Articles by Arthur R George
Gravity and Resurgence: The Many Dimensions of Dexter Gordon
by Arthur R George
Long Tall Dexter; swinger, bebopper, saxophone balladeer; acting the dissipated genius expatriate who was not unlike himself in the movie Round Midnight; his dressed-up persona “Society Red;" the laconic elder statesman of his later years. Dexter Gordon is all those things, but more than a kaleidoscope of caricatures. Those who trace their lineages through Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane and beyond contain within them the earlier influence of Dexter Gordon. Joshua Redman, among contemporary players, attributes his robust ...
Continue ReadingInterruptions On A Christmas Eve
by Arthur R George
The small restaurant and occasional music bistro was closed for Christmas Eve. Its owner Ernie DiVitale had darkened the room. There was light enough, from the Christmas tree in the corner and spilling in from a lamp over the prep area in the kitchen, to relax with his wife Veronica at a back table over cappuccini and frutti di bosco tortas, ricotta cheese cake with fresh fruit toppings, a special treat in winter. For Ernie and Veronica it ...
Continue ReadingHoliday Notes Across A Hallway
by Arthur R George
A knock on the door of Augie Cannataro's apartment. He peered through the security window to see the single mother from across the hall. They had always nodded politely at each other when passing in the lobby or hallway. He was respectful but didn't want to approach an involvement in whatever her life was with her son, who Cannataro had also seen in passing and had heard through the walls of their apartments making painful attempts at saxophone practice.
Continue ReadingAutumn Jazz Weathers Well in San Francisco
by Arthur R George
Autumn is a special season for jazz in San Francisco. The weather at other times of the year variously drives one indoors for warmth, a good enough reason to seek shelter in jazz. But in the autumn, mostly gone is the bone-chilling summer fog that pours into the city from the cold Pacific Ocean. Not yet are the winter rains that soak damp alleys. The days and nights are crisp and clear, good for being out and listening. ...
Continue ReadingWhere Clifford Brown Learned to Play: Love In A Wilmington Neighborhood
by Arthur R George
Part 1 | Part 2 Robert “Boysie" Lowery was trumpeter Clifford Brown's first music instructor in the early 1940s, and mentored decades of young musicians thereafter in Wilmington, Delaware. He taught as a sideline to club work, a resource for his community but caring not so much about being paid for his lessons. That generosity continues with the eighth year of a tuition-free Boysie Lowery Living Jazz Residency, in conjunction with the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, which runs ...
Continue ReadingDecades of Worldwide Promotion By the Man in the Room
by Arthur R George
A Life In Music Wulf Müller 384 Pages ISBN: # 9798353190752 Amazon Direct Publishing2022 Working in Europe and facilitating jazz internationally, Wulf Müller reveals himself in his autobiography A Life in Music (Amazon Direct Publishing, 2022) as a man who for 40 years was in the rooms where it happened. That was true even by long distance phone call, as with Sonny Rollins who held Müller on the line while the saxophonist ...
Continue ReadingThe Lives of Lost Pianos Look Past Siberian Terrors
by Arthur R George
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Sophy Roberts 433 Pages ISBN: 0802149286 Doubleday/Grove Atlantic2020 In The Lost Pianos of Siberia (Doubleday/Grove Atlantic, 2020), British writer Sophy Roberts uses the piano to channel the past and tell the stories of people's lives through earlier cycles of Russian history before the current Ukraine violence. Roberts comes to understand pianos not as mere inanimate objects, passive elements in jazz and classical music until played, but characterized ...
Continue ReadingEda And: Live in Hamburg
by Arthur R George
Turkish pianist Eda And went large in her ambitious debut CD, Augmented Life (Kalan), in 2018, leading a contemporary jazz big band in Istanbul through compositions and arrangements that she originally created for the NDR Bigband in Hamburg, Germany. She has returned, scaled back and in a completely different direction, solo, with Live in Hamburg on the Z Musik label. Covid's travel restrictions had made And more reminiscent about her Turkish roots while sequestered in her second home ...
Continue ReadingBebop, Beats, and the Drive of Beat Literature
by Arthur R George
"Mulberry-eyed girls in black stockings, Smelling vaguely of mint jelly and last night's bongo drummer... fling their arrow legs / To the heavens / Losing their doubts in the beat" of San Francisco nights, announced poet Bob Kaufman's “Bagel Shop Jazz." (Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness, New Directions Publishing, 1965; Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman, City Lights, 2019) “Angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,.. floating across the tops of cities ...
Continue ReadingGaga, Bennett, The Count, Presidents: Harold Jones Drums Across History
by Arthur R George
When Tony Bennett stepped past the twilight of Alzheimer's onto the stage of Radio City Music Hall in New York City in August 2021, drummer Harold Jones was there ready for him, as he had been for Bennett over the past seventeen years, in a friendship going back to 1968. Lady Gaga, the popstar recreated as a jazz singer and Bennett's partner on two Columbia albums, Cheek to Cheek in 2014 and this year's Love for Sale, both also with ...
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