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Note of Passing: Oscar Peterson  Jazz Pianists Pay Tribute to Peterson
Published: 12/26/07, 7:25 AM EDT
By CHARLES J. GANS
NEW YORK (AP) - Oscar Peterson's dazzling keyboard technique, commanding sense of swing and mastery of different piano styles could leave even his most accomplished peers awe-struck. His death brought forth tributes from jazz pianists spanning the generations.
Fellow jazz piano legend Dave Brubeck said he was "saddened by the news of Oscar's passing." Peterson died Sunday of kidney failure at his home in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga. The 87-year-old Brubeck recalled the first time he ever heard a Peterson recording shortly after jazz impresario Norman Granz introduced the Canadian pianist to American audiences at a 1949 Carnegie Hall concert. "I was in awe," Brubeck wrote in an e-mail Tuesday to The Associated Press. "Every jazz pianist would soon know that Oscar was a master." Decades later, Brubeck found himself asked to help fill in at a 1993 Carnegie Hall concert after Peterson had to cancel his appearance because he had suffered a serious stroke.
"Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner and I were asked to come to Carnegie Hall and take Oscar's place, when he was unable to perform. I'm not sure that the three of us playing at the top of our form were able to fill his shoes, but we gave it a try. Oscar, as Duke Ellington would say, was `beyond category.'"
Herbie Hancock, another jazz piano legend, said Peterson's influence could be found "in the generations that came after him." "Oscar Peterson redefined swing for modern jazz pianists for the latter half of the 20th century up until today," Hancock, 67, wrote in an e-mail. "I consider him the major influence that formed my roots in jazz piano playing. He mastered the balance between technique, hard blues grooving, and tenderness. ... No one will ever be able to take his place."
Peterson had a similar impact on a young Diana Krall growing up in Nanaimo, British Columbia. She was spotted playing in local clubs by bassist Ray Brown, a longtime member of the Oscar Peterson Trio, who encouraged her to move to Los Angeles. Peterson "was the reason I became a jazz pianist," the 43-year-old singer-pianist told the Los Angeles Times. "In my high school yearbook it says that my goal is to become a jazz pianist like Oscar Peterson."I didn't know then we'd become such close friends over the years. We were together at his house in October, playing and singing songs together. Now it's almost impossible for me to think of him in the past tense."
While Peterson was known for his lightning-fast keyboard runs, jazz piano veteran Hank Jones called attention to his finesse and deft touch on melodic slow-tempo tunes.
"He had a beautiful approach to ballads, which a lot of pianists forget," the 89-year-old Jones told The Canadian Press.
Marian McPartland, host of National Public Radio's long-running "Piano Jazz" series, called Peterson "the finest technician that I have seen." She recalled first meeting Peterson when she and her husband, jazz cornetist Jimmy McPartland, opened for him at the Colonial Tavern in Toronto in the 1940s. "He was always wonderful to me and I have always felt very close to him," the 89-year-old jazz pianist said in a statement. "I played at his tribute concert at Carnegie Hall earlier this year and performed `Tenderly,' which was always my favorite piece of his."
The youngest pianist appearing at the tribute was 20-year-old Eldar Djangirov, who played the fast tempo "Place St. Henri," named for the Montreal district where Peterson grew up.
Djangirov said he decided to become a jazz musician after listening to Peterson's records as a boy growing up in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan - an indication of how far Peterson's reach spread. "He was the first I ever heard and my main artistic influence," Djangirov said. "He would play things with one hand that most piano players couldn't do with both of their hands."
 Art Davis
LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) - Art Davis, the renowned double bassist who played with John Coltrane and other jazz greats, has died. He was 73.
Davis died of a heart attack Sunday at his home in Long Beach, his son Kimaili Davis told the Los Angeles Times for a story in Saturday's editions.
Davis was blacklisted in the 1970s for speaking up about racism in the music industry, then later earned a doctorate in clinical psychology and balanced performance dates with appointments to see patients.
"He was adventurous with his approach to playing music," said pianist Nate Morgan, who played with the elder Davis intermittently over the last 10 years. "It takes a certain amount of integrity to step outside the box and say, 'I like it here and I'm going to hang here for a while.'"
Known for his stunning and complete mastery of the instrument, Davis was able to jump between genres. He played classical music with the New York Philharmonic, was a member of the NBC, Westinghouse and CBS (nyse: CBS - news - people ) orchestras, and played for Broadway shows.
The most enriching experience of his career was collaborating with John Coltrane. Described by jazz critic Nat Hentoff as Coltrane's favorite bassist, Davis performed on the saxophonist's albums including "Ascension," Volumes 1 and 2 of "The Africa/Brass Sessions" and "Ole Coltrane."
The two musicians met one night in the late 1950s at Small's Paradise, a jazz club in Harlem.
Davis viewed his instrument as "the backbone of the band," one that should "inspire the group by proposing harmonic information with a certain sound quality and rhythmic impulses," Davis said in an excerpt from So What magazine posted on his Web site.
By following his own advice, Davis' career flourished. He played with a long and varied list of artists: Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, John Denver, the trio Peter, Paul and Mary and Bob Dylan.
In the 1970s, his fortunes waned after he filed an unsuccessful discrimination lawsuit against the New York Philharmonic. Like other black musicians who challenged job hiring practices, he lost work and industry connections.
With less work coming his way, Davis returned to school and in 1981 earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from New York University. For many years he was a practicing psychologist while also working as a musician.
 Jon Lucien
January 8, 1942 - August 18, 2007
"I would say my sound is a romantic sound...it's water...it's ocean...it's tranquility."
Jon Lucien
On August 18, 2007, Jon Lucien succumbed to respiratory failure and other complications in Florida where he had been residing for the last few years. By his side were his wife Delesa and his daughter Celesa.
More than any other singer, Jon Lucien captured the essence of romance. His voice was rich and expressive, his best songs were perceptive poetic tales of devotion, trust, hope, harmony and spirituality. Three dimensional parables of love lost and love found and relationships filled with the promise of a new day. He seemed to possess an innate ability to evoke an atmosphere and create images not only through his lyrics but the colors of his music.
Born in Tortola, Jon began performing professionally at 17 in the Virgin Islands. In 1970 he released his first recording in the United States, "I Am Now" on RCA. In the 37 years since the release of his debut album, connoisseurs and assorted in-the-know types have spoken his name with the utmost hushed reverence. His seamless melding of jazz, R&B, Caribbean rhythms and Brazilian music proved to be a decisive early influence on what would be simplified and marketed as the twin formats of "quiet storm" and "smooth jazz," although very few artists working in either format approach Lucien's level of artistry or innovation, not to mention originality.
is survived by his wife Delesa, daughter Celesa, son Hanis Lucien, step son Mark and grandchildren.
For a complete biography or to listen to Jon's music, please go to www.jonlucien.com. His CDs are available through www.jazzcares.com.
Memorial plans will be announced soon. A book of Jon's lyrics will be published in the near future. 
August 16, 2007
Max Roach, a Founder of Modern Jazz, Dies at 83
By PETER KEEPNEWS (NY Times)
Max Roach, a founder of modern jazz who rewrote the rules of drumming in the 1940’s and spent the rest of his career breaking musical barriers and defying listeners’ expectations, died early today in Manhattan. He was 83.
His death was announced today by a spokesman for Blue Note records, on which he frequently appeared. No cause was given. Mr. Roach had been known to be ill for several years.
As a young man, Mr. Roach, a percussion virtuoso capable of playing at the most brutal tempos with subtlety as well as power, was among a small circle of adventurous musicians who brought about wholesale changes in jazz. He remained adventurous to the end.
Over the years he challenged both his audiences and himself by working not just with standard jazz instrumentation, and not just in traditional jazz venues, but in a wide variety of contexts, some of them well beyond the confines of jazz as that word is generally understood.
He led a “double quartet” consisting of his working group of trumpet, saxophone, bass and drums plus a string quartet. He led an ensemble consisting entirely of percussionists. He dueted with uncompromising avant-gardists like the pianist Cecil Taylor and the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. He performed unaccompanied. He wrote music for plays by Sam Shepard and dance pieces by Alvin Ailey. He collaborated with video artists, gospel choirs and hip-hop performers.
Mr. Roach explained his philosophy to The New York Times in 1990: “You can’t write the same book twice. Though I’ve been in historic musical situations, I can’t go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.”
He found himself in historic situations from the beginning of his career. He was still in his teens when he played drums with the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker, a pioneer of modern jazz, at a Harlem after-hours club in 1942. Within a few years, Mr. Roach was himself recognized as a pioneer in the development of the sophisticated new form of jazz that came to be known as bebop.
He was not the first drummer to play bebop — Kenny Clarke, 10 years his senior, is generally credited with that distinction — but he quickly established himself as both the most imaginative percussionist in modern jazz and the most influential.
In Mr. Roach’s hands, the drum kit became much more than a means of keeping time. He saw himself as a full-fledged member of the front line, not simply as a supporting player.
Layering rhythms on top of rhythms, he paid as much attention to a song’s melody as to its beat. He developed, as the jazz critic Burt Korall put it, “a highly responsive, contrapuntal style,” engaging his fellow musicians in an open-ended conversation while maintaining a rock-solid pulse. His approach “initially mystified and thoroughly challenged other drummers,” Mr. Korall wrote, but quickly earned the respect of his peers and established a new standard for the instrument.
Mr. Roach was an innovator in other ways. In the late 1950s, he led a group that was among the first in jazz to regularly perform pieces in waltz time and other unusual meters in addition to the conventional 4/4. In the early 1960s, he was among the first to use jazz to address racial and political issues, with works like the album-length “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.”
In 1972, he became one of the first jazz musicians to teach full time at the college level when he was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. And in 1988, he became the first jazz musician to receive a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation.
Maxwell Roach was born on Jan. 10, 1924, in the small town of New Land, N.C., and grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He began studying piano at a neighborhood Baptist church when he was 8 and took up the drums a few years later.
Even before he graduated from Boys High School in 1942, savvy New York jazz musicians knew his name. As a teenager he worked briefly with Duke Ellington’s orchestra at the Paramount Theater and with Charlie Parker at Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem, where he took part in jam sessions that helped lay the groundwork for bebop.
By the middle 1940’s, he had become a ubiquitous presence on the New York jazz scene, working in the 52nd Street nightclubs with Parker, the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and other leading modernists. Within a few years he had become equally ubiquitous on record, participating in such seminal recordings as Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool” sessions in 1949 and 1950.
He also found time to study composition at the Manhattan School of Music. He had planned to major in percussion, he later recalled in an interview, but changed his mind after a teacher told him his technique was incorrect. “The way he wanted me to play would have been fine if I’d been after a career in a symphony orchestra,” he said, “but it wouldn’t have worked on 52nd Street.”
Mr. Roach made the transition from sideman to leader in 1954, when he and the young trumpet virtuoso Clifford Brown formed a quintet. That group, which specialized in a muscular and stripped-down version of bebop that came to be called hard bop, took the jazz world by storm. But it was short-lived.
In June 1956, at the height of the Brown-Roach quintet’s success, Brown was killed in an automobile accident, along with Richie Powell, the group’s pianist, and Powell’s wife. The sudden loss of his friend and co-leader, Mr. Roach later recalled, plunged him into depression and heavy drinking from which it took him years to emerge.
Nonetheless, he kept working. He honored his existing nightclub bookings with the two surviving members of his group, the saxophonist Sonny Rollins and the bassist George Morrow, before briefly taking time off and putting together a new quartet. By the end of the 50’s, seemingly recovered from his depression, he was recording prolifically, mostly as a leader but occasionally as a sideman with Mr. Rollins and others.
The personnel of Mr. Roach’s working group changed frequently over the next decade, but the level of artistry and innovation remained high. His sidemen included such important musicians as the saxophonists Eric Dolphy, Stanley Turrentine and George Coleman and the trumpet players Donald Byrd, Kenny Dorham and Booker Little. Few of his groups had a pianist, making for a distinctively open ensemble sound in which Mr. Roach’s drums were prominent.
Always among the most politically active of jazz musicians, Mr. Roach had helped the bassist Charles Mingus establish one of the first musician-run record companies, Debut, in 1952. Eight years later, the two organized a so-called rebel festival in Newport, R.I., to protest the Newport Jazz Festival’s treatment of performers. That same year, Mr. Roach collaborated with the lyricist Oscar Brown Jr. on “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite,” which played variations on the theme of black people’s struggle for equality in the United States and Africa.
The album, which featured vocals by Abbey Lincoln (Mr. Roach’s frequent collaborator and, from 1962 to 1970, his wife), received mixed reviews: many critics praised its ambition, but some attacked it as overly polemical. Mr. Roach was undeterred.
“I will never again play anything that does not have social significance,” he told Down Beat magazine after the album’s release. “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through.”
“We Insist!” was not a commercial success, but it emboldened Mr. Roach to broaden his scope as a composer. Soon he was collaborating with choreographers, filmmakers and Off Broadway playwrights on projects, including a stage version of “We Insist!”
As his range of activities expanded, his career as a bandleader became less of a priority. At the same time, the market for his uncompromising brand of small-group jazz began to diminish. By the time he joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts in 1972, teaching had come to seem an increasingly attractive alternative to the demands of the musician’s life.
Joining the academy did not mean turning his back entirely on performing. In the early ‘70s, Mr. Roach joined with seven fellow drummers to form M’Boom, an ensemble that achieved tonal and coloristic variety through the use of xylophones, chimes, steel drums and other percussion instruments. Later in the decade he formed a new quartet, two of whose members — the saxophonist Odean Pope and the trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater — would perform and record with him off and on for more than two decades.
He also participated in a number of unusual experiments. He appeared in concert in 1983 with a rapper, two disc jockeys and a team of break dancers. A year later, he composed music for an Off Broadway production of three Sam Shepard plays, for which he won an Obie Award. In 1985, he took part in a multimedia collaboration with the video artist Kit Fitzgerald and the stage director George Ferencz.
Perhaps his most ambitious experiment in those years was the Max Roach Double Quartet, a combination of his quartet and the Uptown String Quartet. Jazz musicians had performed with string accompaniment before, but rarely if ever in a setting like this, where the string players were an equal part of the ensemble and were given the opportunity to improvise. Reviewing a Double Quartet album in The Times in 1985, Robert Palmer wrote, “For the first time in the history of jazz recording, strings swing as persuasively as any saxophonist or drummer.”
This endeavor had personal as well as musical significance for Mr. Roach: the Uptown String Quartet’s founder and viola player was his daughter Maxine. She survives him, as do two other daughters, Ayo and Dara, and two sons, Raoul and Darryl.
By the early ‘90s, Mr. Roach had reduced his teaching load and was again based in New York year-round, traveling to Amherst only for two residencies and a summer program each year. He was still touring with his quartet as recently as 2000, and he also remained active as a composer. In 2002 he wrote and performed the music for “How to Draw a Bunny,” a documentary about the artist Ray Johnson. Here's a list of some of the musicians, entertainers and other notables who have passed away during 2007:
Kip Anderson, Ingmar Bergman, Michael Brecker, Teresa Brewer, Donnie Brooks, Bobby Byrd, Jimmy Cheatham, Jamie Coe, Ivor Cutler, Dan Fogelberg, Robert Goulet, Merv Griffin, Lee Hazlewood, Ronnie Hazlehurst, Billy Henderson, Pookie Hudson, Luther Ingram, Carol Johnson, Debora Kerr, Yolanda King, Frankie Laine, John Lucien, Nellie Lutcher, Tommy Makem, George Malone (Monotones), Marcel Marceau, Janis Martin, Lionel ‘Butch’ Mattice, Lois Maxwell, Barbara McNair, George Melly, Oliver La la Morgan, Luciano Pavarotti, Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett, Bill Pinkney, Boots Randolph, Bob Relf, Max Roach, Freddie Scott, Flo Sledge, Dakota Staton. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Zola Taylor (pictured with the Platters), Willie Tee, Hank Thompson, Kim Tolliver, Earl Turbinton, Ike Turner, Porter Wagoner, Clarence 'Tex' Walker, Hy Weiss, Tony Wils on, Shakey Jake Woods, Jane Wyman, Eldee Young, Hy Zaret, Zydeco Joe, Jazz artist Nükhet Ruacan, Alice Coltrane, Jazz vocalist, Nellie Lutcher, bassist, Art Davis, Jazz keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, Veteran record producer Joel Dorn, Frank Morgan, Cuban conga master and Latin jazz legend Carlos "Patato" Valdés, legendary jazz trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, Jazz pianist Andrew Hill, Jazz drummer Gordon "Specs" Powell, jazz bassist, Sonny Dallas, Doug Riley, a Toronto-born composer, arranger and pianist known as Dr. Music, Nellie Lutcher, (who played piano for blues singer Ma Rainey at the age o f 11 and gained prominence as a jazz vocalist in the 1940s and ’50s), Jack J. Hubal "a.k.a. Jack Hubble, Jazz pianist, saxophone player, Producer and star of the Jack Hubble Jazz Show ", Jazz Singer Dakota Staton, composer and violinist Leroy Jenkins, (was one of the most important musicians to emerge from the legendary collective, AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), three-time Grammy winner Joe Hunter of the Funk Brothers, Jazz clarinetist John Kenneth "Kenny" Davern, bassist Walter Booker.
LOCAL ATLANTA UNSUNG HERO Ken Stanton, 95, helped many students get into playing music
By HOLLY CRENSHAW
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/07/07
Music store owner Ken Stanton cared too much about making a joyful noise to haggle over every instrument he rented or sold. "He wasn't going to sell you a bill of goods," said longtime employee Ron Chenoweth of Atlanta. "He made some really crazy deals with some people just so they could get an instrument in whatever way possible, even sometimes to the bank account's detriment. But he did everything he could to make sure people could get set up with something."
Ken Stanton, the namesake of a metro chain of music stores, stands before his original location in Marietta, around 1970.
In 1949, he opened Ken Stanton Music in Marietta to put band instruments into the eager hands of Cobb County students.
Over time, retail stores in Roswell, Woodstock, Snellville and west Cobb joined that original location. Now its stock includes flashy electric guitars and ear-splitting drum sets along with its original inventory of band instruments.
Well into his 90s, Mr. Stanton kept working at the store, even though it meant commuting from Metter, where he moved after not really retiring in 1979.
"Sometimes it might have been a little shocking to him because it tends to get a little rock 'n' roll-ish in here now," Mr. Chenoweth said.
"But especially during rental season, he'd come in to do the training and tell us how to interact with parents and help them understand the whole process of what their kids were about to go through and how they needed to stay enthusiastic about it as well."
Kenneth E. Stanton, 95, of Metter died Wednesday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Savannah of complications from pneumonia and asthma. The funeral is 2 p.m. today at Metter United Methodist Church. Kennedy Funeral Home, Hooks Chapel, is in charge of arrangements.
Mr. Stanton taught himself trumpet by playing along to Louis Armstrong records, performed in dance bands to work his way through college, earned a master's degree in music from the Eastman School of Music in the 1930s and toured with U.S. Army bands during World War II.
When he settled in Cobb County, he was disheartened to realize there were no high school bands. He convinced the superintendent to let him start programs at six schools at once — Acworth, Smyrna, Fitzhugh Lee, Austell, Osborne and McEachern. He charged the schools nothing, rented instruments to students for $1 a month and hustled from campus to campus to personally lead each band practice until permanent directors were hired.
At his store, Mr. Stanton lingered for as long as it took to explain what type of instrument a customer needed. He'd even insist that an inexpensive rental was good enough to start on when they were willing to shell out big bucks for a major purchase.
"He was great with people, and he really believed in doing things the right way," said his son, Kenny Stanton of Marietta, who took over the business. "We've had a lot of national chains move in, and people still like to do business with us."
Every time he walked into his store, Mr. Stanton approached every employee and greeted them with a handshake. They and his customers stayed loyal for years.
"When he first started teaching, it was a hard time economically," said his wife, Jane Trapnell Stanton. "If a student didn't have any money, that was fine. He always tried to be kind to the customers. He just wanted to make sure they had an instrument to play."
Survivors other than his wife and son include three daughters, Dana Haviland of Los Altos, Calif., Nancy Main of Raleigh, and Mindy Stanton of Stonewall, Okla.; a sister, Phyllis Row of Santa Barbara, Calif.; seven grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
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