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NO GRAMMY FOR MARVIN SAPP?: Grammy Awards official explains the reason 'Never Would Have Made It' wasn't nominated.

2009-01-03T07:30:00.000-08:00

NO GRAMMY FOR MARVIN SAPP?: Grammy Awards official explains the reason 'Never Would Have Made It' wasn't nominated.

*A Brooklyn street vendor is standing in 30 degree weather peddling Hip Hop mix tapes and DVDs from a six-foot table.
Encircled by a variety of CDs of Black motivational speakers and President-elect Barack Obama's acceptance speech, there are some CDs bearing a guy on the cover wearing what resembles a zoot suit.

Referring to the music coming from his speakers the vendor hollers in a New York drawl, almost yawning the vowels: "Got that 'Maaavin Saaapp!'"

Translation: "Marvin Sapp," who is the Pastor of Lighthouse Full Life Center Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan and noted gospel artist. He is the man smiling on the cover of the CD, the voice behind one of the most popular gospel recordings ever. A former member of Detroit-based gospel group Commissioned, the album "Thirsty" is Sapp's 7th musical undertaking in his solo career. The song blasting through the speakers is "Never Would Have Made It," the uber-popular lead single.

In 2008, Marvin Sapp was to music what President-Elect Barack Obama was to politics, a phenomenon. As one of the hottest musical commodities of 2008, the album sat high among the hodgepodge of selections at this make-shift record store, just as it engrossed spins at mainstream urban AC station, KJLH-FM to become the first gospel single to hold the #1 position.

That's only the beginning of the impact "Never Would Have Made It" has had.
The record-breaking track spent over 40 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's gospel radio charts, successfully crossed-over to No. 1 on the urban adult contemporary chart, maintained the No. 1 position in Gospel radio for over 6 months, making it the longest number one song in the history of the Nielsen BDS Gospel Chart, plus the inspiring ballad became the longest running No. 1 single at radio across all genres in the history of Billboard analysis.

(Incidentally, many would argue that this was the top gospel recording of the year, but it never mentioned the words that some say define a song as a gospel song: "Jesus" or "God.")
While its simple refrain, "never would have made it without you," resonated deeply with everyday people who could feel the weight of a suffering economy, a dramatic election competition and a war that seems to have no end in sight, it also touched the hearts of famous rappers Lil' Wayne and Nellie who were moved to lift their hands in worship when Sapp performed the song at the 2008 BET Awards. Sapp was honored with BET's Best Gospel Aryist Award that night and leads the list of Gospel music's Grammy equivalent, The Stellar Awards with a whopping 9 nominations.

Understandably so ... There is something special about this song that brings about a universal connection, although it penetrates on a personal level. I personally hadn't seen nor felt this type of energy from a recording since "We Are the World."

Yet, even with the stream of unprecedented accolades there is a level of honor the song will never attain--the coveted Grammy Award.

"Never Would Have Made It" never made it onto the 2009 Grammy ballot.
Here's how the got nixed:
Unlike any other award show, the National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS) issues the Grammy award based strictly on peer recognition--it is not a popularity contest or based on chart status or record sales. The basic eligibility requirements are to have nationwide commercial distribution or for digital releases to be available on a Web site other than the artist's personal Web site such as CD Baby, Amazon.com or Itunes.

"Peers" are producers, song-writers, artists etc. who are dues paying members of the organization allowed to vote.
In Sapp's case, "What happened was ... " Bill Freimuth, NARAS Vice President, Awards explains, "It didn't really take off in the public consciousness until this year."
The album was nominated in the Best Traditional Gospel category last year (for 2008) and re-entered for 2008, which is allowed in the allotted 2-year submission window. It was disqualified because continues Freimuth, "The live version was on the album that was entered into the process in the previous year."

Essentially, the song had not peaked in mass popularity and did not receive enough votes the first time around and was disqualified in round 2, although it achieved public acclaim, because it was the same performance of the song according to Freimuth.

It's an unfortunate reality that artists run into all the time, Freimuth says. As another example, "Alternative rock group MGMT, for the album Oracular Spectacular expected that they would be nominated but were disqualified because of a previous entry,” Freimuth stated.

"We live and die by our rules and we publish them to makes sure that everybody making the decisions knows."
The bottomline in Freimuth's opinion is that time was not on Marvin Sapp's side.
Pastor Sapp had not responded to an interview request by press time.

Music Sales Fell in 2008, but Climbed on the Web

2009-01-01T04:49:00.001-08:00

Music Sales Fell in 2008, but Climbed on the Web
By BEN SISARIO
Published: December 31, 2008

Sales of recorded music fell sharply in 2008, as consumers continued to migrate away from the CD format, large retailers reduced floor space for music and the recession dampened consumer spending during the critical year-end holiday shopping period.
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Chris Pizzello/Associated Press
Chris Martin and Coldplay had 2008’s No. 2-selling album.
Related
The Top-Selling Albums of 2008 (January 1, 2009)
Music: My Music, MySpace, My Life (November 9, 2008)
Times Topics: Coldplay Lil Wayne

Total album sales in the United States, including CDs and full-album downloads, were 428 million, a 14 percent drop from 2007, according to data from Nielsen SoundScan. Since the industry’s peak in 2000, album sales have declined 45 percent, although digital music purchases continue to grow at a rapid rate.

The year’s biggest seller was Lil Wayne’s album “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Motown), which sold 2.87 million copies, followed by Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends” (Capitol), with 2.14 million. “Fearless” (Big Machine), the second album by the 19-year-old country star Taylor Swift, was third, with 2.11 million. (Ms. Swift also scored the sixth-highest seller this year, for her self-titled debut, released in 2006, which sold 1.6 million copies in 2008.)

The music industry has grown accustomed to dismal sales numbers, and this year even the good news comes with disappointment. “Tha Carter III” is the first release in SoundScan’s 17-year history to top the year-end list with sales of less than 3 million.

Sales of digital music continued to rise steeply last year. Just over a billion songs were downloaded, a 27 percent increase from 2007, and some record companies say they are finally beginning to wring significant profits from music on Web sites like YouTube and MySpace.
But analysts say that despite the growth and promise of digital music — in 2003 just 19 million songs were purchased as downloads — the money made online is still far from enough to make up for losses in physical sales.

“As the digital side grows, you get a different business model, with more revenue streams,” said Michael McGuire, an analyst with Gartner, a market research firm. “But do we get back to where the revenue that the labels see is going to be fully replacing the CD in the next four to five years? No.” Gartner recently issued a report urging record companies to put their primary focus on downloads.

Record companies counter that album sales alone do not give a full picture of the complex new economics of the industry. Rio Caraeff, the executive vice president of Universal Music Group’s digital division, eLabs, said other income, like the fees collected when users stream a video online, had become an essential part of the pie. Twenty percent of Rihanna’s revenue, he said, has come from the sale of ring tones.

“We don’t focus anymore on total album sales or the sale of any one particular product as the metric of revenue or success,” Mr. Caraeff said. “We look at the total consolidated revenue from dozens of revenue lines behind a given artist or project, which include digital sales, the physical business, mobile sales and licensing income.”

Even as most of the industry pushes for greater online sales, two of the biggest albums of the year were by artists who have been vocal opponents of downloading. Kid Rock’s “Rock N Roll Jesus” (Atlantic) reached No. 4 with just over 2 million sales, and AC/DC’s “Black Ice” (Columbia), sold through an exclusive deal with Wal-Mart, was No. 5 with 1.92 million.
Neither act sells its music through Apple’s iTunes, the dominant online seller. AC/DC has said that selling individual tracks breaks up the continuity of a full album. But à la carte downloads are also far less lucrative than full CDs.

At least one sector of the music industry has continued to enjoy robust success: the concert business. Ticket sales in North America in 2008 rose at least 7 percent, to $4.2 billion, according to Pollstar, the touring-industry trade magazine. But in keeping with the trend of recent years, slightly fewer tickets were sold for more money: attendance for the top 100 tours dropped 3 percent, but the average ticket price climbed 8 percent, to $66.90.

The record industry has been eager to share in touring’s bull market, and many of the major labels’ new contracts are for so-called 360 deals, which give the company a much wider share in an artist’s income, from touring to merchandising to product endorsements. But those types of contract are still far from the norm.

Despite the growth of online music sales, CDs remain by far the most popular format, although that hold is slipping; 361 million CDs were sold in 2008, down almost 20 percent from the previous year. About 84 percent of all album purchases were CDs, down from 90 percent the year before.

And since CDs remain the record industry’s biggest profit engine, many analysts worry that the industry will be particularly vulnerable to inventory reductions at retail stores. Big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy account for up to 65 percent of all retail purchases, and many of those stores are sharply reducing the floor space allotted to music, said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research in New York.

“CDs no longer drive somebody into a store on Tuesday,” Mr. Greenfield said, referring to the day new CDs usually go on sale. “So the big risk for 2009 is that you will see even more rapid contraction of floor space, as CDs really go out of sight, out of mind for the consumer.”
The Top-Selling Albums of 2008
Published: December 31, 2008
1. LIL WAYNE, “Tha Carter III” (Cash Money/Universal Motown); 2.87 million
2. COLDPLAY, “Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends” (Capitol); 2.14 million
3. TAYLOR SWIFT, “Fearless” (Big Machine); 2.11 million
4. KID ROCK, “Rock N Roll Jesus” (Atlantic); 2.02 million
5. AC/DC, “Black Ice” (Columbia); 1.92 million
6. TAYLOR SWIFT, “Taylor Swift” (Big Machine); 1.6 million
7. METALLICA, “Death Magnetic” (Warner Brothers); 1.57 million
8. T. I., “Paper Trail” (Grand Hustle/Atlantic); 1.52 million
9. JACK JOHNSON, “Sleep Through the Static” (Brushfire/Universal); 1.49 million
10. BEYONCé, “I Am ... Sasha Fierce” (Music World/Columbia); 1.46 million
Source: Nielsen SoundScan

Freddie Hubbard, Jazz Trumpeter, Dies at 70

2008-12-30T05:38:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-29T09:40:00.000-08:00

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..

2008-12-29T09:32:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-29T09:28:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-28T11:06:00.000-08:00

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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Destiny's Children Dee Dee, in 1969, just missed the spotlight.
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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

2008-12-26T08:05:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-19T05:31:00.000-08:00

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.

2008-12-03T04:56:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-03T04:40:00.000-08:00

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]

Songs in the Key of Monk With Lyric Latin Touches

2008-11-25T07:13:00.001-08:00

Songs in the Key of Monk With Lyric Latin Touches

By PETER KEEPNEWS
Published: November 23, 2008
Twelve years ago the Panamanian jazz pianist Danilo Pérez recorded an album whose title, “Panamonk,” neatly summed up its concept and limitations. It was made up primarily of compositions by Thelonious Monk, delivered with a Latin American inflection. Mr. Pérez’s approach was refreshing in its irreverence: rather than try to be as faithful as possible to Monk’s distinctive rhythms and harmonies, he used Monk’s vision as a jumping-off point for his own individuality as an improviser. But “Panamonk” at times skated dangerously close to glib Monk-goes-Latin gimmickry.

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Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Some fun among the lyricism: From left, Ben Street, Danilo Pérez and Adam Cruz performing at the Allen Room.

Mr. Pérez is a smarter and more imaginative musician today than in 1996. His long tenure in the quartet of the relentlessly adventurous saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who likes to keep his sidemen on their toes, has surely contributed to his artistic growth. Leading a trio at the Allen Room as part of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s weekend-long Monk celebration, Mr. Pérez revisited some of the “Panamonk” repertory and played a few other Monk compositions as well. In the first of his two sets on Saturday night (he also performed twice on Friday) he was often exhilarating, sometimes moving and rarely glib or gimmicky.

Only a few of the nine numbers, six of them written by Monk, received the full-on Latin treatment. And even on those, despite fiery polyrhythmic support from the bassist Ben Street and the drummer Adam Cruz, Mr. Pérez steered clear of the overheated passion that can infect jazz musicians trying to fit a stereotypical idea of Latin. The essence of his performance was not heat but restrained, assured lyricism.

The slower and more ruminative pieces were among the highlights of the set. In his unaccompanied interpretation of “ ’Round Midnight,” whose emotional intensity has tempted many a good musician to lapse into melodrama, Mr. Pérez was introspective without being maudlin or sentimental. With Mr. Street and Mr. Cruz providing sensitive counterpoint, he was just as effective assaying “Ask Me Now,” a lesser-known but equally beautiful Monk ballad.

If Mr. Pérez rarely aped Monk’s style directly — his playing was far more legato, his lines far more elaborate — he often evoked Monk’s playful spirit. During Mr. Cruz’s solo on “Think of One,” one of the few Monk tunes to receive the no-holds-barred Afro-Cuban treatment, Mr. Pérez got up from the piano bench, walked over to the drum kit and provided spontaneous percussion accompaniment. And he brought the song, and the set, to a joyful conclusion with an overtly Monkian gesture: a dissonant cluster of notes, played loudly and emphatically with his right elbow.

Big-Band Jazz, Personalized, Soloized and Energized

2008-11-25T07:09:00.001-08:00

Big-Band Jazz, Personalized, Soloized and Energized

By BEN RATLIFF
Published: November 23, 2008

me of Thelonious Monk’s music is more than 60 years old, but it still has magic properties. It keeps small-group jazz honest: his compositions still contain relevant lessons about melody and harmony, rhythm and open space. Above it all they are songs: you can whistle them.

Richard Perry/The New York Times
The pianist Marcus Roberts on Friday night, part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center’s weekend-long tribute to Thelonious Monk.
But his music is also playful and rugged enough to withstand any revisionism. You can rough it up, break it down, broaden or narrow it. In jazz nobody else’s music sounds as equally right played by one monophonic instrument or filtered through a big band.

Jazz at Lincoln Center held a Thelonious Monk festival over the weekend, and its biggest event was a program of large-ensemble music at Rose Theater, with the 16-piece Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and the pianist Marcus Roberts. In the past the organization and its house band have presented and played Monk’s music up and down. The orchestra, led by Wynton Marsalis, has particularly personalized the notion of big-band Monk. Its concerts in the past 15 years have included some of the large-ensemble Monk orchestrations written by Monk and Hall Overton in 1959 and 1963, but also new commissions from its own members, magnifying small-group Monk tunes.

The concert on Friday — with irritating, recited biographical intrusions by the actor Courtney B. Vance — drew on the orchestra’s own arrangements. They came in all stripes. The trombonist Vincent Gardner’s take on “Light Blue” used Gil Evans timbres — piccolos, muted trumpets — as well as a dramatically slow tempo, a solo-piano chorus and a finale that sounded like an orchestration of an improvised solo. (That trick — orchestrating a notated improvisation — was true to Monk: you can hear it on “Little Rootie Tootie,” from the recording of Monk’s 10-piece band at Town Hall in 1959. A preconcert audiovisual lecture by the historian Sam Stephenson, on the documentation of the rehearsals for that concert, demonstrated how Monk and Overton came to the idea.)

Other arrangements stressed rhythm first. Both “Bye-Ya,” arranged by the bassist Carlos Henriquez, and “Criss Cross,” arranged by the drummer Ali Jackson, used a 17th member: the percussionist Marc Quiñones. Playing congas, Mr. Quiñones built clave rhythms in conjunction with Mr. Jackson’s timbales.

Mr. Marsalis loves playing with orchestral effects — he has a cinematic imagination — and his arrangement of “Evidence” showed it. Each of the theme’s strangely spaced notes came dressed in different colors, using the full range of the band, no single part of it for two consecutive notes. The approach suggested a living being, some big beast moving a toe, then an eyebrow, then a neck muscle, then a tail.

In two songs whose melodies come in sprays of notes, the arrangers played up that effect throughout. “Skippy” was arranged by Ted Nash, who played his own alto-saxophone solo, full of frenetic hummingbird motions; in “Four in One,” Mr. Marsalis got the melody’s rippling spirit into his trumpet solo, making hungry, tearing phrases.

Through these diverse variations Mr. Roberts was a constant, applying similar tactics to most of these pieces. He used specifics from Monk’s keyboard technique — dissonant chords artfully banged like early funk, sparky downward runs at the close of an eight-bar segment. But his solos contained his own focused energy, through repetition and sweet blues phrases. As he subtly toyed with the audience, building tension without raising his volume or speed, he repeatedly prompted cheers even before his solos had ended.

Channel Thirteen PBS had an interesting report on online religion

2008-11-22T08:04:00.000-08:00

Channel Thirteen PBS had an interesting report on online religion.

Click here: Episode no. 1212 ~ COVER . Online Religion Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

Although most churchgoers still prefer religion the old-fashioned way, an increasing number, especially those under 30, are exploring religion online. A study in 2001 by the Pew Research Center found that one-in-four adults use the Internet for religious and spiritual purposes. That was seven years ago. Today, the number is probably considerably higher.

Angola: Musician Simmons Massini Happy With New Generation Musicians

2008-11-22T04:46:00.000-08:00

Angola: Musician Simmons Massini Happy With New Generation Musicians
Angola Press Agency (Luanda)

19 November 2008Posted to the web 19 November 2008
Luanda

The Angolan music producer Simmons Massini expressed last Tuesday in Luanda his satisfaction at the emergence, in recent years, of new talented Angolan musicians.
According to him, from this moment on, this new wave of singers should be accompanied and supported, so that we can have artists of the level of famous musicians like Filipe Mukenga, Paulo Flores and Rui Mingas.

According to the producer, the fact that the new singers are committed to using more and more the Angolan rhythms constitutes a basis to achieve a successful career at international level.
Simmons Massini said that records piracy has been a heavy factor for the weak support artists get from business people, which makes it difficult for new musicians to achieve the stardom, even being very talented.

On the other hand, the producer stated that the lack of support from entrepreneurs caused the appearance of many home studios as alternative, which has been an incentive to piracy, having into account the distribution methods of the music recorded in those places, which normally end up going to the black market.

The musician also confirmed the release of his first gospel CD at the end of this month entitled "Poder do Alto" (Power from Above).

For this, Simmons Massini invited the artists Dodó Miranda, Afrikkanitha, Puto Prata, Totó, Edmázia and Cândido brothers, Walter and Nicol Ananás, to sing songs in styles like kizomba, rap and dance.

The singer intends to release for the first time in the history of the Angolan CD market, 40,000 copies throughout the country.
The music work will comprise 11 tracks and all of them have messages related to God and love.

Simmons Massini started his career in the 1980s in infant music festivals promoted by the National Radio of Angola (RNA), when he started to learn to play guitar under the guidance of the Angolan musician Teddy

Nigeria: Move to Ban Public Music Underway

2008-11-22T04:44:00.001-08:00

Nigeria: Move to Ban Public Music Underway
Leadership (Abuja)

11 November 2008Posted to the web 17 November 2008
Bamun Nii-Veror

The Chief Environmental Health Officer, Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), Mallam Tijjani Ado has disclosed moves by the council to set up a task force that would clampdown on vendors of music label, Restaurants and others who play music aloud in the public.
Ado who said such music constitutes nuisance to residents of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), also noted that such act do not conform with the laws of the FCT apart from the health hazard it constitute.

The health officer who frowned at the situation in which about two or more operators of such businesses tune their music so loud that one does not know which music to listen to, is enough reason to caution them to bring it down to their own hearing and that of their immediate listeners.

He said the task force would commence work within the week, but was quick to explain that an advanced notice would be served to all those who operate such businesses before they finally swing into action.

Areas to be affected according to him, include motorparks, Nyanya, Karu, Garki, Wuse and most of the restaurants in town especially those patronised by fun seekers.
In view of this, Mallam Ado called on residents to desist from such act or face the full wrath of the law

Zimbabwe: Collapse of Music Market Forces Players to Look Abroad

2008-11-22T04:40:00.000-08:00

Zimbabwe: Collapse of Music Market Forces Players to Look Abroad
Zimbabwe Independent (Harare)

20 November 2008Posted to the web 21 November 2008
THE declining sales of music have forced music producers to look to the foreign market to boost revenue and encourage aspiring musicians to look to music as a career, says a representative of a new recording studio.

Speaking at the launch of the Thulani Studios, co director of the studio, Bengt Post said the new studios would target festivals in Africa and appealed to donors to support the initiative that will look at all aspects of live performance including concept development, set design, costumer design, lighting design, stage direction and choreography.

"The purpose of the programme is to improve the performance of talented and promising musicians to a level where they can 'compete' internationally, i.e. perform and sell their albums abroad," said Bengt.

"Given the collapse of the local market, we must become an export industry -- there is no other way in the short to medium term. Our first point of focus in this regard is music festivals in Africa.

The launch was attended by a colourful mix of guests -- the National Arts Council, the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association, the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation and the Culture Fund, fellow musicians, young and not so young, DJs, music journalists and members of the international community.

The new studios are focusing on launching their first two albums towards the end of the year -- Kuzangoma by Willom Tight and Famba Pore Pore by Adam Chisvo, produced with the financial assistance of Africalia, a Belgian NGO that supports cultural initiatives in Africa. The project is collaboration with Producciones Serrano, a Spanish Production company.

But the managers of Thulani Studios- Steve Sparx and Bengt- are not entirely new to the music arena. Four years ago, the group brought together eight of Zimbabwe's most creative musicians to collaborate on the production of an album to form the group "The Collaboration" whose end product was the album Hupenyu Kumusha. The group performed at the Sauti Za Busara Festival in Zanzibar. Their group's hit song, Urombo, was included on an album by one of South Africa's most successful groups, Revolution, and has featured on the musical channel Channel O for over two years.

The new breed in the music scene comes at a time when the music industry is teetering on the jaws of collapse as the productive sector of the economy seems to be getting little rewards. The music business in Zimbabwe is in very dire straits, and music being a luxury item, it is in even rougher waters than many businesses.

"Steve Sparx (co-director of Thulani Studios) spoke to a Director at the Zimbabwe Music Corporation who said that CD sales have declined to a point where they have pretty much come to a screeching halt. "No CD sales in Zimbabwe," said Begt

"In a poor country like ours, music is a luxury item, and who can afford such frivolous spending in Zimbabwe today? Here we are faced with a sad irony, one of many that confront us today. Zimbabwe has a very rich musical tradition that is respected all over the continent and beyond," said Sparx.

In Zimbabwe today, only a handful of musicians manage to make a decent living from their trade. Only a handful of musicians are able to afford to pay to record their music

Music the blood of African church life

2008-11-17T11:53:00.000-08:00

Music the blood of African church life - Thursday, July 24, 2008
Congolese women singing in their own styles Photographer: Stanley W. Green PHOTO(S) AVAILABLE

When a people develops its own hymns with both vernacular words and music, it is good evidence that Christianity has truly taken root.

—Vida Chenoweth and Darlene Bee from “On Ethnic Music” in Practical Anthropology
ELKHART, Ind. (Mennonite Mission Network) — Mission workers strive to reach across cultural divides to communicate the gospel, but Christian music from one culture imposed upon another can become an impediment. However, when music is created within a culture, the seeds of Christ have taken root.

“If people feel like they have to learn someone else’s language or they have to sing somebody else’s music in order to worship, all you’ve done is created an unnecessary cultural barrier for people to become followers of Jesus,” said James Krabill, senior executive for global ministries at Mennonite Mission Network.

Krabill was a co-author of Roberta King’s (associate professor of communication and ethnomusicology at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, Calif.) new book Music in the Life of the African Church. Other authors on the team were Jean Ngoya Kidula, associate professor of music at the University of Georgia, and Thomas A. Oduro, senior lecturer and principal at Good News Theological College and Seminary, Accra, Ghana.

“The role of music in Africa and among Africans is like the role of blood to the human body,” said Oduro. “There is no life in Africa without music.”

Krabill spent 14 years living and teaching in the Ivory Coast with his wife, Jeanette. For 3½ years, Krabill collected over 500 original compositions by members of the Harrist church among the Dida people—his first exploration in the field of ethnomusicology*.

Krabill worked with local church leaders to transcribe the hymns in the Dida language before translating them to analyze the lyrical content and theology. His work was some of the earliest Western efforts to explore the music of this indigenous African Christian church.
Especially in oral societies, music is a vehicle for communicating biblical truth, personal faith issues and church history, explained Krabill.

“What people sing in church becomes at least as or more important than what is preached,” said Krabill. “[Music] is what they carry back to their courtyards and houses.”
For a long time, mission workers have used music to communicate the gospel.
However, there is a crucial distinction between the approach to music during earlier, colonial-style missions and a modern, culturally-sensitive approach being taken by many mission workers today.

The former linked Christianity to Western culture by using traditional European or North American hymns and styles of music. This creates a dilemma for new African Christians.
“Using only Western music does not communicate to the personality of the African,” said Oduro. “Singing from a book, reading music notations and using a foreign language inhibits the African form of expression.”

Krabill said, “The mission of a gospel communicator is to learn enough about the culture to communicate effectively. This means knowing the language and knowing what the culture values so you can connect. Music becomes an important part of that.”

The field of ethnomusicology provides a critique for the colonial approach to mission. Music becomes a tool for Africans to fully express their faith in culturally-appropriate ways.
In one village, for example, residents had a plethora of praise songs to honor their chief. As they became followers of Christ, the community began to adapt the songs and traditions to praise their new leader: God.

At each worship service (worship is not reserved for Sundays) the entire congregation meets at the house of the head preacher to sing and dance him to church. After worship, they accompany him home again.

“It’s a way of saying ‘we’re going into God’s house to go hear the word of God and this is our messenger from God,’” said Krabill.

The recessional can last three hours and may be longer than the actual worship service.
It is something that North American Christians would never do—most drive to church on Sundays—but becomes an important form of worship for this African church, explained Krabill.
According to Music in the Life of the African Church, in 1900 there were 10 million Christians in Africa, only 9 percent of the population. In 2000, there were 360 million Christians, roughly half of the continent’s inhabitants.

“The growth of Christianity in Africa … is unprecedented,” said Oduro. “The greatest impetus of [this growth] is the use of African music, rhythms, music instruments and lyrics. Music has revolutionized the face of Christianity in Africa.”

As the church continues to grow in Africa and other parts of the world, Krabill’s work is a reminder of the importance of contextualizing the gospel.

“As new churches develop, the tendency is to bring in Western stuff,” said Krabill. “Ethnomusicology provides you a critique of that. We work with the leadership to encourage worship forms that make sense for them within their own culture.”

In Music in the Life of the African Church, Kidula wrote, “Different organizations often promote the types [of music] they think are most appropriate for worship. Because God cannot be contained by human limits, his creation cannot begin to understand or circumscribe the boundaries of the sounds that best speak of, or to, him.”

*Music in the Life of the African Church defines ethnomusicology as "a musicology that includes the study of music in culture and music as culture in all world contexts."

Mourners Honor 'Mama Africa' Makeba

2008-11-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

Mourners Honor 'Mama Africa' Makeba

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Nov. 15) - A trumpet wailed and poetry soared Saturday as South Africans remembered "Mama Africa," Miriam Makeba, for her music and her commitment to human rights.

The memorial service after Makeba's death Monday at the age of 76 followed two days of national mourning, with flags at half staff and books of condolences at the presidency and parliament — honors due a woman seen as an ambassador for the best values of her country, her continent and the world.

South African singer, composer, humanitarian and activist Miriam Makeba passed away after a concert in Italy on Nov. 10.
Makeba's celebrity and grace made her a powerful voice against apartheid, and she later championed women's and children's rights and other causes. She died after collapsing during a concert in Italy in honor of six immigrants from Ghana who were shot to death in September in an attack blamed on organized crime.
Mourners began arriving Saturday hours before the public memorial service began at a Johannesburg stadium.

Zindzi Mfundisi, a 20-year-old waitress and aspiring singer, was first in line. Mfundisi said she once met Makeba before a concert in South Africa. Her heroine encouraged her to stay in school.
"I know her as a mother, as a caring mother," Mfundisi said. "I love her humanity."
Moferefere Mofokeng brought his wife and two children to the service, rising early for a drive of several hours from the eastern town of Ermelo.

"This is my icon," said the 48-year-old engineer, his 5-year-old son Lebo looking up at him solemnly. "I have to be here with my family."

His 12-year-old daughter Cindy called Makeba "an inspiration."
The service drew a South African mosaic — young and old, white and black. Some wore sober black suits and church hats. Others wore vibrant traditional robes that recalled Makeba's own Afro chic — as well as the poet Langston Hughes's call to remember the dead with "one, last trumpet note of sun."
South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who was once married to Makeba, performed at the memorial. It was billed as a solo performance of her song "Welele," but the audience of about 1,500 joined in, clapping softly to the dirgelike rhythm set by Masekela.

Poet Maishe Maponya told an audience that included former South African President Thabo Mbeki and Makeba's grandchildren her "lips touched our hearts with hymns of beauty." Pallo Jordan, a former anti-apartheid activist who is now South Africa's minister of culture, said Makeba "deployed her music as a weapon in the struggle."

"She kept her eyes on the prize," Jordan said. "And that prize was a free South Africa in a free Africa in a better Africa in a better world."

The white government toppled in 1994 revoked Makeba's passport when she was traveling abroad to promote her appearance in the 1959 anti-apartheid documentary "Come Back, Africa." In 1963, she appeared before the U.N. Special Committee on Apartheid to call for an international boycott of South Africa. She returned to her homeland only after Nelson Mandela was freed from prison in 1990.

Smith Bopape, a 58-year-old Johannesburg resident who was among the first to arrive for the memorial service, said he would remember Makeba for a song she first sang in the 1970s, "A Promise," which spoke of her longing to go home, and for justice.

"And she did in the end" come home," Bopape said. "Although it took quite lengthy period."

Rosetta Reitz, Champion of Jazz Women, Dies at 84

2008-11-15T04:05:00.000-08:00

Rosetta Reitz, Champion of Jazz Women, Dies at 84

By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: November 14, 2008
Rosetta Reitz, an ardent feminist who scavenged through the early history of jazz and the blues to resurrect the music of long-forgotten women and to create a record label dedicated to them, died on Nov. 1 in Manhattan. She was 84.
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Jill Lynne, 1977
Rosetta Reitz
The cause was cardiopulmonary problems, her daughter Rebecca Reitz said.
Ms. Reitz (pronounced rights) came by her interest in jazz through her husband and male friends, but as the feminist movement gathered steam in the 1960s, she noticed something was missing: the music’s women. So she started collecting old 78s of performers like the trumpeter Valaida Snow, the pianist-singer Georgia White and a bevy of blues singers who had faded from memory.

At the same time, she unearthed lost songs by more famous artists like Bessie Smith, Ida Cox and Ma Rainey.

“In that decade of the 1920s, when jazz was really being formulated and changing from an entertainment music to an art form,” Ms. Reitz said in an interview with The New York Times in 1980, “these women were extraordinarily important and instrumental in accomplishing that.”
She continued: “Louis Armstrong was a sideman on records in the ’20s with singers like Sippie Wallace, Eva Taylor, Hociel Thomas, Virginia Liston and Margaret Johnson. These women’s records were made as their records. But when they come out now, they’re reissued as Louis Armstrong records, when actually he was not that important on them.”

These women “had the power,” she told The Christian Science Monitor in 1984. “They hired the musicians and the chorus line, a lot of them wrote the music themselves, and they produced their own shows. They were more than just singers; they were symbols of success.”
Music was at first just one element in a busy life. Ms. Reitz was at different times a stockbroker, a bookstore proprietor and the owner of a greeting card business. She was a food columnist for The Village Voice, a professor, a classified-advertising manager and author of a book on mushrooms. She was a founding member of Older Women’s Liberation. She reared three daughters as a single parent.

Ms. Reitz also wrote “Menopause: A Positive Approach” (1977), considered one of the first books to look at menopause from the viewpoint of women and not doctors. She listened to her recordings of women while she wrote the book, many of them celebrating the strength of women rather than treating them as victims.
“I was so alone and needed to be nurtured, and I found I was getting it from them,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.

Ms. Reitz started Rosetta Records in 1979
with $10,000 she had borrowed from friends. Her routine was to scout out lost music, usually through record collectors. She then supervised the remastering of records that were often severely damaged; researched and wrote detailed liner notes; and designed graphics and found period photographs for the album covers. She personally wrapped each order and took it to the post office for shipment. (Around a dozen stores later carried the Rosetta label.)

Over the years Ms. Reitz went from vinyl recordings to tapes to CDs. She refused to give sales figures, but she did tell The Los Angeles Times that the four titles in her “independent women’s blues” series of compilations — including “Mean Mothers” — sold around 20,000 copies each. Some albums centered on themes like railroads or prisons.
Much of the music she recorded was in the public domain, but Ms. Reitz said she had devoted time and energy to tracking down the rights to some songs and to paying artists royalties when she could. Her label had not issued a recording in at least 13 years, but previous releases are sometimes sold on the Internet. And a number of mainstream labels have also reissued albums of the artists Ms. Reitz admired.

Rosetta Goldman was born in Utica, N.Y., on Sept. 28, 1924. She attended the University of Wisconsin for three years, moved to Manhattan and got a job at the Gotham Book Mart. She negotiated a loan to buy her own bookstore, the 4 Seasons, in Greenwich Village, where literary figures like Ralph Ellison were celebrated.

For years Ms. Reitz lobbied for a postage stamp honoring Bessie Smith, which was issued in 1994. She produced concerts by longtime female blues singers for the Newport Jazz Festival, Carnegie Hall and the Hollywood Bowl.

She married Robert Reitz when she was 23, and they divorced in the late 1960s. Besides her daughter Rebecca, of Manhattan, Ms. Reitz is survived by two other daughters, Robin Reitz of Tucson, and Rainbow Reitz of Manhattan; and a granddaughter.

Ms. Reitz did not always finish what she started. She had planned to make 26 albums, she said, but completed only 17. She never finished a book on women in jazz. And even her success with the Rosetta label had left her with a conviction that more work still had to be done.
“My hope and dream,” she said, “is that there won’t be a need for a women’s record company.”

Kenya: Nairobi Orchestra in 60th Anniversary Gala Concert

2008-11-14T05:06:00.000-08:00

Kenya: Nairobi Orchestra in 60th Anniversary Gala Concert
East African Business Week (Kampala)
9 November 2008Posted to the web 10 November 2008
Brian Coutinho

Nairobi Orchestra has organized 60th Anniversary Gala Concert come Saturday 15th November at Braeburn Theatre, Nairobi. The concert will see guest conductor, Damian Penfold and guest soloist, Ivan Kiwuwa. Visiting conductor Damian Penfold has conducted two Christmas concerts here, in 2004 and 2006 and he makes a very welcome return. He has a lot of experience with amateur and professional musicians and was a finalist in the highly prestigious International Sibelius Competition for young conductors.

He conducted a programme of Vaughan Williams' music in London in September and, since this year is also the 50th anniversary of that composer's death we are, at Damian's suggestion, including Vaughan Williams' lyrical Norfolk Rhapsody. Perfomers will incude Nicolai of Merry Wives of Windsor Overture, Schumann the Piano Concerto, Grixti, an Australian in Kenya and others. Ivan Kiwuwa a visiting soloist is a Ugandan pianist, who delighted audiences when he gave an NMS recital at the Kenya National Theatre two years ago.

Graduate, postgraduate and now Fellow of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, Ivan is the winner of many prizes and scholarships, including the Martin Musical Scholarship, the Sevenoaks Festival Young Musician of the Year and the Royal Overseas League's Philip Crawshaw Memorial Prize

"Mama Afrika" Miriam Makeba

2008-11-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

"Mama Afrika" was not only a singer but a humanitarian and an activist. This photographic tribute to her memory records a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in March 2008, eight months before her death.
Congo-Kinshasa: South African UN Goodwill Ambassador Meets Rape Survivors

UN News Service (New York)
13 March 2008Posted to the web 13 March 2008
Women who have survived sexual violence endure a "triple tragedy" - physical, psychological and social - in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South African singer and United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Goodwill Ambassador Miriam Makeba has said.

Ms. Makeba, on a four-day visit to the capital Kinshasa, is touring small farming projects which seek to help rape survivors feed their families and boost their self-reliance. The women taking part in the scheme have received seeds, tools and agricultural training from FAO.
"Women guarantee the survival of 80 per cent of the households in DRC. Yet despite their crucial role for the well-being of the family, they are frequently victims to rape and sexual violence," she said, adding that the systematic rape of women in recent years is the "most horrifying feature of the complex emergency" in the vast Central African nation.

In the volatile North Kivu province alone, 27,000 cases of sexual violence were recorded in 2006, the singer, who was appointed FAO Goodwill Ambassador in 1999, noted.
She also pointed out that despite the DRC's "vast potential for economic growth," 70 per cent of the population faces food insecurity, malnutrition rates are rising and approximately 3.5 million people have lost their lives in the past two decades to violence, famine and disease.
In concert with other UN agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and local authorities, FAO's Emergency Coordination and Rehabilitation Unit has helped 500,000 households, or over two million people, and intends to increase their assistance to aid some 800,000 households this year.

The agency's projects, prioritizing vulnerable groups such as internally displaced persons (IDPs), malnourished children and ex-combatants, have provided farming and fishing equipment, seeds and disease-free plants and road repairs to bolster market access.
"I would like my visit to this country to be an opportunity to renew and strengthen our commitment and ensure that innocent victims suffering from hunger have access to the necessary resources to cultivate their hope for a better life," said Ms. Makeba, recipient of the 1986 Dag HammarskjÃ¶ld Prize for Peace.

While in the DRC, she also plans to visit a project for families impacted by HIV/AIDS, as well as meet with high-ranking Government officials and representative of UN agencies and NGOs
South Africa: Miriam Makeba Sang the Music of Her Roots
allAfrica.com

10 November 2008Posted to the web 10 November 2008
Adiel IsmailCape Town
Singer, song writer, political activist and actress Miriam Zenzi Makeba, or "Mama Africa" as she was popularly known, was born in Johannesburg on March 4 1932.
She made her debut as a vocalist with the Manhattan Brothers in the 1950s. After leaving South Africa to star in the Todd Matshikiza musical, King Kong, she attracted international attention with her vocal ability and released many famous hits such as "Pata Pata," "The Click Song" and "Malaika" while abroad.

When she attempted to return to South Africa after her mother's death, Miriam was refused entry. She lost her passport and after she became known as an anti apartheid activist abroad, her music was banned. She stayed in exile for 31 years, returning only after Nelson Mandela was released and persuaded her to come back.
8
Makeba captured the hearts of many South Africans as some of her songs dealt with the political plight of blacks oppressed by the apartheid regime.

In her autobiography, "Makeba: My Story," she wrote: "I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became the voice and image of Africa and the people."
Amongst her top accolades is a joint Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. She was voted 38th of the "Top 100 Great South Africans" and was given the "International Award for Social Engagement" by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
As "Mama Africa's" music continues to reach both the heights and depths of her listeners' emotions, she will always be remembered as an instrument with the ability not only to speak out but to sing out against all social vices

Adopting New Healthy “Hot” Water Habits

2008-11-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

http://circa50-liberated-boomer-communi1.blogspot.com/2008/11/virtual-picket-and-strike-action.html

http://circa50-liberated-boomer-communi1.blogspot.com/2008/11/heart-attacks-and-drinking-warm-water.html

Adopting New “Hot” Water Habits

Epson salt will flush toxins and heavy metals from the body. Taken internally, Epson Salt acts as a detoxifying agent for colon cleansing. The magnesium sulfate is absorbed through the skin, such as in a bath, it draws toxins from the body, soothese the nerves, reduces swelling, relaxes muscles, is a natural emollient and exfoliator.

Following are several recipes:
1 cup epsom salt, 1 handful sea salt, 2 tablespoons bath oil;
Equal parts epsom salt, baking powder and ginger powder. The ginger opens up pores and promotes sweating (thereby ridding the body of toxins) and the epsom salt has purifying properties

Simply soak in warm water and 2 cups of epsom salt.
If available, add some melted cocoa butter for extra moisturizing -- but watch out; it will make the tub very slippery.

Rejuvenating Detoxifying Bath: Use about 2 quarts 3% hydrogen peroxide to a tub of warm water. Soak at least 1/2 hour, adding hot water as needed to maintain a comfortable water temperature.

Rejuvenating Detoxifying Bath: Add 6 ounces of 35% hydrogen peroxide to a tub of water. You may increase up to 2 cups. Soak at least 1/2 hour.Alternate Bath: Add 1/2 cup 35% hydrogen peroxide, 1/2 cup sea salt, 1/2 cup baking soda or Epson salts to water and soak.

RECIPE FOR A DETOX BATHDaily full bath2 Cups Epson Salt (or Sea Salt)2 Cups Hydrogen Peroxide (3% solution).Soak for 20 Minutes

Virtual Picket and Strike action against the healing Line

2008-11-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

This season may require us to “Picket” and Strike action the healing Line. The healing Line Strike action (“Picket”), often simply called a healing Line strike, is a refusal to patronize the healing caused by poor eating habits.

This season may require us to save the Healing Line for the miraculous.
Picket the healing line by:

1. Adopting spiritual habits that support adopting healthy habits

2. Adopting healthy healing daily habits

3. Fellowshipping with more family and friends who live holy, wholly, and healthy

4. Limiting the “ham sandwich” and choose to eat and live healthy

Heart Attacks And Drinking Warm Water

2008-11-12T07:07:00.000-08:00

Heart Attacks And Drinking Warm Water

This is a very good article. Not only about the warm water after your meal, but about Heart Attacks The Chinese and Japanese drink hot tea with their meals, not cold water, maybe it is time we adopt their drinking habit while eating.

For those who like to drink cold water, this article is applicable to you. It is nice to have a cup of cold drink after a meal. However, the cold water will solidify the oily stuff that you have just consumed. It will slow down the digestion. Once this 'sludge' reacts with the acid, it will break down and be absorbed by the intestine faster than the solid food. It will line the intestine. Very soon, this will turn into fats and can lead to cancer. It is best to drink hot soup or warm water after a meal.

Common Symptoms Of Heart Attack... A serious note about heart attacks - You should know that not every heart attack symptom is going to be the left arm hurting . Be aware of intense pain in the jaw line . You may never have the first chest pain during the course of a heart attack. Nausea and intense sweating are also common symptoms. 60% of people who have a heart attack while they are asleep do not wake up. Pain in the jaw can wake you from a sound sleep. Let's be careful and be aware. The more we know, the better chance we could survive.

....... you can be sure that we'll save at least one life. Read this & Send to a friend. It could save a life. So, please be a true friend and send this article to all your friends you care about.

Look And Live Richard D'Abreu Jr. Rave Reviews Download $0.99 Rate-Comment-Review

2008-11-12T06:25:00.000-08:00

Click here: Amazon.com: Look And Live: MP3 Downloads: Richard D'Abreu Jr.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
. "Look and Live" is a delicious music delicacy for us mere mortals, November 6, 2008
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Philip Bingham (Montclair) - See all my reviews "Look and Live" is not a coincidence...though the markets have traded down, "Look and Live" has spiraled back-up to rank in the top ten personal gospel-jazz songs for hard times in 2008-2009. "Look and Live" is a delicious music delicacy for us mere mortals, usually too precious for human consumption. "Look and Live" takes Take 6 and Manhattan Transfer Vocalies and morphs them to another level. The Saxophone offers a smoothe innovative shift to/from emotional gospel shouts to jazz riffs. "Look and Live" makes my heart dance, causes my feet to tap positive emotions in Morse code, and refreshes my soul. PB
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D. Manning (Hempstead,NY) - See all my reviews Move over world get Ready!!!!!!!!!!get Ready!!!!!!!!!!for a new sound in the christian music. Saxophone sound offer a smoothe innoviative to our everyday spiritual lift each of us in the morning. I truly enjoy the sound. Im looking forward to the entire album for Mr D'Abreu. God blessing and guide you to your album coming.
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Moonchild "Moonchild" (EUR) - See all my reviewsI LOVE this! What a great production and sound. I look fw to hearing more.
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Eli Wilson’s new book, “Equipping The Church Choir for Ministry”

2008-11-12T05:59:00.000-08:00

Eli Wilson’s new book, “Equipping The Church Choir for Ministry” hasfinally arrived. You can order your copy today. The books are $12.00 eachplus $3.00 shipping. Our address is:Eli Wilson MinistriesP.O. Box 680712Orlando, Florida 32868-0712

Eli Wilson Ministries Presents A New Church Music
Resource Book

“Equipping The Church Choir for Ministry”

Order Form

1. Name _____________________________________

2. Address ___________________________________

City ______________________ State____________ Zip _________

3. Contact Phone #: ___________________________

4. Email Address: ______________________________

“Equipping The Church Choir for Ministry” – Number of Copies ______

Mail To The Following Address:

Eli Wilson Ministries
P.O. Box 680712
Orlando, Florida 32868-0712
(407)703-4359
http://www.eliwilson.com/
Email: eli@eliwilson.com

Robert Kennedy Things are moving so fast in race relations a Negro could be president in 40 years.

2008-11-12T05:23:00.000-08:00

“Things are moving so fast in race relations a Negro could be president in 40 years. There is no question about it. In the next 40 years (in about 30 to 40 years), a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has … prejudice exists and probably will continue to … but we have tried to make progress and we are making progress. We are not going to accept the status quo,” Kennedy said May 27, 1968, approximately one week before he was assassinated.

Piano Works by Those Who Escaped the Nazis

2008-11-12T04:18:00.000-08:00

Piano Works by Those Who Escaped the Nazis
By ALLAN KOZINN
Published: November 11, 2008

Over the last 20 years conductors like James Conlon and John Mauceri and ensembles like the Hawthorne String Quartet have made a specialty of works by Jewish composers whose careers were derailed during the Nazi era. They focused at first on composers who were killed, among them Erwin Schulhoff, Hans Krasa and Gideon Klein, but lately they have included composers who survived by fleeing their homelands, and non-Jewish German composers who resisted the regime.

The Royal College of Music, in Toronto, has joined in this exploration, and made an estimable recording of music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg in 2006. Now its faculty ensemble, Artists of the Royal Conservatory, or ARC ensemble, is presenting “Music in Exile: Émigré Composers of the 1930s,” an ambitious, five-day overview at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The series, directed by Simon Wynberg, focuses mostly on the composers who escaped to Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States.

The opening concert, on Sunday, coincided with the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, a night of Nazi rioting in which hundreds of synagogues were burned, thousands of homes and businesses vandalized, and about 30,000 men and boys (Jews, not rioters) arrested. Before the performance Ernest W. Michel, a trustee of the museum, spoke about his memories of Kristallnacht (he was 15), and Mr. Conlon, the honorary chairman of ARC, spoke about the importance of performing the forgotten music of the era.

The first program was to have included works by Walter Braunfels, who was half Jewish, and Adolf Busch, Click here: YouTube - Bachs Chaconne played by Adolf Busch 1/3 who was not Jewish but considered the Nazis contemptible, refused their order to replace Jewish musicians in his string quartet and eventually left Germany. (He was also Rudolf Serkin’s father-in-law.) Alas, a death in the family of an ensemble player forced ARC to replace those pieces with piano quintets by Franz Reizenstein and Weinberg that also appear on later programs.

Both these rarities can stand two hearings in close succession, and the Weinberg Piano Quintet (Op. 18) is a real find. Weinberg fled Poland for the Soviet Union in 1939. He became friendly with Shostakovich, who wrote to Stalin on his behalf when he was arrested during the Soviet Union’s anti-Semitic persecutions in the early 1950s.

The quintet, composed in 1944, is an intense but not particularly troubled work: its rich, Brahmsian string writing is consistently vigorous and sometimes steamy, with singing solo lines that travel among the instruments, a vibrant dance figure in its finale and surprising structural touches. Shostakovich’s influence is slight, but you hear it in the accent and shape of the piano line.

The Reizenstein Quintet in D (Op. 23), from 1948, is also a stone’s throw from late Brahms. It begins and ends with the barest hint of modernist acidity but is mostly given to lush textures and sumptuous themes. The ARC musicians performed both scores with passion, polish and vitality. And Mr. Wynberg provides an extraordinary amount of information about the era and the music in the beautifully produced 104-page program book.

“Music in Exile: Émigré Composers of the 1930s” runs through Thursday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, 18 First Place, at West Street and Battery Place, Lower Manhattan; (646) 437-4202, mjhnyc.org.

Miriam Makeba “Mama Africa” Taking Africa With Her to the World

2008-11-11T06:02:00.000-08:00

Taking Africa With Her to the World
Published: November 10, 2008
To be the voice of a nation speaking to the wider world is a tough mission for any performer. To be the voice of an entire continent is exponentially more difficult. Both were mantles that the South African singer Miriam Makeba took on willingly and forcefully. Despite her lifelong claim that she was not a political singer, she became “Mama Africa” with an activist’s tenacity and a musician’s ear. She died Sunday, at 76, after a concert in Italy.
Related
Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76 (November 11, 2008)
Times Topics: Miriam Makeba
'Pata Pata' by Miriam Makeba, from the 2004 Heads Up album, Reflections

Salvatore Laporta/Associated Press
Miriam Makeba performing barefoot at a concert in Castel Volturno, in southern Italy, on Sunday night, just before she died.
Treating her listeners as one global community, Ms. Makeba sang in any language she chose, from her own Xhosa to the East African lingua franca Swahili to Portuguese to Yiddish. She also took sides: against South African apartheid and for a worldwide movement against racism, to the point of derailing her career when she married the black power advocate Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s. (They were divorced in the mid-1970s.) Even during three decades of life as an exile and expatriate — the South African government revoked her passport in 1960 — she made it clear that South Africa was her home and her bedrock as an artist.

Her voice, more properly voices, were unstoppable. Always cosmopolitan, Ms. Makeba knew her Billie Holiday as well as old Xhosa melodies like “The Click Song,” with its percussive syllables, which became one of her international hits. She could sound light, lilting and girlish; she could be flirtatious, bluesy or utterly exuberant. Her voice also held a layer of rawer, sharper exhortation: the tone of village songs and spirit invocations, the traditions that were her birthright — songs she revisited on her 1988 album “Sangoma” (Warner Brothers). Her huge repertory didn’t feature strident protest songs but in love songs and lullabies, party songs and calls for unity there was an indomitable will to survive: a joyful tenacity that could translate as both deep cultural memory and immediate defiance.

She must have been an exotic apparition in the 1960s, upbeat and already a star in South Africa, wowing Europe and then arriving in the United States with support from Harry Belafonte. She had already, bravely, sung in an anti-apartheid documentary, “Come Back, Africa.” In exile she was still an ambassador, showing America and the world an Africa full of vibrant, irresistible sounds: the loping mbube grooves that Paul Simon would rediscover decades later, the flow of African words, the grain of her voice.

Videos on YouTube from 1966 show Ms. Makeba, with her musicians in jackets and ties, performing in an elegant long dress that also happens to have a leopard-skin pattern: supper-club Africana that’s at home on any continent. Her music was different but not forbidding, especially with her own charisma to introduce it. Before anyone was tossing around terms like “world music,” she was creating it, making her heritage portable while preserving its essence.

She was never a purist, but always proud of her roots.

Ms. Makeba arrived during America’s civil-rights struggles and performed at the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s marches. A visible reminder that discrimination stretched beyond the United States, she denounced apartheid in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1963. It’s impossible to guess what she may have been thinking when she sang her 1967 “Pata Pata,” with its bits of English narration — “ ‘Pata Pata’ is the name of a dance we do down Johannesburg way” — in the full knowledge that she herself would not be welcome back in Johannesburg until a regime change.

Prohibited from returning to South Africa, she settled instead in Guinea, in West Africa, where she participated in that country’s government-assisted movement toward musical “authenticité” — merging traditional styles with new instruments — and let her repertory stretch further. For a while she also joined Guinea’s United Nations delegation.

Ms. Makeba didn’t have the career of a pop singer, thinking about hits and trends and markets. She followed conscience and history instead, becoming a symbol of integrity and pan-Africanism — lending her imprimatur, for instance, by performing on Mr. Simon’s 1987 “Graceland” tour, which carried South African music worldwide while implicitly pointing to the apartheid that still prevailed at home. Through five decades of making music, down to her final studio album, “Reflections,” in 2004 and concerts till the day she died, she sang with a voice that was unmistakably African, and just as unmistakably fearless.

South Africa: Miriam Makeba Sings to the Last

2008-11-10T10:29:00.000-08:00

South Africa: Miriam Makeba Sings to the Last
allAfrica.com
10 November 2008Posted to the web 10 November 2008
Miriam Makeba, the South African singing star whose career took off in the 1950s and who famously appeared at the United Nations to condemn apartheid, has died suddenly after a concert in Italy. She was 76.

Makeba, widely known as Mama Afrika, collapsed on Sunday as she was leaving the stage in the town of Castel Volturno, near Naples, according to a statement issued on Monday by South African foreign minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma. "She received paramedic assistance and was rushed to hospital where she unfortunately passed way," Dlamini Zuma said.

News agencies reported that she appeared at a concert to support an Italian journalist being threatened by the local mafia. In September, six African immigrants were killed in the town when gunmen from the mafia sprayed a group of immigrants with gunfire in an alleged drug-dealing dispute.

Dlamini Zuma paid tribute to Makeba as "one of the greatest songstresses of our time... Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid colonialism through the art of song."

Makeba has been described as Africa's first superstar. She first rose to fame professionally with the Manhattan Brothers in the early 1950s, and subsequently travelled abroad to perform the lead female role in the musical, King Kong. She was promoted by Harry Belafonte in the United States, becoming best known to general audiences for her hits "Pata Pata," "The Click Song" (Qongqothwane) and "Malaika."

She was at one stage married to Stokely Carmichael and lived for some years in Guinea. She was stripped of her South African citizenship after becoming an anti-apartheid icon and returned home only after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

In recent years, she has been a "goodwill ambassador" for South Africa and for the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. In March this year, she highlighted the plight of woman victims of sexual violence during a visit to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Nigeria: Celebrities in Retirement Makeba, Still Mama Africa

Daily Champion (Lagos)
COLUMN5 February 2007Posted to the web 5 February 2007
Victor NzeLagos
She told the world that the March 31 to April 1, 2006 seventh Cape Town Jazz Festival in South Africa, was to be her last stage appearance before settling into a much desired life in retirement. But that was not to be.

The Jazz festival came and went and she never retired, because on April 29, 2006, she made an unprecedented appearance at the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA) in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, where she practically stole the show from such other veterans like Onyeka Onwenu.
That AMAA appearance on a Nigerian stage was to be first time since 28 years, 7 months ago she performed at the 2nd Festival of Black Arts, otherwise called Festac 77 in Lagos.
Such has been the style of the indefatigable songstress, fondly called Mama Africa, who so dominated the African music scence and was so popular here even among those who barely understood her South African Xhosa lyrics.

Indeed, if the African music were to have a hall of fame, this woman of songs would occupy undoubtedly the most prominent position in it, at least to underscore her position and status as the most popular voice and name out of Africa.

With a music career that spans over six decades and or which time she put out nearly a dozen albums excluding singles, Miriam Makeba strides the African music terrain with such familiarity that could give off the false impression about her true country of origin.

Born on March 4, 1932 in Johannesburg, South Africa, 'the Empress of African Song' has for many become synonymous with South African music, just as she put African music on the world map in the 60s.Makeba began her professional career in
1950, when she joined Johannesburg group, the Cuban Brothers. She came to national prominence during the mid-50s as a member of local leading touring group, the Manhattan Brothers. She performed widely with her outfit in South Africa, Rhodesia and the Congo until 1957, when she was recruited as a star attraction in the touring package show African Jazz and Variety.

She remained with the troupe for two years, again touring South Africa and neighbouring countries, before, leaving to join the cast of the "township musical" King Kong, which also featured such future international stars as Hugh Masekela and Jonas Gwangwa.
The opportunity came following her starring role in American film-maker Lionel Rogosin's documentary; Come Back Africa, shot in South Africa. When the Italian government invited Makeba to attend the film's premiere at the Venice Film Festival in spring 1959, she privately decided not to return home.

Shortly afterwards, furious at the international uproar created by the film's powerful expose of Apartheid, her South African passport was withdrawn. In London after the Venice Festival, Makeba met Harry Belafonte, who offered to help her gain an entry Visa and work permit to the United States of America (USA) along with the usual guest appearances on television and jazz clubs.
As a consequence of this exposure, Makeba became a nationally feted performer within a few months of arriving in the USA, combining her musical activities with outspoken denuciations of apartheid. In 1963, after an impassioned testimony before the United Nations Committee Against Apartheid, all her records were banned in South Africa.

Married for a few years to fellow South African emigre Masekela, in 1968, Makeba divorced him in order to marry the Black Panther activist, Stokeley Carmichael-a liaison that severely damaged her following among older white American record buyers. Promoters were no longer interested, and tours and record contracts were cancelled. As a result of this, the couple moved to Guinea in West Africa. He was to divorce him later.
Makeba returned to South Africa, 16 years ago in 1990 at the end of apartheid after spending 30 years in exile.

In a way it could be said that personal strokes of fate afflicted her all those years in exile: The break-up of her marriages with Carmichael-which was her third marriage already, that also included the one with jazz icon Hugh Masekela, coupled with the tragic death of her daughter Bongi, who like her mother, Mariam, was a fantastic singer and a gifted songwriter on top of it.
However, despite the bitter memories of all these, Makeba kept on singing, along with her granddaughter Zenzi Lee in her background choir and a great-grandson in her entourage. She also kept on appearing in movies, as in the 2002 anti-apartheid documentary, entitled: Amandla!.

Recently, she was also involved in her own charity project for abused young women in South Africa and supporting campaigns against hard drugs and AIDS.
Practically, retired from active music, as far as album making is concerned, Makeba now restricts her appearances to very special command performances like that seventh Cape Town Jazz Festival which featured the likes of Manu Dibango and Caiphus Semenya, both of whom are well decorated jazzists on the international scene from Africa.
Her special appearance at the AMAA show in Yenagoa was under the 'special' invitation of the governor, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.

These days, Makeba spends much of her time in London where she resides. Although, she also spends some time in South Africa, her birthplace.
At 75, (in March), the Mama Africa of the entertainment industry keeps going.

South Africa: Miriam Makeba Sang the Music of Her Roots
allAfrica.com
10 November 2008Posted to the web 10 November 2008
Adiel IsmailCape Town
Singer, song writer, political activist and actress Miriam Zenzi Makeba, or "Mama Africa" as she was popularly known, was born in Johannesburg on March 4 1932.
She made her debut as a vocalist with the Manhattan Brothers in the 1950s. After leaving South Africa to star in the Todd Matshikiza musical, King Kong, she attracted international attention with her vocal ability and released many famous hits such as "Pata Pata," "The Click Song" and "Malaika" while abroad.

When she attempted to return to South Africa after her mother's death, Miriam was refused entry. She lost her passport and after she became known as an anti apartheid activist abroad, her music was banned. She stayed in exile for 31 years, returning only after Nelson Mandela was released and persuaded her to come back.

Makeba captured the hearts of many South Africans as some of her songs dealt with the political plight of blacks oppressed by the apartheid regime.

In her autobiography, "Makeba: My Story," she wrote: "I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became the voice and image of Africa and the people."
Amongst her top accolades is a joint Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. She was voted 38th of the "Top 100 Great South Africans" and was given the "International Award for Social Engagement" by the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
As "Mama Africa's" music continues to reach both the heights and depths of her listeners' emotions, she will always be remembered as an instrument with the ability not only to speak out but to sing out against all social vices.
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Elsie Washington is in a Nursing Home in Manhattan

2008-11-10T09:18:00.000-08:00

I saw James Peterson (Bethany CM&A) last week at the funeral of my aunt Lurline Brown. James Peterson told me that Elsie Washington was in a Nursing Home in Manhattan. Elsie is suffering from Multiple Sclerosis and a reoccurrence of cancer. I visited Elsie last week. Although Elsie is struggling..... Elsie recognized me. We reminisced about our years at Bethany. Our visit ended with Elsie Ghana song Seniwa de de de and singing several choruses of her Bethany favorite solo So Send I You. Click here: FortiFi @ : "So Send I You" - Meade Margaret Clarkson Needless to say, It was quite an emotional moment for both of us......
Elsie was a missionary from our group that went to Ghana.

Elsie taught the Ghana song Seniwa de de de

Elsie was the first employer of the Minisink Summer Youth day camp, New York City Mission Society, at Bethany.

Elsie was part of a bethany trio made up of Dolores (Elsies' cousin), Pat Cruz and Elsie

"So Send I You" - Meade Margaret Clarkson

2008-11-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

"So Send I You" - revisited Written by David Meade Margaret Clarkson revised her own famous words, after contact with missions first-hand...

Margaret Clarkson wrote the more-famous and well-known words to "So Send I You" in 1954. Apparently, it expressed her idea of what missionary work would be like, having had no experience herself. But, by 1963, she had a more Biblical and mature view of the Lord of of Mission work. Her perspective changed considerably. So re-wrote the lyrics to "So Send I You".
Unfortunately, most hymnals only include and/or we only sing the original words. It would be better to sing the later lyrics. See the texts below:

So Send I YouMargaret Clarkson, 1954So send I you -- to labor unrewarded,To serve unpaid, unloved, unsought, unknown,To bear rebuke, to suffer scorn and scoffing --So send I you, to toil for Me alone.

So send I you -- to bind the bruised and broken,O'er wand'ring souls to work, to weep, to wake,To bear the burdens of a world a-weary --So send I you, to suffer for My sake.
So send I you -- to loneliness and longing,With heart a-hung'ring for the loved and known,Forsaking home and kindred, friend and dear one --So send I you, to know My love alone.

So send I you -- to leave your life's ambition,To die to dear desire, self-will resign,To labor long, and love where men revile you --So send I you, to lose your life in Mine.
So send I you -- to hearts made hard by hatred,To eyes made blind because they will not see,To spend, tho it be blood, to spend and spare not --So send I you, to taste of Calvary.
"As the Father hath sent Me, So send I you."

Margaret Clarkson, 1963So send I you -- by grace made strong to triumphO'er hosts of hell, o'er darkness, death and sin,My name to bear and in that name to conquer --So send I you, My victory to win.

So send I you - to take to souls in bondageThe Word of Truth that sets the captive freeTo break the bonds of sin, to loose death's fetters --So send I you, to bring the lost to Me.
So send I you -- My strength to know in weakness,My joy in grief, My perfect peace in pain,To prove My pow'r, My grace, My promised presence --So send I you, eternal fruit to gain.
So send I you -- to bear My cross with patience,And then one day with joy to lay it down,To hear My voice, "Well done, My faithful servant --Come share My throne, My kingdom and My crown!"

"As the Father hath sent Me, so send I you."

A lonely and scared young teacher wrote it as she contemplated her isolation—a loneliness that pervaded her heart and soul. Margaret Clarkson experienced loneliness of every kind—mental, cultural, and spiritual—as she began teaching at a logging camp in northern Ontario, Canada she wrote these words of pain and suffering. However years later she would see the “one-sidedness” of this hymn and compose a newer version—one that reflected her growth and rest in Christ.

So send I you—by grace made strong; To triumph o’er hosts of hell, O’er darkness, death and sin; My name to bear, and in that name to conquer So send I you, my victory to win

Margaret Clarkson, whose rarely-used first name is Edith, was born in 1915 into, as Margaret herself described, “a loveless and unhappy marriage” which broke up when she was twelve. The memories of her childhood were of tension, fear, insecurity, and isolation. Margaret was born in Melville, Saskatchewan where she lived until her parents, Frederick and Ethel, and the family moved to Toronto when she was around age four. Throughout her life, she was plagued by pain; initially from migraines, accompanied by convulsive vomiting, and then arthritis—two ailments that accompanied her continually. In Destined for Glory, she related sadly that her mother told her that her first words were “my head hurts.” At age three Margaret, or Margie as her friends knew her, contracted juvenile arthritis and became bed bound. She recalled the pain as well as the bald spot worn on the back of her head from lying in bed so long.

Basie Theater Renovation Turns Back the Clock 82 Years

2008-11-10T08:22:00.000-08:00

Basie Theater Renovation Turns Back the Clock 82 Years

Laura Pedrick for The New York Times
NEW LUSTER Renovation of the Count Basie Theater in Red Bank has restored much of its original splendor.

By COLEEN DEE BERRY
Published: November 7, 2008
RED BANK

FOR years, performers like Bruce Springsteen, George Carlin and Whoopi Goldberg took the stage at the aging Count Basie Theater amid decaying plaster and leaking ceilings. Repairmen stood on call to fix any seat that suddenly gave way.

“We used to tell the performers that the audience here was great; the house itself, not so good,” said Numa Saisselin, the chief executive of the 82-year-old theater. “Now we no longer have to make excuses. For all those who kept the faith and kept coming back here, we finally have a house worthy of their performances.”

The paint is dry, new carpet has been installed and the scaffolding has come down at the newly renovated theater, on Monmouth Street. The reopening show, a rock and soul revue on Oct. 30, sold out, and tickets for a Nov. 8 performance by Tony Bennett have also.

Red Bank residents were invited to an open house at the 1,500-seat theater a day before the first show for an advance peek at the renovation work. Lori Kislin, a Red Bank native, said she spent every Saturday of her childhood watching movies at the theater. “They did a wonderful job,” she said. “The new dome is just gorgeous.”

Just before the reopening, the theater received word that it had been recommended by a state review board for listing on both the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places.
The goal of the $7.8 million renovation project was to restore the theater’s interior to its 1926 grandeur.

Many people volunteered time, work or money. One was Mr. Springsteen, who has a long association with the Count Basie, and whose wife, Patty Scialfa, sits on the theater foundation’s board of directors. (The couple has homes in nearby Rumson and Colts Neck.) In May, Mr. Springsteen and his band, including Ms. Scialfa, performed a benefit concert at the theater, raising $3 million. Mr. Springsteen was introduced onstage by the NBC News anchor Brian Williams, who grew up in Middletown.

Lee S. Babitt, president of Gibraltar Construction Corporation, who acted as general construction manager, donated the cost of his company’s services. “We could have never done this without Lee,” said Rusty Young, chief executive of the theater foundation. “He not only completed this on time in three and a half months, he saved us $800,000.”
Mr. Babitt had never been to the Basie until he volunteered for the project. “Once here, you can tell how much this place means to the community,” he said. “It’s a much-loved theater.”
First known as the Carlton, the theater was the last project of Joseph Oschwald, a prominent builder who lived in Little Silver and Newark. Although the theater had a stage, it was built primarily as a movie house, according to Oschwald’s granddaughter Barbara Wingerter, a Red Bank resident. “You can tell it was a movie house because the dressing rooms are so small,” she said.

In 1973 an anonymous donor saved the building from demolition, and in 1984, the theater, then known as the Monmouth Arts Center, was rechristened for the jazz great Count Basie, born in Red Bank in 1904. It is run by a nonprofit corporation.

Tradesmen scraped away old paint to come up with the original palette of golds, maroons and greens. “We don’t know exactly what color every little thing was painted,” Mr. Saisselin said. “But we do know this is the range of colors they used.”
Now dragons cavort over grillwork and carpeting, and exotic faces peer down from decorative columns. A new patron’s lounge was added.

Originally painted copper, the starburst dome, with its circular mural of fluffy white clouds in an azure sky, dominates the first floor of the theater. “The atmospheric mural is not original, but it works,” Mr. Saisselin said. “That’s our 2008 stamp on the building.”

Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76

2008-11-10T08:19:00.000-08:00

Miriam Makeba, Singer, Dies at 76
By ALAN COWELL
Published: November 10, 2008
LONDON — Miriam Makeba, a South African singer whose voice stirred hopes of freedom among millions in her own country though her music was formally banned by the apartheid authorities she struggled against, died overnight after performing at a concert in Italy on Sunday. She was 76.

Miriam Makeba performed in a concert on Sunday night in southern Italy shortly before she died early Monday.
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The cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to Vincenza Di Saia, a physician at the private Pineta Grande clinic in Castel Volturno near Naples in southern Italy, where she was brought by ambulance. The time of death was listed in hospital records as midnight, the doctor said.
Ms. Makeba collapsed as she was leaving the stage, the South African authorities said. She had been singing at a concert in support of Roberto Saviano, an author who has received death threats after writing about organized crime.

Widely known as “Mama Africa,” she had been a prominent exiled opponent of apartheid since the South African authorities revoked her passport in 1960 and refused to allow her to return after she traveled abroad. She was prevented from attending her mother’s funeral after touring in the United States.

Although Ms. Makeba had been weakened by osteoarthritis, her death stunned many in South Africa, where she stood as an enduring emblem of the travails of black people under the apartheid system of racial segregation that ended with the release from prison of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and the country’s first fully democratic elections in 1994.
In a statement on Monday, Mr. Mandela said the death “of our beloved Miriam has saddened us and our nation.”

He continued: “Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us.”
“She was South Africa’s first lady of song and so richly deserved the title of Mama Afrika. She was a mother to our struggle and to the young nation of ours,” Mr. Mandela’s was one of many tributes from South African leaders.

“One of the greatest songstresses of our time has ceased to sing,” Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said in a statement. “Throughout her life, Mama Makeba communicated a positive message to the world about the struggle of the people of South Africa and the certainty of victory over the dark forces of apartheid and colonialism through the art of song.”
For 31 years, Ms. Makeba lived in exile, variously in the United States, France, Guinea and Belgium. South Africa’s state broadcasters banned her music after she spoke out against apartheid at the United Nations. “I never understood why I couldn’t come home,” Ms. Makeba said upon her return at an emotional homecoming in Johannesburg in 1990 as the apartheid system began to crumble, according to The Associated Press. “I never committed any crime.”
Music was a central part of the struggle against apartheid. The South African authorities of the era exercised strict censorship of many forms of expression, while many foreign entertainers discouraged performances in South Africa in an attempt to isolate the white authorities and show their opposition to apartheid.

From exile she acted as a constant reminder of the events in her homeland as the white authorities struggled to contain or pre-empt unrest among the black majority.
Ms. Makeba wrote in 1987: “I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa, and the people, without even realizing.”
She was married several times and her husbands included the American black activist Stokely Carmichael, with whom she lived in Guinea, and the jazz trumpeter Hugh Masekela, who also spent many years in exile.

In the United States she became a star, touring with Harry Belafonte in the 1960s and winning a Grammy award with him in 1965. Such was her following and fame that she sang in 1962 at the birthday party of President John F. Kennedy. She also performed with Paul Simon on his Graceland concert in Zimbabwe in 1987.
But she fell afoul of the U.S. music industry because of her marriage to Mr. Carmichael and her decision to live in Guinea.

In one of her last interviews, in May 2008 with the British music critic Robin Denselow, she said she found her concerts in the United States being cancelled. “It was not a ban from the government. It was a cancellation by people who felt I should not be with Stokely because he was a rebel to them. I didn’t care about that. He was somebody I loved, who loved me, and it was my life,” she said.

Ms. Makeba was born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, the daughter of a Swazi mother and a father from the Xhosa people who live mainly in the eastern Cape region of South Africa. She became known to South Africans in the Sophiatown district of Johannesburg in the 1950s.
According to Agence France-Presse, she was often short of money and could not afford to buy a coffin when her only daughter in 1985. She buried her alone, barring a handful of journalists from covering the funeral.

She was particularly renowned for her performances of songs such as what was known as the Click Song — named for a clicking sound in her native tongue — or “Qongoqothwane,” and Pata Pata, meaning Touch Touch in Xhosa. Her style of singing was widely interpreted as a blend of black township rhythms, jazz and folk music.

In her interview in 2008, Ms. Makeba said: “I’m not a political singer. I don’t know what the word means. People think I consciously decided to tell the world what was happening in South Africa. No! I was singing about my life, and in South Africa we always sang about what was happening to us — especially the things that hurt us.”
In a tribute, Jacob Zuma, head of the ruling African National Congress, said the party “dips its banner in tribute to an African heroine, Miriam Zenzile Makeba, a freedom fighter and outstanding African cultural figure.”

“Miriam Makeba used her voice, not merely to entertain, but to give a voice to the millions of oppressed South Africans under the yoke of apartheid,” Mr. Zuma said.
Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting from Johannesburg and Rachel Donadio from Rome.

South African singing legend Miriam Makeba has died aged 76, after being taken ill in Italy.

2008-11-10T07:15:00.000-08:00

South African singing legend Miriam Makeba has died aged 76, after being taken ill in Italy.
She had just taken part in a concert near the southern town of Caserta and died of a heart attack.

Makeba, known as "Mama Africa", spent more than 30 years in exile after lending her support to the anti-apartheid struggle.

She appeared on Paul Simon's Graceland tour in 1987 and in 1992 had a leading role in the film Sarafina!

Passport revoked
Makeba, was born in Johannesburg on 4 March 1932 and was a leading symbol in the struggle against apartheid.

MIRIAM MAKEBA
1932: Born Johannesburg, South Africa
1959: Stars in the jazz opera King Kong and anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, met Harry Belafonte
1960: Barred from South Africa
1963: Testifies against apartheid at the United Nations
1966: Becomes the first African woman to win a Grammy award
1968: Marries Black Panther Stokely Carmichael and moves to Guinea
1985: Moves to Brussels after her child Bongi dies in childbirth
1990: Returns to South Africa after personal request from Nelson Mandela
2005: Begins a "farewell tour" of the world that lasts three years
2008: Dies in Caserta, Italy following a concert, aged 76
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Mandela's tribute to Makeba
Her singing career started in the 1950s as she mixed jazz with traditional South African songs.
She came to international attention in 1959 during a tour of the United States with South African group the Manhattan Brothers.
She was forced into exile soon after when her passport was revoked after starring in an anti-apartheid documentary and did not return to her native country until after Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990.

Makeba was the first black African woman to win a Grammy Award, which she shared with Harry Belafonte in 1965.

Charlie Gillett, who presents the BBC World of Music programme, says there is nobody to compare to her, as she was popular in West Africa - after living in exile in Guinea - and East Africa for recording a version of the Swahili song Malaika, as well as her home in South Africa.
She was African music's first world star blending different styles long before the phrase "world music" was coined.
After her divorce from fellow South African musician Hugh Masekela she married American civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael.
It was while living in exile in the US that she released her most famous songs, Pata Pata and the Click Song.
"You sing about those things that surround you," she said. "Our surrounding has always been that of suffering from apartheid and the racism that exists in our country. So our music has to be affected by all that."
It was because of this dedication to her home continent that Miriam Makeba became known as Mama Africa.

Miriam Makeba (4 March 1932 - 9 November 2008[1]) was a Grammy Award-winning South African singer, also known as Mama Afrika.
Click here: YouTube - Miriam Makeba - The Click Song 1966
Miriam Zenzi Makeba was born in Johannesburg in 1932. Her mother was a Swazi sangoma and her father, who died when she was six, was a Xhosa. As a child, she sang at the Kilmerton Training Institute in Pretoria, which she attended for eight years.

Makeba first toured with an amateur group. Her professional career began in the 1950s with the Manhattan Brothers, before she formed her own group, The Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional melodies of South Africa.

In 1959, she performed in the musical King Kong alongside Hugh Masekela, her future husband. Though she was a successful recording artist, she was only receiving a few dollars for each recording session and no provisional royalties, and was keen to go to the US. Her break came when she starred in the anti-Apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa in 1959. She went to the premier of the film at the Venice Film Festival.

Makeba then travelled to London where she met Harry Belafonte, who assisted her in gaining entry to and fame in the United States. She released many of her most famous hits there including "Pata Pata", "The Click Song" ("Qongqothwane" in Xhosa), and "Malaika". In 1966, Makeba received the Grammy Award for Best Folk Recording together with Harry Belafonte for An Evening With Belafonte/Makeba. The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under Apartheid.

She discovered that her South African passport was revoked when she tried to return there in 1960 for her mother's funeral. In 1963, after testifying against Apartheid before the United Nations, her South African citizenship and her right to return to the country were revoked. She has had nine passports, [2] and was granted honorary citizenship of ten countries.[3]
Her marriage to Trinidadian civil rights activist and Black Panthers leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968 caused controversy in the United States, and her record deals and tours were cancelled. As a result of this, the couple moved to Guinea, where they became close with President Ahmed Sékou Touré and his wife. Makeba separated from Carmichael in 1973, and continued to perform primarily in Africa, South America and Europe. She was one of the African and Afro-American entertainers at the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman held in Zaïre. Makeba also served as a Guinean delegate to the United Nations, for which she won the Dag Hammarskjöld Peace Prize in 1986.

After the death of her only daughter Bongi Makeba in 1985, she moved to Brussels. In 1987, she appeared in Paul Simon's Graceland tour. Shortly thereafter she published her autobiography Makeba: My Story (ISBN 0-453-00561-6).

Nelson Mandela persuaded her to return to South Africa in 1990. In the fall of 1991, she made a guest appearance in an episode of The Cosby Show, entitled "Olivia Comes Out Of The Closet". In 1992 she starred in the film Sarafina!, about the 1976 Soweto youth uprisings, as the title character's mother, "Angelina." She also took part in the 2002 documentary Amandla!: A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony where she and others recalled the days of Apartheid.
In January 2000, her album, Homeland, produced by Cedric Samson and Michael Levinsohn[4] was nominated for a Grammy Award in the "Best World Music" category[5]. In 2001 she was awarded the Gold Otto Hahn Peace Medal by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding". In 2002, she shared the Polar Music Prize with Sofia Gubaidulina. In 2004, Makeba was voted 38th in the Top 100 Great South Africans. Makeba started a worldwide farewell tour in 2005, holding concerts in all of those countries that she had visited during her working life. [3]
Her publicist notes that Makeba had suffered "severe arthritis" for some time.[6]
She died in Castel Volturno, near Caserta, Italy, in the evening of 9 November 2008, of a heart attack, shortly after taking part in a concert organized to support writer Roberto Saviano in his stand against the Camorra, a mafia-like organisation.[7][8][9] In his condolence message, former South African president Nelson Mandela said it was “fitting that Makeba died doing what she did best - singing.”

Singer Miriam Makeba dies
Makeba became popular with her song 'Pata pata' [EPA]
Miriam Makeba, the world-renowned South African singer, has died at the age of 76 after collapsing on stage during her last performance.
Makeba was taken ill to a hosptial early Monday morning near the southern Italian town of Naples.
"I'm not yet absolutely certain of the causes of her passing, but she has had arthritis, severe arthritis, for some time," her publicist told an Italian radio station, however other reports said she passed away after sufferring a heart attack.
Makeba was best known to her fans as 'Mama Africa' as she became the distinguished voice of Africa and a symbol of the fight against apartheid in her home country.
"Her haunting melodies gave voice to the pain of exile and dislocation which she felt for 31 long years. At the same time, her music inspired a powerful sense of hope in all of us," said Nelson Mandela, who led the struggle to replace the apartheid regime of South Africa with a multi-racial democracy.
Born in a shantytown outside of Johannesburg on March 4 1932, Makeba first received international attention as a featured vocalist with the Manhattan Brothers in 1954. She toured the US until 1959.
The following year, when she wanted to return home to bury her mother, the apartheid state revoked her citizenship and also banned her music.
As a result, she spent 31 years in exile, living in the US and later in Guinea before becoming the first black African woman to receive a Grammy Award, which she shared with folk singer Harry Belafonte in 1965.
'Pata, Pata'
Two years later her fame sky-rocketed with the recording of the all-time hit "Pata Pata". From that point, Makeba stood out for her distinctive clicking sounds, which she used to punctuate songs in her native Xhosa language.
She hit an all-time low in 1985 when Bongi, her only daughter, died at the age of 36 from complications from a miscarriage.
Makeba did not have money to buy a coffin for Bongi so she buried her alone barring a handful of journalists covering the funeral.
But she picked herself up again, as she did many times before, surviving failed marriages and illness.
'Homeland'
She returned to South Africa in the 1990s after Mandela was released from prison.
However, it took a cash-strapped Makeba six years to find someone in the local recording industry to produce a record with her.
She then released "Homeland" which contains a song describing her joy to be back home after the many years in exile.
"I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising," she said in her biography.

2008-11-10T06:49:00.000-08:00

Baptist hymnody largely settles for two out of three in Trinity

By Ken Camp, Managing Editor, Baptist Standard
Published: October 30, 2008

Hymns sung in most Baptist churches historically have been “More About Jesus” than about either God the Father or the Holy Spirit, several church music experts agree.
“From a Baptist perspective, I don’t think the hymnody has ever been Trinitarian,” said Clell Wright, director of choral activities and Logsdon professor of church music at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene.

Baptist worship has been shaped to a large degree by the revivalist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, he noted.
“By nature, the focus is on Jesus and his redeeming work,” Wright said.

Consequently, when it comes to Baptist understanding of the Godhead as reflected in congregational song, “Our Trinity is more two-point-something rather than three,” said Terry York, associate professor of Christian ministry and church music at Baylor University’s School of Music and Truett Theological Seminary in Waco.

“One way to gauge that is by looking at the index in the back of the hymnal under ‘Holy
Spirit.’ Looking at the 1991 Baptist Hymnal, for instance, there’s not much there. And I was on the committee that put that one together, for crying out loud.”

A quick glance at the recently released 2008 Baptist Hymnal reveals similar results, noted Lee Hinson, coordinator of church music studies at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Okla.
“It has not changed much,” Hinson said. “We struggle with singing Trinitarian doctrine. There are several categories of things we free-churchers don’t do well in worship. … Dealing with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is one of them.”

York agreed, noting lack of emphasis on the Holy Spirit may reveal—in part—lack of clarity among Baptists about the Spirit’s role and about the doctrine of the Trinity in general.
“Baptist churches divide themselves in worship according to which Person of the Trinity gets the most emphasis,” he noted. Baptists who say they want to “worship the Father in the beauty of holiness” generally favor more formal, liturgical worship. Baptist who want to “praise Jesus for who he is and what he has done” may tend toward a more revivalist and evangelistic worship style. Baptists who say they want “the Spirit to come down and bless us” often follow a less structured worship format.

“Generally, we are less than balanced,” York commented. “Few churches stand in the middle.”
Observers differ about whether the rising popularity of praise and worship music translates into increased attention directed toward the Holy Spirit.
Wright sees a shift toward greater “recognition of the work of the Holy Spirit” in praise music.
“So much of it in the last 15 to 20 years seems very pietistic, with a strong emphasis on personal worship,” he noted.

That emphasis represents a departure from the evangelistic and revivalist tradition that has marked Baptist worship, he noted.
“Our Baptist heritage of music in the gospel tradition has defined who we are for a couple of hundred years,” Wright noted.

Hinson sees a greater emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit in Baptist worship, but he believes it is restricted to the youngest worship leaders.

“Millennials (roughly defined as the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s) want their worship to be free,” he said. Lyrics that stress the Holy Spirit exist, “but they’re not sung where the Boomers are in charge. They’re in the Wednesday night services where students lead worship.”
York, on the other hand, sees praise and worship lyrics focused primarily on Jesus, but worship leaders stressing the role of the Holy Spirit in leading them.

“They attribute being caught up in worship to the work of the Holy Spirit, who helps lead in the worship of Jesus,” he said.

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put the McCain campaign together again

2008-11-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put the McCain campaign together again

2008-11-08T12:23:00.000-08:00

All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put the McCain campaign together again

Obama Chyros Moment-Rev. Gardner Taylor This is a New Season

2008-11-08T07:15:00.000-08:00

Rev. Gardner Taylor
original airdate November 6, 2008
At age 90, Rev. Gardner Taylor—known as the "dean of the nation's Black preachers"—is still mentoring aspiring seminarians, and his sermons are studied in divinity schools worldwide. He led the Concord Baptist Church of Christ in Brooklyn, NY for 42 years and was the first African American on the New York Public School Board. He also helped form the Progressive National Baptist Convention. The grandson of slaves, he was a close friend and mentor to Dr. King. In '00, Taylor was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Rev. Gardner Taylor: I believe it's divine intervention. I don't think any script writer could have produced this kind of scenario. It is almost beyond belief that all of these things would have come together at this particular juncture in history. Now, you mentioned hermeneutics -- there is a word, "chyros," in the New Testament. It means the fullness of time, that things come together to produce certain events.

The rest of the story:
Click here: Tavis Smiley . Archives . Rev. Gardner Taylor . November 6, 2008 PBS

Southern Cuisine & Stix Bones Jazz album "Groove Like This"

2008-11-03T04:36:00.000-08:00

November 8

Peace And Blessings Family,

I'd like to invite you to come and enjoy an evening good music played by me and my band and enjoy great food at a great price at Yvonne's Southern Cuisine in Pelham NY just a few minutes north of the Bronx. Check out Yvonne's menu and directions at http://www.yvonnessoutherncuisine.com/.

I'll be playing songs from My Jazz album "Groove Like This" as well as some of your Jazz favorites. I look forward to seeing there. Please tell a friend and bring friend,

Musically Yours,

Stix Bones

Family Tradition: The Legacy of Ol’ Hank Williams

2008-11-03T04:31:00.000-08:00

Click here: YouTube - Hank Williams - Cold Cold Heart

Family Tradition: The Legacy of Ol’ Hank
IN the opening scenes of the 1964 biopic “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” Hank Williams hawks patent medicine, swills whiskey and throws a few punches. Moments later, at a church social, Hank — played by George Hamilton — makes a pass at his future wife and busts a guitar over the head of a heckler. Overripe with swagger and excess, Mr. Hamilton’s performance comes off as a clumsy composite of James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis and John Wayne.

Though cartoonish, the movie underscores the enduring challenge in deciphering this country music pioneer. More than five decades after his death, in 1953, of an overdose of morphine on his way to play a show, Hank Williams lives on in myth that is so fraught with melodrama — the liquor and pills, heartache and gloom — and so calcified by decades of redaction and hype that it’s almost impossible to tell the singer of “Lost Highway” from his songs.

But two recent projects help recast him in a revealing new light, without whitewashing the intemperance and scandal. The first, an exhibition at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum here, features family artifacts that have never been displayed in public before. The second, a CD box-set called “The Unreleased Recordings,” is the first installment of unearthed radio transcriptions to be issued by Time Life. Far from presenting this archetypical singer-songwriter as ghostly or morose, the exhibition and box-set leave the impression of a devout man who, despite debilitating health and personal problems, loved his family and liked nothing so much as a good prank.

“You talk about pulling practical jokes — him and the band, that’s all they did,” said Hank Williams Jr., 59, in an interview at his customized R.V. here this summer. (He also owns several residences.) “We’re talking about a bunch of 20-year-old guys,” he continued, referring to his father’s band, the Drifting Cowboys. “He would sign autographs and they would come up behind him with a stink bomb.”

The exhibition, “Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy,” depicts the lives of three generations, from Hank and his wife, Audrey, to Hank Jr.’s five children, and features items like the 1944 Martin D-28 guitar on which Williams wrote many of his hits. The Scotch-taped scrapbooks that Hank’s mother kept during his rise to fame are presented alongside touch-screen recreations of their contents. There are candid family photos from the late 1940s, home movies of a trip to Disneyland and a snapshot, taken decades later, of a young Hank Williams III taking a bath with his half-sisters Holly and Hilary. (All three now sing professionally.) The singer Jett Williams, Hank Sr.’s daughter from his brief affair with Bobbie Jett, is also a subject of the exhibition.

Originally preserved on 16-inch acetate discs, the 143 transcriptions included in “The Unreleased Recordings” — the first 54 of which were released last week — nearly double Hank Williams’s recorded output. The music was rescued from a Dumpster in the late 1980s by an employee of WSM-AM, the Nashville radio station on which the songs were originally broadcast, on an early morning program sponsored by Mother’s Best Flour Company, in 1951. The decision about what should be done with the transcriptions was delayed by protracted litigation over the Williams estate. The recordings greatly expand what we know of Williams’s persona and repertory. We hear him not only exulting in the pleasures of making music, but also clowning with his band and crooning old hymns like “Softly and Tenderly” and Victorian parlor ballads like “The Blind Child’s Prayer.”

“What the Mother’s Best Flour shows reveal is that Hank was a fully fleshed-out man, with a silly sense of humor, deep religious faith and a sentimental side that comes off as borderline cheesy today,” said Brenda Colladay, curator of the Grand Ole Opry Museum in Nashville. “This isn’t the tortured, tragic genius who died in the back seat of a Cadillac. This is the Hank who can’t quite believe he is playing on WSM radio, has a closet full of custom suits, a string of hit records and a beautiful blond wife sitting next to him as he steers that Cadillac toward his dream house.”

In one touching between-song segment, Williams promises young Bocephus — his nickname for Hank Jr. — that he’ll be home for breakfast to “sop biscuits” with him. Williams had just reached new heights in popularity, including appearances on national television programs like “The Perry Como Show” and being billed above Bob Hope and Milton Berle on the touring Hadacol Caravan. Nevertheless, the eagerness in his voice at the prospect of being home with his family is palpable.

Hank Jr. was only 3 1/2 when his father died, and he remembers little of their time together. Nearly eight years his senior, Hank Jr.’s half-sister Lycrecia Williams Hoover has more firsthand memories of what Williams was like.

“Of the two of us, I always considered myself the luckiest one because I got to do things with Daddy,” said Ms. Hoover, 67, a dignified woman with intense blue eyes. A stay-at-home mom much of her life, Ms. Hoover, who today works part time in a beauty shop, spoke from the patio of her home in rural Bon Aqua, Tenn., about 40 miles from Nashville.

“Daddy was a fun person,” she said. “He would take me bowling a lot. He would go horseback riding and fishing with me. I just feel like Hank Jr. missed out on so much.”

Audrey Williams’s daughter from an earlier marriage, Ms. Hoover wasn’t enthusiastic about the prospect of another retrospective about her stepfather when representatives of the museum in Nashville contacted her about the project. She doesn’t shy away from talking about her parents’ “fussing and fighting,” or about Hank’s darker side or drinking. She was, however, wary of yet another tabloid treatment of the Williams legacy.
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“They said, ‘We promise you this is not going to be like the others,’ ” she said.
Particularly welcome, Ms. Hoover said, is the museum’s depiction, through telegrams and other documents, of her mother’s career as a businesswoman. Audrey married Hank in 1944, at a gas station near Andalusia, Ala. After playing a critical role in helping her husband start his career, Audrey, a performer who has often been portrayed as conniving and shrill, went on to become a successful song publisher and movie producer. In 1964 she was a founder of Aud-Lee Attractions, Nashville’s oldest privately owned talent agency (now called Buddy Lee Attractions).

“Had it not been for Mother, I just don’t think Daddy would have gotten to Nashville, unless somebody else could of got a hold of him and pushed,” Ms. Hoover said. “Daddy, he liked to entertain. He was a genius, but Mother was the mastermind behind getting him where he needed to be.”

Carolyn Tate, the curator, with Michael McCall, of the Family Tradition exhibition, stresses the importance of putting Audrey’s accomplishments in historical context. “She was a single mom in the mid-’50s,” Ms. Tate said. “She was left to run a business and raise children and to deal with a lot of legal issues.”

Despite her business acumen, Audrey died bankrupt, in 1975, after years of struggling with addiction to alcohol and other drugs. “After Daddy passed away, Mother blamed herself,” Ms. Hoover said. “She loved him and felt like she should have been able to keep him from drinking. Later, little by little, she began to drink, until she became an alcoholic too.” Audrey and Hank Williams divorced in July 1952, less than six months before Hank’s death.

The exhibition also plots lesser-known points in the trajectory of Hank Jr.’s career. Initially cast as his father’s imitator, Hank Jr. transformed himself into a raucous country-rocker, fusing his father’s blues-steeped honky-tonk with disparate influences to create a new Southern hybrid.
“To see me, at 13 and 14 years old with the wavy jellyroll hair and the white Stratocaster, it all comes together,” said Hank Jr., who was born Randall Hank Williams, recalling his days leading a combo called Rockin’ Randall and the Rockets. “I’d go out on the road and be Hank Williams Sr. and come back home and be Rockin’ Randall. That’s how I would do it — two worlds. And guess what? Rockin’ Randall consumed the other guy. My cloning days were over.”

Hank Jr.’s son, Hank Williams III (born Shelton Hank Williams), 35, has felt the burden of his birthright too. In his case, this has meant pressure to differentiate himself not just from his father but also from his grandfather, to whom he bears an uncanny physical and vocal resemblance.

“I’m almost following in the same footsteps as my dad, but instead of Skynyrd, I’ve been into Pantera and David Allan Coe and bands like that,” he said of his assortment of country, punk and heavy metal. “The energy’s just different.”

The most emblematic items in the exhibition from Hank III’s career are his duct-taped cowboy boots. Hank III, whose album “Damn Right, Rebel Proud” (Curb Records) was released on Oct. 21, estimates that before loaning them to the museum, he had worn them for as many as 4,000 consecutive performances.

Cropping up again and again in the exhibition is the struggle of Williams family members to define themselves as inheritors of Hank Sr.’s legacy while also striving to preserve some semblance of normality. Most telling is a photo from the late ’50s in which Ms. Hoover and her brother and mother are playing in the snow in front of their ranch-style home in Nashville.
“People don’t understand that part — a kid with his sister and his mother,” Hank Jr. said, referring to the scene in the photo.

“It’s real normal, yeah, until this big bus comes by with all these tourists, and as this little bitty kid I think, ‘Why are they stopping there?’ And then it hits you. That’s why they’re stopping there.”

Piano Runs I Won’t Complain

2008-11-02T10:06:00.000-08:00

I Won’t Complain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7FCjszRRCs http://www.samtsai.com/p532/hee-ah-lee-four-finger-pianist/

Here is a reason why musicians (pianist) should never complain about the rigors of practice. Presently, I have been studying 2, 3, 4 finger piano runs. But, Disabled Pianist Lee Hee-ah is about to Release Her First Album. Lee Hee-ah, 20, a disabled pianist who is making a deep impression on many people around the world by playing the piano despite having only four fingers, will release her first album.

Lee Hee-ah has only 4 fingers due to Phocomelia. Phocomelia is a “congenital malformation” of development.

Phocomelia syndrome Definition
Phocomelia is a “congenital malformation” of development where the upper appendage of an arm or leg is absent so the hands or feet are attached to the body like stumps. The word phocomelia combines phoco—denoting seal and melia—denoting limb to signify a “limb like a seal’s flipper"[1] Although various numbers of factors can cause phocomelia, the prominent roots come from the drug use of thalidomide and from genetic inheritance. The occurrence of this malformation in an individual results in various abnormalities to the face, limbs, ears, nose, vessels and many other underdevelopments. The best fix for phocomelia is prevention of a pregnant woman taking thalidomide during pregnancy and prosthesis. Although operations can be done to fix the abnormality it is difficult due to the lack of nerves, bones, and other related structures.
Causes Thalidomide
Thalidomide is an “oral medication” prescribed today to cure certain skin conditions such as: leprosy, Behcet’s disease, dermatomyositis, and is currently being assessed for containment of HIV-related disease[2] (Thalidomide Article). According to Diane Calabrase and Teresa Odle, other studies propose thalidomide “can slow or stop the spread of cancer of the brain, breast colon, prostate, as well as multiple myeloma”[3] Although thalidomide has proven to be beneficial in many respects, if used during pregnancy, the effects on the fetus can be fatal.

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2008-10-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-30T07:58:00.000-07:00

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2008-10-30T07:34:00.000-07:00

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Bracing for Bad Days, Operas and Orchestras Batten Down Hatches

2008-10-29T05:08:00.000-07:00

Bracing for Bad Days, Operas and Orchestras Batten Down Hatches

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: October 27, 2008

No clowns in Detroit, no pops in Pasadena.

Michigan Opera Theater has canceled a production of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” because of the economy’s southward plunge. The Pasadena Symphony Orchestra has abandoned plans for three pops concerts.

As it has everywhere else these days, the economic crisis has hit classical music, a particularly fragile corner of the nonprofit world that depends as much on donations as on ticket sales. Most managers are only in the fretting stage, but the plunge in stock prices, the credit squeeze and feelings of diminished wealth among donors and ticket buyers have begun to have concrete effects in a few places.

Orchestras and opera companies are cutting costs, eliminating rehearsals and keeping a tighter rein on overtime. New York City Opera, already walloped by a canceled season because of renovations to its house, gave employees two days off this month because of a payroll crunch. The Metropolitan Opera is making cutbacks in its health insurance for administrative staff. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been hit by increased borrowing costs. The Pasadena Symphony Orchestra has also canceled its next symphony concert, which was to have taken place next month.

“It hurts a lot,” said Tom O’Connor, the executive director of the Orchestras of Pasadena, which includes the symphony and the pops. “But I’ve been in the business almost 40 years. You just have to think imaginatively: how can we make sure music is always available to people in one form or another?”

In the opera world, some companies have reduced the draw on their endowment that helps pay for operations, said Marc A. Scorca, the president and chief executive of Opera America, an association of 114 companies. And at some houses, donors are asking for more time to fulfill multiyear pledges.

“These are facts which are just flowing in,” Mr. Scorca said. “Everyone is examining every expenditure to see if there’s a more economical way to move forward. It’s so hard to know how it’s going to play out, because it’s so early in season.”

The situation is particularly dire in Detroit, where each season Michigan Opera usually presents five productions, with five or six performances each.

In addition to canceling “Pagliacci” next spring, the company is letting three employees go, giving up on a big Wagner production next year in favor of the less financially taxing “Don Giovanni” and doing without the final performance in an April run of Donizetti’s “Elixir of Love.” That performance had been scheduled to take place at the same time as a Final Four game of the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, at nearby Ford Field. Management thinks it can make more money renting out its parking lot to fans.

“The community is hurting so badly, particularly the corporations, and also a lot of our individuals,” said David DiChiera, the company’s general director. “They’re not even quite sure of the value of their portfolio. It makes giving worrisome on their part.”

Mr. DiChiera said that the only fiscally prudent thing to do to keep the budget balanced was to cancel next spring’s “Pagliacci,” for a saving of up to $500,000. “I’d rather just not do a production rather than jeopardize the standard and quality of the production itself,” he said. That is the mantra of music administrators: Do not damage the musical product.

Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s general manager, said in a memorandum to his staff that the company was looking at many ways to control costs “without affecting the quality of productions.” The measures could include cutting travel and entertainment expenses and overtime, he said.

For now, Mr. Gelb said, ticket sales are slightly up over last year. “It is likely that ticket sales will be affected” by the financial crisis, he said. “We anticipate that our fund-raising will also suffer.”

In an interview last week, Mr. Gelb said the Met was still expecting to break even this season, after an $11 million deficit last year. He said most of that deficit had been expected under a five-year-old economic plan.

He added that the Met was trying to save money by scheduling rehearsals more efficiently and cutting production costs in ways unnoticeable to the audience, like using less expensive costume material or outsourcing the making of costumes.

The full picture of the effects on fund-raising will become clearer toward the end of the year, when many donations are made for tax planning reasons and after bonuses are bestowed.

In Pasadena, where there are about eight concerts a year, matters were all too clear this month. The orchestra’s endowment had dipped below the original $5.8 million gift that established it, so according to its rules no money could be drawn off to finance operations, Mr. O’Connor of the Orchestras of Pasadena said. The endowment’s high point a few years ago was $8.3 million. Several donors also said they could not give as much because of hits to their portfolios, he said.

Some of the larger orchestras are holding their own for now. The Philadelphia Orchestra recently said it had surpassed by $5 million its goal of raising $125 million for the endowment. But the endowment’s overall market value dropped to $160 million at the end of September from a recent peak of $220 million, the orchestra said.

Subscription sales are slightly down, but single-ticket sales remain strong, said the orchestra’s president and chief executive, James Undercofler. He said the orchestra had reduced spending as much as possible. “There are further cuts you can make, but they start to injure the mission of the organization,” he said.

In July, Mr. Undercofler said the orchestra had canceled a European tour in the summer of 2009 because of high costs and weak corporate support.

The New York Philharmonic’s endowment has also dropped, to $178 million on Sept. 30 from $205 million on June 30, the orchestra said. The endowment value that is used to calculate the draw is generally based on the average performance over three years, so the impact of the recent downturn is blunted.

Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s president, said on Monday that no concrete steps had yet been taken to deal with the crisis, which he said was sure to have an effect. “We’re looking to see how we’re going to tighten our belts,” he said.

The Chicago Symphony last week disclosed its financial results for last season, reporting a modest surplus, strong fund- raising and increased ticket sales, but cited higher costs for outstanding bonds issued for the renovation of Symphony Center.

In contrast to the grim economic times, the Chicago Symphony’s news release had an exultant tone. It cited the orchestra’s “extraordinary artistic and financial successes,” its “remarkable achievements” and a “new era in the history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.”

DISPUTE AT EBENEZER BAPTIST TAKES TO THE STREETS: Church members protested on Sunday the ouster of t

2008-10-25T16:19:00.000-07:00

Inauguration: Inaugural Anthem

Inaugural Anthem
"And There Was Light"
Uzee Brown Jr. '72

Inaugural Anthem "And There Was Light" Uzee Brown Jr. '72 (Commissioned for the Inauguration of the 10th President of Morehouse College, Robert Michael Franklin Jr. '75) (Commissioned for the Inauguration of the 10th President of Morehouse College, Robert Michael Franklin Jr. '75)

Members of historic Ebenezer Baptist Church protest

DISPUTE AT EBENEZER BAPTIST TAKES TO THE STREETS: Church members protested on Sunday the ouster of their choir director.

Click here: Video

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that a handful of church members protested Sunday morning in front of historic Ebenezer Baptist Church decrying the ouster of the historic church’s choir director and demanding the Rev. Raphael Warnock step down as senior pastor.

The demonstrators held placards reading “Warnock Lies” and “Bring Back Dr. Uzee Brown,” a reference to the recently departed choir director who heads the Department of Music at Morehouse College.

One protester, former choir member Gloria Bell, was handcuffed and taken away and given a trespass warning by National Park Service rangers. Bell refused to leave the sidewalk saying it was city property. Park ranger Clark Moore said it was Park Service property.

Church leaders said Warnock, who preached his first sermon at Ebenezer three years ago, wasn’t available for comment Sunday morning at the modern Horizon Sanctuary, where services now are held, the paper reported. But shortly after the 11 a.m. service started, a dozen members of the church’s board of deacons walked across Auburn Avenue to the historic church where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once preached his message of nonviolence. They voiced support for Warnock there.

“The current protest by seven members of Ebenezer’s more than 3,000 members clearly does not represent the consensus of the body,” said deacon chairman Phillip Finch, 55, a lifelong member.

Across the street, on a sidewalk outside the national park limits, protestors received a mixed reaction from parishioners leaving the early service.

The article states that the protestors included choir president Lydia Walker, who insisted that Warnock has shaken up the church staff without regard to the feelings of some longtime members and he is accused of not sharing the church’s finances with them.

Warnock addressed the protesters accusations during his 8 a.m. service saying that while they might not understand everything he does, they must trust in his plans for the future.

Turmoil at Ebenezer Baptist Church

It seems a bit of turmoil is brewing at the historic church where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. served as co-pastor alongside Daddy King from 1960 until his death in 1968.

Here's a snippet from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution story:

A handful of church members protested Sunday morning in front of Ebenezer Baptist Church, decrying the ouster of the historic church’s choir director and demanding the Rev. Raphael Warnock step down as senior pastor.

The six demonstrators held placards reading “Warnock Lies” and “Bring Back Dr. Uzee Brown,” a reference to the recently departed choir director who heads the Department of Music at Morehouse College.

One protester, former choir member Gloria Bell, was handcuffed and taken away by National Park Service rangers in front of the church where she was baptized more than 50 years ago.

The protestors are insisting that the pastor has shaken up the church staff without regard to the feelings of some longtime members. They also are accusing the pastor of refusing to share the church's finances with them.

If we're to believe the Deacon chairman who is quoted, this is much ado about nothing. Although, the pastor did apparently address the controversy during the 8am service before the protestors began their sidewalk protesting. So, it seems that turmoil is indeed brewing.

However, the short quote from the pastor is what I find most troubling. From the AJC article:

Warnock addressed the controversy during the 8 a.m. service, telling worshipers that while they might not understand everything he does, they must trust in his plans for the future. “Any effort to plant the seeds of dissension in the church is by definition a demonic effort,” he said to cheers from the congregation. “I’m glad that the devil has no power here.”

This Pastor as Supreme Ruler mentality is not atypical in Baptist churches these days. A Baptist pastor can create a vision, a plan for the future. But that Baptist pastor needs the congregation to first approve his/her vision before it is implemented. If the congregation is not involved in the decision-making process, why even keep the name "Baptist" on the sign out front?

Further, the implication that those who dare voice dissent are engaged in a "demonic effort" is ridiculous. The pastor of such a historic church should have more respect for the right to dissent.

I'm not sure that taking to the streets to protest your pastor is the best way to dissent. But at these large Baptist churches which are Pastor-Ruled or Staff-Ruled and less than transparent, what option are the members really left with?

Whether in the streets or in the blogosphere, I think its clear that members of these big Baptist churches will continue to make public their disagreements with their pastor.

Uganda: A Musician's Take On Jazz

2008-10-24T05:21:00.000-07:00

Uganda: A Musician's Take On Jazz

The Weekly Observer (Kampala)

OPINION
22 October 2008
Posted to the web 23 October 2008

Tshaka Mayanja

Jazz is receiving a lot of time and space in both the print and electronic media in Uganda these days. This is a good thing if only that the stories were accurate. Although the saying goes that all publicity is good publicity I believe jazz has been marketed so badly in Uganda, so much so that it is being described as music for the expatriates, wannabes, show offs and the filthy rich. And it is quite far from the truth!

It only appears that way because the jazz events that have happened so far are priced so highly, that some real jazz fans cannot afford to attend. In the end, it's those that can afford to attend that do, and almost always they have no clue what's going on. Jazz has become a social event!

Jazz started in the 'Jook joints', shibeams and dark cheap bars where cheap and deadly booze like Moonshine was sold. The poor black people in America could not afford the expensive/posh high society places so out of the Blue; they created new music called jazz, where improvisation and skill were paramount. Isn't it ironic that this poor man's music is being marketed or wrongly tagged as the Elite's music?

What is jazz?

Let's first put this out of the way; Not every song that has no words/lyrics is jazz (do not forget, there is such a thing as Vocal Jazz - Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae etc).

For some reason, whenever an artist plays an instrument, most especially a horn, people call it jazz. Kenny G is the most successful instrumentalist of all time (going by sales), but he is not a recording jazz artist and he's never claimed to be one. Isaiah Katumwa is in the same mould, and in all fairness, he mentions KennyG as a mentor.

It is very impressive and commendable what Warid Telecom and others have done by starting or planting the seed for jazz festivals in Uganda. It would have been even better if what is being marketed as 'The First Jazz Festival' in Uganda had at least, 98% jazz musicians on the bill.

The Kampala Warid Jazz Festival only had two bonafide Jazz musicians/group, out of a whopping ten advertised artistes! That's only 2% of the artistes performing at the entire festival.

By bonafide, I mean those musicians who have both recorded and published jazz music, or those who make a living playing jazz.

The organisers went on to use talented artiste Joel Sebunjo (Sundiata) to do a jazz tour in Ugandan bars so as to promote The Jazz Festival no less! Does Sundiata play jazz? He's an Afro/World musician.

The event should have been called 'The Kampala World Music Festival'. That would have encompassed all the artistes that were advertised, including the minority advertised who actually play jazz.

The problem with naming such an event as a jazz festival where jazz purveyors are the minority and giving it such mainstream publicity is that those who do not know jazz will then start misplacing various artistes into various genres where they do not belong; calling other genres jazz!

The interest of big Ugandan companies sponsoring jazz in Uganda has brought the genre into the mainstream. That is not a bad thing if it is actually what is being marketed. The problem with mass media and promotion getting involved in such a complex genre is that they end up misinforming the general public due to their lack of research or even interest in the genre.

The definition

There is nothing like a quarter, an eighth, two thirds or half jazz! It's either jazz or it isn't. Jazz is probably the genre with the most sub-genres in it. There are various sub-genres within jazz, but, and this is very important; all these sub-genres have some things in common: Improvisation, Jazz scales and notes, Jazz chords and Jazz movement. The only thing where these sub-genres differ is usually rhythm and place of origin.

The sub-genres

We have Traditional Jazz, Bebop (believed to be one of the hardest sub-genres of Jazz to play), Big Band (this involves an Orchestra), Fusion Jazz (with elements of heavy Rock music), Progressive Jazz (very abstract and almost always played by Instrument virtuosos), Smooth Jazz (has a lot of elements from Soul & R 'n' B music), Nu-Jazz (with lots of elements of Funk music, with an emphasis on Groove), South African Jazz (a mixture of Traditional South African music and Traditional American Jazz), Afro Cuban Jazz ( a fusion of Traditional American Jazz and Traditional Afro Cuban music; the creation here is credited to Dizzy Gillespie [R.I.P] and Tito Puente [R.I.P] ), Bossa Nova (a fusion of Traditional American Jazz and Brazilian music - think of Stan Getz's Girl from Ipanema) and others that we shall list subsequently.

The way forward

Let us first agree on what constitutes Jazz music, before we market it to the public as such. Let us make the masses appreciate the genre as it is, without resorting to calling it what it isn't. Jazz is strong enough and solid enough to be appreciated. Jazz music was once mainstream music the world over, played at dances and parties. Indeed when the great Louis Armstrong toured Uganda in the Sixties, the show was in Nakivubo Stadium! We may not see that happen to Jazz in our lifetime, but we're sure going to try to make people appreciate this music by pricing it right and calling it what it actually is!

TShaka Mayanja is a Nu Jazz/Funk/Reggae musician

Uganda: Qwela Takes Jazz Gospel to Hotels

2008-10-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

Uganda: Qwela Takes Jazz Gospel to Hotels

New Vision (Kampala)

23 October 2008
Posted to the web 24 October 2008

Tony Mushoborozi
Kampala

THERE is a new generation of artistes who are fast breaking away from the traditional definition of gospel music.

Take the Qwela Jazz Band, for instance, who perform every Friday at Emin Pasha Hotel in Nakasero.

This is something that was, until lately, unheard of. A gospel band performing in an A-class hotel!

The jazz show runs from 7:00pm to 10:00pm every Friday, and the youngsters do not disappoint. For the last two-and-a-half months, gospel jazz ardent lovers have had reason to dine out at Emin Pasha.

Earlier this year, the band performed alongside Kenyan sensation Wainaina at the same venue. After the show, the band signed a deal with the hotel.

Joseph Kahirimbanyi aka Joze, the band leader helped knit the eight-member band together. His dream started when he asked his friends to do a surprise show on his mother's 60th birthday.

The songs were all from the 60s and a few were his mum's teenage favourites. The guests were gleeful and clapping all through the show, which surprised Joze. And that was his turning point.

"After the show, people asked me where my friends and I performed. That is when I realised that I could form a band," Joze says.

Tanantana the group's most loved song was written by Joze. It oscillates between patriotism and praises to God for his blessing upon Uganda. It is the best song on the band's first album, Kidepo.

Uganda: St. Cecilia Choir Turns to Modern Gospel

2008-10-24T05:16:00.000-07:00

Uganda: St. Cecilia Choir Turns to Modern Gospel

New Vision (Kampala)

23 October 2008
Posted to the web 24 October 2008

Mathias Mazinga
Kampala

FOR over 80 years, Rubaga Cathedral's St. Cecilia mass choir has held the legacy of singing solemn hymns accompanied with organs.

However, during their fundraising show at Ggaba Beach last week, the choristers proved to their fans that they could venture into the arena of modern Gospel music with absolute success.

After singing a few Latin hymns, probably to preserve their identity, the choir performed several contemporary Gospel songs, which they accompanied with spectacular dance strokes.

The songs, which provoked the audience into dancing, included negro-spirituals like Ride the Chariot and local compositions of Andrew Nsubuga, a member of the choir, which included Yezu Okukujjukira, Njagala Mbe Mw'abo and Sinza, Tenda.

They also sang traditional songs by the legendary Joseph Kyagambiddwa, accompanied by the Ganda Bakisimba dance.

At the function, fans fundraised for the purchase of an omnibus for the choir, estimated at sh40m. Over sh10m was raised in cash and pledges.

Gospel and secular artistes who performed included Sweet Kid, Silver Kyagulanyi and Billy Kasodde.

Uganda: We Must First Know What Jazz is Before Marketing It

2008-10-24T05:13:00.000-07:00

Uganda: We Must First Know What Jazz is Before Marketing It

New Vision (Kampala)

22 October 2008
Posted to the web 23 October 2008

Tshaka Mayanja
Kampala

JAZZ is receiving a lot of time and space in both the print and electronic media in Uganda these days.

This is a good thing only if the write ups are accurate. They are not; and contrary to the Entertainment Industry saying that all publicity is good publicity", I do not subscribe to that.

Jazz has been marketed so badly in Uganda, so much so that it is being described as music for the expatriates, 'wannabes', show- offs and the filthy rich. Nothing is so far from the truth! It only appears that way because 'Jazz' events that have happened so far are priced so highly, real Jazz fans cannot afford to attend. In the end, it is those that can afford to attend that do, and almost always they have no clue what is going on. Jazz has become a social event!

Jazz started in the 'Jook joints', shibeams and dark cheap bars where cheap and deadly booze like Moonshine was sold. The poor black people in America could not afford the expensive/posh high society places so out of The Blues; they created new music called Jazz, where improvisation and skill were paramount.

Isn't it ironic that this poor man's music is being marketed or wrongly tagged as the Elite's music? Let us define Jazz.

Ladies and Gentlemen: let us first put this out of the way; not every song that has no words/lyrics is Jaz (do not forget, there is such a thing as Vocal Jazz - Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Louis Armstrong, Carmen McCrae etc).

In addition, for some reason, whenever an artist plays an instrument, most especially a horn, people call it Jazz. Kenny G is the most successful instrumentalist of all time (going by sales), but he is NOT a recording Jazz artist and has never claimed to be one.

Isaiah Katumwa is in the same mould, and in all fairness, he mentions Kenny G as a mentor.

It is very impressive and commendable what Warid Telecom and others have done by starting or planting the seed for Jazz Festivals in Uganda. It would have been even better if what is being marketed as 'The First Jazz Festival' in Uganda had at least, 98% Jazz musicians on the bill.

The Kampala Warid Jazz Festival only has two bonafide Jazz musicians/group, out of a whopping 10 advertised artists!! That is only 2% of the entire festival. By bonafide, I mean those musicians who have both recorded and published Jazz music, or those who make a living playing Jazz.

The organisers went on to use talented artist Joe Sebunjo (Sundiata) to do a Jazz tour in Ugandan bars so as to promote The Jazz Festival no less! Does Sundiata play Jazz? He is an Afro/World musician.

The event should have been called The Kampala World Music Festival. That would have encompassed all the artists that have been advertised, including the minority advertised who actually play Jazz.

The problem with naming such an event as a Jazz Festival" where Jazz purveyors are the minority, and giving it such mainstream publicity is that those who do not know Jazz will then start misplacing various artists into various genres where they do not belong; calling other genres Jazz!

The 'interest" of big Ugandan Corporations and companies sponsoring Jazz in Uganda has brought the genre into the mainstream. That is not a bad thing if it is actually Jazz that is being marketed. The problem with mass media and promotion getting involved in such a complex genre is that they end up misinforming the public due to their lack of research or even interest in the genre.

There is nothing like a quarter, an eighth, two-thirds or half Jazz! It is either Jazz or it isn't. Jazz is probably the genre with the most sub-genres in it. There are various sub-genres within Jazz, BUT, and this is very important; all these sub-genres have some things in common: Improvisation, Jazz scales and notes, Jazz chords and Jazz movement.

The only thing where these sub-genres differ is usually rhythm and place of origin. We have Traditional Jazz, Bebop (believed to be one of the hardest sub-genres of Jazz to play), Big Band (this involves an Orchestra), Fusion Jazz (with elements of heavy Rock music), Progressive Jazz (very abstract and almost always played by Instrument virtuosos), Smooth Jazz (has a lot of elements from Soul & R 'n' B music), Nu-Jazz (with lots of elements of Funk music, with an emphasis on Groove), South African Jazz (a mixture of Traditional South African music and Traditional American Jazz), Afro Cuban Jazz ( a fusion of Traditional American Jazz and Traditional Afro Cuban music; the creation here is credited to Dizzy Gillespie (RIP) and Tito Puente (RIP), Bossa Nova (a fusion of Traditional American Jazz and Brazilian music - think of Stan Getz's Girl from Ipanema) and others that we shall list subsequently.

What is the way forward? Let us first agree on what constitutes Jazz music, before we market it to the public as such. Let us make the masses appreciate the genre as it is, without resorting to calling it what it isn't. Jazz is strong and solid enough to be appreciated. Jazz music was once mainstream music the world over, played at dances and parties. Indeed when the great Louis Armstrong toured Uganda in the 60s, the show was in Nakivubo Stadium!

We may not see that happen to Jazz in our lifetimes, but we are sure going to try to make people appreciate this music by pricing it right and calling it what it actually is!

The writer is a Nu Jazz/Funk/Reggae musician

Rudy Ray Moore, 81, a Precursor of Rap, Dies

2008-10-23T12:07:00.000-07:00

Rudy Ray Moore, 81, a Precursor of Rap, Dies

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: October 22, 2008

Rudy Ray Moore, whose standup comedy, records and movies related earthy rhyming tales of a vivid gaggle of characters as they lurched from sexual escapade to sexual escapade in a boisterous tradition, born in Africa, that helped shape today’s hip-hop, died Sunday in Akron, Ohio. He was 81.

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Xenon Entertainment Group, via Photofest

Rudy Ray Moore as the title character in “Dolemite” (1975), a cult classic among aficionados of blaxploitation movies.

RelatedFilmograpy: Rudy Ray Moore

The cause was complications of diabetes, his Web site said.

Mr. Moore called himself the Godfather of Rap because of the number of hip-hop artists who used snippets of his recordings in theirs, performed with him or imitated him. These included Dr. Dre, Big Daddy Kane and 2 Live Crew.

Snoop Dogg thanked Mr. Moore in liner notes to the 2006 release of the soundtrack to Mr. Moore’s 1975 film, “Dolemite,” saying, “Without Rudy Ray Moore, there would be no Snoop Dogg, and that’s for real.”

Most critics refrained from overpraising “Dolemite,” with the possible exception of John Leland, who wrote in The New York Times in 2002 that it “remains the ‘Citizen Kane’ of kung fu pimping movies.” The film, made for $100,000, nonetheless became a cult classic among aficionados of so-called blaxploitation movies — films that so exaggerate black stereotypes that they might plausibly be said to transcend those stereotypes.

Very little of Mr. Moore’s work in any medium reached mainstream audiences, largely because his rapid-fire rhyming salaciousness exceeded the wildest excesses of even Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor. His comedy records in the 1960s and ’70s — most featuring nude photographs of him and more than one woman in suggestive poses — were kept behind record store counters in plain brown wrappers and had to be explicitly requested.

But Mr. Moore could be said to represent a profound strand of African-American folk art. One of his standard stories concerns a monkey who uses his wiles and an accommodating elephant to fool a lion. The tale, which originated in West Africa, became a basis for an influential study by the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism.”

In one of his few brushes with a national audience, Mr. Moore, in a startlingly cleaned-up version, told the story on “The Arsenio Hall Show” in the early 1990s. Other characters he described were new, almost always dirtier renderings in the tradition of trickster stories represented by Brer Rabbit and the cunning slave John, who outwitted his master to win freedom.

Mr. Moore updated the story of an old minstrel show favorite, Peetie (which he changed to “Petey”) Wheatstraw, a k a the Devil’s Son-in-Law and the High Sheriff of Hell. Others in his cast were Pimpin’ Sam and Hurricane Annie. Mr. Moore became a master at “toasting,” a tradition of black rhymed storytelling over a beat in which the tallest tale — or most outlandish insult — wins.

Rudolph Frank Moore was born on March 17, 1927, in Fort Smith, Ark., where he was soon singing in church. He moved to Cleveland at 15, found work peeling potatoes and washing dishes and won a talent contest. He was drafted in 1950 and performed for his fellow soldiers as the Harlem Hillbilly, singing country songs in R&B style.

After his discharge, he resumed his pre-Army act as the turbaned dancer Prince Dumarr. He made some records as a singer under the name Rudy Moore, doing songs like “Hully Gully Papa,” who liked to “coffee grind real slow.”

His life changed in 1970 when he found himself listening to the stories of Rico, a regular at the record store in Hollywood, Calif., where Mr. Moore worked.

He was particularly captivated by Rico’s rude, rollicking stories of Dolemite, a name derived from dolomite, a mineral used in some cements. Mr. Moore perfected the Dolemite stories in comedy routines, most of which he recorded, then spent all his record earnings to make the movie “Dolemite.” A sequel, “The Human Tornado,” followed. A second sequel, “The Dolemite Explosion,” also starring Mr. Moore, may be released later this year.

Fallout Entertainment bought the rights last year to remake the original movie. Bill Fishman of Fallout said some of Mr. Moore’s famous lines would be used.

Mr. Moore is survived by four siblings; his daughter, Yvette Wesson, known as Rusty; and his 98-year-old mother, Lucille.

Violent scenes in Mr. Moore’s movies included a man’s guts being ripped out by another character’s bare hands in “Dolemite.” Almost none of the dialogue in any of his movies can be printed in a family newspaper, not to mention the language of his more than 16 comedy albums — or even many of their titles.

But what is probably his most famous line is also his most typical:

Dolemite is my name

And rappin’ and tappin’

That’s my game

I’m young and free

And just as bad as I wanna be.

Richard D’Abreu, Jr LOOK AND LIVE AVAILABLE IN E-STORES EVERYWHERE NOVEMBER 4, 2008!!

2008-10-23T05:43:00.000-07:00

New music for people who desire to make a difference

Click here: Richard D'Abreu's "Jazz in the Spirit"

from Richard D'Abreu, Jr.

"Jazz in the Spirit" is more than just a sound or repertoire. It is a musical vision that endeavors to create and build community by bringing diverse groups of people together. Specifically, it is a stylistic celebration of African American culture, as well as the African diaspora, through Christian faith, and love in action.

[hear more at www.jazzinthespirit.com]

A new message for a new day, Election Day 2008!

AVAILABLE IN E-STORES EVERYWHERE NOVEMBER 4, 2008!!

Preview the lead-off single at www.airplaydirect.com/richarddabreujr

LOOK AND LIVE

Richard D’Abreu, Jr

From the upcoming album <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

JAZZ IN THE SPIRIT

Richard D'Abreu's "Jazz in the Spirit"

2008-10-21T12:12:00.000-07:00

Click here: Richard D’Abreu, Jr LOOK AND LIVE AVAILABLE IN E-STORES EVERYWHERE NOVEMBER 4, 2008!!

Richard D'Abreu's "Jazz in the Spirit" (D'Abreu: alto sax, soprano sax, keyboards, vocals; Weldon Hill: keyboards; Mike Hawkins: bass; Billy Williams: drums) continued Sabbath celebrations at the festival back on the Joe Kennedy Jr. Jazz Stage. D'Abreu described his group as a "combination of gospel and jazz," noting that the two "really spring from the same root." The very first tune, "By and By," took the same energy I had just seen from Voices of Virginia and ran with it. Three female singers (Wanda Tiller, Joyce Cook, Parthenia Wallace) joined the group for "Count Your Blessings." The infectious reggaeton with a sing-along chorus felt just like a seaside party, although at times D'Abreu's alto saxophone playing sounded right out of Mardi Gras.

"Jazz in the Spirit is about building community," D'Abreu emphasized. Whether it was under the jazz stage tent or within Richmond city limits, the 2nd Street Festival ensured that community was intact and thriving.

*The food was easily my second favorite part of the festival. The amazing sights and smells of foods and drinks were everywhere, and the food that I did have easily stood up to the great music.

Sights from the 2nd Street Festival

The Jackson Ward community came alive this weekend with the 18th annual 2nd Street Festival. The festival kicked off on Friday night with a dance party featuring Johnny Houston & The Legends, but it wasn't until Saturday that all four performance stages would show some of Richmond's best musicians.

From 2nd Street Festival

I started off early Saturday afternoon at the Waverly R. Crawley Main Stage to catch a little bit of Saturday's first performers, the Johnny Peyton Renaissance Big Band. Slightly unimpressed by their first tune, “In A Mellow Tone," (although an hour later I would hear them from a block away playing “one more time" and “one more once" from Count Basie's arrangement of “April in Paris," which heightened my impression of the band) I made my way over to the Joe Kennedy Jr. Jazz Stage. The Jazz Stage tent would become my home base for the festival.

The Kip Williams Quartet (Williams: drums; James “Saxsmo" Gates: saxophone; Steve Kessler: keyboard; Matt Hall: bass) launched things off at the jazz stage. Gates played with impressive tone that would not be out of place on R&B and smooth jazz recordings, but he still managed to sound just as inspired by Maceo Parker as he is by Charlie Parker.

QuintEssential Jazz (William Prentiss: flute, tenor saxophone; Christopher Moseley: trumpet, flugelhorn; Keith Wallace: keyboard; Sam Craddock: bass; Keith Henderson: percussion; Jacob Price: drums) had a great smooth sound, perfectly equipped with polished solos. Seeking something a little more earthy, I walked over to the Bistro Stage.

Ban Caribe calls its music “clave soul." Singer and steelpan drummer Kevin Davis led his band of three vocalists, electric guitar and bass, drums, congas, and flute in music clearly influenced by Afro-Cuban and Caribbean musics. Leading a cute sing-along about a “signifyin' monkey," Davis taught the children (and the rest of us) about the music's underpinning heart of the clave and about the art of storytelling through music.

Jason Gay's SoulArmy (Gay: tenor saxophone; Brian Mahne: keyboards; Alan Parker: guitar; Derrick Englert: bass; Kevin Gaines: drums) was Saturday's highlight for me. With every solo, Gay got the audience hollering for more, and Parker was equally as electrifying. An original entitled “Barack Obama" got the Obama supporters in the crowd (what seemed like every one of the festival's attendees) into the music. Covering The Police's “Walking on the Moon," Gay began with a solo, using overtones and percussive effects. A light one-drop reggae came into play and the piece eased into an extended jam of great soloing.

Sunday began in the afternoon with the Jason Jenkins Quartet (Jenkins: bass; Kevin Simpson: tenor saxophone; Anthony Dowd: keyboard; Keith Willingham: drums) on the jazz stage. Remembering the amazing lunch I had eaten the day before from Hidden Treasure restaurant, I came hungry*. I sat down with lunch from Hawk's BBQ and listened to the quartet go through standards like “Tune Up" and “Softly As In A Morning Sunrise." Simpson and Dowd both delivered exciting and climactic solos.

Vocalist Jim Branch sat in on a couple tunes and wooed the crowd.

Voices of Virginia, led by Will Griffin, felt like a church service right on 2nd Street. The youth gospel choir, accompanied only by drums and keyboards, sang and rejoiced. A young girl in the front row of the choir sang with enthusiasm and movements that were contagious. I walked away from the Community Stage uplifted.

Richard D'Abreu's “Jazz in the Spirit" (D'Abreu: alto sax, soprano sax, keyboards, vocals; Weldon Hill: keyboards; Mike Hawkins: bass; Billy Williams: drums) continued Sabbath celebrations at the festival back on the Joe Kennedy Jr. Jazz Stage. D'Abreu described his group as a “combination of gospel and jazz," noting that the two “really spring from the same root." The very first tune, “By and By," took the same energy I had just seen from Voices of Virginia and ran with it. Three female singers joined the group for “Count Your Blessings." The infectious reggaeton with a sing-along chorus felt just like a seaside party, although at times D'Abreu's alto saxophone playing sounded right out of Mardi Gras.

“Jazz in the Spirit is about building community," D'Abreu emphasized. Whether it was under the jazz stage tent or within Richmond city limits, the 2nd Street Festival ensured that community was intact and thriving.

*The food was easily my second favorite part of the festival. The amazing sights and smells of foods and drinks were everywhere, and the food that I did have easily stood up to the great music.

Dolemite' Actor Rudy Ray Moore Dies

2008-10-21T09:00:00.000-07:00

Dolemite is a 1975 blaxploitation feature film, and is also the name of its principal character, played by Rudy Ray Moore, who co-wrote the film and its soundtrack.

Moore, who started his career as a stand-up comedian in the late 1960s, heard around that time a rhymed toast by a local homeless man about an urban hero named Dolemite, and decided to adopt the persona of Dolemite as an alter-ego in his act. He included the character on his 1970 debut album, Eat Out More Often, which reached the top 25 on the Billboard charts. He released several more comedy albums using this persona. In 1975, Moore decided to create a film about Dolemite, using many of his friends and fellow comedians as cast and crew.[1] The film was directed by D'Urville Martin, who appears as the villain Willie Green.

The film has attained something of a cult status, earning it a following and making it more well known than many of its counterparts.

'Dolemite' Actor Rudy Ray Moore Dies

(Oct. 20) - Comedic actor Rudy Ray Moore, best known to blaxploitation fans as kung fu pimp Dolemite, died Sunday at an Akron nursing home from complications of diabetes, according to media reports. He was 81.

His death was first reported by EURweb.com, which was contacted by comedienne Luenell with the news and later confirmed by Moore's daughter.

Moore, born Rudolph Frank Moore, was known as the "king of the party records" and released several raunchy comedy albums in the 1960's and 1970's that were seen as more explicit than peers like Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor.

In 1975, he starred as the title character in "Dolemite," a low budget comedy romp about a rhyming pimp with a stable of karate-loving prostitutes. A sequel, "The Human Tornado," emerged a year later. The persona was developed during his comedy act and included the memorable line "rappin' and tappin' is my game!"

Moore's other acting credits include "Petey Wheatstraw" in 1978 and the blaxploitation film "Disco Godfather" in 1979. In later years Moore collaborated with 2 Live Crew and Snoop Dogg and in 2000 reprised his Dolemite character in the movie "Big Money Hustlas."

He is survived by a daughter, Yvette "Rusty" Wesson, who tells EURweb that funeral ceremonies will be held in Akron and in Spokane, Wash.

Master Class: An Honor Roll in Action

2008-10-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

Master Class: An Honor Roll in Action

A group portrait from the Jazz Masters evening: standing, from left, the host, Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; and the award winners George Benson, Toots Thielemans and Jimmy Cobb; seated, from left, Snooky Young, Lee Konitz and Rudy Van Gelder.

By NATE CHINEN

Published: October 20, 2008

The alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, on receiving his 2009 NEA Jazz Masters award at the Rose Theater on Friday night, tried to disarm the pomp with wordplay.

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Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times

Mr. Konitz performing at the Rose Theater on Friday after being named a Jazz Master.

“ ‘Master’ sounds a little presumptuous,” he said. “So I looked it up in the dictionary.” Arriving at “eminent,” he said, he kept looking. Then he came to a definition that felt right: “noteworthy.” Mr. Konitz dropped that word as a punch line, eliciting groans as well as applause.

It was an endearingly goofy moment in an evening girded with serious intentions. Sponsored and bestowed by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jazz Masters awards have been a rare public accolade for jazz since they began in 1982.

The ceremony, presented this year in affiliation with Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrated the “incoming” class of inductees: along with Mr. Konitz, they were the trumpeter Snooky Young, the harmonica and guitar player Toots Thielemans, the recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder, the drummer Jimmy Cobb and the guitarist and singer George Benson.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, served as host of the program, which included laudatory biographical films. All but a couple of the recipients performed, winningly, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. (Mr. Young and Mr. Van Gelder instead received dedications.) The introductions were the provenance of past Jazz Masters, chosen by the honorees.

That last element helped make a formal occasion feel warm and welcoming. When the trumpeter Gerald Wilson (class of 1990) and the saxophonist Frank Wess (2007) recalled meeting Mr. Young some 70 years ago, they brought reserves of old-guy wit and bluster to the stage. The trombonist Tom McIntosh (2008) welcomed Mr. Benson in avuncular fashion, as an elder making room at the table. The alto saxophonist Phil Woods (2007) saluted Mr. Konitz as a peer, but with a touch of awe: “If anyone was ever overqualified to be a Jazz Master, it’s Lee Konitz.”

There’s credible weight behind “the central significance of jazz to our nation’s history and values,” as Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, put it in his opening comments. But the evening showed how the greatest testament to jazz’s power might simply be the lifelong commitment of its practitioners.

None of the performances were perfunctory. Mr. Benson, who has spent more of his career in the pop spotlight than in jazz, seemed grateful for the chance to glide confidently through “Stella by Starlight” with the band. Mr. Cobb used his stage time as a demonstration of subtlety rather than ego, behind a quartet. And Mr. Thielemans applied the full measure of his sensitivity and charisma to a version of “What a Wonderful World,” in an unspoken but heartfelt nod to Louis Armstrong.

“How do you follow that?” Mr. Konitz mock-lamented as he took the stage. But his take on “Body and Soul” was a quiet astonishment, both inventive and respectful. He paired searching insights with an unhurried feeling, creating the impression of casual discovery.

Near the evening’s close, Mr. Gioia reflected on his tenure with the endowment, which began in 2003 and will soon come to a close. (Mr. Gioia, a poet, has resigned his post to refocus on writing.) “Nothing has been closer to my heart than the investment that we have made in jazz,” he said. The record supports his claim: in the last few years, the Jazz Masters program has expanded, with new touring and educational initiatives. One can only hope that his successor, to be appointed by the next president, will keep the faith.

Dave McKenna, Pianist Known for Solo Jazz Work, Dies at 78

2008-10-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

Dave McKenna, Pianist Known for Solo Jazz Work, Dies at 78

By PETER KEEPNEWS

Published: October 20, 2008

Dave McKenna, a jazz pianist who began his career as a big-band sideman but became best known for his distinctive solo playing, with a powerful left hand that made a bass player seem unnecessary, died Saturday in State College, Pa. He was 78.

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Dave McKenna in 1990.

The cause was lung cancer, said his companion, Liz Muir of Brookline, Mass.

Widely admired by his fellow musicians, Mr. McKenna acquired a devoted following over the years even though he rarely left the East Coast. He spent most of the last four decades of his life in Massachusetts, after moving from New York City to Cape Cod in 1966. Most listeners in other parts of the world knew his work primarily from his recordings, of which there were many.

David McKenna was born on May 30, 1930, in Woonsocket, R.I. His father, William, was a postman who played drums as a hobby; his mother, Catherine, was a pianist who gave him his first lessons on the instrument.

He first performed with local groups in Boston as a teenager before moving on to the big bands of Charlie Ventura and Woody Herman.

After serving in the Army and rejoining Ventura for a while, he worked with small ensembles led by Stan Getz and others and began long associations with two mainstays of the traditional jazz scene, the cornetist Bobby Hackett and the clarinetist and soprano saxophonist Bob Wilber.

After his move to Cape Cod, Mr. McKenna worked mostly as a solo pianist, occasionally in New York but more often in New England. For much of the 1980s he was the pianist in residence at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston.

Mr. McKenna made a solo album for ABC Paramount in 1955 but otherwise rarely recorded until signing with Concord Records in the late 1970s. He recorded frequently after that, as bandleader, accompanist and, most notably, unaccompanied soloist.

It was in that role, in performance and on albums with titles like “My Friend the Piano” and “Left Handed Complement,” that he gave full vent to his distinctive style. That style, rooted in the jazz piano tradition of an earlier era, was built around powerful bass lines, elegantly voiced chords and a loving approach to melodies, especially those of the Tin Pan Alley standards that were the foundation of his vast repertory. He liked to spin out long medleys united by a theme, like famous and obscure songs with “You,” “Stars” or “Spring” in the title.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was more likely to ornament a tune with elegant embellishments than to use it as a springboard for elaborate improvisations that left the melody behind.

“I don’t know if I qualify as a bona fide jazz guy,” he once said. “I play saloon piano. I like to stay close to the melody.”

Survivors also include his wife, Frances Wiggins McKenna, of Oak Island, N.C.; his sons Stephen, of State College, and Douglas, of Dennis, Mass.; a brother, Donald, of Woonsocket; two sisters, Jean O’Donnell of Woonsocket and Patricia Savard of Barrington, R.I.; and one granddaughter

THE BIG ONE!: Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama for president.

2008-10-19T11:40:00.000-07:00

THE BIG ONE!: Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama for president.

Colin Powell Endorses Barack Obama

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a Republican, says he will vote for Democrat Barack Obama for president. "He is a transformational figure," the retired general says of Obama on NBC's 'Meet the Press.' Powell calls GOP candidate John McCain admirable but questions his strategy and running mate choice.

"It isn't easy for me to disappoint Sen. McCain in the way that I have this morning, and I regret that," Powell, interviewed on NBC's "Meet the Press," said of his longtime friend, the Arizona senator.

But, he added: "I think we need a transformational figure. I think we need a president who is a generational change and that's why I'm supporting Barack Obama, not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Sen. John McCain."

Powell's endorsement has been much anticipated because he is a Republican with impressive foreign policy credentials, a subject on which Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, is weak. Powell is a Republican centrist who is popular among moderate voters.

At the same time, Powell is a black man and Obama would be the nation's first black president. Powell said he was cognizant of the racial aspect of his endorsement, but said that was not the dominant factor in his decision. If it was, he said, he would have made the endorsement months ago.

Powell expressed disappointment in the negative tone of McCain's campaign, his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate and McCain's and Palin's decision to focus in the closing weeks of the contest on Obama's ties to 1960s-era radical William Ayers. A co-founder of the Weather Underground, which claimed responsibility for nonfatal bombings during the Vietnam War-era, Ayers is now a college professor who lives in Obama's Chicago neighborhood. He and Obama also served together on civic boards in Chicago.

"This Bill Ayers situation that's been going on for weeks became something of a central point of the campaign," Powell said. "But Mr. McCain says that he's a washed-out terrorist. Well, then, why do we keep talking about him?"

Former Secretary of also criticizes tone of McCain's campaign

*Colin Powell, a Republican who was President Bush's first secretary of state, endorsed Democrat Barack Obama for president Sunday and criticized the tone of Republican John McCain's campaign.

Powell said both Obama and Republican John McCain are qualified to be commander in chief. But he said Obama is better suited to handle the nation's economic problems as well as help improve its standing in the world.

"But I firmly believe that at this point in America's history, we need a president that will not just continue, even with a new face and with the changes and with some maverick aspects, who will not just continue basically the policies that we have been following in recent years," Powell said.

"I think we need a transformational figure. I think we need a president who is a generational change and that's why I'm supporting Barack Obama, not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Sen. John McCain."

Powell's endorsement has been much anticipated because he is a Republican with impressive foreign policy credentials, a subject on which Obama is weak. At the same time, he is a black man and Obama would be the nation's first black president.

Powell also expressed disappointment in the negative tone of McCain's campaign, his choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as a running mate and McCain's and Palin's decision to focus in the closing weeks of the contest on Obama's ties to 1960s-era radical William Ayers.

He said McCain's choice of Palin raised questions about judgment.

"I don't believe she's ready to be president of the United States," Powell said

Powell, as secretary of state, helped make the case before the United Nations for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003. A retired general, he also was the nation's top military commander, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the first Gulf war under President George H.W. Bush.

McCain disagreed with Powell's decision and said he has been endorsed by four other former secretaries of state, all veterans of Republican administrations: Henry Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Lawrence Eagleburger and Alexander Haig.

"Well, I've always admired and respected Gen. Powell. We're longtime friends. This doesn't come as a surprise," McCain said on "Fox News Sunday."

Asked whether Powell's endorsement would undercut his campaign's assertion that Obama is not ready to lead, McCain said: "Well, again, we have a very, we have a respectful disagreement, and I think the American people will pay close attention to our message for the future and keeping America secure."

Powell said he does not plan to campaign for Obama.

The Baroness of Jazz

2008-10-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

The Baroness of Jazz

The Baroness of Jazz

Pannonica De Koenigswarter

The saxophonist Sonny Rollins, photographed by Pannonica de Koenigswarter.

By BARRY SINGER

Published: October 17, 2008

IF the mysterious Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter is at all remembered today, it is for her proximity to the deaths of two legendary jazz musicians. In 1955 Charlie Parker died on a sofa in her Fifth Avenue home; 27 years later Thelonious Monk died after secluding himself for years in her New Jersey house.

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Courtesy of Abrams Image/Harry N. Abrams

Thelonious Monk was among the many jazz musicians befriended (and photographed) by Pannonica de Koenigswarter, right.

Both deaths made the baroness an immediate target of tabloid headlines and a long-term subject for scurrilous gossip. Almost no one, though, beyond the insular jazz world, could possibly know her whole story: how, until her death in 1988, she championed jazz as both a friend and a generous, if rather unlikely, benefactor.

A Rothschild heiress, she offered her home to countless jazzmen as a place to work and even live, while quietly paying their bills when they couldn’t find work. She chauffeured them to gigs around New York, toured with them as a kind of racial chaperon, and was even known to confront anyone she felt was taking advantage of her friends because they were black.

“I always likened her to the great royal patrons of Mozart or Wagner’s day,” the saxophonist Sonny Rollins said in a telephone interview. “Yet she never put the spotlight on herself. I try not to talk publicly about people I knew in jazz. But I have to say something about the baroness. She really loved our music.”

The baroness first materialized in New York jazz clubs in the early 1950s like some film noir siren, right down to the raven hair and long cigarette holder. She seduced the music’s greatest figures with her friendship, the revolutionists of the bebop era: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and many others. Her illustrious family has long refused to discuss her. But now a new book, “Three Wishes: An Intimate Look at Jazz Greats” (Abrams Image), offers a window into her personal life, providing details even her jazz intimates were probably unaware of.

The book is primarily a collection of candid photographs of the musicians taken by the baroness, and a compilation of their varied responses to a favorite question: “What are your three wishes?” On Oct. 30 an exhibition of her original notebooks collecting these snapshots and wish lists will open at the Gallery at Hermès in New York.

“Three Wishes” arrives with the implicit sanction of the Rothschild family, including a six-page introduction by a granddaughter, Nadine de Koenigswarter. The book offers more concrete information about the baroness than has ever before appeared between covers. But the source of her extraordinarily deep bond with jazz musicians remains elusive.

She was born, her granddaughter writes, in London on Dec. 10, 1913. Her full name was Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild, according to her 1935 wedding announcement in The New York Times. She was the granddaughter of Nathan Mayer, the first Lord Rothschild, and the great-granddaughter of Mayer Amschel, the Rothschild patriarch who, from the Frankfurt ghetto, orchestrated his family’s rise. Her father was Nathaniel Charles Rothschild, a partner in the family bank, whose greater passion was entomology, a hobby at which he was both gifted and exceedingly accomplished. According to a great-niece, Hannah Rothschild, who is completing a documentary about her for the BBC, the baroness’s father was plagued by clinical depression that sometimes led the family to hospitalize him. He killed himself in 1923, at 46.

Nica Rothschild, as she was known, became an aviation enthusiast and an accomplished pilot. At 21 she met a kindred spirit at Le Touquet airfield in France. Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, 31, was a French mining engineer, banker and pilot. He was also a widower with a young son, and like Nica, he was Jewish. The baron quickly proposed after just three months; her response was flight to New York. They were married at City Hall in October 1935.

The couple took up residence in Abondant, a 17th-century chateau not far from Normandy. Their first-born child, Patrick de Koenigswarter, recalled in May in an interview published in The National, an Abu Dhabi newspaper, that when the Nazis invaded France, the baron, a lieutenant in the reserves, was called up. His father “left my mother a map, with instructions: If the Germans get to this point, take the children and escape any way you can to your family in England.” Shortly thereafter, his mother did, accompanied by a nanny and a maid, on what proved to be the last train out of Paris. The baron’s mother dismissed her son’s entreaties and instructions. She died at Auschwitz.

The baron joined de Gaulle’s Free French forces and was assigned to the Congo. At his instigation his wife next moved their two children to the United States, placing Patrick de Koenigswarter and his younger sister, Janka, with the Guggenheim family on Long Island. The baroness then somehow rejoined her husband in Africa with the Free French, serving in various capacities including ambulance driver and ending the war as a decorated lieutenant.

Published: October 17, 2008

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One little-known wartime detail lends a different sense to her later arrival in the New York jazz world. Her husband’s extended family, as well as her Hungarian-born mother’s, were nearly all killed in the Holocaust. The baroness’s adoption of New York’s predominantly black jazz family in the war’s aftermath thus seems less the act of a louche dilettante than of a survivor bent on resurrection and rebirth.

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Pannonica De Koenigswarter

Lex Humphries

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Pannonica De Koenigswarter

Thelonious Monk

“I believe that she could no longer live in any ivory tower after what she saw in the war,” Hannah Rothschild said in a telephone interview. “Privilege offered no protection. The fate of her own mother-in-law proved that. She had experienced the very depths of prejudice herself firsthand.”

The baron entered the French diplomatic service after the war, settling his wife and children first in Norway and then in Mexico. “My father was a very controlling person,” Patrick de Koenigswarter said. “He was adamant about punctuality, while Nica was notorious for being late. She missed appointments, sometimes by days.” He continued, “It didn’t help that my father had no particular interest in the subjects that fascinated her: art and music.”

The baroness always credited her brother, Victor, a jazz fan and amateur pianist who studied with Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson, with introducing her to jazz. Shortly before her death, though, she revealed in a rare interview for the Monk documentary "Straight, No Chaser" the moment when her interest in jazz music escalated into something more.

“I was in the throes of the diplomatic life in Mexico,” she remembered of the years 1949 to 1952, “and I had a friend who got hold of records for me. I used to go to his pad to hear them. I couldn’t have listened to them in my own house, with that atmosphere. I heard them and really got the message. I belonged where that music was. This was something I was supposed to be involved in in some way. It wasn’t long afterwards that I cut out.”

It is well known in jazz circles that the great project of the baroness’s life was the torturously unstable Monk, whom she served as a surrogate wife right alongside Monk’s equally devoted actual wife, Nellie. The baroness paid Monk’s bills, dragged him to an endless array of doctors, put him and his family up in her own home and, when necessary, helped Nellie institutionalize him. In 1958 Monk and the baroness were stopped by the police in Delaware. When a small amount of marijuana was discovered, she took the rap for her friend and even served a few nights in jail.

People have always asked why. What drew her to him so intensely? Was it sex, drugs or groupie-esque infatuation? Clearly her steadfast devotion to Monk’s music propelled their relationship, which both maintained was platonic. In light of her father’s history, though, it seems possible that the underlying bond was love and childhood loss. In Monk, she may have been drawn to the same anguished brilliance that had consumed her father, whom she could not save.

The introduction to “Three Wishes” still leaves unanswered many questions that pursued the baroness throughout her life. Did she abandon her children in her headlong embrace of the jazz life, or were they taken from her? Did she enable addiction in the musicians she loved? Did she buy them drugs? Did she use drugs herself?

These questions once loomed large in her mystique. As her back story deepens, however, their sense of enormity recedes. The baron divorced his wife in 1956 after the scandalous publicity surrounding Charlie Parker’s death in her home. Shaun de Koenigswarter, the couple’s youngest son, recently confirmed that the baron also got custody of the three younger children, Berit (born in 1946), Kari (1950) and himself (1948). “I am the only child who never lived with my mother after she settled in New York in 1953,” he said in an e-mail message, adding that his four siblings lived with her during different periods.

That the baroness in fact lost custody of her three youngest children as a consequence of her love of jazz further illuminates the maternal quality of her presence on the scene. Is it any wonder that she clung to her musicians like family?

“She realized that jazz needed any kind of help it could get,” Mr. Rollins said, “especially the musicians. She was monetarily helpful to a lot who were struggling. But more than that, she was with us. By being with the baroness, we could go places and feel like human beings. It certainly made us feel good. I don’t know how you could measure it. But it was a palpable thing. I think she was a heroic woman.”

It has taken the actual family she left behind a long time to arrive at a similar conclusion. “Not all members of our family were enthused about the life she chose to lead (especially our father!),” Shaun de Koenigswarter wrote. “But over the years, many of those who had initially disapproved — particularly in light of the many viciously biased and racist press reports about her — came to understand and appreciate what she was all about.”

Tuning In to the Organ, and Not Just in Church

2008-10-18T04:34:00.000-07:00

Tuning In to the Organ, and Not Just in Church

By CRAIG R. WHITNEY

Published: October 17, 2008

If anyone had told J. Michael Barone a quarter-century ago that the radio program about organ music that he was starting would still be going strong today, he might have dismissed the idea.

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J. Michael Barone, a celebrity in the world of organ music, at the St. Paul studio that produces his “Pipedreams” radio program.

Multimedia 'Pipedreams' Program Archive.

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Richard Rasch/American Public Media

J. Michael Barone playing at Wooddale Community Church in Eden Prarie, Mn.

But this month is the 25th anniversary of “Pipedreams” as a weekly national show, distributed to public and commercial stations by American Public Media of St. Paul. Even Mr. Barone sometimes has trouble believing it.

“I feel as if I had walked down a corridor past an open door, gone in and started doing the show, and been waiting ever since for someone to return and kick me out,” he said the other day on a short visit to New York to attend a concert by the young virtuoso Cameron Carpenter (on a digital organ).

The radio audience is not huge but it is devoted and steady. Appearing on more than 150 stations (down from a peak of 180) across the country, the show draws about 250,000 listeners, Mr. Barone says, and more worldwide who listen on the program’s Web site, pipedreams.org.

“Interestingly, my two largest listening audiences are on commercial classical music stations,” he said, with those stations drawing an average quarter-hour audience of about 9,000 each in Chicago and Dallas, where the 90-minute program is broadcast on Sunday evenings. He hopes to pick up a few more stations after January by making the program available in one- and two-hour formats.

In some places it is hard to find. In New York in recent years, devotees have had to chase it across the lower end of the FM spectrum, where at 10 on Saturday nights it can now be found on two Long Island stations, WLIU (88.3) and WCWP (88.1); in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, it has no radio home at all. XM Satellite Radio Channel 133 carries “Pipedreams” on Sundays — at 5 a.m. Eastern time.

“I suspect organ music will always be a niche,” Mr. Barone conceded. “If a million people listened to ‘Pipedreams,’ I’d be thrilled. I don’t think there’s anything about the organ that should get in the way of its being embraced by many more people than it is today.”

To people who care about the instrument and its music, Mr. Barone, 62, is a celebrity, his rich bass-baritone voice as instantly recognizable as his long, gray (and thinning) ponytail and full beard.

Among his regular listeners is Alan Koole, a truck driver from Wyoming, Mich., who until he retired in May used to record “Pipedreams” on Sunday mornings and then play it over and over on the road in his tractor-trailer rig. “Traveling, I really appreciated what he’s doing,” Mr. Koole said in a telephone interview. “I had no idea there was so much music specifically for organ.”

Neither did Mr. Barone before his early teens, when he began listening to recordings of organ music and then playing at his Presbyterian church in Kingston, Pa. He was encouraged by a friend there, Robert Wech, who later attended Oberlin College and persuaded Mr. Barone to follow in 1964.

“He suggested it would be a good place for me, even though he knew I wasn’t going to go into music as a profession, because of the limits of my executive skill as a player,” Mr. Barone said. He went on to earn a degree in music history at Oberlin and took courses at the conservatory there, but it was by working at the 10-watt student-run radio station that he stumbled into his profession.

“When I realized I was going to get out after four years, I thought maybe I could announce classical music,” he said. He was offered the job of music director at a new radio station at St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minn., after answering an advertisement, and drove from Ohio to take a look.

“So on the 20th of August, 1968, I showed up, and I believe my intent was to work for a year or two, pay back some of my student loans, take a deep breath and jump on the academic bandwagon again,” he recalled. “Forty years later, I’m still here, trying to figure out what I’ll do when I grow up.”

St. John’s University Radio eventually became Minnesota Public Radio, a nonprofit private corporation that, as American Public Media, also distributes “A Prairie Home Companion,” among other programs.

As Minnesota Public Radio’s classical music director for 25 years, Mr. Barone could acquire and listen to as many recordings as he wanted, starting with the notable organists of his youth: E. Power Biggs, Virgil Fox, Richard Elsasser, Catherine Crozier. He has kept listening and discovering instruments and organists from all over the world.

Tuning In to the Organ, and Not Just in Church Published: October 17, 2008

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He started a weekly Sunday night organ program there in 1970; that eventually led to a pilot series of 14 programs starting in January 1982 with performances recorded at the 1980 national convention of the American Guild of Organists in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Nicholas D. Nash, the station’s program director at the time, suggested calling the series “Pipedreams.”

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Multimedia 'Pipedreams' Program Archive.

It was so well received that “Pipedreams” came back as a weekly program in October 1983, and has been on the air ever since. Mr. Nash’s brother-in-law and sister, credited in every broadcast as Mr. and Mrs. Wesley C. Dudley, have provided financial support from the beginning.

Mr. Barone still plays the organ occasionally, and is a co-founder of the Chamber Music Society of St. Cloud. He also collects Citroën cars, including two of those 2CV’s that look as if it would take a can opener to peel the sunroofs back, and is president of the Citroën Club of Minnesota. One thing he never expected was to become “Michael Barone of ‘Pipedreams.’ ”

That persona led him to an advisory role in pipe organ installation projects like those at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia. At an organ recital marathon at the Kimmel two years ago, he was master of ceremonies when the newly installed instrument (by Dobson Pipe Organ Builders of Lake City, Iowa) developed a couple of stuck notes after Mr. Carpenter played his transcription of the last movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony on it.

“Cameron, you broke it,” Mr. Barone observed. “This is very expensive. Are you insured?”

The organ wasn’t broken, of course, and unlike some of its counterparts in concert halls elsewhere, it has a sizable endowment and is often heard. Avery Fisher Hall and Carnegie Hall in New York do not have pipe organs, a situation that worries Mr. Barone, though they use digital instruments when they need them.

“The digital or electronic or synthetic organs of the 21st century have made remarkable advances in their ability to give a convincing impression of the pipe organ’s effect,” Mr. Barone said, “but the very best pipe organ is still able to create an experience and an impression that has not found a synthetic equivalent.”

Organists like Mr. Carpenter disagree, and Mr. Barone — like Paul Jacobs and Hector Olivera, two other contemporary organists he admires — does not dismiss digital substitutes as “toasters,” as many pipe organists do. Mr. Barone also admires Barbara Dennerlein’s jazz improvisations on the electronic Hammond B3 organ and thinks that theater organists could teach their classical counterparts a lot about technique.

On Sunday, which the American Guild of Organists and other associations have designated as a day for organ spectaculars around the country to celebrate the International Year of the Organ, Mr. Barone will help to lead the festivities in Minneapolis, a multiorganist concert on the Casavant Frères pipe organ at Central Lutheran Church.

“I’m just trying to open a door in an inviting way to provide access to this marvelous realm of thoughtful, passionate, soothing, exciting, delicious, brainy and blissful music,” he said of “Pipedreams.” “It can tell its own story, or stimulate our curiosity to discover it, if we will simply listen.”

Hearing an instrument he has not heard before, he said, “is like meeting new people and finding out how interesting they really are.”

Levi Stubbs, 72, Powerful Voice for Four Tops, Dies

2008-10-18T04:31:00.000-07:00

Levi Stubbs, 72, Powerful Voice for Four Tops, Dies

Ron Frehm/Associated Press

The Four Tops, from left, in 1990: Renaldo "Obie" Benson, Levi Stubbs, Abdul "Duke" Fakir and Lawrence Payton.

DETROIT — Levi Stubbs, the gravelly-voiced, imploring lead singer of the Motown group the Four Tops, who stood out in 1960s pop classics like “Reach Out, I’ll Be There,” and “Bernadette,” died on Friday at his home here. He was 72.

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The Four Tops in the mid-’60s. Clockwise from bottom left, Levi Stubbs, Obie Benson, Abdul Fakir and Lawrence Payton.

Past Coverage

The Four Tops' 50th Anniversary
Lawrence Payton's Obituary
Obie Benson's Obituary

Music Links

"It's The Same Old Song" (youtube.com)
1974 medley, including "Reach Out" (youtube.com)
The Four Tops' Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Citation

Back Story With The Times’s Micheline Maynard (mp3)

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Ron Frehm/Associated Press

The Four Tops, from left, in 1990: Renaldo "Obie" Benson, Levi Stubbs, Abdul "Duke" Fakir and Lawrence Payton.

His death was confirmed by the office of the Wayne County Medical Examiner. No cause was given. Mr. Stubbs had had a series of illnesses, including a stroke and cancer, that forced him to stop performing in 2000, although he briefly participated in the Four Tops’ 50th-anniversary concert in 2004, which was broadcast on public television.

Formed while its original members were in high school, the Four Tops were one of the most successful groups of the 20th century. They had more than 40 hits on the Billboard pop charts, including their first No. 1 single, “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)” in 1965.

Hugely popular abroad as well as in the United States, the group became a linchpin of Motown Records, the Detroit label started by Berry Gordy Jr., and was second only to the Temptations, with whom it was often compared, in popularity among its male artists. In 1990 the Four Tops were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Unlike the Temptations, whose members regularly changed, the Tops exhibited extraordinary loyalty, with the original four remaining together for more than 40 years. In fact, they began their singing career almost a decade before joining Motown in 1963.

In 1953 Mr. Stubbs, a student at Pershing High School in Detroit, and his friend Abdul Fakir, known as Duke, attended a birthday party at which they met two other founding members of the group, Renaldo Benson, known as Obie and Lawrence Payton, who were students at Northern High School.

(Mr. Fakir, who continues to perform with the Tops’ current lineup, is now the last surviving member.)

Originally calling themselves the Four Aims, they were rechristened the Four Tops in 1954 and signed with Chess Records, the Chicago rhythm and blues label, in 1956.

It was clear from the beginning that Mr. Stubbs, with his booming, rough-edged baritone, would be the lead singer, Mr. Fakir said in a 2004 interview. Yet many of his songs were written in a tenor range that pushed his voice higher and made it sound urgent and pleading.

Mr. Stubbs and the group did not plan a pop career, but began as jazz singers. Leaving Detroit in the mid-1950s, they headed for New York, bouncing around the nightclub circuit.

The four singers shared a studio apartment and rotated three daytime suits among them; whoever had the more important appointment got first pick, Mr. Fakir recalled.

The Tops added choreography to their act, but were advised to drop it when they toured with the jazz balladeer Billy Eckstine, who told them to master their singing. In 1963 Mr. Stubbs and the other Tops appeared on the “Tonight” show, then hosted by Jack Paar, singing a jazz arrangement of “In the Still of the Night.”

Mr. Gordy, who saw their performance, told his staff to sign them up, and assigned the songwriting team of Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier and Eddie Holland to shape their sound and deliver them a hit song.

It took a year before the group recorded “Baby, I Need Your Loving,” followed by their first No. 1 hits, “I Can’t Help Myself” in 1965 and “Reach Out” in 1966.

“We didn’t know what bag to put them in,” Mr. Dozier said in 2004. The three songwriters concluded that Mr. Stubbs’s booming voice should be most prominent, backed by the Tops’ harmonies; layered with vocals by a female group, the Andantes; and supported by the Motown studio band known as the Funk Brothers.

The combination worked.

“Stubbs’s bold, dramatic readings of some of Holland-Dozier-Holland’s choicest material set a high standard for contemporary soul in the mid-’60s,” the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said when the Tops were inducted.

Snappily dressed, even offstage, the Tops toured extensively throughout the United States and around the world, recording more hits like “It’s the Same Old Song” and “Standing in the Shadows of Love.”

In 1971 the group joined the Supremes to record a cover version of the Ike and Tina Turner song “River Deep — Mountain High.” But by then, relations with Motown were strained, and the group left the label after Mr. Berry moved it to Los Angeles.

The Tops continued to record during the 1970s and ’80s, often touring with the Temptations. Their biggest post-Motown hit was “Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got,” in 1973.

Levi Stubbles was born in Detroit on June 6, 1936, a cousin of the soul singer Jackie Wilson. His younger brother, Joe, sang with the Falcons and the Contours, two rhythm and blues groups.

Mr. Stubbs is survived by his wife of 48 years, Clineice; five children, Deborah, Beverly, Raymond, Kelly and Levi Jr.; and 11 grandchildren.

Mr. Stubbs took on a side project to become the voice of a man-eating plant, Audrey II, in the 1986 musical film “Little Shop of Horrors,” and also was the voice of Mother Brain, an evil character on the cartoon show “Captain N: The Game Master,” from 1989 to 1991.

By 1995, Mr. Stubbs’s health had begun to fail, forcing him to curtail his performances. Mr. Payton died in 1997, and Mr. Benson in 2005. Mr. Fakir has continued singing with Mr. Payton’s son Roquel; a former Temptation, Theo Peoples; and Ronnie McNair, a veteran Motown singer.

Before his death, Mr. Benson said in an interview that he was saddened by performing without Mr. Stubbs and Mr. Payton.

“It’s like having one body with two limbs missing,” he said.

Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs dies at 72

2008-10-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

Four Tops singer Levi Stubbs dies at 72 Susan Whitall / The Detroit News

Levi Stubbles (June 6, 1936 – October 17, 2008), better known by the stage name, Levi Stubbs, was an American baritone singer, best known as the lead vocalist of the famed Motown R&B group The Four Tops.

Levi Stubbs, whose impassioned baritone was one of the most iconic voices to come out of Motown Records, died this morning at his Detroit home. The singer was 72.

On songs like "Baby I Need Your Loving," "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)," "Reach Out (I'll Be There)," "Standing in the Shadows of Love," "Bernadette," "Ask the Lonely" and other Four Tops hits, Stubbs' voice was a rare instrument, capable of sheer, soaring joy, but also the most abject, broken-hearted sorrow.

Stubbs suffered a series of strokes several years ago that forced him to retire from touring with the Tops. The group -- which also included Abdul "Duke" Fakir, Lawrence Payton and Renaldo "Obie" Benson -- had been together since the 1950s, well before Berry Gordy Jr. signed them to Motown, and were seasoned performers on the sophisticated nightclub circuit. Fakir is now the only survivor of the original group.

"Smooth, classy and polished, they were big stuff," Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr. wrote in his memoir "To Be Loved." "I wanted them bad. I could see how loyal they were to each other, and I knew they would be the same way to me and Motown."

You can reach Susan Whitall at (313) 222-2156 or swhitall@detnews.com

Four Tops Vocalist Levi Stubbs Dies At 72
The Four Tops
October 17, 2008 , 11:15 AM ET
Gary Graff, Detroit
Arguably the most powerful voice in Motown's storied history has been silenced. Four Tops lead singer Levi Stubbs, Jr., died today (Oct. 17) at his home in Detroit after a long series io illnesses -- including cancer and a stroke -- that forced him to stop performing in 2000. He was 72.

Funeral arrangements are pending for Stubbs, who is survived by Clineice, his wife of 48 years, and five children.

"He had one of the most prolific and identifiably voices in American history," the Motown Alumni Association's Billy J. Wilson tells Billboard.com. "It's a deep loss, to the entire Motown family and to the world."

Stubbs' death leaves Abdul "Duke" Fakir as the Tops' only living member from the original quartet, which formed in 1954 as the Four Aims and signed with Motown nine years later. Laurence Payton passed away in 1997, and Renaldo "Obie" Benson died in 2005.

Fakir continues to lead a version of the Tops that includes Payton's son Roquel, former Temptations member Theo Peoples and Motown veteran Ronnie McNeir.

Stubbs -- born Levi Stubbles in Detroit -- gave voice to enduring hits such as "Baby I Need Your Loving," "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)," "Reach Out I'll Be There," "Brenadette" and others. The Tops have sold more than 50 million records and racked up 45 chart hits for the Motown, ABC Dunhill, Arista and Casablanca labels, and the group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.

Stubbs also provided the voice of Audrey II, the man-eating plant in the film version of the musical "Little Shop of Horrors" in 1986, and of Mother Brain in the 1989 animated TV series "Captain N: The Game Master."

Stubbs' last public appearance with the group came at the group's 50th Anniversary Concert on July 28, 2004 at Detroit's Music Hall Center.

Reaction to Stubbs' death has been pouring forth as the word spread. The Temptations' Otis Williams told Billboard.com that the wheelchair-bound Stubbs came to see his group perform with the current Four Tops a couple of times this year, in Toledo and in the Detroit area. "We had him in the dressing room and sang 'Baby I Need Your Loving' ... He would try to sing along with us, and as he was singing you could see tears well up in his eyes. He just longed to be on stage and do what he was known to do."

Williams called Stubbs "our black Frank Sinatra. Frank not only had the voice but what made Sinatra unique was the way he'd phrase the song. Levi had that same kind of talent; whatever he was singing he would phrase it so uniquely that you would just stand there in awe."

War's Lonnie Jordan told Billboard.com he was "blessed" to meet Stubbs once during his career and felt that "his voice was so good he was just, like, from another planet. That's what I told him."

In a statement, Motown founder Berry Gordy, Jr., called Stubbs "the greatest interpreter of songs I've ever heard." Gordy also revealed that Stubbs was his first choice for the romantic lead in the Diana Ross film vehicle "Lady Sings the Blues" but that he turned down the role "because he thought it would interfere with the group's future success."

Brian and Eddie Holland, who co-wrote many of the Tops' hits with partner Lamont Dozier, said in a statement that "Working with Levi was one of the most inspirational aspects of the time we spent at Motown. Just listening to the way he was able to deliver the HDH songs brought more beauty to them than we could have imagined ... He was an inspiration to us as songwriters and producers."

Smokey Robinson commented that Stubbs "was one of the great voices of all times. He was very near and dear to my heart," while Daryl Hall said that "not only was Levi a nice guy, but he had one of the most distinctive voices of all of the Motown artists. He created a style so unique that it actually was never really imitated. And, the songs that he sang, like all great songs, will remain timeless."

Stubbs began his professional singing career with friends Abdul "Duke" Fakir, Renaldo "Obie" Benson and Lawrence Payton to form the Four Aims in 1954. Two years later, the group changed their name to the Four Tops. The group began as a supper-club act before finally signing to Motown Records in 1963; by the end of the decade, The Four Tops had over a dozen hits to their name. The most popular of the Four Tops hits, all of which featured Stubbs on lead vocals, include "Baby I Need Your Loving", "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)", "It's the Same Old Song", "Reach Out I'll Be There", "Standing in the Shadows of Love", "Bernadette", "Still Water (Love)", and "Ain't No Woman (Like the One I've Got)".
Although Stubbs was a natural baritone, most of the Four Tops' hits were written in a tenor range to give the lead vocals a sense of urgency. Stubbs and the other Tops remained a team until Payton died in 1997, at which point Theo Peoples took his place. The Four Tops were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. Benson also died on July 1, 2005. Levi Stubbs passed away after a long illness on October 17, 2008.
As an actor, credited as Levi Stubbs, Jr., he provided the voice of the carnivorous plant "Audrey II" in the movie version of the musical Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and the voice of Mother Brain in the animated TV series Captain N: The Game Master (1989). Stubbs has also guest starred in a number of TV shows as himself.
Stubbs and his wife Clineice were married from 1960 until his death, and had five children. In 1995, Stubbs was diagnosed with cancer, and later, a stroke, and stopped touring. Since 2000, Theo Peoples has taken Stubbs' place as the lead singer of The Four Tops, with Ronnie McNeir taking the place that Payton originally held. Stubbs died October 17, 2008 at his home in Detroit after a long serious illness including cancer and a stroke. He was 72.[1]
Stubbs was a cousin of soul singer Jackie Wilson. [1]

Although Reba McEntire fears that fellow Christians might criticize her for it, the singer says she

2008-10-17T04:34:00.000-07:00

Although Reba McEntire fears that fellow Christians might criticize her for it, the singer says she believe she's been reincarnated.

"I believe I've gone both ways -- that I have been here before as a man," the 53-year-old (in this life, anyway) tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "I believe I have spent time with my son Shelby before. I believe I have spent time with other people in my life before. Who knows? Maybe I'm part Buddhist."

As for reconciling her Christian faith with her belief in reincarnation, McEntire says, "I'm sorry, but this is how I live my life, this is what I believe."

In the same candid and often humorous interview, the country legend confesses her love for buying toilet paper in bulk at Costco.

"Why not buy 150 rolls of toilet paper at one time? I eventually use them up," she says with a laugh.

She also dishes on whether she'd rather star in a film about Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.

"Britney!" she exclaims. "She came up working in the music business, was a huge success, then something went wrong and now she's on a downside. Poor thing. What happened to her is very interesting to me. Paris? She acquired her fame through being, I guess, a rich socialite. She didn't earn it, so she doesn't interest me."

McEntire also reveals that the silliest thing she's done lately is karaoke-ing with Kelly Clarkson.

"She's half my age, but we have a blast together ..."

Neal Hefti, 85, Jazz and Hollywood Composer, Dies

2008-10-16T07:52:00.000-07:00

Neal Hefti, 85, Jazz and Hollywood Composer, Dies

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: October 15, 2008

Neal Hefti (October 29, 1922 – October 11, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, tune writer, and arranger.

He began arranging professionally in his teens, when he wrote charts for Nat Towles. He became a prominent composer and arranger while playing trumpet for Woody Herman; while working for Herman he provided new arrangements for "Woodchopper's Ball" and "Blowin' Up a Storm," and composed "The Good Earth" and "Wild Root." After leaving Herman's band in 1946, Hefti concentrated on arranging and composing, although he occasionally led his own bands. He is especially known for his charts for Count Basie such as "Li'l Darlin'" and "Cute".

Neal Paul Hefti was born October 29, 1922 to an impoverished family in Hastings, Nebraska. As a young child, he remembers his family relying on charity during the holidays. He started playing the trumpet in school at the age of eleven, and by high school was spending his summer vacations playing in local territory bands to help his family make ends meet.

Growing up in and near a big city like Omaha, Hefti was exposed to some of the great bands and trumpeters of the Southwest territory bands, and he was also able to see some of the virtuoso jazz musicians from New York that came through Omaha on tour. His early influences all came from the North Omaha scene. He said,

We'd see Basie in town, and I was impressed by Harry Edison and Buck Clayton, being a trumpet player. And I would say I was impressed by Dizzy Gillespie when he was with Cab Calloway. I was impressed by those three trumpet players of the people I saw in person... I thought Harry Edison and Dizzy Gillespie were the most unique of the trumpet players I heard. [1]

These experiences seeing Gillespie and Basie play in Omaha foreshadowed his period in New York watching Gillespie play and develop the music of bebop on 52nd Street and his later involvement with Count Basie's band.

In 1939, while still a junior at North High in Omaha, he got his start in the music industry by writing arrangements of vocal ballads for local Mickey Mouse bands, like the Nat Towles band.Harold Johnson recalled that Hefti's first scores for that band were "Swingin' On Lennox Avenue" and "More Than You Know," as well as a very popular arrangement of "Anchors Aweigh"[2]. Some material that he penned in high school was also used by the Earl Hines band.

Two days before his high school graduation ceremony in 1941, he got an offer to go on tour with the Dick Barry band, and traveled with them to New Jersey. He was quickly fired from the band after two gigs because he couldn't sight-read music well enough. Stranded in New Jersey because he didn't have enough money to get home to Nebraska, he finally joined Bob Astor's band. Shelly Manne, drummer with Bob Astor at the time, tells that, even then, Hefti's writing skills were quite impressive:

We roomed together. And at night we didn't have nothing to do, and we were up at this place — Budd Lake. He said, "What are we going to do tonight?" I said, "Why don't you write a chart for tomorrow?" Neal was so great that he'd just take out the music paper, no score, [hums] — trumpet part, [hums] — trumpet part, [hums] — trombone part, [hums], and you'd play it the next day. It was the end. Cooking charts. I never forget, I couldn't believe it. I kept watching him. It was fantastic.[1]

Hefti wouldn't focus on arranging seriously for a few more years. As a member of Astor's band, he concentrated on playing trumpet.

After an injury forced him to leave Bob Astor, he stayed a while in New York, playing with Bobby Byrne in late 1942, and then with Charlie Barnet for whom he wrote the classic arrangement of Skyliner. During this time in New York, he hung around the clubs on 52nd Street, listening to bebop trumpet master Dizzy Gillespie and other musicians, and immersing himself in the new music. Since he didn't have the money to actually go into the clubs, he would sneak into the kitchen and hang out with the bands, and he got to know many of the great beboppers.

He finally left New York for a while to play with the Les Lieber rhumba band in Cuba. When he returned from Cuba in 1943, he joined the Charlie Spivak band, which led him out to California for the first time, to make a band picture. Hefti fell in love with California. After making the picture in Los Angeles, he dropped out of the Spivak band to stay in California.

Neal Hefti, whose renown as a forward-looking composer and arranger for Woody Herman and Count Basie was probably overwhelmed forever after he went to Hollywood and wrote the theme for the 1960’s television show “Batman,” and for the movie and television versions of “The Odd Couple,” died Saturday at home in Toluca Lake, Calif. He was 85.

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Mr. Hefti, left, with Frank Sinatra, during a 1961 recording session.

Selected Compositions
Batman Theme
Odd Couple Theme
"Cute"
He died suddenly from an undetermined cause, his son, Paul, said. Mr. Hefti’s death was first reported in a blog posting by a friend, the singer Nancy Sinatra, on the website www.sinatrafamily.com.

The Jazz Scene
Repetition - Neal Hefti Orchestra - Charlie Parker (as)
Recorded at NYC,1947 Cref Records

One of the serendipitous highlights of his work in the late forties was the recording of his Cuban-influenced song "Repetition" using a big band and string orchestra, for an anthology album called The Jazz Scene intended to showcase the best jazz artists around at that time. What saved this otherwise uncharacteristically bland arrangement was the featuring of Charlie Parker as soloist. Hefti had written the piece with no soloist in mind, but Parker was in the studio while Hefti was recording, heard the arrangement, and asked to be included as soloist. In the liner notes to the album, producer Norman Granz wrote:

Parker actually plays on top of the original arrangement; that it jells as well as it does is a tribute both to the flexible arrangement of Hefti and the inventive genius of Parker to adapt himself to any musical surrounding. [5]

Over the years, Mr. Hefti, first known as a jazz trumpeter in the 1940s and 1950s, was much admired and much in demand as an arranger, conductor and occasional record producer; he worked with Frank Sinatra, Doris Day, Mel Tormé and Tony Bennett, among others. He also led his own bands, and he was active as a player until 1960.

But his greatest sphere of influence was as an arranger and composer for other jazz artists. His early travels with jazz bands took him to New York, where he was mesmerized by the bebop playing of Dizzy Gillespie, and joined the Herman band — known as First Herd — in 1944. He was influential in moving that band from its swing roots in the direction of bebop.

He spent only two years with the Herd; when he left in 1946, he took the singer Frances Wayne, his new wife, with him. But by then he had created new arrangements for Herman’s compositions like “Woodchopper’s Ball” and “Blowin’ Up a Storm,” and composed tunes like “Apple Honey,” “Wild Root” and “The Good Earth.”

He toured with Harry James and he arranged tunes for Buddy Rich. Though he also toured and recorded with his own bands, sometimes with his wife, he never achieved real success as a bandleader. For him, the decade of the 1950’s was characterized by his association with the Basie band, for which he wrote perhaps his best known jazz tunes, including “Splanky,” “Little Pony,” “Li’l Darlin’,.” whose tempo Basie famously slowed down to a luscious and sensual crawl, and the perky “Cute.”

“If it wasn’t for Neal Hefti, the Basieband wouldn’t sound as good as it does,” Miles Davis said in 1955. “But Neal’s band can’t play those same arrangements nearly as well.”

Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Hefti found great success writing television and film scores. In addition to writing the theme for “The Odd Couple” (1968), which would be burned into the memories of baby boomers with the creation of the television series in 1970, he composed the scores for two other Neil Simon films, “Barefoot in the Park” (1967) and “Last of the Red Hot Lovers” (1972). His other film work included “Duel at Diablo” (1966), a brutal Western; Elaine May’s farce “A New Leaf” (1971), and the gleeful sex comedies “Sex and the Single Girl” (1964), “Boeing Boeing” (1965) and “How to Murder Your Wife” (1965).

There was a politically incorrect strain to Mr. Hefti’s work, possibly tongue-in-cheek; for the 1965 biographical film “Harlow,” he and Bobby Troupe wrote the bluesy, winkingly sexist tune, Girl Talk.” (For the same movie, Mr. Hefti wrote “Lonely Girl,” the Bobby Vinton hit.)

“He felt his true work was done for the movies and television,” Paul Hefti said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. What his father especially liked about writing for the screen, he said, was that he was not restricted by a band’s instrumentation, that he could write for whatever combo, for whatever musicians he wanted.

Oddly enough, his most famous tune is among his least musically interesting, even if it was somehow brilliantly apt: the jauntily arch and repetitive theme for the television series “Batman.” Mr. Hefti said that the show was so campy it took him weeks to come up with a suitable melody. It won him his only Grammy.

Neal Paul Hefti was born in Hastings, Neb., on Oct. 29, 1922. He received a trumpet as a Christmas present when he was 10 years old; according to family lore, his mother encouraged him to play so that, if he were drafted, he would be in the band and not the infantry. By the time he was out of high school, he was arranging and playing for local bands in order to contribute to the household. He saw Count Basie and Dizzy Gillespie play when they passed through nearby Omaha before he ever saw them in New York.

His wife died in 1978; a daughter died in 1997. In addition to his son, also of Toluca Lake, Mr. Hefti is survived by a brother, Joe, of Pensacola, Fla.; a sister, Pat Wacha, of Clarkson, Neb.; and three grandchildren.

“He told me he tore up more paper on ‘Batman’ than on any other work he ever did,” Paul Hefti said. “He had to find something that worked with the lowest common denominator, so it would appeal to kids, yet wouldn’t sound stupid. What he came up with was a 12-bar blues with a guitar hook and one word.”

Manhattan School of Music Faculty Moves to Organize

2008-10-15T05:46:00.000-07:00

Manhattan School of Music Faculty Moves to Organize

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: October 13, 2008

For 39 years the flutist Harold Jones — a stalwart of New York’s classical music scene — taught at the Manhattan School of Music, maintaining a steady stable of a half-dozen students at the conservatory’s youth division.

But something changed in the last two years. The administration assigned fewer and fewer students to him. His sole remaining pupil left last year, and Mr. Jones is no longer listed among the faculty on the school’s Web site, www.msmnyc.edu.

“I did my job every week I came here,” he said. “To be punished, put aside — I didn’t like it. I couldn’t protest.”

Mr. Jones is held out by a group of Manhattan School teachers as an example of why this conservatory in Morningside Heights needs a union. So the group has begun an organization effort, which has run into strong opposition by the administration.

The organizers say they are poorly paid, lack job security and have little say in how the school is run and no recourse for complaints. “We just want to be able to negotiate about certain things, instead of being treated like children for whom favors are doled out,” said Adam Kent, a pianist and veteran teacher.

School officials reject those claims, saying the teachers have contracts and ample ways to communicate with the administration. They assert that there have never been layoffs or salary cuts and say that the organizers, in a letter to the faculty, have made “egregious misstatements and mischaracterizations” about conditions at Manhattan.

The struggle has injected a dose of real-world politics into the melody-basted halls of the Manhattan School, one of the city’s top conservatories and the producer of legions of highly skilled singers, pianists, fiddlers and other performers.

The organizers have sent sign-up cards to about 150 faculty members, asking for authorization to hold a vote on whether they should be represented by the New York State United Teachers, of the American Federation of Teachers. Some 46 Manhattan instructors have signed on, the organizers said, 36 of them publicly.

In an interview this week Manhattan’s president, Robert Sirota, said he was aware of“some activity toward unionizing.” But he said he could not comment on any aspect, from general conditions at the school to the specific claims of the organizers, including Mr. Jones’s situation.

But Mr. Sirota has sent two letters to faculty members defending the school and rebutting the organizers. In a Sept. 26 letter he said the faculty should consider that unionizing “can undermine the positive, collaborative relationship that is at the heart of Manhattan School of Music.” He cast the organizers as “outsiders” who cannot understand the issues that are important to the school and students. Some faculty members, he wrote, have complained that they have felt “uncomfortable or even intimidated or harassed” by the authorization campaign, and he called the sign-up card a “legal document.”

“MSM is committed to maintaining a teaching and learning environment where a union is unnecessary,” Mr. Sirota wrote.

Daniel Esakoff, a United Teachers organizer who is helping the Manhattan teachers, said Mr. Sirota’s letter contained “standard boilerplate language” often used by law firms representing employers.

Alejandro Mendoza, a faculty organizer whose violin class has dropped to 3 from 12, said, “The administration is waging a campaign telling teachers how bad unions are.” He said the faculty recently received a form from the school that he called a “job application,” which included a clause giving the administration the right to fire an employee without cause or notice. A Manhattan spokeswoman did not respond to several telephone messages seeking comment.

The school has 152 teachers and 458 students in the precollege division; in the college there are 236 teachers and 980 students, a spokeswoman said.

Teachers at several other music schools — including Mannes College the New School for Music and the Lucy Moses School, a community arts school — have acquired union representation in recent years. The Juilliard School, the city’s leading music conservatory, does not have a faculty union, and a spokeswoman said senior staff members had not recalled an organizing effort in the last several decades.

At Manhattan teachers earn about $40 to $60 a lesson, Mr. Kent said, sometimes less than half of what they could charge for lessons privately. But he said the institutional connection was valuable and satisfying. At the same time, he added, the school depends on the teachers to bring in students whopay tuition.

How the school directs students is a sensitive issue. The organizers say they suspect that students are directed to younger, lower-paid instructors — many of them recent Manhattan graduates — to save money. They are demanding an end to the secrecy they say shrouds the applications.

The organizers raise other issues particular to music schools and not found on most shop floors. One is the availability of studio keys to the faculty. The school restricts the keys to cut down on copying, organizers said, angering some teachers. Teachers also claim that they have little recourse when aggrieved. “I know with representation you can’t just step on people easily,” said Mr. Jones, the flutist. The organizers also say many teachers are denied health benefits.

Some organizers made a point of drawing attention to Mr. Sirota’s school-supplied home, a luxury 3,000-square-foot penthouse that cost $1.3 million to furnish and complete in the school’s recently built tower. Mr. Sirota, a composer, has said the apartment is a valuable tool to court fund-raisers and is also a place for faculty and student concerts.

“They are splurging so much,” Mr. Mendoza said, “and then they say they have no money to give us our basic needs like health insurance.”

Eli Wilson, Jr. new book, "Equipping The Church Choir for Ministries" to be released in November 200

2008-10-14T08:29:00.000-07:00

Eli Wilson, Jr. in conjunction with Eli Wilson Ministries Announces his new book, "Equipping The Church Choir for Ministries" to be released in November 2008

Click here: Eli Wilson Ministries - “Keeping the Word of God Alive Through Theologically Sound, Biblically Based Music”

U.S. Refuge for Singer Fleeing the Taliban

2008-10-13T04:26:00.000-07:00

U.S. Refuge for Singer Fleeing the Taliban

Ramin Talaie for The New York Times

Haroon Bacha, center, performed on Saturday with Hamayoun Sakhi, left, and Zmaray Arif.

By BEN SISARIO

Published: October 12, 2008

The threats started about a year ago, telling Haroon Bacha to stop singing or else.

“There were letters, there were phone calls, there were text messages,” Mr. Bacha said, sitting upright on a floor in Brooklyn, surrounded by smoke from Pakistani cigarettes. “They used to come very frequently back home, just telling me to stop music, or else I would be killed and my family would be. ...”

He trailed off, tears welling in his eyes. Mr. Bacha, 36, is a Pashtun, the Muslim ethnic group of the mountainous northwest of Pakistan and southeast Afghanistan, and at home he is a star, with dozens of albums, slick videos and regular television appearances. In a sweet high baritone, he sings of peace, tolerance and resistance to war. Those liberal themes have endeared him to his war-weary Pashtun fans, he says, but made him a target of the local Taliban, which has been waging an escalating campaign against music and popular culture, calling it un-Islamic.

Two months ago Mr. Bacha escaped from his home near Peshawar, in Pakistan, and came to New York, leaving behind his wife, two young children and an extended family. If he goes back, he said, he will be killed. With a sharply reduced audience in the United States, Mr. Bacha faces an uncertain career, but on Saturday he sang at a small but lively benefit concert in Queens, organized by the Pashtun immigrants who have adopted him and held at an unlikely place: the Forest Hills Jewish Center.

“Anybody who is hated by the Taliban is starting out with a check in my column,” said Rabbi Gerald C. Skolnik, the leader of the center, a Conservative synagogue. Rabbi Skolnik said that an initial phone call from one of the organizers had “raised a red flag,” but that after the groups were vetted to make sure none of the money raised would go to terrorist groups, he was happy to rent the space.

In the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, the Taliban has intimidated musicians and record store proprietors; recently dozens of music shops have been bombed, reportedly by pro-Taliban militants.

“Cultural activities are badly affected by what’s going on in the region,” said Hasan Khan, news director of the Islamabad-based television channel Khyber News, in a recent phone interview. “We have lost everything. We have lost music, we have lost local games, we have lost children playing in the street. It is almost impossible to visualize what is happening there.”

The soft-spoken Mr. Bacha, who has striking green eyes and short brown curls, is a slightly unusual figure as a Pashtun star; he has a university education and, unlike most Pashtun singers, he does not come from a family of musicians. He said he saw his role as helping to lead a broad cultural resistance to Islamic fundamentalism.

“These people are bringing Pashtuns a very bad name,” said Mr. Bacha, at one of the apartments in Brooklyn where he has been a guest. “The reason I didn’t succumb to these threats is that I should work for my people, for Pashto as a language and rich tradition. I need to promote it and show to the world that we are not like these people.”

Before the concert, held in the Jewish Center’s mirror-lined basement ballroom, Mr. Bacha led evening prayers, facing Mecca in the small lobby. And once the audience of 300 or so had taken its seats — the event was far from sold out — Mr. Bacha began performing, accompanied by two musicians and pumping a harmonium as he sang.

In the first songs of the night he declared his love for the Pashtuns’ land and traditional lifestyle: “Our mud houses are like palaces to us.” But soon his lyrics, which are drawn from old and new Pashto poetry, turned to topical struggles. “This is not my gun/This is not our war,” he sang,“They are bringing it to us.” The small crowd roared and clapped along, as men danced and threw money on the stage, in a sign of praise and approval.

“We are a peace-loving nation,” said Reyaz Nadi, 44, a Long Island architect originally from Kabul, the Afghan capital. “Unfortunately there’s always a war from the outside, going back to Alexander the Great. America is only the latest one.”

There is a historical precedent for the Taliban’s cultural clampdown. After taking power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, it banned public performances of most forms of music — some religious chants were permitted — and symbolically hanged musical instruments in effigy. Many musicians went into exile in Pakistan, but since the American invasion of Afghanistan and establishment of a new government there, most have returned, said John Baily, an ethnomusicologist and Afghanistan specialist at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Professor Baily said it was not clear whether the same pattern was unfolding in Pakistan. “This is a very musical country with a huge range of different music,” he said. “It’s not that easy just to ban music. But they’re doing what they can.”

Mr. Bacha said he was not hopeful about his homeland’s future.

“If it continues like this, and these fanatics get power, our social fabric, our institutions — everything will be destroyed,” he said. “I don’t know what these elements want to have in their lives, what their world would be like.”

In the way of many musicians who come to New York who were accustomed to be big fish in smaller musical ponds, Mr. Bacha is adjusting to diminished prospects. Last week in New Jersey, for example, he played a wedding, something that his associates say he would never have done back home. On Saturday he will play at St. Michael’s Rectory in Bedford, Mass., and on Oct. 24 he will perform again in New York, at the Adria Hotel in Bayside, Queens.

“Wherever I find Pashtuns I can live as a singer,” Mr. Bacha said. “It could be America. It could be any part of the world.”

These are the times that try men's souls

2008-10-12T09:55:00.000-07:00

These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.Thomas Paine

Online Missionaries – New Force in Evangelism

2008-10-10T04:52:00.000-07:00

Online Missionaries – New Force in Evangelism

By Michelle A. Vu

Christian Post Reporter

Thu, Oct. 09 2008 09:19 AM EDT

Flights to exotic locations, uprooting one’s family, and investing years of one’s life are no longer required to do global mission work given the advancement of communication technology.

Now, with the power of Internet technology, Christians can share the Gospel and God’s plan for salvation with people in 191 countries around the world without leaving their home.

Global Media Outreach (GMO), with its more than 71 Web sites divided by popular issues and topics, has helped over 1.3 million people indicate a decision for Jesus Christ in 2007 alone.

“People who are in crisis typically log on,” said Walt Wilson, founder and chairman of GMO, to The Christian Post.

When people search about marriage and affairs, “chances are very good that they are going to find us,” he said, “In fact that is the number one topic right now – marital relationship.”

Wilson noted that two weeks ago a woman told him that she googled “help me” and that was how she found the ministry. Others have search on the Web using key words such as drug addiction, alcoholism, and financial chaos, among others and have found GMO.

“People who are in crisis find us,” Wilson stated firmly, “I think for two reasons. We know something about search-engine optimization, and number two, I believe firmly that when a person is seriously seeking the face of God He is going to reveal Himself.”

“So I believe a good deal of our success and our traffic comes from the power of the Holy Spirit,” he said. “It is not that we’re so smart or special.”

GMO boasts a volunteer force of some 2,000 online missionaries who reply via email to questions posted by seekers, skeptics, and Christians needing support. The ministry purposely creates Web sites that are easy to use and find as well as safe for individuals who are searching for God online to learn about the Gospel and connect to a Christian mentor.

Volunteers are recruited from evangelical churches and are asked for references from their pastor. They typically spend only a few minutes a day responding to emails and hold another full-time job.

Christians participating in the ministry come from a wide range of professional backgrounds including business executives, housewives, students, truck drivers, and others.

Through these online missionaries, people from places as removed as a small village in Afghanistan have been able to ask questions about Jesus and Christianity.

Wilson remarked, “You wonder, how do these people have access to the Internet. Well there is only 1.3 billion people in the world who have access to the internet and 3.5 billion who have cell phones and we reach 400,000 people a month on cell phones,” he commented.

“So in total there are more than 3 billion people out there who have access to the internet,” he said. “And by the way, the church does not exist in most of their lives."

The GMO founder confirmed that the Web sites get a large amount of traffic from Muslims who are interested in Jesus.

After someone makes a commitment to Jesus Christ, online missionaries are responsible for steering them to the extensive discipleship program available online and also helping connect them to local churches or Christian movement. Continue >>

This year, GMO hopes to help more than 2 million people indicate a decision for Jesus as their savior.

The ministry is preparing to expand its reach by launching Internet-based radio at the end of October and is currently developing Internet-based television, slated for release early 2009, to share the Gospel.

“We will tell all learners across the world the story of Jesus by film and by voice,” Wilson said.

Statistics about GMO:

•Every 3 seconds the Gospel is presented to someone. In total, the Gospel is presented to 15 million people a year.
•Every 20 seconds a decision is made for Christ. A total of 2.5 million commitments are made a year.
•Each month the Gospel is presented to 400,000 people via cell phone.

On the Web: www.globalmediaoutreach.com

Cameroon: Songwriter Sentenced to Three Years in Prison

2008-10-10T04:49:00.000-07:00

Cameroon: Songwriter Sentenced to Three Years in Prison

International PEN (London)

9 October 2008
Posted to the web 10 October 2008

The WiPC protests the three-year prison sentence and exorbitant fine imposed on the well known singer-songwriter Lapiro de Mbanga (real name Pierre Roger Lambo Sandjo) on 24 September 2008 for allegedly taking part in anti-government riots. Mbanga is known as an outspoken critic of the government, both as a songwriter and an opposition party member. The WiPC fears that the sentence is connected to his critical lyrics and, as such, is in violation of his right to freedom of expression. It calls on the Cameroonian authorities to release Mbanga immediately and unconditionally.

On 24 September, almost six months after his arrest and detention, Mbanga (51) was found guilty of taking part in riots against the high cost of living in Cameroon in February and sentenced to three years in prison. The songwriter was convicted of three of the six charges against him: "complicity in looting, destruction of property, arson, obstructing streets, degrading the public or classified property, and forming illegal gatherings". He was also ordered to pay a fine of 280 million CFA francs (approx. US$640,000) to the Société des Plantations de Mbanga (SPM) company and the Ministry of Finance as compensation for damage caused during the riots. The charges against Mbanga are widely held to have been made in retaliation for his criticism of the government. The verdict was met with stunned silence, according to one press report.

Claims that the case is politically motivated have been denied by the government. Mbanga has been detained since his arrest on 9 April on the basis of his alleged role in the February mass demonstrations and strikes. However, some reports have indicated that his presence during the protests was merely a pretext, and his arrest was in fact linked to a song he wrote entitled "Constipated Constitution"which warns President Biya of the dangers of controversial constitutional amendments (see below). Mbanga's wife has denied that he took part in the riots and maintained that he had actually calmed people down and prevented them from burning down Mbanga town hall. Some evidence to this effect was reportedly presented in court during the trial.

Mbanga was reportedly convicted on the grounds that, as a local traditional leader, his presence during the protests had galvanised the rioters. It was further argued that he would not have been allowed to film the events, as he did, had he been an outsider. This therefore made him an accomplice. However, according to local press reports, the riots were widely televised and none of the journalists who filmed the footage have been brought to trial. Moreover, Mbanga's sentence, almost six months after the events in question, is twice that received by the actual authors of the riots, who were handed 18-month prison terms the month after the riots and subsequently received a presidential pardon.

Following his conviction, Mbanga was taken, in chains, to Nkongsamba principal prison to serve his term. His health has reportedly deteriorated as a result of the six months he has already spent there. It is said that he has been denied medical attention and the food and sanitary conditions in prison are poor.

Mbanga's defence is appealing the verdict.

BACKGROUND:

Mbanga has often sung about government corruption and is also known as a member of the Social Democratic Front (SDF) opposition party.

The Cameroonian Constitutional Amendment Bill, which was adopted on 10 April, allows an unlimited number of presidential mandates (President Biya is 75 and has been in office for 26 years), as well as granting the president immunity for any acts committed while in office.

An extract from Mbanga's song "Constipated Constitution: le Chef de l'Etat est pris au piège des réseaux qui l'obligent à rester au pouvoir alors qu'il est fatigué?Libérez le Big katika" ("The head of State is caught in the trap of networks that oblige him to stay in power even though he is tired? Free Big katika [President Biya's nickname]"). The song is banned on some television and radio channels.

Earlier this year, another Cameroonian singer-songwriter who wrote a song criticising the constitutional amendments, Joe La Conscience, was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for organising an allegedly illegal demonstration, but was released in June following a presidential pardon. More than 100 people arrested during the riots have reportedly now been pardoned.

Freemuse report: http://www.freemuse.org/sw29911.asp

BBC report http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7635405.stm

RECOMMENDED ACTION:

Send appeals to authorities:

- protesting the three-year prison sentence and US$640,000 fine imposed on Mbanga for allegedly taking part in anti-government riots

- expressing the belief that Mbanga's detention since April and subsequent conviction stem from his lyrics critical of the government, particularly a song he wrote criticising controversial constitutional amendments, in violation of his right to freedom of expression as guaranteed by the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Cameroon is party

Cameroon: Songwriter Sentenced to Three Years in Prison

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- calling on them to immediately and unconditionally release Mbanga

- expressing concern that Mbanga's health has deteriorated due to poor prison conditions and requesting that he be treated humanely while in detention, including being provided with adequate medical care

APPEALS TO:

President Paul Biya

Fax: +237 22 22 08 70

E-mail: cellcom@prc.cm

Messages may also be sent via the Presidency's website: http://www.prc.cm/index_fr.php?link=messenger/write_pr

Mr. Amadou Ali

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice

Fax: +237 22 23 00 05

And/or via Cameroonian diplomatic representatives in your country.

Please copy appeals to the source if possible.

Please check with WiPC if sending appeals after 6 October 2008.

Updates the Mbanga case: http://www.ifex.org/en/content/view/full/95970