Music Industry News

Desmond Redux in Berlin

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
November 30, 2008

We may as well keep the Desmond string running through the weekend. After the Dave Brubeck Quartet disbanded at the end of 1967, Desmond did not play for more than a year. It wasn't a matter of simply not performing in public or not recording. He did not take his saxophone out of the case, allegedly concentrating on writing How Many Of You Are There In The Quartet? the book that never happened. He also lolled around in the Caribbean. ...

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Louie Bellson Said It

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers
November 29, 2008

"You can imagine the excitement that Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson created. That's the reaction that big bands had in those days. When Harry James played Two O'clock Jump, You Made Me Love You or Bugle Call Rag, people just freaked out. They just stopped while they were dancing to listen. We would play before 3,000 people at the Palladium, but I remember some of those navy and air force bases where we played before fourteen or fifteen thousand people. ...

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Paul Desmond on the Nature of Fame

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
November 29, 2008

Ted O'Reilly, the Toronto broadcaster, sent me a recording of an interview he did with Paul Desmond in 1975. O'Reilly asked if there was a moment when Desmond realized the astounding degree of popularity the Dave Brubeck Quartet had achieved. Not really, Paul said, but that reminded him of a favorite question.

We were on a State Department tour in '59, and we landed in Ismir, Turkey, and there was this huge hoop-de-do at the airport. They had ...

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James Taylor Tells the Stories Behind His Favorite Covers

Source: All About Jazz
November 28, 2008

For years, James Taylor has been covering many of his favorite songs from the 1950s and 1960s during soundchecks before his concerts. This past September, he released some of them on Covers, a collection of twelve classic tracks he recorded at his Massachusetts studio. He recently sat down with Rolling Stone to discuss some of his favorites songs on the set, from Leonard Cohen to Elvis Presley to the Drifters. Leonard Cohen - Suzanne Leonard predates me a ...

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Deadly Clash in Hollywood Between Swedish Rapper and Jazz Performer

Source: Michael Ricci
November 28, 2008

After midnight Sunday, John Osnes, a pianist who performed jazz standards and Beatles songs at piano bars in Hollywood, put an empty glass down on the counter of one of his favorite haunts, The Spotlight, and waved goodbye to an employee. “He said, 'Benji, I will see you tomorrow for sure,' “ bartender Benjamin Avery recalled. An hour later, Osnes, 55, lay dying in a crosswalk a few blocks away, the victim, police say, of a violent road rage attack ...

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Nowra Gets into the Jazz Groove with La Fumee

Source: All About Jazz
November 28, 2008

PUT three 18-year-old musicians together and the last thing you’d expect to get is a jazz band. But that is exactly what Le Fumee is – a three-piece jazz ensemble made up of high school friends Tom Sherringham, Tom Wade and Pat Langdon. They have only been performing as an ensemble for a few months but the response from the community has been surprising, to say the least. “We’ve had a good response, surprisingly good,” Pat said. “People have come ...

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Meet a Singer Who's Right on Song: Christine Tobin

Source: All About Jazz
November 28, 2008

Christine Tobin stops mid-sentence and tells herself to put her shovel away and stop digging. The Dublin-born singer has just been waxing lyrical about the power of sad songs to make both singer and listener feel better when she realises she might be setting herself up for inclusion in the miserable-git school of performer. She's far from miserable. It's true that, with arguably the most distinctively alluring voice on the British jazz scene, Tobin can sound like the roof's just ...

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Paul Desmond's 84th

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
November 27, 2008

Yesterday was Paul Desmond's eighty-fourth birthday. Years after Paul's death, his guitar companion Jim Hall said, “He would have been a great old man," The last birthday Desmond celebrated, his fifty-second, fell on Thanksgiving, 1976. He spent it with Jim and his wife Jane at their daughter's tiny apartment in New York City. He had taken a hiatus from his lung cancer therapy to play the Monterey Jazz Festival and an engagement at Barnaby Conrad's El Matador in San Francisco. From Take ...

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