Music Industry News

Other Places: Bill Holman at Length

Source: Rifftides by Doug Ramsey
August 6, 2008

In his JazzWax, Marc Myers has a fascinating four-part interview with Bill Holman. I'm no enthusiast of transcribed verbatim interviews, but Myers's introductions, questions and production values make the format work, and in the great arranger he has a subject whose articulateness and wit carry the reader along. Two excerpts:

I used to think that writing a jazz arrangement was like stream of consciousness, the same as a jazz solo. You just started playing and built on what ...

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David Byrne Tour/Free Track

Source: All About Jazz
August 5, 2008

EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS WILL HAPPEN TODAY SONGS OF DAVID BYRNE AND BRIAN ENO TOUR

David Byrne As previously reported, David Byrne and Brian Eno have paired up for their first record together as co-writers since the highly influential and critically acclaimed 1981 release My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Due out August 18, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today is the culmination of a year's worth of writing, recording, and travel between New York and London. The ...

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Morgan Freeman Seriously Hurt in Car Accident

Source: All About Jazz
August 4, 2008

Ground Zero Blues Club owner Morgan Freeman Seriously injured

Police say actor's car left Mississippi highway and flipped several times. Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman was seriously injured in a car accident in Mississippi on Sunday night according to the Mississippi Highway Patrol. Police report that Freeman, 71, was driving eastbound on Highway 32 near the town of Ruleville, Miss., around 11:30 p.m. when his car left the road and flipped several times. Police say Freeman and a female ...

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On a Turquoise Cloud: Duke Ellington After the War, 1945-47

Source: Night Lights Classic Jazz
August 4, 2008

At the end of World War II Duke Ellington was coming off one of the most commercially and artistically successful periods of his career--the so-called Blanton-Webster years of the early 1940s. He had managed to keep much of his orchestra intact during the war and had maintained a high public profile with concerts and broadcasts during the 1943-44 recording ban that kept him and other artists out of the studios. In late 1944 he'd scored a smash hit with “I'm ...

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Renting Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs Home

Source: All About Jazz
August 3, 2008

It was the city where the Rat Pack partied, Elvis honeymooned and Eisenhower swung the only hole in one of his life.

Palm Springs, California's fabled desert oasis, has long been a winter playground for the Hollywood set; the city lies just 100 miles (160 km) east of Los Angeles. But it is also home to an extensive array of beautifully preserved Modernist structures that have turned this golf- and-cocktails resort town into a must-see destination for devotees of architecture. ...

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Paul Lansky Computer-Music Man Unplugs

Source: Michael Ricci
August 3, 2008

AFTER 35 years immersed in the world of computer music, the composer Paul Lansky talks with wonder The enormous capacities of primitive objects carved from trees or stamped from metal sheets: violins, cellos, trumpets, pianos.

I'm interested in writing for real people at this point. To create the sound of a violin -- wow! I can't do that on a computer. --Paul Lansky-- in acoustic-instrument mode.

Mr. Lansky has written a new chapter, or at least ...

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Xeric Winner "Jazz: Cool Birth" Based on '50s Album Cover Design

Source: All About Jazz
August 1, 2008

Through study of album covers, television program title artwork, and common illustrations used in everything from health booklets to instruction manuals from the 1950s, author/designer Gary Scott Beatty created recent Xeric Foundation grant winner “Jazz: Cool Birth," a jazz club murder mystery. The comic will appear in September's Previews preorder magazine under Aazurn Publishing. “I hope to pull readers into the late night clubs of 1957, feeling the music through the visuals," Beatty explained. Ignoring paint and ink magazine illustration, ...

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Dispatches from the End of the Jazz Wars

Source: All About Jazz
August 1, 2008

By Darcy James Argue We've heard it all before: Classical music is dead. Punk is dead. Hip hop is dead. Jazz is dead. Whatever the musical genre, you can be sure that someone somewhere is saying it's dead. Apparently, musical death is, like death in superhero comics, both ubiquitous and impermanent. That's not to say that a marginal art form like jazz doesn't face special challenges in this brave new post-music-industry era. Online sales of classical music have been surprisingly ...

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