From Far and Wide

Library of Congress Acts to Save Old Recordings More than half of the oldest sound recordings, including some masters by George Gershwin, Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra, have been lost over the years, according to the Library of Congress. Patrick Loughney, chief of the library's audiovisual conservation division, believes the nation has developed a “cultural amnesia," ...

Guitarist Tomas Janzon Basks in Bassists Players who lead trios and duos featuring a bassist tend to stick with one. Tomas Janzon is happy with Essiet Essiet, 56, drummer Art Blakey's last bassist. Yet, “There are so many extraordinary bassists in New York," the Big Apple-based Swedish guitarist tells me, “that I am happy to work ...

Shakespeare's Sonnets Sung to a Jazz Beat “If music be the food of love, play on." And while you're at it, set 16 of Shakespeare's sonnets to music, and play and sing them to a jazz beat. Which, by my troth, is exactly what Caroll Vanwelden has done. The comely Belgian pianist wanted to produce a ...

12 Horns Hope to Blow Westward Imagine a band of 12 saxophonists from 12 countries and musical backgrounds, with a touring calendar of at least 10 indoor and outdoor venues-including a marketplace and a train station-from July through December, 2012. Meet The European Saxophone Ensemble. Aged 18 to 34, the players range “from a virtuous contemporary ...

Record-Busting 100+ Bassists Serenade Tivoli The seeds were planted by Oscar Pettiford, the seminal American cellist and bassist who put down roots in Copenhagen in 1958, and by the homegrown virtuoso Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, who played his vintage Italian bass like the nimblest-fingered guitarist when he wasn't bowing like Giovanni Bottesini. In August, 2012, the Danish ...

Final Call to See “Pops" Making Records September, 2012 is final call to catch Genius at Work: Louis Armstrong in the Recording Studio, the currently featured exhibit at the Louis Armstrong House and Museum in Corona, Queens, New York. “Records as well as photographs, scores and other artifacts reveal Armstrong hard at work recording his masterpieces," ...

Arabic Roots in Blues, Jazz, Rock? Yes, Says Hofstra Prof Does Islamic music have anything to do with the blues, jazz and rock? A whole lot, asserts Dr. Hussein Rashid, a native New Yorker who teaches religion at Hofstra University. In a lecture at Southern Methodist University in Texas, Rashid spoke of several waves of Islamic-Arabic ...

John--and Bucky--Pizzarelli's First CD with Paul McCartney Kisses on the Bottom (Hear Music, 2012), the album of vocal standards Paul McCartney always wanted to make with The Beatles, is the knighted bassist/singer's first release in nearly five years. Diana Krall and members of the pianist-arranger's band back him on most tracks. The New York Times singled ...

Ahmad Jamal's Identity Crisis

Ahmad Jamal a terrorist? Surely not the renowned American pianist who's given hundreds of concerts over the last half century. So it was puzzling why the $10,000 that the Festival da Jazz in Moritz, Switzerland ordered paid to Jamal in advance of his July 16 appearance, was promptly frozen by U.S. authorities. ...

Would you pay $8,750 for a used but pampered hardcover copy of the classic Lady Sings the Blues, autographed by Billie Holiday?

If you were a jazz bibliophile with deep pockets, and the book was a declared first edition, “boldly and handsomely SIGNED and inscribed at the first blank page"-- and, according to the bookseller's catalogue, ...

To celebrate his 31st birthday, the New York-based, Canadian composer and soprano saxophonist Rob Mosher gave himself a challenge: writing 31 Bach-style chorales in 31 days. He started October 20, and at press time he was on target. “I'm a big fan of Duke Ellington's 'I don't need time, I need a deadline' approach," quotes Mosher. ...

Tenants of Tin Pan Alley are showing ever more pride in their habitat. Apartment residents and ground floor shops occupy the row of five historic brownstones on West 28th Street, Manhattan, where America's enormous sheet music industry took root in the 1850s. Here the careers of galleon figures Irving Berlin, W.C. Handy, George Gershwin and Ira ...

Two East Coast Big Bands specialize in music of the 1920s and '30s. Vince Giordano and His Nighthawks share the pre-Swing era with Long Island trombonist Ray Osnato and his South Shore Syncopators, a 10-piece band with five singers whose performances mimic a 1930s radio show, complete with honey-tongued announcer. Like Giordano, Osnato started young, collecting ...

WITH THE JAZZ PUBLIC “SHRINKING," a new group of activists formed a “#jazzlives" campaign on Twitter to buck the trend. Surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts picture jazz being viewed by ever more Americans as a high-culture art form, like classical music. Fewer are hearing it live than at any time since the late ...