Gerald Wilson, Versatile Jazz Arranger

“Even if you were chronologically decades or maybe generations younger than Gerald, you always felt like he was the youngest person in the room,” Loren Schoenberg, a saxophonist and conductor who is the artistic director of the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, said in an interview on Tuesday. “He had none of that feeling that you were hanging out with a guy from the 1930s or 1940s.”

Mr. Wilson was often a behind-the-scenes influence; even if you had never heard of him, you were often hearing him. Usually he was given credit. Sometimes his work was brazenly borrowed.

The memorable melody from “Yard Dog Mazurka,” the stomping hit he wrote for Lunceford (and among Mr. Wilson’s favorites of his own compositions), resurfaced as “Intermission Riff,” a hit for the Stan Kenton band for which Ray Wetzel was credited as the composer. Mr. Wilson considered suing but decided against it. Years later, he wrote for Mr. Kenton — and received credit.

Horace Silver, 85, Master of Earthy Jazz

Heard his music last night, Wednesday 18 June 2014, on my ride home (in my new Subaru). I didn't know of his death. I supposed it was his birthday.

Horace Silver, a pianist, composer and bandleader who was one of the most popular and influential jazz musicians of the 1950s and ’60s, died on Wednesday at his home in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was 85. His death was announced by Blue Note Records, the company for which he recorded from 1952 to 1979.

After a high-profile apprenticeship with some of the biggest names in jazz, Mr. Silver began leading his own group in the mid-1950s and quickly became a big name himself, celebrated for his clever compositions and his infectious, bluesy playing. At a time when the refined, quiet and, to some, bloodless style known as cool jazz was all the rage, he was hailed as a leader of the back-to-basics movement that came to be called hard bop.

Hard bop and cool jazz shared a pedigree: They were both variations on bebop, the challenging, harmonically intricate music that changed the face of jazz in the 1940s. But hard bop was simpler and more rhythmically driven, with more emphasis on jazz’s blues and gospel roots. The jazz press tended to portray the adherents of cool jazz (most of them West Coast-based and white) and hard bop (most of them East Coast-based and black) as warring factions. But Mr. Silver made an unlikely warrior.

His albums included “Song for My Father,” which featured his father on the cover.  

Credit Blue Note Records 

 

His piano playing, like his compositions, was not that easily characterized. Deftly improvising ingenious figures with his right hand while punching out rumbling bass lines with his left, he managed to evoke boogie-woogie pianists like Meade Lux Lewis and beboppers like Bud Powell simultaneously. Unlike many bebop pianists, however, Mr. Silver emphasized melodic simplicity over harmonic complexity; his improvisations, while sophisticated, were never so intricate as to be inaccessible.

Horace Ward Martin Tavares Silver was born on Sept. 2, 1928, in Norwalk, Conn. His father, who was born John Silva but changed the family name to the more American-sounding Silver after immigrating to the United States, worked in a rubber factory. His mother, Gertrude, was a maid and sang in a church choir.

“I had the house rhythm section at a club called the Sundown in Hartford,” Mr. Silver told The New York Times in 1981. “Stan Getz came up and played with us. He said he was going to call us, but we didn’t take him seriously. But a couple of weeks later he called and said he wanted the whole trio to join him.”

Mr. Silver worked briefly with Getz before moving to New York in 1951. He was soon in demand as an accompanist, working with leading jazz musicians like the saxophonists Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. In 1953, Mr. Silver and the drummer Art Blakey formed a cooperative group, the Jazz Messengers, whose aggressive style helped define hard bop and whose lineup of trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums became the standard hard-bop instrumentation.

He's in the Great Day in Harlem picture.

 

Like Blakey, Miles Davis (with whom he recorded) and a few others, Mr. Silver was known for discovering and nurturing young talent, including the saxophonists Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson and Michael Brecker; the trumpeters Art Farmer, Woody Shaw, Tom Harrell and Dave Douglas; and the drummers Louis Hayes and Billy Cobham. His longest-lived ensemble, which lasted about five years in the late 1950s and early ’60s, featured Blue Mitchell on trumpet and Junior Cook on tenor saxophone. 

Jim Hall, Jazz Guitarist, Dies at 83

A modern American master.

Jim Hall, a jazz guitarist who for more than 50 years was admired by critics, aficionados and especially his fellow musicians for his impeccable technique and the warmth and subtlety of his playing, died on Tuesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 83. The cause was heart failure, his wife, Jane, said.

Jim and Jane. Cute.

The list of important musicians with whom Mr. Hall worked was enough to earn him a place in jazz history. It includes the pianist Bill Evans, with whom he recorded two acclaimed duet albums, and the singer Ella Fitzgerald, as well as the saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Paul Desmond, the drummer Chico Hamilton and the bassist Ron Carter, his frequent partner in a duo. 

But with his distinctive touch, his inviting sound and his finely developed sense of melody, Mr. Hall made it clear early in his career that he was an important musician in his own right. 

He was an influential one as well. Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell and John Scofield are among the numerous younger guitarists who acknowledge him as an inspiration. Mr. Hall, who never stopped being open to new ideas and new challenges, worked at various times with all three.

What an impressive catalogue of musicians.

Like most of his guitar-playing peers, he was influenced by the first two great jazz guitar soloists: Charlie Christian, best known for his work with Benny Goodman, and the Belgian Gypsy Django Reinhardt. But he derived as much inspiration from saxophone players as he did from other guitarists. 

He was from Cleveland.


Moving to Los Angeles, where he studied classical guitar, he became a charter member of the Chico Hamilton Quintet, one of the first and most successful exemplars of the soft-spoken style known as cool jazz. (Mr. Hamilton died last month.) He then worked with the clarinetist, saxophonist and composer Jimmy Giuffre, whose adventurous approach to both composition and improvisation had a lasting impact on Mr. Hall’s own music.

Cedar Walton, Pianist and Composer, 79

Cedar Walton, a pianist who distinguished himself as both an accompanist and a soloist, and who wrote some of the most enduring compositions in modern jazz while a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the early 1960s, died on Monday at his home in Brooklyn. Mr. Walton sat in with Charlie Parker, spent a year accompanying the singer Abbey Lincoln, and recorded with both John Coltrane and, much later, the saxophonist Joshua Redman. He led a series of successful small groups, including a trio and a quartet that both featured his longtime collaborator, the drummer Billy Higgins. Yet he probably remained best known for his early work with one of the most influential incarnations of the Jazz Messengers, the group that the drummer Art Blakey ran as a kind of postgraduate performance academy for rising jazz stars.

 Rachel Papo for The New York Times - Cedar Walton performing with his quartet in 2009.

 

Mulgrew Miller

Mulgrew Miller, a jazz pianist whose soulful erudition, clarity of touch and rhythmic aplomb made him a fixture in the postbop mainstream for more than 30 years, died on Wednesday in Allentown, Pa.

I saw him at an Ellington Society concert.

Abram Wilson

Laura told me about this musician, and of seeing his obit while sitting at our favorite restaurant in Kingston, the Canard Enchaine. As she described him, he was indeed a fascinating person.

Mr. Wilson, who was raised in New Orleans and steeped in its hybrid musical traditions, was known for combining musical forms — melding quicksilver bebop with cloudbursts of hip-hop or passages of Stevie Wonder sung in his modest Sunday chorister’s voice.

He wove story lines into some of his most ambitious music. The autobiographical 2007 concept album, “Ride! Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta,” for example, was a kind of jazz opera about a trumpeter who tries to escape his jazz roots to become a hip-hop megastar, but who returns to the fold in the end. 

While earning a clutch of British awards for his work, including a BBC Jazz Award for best new CD in 2007, Mr. Wilson demonstrated a commitment to his American jazz roots that often surfaced with almost missionary fervor, music critics said. Onstage, between numbers, he sometimes gave extemporaneous history lessons about the many musical currents that flowed into New Orleans jazz. 

Mr. Wilson attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. also studied there), and graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University before earning a master’s degree in performance and composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester.

 In New York he formed his own quartet and played with the trumpeter Roy Hargrove’s big band, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and the rhythm and blues singer Ruth Brown. After moving to London in 2002, Mr. Wilson made three albums for Dune Records, a British jazz label: “Jazz Warrior” (2004), “Ride! Ferris Wheel to the Modern Day Delta” (2007) and “Life Paintings” (2009).

His survivors include his wife, his parents, four brothers, a sister and his grandmother, Oradell Barker.

He had recently finished and begun performing a jazz suite about the life of Philippa Schuyler, an American piano prodigy, born to a black father and white mother, who toured the country in the 1930s and ’40s, became disillusioned by American racism and died in 1967 on a charitable mission in Vietnam at age 35.

In a review in April, John Fordham, a jazz critic for The Guardian, described the piece as a poignant portrait of an artist undone by the American racial divide. Mr. Wilson, he wrote, hoped to stage it as a play soon, adding, “It is a work in progress that will be fascinating to follow.”

Ray Bryant

From WBGO's website, a tribute to this magnificent pianist.

Soulful, boogie-woogie-blues stylist Ray Bryant passed away on Thursday, June 2nd at New York Hospital in Queens.  He was 79.  Here's the New York Times obituary.  WBGO's Becca Pulliam recently interviewed pianist Randy Weston regarding Bryant's legacy.  Listen to Weston's take on his close friend's unique style and favorite recordings.

There are several sound clips on the page.


 From the Times obit: Mr. Bryant had a firm touch and an unshakable sense of time, notably in his left hand, which he often used to build a bedrock vamp. Even in a bebop setting, he favored the ringing tonalities of the gospel church. And he was sumptuously at home with the blues, as a style and a sensibility but never as an affectation. 

Along with his wife, Mr. Bryant is survived by a son, Raphael Bryant Jr.; a daughter, Gina; three grandchildren; and two brothers, Leonard and Lynwood. Mr. Bryant’s sister, Vera Eubanks, is the mother of several prominent jazz musicians: Robin Eubanks, a trombonist; Kevin Eubanks, the guitarist and former bandleader on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno”; and Duane Eubanks, a trumpeter.

Jazz icon Sam Rivers dead at 88

Joy was the word that resurfaced again and again when musicians and friends remembered Sam Rivers, a saxophonist, flutist and composer whose long list of credits included work with the legendary Miles Davis. Rivers, an internationally known jazz icon and fixture on the Orlando music scene for roughly two decades, died Monday night from pneumonia, his daughter confirmed Tuesday. He was 88. Until September, Rivers had continued his weekly open rehearsals with his powerful big band, the Rivbea Orchestra, at the Orlando musician's union hall.

Basie alum

Frank Foster, a saxophonist, composer and arranger who helped shape the sound of the Count Basie Orchestra during its popular heyday in the 1950s and ’60s and later led expressive large and small groups of his own, died on Tuesday at his home in Chesapeake, Va. He was 82. Mr. Foster wrote and arranged a number of songs for the band, none more celebrated than “Shiny Stockings,” a puckishly genteel theme set at a cruising medium tempo with a slow but powerful crescendo. Recorded by Basie on his classic 1955 album “April in Paris,” it subsequently became both a band signature and a jazz standard, often performed with lyrics (there were two sets, one by Ella Fitzgerald and one by Jon Hendricks).

The Ellington Society had him in concert several years back, at Merkin Hall.

Mr. Foster attended the historically black Wilberforce University in Ohio, after being rejected by Oberlin College and the Cincinnati Conservatory. He played in and arranged for Wilberforce’s dance band, the Collegians.

Father of Modern Discography

Brian Rust, a discographic detective who compiled comprehensive guides to recorded jazz and other popular music, in the process setting the standard for the modern field, died on Jan. 5 in Swanage, in southern England. He was 88.

Billy Taylor, Dr.

Well educated and well spoken, he came across, Ben Ratliff wrote in The Times in a review of a 1996 nightclub performance, like “a genial professor,” which he was: he taught jazz courses at Long Island University, the Manhattan School of Music and elsewhere. But he was also a compelling performer and a master of the difficult art of making jazz accessible without watering it down.


His “greatest asset,” Mr. Ratliff wrote, “is a sense of jazz as entertainment, and he’s not going to be obscure about it.”

A pianist with impeccable technique and an elegant, almost self-effacing style, Dr. Taylor worked with some of the biggest names in jazz early in his career and later led a trio that worked regularly in New York nightclubs and recorded many albums. But he left his mark on jazz less as a musician than as a proselytizer, spreading the gospel of jazz as a serious art form in high school and college lectures, on radio and television, on government panels and foundation boards. He also helped bring jazz to predominantly black neighborhoods with Jazzmobile, an organization he founded in 1965 to present free outdoor concerts by nationally known musicians at street corners and housing projects throughout New York City.

“I knew that jazz was not as familiar to young blacks as James Brown and the soul thing,” he told Barbara Campbell of The Times in 1971. “If you say to a young guy in Harlem Duke Ellington is great, he’s going to be skeptical until he has seen him on 127th Street.”

Shortly after moving to New York in 1943 — within two days of his arrival, he later recalled — he began working with the tenor saxophonist Ben Webster at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street, and he remained a fixture on that celebrated nightclub row for many years.

Joya Sherrill

Stan Wayman, via Time Life Pictures—Getty Images - Joya Sherrill in the 1960s

 Joya Sherrill, who sang with Duke Ellington as a teenager, toured the Soviet Union with Benny Goodman and was one of the first African-American performers to host a children’s television show, died on June 28 at her home in Great Neck, N.Y. She was 85.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Richard Guilmenot III, who said she had been suffering from leukemia.

Born in Bayonne, N.J., on Aug. 20, 1924, Joya Sherrill originally aspired to be a writer. While she was still in high school, her father arranged through a mutual friend for her to meet Duke Ellington so she could sing him the lyrics she had written to his theme song, “Take the ‘A’ Train.”

Impressed by her performance, he asked her to “keep in touch” because he could “always use a good singer in the band,” she recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 1979. “I thought that was just flattery,” she said, but six months later he offered to hire her when she finished high school. She joined the band in July 1942.

She left briefly to attend Wilberforce University, but returned in 1944 and remained until 1946, when she left again to marry Richard Guilmenot, a construction superintendent.

Mr. Guilmenot died in 1989. In addition to her son, of Great Neck, she is survived by a daughter, Alice Richelle Guilmenot LeNoir, of Manhattan; a sister, Alice Kinnebrew of Atlanta; and two grandchildren.

Although she left the Ellington band and the road, her son said, Ms. Sherrill never stopped singing. She performed and recorded under her own name and continued to work with Ellington on occasion, most notably on his television special “A Drum Is a Woman” in 1957.

“I never really left the band,” she said in 1979. “Duke would call me for jobs once a year at least.”

In 1962, Ms. Sherrill was the singer in a band assembled by Benny Goodman that performed throughout the Soviet Union. The Goodman tour, sponsored by the State Department, was the first by an American jazz ensemble behind the Iron Curtain.

Ms. Sherrill’s rendition of a Russian folk song, “Katyusha,” was a regular feature of Goodman’s concerts and provoked some controversy. An audience in Georgia hooted its disapproval when she sang it, apparently because she was singing in Russian. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia printed a letter attacking her for singing the song in an “unduly familiar cabaret style.”

In 1970, Ms. Sherrill became the host of a children’s show on the New York television station WPIX, originally called “Time for Joya” and later revamped to emphasize education and retitled “Joya’s Fun School.” Although she taped only a few years’ worth of original episodes, the show continued to be seen in reruns until 1982.

“Time for Joya” was far from a prime-time network show, but it managed to snag at least one big-name guest: Duke Ellington, who played piano, told stories and joked with the studio audience of youngsters on a memorable episode in 1970. It was one of his last television appearances.

July 8, 2010
Joya Sherrill, Who Sang With Ellington and Goodman, Is Dead at 85
By PETER KEEPNEWS

Lady Day

Ed Thigpen

Thigpen in 2005 Photograph: Kevin Statham/Redferns

Ed Thigpen obituary: Classy jazz drummer with Oscar Peterson, he was known as 'Mr Taste'

Peter Vacher: guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 24 February 2010 18.50 GMT

If the ideal preparation for a jazz drummer is to be the son of a jazz drummer, then Ed Thigpen, who has died aged 79, was well placed. His father, Ben Thigpen, was a distinguished performer in the swing era, known for his long tenure with Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy but, ironically, played little part in his son's musical progress once he had separated from the boy's mother.

With or without his father's tutelage, Ed Thigpen far surpassed his father in both his jazz accomplishments and his prominence in the genre, earning the title "Mr Taste" for his sensitivity and classy control. Marked out by peers and commentators for his exceptional yet understated command of percussive techniques, especially when using wire brushes, Thigpen worked and recorded with a wide range of musicians but was best known for his association with Oscar Peterson. In six years with the Canadian pianist, he made an array of highly regarded albums, working alongside the bassist Ray Brown in what for many was Peterson's finest trio.

Excellent trio, indeed. I have a vinyl LP record.

Thigpen was born in Chicago and spent his infancy in St Louis, where his father lived, but moved with his mother to Los Angeles in 1935 after his parents had split up. After the death of his mother when he was 12, the boy was placed with a family who had little interest in his musical aspirations and, indeed, actively disliked the drums. Despite this, he persevered and took lessons. In what was a highly segregated city, Thigpen mixed with many other African-American youngsters who aspired to be jazz musicians. At junior school, he participated in a three-way drum battle in which he came third, before moving on to the city's Jefferson high school. This establishment gained renown as a training ground for musicians because of the inspirational tuition provided by its music teacher, Samuel Browne.

Thigpen benefited from Browne's encouragement, as did the trumpeter Art Farmer, the saxophonist Dexter Gordon and the drummer Chico Hamilton, all of whom passed through the school swing band during the teacher's time. After a year in college studying sociology, Thigpen opted for the musical life – he had already played local gigs – and spent a year in St Louis with his father, whom he named, along with Count Basie's drummer Jo Jones, as his principal influence.

That is quite a roster of musicians.

By 1951 Thigpen was in New York, where he worked for six months with the ex-Duke Ellington trumpeter Cootie Williams's combo at Harlem's Savoy Ballroom before his military call-up. Posted first to Fort Ord, in California, where he was a drum instructor, he served in Korea with the Eighth Army band. During a visit to Tokyo, Thigpen encountered Peterson for the first time when the Jazz at the Philharmonic (JATP) troupe was playing there. He knew then that he wanted to perform with Peterson and told Brown: "I need to play with this group." Four years later, Thigpen replaced the guitarist Herb Ellis in Peterson's trio, which had thus far managed without a percussionist.

Back in New York after demobilisation, Thigpen worked and recorded with the singer Dinah Washington and the pianists Toshiko Akiyoshi, Billy Taylor, Bud Powell and Lennie Tristano. The call from Peterson in 1959 led to a hectic period of travel, prestigious engagements and tours with the all-star JATP package, including visits to the UK. Thigpen impressed local critics with his bandstand authority, articulacy and courteous demeanour, often making time to conduct drum clinics and workshops. He was also a key presence on Peterson's recordings, including the critically lauded Songbook series and Night Train (1962), often cited as Peterson's finest album.

After leaving Peterson, Thigpen joined Ella Fitzgerald's backing group for a year from December 1965, took on studio work and then returned to her band in 1968, staying for a further four years before trading continents and moving permanently to Copenhagen. He said race was a factor in his decision but added: "In my case, it was the love of a woman." Using Denmark as his base, Thigpen built a considerable career as a bandleader, using younger Danish musicians and recording often. He linked up with other expatriate US musicians for club dates and tours, appearing at Ronnie Scott's in the 1990s with Roots, the all-star saxophone group, and was active as a teacher, running his own percussion studio. He wrote several drum manuals and was the subject of Don McLean's 2009 documentary film Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm and Taste, its title an apt summary of Thigpen's personal and musical attributes.

Always impeccably dressed and gracious in manner, Thigpen had suffered from Parkinson's disease latterly, yet continued to perform, last appearing in public in October 2009. He is survived by his daughter Denise and his son Michael. Their mother, Inga-Lisa, died in 1981.

• Edmund Leonard Thigpen, jazz drummer and teacher, born 28 September 1930; died 13 January 2010

Village Gate Impresario

Art D'Lugoff, who ran the Village Gate nightclub, in 1993.







November 6, 2009
Art D’Lugoff, Village Gate Impresario, Dies at 85
By MARGALIT FOX

Art D’Lugoff, who was widely regarded as the dean of New York nightclub impresarios and whose storied spot, the Village Gate, was for more than 30 years home to performers as celebrated, and diverse, as Duke Ellington, Allen Ginsberg and John Belushi, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 85 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

The cause has not been determined, said Mr. D’Lugoff’s brother, Burt, a medical doctor and frequent silent partner in his joyously noisy endeavors. Mr. D’Lugoff died at the Allen Hospital of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he had been taken on Wednesday after experiencing shortness of breath.

Opened in 1958, the Village Gate was on the corner of Bleecker and Thompson Streets. The cavernous basement space it occupied — the building’s upper floors were then a flophouse — had once been a laundry.

Mr. D’Lugoff later expanded to the upper floors, and in its heyday the Gate comprised the basement space, used primarily for live music of all kinds; a street-level terrace for jazz; and the Top of the Gate, an upper-story performance space.

The club closed its doors in 1994, amid rising rents, a changing market for live music and the aftermath of some unsuccessful investments by Mr. D’Lugoff. It briefly reappeared on West 52nd Street in 1996 but sputtered out after less than a year.

Mr. D’Lugoff was also a producer of Off Broadway shows — most at the Gate — and helped conceive the National Jazz Museum in Harlem.

The Gate may have lacked the cachet of the Village Vanguard, a more intimate West Village club, but it was a bright star in the city’s cultural firmament for decades. A young Woody Allen did stand-up comedy there. The playwright-to-be Sam Shepard bused tables there. A waiter named Dustin Hoffman was fired there for being so engrossed in the performances that he neglected his customers, though service was by all accounts never the club’s strength. Dozens of albums were recorded there, by musicians like Pete Seeger and Nina Simone and by comics like Dick Gregory.

Though most often thought of as a jazz space — among the eminences heard there over the years were John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk — the Gate offered nearly every type of performance imaginable. There were blues artists like B. B. King; soul singers like Aretha Franklin; rockers like Jimi Hendrix; comics like Mort Sahl and Richard Pryor; and Beat poets. There was the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler; the odd classical recital (the composer Edgard Varèse gave the American premiere of his “Poème Électronique” there); and a duck, Hermione, who performed in the musical “Scrambled Feet,” which opened there in 1979.

Over the years the club also earned a reputation as an important Off Broadway theater space, presenting shows like “MacBird!” (1967), the Vietnam-era political satire; the revue “Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris,” which had its premiere there in 1968; and “One Mo’ Time,” the musical about black vaudeville that opened in 1979.

For many patrons, as for Mr. D’Lugoff himself, the Gate’s eclecticism was at the heart of its charm. One of his most celebrated offerings was Salsa Meets Jazz, a regular series in the 1970s that paired great Latin artists like Machito and Tito Puente with jazz titans like Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie.

But sometimes the fare grew too varied even for Mr. D’Lugoff, as he told The New York Times in 1988. “I used to put together a lot of unlikely combinations to appeal to a bigger audience,” he said. “Once we had Nina Simone, Dick Gregory and Larry Adler all on the same bill and had so much trouble deciding who would open that I went across the street and hired a guitarist.”

Arthur Joshua Dlugoff was born in Harlem on Aug. 2, 1924, the son of Raphael Dlugoff, who ran a vacuum-cleaner and sewing-machine repair shop, and the former Rachel Mandelbaum. (Art later added an apostrophe to his surname as a pronunciation aid.)

Reared in Brooklyn, Mr. D’Lugoff served with the Army Air Forces in China in World War II. He later earned a bachelor’s in literature and economics from New York University and attended law school there for one year.

For the next few years Mr. D’Lugoff enjoyed a career as eclectic as any of his concert bills, working as an encyclopedia salesman, a waiter in borscht belt hotels, a cab driver in Los Angeles, a tree surgeon’s assistant in upstate New York and a union organizer in Massachusetts and Kentucky. Returning to New York, he embarked on a career as a concert promoter, presenting calypso, folk and jazz artists around the city.

He soon wanted his own space, and the Village Gate was born. (The name stemmed from the fact that early on, patrons entered through a metal gate on Thompson Street to avoid the flophouse traffic on Bleecker.)

Besides his brother, Burt, of Baltimore, Mr. D’Lugoff is survived by his wife, the former Avital Achai; a son, Raphael; three daughters, Sharon D’Lugoff Blythe, Dahlia D’Lugoff and Rashi D’Lugoff; and five grandchildren.

One secret of the Gate’s success was Mr. D’Lugoff’s eye for what the public wished to see. This was perhaps nowhere more evident than in “Let My People Come,” which opened there in 1974. Subtitled “A Sexual Musical,” it was all singing, all dancing and almost all naked, male and female, from top to toe.

The State Liquor Authority would have none of this. Where spirit was on offer, it decreed, the flesh should not be. In a protracted battle that engendered much coverage in the news media, it lifted the Gate’s liquor license.Mr. D’Lugoff went to court, the license was reinstated and the show ran for two and a half years.

Richard M. Sudhalter in performance in the mid-1980s.


September 20, 2008
Richard M. Sudhalter, 69, Author and Jazz Trumpeter, Is Dead
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Richard M. Sudhalter, who won wide respect as a mellifluous trumpet player and perspicacious jazz historian — and ignited controversy for a book arguing that jazz was shaped by white as well as black musicians — died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 69. The final cause was pneumonia after a long period of declining health, said his partner, Dorothy Kellogg.

Mr. Sudhalter ranged widely across the jazz scene, from critic to concert producer to bandleader to scholar to raconteur to teacher to album annotator. He shared a Grammy in 1982 for notes he and John Chilton wrote for “Bunny Berigan (Giants of Jazz).” He organized the New Paul Whiteman Orchestra; became an admired fixture on the classic-jazz scene, playing with groups that included the short-lived but highly lauded Classic Jazz Quartet; and recorded for Audiophile, Challenge and other labels.

In his 1999 book, “Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945” (Oxford), he strove to controvert the widely held belief that white players contributed little to the development of jazz. His account began at jazz’s inception in New Orleans, providing captivating accounts of many important soloists, among them Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Red Norvo, Bud Freeman, the Dorsey brothers, Bunny Berigan, Pee Wee Russell and Artie Shaw.

Jason Berry, in The New York Times Book Review, praised the book’s “elegant musical analysis” and did not dispute that whites greatly contributed to jazz. But Mr. Berry questioned whether Mr. Sudhalter had properly apportioned credit by giving too much of it to whites.

Writing in The Atlantic Monthy, William H. Youngren defended Mr. Sudhalter’s balance, saying the tendency at the time would be to see the book as an attack on black achievement. “Nothing could be further from Sudhalter’s intent,” he wrote.

A month before the book was released, The Times published a long essay on the topic by Mr. Sudhalter in its Arts & Leisure section. A storm of letters followed.

In an interview with Contemporary Authors, Mr. Sudhalter said most critics had not grasped his point. “The angrier the denunciation, it seemed, the less the writer had actually read,” he said. His book, he said, was a history, not “a racial screed.”

Mr. Sudhalter, who was a music critic for The New York Post in the 1970s and ’80s, also wrote “Bix: Man and Legend” (Arlington House), a highly praised 1974 biography of Beiderbecke, with Philip R. Evans. His friend the critic Terry Teachout compared its thoroughness to “a scholarly biography of a major classical composer.”

In 2002 Mr. Sudhalter published “Stardust Melody: The Life and Music of Hoagy Carmichael” (Oxford). Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post said the book showed “that Carmichael’s mind was deeper and tougher than first impressions might suggest.”

Richard Merrill Sudhalter was born in Boston on Dec. 28, 1938. His father was a saxophonist who adored jazz, particularly Beiderbecke, and took his son’s musical education seriously. By his teens the younger Sudhalter was playing his cornet in Boston clubs. He earned a degree in English literature and music from Oberlin, worked as a musician in Germany and then was a reporter for United Press International in Europe.

He gave more emphasis to playing after he visited the Williams College library to research his Beiderbecke book. He discovered all the arrangements of the Paul Whiteman Orchestra of the 1920s, in which Beiderbecke had played, and decided to form a band to play the arrangements.

So he returned to London, where he was then living, and gathered top British musicians to play as the New Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Fans applauded them wildly at a jazz festival, a recording was made four days later, and the group went on to successful appearances at Carnegie Hall and elsewhere. Mr. Sudhalter played the cornet in the role of Beiderbecke, with inflections reminiscent of his other idols, Louis Armstrong and Bobby Hackett.

In addition to Ms. Kellogg, Mr. Sudhalter is survived by his sister, Carol, of Queens; his brother, James, of Harrisburg, Pa.; and his daughters Adrian, of Manhattan, and Kimberly, of Hollywood, Calif.

Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, said jazz lovers were disappointed years ago when the Classic Jazz Quartet suddenly broke up after the death of its pianist, Dick Wellstood. He recalled that all four members of the group were writers of various sorts, and all had a hearty sense of humor.

Their first choice for a name, Mr. Morgenstern said, was the Bourgeois Scum, but “they were told that was not commercial.”

Tough Tenor

July 26, 2008
Johnny Griffin, 80, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies
By BEN RATLIFF

Johnny Griffin, a tenor saxophonist from Chicago whose speed, control and harmonic acuity made him one of the most talented American jazz musicians of his generation yet who spent most of his career in Europe, died Friday at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village in France. He was 80 and had lived there for 24 years. His death was confirmed by his wife, Miriam, who did not give a cause. He played his last concert on Monday in Hyères, France.

Mr. Griffin’s modest height earned him the nickname the Little Giant; his speed in bebop improvising marked him as the Fastest Gun in the West; a group he led with his fellow saxophonist Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis was informally called the Tough Tenor band, a designation that was eventually applied to a whole school of hard-bop tenor players. And in general, Mr. Griffin suffered from categorization.

In the early 1960s, embittered by the critical acceptance of free jazz, he stayed true to his identity as a bebopper. Feeling that the American marketplace had no use for him (at a time when he was also having marital and tax troubles), he left for Europe, where he became a celebrated jazz elder.

“It’s not like I’m looking to prove anything anymore,” he said in a 1993 interview. “At this age, what can I prove? I’m concentrating more on the beauty in the music, the humanity.”

Indeed, Mr. Griffin’s work in the 1990s, with an American quartet that stayed constant whenever he revisited his home country to perform or record, had a new sound, mellower and sweeter than in his younger days.

Johnny Griffin was born in Chicago on April 24, 1928, and grew up on the South Side. He attended DuSable High School, where he was taught by the famed high school band instructor Capt. Walter Dyett, whose other students included the singers Nat (King) Cole and Dinah Washington and the saxophonists Gene Ammons and Von Freeman.

Mr. Griffin’s career started in a hurry: at age 12, attending his grammar school graduation dance at the Parkway Ballroom in Chicago, he saw Ammons play in King Kolax’s big band and decided what his instrument would be. By 14 he was playing alto saxophone in a variety of situations, including a group called the Baby Band with schoolmates, and occasionally with the blues guitarist and singer T-Bone Walker. At 18, three days after his high school graduation, Mr. Griffin left Chicago to join Lionel Hampton’s big band, where he switched from alto to tenor. From then until 1951 he was based in New York City but mostly on the road.

By 1947 he was touring with the rhythm-and-blues band of the trumpeter Joe Morris, a fellow Chicagoan, with whom he made the first recordings for the Atlantic label. He entered the United States Army in 1951; stationed in Hawaii, he played in an Army band.

Mr. Griffin was of an impressionable age when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie became forces in jazz. He heard them both with Billy Eckstine’s band in 1945 and, having first internalized the more balladlike saxophone sound earlier popularized by Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, became entranced by the lightning-fast phrasing of bebop, as the new music of Parker and Gillespie was known. In general his style remained brisk but relaxed, his bebop playing salted with blues tonality.

Beyond the 1960s his skill and his musical eccentricity continued to deepen, and in later years he could play odd, asymmetrical phrases, bulging with blues honking and then tapering off into state-of-the-art bebop, filled with passing chords.

In the late 1940s he befriended the pianists Elmo Hope, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk; he called these friendships his “postgraduate education.” After his Army service he went back to Chicago, where he worked with Monk for the first time, a job that altered his career. He became interested in Monk’s brightly melodic style of composition, and he ended up as a regular member of Monk’s quartet in New York in 1958. In 1967 he toured Europe with a Monk octet.

Mr. Griffin joined Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers for a short stint in 1957. The following year he began recording a series of albums as a leader for the Riverside label. On “Way Out!,” “The Little Giant” and other Riverside albums, his rampaging energy got its moment in the sun on tunes like “Cherokee,” famous vehicles for testing a musician’s mettle.

A few years later he hooked up with Davis, a more blues-oriented tenor saxophonist, with whom he made a series of records that act as barometers of taste: listeners tend to find them either thrilling or filled with too many notes. The Griffin-Davis combination was a popular one, and the two men would sporadically reunite through the ’70s and ’80s.

Mr. Griffin left the United States in 1963, settling in Paris and recording mostly for European labels — sometimes with other American expatriates, like the drummer Kenny Clarke, and sometimes with European rhythm sections. In 1973 he moved to Bergambacht, the Netherlands. He moved to the Côte d’Azur with his second wife, Miriam, in 1980, and then in 1984 to Availles-Limouzine, near Poitiers in midwestern France, where he lived thereafter.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Griffin’s survivors include four children: his daughters Jo-Onna and Ingrid and a son, John Arnold Griffin, all of the New York City area, and another daughter, Cynthia Griffin of Bordeaux, France.

Mr. Griffin stayed true to the small-group bebop ideal with his American quartet, including the pianist Michael Weiss and the drummer Kenny Washington. The record he made with this group for the Antilles label in 1991, “The Cat,” was received warmly as a comeback.

Every April for many years, Mr. Griffin returned to Chicago to visit family and play during his birthday week at the Jazz Showcase. During those visits he usually also spent a week at the Village Vanguard in New York, before returning home to his quiet house in the country.