Jazz Profiles: Pianist Benny Green [Click here to watch Benny play Cottontail with bassist Ray Brown, drummer Jeff Hamilton and the WDR Big Band [Cologne, Germany] 1994]

Becoming a Jazz Musician

There’s a difference between understanding something and accepting it. When you play Jazz, you can copy those who most impress you on your instrument, but at some point you have to step back and accept what you can do in developing your own style on the instrument. This doesn’t mean complacency. You should continue to practice and try to improve your skills. The more technical mastery you have the easier it becomes to free your mind to invent your improvisations. Also important is the lesson contained in the following excerpt from George Shearing’s autobiography: “ ...becoming a jazz pianist with some direction about what your style is going to be. That involves thinking about who you're going to follow or how you're going to develop a style of your own, and from what grounds.”

Willis Conover Voice of America Archive at the University of North Texas

Willis Conover (1920-1996) was a jazz producer and broadcaster on the Voice of America for over forty years. He produced jazz concerts at the White House, the Newport Jazz Festival, and for movies and television. Conover is credited with keeping interest in jazz alive in the countries of eastern Europe through his nightly broadcasts during the cold war when jazz was banned by most of the communist governments. Mr. Conover was not well known in the United States, even among jazz aficionados, but his visits to eastern Europe and Russia brought huge crowds and star treatment for him.

The Digital Collection

The UNT Digital Library contains a small selection of program lists, recording schedules, and promos that come from a much larger collection of Conover materials available in tangible form at the UNT Music Library.

The Physical Collection

A 1997 gift of the Willis Conover Jazz Preservation Foundation, Inc., the physical collection consists of over 22,000 recordings of all kinds, correspondence, memos, magazines, record catalogs, manuscripts, program notes, memorabilia, photographs, books, and other personal items. Many of the recordings and books are being added to the regular collection, cataloged in the UNT Libraries' online catalog, and allowed to circulate. The archival and historical material will be made available as special collections.

For more information, including inventories of circulating recordings, please see the UNT Music Library's Willis Conover Collection page.

- Richard Sudhalter, Jazz cornetist, author and critic

“Jazz musicians are their music. Absent that, they're just people making a living, eating meals, paying bills — no different from cops or politicos. But that's just the point: the music can't be subtracted: it's the defining essence, which sets musicians apart, makes them special and ultimately a little mysterious. Makes their various complexes and misbehaviors interesting to writers, chroniclers, fans. Would British writer Geoff Dyer, for example, have found Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Art Pepper, and the other walking pathologies celebrated in his BUT BEAUTIFUL (Farrar, Straus, 1996) so fascinating had it not been for the music they made? Subtract the music and you have just another chronicle of aberrant thought and behavior. In a review of his book, I wondered whether Dyer would have been similarly drawn to musicians such as Henry “Red” Allen, Dizzy Gillespie, and Red Norvo, no less brilliant, who seem to have led balanced, eminently non-neurotic lives.”

Geugie Hoogeveen's Gift to JazzProfiles and Its Readers [Listeners?]

Hi Steven, You don't know me - and I don't really know you, but I’ve been enjoying your Jazz Profiles blogspot for some time now. (Specifically the recent Roy DuNann piece..) So first of all: thanks for that! Secondly, the reason for me writing you is that I’ve been quite busy organizing my jazz collection and have compiled and uploaded a handful of homemade radio shows on the podcast platform Mixcloud. Initially this was a project intended for Izaak, my son, who’s only two years old right now, but I think they’d be quite interesting for any true classic bop and hard bop jazz lovers. Problem is; nobody's listening to them.. I thought, if you shared my enthusiasm, they perhaps could be linked somehow to your blogspot.. But only if you think that’s appropriate. Two important notes: 1: there’s absolutely no commercial incentive involved here 2: the podcasts are a hundred percent non stop music, so no talking, jingles or add’s etc. Check them out, if you have the time. Right now there are five compilations, each one focussing on on a major jazz label, so there’s Prestige, Blue Note, Savoy, Riverside and Contemporary for now. Ok, so that’s basically it.. Thanks for taking the time and let me know what you think.. Kind regards, Geugie Hoogeveen the Netherlands

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Pianist Benny Green [Click here to watch Benny play Cottontail with bassist Ray Brown, drummer Jeff Hamilton and the WDR Big Band [Cologne, Germany] 1994]