Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
A friend asked me to bicycle through the Yakima River canyon with him this morning. I said I had too much work to do, so he rode the 40 miles north to Ellensburg alone. When he got back, he sent a message, “The canyon is nice today,” with evidence.
Trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, admired within jazz circles but little known outside them, has received tangible recognition for his work as a player and a teacher. Belgrave left Ray Charles in the early 1960s ago to settle in Detroit. In today’s Detroit Free Press, Mark Stryker reports on the award and on Belgrave’s contribution to the city’s cultural life. Stryker writes:
For 46 years, Belgrave’s world-class musicianship, charisma, swing and commitment to mentoring young musicians — many of whom have become stars — have made Detroit a hipper city than it would have been without him.
To read the whole thing and hear a Belgrave performance with Tommy Flanagan’s trio, go here.
This video profile by Bret Primack supplements Stryker’s column.
For more of Primack’s profiles, go here.
Marc Myers, the resourceful and indefatigable king of the verbatim interview, posts a JazzWax conversation with Sonny Rollins about one of Rollins’s most unusual and successful albums. An excerpt:
JW: How did you pick the songs?

SR: All the songs I knew. By going to the movies so much as a child in the 30s, I was tuned in to Western popular music themes. Even today, people credit me for having an encyclopedic knowledge of what’s called the American Songbook. Included in there are Western songs, and Country music, too. When I was offered the date by Les (Koenig), I said, “Let’s make a concept album about the West,” which would evoke my feelings and the whole Western thing.
Rollins talks about how the famous William Claxton cover photo in the desert came about, and whose idea it was. To get the whole story, go here.