Google News: Jazz

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Anyone else ever search the word "jazz" using the Google "News" function?

I've done it a couple times, and often find some cool, uh, news. It's interesting to see what kind of coverage the music gets in today's media. Today a feature on Ron Carter showed up. Something from the Boston Globe in advance of his appearance in the area.

This interesting tidbit was from the article:

"But all that [Carter's great jazz career] might not have happened had the legendary conductor Leopold Stokowski not snubbed him for an orchestra slot in 1959. At the time, Carter was a student at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y. He already had switched from cello to bass at his Detroit high school, to take advantage of the graduation of the school orchestra's only bass player. But he found it difficult to get serious consideration for his bass playing at Eastman.

"They would have auditions for orchestras," Carter recalls on the phone from New York, "but they wouldn't post them until they had already taken place. And then one of the conductors, Stokowski, told me he'd love to have me in his orchestra -- at the time he was down there in Houston, I think -- but said the Houston board directors weren't ready for a `colored guy' playing classical music."

That was the last straw for Carter, who refocused his attention on jazz. "I would have been one of the best classical bass players there ever was," says Carter, a boast backed up by two of his releases, "Brandenburg Concerto" (1996) and last year's chamber-like trio disc, "The Golden Striker.""