I’d like to ask your support for trombonist Roswell Rudd’s Kickstarter campaign. 

“Rudd extracts sounds from the trombone that go back to New Orleans and further ahead than anyone has yet reached.”
Nat Hentoff, Cosmopolitan

Roswell Rudd is a intensely deep musician, an emotional player whose music —be it dixieland, avant-garde jazz, or standards ranging from Duke Ellington to Bob Dylan— is agnostic to it’s source. This standards project, as he says in the Kickstarter pitch, “songs we all know that mark moments in our lives,” is one that I know from personal experience is one that comes directly from his heart.

Ros has had an profound effect on the way I look at the arts. He wouldn’t remember me from Adam, but we spent a couple of weeks together when he was the trombonist in composer Carla Bley’s first touring band and I was the sound engineer and road manager in 1977.

I was driving a boat of a station wagon around Woodstock with some of the musicians in the band. It was a silent, winter night, black sky with a few stars, and we were coming back from a gig in town to the house we were bunking at. Quietly, from the back seat Ros was humming a rich melody, one that could have come directly out the horn he played. When I asked what it was he surprised me with the answer.

“Queen. “We Are the Champions.”

Why was I shocked? Well, I was in full post-college hipster mode, rejecting the pop music that had formed me, and I was looking for the answers I thought “new music” might have. It was why I was attracted to the sophisticated music Carla was composing and Ros was playing with the likes of Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler.

And Queen! Well, Queen was just suburban crap, right?

“I’m teaching middle school music where I live in Maine,” Ros was saying. “You’ve got to speak to them in language they understand. Besides, it a great melody.”

It was Roswell’s ability to convey emotion in his sound, and equally make his way around melody, rhythm, and pure sound that made him the go-to guy for such a wide range of musical leaders. He could do it all, and retain his humanity in the process.

All of a sudden I was struck straight in the head with the bogus parameter’s hipness had thrust my way. Here was one of the truly hippest musicians ever saying that he decided what was important, not anyone else. If he was going to like pop, or jazz, or anything else, well damn the torpedoes. He liked what he liked.

That simple, seemingly unmemorable moment changed me. In a completely innocent reaction, a great musician shamed my hipsterness forever, from then on I was going to make my own decisions. If I wasn’t cool, so be it.

And, of course, I’ve been liking “We Are The Champions” ever since.

Thanks Roswell Rudd for the rest of my life.

This “Overture” from Carla Bley’s and Paul Haines’ 1972 Escalator Over The Hill should give you an idea of the beauty and fierceness of Roswell Rudd’s trombone.

And, if you need to refamiliarize yourself with “We Are The Champions”…

MTV’s 30th has prompted a lot of web chatter. My friend Marc Myers took a conversation we had recently and turned it into a sweet piece on the MTV logo on his wonderful JazzWax blog (a lot more detail from me for you detail freaks here). Thanks Marc!

MTV turned music inside out on this date 30 years ago. On August 1, 1981, the 24-hour music channel not only added a powerful visual component to rock but also helped usher in a third pop British Invasion that influenced virtually all forms of music and music videos in the 1980s. By extension, MTV created a new appetite for music sales. Before MTV, rock, pop and soul were radio and record affairs. For a visual look at your favorite artists, you had to turn to album covers and fan magazines. MTV forced stars to become larger than life personalities, dancers and actors.

Music videos for MTV may have killed the radio star but they also sparked an employment boom for video directors, choreographers, cameramen, tape editors, hair and makeup artists, costume designers, and graphic designers. When most people think of MTV in the ’80s, what comes to mind first is the channel’s cartoony logo and endless clever ways in which the letters M, T and V were displayed.

The person largely responsible for the logo was Fred Seibert [pictured in 1981], a creative director then and now a television and film producer who owns Frederator Studios in New York. Thirty years ago Fred had a vision for the network’s brand and inspired artist Frank Olinsky to solve the challenge. Today, on the anniversary of MTV’s start, I asked Fred to recall the story of the logo’s birth, a fabulous tale he told me over lunch recently.

(Get the rest of Marc’s piece here.)

At my MTV office, 1981. Photograph by Alan Goodman.

Joe Lee Wilson, R.I.P.  

Word just arrived via writer Ashley Kahn that the great, underrated jazz vocalist Joe Lee Wilson has passed away at the age of 75. There’s a thoughtful, well reported obituary from Joe’s adopted country in The Guardian, which rightly headlines him as an “eloquent jazz vocalist who drew on the raw passion of the blues.”

My partner in Oblivion Records and I did our best to remedy the “underrated” part of Joe’s legacy when we released “Livin’ High Off Nickels and Dimes” in 1974. The 1972 live radio session was legendary around WKCR in New York, and though it wasn’t exactly in my wheelhouse, my great friend Nick Moy persuaded me to spend some time with the tapes and immediately we came to the conclusion that Joe fit our criteria of a superior artist who needed some more visibility. We eventually made a great hit in New York with the help of Van Jay at WRVR, but our company was so unglued we couldn’t supply the albums to meet the demand. It helped boost ticket sales for live performances at Joe’s Ladies’ Fort loft, so it wasn’t all in vain. Ultimately, it’s one of the records I ‘m proud to have had a hand in.

Check out “Jazz Ain’t Nothin’ But Soul” and the standard “It’s You or No One.” Tell me you aren’t sad you didn’t know about them before.

Muzicons.com