AthensJazz411

bob brussack

Ben Ratliff on NYC January Jazz

The heap of first-class improvised music in New York over the next month alone looks so good that I feel badly for everyone everywhere else. First, there’s WINTER JAZZFEST (winterjazzfest.com), next Friday and Jan. 8, spread across five clubs within a few cold steps of one another in Greenwich Village. Here is current New York jazz in context and enactment, situation and story: groups like the saxophonist Andrew D’Angelo’s Agogic, a quartet including the trumpeter Cuong Vu; the pianist Orrin Evans’s Captain Black Big Band; the trumpeter Shane Endsley’s Music Band; and the drummer Mike Pride’s From Bacteria to Boys.
via nytimes.com

Billy Taylor, Jazz Pianist and Educator, Dies at 89

Billy Taylor, a pianist and composer who was also an eloquent spokesman and advocate for jazz as well as a familiar presence for many years on television and radio, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 89 and lived in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Kim Taylor-Thompson.

Dr. Taylor, as he preferred to be called (he earned a doctorate in music education from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975), was a living refutation of the stereotype of jazz musicians as unschooled, unsophisticated and inarticulate, an image that was prevalent when he began his career in the 1940s, and that he did as much as any other musician to erase.

Dr. Taylor probably had a higher profile on television than any other jazz musician of his generation. He had a long run as a cultural correspondent on the CBS News program “Sunday Morning” and was the musical director of David Frost’s syndicated nighttime talk show from 1969 to 1972.

via nytimes.com

RIP, Dr. Taylor. And thanks.

From the 2010 Shoebox: Rand at His Photo Show

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In January 2010, pianist Rand Lines hosted an opening reception at the White Tiger for an exhibit of his photographs and those of his brother. We remember the evening well. It was later that evening, or in the wee hours of the next morning, that we took our son to the hospital for an emergency operation to repair his spleen, lacerated in a skateboarding fall.

Dave's Home for the Holidays

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Dave D'Angelo spent the fall touring with "Fiddler on the Roof." He's back in town, folks. And tonight, he worked his sax magic in the casual intimacy of Hendershot's, playing with his quartet non-stop from about 8:00 to about 9:30. Rand Lines was on keys, Chris Enghauser on bass, and Nic Wiles on drums. The quartet displayed some serious chops on everything from ballads to bebop. If you haven't been to a Dave D'Angelo gig yet in our town, you owe it to yourself to catch him the next time he performs. We're very fortunate that this jazz virtuoso has made Athens his home. Photograph by Bob Brussack.