Freddie Hubbard, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 70

Freddie Hubbard, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 70

By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: December 29, 2008
Freddie Hubbard, a jazz trumpeter who dazzled audiences and critics alike with his virtuosity, his melodicism and his infectious energy, died on Monday in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Sherman Oaks.

Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos
Freddie Hubbard performing at Iridium in New York last year.
The cause was complications of a heart attack he had on Nov. 26, said his spokesman, Don Lucoff of DL Media.
Over a career that began in the late 1950s, Mr. Hubbard earned both critical praise and commercial success — although rarely for the same projects.

He attracted attention in the 1960s for his bravura work as a member of the Jazz Messengers, the valuable training ground for young musicians led by the veteran drummer Art Blakey, and on albums by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and many others. He also recorded several well-regarded albums as a leader. And although he was not an avant-gardist by temperament, he participated in three of the seminal recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde: Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” (1960), Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch” (1964) and John Coltrane’s “Ascension” (1965).

In the 1970s Mr. Hubbard, like many other jazz musicians of his generation, began courting a larger audience, with albums that featured electric instruments, rock and funk rhythms, string arrangements and repertory sprinkled with pop and R&B songs like Paul McCartney’s “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” and the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow.” His audience did indeed grow, but his standing in the jazz world diminished.

By the start of the next decade he had largely abandoned his more commercial approach and returned to his jazz roots. But his career came to a virtual halt in 1992 when he damaged his lip, and although he resumed performing and recording after an extended hiatus, he was never again as powerful a player as he had been in his prime.

Frederick Dewayne Hubbard was born on April 7, 1938, in Indianapolis. His first instrument was the alto-brass mellophone, and in high school he studied French horn and tuba as well as trumpet. After taking lessons with Max Woodbury, the first trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music, he performed locally with, among others, the guitarist Wes Montgomery and his brothers.

Mr. Hubbard moved to New York in 1958 and almost immediately began working with groups led by the saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the drummer Philly Joe Jones and others. His profile rose in 1960 when he joined the roster of Blue Note, a leading jazz label; it rose further the next year when he was hired by Blakey, widely regarded as the music’s premier talent scout.

Adding his own spin to a style informed by Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and Clifford Brown, Mr. Hubbard played trumpet with an unusual mix of melodic inventiveness and technical razzle-dazzle. The critics took notice. Leonard Feather called him “one of the most skilled, original and forceful trumpeters of the ’60s.”

After leaving Blakey’s band in 1964, Mr. Hubbard worked for a while with another drummer-bandleader, Max Roach, before forming his own group in 1966. Four years later he began recording for CTI, a record company that would soon become known for its aggressive efforts to market jazz musicians beyond the confines of the jazz audience.

His first albums for the label, notably “Red Clay,” contained some of the best playing of his career and, except for slicker production and the presence of some electric instruments, were not significantly different from his work for Blue Note. But his later albums on CTI, and the ones he made after leaving the label for Columbia in 1974, put less and less emphasis on improvisation and relied more and more on glossy arrangements and pop appeal. They sold well, for the most part, but were attacked, or in some cases simply ignored, by jazz critics. Within a few years Mr. Hubbard was expressing regrets about his career path.

Most of his recordings as a leader from the early 1980s on, for Pablo, Musicmasters and other labels, were small-group sessions emphasizing his gifts as an improviser that helped restore his critical reputation. But in 1992 he suffered a setback from which he never fully recovered.

By Mr. Hubbard’s own account, he seriously injured his upper lip that year by playing too hard, without warming up, once too often. The lip became infected, and for the rest of his life it was a struggle for him to play with his trademark strength and fire. As Howard Mandel explained in a 2008 Down Beat article, “His ability to project and hold a clear tone was damaged, so his fast finger flurries often result in blurts and blurs rather than explosive phrases.”

Mr. Hubbard nonetheless continued to perform and record sporadically, primarily on fluegelhorn rather than on the more demanding trumpet. In his last years he worked mostly with the trumpeter David Weiss, who featured Mr. Hubbard as a guest artist with his group, the New Jazz Composers Octet, on albums released under Mr. Hubbard’s name in 2001 and 2008, and at occasional nightclub engagements.

Mr. Hubbard won a Grammy Award for the album “First Light” in 1972 and was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2006.

He is survived by his wife of 35 years, Briggie Hubbard, and his son, Duane.

Mr. Hubbard was once known as the brashest of jazzmen, but his personality as well as his music mellowed in the wake of his lip problems. In a 1995 interview with Fred Shuster of Down Beat, he offered some sober advice to younger musicians: “Don’t make the mistake I made of not taking care of myself. Please, keep your chops cool and don’t overblow.”

Jazz great Freddie Hubbard dead at 70 By JOHN ROGERS – Associated Press LOS ANGELES (AP) — Grammy-winning jazz musician Freddie Hubbard, whose style influenced a generation of trumpet players, has died at age 70. Hubbard's manager, David Weiss, says the musician died Monday at Sherman Oaks Hospital in Los Angeles. He had been hospitalized since suffering a heart attack last month. Although he had been in declining health in recent years, Hubbard continued to perform until just a few months ago. Known for both the intensity of his playing, as well as his melodic style, Hubbard's last concert was in June in New York at a party celebrating the release of his final album. He won a Grammy in 1972 for best jazz performance by a group for the album "First Light."


Frederick Dewayne Hubbard (7 April 1938 – 29 December 2008)[1] was an American jazz trumpeter. He was known primarily for playing in the bebop, hard bop and post bop styles from the early 60s and on. His unmistakable and influential tone contributed to new perspectives for modern jazz and bebop.[2]


Hubbard started playing the mellophone and trumpet in his school band, studying at the Jordan Conservatory with the principal trumpeter of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. In his teens Hubbard worked locally with brothers Wes and Monk Montgomery and worked with bassist Larry Ridley and saxophonist James Spaulding. In 1958, at the age of 20, he moved to New York, and began playing with some of the best jazz players of the era, including Philly Joe Jones, Sonny Rollins, Slide Hampton, Eric Dolphy , J. J. Johnson, and Quincy Jones. In June 1960 Hubbard made his first record as a leader, Open Sesame, with saxophonist Tina Brooks, pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Sam Jones, and drummer Clifford Jarvis.

Then in May 1961, Hubbard played on Ole Coltrane, John Coltrane's final recording session with Atlantic Records. Together with Eric Dolphy, Hubbard was the only 'session' musician who appeared on both Ole and Africa Brass, Coltrane's first album with ABC/Impulse! Later, in August 1961, Hubbard made one of his most famous records, Ready for Freddie, which was also his first collaboration with saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Hubbard would join Shorter later in 1961 when he replaced Lee Morgan in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He played on several Blakey recordings, including Caravan, Ugetsu, Mosaic, and Free For All. Hubbard remained with Blakey until 1966, leaving to form the first of several small groups of his own, which featured, among others, pianist Kenny Barron and drummer Louis Hayes.

It was during this time that he began to develop his own sound, distancing himself from the early influences of Clifford Brown and Morgan, and won the Downbeat jazz magazine "New Star" award on trumpet.

Throughout the 1960s Hubbard played as a sideman on some of the most important albums from that era, including, Oliver Nelson's The Blues and the Abstract Truth, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage, and Wayne Shorter's Speak No Evil.[4] He recorded extensively for Blue Note Records in the 1960s: eight albums as a bandleader, and twenty-eight as a sideman.[5] Though Hubbard never fully embraced the free jazz of the '60s, he appeared on several landmark albums in the genre: Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, and John Coltrane's Ascension.

Hubbard achieved his greatest popular success in the 1970s with a series of albums for Creed Taylor and his record label CTI Records. Although his early 1970s jazz albums Red Clay, First Light, Straight Life, and Sky Dive were particularly well received and considered among his best work, the albums he recorded later in the decade were attacked by critics for their commercialism. First Light won a 1972 Grammy Award and included pianists Herbie Hancock and Richard Wyands, guitarists Eric Gale and George Benson, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and percussionist Airto Moreira.[6] In 1994, Freddie, collaborating with Chicago jazz vocalist/co-writer Catherine Whitney, had lyrics set to the music of First Light.[7]
[edit] Later career

During 1970-1974 Hubbard was the biggest star of the CTI label, overshadowing Stanley Turrentine, Hubert Laws, and George Benson.[8] Columbia's VSOP: The Quintet, album was recorded from two live performances, one at the Hearst Greek Theatre, University of California, Berkeley, on July 16, 1977, the other at the San Diego Civic Theatre, July 18, 1977. Musicians joining the trumpeter for this landmark performance were the members of the mid-sixties line-up of the Miles Davis Quintet (except the leader): Herbie Hancock on keyboards, Tony Williams on drums, Ron Carter on bass, and Wayne Shorter on tenor and soprano saxophones. [2]
In the 1980s Hubbard was again leading his own jazz group, attracting very favorable notices for his playing at concerts and festivals in the USA and Europe, often in the company of Joe Henderson, playing a repertory of hard-bop and modal-jazz pieces. Hubbard played at the legendary Monterey Jazz Festival in 1980 and in 1989 (with Bobby Hutcherson). He played with Woody Shaw, recording with him in 1985, and two years later recorded Stardust with Benny Golson. In 1988 he teamed up once more with Blakey at an engagement in Holland, from which came Feel the Wind. In 1990 he appeared in Japan headlining an American-Japanese concert package which also featured Elvin Jones, Sonny Fortune, pianists George Duke and Benny Green, bass players Ron Carter, and Rufus Reid, with jazz and popular music singer Salena Jones. He also performed at the Warsaw Jazz Festival at which Live at the Warsaw Jazz Festival (Jazzmen 1992) was recorded.

Following a long setback of health problems and a serious lip injury in 1992 where he ruptured his upper lip and subsequently developed an infection, Hubbard was again playing and recording occasionally, even if not at the high level that he set for himself during his earlier career. [9] His best records ranked with the finest in his field.

In 2006, The National Endowment for the Arts honored Hubbard with its highest honor in jazz, the NEA Jazz Masters Award.

On December 29, 2008, Hubbard's hometown newspaper, The Indianapolis Star reported that Hubbard died from complications from a heart attack suffered on November 26 of the same year.[11] Billboard magazine reported that Hubbard died in Sherman Oaks, California.[12]
[edit] Discography

Soulja Boy Apologizes to Parents for Risque Language

Soulja Boy Apologizes to Parents for Risque Language
By The Associated Press
Wed, Dec. 17 2008 04:00 PM EST
NEW YORK – Soulja Boy Tell 'Em is telling parents he's sorry for his vulgar words.
The 18-year-old rapper became a sensation and started a dance craze last year with his Grammy-nominated hit "Crank That (Soulja Boy)."
Some of the language and subject matter in that hit was risque, and on some of his YouTube videos, he's used some naughty words.

So in an interview this week, Soulja Boy apologized to parents and says he is going to try harder to set a positive example for his young fans.
"Over the past few months, I've had a chance to meet a lot of my fans face to face and it made me realize that I got a large fan base of kids that look up to me," he said. "I have a greater responsibility to the kids that want to be like Soulja Boy (and) I need set a positive example for them."

Though Soulja Boy apologizes for his public behavior, he's not quite ready to become the ideal role model for kids.

"I wouldn't say a role model because I think parents or a guardian should be a kid's main role model, but from now on, I'm going to make sure that every kid that looks up to me will get a positive image that the kids and parents can trust," he said.
Soula Boy just released his new CD, "iSouljaBoyTellem," this week.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Nigeria: Kunle Ajayi, Infinity, Other Gospel Artistes at RCCG's Weekend of Praise..

Nigeria: Kunle Ajayi, Infinity, Other Gospel Artistes at RCCG's Weekend of Praise..
Benjamin Njoku
18 December 2008
Lagos — Famous gospel singer and trumpeter, Kunle Ajayi, Infinity Band, Midnight Crew, Censer of Gold and a couple of other gospel artistes, last weekend, starred at the Redeemed Christian Church of God, Milk and Honey Parish's Weekend of Praise.

The programme was the Special Weekend of Praise, yearly organized by the Redeemed Christian Church of Gold, Milk and Honey Parish, Maryland, Lagos.

The 4-day programme, which began on Thursday, December 4 and climaxed on Sunday, December 7, is organized annually as a means to highlight on the imperativeness of anointing of praises. Featuring inspirational songs, praises and worship songs, the programme, as usual, had "Let Somebody Shout Hallelujah" as its theme.

Renowned trumpeter, Ajayi, leading other gospel singers, held the congregation spellbound with his remarkable performance, which invariably earned him standing ovation. Fast rising four-man band, the Infinity, gave a good account of themselves on stage as they treated the congregation to their inspirational songs, even as Bisi Adubarin performed to the stimulation of the spirit-filled congregation.

Speaking on the significance of the programme, the pastor-in-charge, Wale Adeduro, said, the Weekend of Praise, apart from being designed to praise the Maker of mankind, has enabled Christians to put the pressures of the passing year behind and focus on their Maker.

The programme has also become a major social and rallying point, where Christians come together to worship and lift up the name of the Lord." He added that "over the years, it has been a very successfully spiritual and social programme."

According to him, plans are underway to institu-tionalize the programme as it is the desire of the Church to use the avenue to spread the gospel of salvation. This year's edition was the fourth to be organized by the Church.

Aside the ritual of praise and worship that took the centre stage, the four-day spiritual retreat also witnessed provision of free medical services to the Christian brothers and sisters in addition to providing welfare packages in the form of food stuff, which were distributed to the members.

Botswana: The Year That Was in the Arts

Botswana: The Year That Was in the Arts
Ephraim Keoreng and Maureen Odubeng
19 December 2008
The arts industry in Botswana has been growing by leaps and bounds. The Botswana Musicians Union (BOMU) is an organisation founded to protect the rights of musicians.

In the past it was known for its annual awards ceremonies, but it has proved to be more than that. It has become a strong organisation that speaks for artists, especially on issues like piracy and recognition of artists as contributors to the country's economy.

It is recognised by government and has worked with organisations like Mascom Wireless and others on a partnership basis to advance the lot of artists.

Despite its milestones, BOMU had its shortfalls this year. It has been unable to run the office efficiently due to maladministration and lack of resources, among others. This situation even affected the awards ceremony slated for the end of the year, something, which has upset many artists. For them the awards are very important. They use the awards as a grading system to measure the quality of their work.

BOMU executive member, Seabelo Modibe, believes the music industry is one key area in which government should invest. There is a lot that government should do. "If you look at the amount of billions invested in agriculture year in year out and the returns on that investment, looking at how prone Botswana is to lack of rainfall then maybe we need to focus elsewhere while developing new agricultural means through introducing technology in farming among small farmers. Botswana is the only country in Southern Africa without a national arts council," he says.

There are no facilities in this country, no public entertainment centres, no public swimming pool, no cultural village - nothing. "I feel as a union we should work hard and change the mindset of our leaders because diamonds are not forever. Arts, culture and sport should take the centre stage, as one key economic area of investment looking at 2009 Confederations Cup, 2010 World Cup, 2011 Rugby World Cup in South Africa and other international events in that country," he said.

Artists
Art is very important in that it does not only help in entertaining people, but most importantly it helps document the heritage of a people for future generations to look back and say "this is the arts of our forbearers". Botswana music, especially traditional has proven to be one of the best and most liked by tourists and even people outside Botswana.

We have seen groups like Culture Spears being invited to play for former South African president Thabo Mbeki. It is a fact that Botswana artists have been busy, both in the national and international arena. They were not just hogging the limelight but also most importantly making money for themselves. Artists like Culture Spears, Dikakapa, Socca Moruakgomo, Ndingo Johwa, Lister Boleseng, Franco, and Vee, to name but just a few, have been grabbing headlines with their amazing shows. Most of Botswana artists' works have even penetrated the southern African market in countries like Namibia, Zimbabwe and South Africa. Dikakapa even had itself nominated for the Kora awards this year.

Piracy in Botswana
Piracy in Botswana is very high. Government has been on the forefront to fight this war.
Experts were invited from the United States and South Africa and lately a Kenyan Microsoft manager was also invited to Botswana to address stakeholders like the police, artists and journalists on the issue of piracy.

The war against piracy has not been subtle, especially on the part of artists. At the beginning if the year, some went on the rampage, picking on shop owners who sell pirated goods and confiscating their merchandise (the pirated CDs and DVDs). There was one instant where an artist was involved in a fist-fight with a Chinese shop owner and ended up in jail over his pirated CD. Some of the cases went to court where it was also realised that the offending shop owners got away easily as they were fined negligible amounts.

"There has not been any significant progress in the fight against piracy and intellectual property infringement due to the fact that we don't have an independent copyright office. There are about five copyright officers manning the whole country all based in Gaborone. If you can make an assessment of what has happened since the Act was passed in 2005 you will be shocked at the slow pace of its implementation," observes Modibe.

President's Day - Celebration of Culture
Promotion of arts and culture is slowly improving in the country with government playing an active role in establishing support systems for the arts industry to start enjoying growth experienced in other sectors of the economy.

In previous years artists used to complain that government was indifferent, as it did not give any support to the arts. But it is slowly changing as it has been evidenced by not only the growth of the industry but also the increase in number of artists more particularly musicians, comedians and visual artists who are now able to support themselves through their trade.

This year's President's Day celebrations marked yet another milestone in government efforts to assist local artists to promote their works.

The President's Day holidays celebrated under the theme Towards Artistic Excellence by 2016 were dedicated to arts and July was set aside as the National Heritage Month, with the Minister of Youth, Sport and Culture, Gladys Kokorwe, explaining that the aim of dedicating July as National Heritage Month was to encourage Batswana to celebrate their heritage and culture, as well to appreciate the things that make them a nation. The holidays saw a number of competitions in different forms of art, including among others traditional music and dance, contemporary music, drama and comedy.

The finalists were selected from 12 mini festivals that were staged throughout the country and it is a step in the right direction in encouraging excellence in the arts. The long holiday also included the National Basket and Craft Exhibition.

There were many different winners who not only got cash prizes but also won recognition for their work. Drama, comedy and poetry competitions were held at Maitisong, while contemporary music competitions were staged at Tsholofelo Park. The traditional song and dance competitions were held at Sir Seretse Khama Barracks in Mogoditshane.

The government should, of course, be commended for this, and urged to continue doing more. The Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture is also doing its part, having set up a number of structures that work with artists to give them support in marketing and promoting their products. The ministry, through its Department of Culture and Youth, has a fund set aside for sponsoring art related activities, which include exhibitions, and cultural festivals.

Miss Botswana
While other forms of arts and entertainment seem to be on the right track, one of the most prestigious pageants in the country, the Miss Botswana pageant, seems to be sinking with each passing year. The pageant has continuously failed to live up to expectations. Last year, the then Miss Botswana Malebogo Marumoagae went for the Miss World show held in Sanya, China, without a chaperone and did not have money to pay for accommodation and ended up seeking shelter away from the hotel where other beauties were housed.

This year was not any different as the reigning queen, Itseng Kgomotso, left for Johannesburg, South Africa, without a chaperone, and one would have thought since South Africa is closer, money would not be too much of an issue.

Botswana Council of Women (BCW), who are the Miss Botswana licence holders, should up their game if Botswana is to continue to send contestants to pageants like the Miss World pageant.


Countries serious about sending their queens to the Miss World contest mean real business in that they groom their queens and offer them support all the way.
The Miss Botswana organisers always complain that some of their plans are hindered by lack of sponsorships, but with enough hard work, Miss Botswana should be one of the easiest events to source sponsorship for. BCW would do well to mobilise resources to revamp Miss Botswana and take it where it is should be - among the best.

Soul Bearers Levi Stubbs | b. 1936; Dee Dee Warwick | b. 1945

Levi Stubbs b. 1936; Dee Dee Warwick b. 1945
Soul Bearers

By ROB HOERBURGER
Published: December 24, 2008

You weren’t supposed to hear the struggle. At least that was the idea with most Motown artists during those breadbasket years of the ’60s, post-J.F.K., pre-Tet, more AM than FM. The plan, as dreamed up by Motown’s founder and the architect of its sound, Berry Gordy Jr., was not so much to make black music safe for a white audience but to make it colorblind, to get black and white kids out on the dance floor together without their having to think about it too much. And so his writers, producers and most of his marquee singers — Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross — sifted out the rougher parts of the blues; there was heartache, sure, but it was at the service of finger-snapping, hip-swaying joy. It was sexy, suave, sweetly spun soul. But when it came to Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of the Four Tops, the pain proved insoluble.
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James J. Kriegsmann/Associated Press
Destiny's Children Dee Dee, in 1969, just missed the spotlight.
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CBS/Photofest
The Tops shared it on TV in '66.
Stubbs had one of those big, load-bearing voices that hold up the weight not just of a musical style but also of an entire era’s moods. His booming, pleading baritone exploded into every line of every song, so that even as banal a phrase as “Sugar pie, honey bunch” packed waves of wallops. Perhaps because the Tops were a little older than most Motown acts and had sung together for nearly 10 years, Gordy decided not to tamp Stubbs down but instead had his writers and producers push him the other way. The tracks behind him, still the steady, trademark Motown 4/4, became a bit more martial and urgent, and Stubbs was encouraged to grab high-hanging fruit beyond his range; and he didn’t just grab, he lunged.

Think of the galloping thunder of “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” which thanks to Stubbs’s alternating grunts, chants and exhortations encapsulated all of the passion of the ’60s: civil rights, the sexual revolution, the war; or the skittering paranoia of “Shake Me, Wake Me,” whose Hitchcockian piano and strings were just a backdrop for Stubbs’s thrashing night sweats. In “Bernadette,” Stubbs sang of love not as a teenage crush but as an Othello-like obsession; the a cappella howl of her name near the end of the song was the sound of a man in the throes of sex or death, and of car radios going tilt. (According to the Motown historian Adam White, during the session, the prideful Stubbs was having trouble nailing a note, and the producers, Holland/Dozier/Holland, called over a few young women from an adjoining studio; Stubbs got the note on the next take.) Maybe the most devastating of all was “Ask the Lonely,” in which, as the notes surge higher and higher, Stubbs sings about “a story of sadness, a story too hard to believe.” This was as heavy as Motown got then, but heavy didn’t mean bogged down; the Tops were probably the only act of their time who could get the kids on “American Bandstand” dancing to a song called “Seven Rooms of Gloom.” (More than a decade later, new-wave nihilists like the Smiths had nothing on the Tops.)

There were calmer moments: one, a post-Motown hit, “Sweet Understanding Love,” showed the rare perky side of the Tops, but when Stubbs sang the line “You made me a winner,” his credibility was untarnished, because you could still hear all the bruises and battle scars. And by this time it was clear that Stubbs could have been singing as much about the Tops as about any romance. The original group stayed together more than 40 years; Stubbs had only one solo singing gig his entire career, as the voice of Audrey II in “Little Shop of Horrors,” and split his income with the rest of the group; there was never any thought of renaming the act “Levi Stubbs and the Tops.” Their legacy was so strong that of all the Motown legends, their songs have not produced any big hit remakes. And you get the feeling that’s because Stubbs’s voice, supported by the Tops’ fraternal harmonies and the grooves of the Motown studio cats, said: No need to look any further; I can carry you.

Dee Dee Warwick had a different burden to bear. Like Stubbs, she had a big whomp of a voice and got to work with some of the best producers and writers in the business. While she was still a teenager, she was among the most in-demand backup singers on the New York studio scene. She had a strong musical pedigree: her mother was the founder of a well-respected gospel group, the Drinkard Singers, which also included her aunt Emily, who went on to become Cissy Houston, the mother of Whitney. But she also had a big sister who happened to be the most successful female solo artist of the post-British Invasion ’60s, and that came to be a yoke, one she could never quite shake.

But, oh, how she kept trying. She recorded the sassiest version of “You’re No Good” with no less than Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who produced Elvis and the Drifters, only to see it become a bigger hit later, not just once but twice: first in the ’60s for Betty Everett and then in the ’70s for Linda Ronstadt, who took it to No. 1; she had first dibs on “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” but it was the silkier version by the Supremes and the Temptations that scored. Dee Dee even had a crack at “Alfie,” and delivered a rafters-shaking performance, but it was her sister Dionne’s lither, more reflective version that hit big. As Dionne’s hits piled up, “Dionne’s sister” practically became a prefix to Dee Dee’s name, and Dee Dee’s performances grew growlier, almost as if she were expressing her frustration at her relative anonymity. (By the mid-’70s, she was making most of her money singing backup at Dionne’s concerts, and one night bizarrely demanded to perform her own show.) Dee Dee would perhaps be a better subject than Bill Gates or the Beatles for Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, “Outliers,” but as a study of why success didn’t happen: she had the talent, the support, the material; what deeper meanings and causes were there to her failure to connect with a mass audience? Maybe it was just as simple as the fact that, as one D.J. proposed the week after she died, “the right payola never got paid.”
Whatever the cause, Dee Dee ended up as one of pop’s hidden gems. She continued to record, and picked up a couple of Grammy nominations along the way, ever the insider’s favorite, keeping the music at a high level even when it was clear that the big break wasn’t going to come. She ended her career earlier this year singing on Dionne’s latest album, the musical bond between the sisters unbroken, just like the bond among the Four Tops. She may not have had gold records, but she had plenty of musical integrity to hang on her wall.

Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81

Eartha Kitt, a Seducer of Audiences, Dies at 81


Click here: YouTube - Eartha Kitt with Friends Santa Baby
By ROB HOERBURGER
Published: December 25, 2008
Eartha Kitt, who purred and pounced her way across Broadway stages, recording studios and movie and television screens in a show-business career that lasted more than six decades, died on Thursday. She was 81 and lived in Connecticut.

The cause was colon cancer, said her longtime publicist, Andrew E. Freedman.

Ms. Kitt, who began performing in the late ’40s as a dancer in New York, went on to achieve success and acclaim in a variety of mediums long before other entertainment multitaskers like Julie Andrews, Barbra Streisand and Bette Midler.

With her curvaceous frame and unabashed vocal come-ons, she was also, along with Lena Horne, among the first widely known African-American sex symbols. Orson Welles famously proclaimed her “the most exciting woman alive” in the early ’50s, apparently just after that excitement prompted him to bite her onstage during a performance of “Time Runs,” an adaptation of “Faust” in which Ms. Kitt played Helen of Troy.

Ms. Kitt’s career-long persona, that of the seen-it-all sybarite, was set when she performed in Paris cabarets in her early 20s, singing songs that became her signatures, like “C’est Si Bon” and “Love for Sale.”

Returning to New York, she was cast on Broadway in “New Faces of 1952” and added another jewel to her vocal crown, “Monotonous” (“Traffic has been known to stop for me/Prices even rise and drop for me/Harry S. Truman plays bop for me/Monotonous, monotone-ous”). Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times in May 1952, “Eartha Kitt not only looks incendiary, but she can make a song burst into flame.”

Shortly after that run, Ms. Kitt had her first best-selling albums and recorded her biggest hit, “Santa Baby,” whose precise, come-hither diction and vaguely foreign inflections (Ms. Kitt, a native of South Carolina, spoke four languages and sang in seven) proved that a vocal sizzle could be just as powerful as a bonfire. Though her record sales fell after the rise of rhythm and blues and rock ’n’ roll in the mid- and late ’50s, her singing style would later be the template for other singers with pillow-talky voices like Diana Ross (who has said she patterned her Supremes sound and look largely after Ms. Kitt), Janet Jackson and Madonna (who recorded a cover version of “Santa Baby” in 1987).

Ms. Kitt would later call herself “the original material girl,” a reference not only to her stage creation and to Madonna but also to her string of romances with rich or famous men, including Welles, the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson and the banking heir John Barry Ryan 3rd. She was married to her one husband, Bill McDonald, a real-estate developer, from 1960 to 1965; their daughter, Kitt Shapiro, survives her, as do two grandchildren.

From practically the beginning of her career, as critics gushed over Ms. Kitt, they also began to describe her in every feline term imaginable: her voice “purred” or “was like catnip”; she was a “sex kitten” who “slinked” or was “on the prowl” across the stage, sometimes “flashing her claws.” Her career has often been said to have had “nine lives.” Appropriately, she was tapped to play Catwoman in the 1960s TV series “Batman,” taking over the role from the leggier, lynxlike Julie Newmar and bringing to it a more feral, compact energy.

Yet for all the camp appeal and sexually charged hauteur of Ms. Kitt’s cabaret act, she also played serious roles, appearing in the films “The Mark of the Hawk” with Sidney Poitier (1957) and “Anna Lucasta” (1959) with Sammy Davis Jr. She made numerous television appearances, including a guest spot on “I Spy” in 1965, which brought her her first Emmy nomination.
For these performances Ms. Kitt likely drew on the hardship of her early life. She was born Eartha Mae Keith in North, S.C., on Jan. 17, 1927, a date she did not know until about 10 years ago, when she challenged students at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., to find her birth certificate, and they did. She was the illegitimate child of a black Cherokee sharecropper mother and a white man about whom Ms. Kitt knew little. She worked in cotton fields and lived with a black family who, she said, abused her because she looked too white. “They called me yella gal,” Ms. Kitt said.

At 8 she was sent to live in Harlem with an aunt, Marnie Kitt, who Ms. Kitt came to believe was really her biological mother. Though she was given piano and dance lessons, a pattern of abuse developed there as well: Ms. Kitt would be beaten, she would run away and then she would return. By her early teenage years she was working in a factory and sleeping in subways and on the roofs of unlocked buildings. (She would later become an advocate, through Unicef, on behalf of homeless children.)

Her show-business break came on a lark, when a friend dared her to audition for the Katherine Dunham Dance Company. She passed the audition and permanently escaped the cycle of poverty and abuse that defined her life till then.

But she took the steeliness with her, in a willful, outspoken manner that mostly served her career, except once. In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: “You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot.” The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Ms. Kitt’s career.

As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in “Timbuktu!,” an all-black remake of “Kismet.”

By now a diva and legend, Ms. Kitt did what many other divas and legends — Shirley Bassey and Ethel Merman among them — did: she dabbled in dance music, scoring her biggest hit in 30 years with “Where Is My Man” in 1984, the same year she was roundly criticized for touring South Africa. Ms. Kitt was typically unapologetic; the tour, she said, played to integrated audiences and helped build schools for black children.

The third of her three autobiographies, “I’m Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten,” was published in 1989, and she earned a Grammy nomination for “Back in Business,” a collection of cabaret songs released in 1994.

As Ms. Kitt began the sixth decade of her career, she was still active. In 2000 she received her second Tony nomination, for best featured actress in a musical in “The Wild Party.” Branching out into children’s programming, she won two Daytime Emmy Awards, this year and in 2007, as outstanding performer in an animated program for her role as the scheming empress-wannabe Yzma in “The Emperor’s New School.”

All the while she remained a fixture on the cabaret circuit, having maintained her voice and shapely figure through a vigorous fitness regimen that included daily running and weight lifting. Even after discovering in 2006 that she had colon cancer, she triumphantly opened the newly renovated Café Carlyle in New York in September 2007. Stephen Holden, writing in The Times, said that Ms. Kitt’s voice was “in full growl.”

But though Ms. Kitt still seemed to have men of all ages wrapped around her finger (she would often toy with younger worshipers at her shows by suggesting they introduce her to their fathers), the years had given her perspective. “I’m a dirt person,” she told Ebony magazine in 1993. “I trust the dirt. I don’t trust diamonds and gold.”

Singer, Actress Eartha Kitt Dies
posted: 8 HOURS 54 MINUTES AGOcomments: 0
Eartha Kitt rose from the cotton fields of South Carolina to become an international dancing and singing star. A family friend says she passed away from colon cancer. Among her many performances, she recorded the holiday staple, "Santa Baby."
Kitt died on Thursday of colon cancer, according to family spokesman Andrew Freedman.
Known to the world as a self-proclaimed "sex kitten" famous for her catlike purr, Kitt was one of America's most versatile performers, winning two Emmys and nabbing a third nomination. She also was nominated for several Tonys and two Grammys.


Her career spanned six decades, from her start as a dancer with the famed Katherine Dunham troupe to cabarets and acting and singing on stage, in movies and on television. She persevered through an unhappy childhood as a mixed-race daughter of the South and made headlines in the 1960s for denouncing the Vietnam War during a visit to the White House.


Through the years, Kitt remained a picture of vitality and attracted fans less than half her age even as she neared 80.


When her book "Rejuvenate," a guide to staying physically fit, was published in 2001, Kitt was featured on the cover in a long, curve-hugging black dress with a figure that some 20-year-old women would envy. Kitt also wrote three autobiographies.


Once dubbed the "most exciting woman in the world" by Orson Welles, she spent much of her life single, though brief romances with the rich and famous peppered her younger years.


After becoming a hit singing "Monotonous" in the Broadway revue "New Faces of 1952," Kitt appeared in "Mrs. Patterson" in 1954-55. (Some references say she earned a Tony nomination for "Mrs. Patterson," but only winners were publicly announced at that time.) She also made appearances in "Shinbone Alley" and "The Owl and the Pussycat."


Her first album, "RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt," came out in 1954, featuring such songs as "I Want to Be Evil," "C'est Si Bon" and the saucy gold digger's theme song "Santa Baby," which is revived on radio each Christmas.

The next year, the record company released follow-up album "That Bad Eartha," which featured "Let's Do It," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy."


In 1996, she was nominated for a Grammy in the category of traditional pop vocal performance for her album "Back in Business." She also had been nominated in the children's recording category for the 1969 record "Folk Tales of the Tribes of Africa."


Kitt also acted in movies, playing the lead female role opposite Nat King Cole in "St. Louis Blues" in 1958 and more recently appearing in "Boomerang" and "Harriet the Spy" in the 1990s.
On television, she was the sexy Catwoman on the popular "Batman" series in 1967-68, replacing Julie Newmar who originated the role. A guest appearance on an episode of "I Spy" brought Kitt an Emmy nomination in 1966.


"Generally the whole entertainment business now is bland," she said in a 1996 Associated Press interview. "It depends so much on gadgetry and flash now. You don't have to have talent to be in the business today.
"I think we had to have something to offer, if you wanted to be recognized as worth paying for."
Kitt was plainspoken about causes she believed in. Her anti-war comments at the White House came as she attended a White House luncheon hosted by Lady Bird Johnson.
"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she told the group of about 50 women. "They rebel in the street. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."


For four years afterward, Kitt performed almost exclusively overseas. She was investigated by the FBI and CIA, which allegedly found her to be foul-mouthed and promiscuous.


"The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth - in a country that says you're entitled to tell the truth - you get your face slapped and you get put out of work," Kitt told Essence magazine two decades later.




In 1978, Kitt returned to Broadway in the musical "Timbuktu!" - which brought her a Tony nomination - and was invited back to the White House by President Jimmy Carter.
In 2000, Kitt earned another Tony nod for "The Wild Party." She played the fairy godmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" in 2002.
As recently as October 2003, she was on Broadway after replacing Chita Rivera in a revival of "Nine."
She also gained new fans as the voice of Yzma in the 2000 Disney animated feature "The Emperor's New Groove."'
In an online discussion at Washingtonpost.com in March 2005, shortly after Jamie Foxx and Morgan Freeman won Oscars, she expressed satisfaction that black performers "have more of a chance now than we did then to play larger parts."


But she also said: "I don't carry myself as a black person but as a woman that belongs to everybody. After all, it's the general public that made (me) - not any one particular group. So I don't think of myself as belonging to any particular group and never have."


Kitt was born in North, S.C., and her road to fame was the stuff of storybooks. In her autobiography, she wrote that her mother was black and Cherokee while her father was white, and she was left to live with relatives after her mother's new husband objected to taking in a mixed-race girl.
An aunt eventually brought her to live in New York, where she attended the High School of Performing Arts, later dropping out to take various odd jobs.


By chance, she dropped by an audition for the dance group run by Dunham, a pioneering African-American dancer. In 1946, Kitt was one of the Sans-Souci Singers in Dunham's Broadway production "Bal Negre."
Kitt's travels with the Dunham troupe landed her a gig in a Paris nightclub in the early 1950s. Kitt was spotted by Welles, who cast her in his Paris stage production of "Faust."
That led to a role in "New Faces of 1952," which featured such other stars-to-be as Carol Lawrence, Paul Lynde and, as a writer, Mel Brooks.


While traveling the world as a dancer and singer in the 1950s, Kitt learned to perform in nearly a dozen languages and, over time, added songs in French, Spanish and even Turkish to her repertoire.
"Usku Dara," a song Kitt said was taught to her by the wife of a Turkish admiral, was one of her first hits, though Kitt says her record company feared it too remote for American audiences to appreciate.
Song titles such as "I Want to be Evil" and "Just an Old Fashioned Girl" seem to reflect the paradoxes in Kitt's private life.


Over the years, Kitt had liaisons with wealthy men, including Revlon founder Charles Revson, who showered her with lavish gifts.


In 1960, she married Bill McDonald but divorced him after the birth of their daughter, Kitt.
While on stage, she was daringly sexy and always flirtatious. Offstage, however, Kitt described herself as shy and almost reclusive, remnants of feeling unwanted and unloved as a child. She referred to herself as "that little urchin cotton-picker from the South, Eartha Mae."


For years, Kitt was unsure of her birthplace or birth date. In 1997, a group of students at historically black Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., located her birth certificate, which verified her birth date as Jan. 17, 1927. Kitt had previously celebrated on Jan. 26.


The research into her background also showed Kitt was the daughter of a white man, a poor cotton farmer.
"I'm an orphan. But the public has adopted me and that has been my only family," she told the Post online. "The biggest family in the world is my fans."

Tony Bennett, He May Have Left His Heart, but He Brought His Hands

He May Have Left His Heart, but He Brought His Hands

By BEN RATLIFF
Published: December 17, 2008
Poise in the wind of uncertainty is a very old idea in American pop. Basically outdated and nearly archaeological, it’s the default disposition of all songs that cycle constantly through cocktail-hour soundtracks, songs from a disappearing race of sanguine, moral-romantic heroes

When Tony Bennett, now 82, enacts that kind of poise onstage, what’s impressive isn’t that he’s doing it at all but how he does it, his consummate and subtle technique. You don’t look at his face for clues of what the song’s about, you look at his hands and gauge the timbre of his voice.

On Tuesday night at the Apollo Theater, where he performed with the Count Basie Orchestra (currently led by Bill Hughes), he kept demonstrating the meaning of lyrics with perfect hand gestures. In Kander and Ebb’s “Maybe This Time,” after he sang the pitifully hopeful epithets “Mr. Peaceful, Mr. Happy,” he raised an open hand, as if he were in a classroom, to finish the line: “that’s what I want to be.” The raised hand meant that these are privileges, not rights.

Near the beginning of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” delivering the line “the glory that was Rome is of another day,” he folded his arms as if about to deliver a history lecture. This is the moment, the motion implied, where you start trusting the protagonist of this song. And in Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand’s “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?,” as he sang the counterintuitive line “the more I love, the more that I’m afraid,” he did something so quickly it was nearly subliminal. It was a slight shoulder shrug; a half-swivel of the wrists so that the left thumb is pointed to 10 o’clock and the right thumb to 2 o’clock; eyebrows raised and eyes looking downward. It meant: This might be hard to understand, but stay with me. Obviously, he made all these gestures while holding a microphone.

Mr. Bennett holds the mike in the left hand, up between his tie knot and his breast pocket, and occasionally down by the button of his jacket; he never raises the upper arm or blocks any part of his face. The crooked-arm posture looks comfortable, as if he’s not thinking about it, but he is a one-man mixing board: he slightly raises or lowers the microphone constantly, depending on the force of his singing — from the conversational level to the almost flamenco-style yelling he got into during the first and last songs of the set — and the force of the band.

In one case he didn’t use the microphone at all. Demonstrating the superior acoustics of the old Apollo — “new theaters are like filing cabinets,” he remarked — he sang “Fly Me to the Moon” accompanied only by his guitarist Gray Sargent. There was no instrumental solo here, and that was the case for most of the songs in this swift, concise show. Mr. Bennett got in and out of songs quickly. When a solo was played — by Mr. Sargent or the drummer Harold Jones or the pianist Lee Musiker — it counted.

The concert looked from a distance as if it might be holiday oriented; Mr. Bennett’s new record, with the Basie band, is “A Swingin’ Christmas.” And there was a short sequence when the show changed gears: Mr. Musiker was replaced by the pianist Monty Alexander, and Mr. Bennett sang a few songs from lyric sheets, including “My Favorite Things” and “Jingle Bells.” It wasn’t his thing: he didn’t particularly swing, gesticulate or pace his delivery. But it didn’t last long. Within 10 minutes the pianists changed again, Mr. Bennett called for the Ellington song “In a Mellow Tone,” and he resumed his role as a delicate, almost scholarly guide to strong emotions — elation, depression and unreasonable hope.

Making Up the Classics Classical music ceded spontaneity to jazz.

Making Up the Classics
At a recital last month in Seoul, the pianist and musicologist Robert Levin began the program's second half by pulling four slips of paper out of a basket. Then he launched into a musical fantasy that, to a layman's ear, sounded just like Mozart. It was Mr. Levin's own spontaneous composition, invented on the spot using suggestions gathered from the audience.

The art of improvisation, long dormant in classical music, is undergoing a revival in concert halls, conservatories and recording studios. A handful of performers say they're restoring a lost tradition that stretches back to Bach, Mozart and Beethoven -- composer-performers and improvisers whose impromptu creations were almost as celebrated as their written masterpieces.

"We're seen as revolutionaries, but we're bringing back something that's very old, actually," says Gabriela Montero, a Venezuelan pianist known for ending programs of Rachmaninoff, Bach, Chopin and Liszt with improvisations based on audience requests, ranging from ringtones to nursery rhymes to "La Cucaracha." During a concert tour of the Northwest last month, Ms. Montero gave several fully improvised performances, each lasting more than an hour.
A controversial grassroots effort is proving that improvisation in classical music is back from the dead. WSJ's Alexandra Alter reports. (Nov. 27)

This season, at least half a dozen classical concerts have incorporated improvisation, and more are cropping up, often in unconventional venues. At a packed downtown Manhattan nightclub earlier this month, the cellist Matt Haimovitz teamed up with DJ Olive in an eclectic mash-up that veered from a Beethoven cello sonata to a strange duet that set Mr. Haimovitz's frenetic bowing against the turntable's hallucinatory electronic sounds. A crowd sipped beers and looked spellbound as Mr. Haimovitz improvised seamless transitions between movements, building up to a fully improvised cadenza. "There are certain movements where, as it would happen in the 18th century, we make it up on the spot," Mr. Haimovitz says.

Just last weekend at the Boston Philharmonic, Algerian-born violinist Gilles Apap dazzled the audience with an improvisation on Bach's fourth cello suite, segueing from Baroque to Celtic melodies to Appalachian fiddle tunes. This weekend, the classically trained string trio Time for Three will play a freewheeling program with the Florida Orchestra in Tampa Bay, mixing Bach, the Beatles, bluegrass and jazz and leaving room for their own melodic riffs. "We're not inventing anything. This was done in Mozart's time," says Zach De Pue, the 29-year-old concertmaster of the Indianapolis Symphony and one of Time for Three's two violinists.

Jan. 23 at Symphony Space, New York, performing the premiere of his new work "Strings and Threads," with guitarist Sharon Isbin.

A new generation of performers has embraced improvisation in ways Bach and Mozart couldn't have imagined, videotaping themselves and posting the results on YouTube. Eric Barnhill, a Juilliard-trained pianist in New York, records a daily improvisation in the style of Brahms or Schubert and posts audio files on his blog. Graduates of the country's top conservatories have formed classical garage bands that leapfrog across genres and use improvisation to blend classical motifs with jazz, folk and hip-hop.

Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, improvisation was a vital aspect of musical performances. Bach's spontaneous melodies often lasted half an hour and ended with complex, three-part fugues. Beethoven famously battled German pianist Daniel Steibelt in heated improvisation duels. When Franz Liszt performed, the audience suggested melodies and themes for him to riff on -- at an 1838 concert in Milan, he improvised based on such wide-ranging themes as marriage and railroads, according to Kenneth Hamilton's 2007 book "After the Golden Age: Romantic Pianism and Modern Performance."

Concerts began to change in the 1850s. Audiences came to prefer composers' iconic masterpieces. The growth of the music publishing business gave musicians identical, mass-produced scores. Later, the recording industry enabled listeners to memorize the nuances of famous performances. By the mid-20th century, improvisation had all but vanished among classical performers. Classical music ceded spontaneity to jazz.

Improvisation's unlikely rebirth comes at a pivotal moment. Symphony orchestras are struggling to attract the next-generation audience, but the genre is flourishing in unexpected places. Nightclubs and other pop music venues are booking new, cross-pollinating ensembles that attract young crowds. The Metropolitan Opera is reaching fans in movie theaters with screenings of live, high-definition broadcasts. InstantEncore.com, a year-old Web site, has free video of more than 1,000 classical concerts; visitors have watched nearly 60,000 streaming videos since February. In this unruly landscape, improvisation has double appeal: It offers something that's fresh and unique to each performance while steering the classical repertoire back to its roots.

"It's not like these are museum pieces under glass," says Benjamin Zander, conductor of the 29-year-old Boston Philharmonic and an advocate of reviving improvisation. "These are living, breathing pieces, and our job is to bring them to life."
Efforts to restore improvisation have stirred controversy. Ms. Montero, the Venezuelan pianist, says people occasionally walk out when she starts to improvise. Mr. Haimovitz says he was booed by an audience in Paris in the early 1990s when he improvised with an electric guitarist. Some scholars and musicians say it's counterproductive, and slightly impious, to tinker with masterpieces. "The idea that when you improvise a cadenza you are doing what they did in the 18th century is a delusion," says pianist and author Charles Rosen. "There's no reason to think that if you improvise one, it's going to be better than the one Mozart wrote."

Rahav Segev for The Wall Street Journal
Matt Haimovitz performing at Le Poisson Rouge, N.Y.
An improvisation revival could profoundly influence how classical music is taught and performed. Learning how to jam in the style of Beethoven may sound impossible, but musicians who dare to try say it enriches their understanding of rhythmic and harmonic structures and leads to livelier and more-nuanced interpretations. Improvisation could even help draw new audiences to the concert-hall format, by offering something that has never been played before.

Bringing it back won't be easy, though. There's no Suzuki method for improvisation. Few contemporary classical performers master the art, let alone try to teach it. Violinist and composer Mark O'Connor, who improvised a two-minute solo passage while performing one of his own compositions at Carnegie Hall last month, says performers have to relearn how to be creative, in part because their training places so much emphasis on the flawless execution of another person's creation.

"One of the reasons we don't see more improvisation in the academic setting is because at some point in our education system, the creative composers were separated from the virtuosic performers. Some of that is starting to be broken down now," says Mr. O'Connor, who learned to improvise by studying jazz and folk music and now coaches young musicians in improvisation at UCLA, Harvard and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.

Once rare outside jazz departments, such workshops have become more common in recent years. Last month, a group of piano majors at Juilliard gathered in a classroom with two grand pianos and took turns improvising in the style of Bach, Chopin and Beethoven. None had studied improvisation before, and most were hesitant. The teacher, visiting pianist David Dolan, chided them for playing too carefully and challenged the idea that the performer's job is merely to execute a composer's intentions perfectly. "Do you think Chopin would authorize you to change his text?" he asked the 10 students, who seemed stunned into silence. "Chopin wouldn't only authorize you, he would push you to do that."

Few teachers take improvisation further than Eric Edberg, a professor of music at DePauw University, in Greencastle, Ind. Prof. Edberg, a cellist, began improvising 15 years ago. He started by playing spontaneous, dissonant cello harmonies, then taught himself to improvise simple melodies. Now he teaches his cello students to improvise and coaches chamber music groups that play nothing but improvisations.

Prof. Edberg's unorthodox coaching sessions begin with freestyle humming, sighing, babbling and finger-wiggling. Sometimes he turns off the lights and instructs students to play in the dark to hone their instincts. His students say it helps them develop their own musical voice. "We're kind of like composers when we improvise," says Rebecca Janvrin, a junior majoring in vocal performance and history, who improvises with a chamber music group. "We have the whole gamut of techniques and styles from all of music history to draw from."

On a recent rainy afternoon, members of a string quartet rehearsed a loosely structured improvisation. They began plucking their strings in ascending notes that grew louder and faster. Then the cellist and viola player held down a rhythm, plucking and tapping their instruments, while the violinists took turns improvising solos. Jenna Bauer, a 19-year-old violin major, played smooth, drawn-out notes that sounded like Irish folk tunes. The other violinist, Jeremy Eberhard, a junior, played furious, dissonant chords that evoked the 20th century Russian composer Shostakovich.

The players locked eyes, looking for cues about when to switch tempos and when to end. Sometimes, they ended with a decisive swipe of their bows. Other times, they ground unexpectedly to a halt, seemingly out of ideas. Prof. Edberg told them to make more eye contact and have more confidence. "Repeat after me," he said. "There are no wrong notes. I embrace the surprises.

"They say that in jazz all the time," he continued. "If you play a wrong note, play it again, then it's not a wrong note anymore."
During a concert last week at DePauw, Prof. Edberg's chamber music students gave an hour-long performance without music stands or notes. At one point, the string quartet sat in a tight circle on stage, the lights went down and they played in complete darkness for two minutes, listening to each other's breathing to time their bowing and to match volume and rhythm. They ended with a quick, two-chord flourish, drawing applause and astonished laughter.

If improvisation were to make a widespread comeback, it could change the way contemporary audiences hear masterpieces like Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Rather than regarding them as static and timeless achievements, audiences would come to hear them as evolving works. Not every adaptation would be a success, but some say it's worth sacrificing consistency to give audiences something never heard before. Improvisers say that all it takes, apart from serious musical chops, is a willingness to fail.

"The immediacy and the intensity is vivid and dangerous," says Mr. Levin, the pianist. "Everybody in the audience is going to know if you fail, because they have 200 years of hindsight, and they love Beethoven."

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
By TIM WEINER 41 minutes ago

Odetta performed at the 2007 Jazz Foundation Loft Party in New York City.
The singer, whose voice wove together American folk music and the civil rights movement, died Tuesday.

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.
Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.”
Odetta sang at the march on Washington, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, in August 1963. Her song that day was “O Freedom,” dating to slavery days: “O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word.” “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life.”

Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later, Odetta discovered that she could sing.
“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”

She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.

“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.
In a 2005 National Public Radio interview, she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

In 1950, Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.
She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair.

Her voice plunged deep and soared high, and her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” resonated with an audience hearing old songs made new.
Bob Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” It was her first, and the songs were “Mule Skinner,” “Jack of Diamonds,” “Water Boy,” “ ’Buked and Scorned.”

Her blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”

Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But after King was assassinated in 1968, the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.
In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Odetta the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities.

Odetta was married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983 to pursue his performing career.
She was singing and performing well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong.
In April 2007, half a century after Bob Dylan first heard her, she was on stage at a Carnegie Hall tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.

Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”

The critic called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”
Odetta (December 31, 1930 - December 2, 2008) was an African-American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, often referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement." Her musical repertoire consists largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and '60s, she was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Janis Joplin.
Early life

She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, grew up in Los Angeles, California, and studied music at Los Angeles City College. Having operatic training from the age of 13, her first professional experience was in musical theater in 1944, as an ensemble member for four years with the Hollywood Turnabout Puppet Theatre, working alongside Elsa Lanchester; she later joined the national touring company of the musical Finian's Rainbow in 1949.
[edit] Career beginnings

While on tour with Finian's Rainbow, Odetta "fell in with an enthusiastic group of young balladeers in San Francisco", and after 1950 concentrated on folksinging.[1]
She made her name by playing around the United States: at the Blue Angel nightclub (New York City), the hungry i (San Francisco), and Tin Angel (San Francisco), where she and Larry Mohr recorded Odetta and Larry in 1954, for Fantasy Records.
A solo career followed, with Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues (1956) and At the Gate of Horn (1957). Odetta Sings Folk Songs was one of 1963's best-selling folk albums.
In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed her "The Queen of American folk music",[2] and poet Maya Angelou once said,
“
If only one could be sure that every 50 years a voice and a soul like Odetta's would come along, the centuries would pass so quickly and painlessly we would hardly recognize time.[3]
”
[edit] Acting career
Having previous acting experience, Odetta also acted in several films, notably in Cinerama Holiday (1955), the film of William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1961) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974).
See Filmography.

1960s - 1980s
Broadening her musical scope, Odetta used band arrangements on several albums rather than playing alone, and released music of a more "jazz" style music on albums like Odetta and The Blues (1962) and Odetta (1967).
She toured extensively on the folk music circuit from the 1960s to the 1980s, performing with Pete Seeger, Tom Winslow, and many other artists.[citation needed]
Odetta only released two new albums in the 20-year period from 1977-1997: Movin' It On and Christmas Spirituals, both in 1987.
1990s
Beginning in 1998, she re-focused her energies on recording and touring and her career took on a major resurgence. The new CD To Ella (recorded live and dedicated to her old friend Ella Fitzgerald upon hearing of her passing before walking on stage), was released in 1998 on Silverwolf Records, followed by three new releases on M.C. Records, which cemented a partnership with pianist/arranger/producer Seth Farber and record producer Mark Carpentieri, including: Blues Everywhere I Go, a 2000 Grammy Nominated blues/jazz band tribute album to the great lady blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s; Looking for a Home, a 2002 W.C. Handy Award nominated band tribute to Lead Belly; and the 2007 Grammy Nominated Gonna Let It Shine, a live album of gospel and spiritual songs supported by Seth Farber and The Holmes Brothers. These new recordings and an active world touring schedule created the demand for her guest star appearance on fourteen new albums of other artists (between 1999 and 2006), and the re-release of forty-five old Odetta albums and compilation appearances.
On September 29, 1999, President Bill Clinton presented Odetta with the National Endowment for the Arts' National Medal of Arts. In 2004, Odetta was honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington with the "Visionary Award" along with a tribute performance by Tracy Chapman. In 2005, the Library of Congress in Washington honored her with its "Living Legend Award".
[edit] 2000s

The 2005 documentary film No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese, highlights her musical influence on Bob Dylan, the subject of the documentary. The film contains an archive clip of Odetta performing "Waterboy" on TV in 1959, and we also hear Odetta's songs "Muleskinner Blues" and "No More Auction Block for Me".

In 2006, Odetta opened shows for jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux, and in 2006 she toured the US, Canada, and Europe accompanied by her pianist, which included being presented by the US Embassy in Latvia as the keynote speaker at a Human Rights conference, and also in a concert in the capital city of Riga's historic 1,000 year old Maza Guild Hall. In December, 2006, the Winnipeg Folk Festival honored Odetta with their "Lifetime Achievement Award." In February, 2007, The International Folk Alliance awarded Odetta as "Traditional Folk Artist of the Year." On March 24, 2007 a tribute concert to Odetta was presented in Washington, D.C. at the Rachel Schlessinger Theatre by the World Folk Music Association with live performance and video tributes by Pete Seeger, Madeleine Peyroux, Harry Belafonte, Janis Ian, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Josh White, Jr., Peter, Paul & Mary, Oscar Brand, Tom Rush, Jesse Winchester, Eric Andersen, Wavy Gravy, David Amram, Roger McGuinn, Robert Sims, Carolyn Hester, Donal Leace, Marie Knight, Side By Side, and Laura McGhee (from Scotland).
In 2007, her album Gonna' Let It Shine was nominated for a Grammy, and she completed a major Fall Concert Tour in the "Songs of Spirit" show, which included artists from all over the world. She toured around North America in late 2006 and early 2007 to support this CD.[4]
On January 21, 2008, Odetta was the Keynote Speaker at San Diego's Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration, followed by concert performances in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and Mill Valley, in addition to being the sole guest for the evening on PBS-TV's "Tavis Smiley Show."

In 2008, at the age of 77, she launched another national tour, with concerts in Albany, New York and other cities, singing strongly and confidently from a wheelchair.[5] [6] Her set in recent years includes "This Little Light of Mine (I'm Gonna Let It Shine)",[7] Lead Belly's "The Bourgeois Blues",[8] [9] [7] (Something Inside) So Strong", "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "House of the Rising Sun".[6]

In November 2008, Odetta's health began to decline and she began receiving treatment at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. She was slated to perform at Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009. [10]
On December 02, 2008, Odetta died from heart disease in New York City. She was 77 years of age.[11]
Influence

Among the many musicians who cite Odetta as a major musical influence have been:
Janis Joplin - "Janis spent much of her adolescence listening to Odetta, who was also the first person Janis imitated when she started singing".[12]

Bob Dylan, who said, "The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers [Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues] in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson. ... [That album was] just something vital and personal. I learned all the songs on that record. It was her first and the songs were- 'Mule Skinner', 'Waterboy', 'Jack of Diamonds', ''Buked and Scorned'."[13]In 1965, Odetta recorded an album of Dylan covers, Odetta Sings Dylan.
Joan Baez said "Odetta was a goddess. Her passion moved me. I learned everything she sang."[14]