– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
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Make sure you check out the video below.
You know the narrative…
“Jazz started in New Orleans and traveled to Chicago and Kansas City and New York.”
Historians are starting to come to a more sophisticated – and exciting – view of the music’s origins.
In this program we look at the unheralded role San Francisco played in the creation of jazz. In the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, San Francisco was the biggest and most dynamic city west of the Mississippi River and a place of dazzling diversity.
An international port, a vibrant Afro-American community, a prosperous place that supported a wide variety of live music venues and occasions – old San Francisco and the Bay Area had all the ingredients to be a hotbed for music creativity.
Three years after this was filmed, the first jazz sound recording was made in 1917. It’s pretty clear, here was something going on in San Francisco well before the heralded “Jazz Age” began.
Who’s the band in the film?
The best scholarly guess is Sid LeProtti’s So Different Jazz Band, San Fransisco. Sid LeProtti, piano; Adam “Slocum” Mitchell, clarinet, and Gerald Wells, flute. Probably shot outdoors.
What are they dancing?
A quadrille (a square dance) – but with a difference. How I wish I could hear this music!
(1952) RAW UNEDITED – Turk Murphy interviews San Francisco jazz pianist Sid LeProtti (born 1886) – with music
Other Jazz on the Tube podcasts that touch on the diverse origins of jazz
The huge contribution of Texans and Oklahomans to jazz
https://www.jazzonthetube.com/interview-with-dave-oliphant-about-texan-jazz/
Afro-American “barbershop” and jazz
https://www.jazzonthetube.com/vic-hobson-and-the-roots-of-louis-armstrongs-music/
A broader view of the origins of jazz
https://www.jazzonthetube.com/interview-with-professor-douglas-henry-danielslester-leaps-in-jazz-in-asia-and-more/
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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Ken McCarthy’s Jazz on the Tube interviews filmmaker Abraham Ravett about his film “Forgotten Tenor: A Tribute to Tenor Saxophonist Wardell Gray.”
Tenor saxophone giant Wardell Gray was born February 13, 1921, in Oklahoma City. OK. He was a graduate of the Cass Technical High School, a Detroit school that also lists Donald Byrd, Lucky Thompson, and Al McKibbon as distinguished alumni.
You can order a DVD copy of the film “Forgotten Tenor: A Tribute to Saxophonist Wardell Gray” direct from the filmmaker by writing to aravett AT hampshire DOT edu
You can order a DVD copy of the film “Forgotten Tenor: A Tribute to Saxophonist Wardell Gray” direct from the filmmaker by writing to aravett AT hampshire DOT edu
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Louis Armstrong was a genius – no doubt about that.
But there’s no such thing as a genius in a vacuum.
For some strange reason, the culture and community that gave birth to Louis Armstrong is given short shrift in accounts of his life and art.
In his autobiography and in interviews, Armstrong painted a vivid picture of the world he grew up in, but until now, there has been no in-depth inquiry into what he meant when he said things like “I figure singing and playing is the same,” or, “Singing was more into my blood than the trumpet.”
Now thanks to Vic Hobson’s book “Creating the Jazz Solo” we’re starting to understand what he meant.
Click here to learn more about Vic Hobson’s work:
Comments and insights sought from musicians, music educators and scholars. We’re opening this up to a moderated discussion.
Our goal: To discover if there was something valuable and now lost in music education that can be productively revived.
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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The music at the end this interview is “I’m an Old Cow Hand” composed by Johnny Mercer and recorded by Fairfield,Texas-born (1924) Kenny Durham on January 10, 1960. For a unique “discography” of Durham’s work, see Oliphant’s biography-poem KD: A Jazz Biography
A documentary short about Native Texas Poet Dave Oliphant. This documentary was filmed, edited, produced and directed by Kanya Lyons in 2018.
Oliphant was born in Fort Worth in 1939. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in English from Lamar University and the University of Texas, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. His primary reading and writing interest has always been poetry, but he has also written four books on jazz (primarily by Texas musicians).
He has translated poetry from Spanish and was a winner of the Texas Institute of Letters book translation award in 2011. In addition to fourteen collections of his own poetry, among them The Pilgrimage: Selected Poems 1962-2012, he has edited three anthologies of Texas poetry and one of Chilean poetry. For forty years he contributed essays on and reviews of Texas poetry to various state literary magazines, and 55 of those pieces were collected in 2015 in his Generations of Texas Poets.
He retired from the University of Texas at Austin after serving for 30 years in various capacities, from assistant professor to editor of a scholarly journal, senior lecturer, and coordinator of the Freshman Seminars Program. He lives in Cedar Park, Texas with his wife and muse, Maria.
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
Music credits:
The Jazz on the Tube podcast theme song is “Mambo Inferno” performed by The Manhattan School of Music Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra conducted by Bobby Sanabria from the CD ¡Que Viva Harlem!
At the end of today’s interview, we featured “I’m an Old Cow Hand”, written by Johnny Mercer and performed by Kenny Dorham (Xanadu Records, The Kenny Dorham Memorial Album) recorded January 10, 1960 (4:12)
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Gilberto Valdés Zequeira was born in Havana on August 16, 1928.
Note: His mother was a milliner (hat), not a millionaire.
As a kid he listened to Chano Pozo’s rehearsals in the Colon neighborhood of Havana.
His vocal group had a weekly gig at the San Souci night club in Havana and he appeared on Cuba’s pioneering television channel twice a week in the 1950s.
Roy Haynes introduced him to American jazz drumming and gave him his first set of drumsticks.
He performed with his old friend Bebo Valdés when the two of them found themselves in Europe in the early 1960s.
He spent time as the #2 man at Egrem.
He was Dizzy Gillespie’s host when Dizzy visited Havana in 1977.
He introduced Irakere to Columbia Records and toured the world with them as their manager.
He helped save Cuba’s most important jazz club La Zorra y el Cuervo from being turned into a pizzeria.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of Gilberto’s remarkable life.
Click here to learn more about Gilberto.
Havana’s top nightclub Sans Souci (1958)
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Oscar Peterson
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