor in the control room. The drummer, a tall dark man named Jesse Hameen, kept taking a seat next to Taylor to express his gratitude. Hameen is in his 50s, and, as it happened, had played on Taylor's Jazzmobile a few times back in the '80s. "You put a lot of money in my pocket, a lot of our pockets," Hameen said. "I'm glad," Taylor said. Hameen mentioned that he was putting together a local program of visiting artists and wanted to know if Taylor would consider making an appearance next year. Taylor demurred. "Well, I'm not doing a whole lot now, just trying to get my library together. I've spent too much time away from my wife. I've got to come back in now." "How long you been married?" "Sixty-five years," Taylor said. "Wow," Hameen said. "That's a blessing." "That's right. I was lucky. I met somebody very special. She brought up our kids, while I was running all over the radio, out on the road, trying to pay those bills." "But see, you were doing more than paying bills," Hameen said. "You paid a whole lot of our bills, everybody's bills. You were the one that God used to set some stuff up for us. Some people, yeah, they are just trying to pay bills, but you set up institutions. The rest of us, we need to be coming together now, sitting with you -- a Billy Taylor summit! -- figuring out how we're going to continue this tradition." "And that's what I was trying to do, with things like the Jazz-mobile," Taylor said, "but all of my elders drummed it into me: Man, you got to pass it on." "And you been doing it," Hameen said. "You helped a lot of people, helped a lot of people grow. And that's serious, man. You're a tremendous example. You put so much in motion." Taylor laughed. "Well, straight ahead, man. That's beautiful to hear." In the next room, the piano tuner was still plinking diagnostically at the Steinway's ailing F. The morning spent listening so closely to Sands's music had roused in Taylor a desire to share some songs of his own, and so with the aid of his iPod, mainlined into the studio monitors, he treated the room to a brief synopsis of the largely vanished songs he had recorded over the years. A tune he'd recorded back in the 1950s with members from Ellington's band coursed from the speakers -- a languid saxophone breathing out a husky, voluptuous murmur above the limber cadences of Taylor's chords. The room fell silent at the sound of it. After a few measures, Christian and Sylvester Sands and Jesse Hameen lapsed into a simultaneous bout of giggling wonderment. "Man," Christian Sands said, "what a sweet sound. Who's that on the saxophone?" "That's Johnny Hodges," Taylor said. "Who's that young guy on the piano?" Sylvester Sands asked. "Nobody," said Billy Taylor, smiling. "Nobody we know." "WE'VE COME TO THE SUMMIT OF OUR PROGRAM," James Earl Jones intoned from the Kennedy Center's Concert Hall on the opening night of the "Jazz in Our Time" celebration. "The reason we're all here, to honor the living jazz legends." Jones called the 32 legends to the stage. They stood for a long moment in their medals and red ribbons, blinking and smiling under the stage lights, while the room shook with applause. When the ovations died down, the honorees turned and made their way at a careful pace, into the darkness of the wings. With the evening almost at its end, the chairman of the Kennedy Center's board of trustees came out to utter praise for "our own living legend, Dr. Billy Taylor." And after the chairman declaimed Taylor's long inventory of achievements and job titles, Taylor was permitted at last to play the piano. The piece he'd chosen was his most famous composition, "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free," arranged with a full jazz orchestra and a 50-person choir. After an introductory flourish of horns, Taylor played by himself. At the end of a night of brisk ensemble numbers and lush orchestral spectacles, a lonely, pondering elegance emanated from Taylor's unaccompanied piano. The melody was sure-handed but still halting, contemplative, its silences full of the melancholy wisdom of the blues. Even with the bandstand crowded to capacity, never before in the evening's program had the stage seemed as private and solitary a place as it did during Taylor's meandering soliloquy. One couldn't help feeling a kind of grief and deprivation when the band came in and the choir swelled, and Billy Taylor's piano became lost in plain sight. Wells Tower is a contributing writer for the Magazine and can be reached at 20071@washpost.com. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at noon. View all comments that have been posted about this article. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Looks good!

What did you think of "Cry Me A River" and "Chelsea Bridge"?

Tonight @ 10 p.m. est. "Live From Blue Lake" features New York guitarist John Hart's Quartet performing from our studios with saxophonist Jed Levy (http://www.jedlevy.com), bassist Kelly Friesen (http://www.kellyfriesen.com) and drummer Rudy Petschauer. For information on John Hart please see: http://www.hepjazz.com/bios/johnhart.html. This radio appearance is in support of the band's participation in Tim Scully's World Class Jazz Mini Tour which finds them performing Tuesday through Sunday in several small towns and villages in northern lower and western Michigan (see: www.bluelake.org/datebook.html). Earlier this evening, at 7 p.m., The Blue Lake International Jazz Band Homecoming Concert features this talented big band of high school age musicians playing before 2,000 fellow campers, parents and teachers at Blue Lake's Stewart Memorial Music Shell on Little Blue Lake and broadcast live on Blue Lake Public Radio. The band toured Europe for a month this summer, then spent a week on the road around the Great Lakes. Both of these events will stream live from http://bluelake.ncats.net/. After the John Hart performance, Jazz From Blue Lake will celebrate the birthday of Buster Bailey on the "The Jazz Retrospective, " hear some of tenor saxophonist Arno Marsh (Woody Herman's Third Herd, The Carl Fontana-Arno Marsh Quintet) who returns to Grand Rapids for a performance this Friday at 8:30 at Bistro Bella Vita, and feature the finest in recorded jazz until 3 a.m. Lazaro Vega Jazz Director Blue Lake Public Radio www.bluelake.org

This just came across the Jazz Programmer's List: (Quote) Some news recently announced....this is apparently true so good news for webcasters. At today's Congressional hearing...... SoundExchange, which was scheduled to receive the new royalty payments on Monday morning (since the enforcement date falls on a Sunday), made a startling statement. The SoundExchange executive [Jon Simson, executive director] promised -- in front of Congress -- that SoundExchange will not enforce the new royalty rates. Webcasters will stay online, as new rates are hammered out. Tim Westergren expressed relief that Pandora wouldn't have to shut down on Sunday in response to the new rates. He said, "It was getting pretty close. I always had underlying optimism that sanity was going to prevail, but I was beginning to wonder." He said everyone who called their Congress person about this should feel that they had an effect on the process: "This is a direct result of lobbying pressure, so if anyone thinks their call didn't matter, it did. That's why this is happening." The flyer DiMA distributed to Congress today probably helped a bit too, but overall, it appears Congress intervened due to pressure from web radio listeners. ----- Update: Another source -- close to the situation although not inside today's closed-door hearing -- confirmed the following: Pandora was there; "progress was made"; the minimum fees are indeed off the table; and SoundExchange and the webcasters that were part of the Copyright Royalty Board hearings are going to have another chat about the rates. However, the source said the big question right now is whether webcasters not part of the CRB hearing might still have to pay the rates set by the board, minus the minimum fees. Basically, this news qualifies as a reprieve, but internet radio won't be truly saved until negotiations result in a workable royalty rate. Another Update: This story has been confirmed by Kurt Hanson of RAIN. ----- Westergren had more to say, lending insight into a process that was largely opaque to non-participants. Apparently, the per-channel minimum fees mandated by the Copyright Royalty Board were never taken very seriously by those involved. They've now been taken off the table completely, saving Pandora, Live365, and other multicasters from their most imminent threat. Instead, per-station minimums will be capped at $50,000 per year. "No one thought those per station fees were remotely rational. It only makes sense that they're being taken off the table." As for the Copyright Royalty Board? They're entirely cut out of the process, having set the rates and then refused a rehearing. Going forward without the royalties being collected, SoundExchange and webcasters will negotiate a new royalty rate with Congress looking over their shoulder -- "and last but not least, the public looking over Congress's shoulder." Alternatively, Congress now has time to consider the Internet Radio Equality Act, which would set webcaster royalties at 7.5 percent of revenue and allow them to continue operating pretty much as they have been. Either way, this is a big win for webcasters and their listeners. Again, this is a reprieve, and internet radio can't be considered saved until new rates are set that everyone can live with.

http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy_regions/um...tt-after-insult He's out.

Right. And, when we have to follow the rules for web streaming we're sticking it to the FM audience. That is our FM audience has been fed a steady diet of traditional jazz features for more than 20 years -- each hour contains about 20 minutes of historical jazz, or at least recordings by a single artist (tonight is Tomasz Stanko), which the DMCA disallows. That law says only 4 selections by the same artist in a three hour period. You can get a waiver of those rules, and we have, yet the majors won't sign off. So, for the 25 people listening on-line we are expected to follow those limitations? Bass ackwards.

Ghost, Paying a $500 a year fee won't put us out of business, and our stream is capped at 75 listeners or so. As an established small stream this should not kill us -- the new rules as I was reading them a month ago are more costly to web casters with huge audiences. Has something changed?