Art’s brush with boogie-woogie
The News Review:
- Art’s brush with boogie-woogie
- Nancy Wilson sounds forever young at JVC Jazz Festival salute to her…
- Jazz Tuba Player Bill Barber; Pioneered Interpretive Styles
Art’s brush with boogie-woogie
Telegraph.co.uk – Jun 30, 2007
But if Van Gogh had lived another few decades he might have become a jazz aficionado. That is one conclusion of Eye-Music: Kandinsky Klee and All That Jazz an exhibition opening at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester today. Many major figures in modern art were fascinated by the relationship between visual art and music especially those who followed in Van Gogh’s footsteps and experimented with colour in novel ways. Vincent himself took music lessons from an organist in Eindhoven but they were not a success because he constantly compared chords with pigments such as Prussian blue and cadmium yellow. His teacher concluded that he was dealing with a madman. But just such comparisons became commonplace with later artists such as Kandinsky who was obsessed with synaesthesia – the ability to experience one sense in terms of another (which it sounds as though Van Gogh possessed)… “I almost breathed it in like air. I think all my paintings at least in part come from this influence though I never tried to paint a jazz scene. It was the tradition of jazz music that affected me. ” Davis tutored perhaps the only two jazz musicians of any artistic distinction on canvas clarinettist Pee Wee Russell and drummer George Wettling. Like rock stars’ efforts most art by famous jazz musicians is distressing to contemplate. It was more the general mood of the music that seems to have appealed to the French master Fernand Léger. As Kuh recounts in her recently published memoirs he loved the jazz clubs of Chicago’s South Side where he had come for the opening of an exhibition: “Fernand would sit for hours drinking it all in.
Nancy Wilson sounds forever young at JVC Jazz Festival salute to her…
International Herald Tribune – Jun 30, 2007
Then he made a little history of his own by playing accompanist to Wilson for the first time ever as she sang the ballad “ld Folks” — a sentimental reflection on respect for one's elders and their memories — from her latest Grammy-winning CD. In a particularly touching moment Wilson asked her manager the 95-year-old John Levy to take a bow from his seat. Levy a former jazz bassist made history as the first black to work as a personal manager in the pop and jazz music industry representing such stars as Wilson Adderley Hancock George Shearing and Roberta Flack. As a manager he has been “honest and caring more about me than he did about the business” Wilson said noting they have worked together without a contract since 1959 shortly after she arrived in New York from hio and he got her signed to Capitol Records. She then sang the emotive heartfelt ballad “I Wish I'd Met Him” to Levy. After the intermission pianist Ramsey Lewis who first collaborated with Wilson on the 1984 album “The Two of Us” engaged in some spirited risk-taking interplay with her on Billie Holiday's signature tune “God Bless the Child” which they recorded together on their 2003 CD “Simple Pleasures. ” “She knows what she wants and lets you know it but in such a ladylike way” Lewis told the audience.
Jazz Tuba Player Bill Barber; Pioneered Interpretive Styles
Washington Post – Jun 30, 2007
The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz credits Mr. Barber who took a central role in Evans’s experiments in sound with trumpeter Davis as probably the first tuba player “to take solos in a modern jazz style and to participate in intricate ensemble passages. “Harvey Phillips an emeritus music professor at Indiana University and a leading tuba player since the 1950s wrote this year in the journal of the International Tuba Euphonium Association that Mr. Barber “is a legend to me and many others for having pioneering the interpretive styles and phrasing of the tuba in modern American jazz and for helping define the variety of roles the tuba can play in other music disciplines. “John William Barber was born May 21 1920 in Hornell N. in the Finger Lakes region.