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Results for "Rifftides by Doug Ramsey"
The Bill Holman Film
The Bill Holman documentary that I helped with late last year is moving closer to reality. Its producer, Kathryn King, has launched a fund-raising drive to help her and her crew complete the filmon schedule. That is how many projects are accomplished these days when they don’t have the backing of big Hollywood investors. Few of ...
Passings: Alice Babs, Dick Berk
Alice Babs, the Swedish singer whom Duke Ellington once called “probably the most unique artist I know,” died today in her native Sweden. She was 90. Her breakthrough came in 1940 in the Swedishfilm Swing it magistern (Swing It, Teacher!) She went on to make her name in stage, motion picture and television work, singing in ...
MLK and Freedom Suite
It is late on Martin Luther King Day to be posting an MLK tribute, but it would be an even more serious oversight not to do so. To one who reported on the civil rights movement in the American South and was sometimes in the midst of its demonstrations, marches, brutality and occasional elation, the images ...
Rowles on Tatum
Many stories about jazz heroes are apocryphal. This is one is true. One night in the late 1930s, Fats Waller And His Rhythm were playing at the Yacht Club on 52nd Street in Manhattan. Art Tatum, the other half of the Tatum-Waller mutual admiration society, came in to listen. When he first moved to New York, ...
"Does Anyone Remember Conrad Gozzo?"
In response to the Rifftides post about the death of Al Porcino, reader Dick Vartanian sent a comment: I remember Al Porcino well and had deep regard for his playing. But does anyone remember a equally great countryman of his named Conrad Gozzo? Jack Greenberg responded with this: Everyone who is my age (70 years old) ...
The New NEA Jazz Masters: Jamey Aebersold
With a 1962 Indiana University master’s degree in saxophone, Jamey Aebersold might have carved out a career as a performer. He has never stopped playing, but a casual request set him on a course that led to success as the best-known third-party teacher in jazz. In 1966, a student at a workshop asked Aebersold, who is ...
The New NEA Jazz Masters: Anthony Braxton
There has been disagreement for more than forty years about whether the saxophonist, composer and sometime pianist Anthony Braxton is a jazz musician. With many others, he long insisted that the music he wrote and played was not jazz, but in 1993 he told author Cole Gagne, ...even though I have been saying I’m not a ...
The New NEA Jazz Masters: Keith Jarrett
Pianist Keith Jarrett is one of the four new NEA Jazz Masters who will accept their awards at Lincoln Center Monday evening. In its advance publicity, the National Endowment for the Arts says that Jarrett has a “talent for playing both abstractly and lyrically, sometimes during the same song.” True as that assessment is, it doesn’t ...
The New NEA Jazz Masters: Richard Davis
The 2014 NEA Jazz Masters will receive their awards in a ceremony at New York’s Lincoln Center Monday evening, January 13. The four recipients are pianist Keith Jarrett, saxophonist Anthony Braxton, bassist Richard Davis and—in the jazz advocacy category—publisher, recording executive and musician Jamey Aebersold. They will be the 32nd group in the jazz community to ...




