Mark Stryker

A great Sinatra small group version from 1954.

Tucker's "The Early Years" is excellent, but it is written by a musicologist and full of analysis and notated musical examples, so it might not be the best fit for Felser's original query seeking books for non-musicians. However, I'd recommend it if one can at least read music. However, Tucker's "The Duke Ellington Reader" can be recommended enthusiastically without caveats. It's a tragedy that Tucker died so young -- at 46, from lung cancer, in 2000. He would have been the scholar to give us the Ellington biography we want, the culture needs, and that Ellington deserves. On a related front, "The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington," edited by Edward Green is mostly excellent. Mostly scholarly but easily readable for non-musicians, though there are a number of essays with notation/analysis.

Obituary by Nate Chinen for WRTI in Philly. https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/g-s1-60556/francis-davis-jazz-critics-poll-obituary?fbclid=IwY2xjawJspwJleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHowZSmqcyS5X-RVEBMZt9tMiiJkTzyCEvYzzMdzZ4rWpyeLAvnfhYdHuPT_-_aem_1IW8_mmM32fUYPcxGfBRsA

I reviewed this record (loved it) for Cadence in the August 1989 issue, not long after it was released. Some of my earliest published jazz writing. It was just Joe's second album as a leader and he was under the radar enough that I could write: “He plays changes with an authority that should make a few more well-known tenorists nervous.” After the review was assigned to me but before publication, Joe apparently had some things he wanted to say to the writer, so the magazine gave him the number at my parents’ house in Bloomington, Ind., where I was living (post-grad school but pre-first newspaper job at the South Bend Tribune). I was 25. So one day the phone rang, and my mom answered and called over to me: "Somebody named Joe Lovano wants to talk to you." I’ve forgotten the details of the conversation, but my recollection is that he just wanted me to know how personal and important a project the recording was to him. A musician of his stature today would never make that kind of a call to a critic — though I hasten to add that in 1989 I was young and still green, and Joe was seasoned but not famous. I combined the review of Joe's record with a review of a Houston Person record and on the same page is my review of the third Quest record (Liebman, Beirach, McClure, Hart). Also, for the record, Joe's call to me in fact came after I had finished the review and had just sent it to the editor, on a floppy disc by snail mail in those pre-Internet days. So the call did not influence the writing in any way. The moral of the story is that I’m getting old.

There is a three-CD set on Acrobat that gets through a lot of music, but the sound is highly variable. Mosaic had a Newton box in the cue a few years back but, alas, Sony apparently withdrew licensing rights at the last minute. Hoping this changes. The world truly needs that set.

I am thrilled to pass along this groundbreaking piece of scholarship about one of my heroes, trumpeter Frankie Newton, written by my gifted friend Matthew Rivera and published today by the New York Review of Books. I am proud to have played a small but consequential role in its development. Here's the backstory: A few years ago, Matthew, a young scholar and archivist whom I had never met, reached out to me after he read the long interview I did with Ethan Iverson in which I talk about my curious childhood interest in Newton, a sui generis trumpeter and political and social progressive. I corresponded with Newton's widow, Ethel, while in high school and later interviewed her in 1985 for a paper I wrote about Newton in a jazz history seminar taught by the sainted Larry Gushee at the University of Illinois. Matthew, a longtime Newton obsessive, asked if I still had the tape. It took me a minute, but I located it. After 40 years, I had forgotten most of the details, but it turned out be a goldmine of information about Newton (whose biography is notably elusive), including his thoughts about music and his life with Ethel as an interracial couple. Matthew has drawn on that interview in his brilliant work here, and there's additional valuable information he'll be able to report as his research expands. He has also dug up an extraordinary treasure trove of newly discovered newspaper writing by Newton himself -- a MAJOR find. Ultimately, that's what this story is about -- the way scholarship expands, how jazz history is being written and revised in real time, and how you never know where bits and pieces of the historical record might be found. https://www.nybooks.com/online/2025/03/19/frankie-newton-lost-and-found/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2mcS9rEILTzcXYVFckDkJuvwdehv89ntUBlujrEtUKhFK3UOz5W3T8jFg_aem_1GsAmCCPZJfRZz-ERSjLTQ

R.I.P. In the wake of her death, I just discovered this remarkable 30 minutes of footage from 1970. Bassist is David Williams, but I don't immediately recognize the drummer. Anyone know who it is?

This is a FANTASTIC record. None stop groove, great chemistry among the four.

Is that the first issue of that record?

R.I.P. He made it to 90 -- a long and fulfilling life, but the world will be a far less funny place going forward without him. There was only one of those! If you haven't watched his Hall of Fame induction speech, please set aside time to do so. So many hilarious lines, but two I particularly love: "My kids used to aggravate me too. I'd take 'em to a game & they'd want to come home with a different player." Gene Mauch to Uecker: "Grab a bat and stop this rally."

My dream is the whole video of the show or, at the least, a complete tune on video. But absent that, I'd still love to hear audio of all or part of it. You have this? I'd be in your debt ... Thanks

HOLY SHIT!! I have been searching for years for this Just Jazz broadcast from Chicago because Barry Harris is on piano. While this is just a short clip, it is the only remnant I've ever found. I was in touch with Dan Morgenstern (who coproduced the series), but he was not able to turn up a copy before he died -- but I hold out hope that a copy of the full program exists somewhere. The late Harriet Rosenfeld-Choice, a Chicago journalism legend who covered jazz at the Chicago Tribune before our friend Larry Kart and who was close to all involved, also tried to help me track down a copy of a tape to no avail. Thanks for posting. I would have never known it was buried deep inside this survey program without seeing it here.

So would I. Or like this:

As I often say: If I could do anything in life, it would be play like Sonny Rollins on a good night in 1965. Like this -- 3 minutes of the greatest improvising over Rhythm changes I have ever heard.

Thankfully, his full interview with us for The Best of the Best: Jazz from Detroit is 80 minutes long and will be part of a Jazz from Detroit Oral History Archive that we are creating. Sigh.