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Rifftides

Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Archives for December 3, 2011

Lennie Sogoloff Still Presents

For a couple of weeks, I’ve been waiting for permission to post photographs from the collection that Lennie Sogoloff donated to Salem State University in Massachusetts. Sogoloff was the proprietor of Lennie’s On the Turnpike, a club north of Boston that presented jazz, comics and cabaret from 1951 to 1972. In that era, it was not unusual for artists to appear in clubs for a week, two weeks or longer, not the one- or two-night gigs customary in the 21st century. The range of performers that Sogoloff hired was remarkable. It ran from budding humorists and singers (among them Jay Leno and Bette Midler) to established jazz artists, including Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Earl Hines, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. Among the recordings From Lennie’s was Jaki Byard’s Live!, a masterpiece that—for no apparent good reason—has gone out of print and become a bizarrely overpriced collectors item. Maybe Concord Records can explain why. In the 1963 photograph above, Sogoloff is introducing trumpeter Joe Newman. Five years ago, he turned over his archive of photographs and other memorabilia to Salem State U., which has posted many of the pictures on the web.

Thanks to the university archivist, Susan Edwards, for permission to show you a few of Sogoloff’s, and his customers’, memories.

Woody Herman and Sal Nistico

Clark Terry and Bob Brookmeyer


Jon Hendricks


Jim Hall, Art Farmer, Steve Swallow, Walter Perkins

To see the entire Sogoloff collection of 118 photographs, go here.

Coincidentally, as we were about to post this item, Alan Broadbent alerted the Rifftides staff to a video clip of Sogoloff in 2011. The pianist remembers Lennie’s as “the great club where I heard Miles with Herbie and Wayne in 1966 or so.”

The irrepressible Lennie is still presenting artists he loves and respects, but in rather different circumstances, at the Devereux Nursing Home in Marblehead, Massachusetts. Listen to what he says when his interviewer asks him about jazz “acts”——words to remember.

 

If you’d like to hear Mike Palter and Lynne Jackson perform a song with words by Palter and music by Alan Broadbent, go here.

Motian On Motian

National Public Radio’s Fresh Air last night rebroadcast Terry Gross’s 2006 interview with drummer Paul Motian, who died on November 22. Motian’s conversation was like much of his drumming—low-key, definite and often surprising. Here is some of what he said.

I’m not a showpiece drummer. … I feel like I’m an accompanist. It’s my sort of thing to make the other people sound good, as good as they can be. I feel like I should accompany them, and I should accompany the sound that I am hearing and make it the best that I can — that I can do.

To listen to the broadcast, go to the Fresh Air archive.

For the Rifftides remembrance of Motian, go here.

Doug Ramsey

Doug is a recipient of the lifetime achievement award of the Jazz Journalists Association. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he settled following a career in print and broadcast journalism in cities including New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, San Antonio, … [MORE]

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