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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 09.30.04
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JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER TO INDUCT INAUGURAL CLASS OF MUSICIANS
INTO THE ERTEGUN JAZZ HALL OF FAME
International Voting Panel Selects 14 Jazz Legends to be Honored
September 30, 2004 (NEW YORK) – Jazz at Lincoln Center tonight will celebrate the dedication of the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame and the official induction of its inaugural class of members. Located within the new home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Frederick P. Rose Hall, the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, which interactively immerses visitors in the lives and artistry of jazz greats, was named by Jazz at Lincoln Center Board member Ahmet Ertegun and his wife, Mica, in honor of his late brother and Atlantic Records partner Nesuhi Ertegun.
The musicians inducted into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame are: Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Bix Beiderbecke, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Thelonious Monk, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum and Lester Young. Inductees" family members, friends and fellow artists will be on-hand to receive the honors on their behalf.
With a welcome by Ahmet Ertegun and introductions by Gunther Schuller, Victor Goines and Wynton Marsalis, inductees" awards will be presented by Wess "Warmdaddy" Anderson, James Carter, Benny Golson, Herbie Hancock, Hank Jones, Abbey Lincoln, Wynton Marsalis, James Moody, Nicholas Payton, Randy Sandke, Clark Terry, Frank Wess, Randy Weston, Dr. Michael White and Bob Wilber. Also performing will be the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra Rhythm Section: Eric Lewis (piano), Carlos Henriquez (bass), and Herlin Riley (drums); Madeleine Peyroux (vocals) and Ryan Kisor (trumpet). Generous support for the evening was provided by Movado.
"The greatest artists speak across epochs of the undying soul that distinguishes man from everything else in creation," said Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center. "These 14 men and women are the embodiment of the very best in American culture. Their creations will stand for all time as a testament to the richness of our way of living. We're proud to provide the world with a place to celebrate and reflect upon their great achievements."
A 72-person international voting panel, which includes musicians, scholars and educators from 17 countries, was charged with nominating and selecting the most definitive artists in the history of jazz for induction into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame. Criteria for nomination include excellence and significance of the artists" contributions to the development and perpetuation of jazz.
"The artists that we will honor as the first class of members into the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame gave something wonderful, passionate, inspiring and eternal to the world," said Ahmet Ertegun. "My brother Nesuhi, in whose honor my wife and I named the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, helped nurture some of these great artists and I think it is only fitting that we help create a space where people of all ages can come to learn about their contributions to the world of jazz. The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will provide a center where the lives and the artistry of the greatest jazz musicians will be celebrated, and where people will come to learn about jazz, something to which my brother devoted his life"s work."
The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, which was designed by the Rockwell Group and opens to the public on October 21, is a multi-media installation featuring a 14-foot video wall, interactive kiosks, touch-activated virtual plaques and the great sounds of jazz. The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame"s physical design celebrates jazz by emphasizing flexibility and improvisation, and utilizes materials, such as cork, wood and brass, found in jazz instruments. The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame will be free and open to the public between the hours of 10am-4pm, Tuesday through Sunday. The space will also be open to ticket-holders in the evening.
"The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame is a very special part of our new home," said Derek E. Gordon, Executive Director, Jazz at Lincoln Center. "Whether you come to Frederick P. Rose Hall to see a jazz performance or a classical concert or a dance program, you will be exposed to the essence of jazz and inspired by the talented and celebrated men and women that we honor in the Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame."
Every year, the international panel that Jazz at Lincoln Center has assembled will vote on a new class of honorees. Each new class of inductees will be honored at an annual ceremony at Frederick P. Rose Hall.
Design Architect
Rockwell Group
New York, New York
Principals: David Rockwell, Diego Gronda, David Wilbourne
Senior Associate: Michael Fischer
Design Team: Julie Yurasek
Frederick P. Rose Hall Project Leadership
Lisa Schiff, Chairman, Board of Directors
Jonathan F. P. Rose, Chairman, Building Committee
Wynton Marsalis, Artistic Director
Hughlyn F. Fierce, President and Chief Executive Officer
Derek Gordon, Executive Director
Walter Thinnes, Vice President, Frederick P. Rose Hall
Paul Logan, Project Director
Laura Johnson, Vice President, Education
Rockwell Group is an award winning, 90-person New York-based architecture firm founded by David Rockwell. It is recognized for creating innovative and unique spaces that are characterized by rich materials, innovative narrative and a sense of theater. Ranging from cultural institutions, hotels and restaurants, the firm"s acclaimed projects include the Motown Center, in collaboration with ARO; the set design for the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, "Hairspray"; Chambers, a boutique hotel in midtown Manhattan; Children"s Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx; W New York and W Union Square; the Kodak Theatre, the permanent home of the Academy Awards ceremony; Nobu and Next Door Nobu; and several projects for Cirque du Soleil.
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a not-for-profit arts organization dedicated to jazz. With the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and a comprehensive array of guest artists, Jazz at Lincoln Center advances a unique vision for the continued development of the art of jazz by producing a year-round schedule of performance, education, and broadcast events for audiences of all ages. These productions include concerts, national and international tours, residencies, weekly national radio and television programs, recordings, publications, an annual high school jazz band competition and festival, a band director academy, a jazz appreciation curriculum for children, advanced training through the Julliard Institute for Jazz Studies, music publishing, children"s concerts, lectures, adult education courses, film programs, and student and educator workshops. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis, President & CEO Hughlyn F. Fierce, Executive Director Derek E. Gordon, Chairman of the Board Lisa Schiff and Jazz at Lincoln Center Board and staff, Jazz at Lincoln Center will produce hundreds of events during its 2004-05 season. This is the inaugural season in JALC"s new home – Frederick P. Rose Hall – the first-ever performance, education, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz.
Nesuhi Ertegun
(1917 - 1989) The Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, named for Nesuhi Ertegun, is a gift of Mica and Ahmet Ertegun. Nesuhi Ertegun"s passionate advocacy of jazz music and nurturing of jazz musicians made an indelible contribution to the awareness and appreciation of jazz throughout the world. The son of the former Turkish Ambassador to the United States, Nesuhi Ertegun was born in Istanbul and subsequently raised in Switzerland, Paris, London, and Washington, D.C. A passionate jazz and blues record collector, in 1944 Ertegun moved to Los Angeles, where he ran the Jazzman Record Shop and the Jazzman and Crescent labels. Among his first signings was legendary New Orleans trombonist Kid Ory. Ertegun became the editor of Record Changer magazine, made records for the Contemporary label, and taught jazz studies at UCLA – the first accredited course of its kind in the country. Today, the U.S. Library of Congress is home to the Nesuhi Ertegun Collection of Jelly Roll Morton Recordings.
In 1954, Nesuhi joined his brother Ahmet at Atlantic Records. Moving to New York, he developed an album department and was responsible for building the label"s exceptional jazz roster – producing John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Ray Charles, Charles Mingus, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Herbie Mann, and many others. In 1971, Nesuhi"s international expertise led to his establishment of WEA International (now known as Warner Music International). A committed and effective foe of record piracy worldwide, he also served as President of International Federation of Phonogram and Videogram Producers (I.F.P.I.). Among his many other interests, Nesuhi, along with his brother, founded the New York Cosmos soccer team. He was also a world-renowned collector of surrealist art.
2004 Inductees
Louis Armstrong (1901-1971)
"My whole life has been happiness," Louis Armstrong liked to say, and he managed to make everyone who heard him feel that no matter how bad things got, everything was bound to turn out all right, after all. But his warm, unaffected presence sometimes masked the fact that he was also the most influential innovator in the history of jazz.
He was born in the poorest neighborhood in New Orleans, and the story of his rise is as astonishing, as inexplicable – and as American –as Abraham Lincoln"s. While in Fletcher Henderson"s band in 1924 and 1925 he introduced the world to the super syncopated interpretation of the 4/4 rhythms that became the art of big band swing. The power and virtuosity, the musical logic and emotional intensity of his playing on his own "Hot Five" and "Hot Seven" recordings made between 1925 and 1929 persuaded a generation of musicians that jazz could be a soloist"s art. And for the forty-plus years that followed he was the universally recognized ambassador of America"s music, beloved throughout the world. Along the way he extended the range of his instrument, fused the sound of the blues with the American popular song, and revolutionized American singing, bringing to it the same irresistible drive he"d brought to instrumental jazz.
He was, as trumpet player and Armstrong contemporary, Max Kaminsky, wrote, "the heir of all that had gone before and the father of all that was to come." Miles Davis agreed: "You can"t play anything on your horn that Louis hasn"t played," he said. "I mean not even modern."
Sidney Bechet (1897-1959)
"There"s this mood about the music, a kind of need to be moving," Sidney Bechet wrote. No jazz musician was more restless – or played more memorable music – than this master of the clarinet and soprano saxophone.
New Orleans music was an ensemble art but the cornet player was traditionally first among equals – except when Sidney Bechet was on the bandstand. A child prodigy born into a music-loving Creole family, he was still in his teens when he developed the huge, impassioned sound that insured that no other instrument could ever drown him out. He toured Europe as a young man, dazzling audiences (including the famed Swiss classical composer Ernest Ansermet) with his virtuosic improvisation. In 1923, he recorded two sides, "Wild Cat Blues" and "Kansas City Man Blues." Afterwards, he was the center of attention from the first measure to the last as his pungent playing inspired a host of young reed players to follow in his footsteps. His last years were spent in France where he became a national icon.
Bechet was edgy and combative, sometimes "powerful mean," he said. But not when it came to music. "That"s the thing you gotta trust. You got to mean it, and you got to treat it gentle."
Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931)
"Every note went through you like a shaft of light," a friend wrote after hearing Bix Beiderbecke play the cornet for the first time, "making you feel all clear and clean and open."
Born and raised in Davenport, Iowa, Bix Beiderbecke fell in love with New Orleans music at the age of 15 and over the objections of his family determined to become a jazz musician. He first came to public attention with the Wolverine Orchestra and later became a featured "hot" soloist with the orchestras of Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman. But he made perhaps his most important contribution in 1927, when he and the C-melody saxophonist Frankie Trumbauer made a series of recordings, including "Singin" the Blues," that showed how jazz and the romantic ballad could be combined, how music could simultaneously be sweet and hot.
Beiderbecke"s recording career lasted less than seven years; alcoholism and pneumonia killed him at 28. But the understated eloquence of his solos and the silvery brilliance of his tone -- "like a girl saying yes," the guitarist Eddie Condon remembered --brought a new kind of quiet lyricism to jazz and helped convince a generation of eager young white musicians that they, too, could make a contribution to the new American music.
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"My music," John Coltrane said, "is the spiritual expression of what I am--my faith, my knowledge, my being..." The grandson of ministers, he began his career in the blues clubs of Philadelphia, and throughout his career combined the sacred and the secular in the intense, earnest sound of his saxophone. His musical sermons, by turns somber and ecstatic, radiated his undying faith in music"s power to heal.
Coltrane fell under the spell of Charlie Parker at age 18 and dedicated himself to a practice regime that sometimes found him asleep, fingers still ghosting the keys. He first gained fame as a member of Miles Davis"s classic quintet in 1955, worked with Thelonious Monk, then took the lessons he"d learned from those masters and became a leader in his own right – and the most admired, most influential and most adventurous saxophonist of the 1960s.
"There is never any end," Coltrane said. "There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that... we can give... the best of what we are."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"The difference between me and other musicians," Miles Davis once said, "is that I"ve got charisma." He became a cultural icon, nearly as well known for his elegant clothes, plain-spoken opinions and rejection of every remnant of minstrelsy as for his music.
But it was the music that mattered in the end, and he is best remembered both for the unmistakable sound of his muted trumpet – spare and sometimes plaintive but always swinging – and for the skill with which he found and brought together great musicians and made them sound still greater. "That was my gift," he said, "...the ability to put certain guys together [and] create a chemistry...letting them play what they knew, and above it ... That"s where great art and music happens."
With Davis"s involvement, great music happened again and again. Among the highlights of his long career: the 1949 "Birth of the Cool" sessions; the classic quintet that introduced John Coltrane to the world in 1955; the orchestral collaborations with Gil Evans; the 1959 modal experiments captured on the record "Kind of Blue;" and the 1964-66 quintet that struck a rare balance between intricate interplay and individual improvisational freedom. "Even we didn"t know where it was all going to," he once said of his music. "But we knew it was going somewhere and that it was probably going to be hip."
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
"If jazz means anything," Edward Kennedy Ellington once said, "it is freedom of expression." No one in the history of jazz expressed himself more freely -- or with more variety or swing or sophistication. He was a masterful pianist but his real instrument was the orchestra he led for half a century. More consistently than anyone else in jazz history, Ellington showed how great music could simultaneously be shaped by the composer and created on the spot by the players. Each of his almost 2,000 compositions -- love songs and dance tunes, ballet and film scores, musical portraits and tone poems, orchestral suites and choral works and more -- was crafted to bring out the best in one or another of the extraordinary individuals who traveled the road with him.
Ellington hated what he called "categories," and refused to conform to anyone else"s notion of what he should be doing. As a result he managed to encompass in his music not only what he once called "Negro feeling put to rhythm and tune" but the rhythm and feeling of his whole country and much of the wider world, as well.
Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993)
"You only have so many notes," John Birks Gillespie once explained, "and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other." Gillespie was in full command of every note on the trumpet – with a special fondness for the high, hard ones – but it was the way he strung them together that made him one of the greatest artists in jazz history. The youngest of nine children, Gillespie learned the value of speed, agility, and humor at the family dinner table and each found its way into his playing. Those elements, combined with his profound understanding of harmony were central to the development of the virtuosic style called bebop, and he was always willing to share all that he knew with younger musicians eager to learn how to play along.
Gillespie was also a zestful showman seasoned in the swing era who believed even the most challenging jazz should be "rhythmic enough to make you want to move." To make his audiences want to do just that he led a series of brilliant big bands and, working with the conga master Chano Pozo, showed how jazz could be blended with Afro-Cuban rhythms. No one did more than he to demonstrate the power of jazz to cross all international boundaries; the role of music and musicians, he said, was to "help set things right."
Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969)
Coleman Hawkins made the tenor saxophone. "There"s nobody plays like me," he said, "and I don"t play like anybody else." Before Hawkins, the saxophone was treated as an instrument of little importance to the sound of jazz. He turned it into one of the central solo voices in jazz, and his huge sound – tender and hard-driving by turns but always warm and all-encompassing -- set the standard for generations of tenor players.
The richness of the musical ideas that seemed to spill effortlessly from his mind daunted his fellow musicians. So did the delight he took in outplaying anyone who dared challenge him. He first rose to prominence between 1923 and 1934 as the star soloist in Fletcher Henderson"s pioneering big band, and then helped spread the message of jazz in Europe. In 1939, he returned home and recorded a magisterial version of "Body and Soul" that drifted away from melody toward the fresh harmonies that would characterize bebop.
Billie Holiday (1915-1959)
"Me and my old voice," Billie Holiday once told an accompanist. "It just goes up a little and comes down a little. It"s not legit..." It may not have been legit, but it was unforgettable and helped make her the most influential female singer in jazz history. Her friend and frequent collaborator Lester Young gave her the nickname, "Lady Day," and she shared with him – and with her acknowledged model, Louis Armstrong – a great jazz instrumentalist"s ability to shift the rhythm, alter the melody, and uncover new meanings in any song she chose to perform.
The personal turmoil that shortened her life has sometimes been allowed to obscure the power of her singing. Her greatness lies not in the pain she endured but in her ability to transcend her suffering and transform it into art. "It"s not nice to think that each time she goes into the lights she"s crying her heart out," the singer Bobby Short said after her death. "It"s nice to remember that she had a good time when she was singing."
Thelonious Monk (1917-1982)
"A genius is one who is most like himself," said Thelonious Monk. By this standard, Monk"s brilliance was unmatched. Fingers splayed, elbows poised to collide with the keyboard, he neither played nor sounded like anyone else and the public recognized his eccentricities – his ever-changing headgear, dizzying mid-performance dances and long, baffling silences – long before it accepted his music.
Raised in Manhattan and inspired by the New York masters of stride piano, Monk became the house pianist at Minton"s Playhouse where the young creators of bebop played together after-hours in 1940. From the first, the greatest musicians loved compositions like ""Round Midnight" and "Epistrophy" with their unusual chords and voicings and sudden starts and stops, but it was not until 1957 and the release of his record, "Brilliant Corners," that the jazz world fully came to see that he was, as John Coltrane said, "a musical architect of the highest order," and one of the most important composers in the history of the music.
Jelly Roll Morton (c.1890-1941)
"It is evidently known, beyond contradiction, that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz," Jelly Roll Morton once said, "and I, myself, happened to be [its] creator in the year 1902." Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe didn"t create jazz – no single person did -- but he was a master of piano ragtime, the first important jazz composer, the first to demonstrate that New Orleans music could be formally arranged, and the first to break down the elements of the music so that musicians beyond the city of his birth could learn it.
Best known for the recordings he made with his Red Hot Peppers between 1926 and 1928, he was one of the most creative – and colorful – artists in jazz history. His admonitions remain as valid today as when they were first set forth: "A lot of people have the wrong conception of jazz," he said. "Jazz music is to be played sweet. Soft, plenty rhythm. When you have your plenty rhythm with your plenty swing it becomes beautiful."
Charlie Parker (1920-1955)
"The first time I heard Bird play," John Coltrane remembered, "it hit me right between the eyes." Coltrane was not alone. Charlie Parker was the most influential improviser in jazz after Louis Armstrong; every musician who has attempted to play jazz since Parker"s death has had to deal with the impact of his furious inventive genius.
Steeped in the blues that were everywhere in his hometown of Kansas City, Missouri, and inspired by heroes like Lester Young, Parker was first heard in big bands led by Jay McShann and Earl Hines. In 1945, he and Dizzy Gillespie formed the quintet that ushered in the bebop era. Gillespie and Thelonious Monk and others had been experimenting with new ways of working with melody and harmony. Parker had been doing that, too, but he also brought with him a new way of phrasing. "He had just what we needed," Gillespie remembered. "He had the line and he had the rhythm. We heard him and knew the music had to go his way."
It did go his way. He was able to play only nine more years of it himself before his private demons killed him at 34. But the legacy of astonishing improvisation he left behind altered the melodies, harmonies, and rhythms – the whole language – of jazz.
Art Tatum (1909-1956)
"Tell them New York cats to look out," a 22-year-old Art Tatum told a musician passing through his hometown of Toledo, Ohio in 1931. "Here comes Tatum!" He was blind in one eye and nearly sightless in the other but already a local piano legend. His recording debut two years later established him as the most dauntingly accomplished pianist in jazz.
Equally adept with either hand even at blistering tempos and armed with a seemingly limitless reservoir of fresh ideas and novel harmonies, startling shifts in rhythm and dynamics, and witty musical quotations from other tunes, he overwhelmed his rivals. "The first time I listened to Tatum," the pianist Jimmy Rowles remembered, "I thought I was listening to four guys!" Fats Waller was playing at a New York club one evening when he saw Tatum come through the door. He stopped playing and got up from the piano bench so that Tatum could get at the keyboard. "Ladies and gentlemen," Waller said. "I play the piano, but God is in the house tonight."
Lester Young (1909-1959)
"Originality"s the thing." Lester Young once said. "You can have tone and technique and a lot of other things but without originality you ain"t really nowhere. Gotta be original." He took up the tenor saxophone at a time when it was defined by the big swaggering sound of Coleman Hawkins and showed there was another way to play – soft-spoken, laid-back, elegant, "cool." With his porkpie hat tilted on his head, and his horn angled toward the heavens, he relaxed the rhythms of jazz. His friend and recording partner, Billie Holiday, gave him his nickname: "Prez" – for "President."
First inspired by the sweet lyricism of Frank Trumbauer, Young rose to prominence as a member of the Count Basie Orchestra during the 1930s. He was "like a pixie with a blowtorch," one musician remembered, dueling onstage every night with his tenor rival, Herschel Evans. But he preferred the freedom and elasticity of a small group and emerged from World War II as a leader in his own right, with a series of quintets that showcased his wit, his unmistakable sound and his endless flights of imagination.
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