(aus dem Jazzinstitut Darmstadt)

21 October - 3 November 2021 | Ausgabe 20/2021 (English)

We read the morning paper for you!                                     

Dear jazz friends,

The Jazzinstitut's JazzNews keeps you up-to-date with news of the jazz world, which we collect, summarize, and issue via e-mail about once a week. This service can also be accessed on our website (www.jazzinstitut.de), where it is updated on a daily basis.

If you need bibliographies of the musicians named in our JazzNews, please click on our website’s Jazz Index page. This is a bibliographical reference to jazz-related books, magazines, journals and other sources that you can access without charge. If you don't find the name(s) you’re looking for, feel free to e-mail us! We will send you Jazz Index digests of articles about musicians as they make the news.

Now, have fun reading about the jazz week that was!

... brief news ...

Jonathan Shipley talks to Robert Boone, the latest drummer in the Count Basie Orchestra, about some of his inspiration, about the audition with the Basie band, as well as about future plans (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution). --- Giovanni Russonello listens to a recently discovered live recording of John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" from a 1965 live set in Seattle, and compares it to both the studio recording of the suite and another live recording from Antibes, France (New York Times). Ethan Iverson listens to Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" as well, emphasizes the role all four band members played in the composition and discusses why, "because this is a capitalist society", only Coltrane was given composer credit while the other three, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones received flat fee of $142,33 (The Nation).

Maggie Donahue sees Jason Moran's show "Bathing the Room with Blues" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado, an exhibition showing the pianist and artist's installation "STAGED: Three Deuces" as well as some of his artwork. She talks to Moran as well as to trumpeter Ron Miles about the magic of jazz clubs and how little about them was documented, a subject Moran approaches with New York venues in mind but which is no less true in Denver. Moran explains that "a city’s jazz clubs are essential to its cultural identity. And there’s a certain character to Denver’s jazz clubs that speaks to the character and history of the city, and vise versa" (Denverite). --- A.D. Amorosi talks to Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, about his love for jazz, about the decision to have Lisa play the baritone saxophone, about Bleeding Gums Murphy being loosely modeled after Rahsaan Roland Kirk, as well as about curating a video playlist for Quincy Jones' Qwest TV (Yahoo Entertainment).

Shaun Curran talks to British saxophonist Nubya Garcia about playing her first Prom concert at Royal Albert Hall earlier this year, about her debut album "Source" from 2020, about some of the messages in her head for her compositions, about the need she feels to speak out on social issues, as well as about the myth of jazz as an elitist music and her wish to share the music "with more and more different types of people" (INews). --- Dagmar Fulle talks to German saxophonist Fabian Dudek about stylistic openness, about the constant reinvention of jazz, about young and older audiences, about music as an emotional language that needs no specific pre-knowledge, as well as about the vitality of the current German jazz scene (Hessenschau).

Lily O'Brien talks to saxophonist Ravi Coltrane about his new program dedicated to the music of his parents, John and Alice Coltrane, about how his mother's spirituality was an influence on him, about "The Coltrane Home", an organization dedicated to the preservation of his parent's home in Long Island, as well as about the musical plans of his own two sons, the youngest of whom was just accepted into the precollege program at Manhattan School of Music (San Francisco Classical Voice). --- Roland Spiegel has German vibraphonist Christopher Dell explain his interest in form and structure and the magic of improvisation (BR Klassik).

Robin Lloyd talks to trumpeter Thomas Marriott about the Seattle Jazz Fellowship he founded (KNKX). --- Arun S. talks to pianist Vijay Iyer (Brown Girl Magazine). --- Oliver Hochkeppel recounts the story of the German record label Enja founded 50 years ago by Matthias Winckelmann and Horst Weber (Süddeutsche Zeitung). --- Todd Coolman talks to fellow bassist Bill Crow in an audio podcast (The Cool Toddcast). --- In an excerpt from his upcoming book Allan Sutton tells the story of the early 1940s recording ban and the role of the American Federation of Musicians' president James Caesar Petrillo played in it (78 Records) --- Reiner Jäckle talks to Hungarian-German clarinetist Lajos Dudas (Südkurier). --- R.J. Deluke talks to singer Karrin Allyson (Albany Times-Union).

Obituaries

We learned of the passing of the Italian guitarist Franco Cerri at the age of 95 (Corriere della Sera), the promoter Benjamin L. Bynum Sr. at the age of 98 (The Philadelphia Tribune), the co-founder of the Montreux Jazz Festival, René Langel at the age of 96 (Südostschweiz), the trumpeter Jack Fine at the age of 92 (New Orleans Times-Picayune), the Irish saxophonist Gay McIntyre at the age of 88 (BBC), the trombonist Hill Jordan at the age of 50 (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune), the singer Ginny O'Connor (Mancini) at the age of 97 (JazzWax), the trumpeter Dominic Spera at the age of 89 (Kenosha News), the guitarist Pat Martino at the age of 77 (The Philadelphia Inquirer), as well as the poet, promoter and Sun Ra expert Hartmut Geerken at the age of 82 (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung).

Last Week at the Jazzinstitut

Space is the Place
If you've ever been at the Jazzinstitut you may have been impressed with the beautiful historical site we occupy, however you may also know that our elegant building, the Kavaliershaus from the early 18th century, comes with a problem not unfamiliar to archives in general: lack of space. We are already storing hundreds of boxes containing parts of the Jazzinstitut's collection at a storage space on the outskirts of town, and recently rented additional space close to the Jazzinstitut for material we need to access more often. On Monday our mayor Jochen Partsch led the groundbreaking ceremony for a new archival building allowing storage for the city's art collection of Institut Mathildenhöhe, the municipal archive, the Internationales Musikinstitut (for contemporary music) and the Jazzinstitut Darmstadt. The new archival building will be finished in early 2023. Our main office will remain in the idyllic Jagdhof (hunting court) in Darmstadt's Bessungen neighborhood. We are glad, however, that we will finally be able to store valuable material in a properly climated archival complex (Wissenschaftsstadt Darmstadt).

R.I.P. Hartmut Geerken
We had been on the phone with him earlier that week, talking about the progress of indexing his Sun Ra Archive which the Jazzinstitut had taken over in May. Over the weekend we learned that Hartmut Geerken, poet, musician, promoter, fan and expert of African-American music, had died, suddenly and unexpectedly, as his daughter wrote us, just days after that conversation at the age of 82. Geerken lived many lives at once, it seemed, indulging in each of them totally, whether he wrote poetry, created old and new myths, performed with some of his numerous musician friends, researched subjects like the philosophers Salomo Friedlaender and Anselm Ruest or Sun Ra, wrote poetry and radio plays. When the many boxes of his Sun Ra archive arrived in Darmstadt, Geerken called, explaining how glad he was to have found a place for the material, and how touched he was that this place was Darmstadt, because the Jazzinstitut's archive was based on Joachim Ernst Berendt's collection, and Berendt had been the beginning for his, Geerken's love of Sun Ra's music when he listened to a Berendt radio show in the late 1950s introducing him to Ra's music. We are currently digitizing the boxes, one by one, surprised by Geerken's archival diligence. In our conversations, only days before his death, we agreed that we should talk more, about his collection, about specific items in it, about his musical memories over the years. Now the archive will have to speak for itself. We will miss you, Hartmut Geerken, Rest in Peace!

Niklaus Troxler: Jazzgeschichten in Rot und Blau
Swiss graphic designer and concert promoter Niklaus Troxler's talk at the Darmstadt Jazzforum in early October is now part of the exhibition shown at the Jazzinstitut's gallery which otherwise presents many of his posters. Come and see it during our regular opening hours, make sure to make an appointment first, though (see below).

Current opening hours of the Jazzinstitut
The Jazzinstitut is open to the public by appointment. Research slots will be given out with exact time slots for one visitor at a time. At the same time we continue our offer for research help by phone, e-mail or video-call. If you would like to schedule a video call, please send an e-mail to make an appointment and give us an idea what you want to talk about. We will then reply with a link for a Webex video session for your meeting.

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Jazzinstitut Darmstadt
Bessunger Strasse 88d | 64285 Darmstadt | Germany
The Jazzinstitut is an institution of the City of Sciences Darmstadt | Das Jazzinstitut ist eine Einrichtung der Wissenschaftsstadt Darmstadt