The Syncopated Times

Jeff Barnhart: Welcome back, dear readers! Hal, last month we covered the early years of composer Fred Rose’s life and career. There is still so much to share about this (today) little-known musician, starting with some HOT tunes from the mid-1920s; one was such a mega-hit it’d be easier listing jazz artists who didn’t cover this tune).

If the contributions Gary Giddins has made in the last 50 years to the dissemination of Jazz and Jazz history were all listed here, they would take up this entire piece. Here’s a brief sample: Giddins’ Weatherbird column at the Village Voice set a standard for jazz journalism for 30 years. He and John Lewis co-created the American Jazz Orchestra, active from 1986 to 1993.

Clarinetist and saxophonist John Defferary, a fixture of the British trad jazz revival for over six decades, died on July 10; he was 85. Born Read More » Banjoist Neil Unterseher, a mainstay of the New Orleans traditional jazz scene for over half a century, died June 20 at his home in Kiln, Read More » Arranger Marion Evans died July 22, he was 100 years old.

Clarinetist and saxophonist John Defferary, a fixture of the British trad jazz revival for over six decades, died on July 10; he was 85. Born March 27, 1941, Defferary cut his teeth in New Orleans-style outfits early, playing with the New Teao Brass Band and “Uncle” John Renshaw’s Band before joining Keith Smith’s Climax Jazz Band in 1962 for a three-year run.

Banjoist Neil Unterseher, a mainstay of the New Orleans traditional jazz scene for over half a century, died June 20 at his home in Kiln, Mississippi; he was 86. Born February 6, 1940, in Lincoln, Nebraska, Unterseher relocated to New Orleans in the 1960s and quickly became a fixture of the city’s trad jazz rooms, holding down the banjo and guitar chairs at Preservation Hall, Mahogany Hall, Fritzel’s, Maison Bourbon, the Palace Café, and Your Father’s Mustache.

Arranger Marion Evans died July 22, he was 100 years old. He lived two full careers in music separated by decades of near-total anonymity on Wall Street, a pause so complete that reference books rarely included him despite two Grammys and 65 Gold Records. Raised in Goodwater, Alabama, he left an engineering track at Auburn to study music after his World War II service with the Seabees and the Marine Corps on Okinawa put him alongside sharp jazz players in military dance bands.

The Nash Jazz Club in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, recognized by Downbeat Magazine as “one of the Great Jazz Venues in the World,” has undergone a $1.8 million expansion of the Club’s facilities, including the creation of a 3,200-square-foot John Dawson Center for Jazz Education at the Nash. The expansion was funded by a $1 million donation from the John Dawson Foundation and a capital fundraising campaign underwritten by Nash supporters.

Having mentioned in last month’s column that Tex Wyndham would sometimes travel from Wilmington, DE to Mystic CT to sub for me while I was traveling, it now seems time to share the music and stories of the place he’d come play in my stead. Playing at the Seamen’s Inne was one of my very favorite periods of my early career as a ragtime/early jazz pianist, vocalist, and entertainer.

It is difficult to determine who the most popular singer of the acoustic era was, and while many of the time claimed this title for themselves, one could argue Arthur Collins was certainly one of them. His career went in several different directions before he became part of the phonograph world. Much of the information we have on Collins comes from letters written to Jim Walsh by his widow Anna. Arthur Francis Collins was born February 7, 1864, in Philadelphia.

Ma Rainey in 1917 Of all of the classic blues singers of the 1920s who were able to record, Ma Rainey’s history went back the furthest. In an interview in the 1930s, she said that she first heard the blues in 1902 and soon afterwards was including blues in her repertoire.