Music Industry News

Oliver Lake Featured in St. Louis American

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
August 29, 2008

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Diversion: Marimba Queens Meet Insane Bassist

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
August 29, 2008

Rifftides reader David Peterkofsky inquired about modern-day jazz marimba players. In the course searching, I ran across a 1940s soundie with marimbists galore. This has little to do with jazz, but it's an opportunity to see a bass player who makes Chubby Jackson seem catatonic. 

As for Mr. Peterkofsky's question, Bobby Hutcherson, Stefon Harris, Dave Samuels, Cal Tjader, Mike Mainieri, Emil Richards and Gary Burton have all used marimba as well as vibes. If readers have leads to other current marimba soloists, ...

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The Next Generation of Jazz

Source: All About Jazz
August 28, 2008

You could say it all began with a blue Porsche. It is what jazz musician Chris Brubeck remembers distinctly about his junior high music teacher Ray Tiezzi, who gave him his first few trombone lessons more than 40 years ago in Connecticut. “It was a cool-looking car -- part of his persona," Brubeck, son of noted jazz pianist Dave Brubeck, said of Tiezzi's wheels. “He was a really cool cat." Tiezzi went on to become the longtime principal at Amesbury ...

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Most Sung-About Body Part? The Eyes Have It

Source: All About Jazz
August 26, 2008

Visual artists Fernanda Vigas and Martin Wattenberg analyzed over 10,000 songs to find out which parts of the human body were mentioned the most and broke down the resulting data by genre.

The result: An interactive graphic work called “Listen" that correlates musical genres with the body parts they mention the most, as part of their ongoing Fleshmap project. Clicking on each genre brings up a more detailed representation of its chief bodily concerns.

“Listen investigates the relationship between language ...

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How We Forgot the City of Jazz and Jambalaya

Source: All About Jazz
August 25, 2008

Three years after Hurricane Katrina, the world's media has lost sight of the ongoing misery in New Orleans. Richard Holledge picks up the story Anyone hungry for the big news story might be underwhelmed by a newspaper announcing that it was restoring the ratings for restaurant reviews. But that was “a big deal" for The Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily paper, according to its editor Jim Amoss. “It signalled a degree of return to normality and recovery that everyone here ...

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The Horace Silver Songbook

Source: Night Lights Classic Jazz
August 25, 2008

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Foundry Arts Centre Getting More Funding from City of St. Charles

Source: St. Louis Jazz Notes by Dean Minderman
August 24, 2008

The Foundry Arts Centre, which last year served as the venue for Jazz St. Louis' St. Charles concert series, is getting some financial help from the city of St. Charles. According to an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Charles is giving the Centre $30,000 to help with operating expenses, helping to offset a fund-raising shortfall that officials say stems mostly from a dropoff in corporate donations. The city, which helped finance the redevelopment of the ...

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Other Places: John Coltrane, Bud Shank

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
August 24, 2008

John Coltrane

In the August 21 Wall Street Journal, Nat Hentoff tells of a New York second grade teacher, Christine Pasarella, who uses John Coltrane as a classroom role model in her work of drawing out the intelligence of her students. He reports Mrs. Pasarella saying that when she played Coltrane's recordings...

“...the children were drawn to the range of feelings in the songs as I gave them the backgrounds of the compositions.

“'Alabama,' for example, was about ...

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